Amanda - Anna Balmer Myers (read e book TXT) 📗
- Author: Anna Balmer Myers
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“Go on, Manda, go on with the story,” cried the children. Only Martin had seen the look in her eyes, that mother-look of compassion.
“Very well, I’ll go on.”
“And, Charlie,” said Mary, “you keep quiet now and don’t break in when Manda talks.”
“Well,” the story-teller resumed, “the Indians who lived out in the woods, far from towns or cities, had to find all their own food. They caught fish, shot animals and birds, planted corn and gathered berries. Some of them they ate at once, but many of them they dried and stored away for winter use. While the older Indians did harder work, the little Indian children ran off to the woods and gathered the berries. But one thing they had to look out for—bears! Great big bears lived in the woods and they are very fond of sweet things. The bears would amble along, peel great handfuls of ripe berries from the bushes with their big clawed paws and eat them. So all good Indian mothers taught their children a Bear Charm Song to sing as they gathered berries. Whenever the bears heard the Bear Charm Song they went to some other part of the woods and left the children to pick their berries unharmed. But once there was a little Indian boy who wouldn’t mind his mother. He went to the woods one day to gather berries, but he wouldn’t sing the Bear Charm Song, not he! So he picked berries and picked berries, and all of a sudden a great big bear stood by him. Then the little Indian boy, who wouldn’t mind his mother, began to sing the Bear Charm Song. But it was too late. The great big bear put his big paws around the little boy and squeezed him, squeezed him, tighter and tighter and tighter—till the little boy who wouldn’t mind his mother was changed into a tiny black bat. Then he flew back to his mother, but she didn’t know him, and so she chased him and said, ‘Go away! Little black bird of the night, go away!’ And that is where the bats first came from.”
“Ain’t that a good story?” said Charlie as Amanda ended. “Tell us another.”
“Not now. Perhaps after a while,” she promised. “Here’s another patch of berries. Shall we pick here?”
“Yes, fill the pails,” said Martin, “then we’ll be ready for the next number on the program. It seems Amanda’s the committee of one to entertain us.”
But the next number on the program was furnished by an unexpected participant. The berrying party was busy picking when a crash was heard as if some heavy body were running wild through the leaves and sticks of the woods near by.
“Oh,” cried Charlie, “I bet that’s a bear! Manda, sing a Bear Charm Song!”
“Oh,” echoed Katie in alarm, and ran to the side of Amanda, while Martin lifted his head and stood, alert, looking into the woods in the direction of the noise. The crashing drew nearer, and then the figure of a man came running wildly through the bushes, waving his hands frantically in the air, then pressing them to his face.
“It’s Lyman Mertzheimer!” Amanda exclaimed.
“With hornets after him,” added Martin.
The children, reassured, ran to the newcomer.
It was Lyman Mertzheimer, his face distorted and swollen, his necktie streaming from one shoulder, where he had torn it in a mad effort to beat off the angry hornets whose nest he had disturbed out of sheer joy in the destruction and an audacious idea that no insect could scare him away or worst him in a fight. He had underestimated the fiery temper of the hornets and their concentrated and persistent methods of defending their home. After he had run wildly through the woods for fifteen minutes and struck out repeatedly the insects left him, just as he reached the berrying party. But the hornets had wreaked their anger upon him; face, hands and neck bore evidence of the battle they had waged.
“First time hornets got me!” he said crossly as he neared the little party. “Oh, you needn’t laugh!” he cried in angry tones as Charlie snickered.
“But you look funny—all blotchy.”
The stung man allowed his anger to burst out in oaths. “Guess you think it’s funny, too,” he said to Amanda.
“No. I’m sure it hurts,” she said, though she knew he deserved no pity from her.
“We all know that it hurts,” said Martin. But there was scant sympathy in his voice.
“Smear mud on,” suggested Mary. “Once I got stung by a bumblebee when he went in a hollyhock and I held the flower shut so he couldn’t get out, and he stung me through the flower. Mom put mud on and it helped.”
“Mud!” stormed Lyman, stepping about in the bush and twisting his head in pain. “There isn’t any mud in Lancaster County now. The whole place is dry as punk!”
“If you had some of the mud you slung at me recently it would come in handy now,” Martin could not refrain from saying.
Another oath greeted his words. Then the stung young man started off down the road to find relief from his smarts, ignoring the fling.
“Well,” said Amanda, “well, of all things! For him to tackle a hornets’ nest! Just for the fun of it!”
“But he got his come-uppance for once! Got it from the hornets,” said Martin. “Serves him right.”
“But that hurts,” said Mary sympathetically. “Hornets hurt awful bad!”
“Yes,” said Martin as they turned homeward. “But he’s getting paid for all the mean tricks he’s played on other people.”
“Mebbe God made the hornets sting him if he’s a bad man,” said Charlie.
“We all get what we give out,” agreed Martin. “Lyman Mertzheimer will feel those hornet stings for a few days. While I’ve always been taught not to rejoice at the misfortunes of others I’m not sorry I saw him. I’ll call our account square now. You pitied him, didn’t you?” he asked Amanda suddenly. “I saw it in your eyes. So did Mary and Katie.”
“Of course I pitied him,” she confessed. “I’d feel sorry for anything or anybody who suffers. I know it serves him right, that he’s earned worse than that, and yet I would have relieved him if I could have done so. Nature meant that we should be decent, I suppose.”
The man was thoughtful for a moment. “Yes, I suppose so. It is a woman’s nature.”
“Would you have us different?”
“No—no—we wouldn’t have you different. Many of the best men would be mere brutes if women’s pity and tenderness and forgiveness were taken out of their lives—we wouldn’t have you different.”
The following Sunday at noon Martin passed the Reist farmhouse as he drove his mother and several of the children to Mennonite church at Landisville. After the service he passed that way again and noticed several cars stopping at Reists’. Evidently they were entertaining a number of visitors for Sunday dinner after the service, as is the custom in rural Lancaster County. The big porch was filled with people who rocked or leaned idly against the pillars, while in the big kitchen Millie, Amanda and Mrs. Reist worked near the hot stove and prepared an appetizing dinner for them.
Amanda did not shirk her portion of the necessary work, but rebellion was in her heart as she noted her mother’s flushed, tired face.
“Mother, if you’d only feel that Millie and I could get the dinner without you! It’s a shame to have you in this kitchen on a day like this!”
“Ach, I’m not so hot. I’m not better than you or Millie,” the mother insisted, and stuck to her post, while Amanda murmured, “This Sunday visiting—how I hate it! We’ve outgrown the need of it now, especially with automobiles.”
But at length the meal was placed upon the table, the guests gathered from porches and lawn and an hour later the dishes were washed and everything at peace once more in the kitchen. Then Amanda walked out to the garden at the rear of the house.
“Ooh,” she sighed in relief, “I’m glad that’s over! Visiting on such a day should be made a misdemeanor!” She pulled idly on a zinnia that lifted its globular red head in the hot August sun.
“Hey, Sis,” came Phil’s voice to her, “he wants you on the ‘phone!”
“Who’s he?” she asked as the boy ran out to her in the garden.
They turned to the house, talking as they went.
“Well, Sis, you know who he is! He’s coming round here all the time lately.”
A gentle shove from the girl rewarded the boy for his teasing, but he was not easily daunted. “Don’t you remember,” he said, “how that old Mrs. Haldeman who kept tine candy store near the market house in Lancaster used to call her husband he? She never called him Mister or Mr. Haldeman, just he, and you could feel she would have written it in italics if she could.”
“Well, that was all right, there was only one he in the world so far as she was concerned. But do you remember, Phil, the time Mother took us in her store to buy candy and we talked to her canary and the old woman said, ‘Ach, yes, I think still how good birds got it! I often wish I was a canary, but then he would have to be one too!’ We disgraced Mother by giggling fit to kill ourselves. But the old woman just smiled at us and gave us each a pink and white striped peppermint stick. Now run along, Phil, don’t be eavesdropping,” she said as they reached the hall and she sat down to answer the telephone.
“That you, Amanda?” came over the wire.
“Yes.”
“Got a houseful of company? It seemed like that when we drove past. Overflow meeting on the porch!”
“Oh, yes, as usual.”
“What I wanted to know is—are there any young people among the visitors, that makes it a matter of courtesy for you to stay at home all afternoon?”
“No, they are all older people to-day, and a few little children.”
“Good! Then how would you like to have a little picnic, just we two? I want to get away from Victrola music and children’s questions and four walls, and I thought you might have a similar longing.”
“Mental telepathy, Martin! That’s just what I was thinking as I was out in the garden.”
“Then I’ll call for you and we’ll go up past the sandpit to that hilltop where the breeze blows even on a day like this.”
When Martin came for her she was ready, a lunch tucked under one arm, two old pillows in the other. She had given the red hair a few pats, added several hairpins, slipped off her white dress and buttoned up a pale green chambray one with cool white collar and cuffs. She stood ready, attractive, as Martin entered the lawn.
“Say!” he whistled. “You did that in short order! I thought it took girls hours to dress.”
“Then you’re like Solomon; you can’t understand the ways of women!” She laughed as she handed him the lunch-box.
Her calm efficiency puzzled him. Lately he was discovering so many undreamed of qualities in this lively friend of his childhood. He was beginning to feel some of the wonder those people must have felt whose children played with pebbles that were one day discovered to be priceless uncut diamonds. Until that day she had found him prostrate in her moccasin woods he had thought of her as just Amanda
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