Chastened by her experience, Ruth St. Croix did not that year attempt another story that discomfited her (and for which she had a good chance of losing another hat — even though it be expendably under-trimmed). Nor did she set out to write another story whose subject so easily earned her disfavor. Ruth, who quickly abandoned any thought of writing about Miss Mallon, fought hard against feelings that depreciated the ignorant Irish, while making the customary boasts to her editor (and to the editors of the other enterprising progressive journals which employed her) of her general liberal nature.
And like a twentieth-century Lady Macbeth, Ruth St. Croix began to wash her hands several times a day to the point of crazed obsession. The soap she used was made of lye and the laving with such was quite punishing to her hands. By the end of the year, great patches of Ruth’s epidermis had been abraded away. She was forced to wear large, paw-like protective mitts and to be laughed at, especially by the Irish, who, by their general nature, had a healthy sense of humor.
1910 PORCINE IN NORTH CAROLINA
The boy had never known a permanent home. At the death of his father when he was only seven, he was taken away from his impoverished mother, separated from his six brothers and sisters, and delivered to his mother’s younger sister and her husband, a dry goods dealer in Wilmington. When the sister wandered off late one night in her bed robe seeking Jesus and was found the next morning floating face-down in a lake, the boy was removed to the custody of a spinster great aunt in Raleigh, who ultimately could not abide his energy and rambunctious nature and so was regretfully obliged to give him up to a paternal uncle who was a cooper, and his wife. Here in Winston the boy was to be made an apprentice when he reached the age of twelve, but due to the incapacitation of the husband, the victim of concussion by the injurious aim of a sprung stave, the boy stayed only long enough to learn the difference between a rundlet and a tierce, a hogshead and a firkin, and then he was off again to live in Durham with a different uncle, who was a phenomenon of sorts — a college-educated blacksmith — and his wife — a transplanted New England Bluestocking dressmaker — and their son, who was close to the boy’s age and would have been a boon companion had he not been sickly and nearly always bedridden and eventually dead.
With the death of the son, Master Eugene Ramp, as the boy had come properly to be called, prepared himself to be sent off yet again, shuffled away to some other reluctant North Carolinian relative or village man wanting an apprentice. Yet, to Eugene’s surprise, the decision was made by the grieving uncle and his grieving wife that it was not Eugene’s fault that his first cousin was of a sickly constitution and could not do a better job of surviving childhood, so Eugene was kept. And though he wasn’t at first any sort of replacement for the dead boy, young Eugene, now eleven years of age, was treated as somewhat of a son and loved as best as his uncle and aunt were able, except that the aunt was intolerant of energetic and high-spirited boys, and frequently punished him for his unbridled youthful ebullience.
“You will come in and sit down to dinner when I call you!” commanded Aunt Helen at the back door. “Send all of your colored playmates home. They know they aren’t allowed in our backyard after sundown.”
As Eugene was nodding goodbye to his dusky playfellows, his aunt cautioned him against coming inside without having first washed his face and hands at the well pump. This he promptly did, though his blouse was equally drenched and the aunt put to even greater ill humor. Then nephew and aunt sat and waited until the uncle came in from the adjoining blacksmith’s shop and made his apologies for his tardiness and washed up, and then the three said grace with a mumbled amen from the areligious blacksmith and something even less than that on the part of Eugene, for he at the young age of eleven had concluded that God had long abandoned him and that he would return the favor.
There was a roast chicken on the table, and potatoes and freshly baked bread and some of the peas that had been put up last year in surfeit. Eugene was ravenous from having run and played after coming home from school and from having given away his lunch to the poor, hungry boy who was his desk companion at the schoolhouse, and from the fact that his Aunt Helen didn’t believe in afternoon snacks. And so Eugene ate quickly and voraciously with both hands, reaching and grasping and shoveling food into a willing, gobbling mouth. At first the scene didn’t register with the aunt, who was caught up in her private concerns over the fact that her blacksmith husband was seeing fewer and fewer customers. Was it because the carriage horses were being fast replaced by automobiles? What did the future hold for men like her artisan husband in this increasingly mechanized world? And what of Eugene when it came time for him to become a striker and work alongside his uncle?
With the thought of Eugene, the aunt turned to see her nephew stuffing a large wad of buttered bread into his mouth and was revolted.
“Young man, I have asked you repeatedly to respect this table and eat as an adult and not as a pig in a sty. Yet you refuse to listen.”
“I’m sorry,” said a cowed Eugene, his mouth still filled with bread, the butter basting his lips with an oily sheen. Could his aunt not see that his unruly attack upon his supper was testament to his appreciation of her fine cooking?
“And I do not intend to ask you again to display manners that my own dead son showed even in his sleep. You will suspend eating and you will go to your room.”
The uncle, who nearly always took the side of his nephew (at least privately), for he knew that it was hard being an orphan (for Eugene’s mother had died while he was being sent along from one relative to the next) and felt that some degree of latitude should be given, petitioned his wife with a look that bespoke a need for compassion and leniency. But the look and the implied request did not move her.
Eugene sat upon his bed, surrounded by residual evidence of the other boy who had once occupied this room. Gregory’s books were still there and his hand-drawn pictures remained tacked to the walls (for Eugene’s cousin Gregory was a gifted artist), and there were rocks and pinecones and other trophies of an exploratory boyhood. Eugene, who was frisky and exuberant by nature, now sat very still and tried to hear what his aunt was saying to his uncle. But he could glean only two words for certain: “pig nose.”
This made no sense to Eugene whatsoever, although an hour later the words made quite a bit of sense, for Uncle Oswald came into the room carrying an artificial pig snout that he had fashioned in his shop, made of papier mâché and fixed to a string that allowed the nose to be put on top of a human nose as if for a masquerade. “Eugene, I’ve made this pig nose, which your aunt wishes you to wear for a week. I made it a month ago when you attacked the Sunday meal with reckless abandon in the presence of Reverend Gardner and his wife, and I was successful then in talking your aunt out of your having to wear it. Alas, I have lost the battle this time around and you must now put it on. While I would not portray your behavior at the table, my boy, as that of a greedy, snorting pig, it is your aunt who governs within these walls and she who has final say in all manners of domestic discipline. Put on the nose. She’ll want to see it on you before you lay yourself down to sleep.”
Eugene put on the nose. He did indeed look like a pig — or rather a creature that was half pig and half human in physiognomy.