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than she looked sadly at the dummy and
said, "The poor little thing. She's terribly sick with
smallpox."
It seems that many of our auctions were in the neighborhood
of Stow. This necessitated going past a wall in Maynard made of
cobblestones from the bed of the Assebet River. Aunt Beatrice considered
it the ugliest stonewall she had ever seen — so ugly, that looking at it
made her feel nauseated. So, whenever we ap-proached it she would shut
her eyes and ask me to tell her when we were past. Naturally, as
soon as we were abreast of the wall I would say,
"All right, Aunt Beatrice — you can open your eyes now." She would open
them, gasp, cover them with her arm and tell me how unreliable I was to
go back on my word for the sight of the
wall had disturbed her emotionally, and by allowing
her to see it I had ruined her day. Then she would begin to sob
and finally cry. When she regained control of herself she would
tell me firmly that she would never trust me again — never. But
next time she would trust me and I would do just as I had done before,
because each new outburst was better than the last. The wall is no
longer there and I miss it whenever I drive by.
Although my father felt quite
at home at an auction my
mother did not. Once when she was alone she bid on a piece of land in
Sudbury that she supposed adjoined our farm, and when the sale was
consummated we discovered that she had acquired a
tract of land high up on Nobscott Mountain with no legal
access, or so the abutters contended. We felt that we should
have rights along a wood path that led in from the Boston Post Road, but
the farmer, whose land we crossed, felt differently. Every time we
parked our automobile at the entrance something |
