To get back to Uncle Phil, he was the only one who ever understood me. Maybe that’s why I can sympathize with him. When two people are just about outcasts, they tend to lean on each other for understanding and compassion. It was like that with me and Uncle Phil, though he was thirty years older than me. Still, there was a rapport between us, if you know what I mean, a feeling of muy simpático or lebensraum or something.
Anyway, this closeness, this mutual sympathy, developed when Grandmother Smedley died. The rest of the family — the brothers, the sisters, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins and second-cousins, the nieces, the nephews — were all somewhat scandalized by his attitude. I was the only one, young as I was, to realize that he was only being philosophical and practical about her death.
Neither Uncle Phil nor I had hated Grandmother Smedley. Oh, I’d had my differences with her, but I realized that she was old and crabby because she couldn’t help being either, and so I tried my best to be tolerant. Even when she killed my pet mosquito, Annabelle, a week before she died, I kept myself from hating her. I told myself that her eyesight wasn’t too good, I think she had cataracts or something, and so she hadn’t recognized Annabelle and squashed her with one well-aimed slap. Of course, she would never believe that I had trained poor Annabelle not to bite people. Afterwards, I tried to find another pet mosquito, but I never could find one quite like Annabelle.
Well, the relatives came from far and near for Grandmother Smedley’s funeral. With all that company it seemed like a holiday to me, but Mother and Father didn’t approve of my attitude. Only Uncle Phil agreed, because he felt the same way.
You could hardly blame Uncle Phil. He worked in the iron-ore mines, deep underground, ten hours a day and six days a week. This was before unions; so there was no such thing as holidays with pay or vacations with pay. There were no vacations, period. Not only that, but if a miner missed a shift, he’d get fired. So it came as a welcome relief, an answer to a prayer, when Uncle Phil was allowed to take three days off from work, without pay, for the mourning and the funeral, and without jeopardizing his job.
That was why he understood the way I felt and I understood the way he felt. He found me after Mother had given me a severe talking-to and I’d run off to sulk behind the woodshed, I was working off my spite, hanging a grasshopper, when Uncle Phil walked up.
He hunkered down on his heels and watched the grasshopper kicking for a while, then he reached over and adjusted the noose better. Then he watched a few moments more and nodded approval. After that, he turned his pale blue eyes on me. They always looked soft and wet, as though great sorrows were constantly tormenting him, even though he was usually smiling.
“I heard your mother, Paul,” he said to me, “but don’t mind her. She doesn’t understand people like you and me. You know how she picks on me just because she’s my sister. She. all of them, have the wrong attitude about death. Look at them up in the house, talking in hushed voices, sighing, twittering, crying. What did they expect, Grandmother to live forever?”
He prodded the grasshopper, which had stopped kicking, with a finger, and nodded, satisfied, when it didn’t move.
“This is really a break for me. Grandmother couldn’t have picked a better time to die — middle of summer with the sun shining and all that. You don’t know what it means to me to be able to walk around in the sun. Do you realize in the winter I go to work before daylight and come home after dark? What kind of a life is that? A man should be entitled to some time off from his job once in a while. Grandmother must have understood. That’s why she took it upon herself to pass away now, so on these days off I can enjoy the sun and the outdoors. She made me a gift. Should I cry over that? Am I an outlaw because I don’t feel like joining the others in their mourning and weeping?”
His eyes were wet, but, like I said, they always looked that way. He smiled brightly at me. “Let’s go for a walk, hey, Paul? We’re buddies, me and you...”
I still sigh when I think of that walk. A feeling of peace and contentment came over me as we walked through the fields. The sun shone in a deep blue sky; a couple of fluffy white clouds drifted by. The air was rich with the smell of ripening timothy and clover, and sweet with the singing of birds. It was the most comforting feeling I’d ever know.
I caught a frog, and me and Uncle Phil hanged it. Then we did some other interesting things. I really had a wonderful time on that walk, and I know Uncle Phil did, too.
“Am I going to hate going back to work day after tomorrow,” he said on our way home, and sighed deeply. “What the miners ought to have is a five-and-half-day week.” Tomorrow was Grandmother’s funeral. “It’s so nice having a vacation.”
“Maybe Aunt Selma will die,” I said, trying to comfort him, because for once he wasn’t smiling, and really looked like he was ready to cry. “She looks pretty old, and I heard her coughing something terrible.”
“It’s that corncob,” Uncle Phil said, almost absently, and I could tell his mind was on something else. “She should switch to another kind of pipe.”
“Maybe shell die anyway,” I said, trying to cheer him up, “and you’ll have another vacation.”
He looked at me for the first and only time with disapproval. “Hush now, Paul,” he said. “You mustn’t say things like that.”
That hurt and made me mad. “You sound just like Mother,” I said, and ran off, crying.
Well, we buried Grandmother, and that brings up Cousin Newfry. He was Uncle Phil’s nephew, like me, but he was grown up. I never liked him because he was all-fired bossy. I remember that in church I couldn’t help myself, and got a giggling jag. Mother tried to shush me, and though I got a belly-ache for my efforts, I couldn’t quit giggling. So Cousin Newfry, who was in the pew behind me, rapped me one on the skull real hard, and that made me bust out crying, right out loud. That was when they took me out of the church and really gave me something to cry about.
The only one to understand and show me sympathy was Uncle Phil. “I hate Cousin Newfry,” I told Uncle Phil between sobs, “I’d like to hang him right from the belfry.”
He didn’t swat me one like the others would have done. He just tousled my hair and nodded thoughtfully. I took care to stay next to Uncle Phil throughout the rest of the doings. He was the only protection I had.
Uncle Newfry lived in the southern part of the state, and I could hardly wait for him to go home. I thought he’d leave right after the funeral or the next day, but he hung around. There was something about a will, I think, and the way I got it from Uncle Phil, it was Cousin Newfry causing all the trouble — which didn’t surprise me any.
What did surprise me was how Uncle Phil suddenly started playing up to Cousin Newfry. It also disgusted me very much. Here I thought I was Uncle Phil’s favorite nephew, and all at once he starts preferring Cousin Newfry to everyone else.
He invited Cousin Newfry to stay at his house. And two weeks later, on a Sunday, the only day off he had from the mine, he took Cousin Newfry fishing with him. I ran off and hid in the woods and just bawled when Uncle Phil didn’t ask me to go along. I looked around for something to hang, and when I couldn’t find anything, I cried harder than ever.
Well, it happened that Uncle Phil and Cousin Newfry went out on the lake in a boat, and somehow the plug in the bottom came out, and the boat sank. Uncle Phil said he just barely made it to shore, but Cousin Newfry, who couldn’t swim, drowned.
I tell you, I didn’t shed any tears for Cousin Newfry. I went around with a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud, and that got me plenty of dirty looks from all the Smedleys, who had gathered again, and a good whipping from Father. I was behind the woodshed hanging a chipmunk when Uncle Phil found me this time, but he cut the chipmunk down before it was dead, and I stared at him. For once he didn’t make any sense to me.