The aunt now appeared in the doorway with folded arms. “You will remove the nose when you sleep so that it won’t hinder your breathing, and then again when you take your meals. But at all other times you will wear the nose as a necessary reminder that boys who act like pigs will be regarded thusly.”
“But must I wear it to school, Aunt?” Eugene’s voice sounded different. It sounded as if he were holding his nose. And why should it not? The papier-mâché nose was tight and it pinched the nostrils nearly shut.
Aunt Helen nodded. “You may take it off when you eat your lunch. Only then.”
Eugene was not a boy for whom tears came easily and this night would prove no exception. He reconciled himself to the ignominy of his fate, though he dreaded what his schoolmates would say and do when they saw him looking like a pig.
And they did not disappoint. There was no small number of snickers and guffaws and puns directed at Eugene that involved pigs and piglets and hogs and shoats and pork and ham and, naturally, all things nasal. Eventually, Eugene’s teacher, Miss London, declared a moratorium on all future raillery, if for no other reason than the simple fact that she was tired of hearing it.
“You wear me out,” she said to her class with a sigh of exasperation. “And there isn’t an ounce of originality in anything you’ve thrown at poor Eugene today. This classroom is an absolute graveyard for cleverness. It batters my heart.”
While the children were taking their lunch outside upon the sunny playground (the arrival of emancipative summer being just around the corner), Miss London detained Eugene to ask for the true story of the nose, since he had earlier attributed it to an affinity for oinkers.
Eugene, who had always been fond of his comely young blond-haired teacher, who was both gentle and wry — a fascinating cross between a nineteenth-century no-nonsense school marm and a twentieth-century pedagogical subversive — told the truth about how he came to receive the nose and related the sad fact of the length of his punitive sentence.
Miss London shook her head sympathetically, a few strands of her long, carefully gathered blond tresses escaping their confinement upon her head and hanging in free filament. “It’s a small matter to make a boy wear a pig snout around his own home, but it’s something far different to force a child to wear it where others will see it and taunt him over it.”
“I don’t mind the jests, Miss London. I myself would point and laugh if one of the other boys was made to wear it.”
“Well, take it off. In my schoolhouse you’re to be a boy and not a pig.”
Eugene shook his head. “I cannot. I am under strict orders from my aunt to wear it at all times except when I eat and sleep.”
“How will she know if you’re wearing it here or not?”
“She said that she’ll send Caleb, our hired man, to come and look in the window from time to time to make sure that I’m in compliance.”
“What a predicament!” marveled Miss London, leaning back in her chair and drumming her fingers upon her lips. “Perhaps I should have a talk with your aunt tonight.”
Miss London came that night but Aunt Helen wasn’t home. Aunt Helen was at her missionary society meeting discussing heathen brown babies throughout the world and how best to bring them to Christ. Miss London went instead to talk to Uncle Oswald, who had been working late in the forge, scouring his tools and anvil. Eugene had been assisting his uncle prior to Miss London’s arrival, though at present the two were munching potted meat sandwiches like hungry bachelors. “Eugene, if you will excuse your uncle and me,” said Miss London, “there’s a private matter that I wish to discuss with him.”
Eugene picked up the remains of his sandwich and the pig nose, which lay next to him, and obediently left the forge. (He had been ingesting his sandwich very slowly to postpone the return of the false snout to his face.)
“Mr. Ramp, I cannot say that I’m a big fan of humiliation as a means of correcting misbehavior.”
“Nor I, Miss London,” said Uncle Oswald. “And yet my tacit compact with my wife — the compact which opened the door to Eugene’s coming to live with us — is that within the sphere of discipline, all will be left to her and her alone. She isn’t a heartless woman, Miss London, nor even, may I add, misguided. She simply sees things differently than do you and I.”
Miss London paced a moment with her fingers interlaced behind her back. “Then Eugene is doomed to be a pig for six days more.”
Uncle Oswald nodded and wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow. The forge remained forever warm regardless of the season.
“And what a pity it is,” said Miss London. “He’s a good boy in the main. And not a pig.”
“No more a pig than you or I,” agreed Uncle Oswald, who was, nonetheless, remembering how Miss London had attacked with hedonistic glee a particularly tasty blueberry pie at the county fair when a more contained and cultivated judge would have simply placed the fork daintily to her lips and withheld her full assessment until the distribution of the prize ribbons.
The next morning there was more fun to be had by several boys who had thought of new things to say, and there was even a comment on the part of the visiting nurse who came each month to check for head lice and suspicious coughs, and who, in seeking a tally by Miss London of all the children in attendance that day, couldn’t resist appending her request with, “including the pig.”
The following day, which was a Friday, was quite different from the two days that had preceded it. In the first place, when Eugene came down for breakfast, his uncle was missing. Before Eugene could inquire of his aunt, who stood frying eggs at the stove, as to his whereabouts, Eugene’s uncle made his appearance in quite a dramatic fashion. He dashed into the room, and, snatching up the plate of sausage and bacon from the table, addressed it in the voice of melodramatic tragedian, “Oh, Mother! What has happened to my poor, dear porcine mother?”
The fretful wail had a logical explanation. Uncle Oswald was wearing a pig nose — a nose with the same look and construction as Eugene’s.
Nor was this the end of things. When Eugene got to school he was greeted by a pig-snouted teacher and twenty-two pig-nosed classmates. Eugene’s Uncle Oswald, by all evidence, had been up all night in his blacksmith’s shop making pig noses to match the one worn by his nephew. He had taken them quite early to the school, and Miss London had asked her other pupils in confidence to come early to put them on. And all had agreed and had delighted in the frivolity of it, and Eugene’s aunt’s choice of punishment for her nephew became undermined in a way that did not in the least put him at odds with her, for even the aunt had at last come to see the folly of it all.
Yet ever thereafter Eugene sat up straight in his chair and displayed his very best manners when taking meals with his uncle and aunt. And over the ensuing years Eugene came to be loved by both of his surrogate parents just as deeply as they had loved their own infirm son.
When as a young man Eugene Ramp left to join the American Expeditionary Force to help deliver the world from German barbarism, he took his papier-mâché nose with him and wore it to coax a laugh from his fellow doughboys and to keep up their spirits when hopes would ebb. When he fell at the bloody Battle of Château-Thierry in France, Eugene was still wearing the nose. At the request of his fellow Yanks, he was laid to his eternal rest with the fabricated pig snout firmly emplaced.
Back in North Carolina there was a memorial. Punch was served, along with cheese and crackers and a tar-heel honey ham. Most in attendance thought the ham an appropriate touch.
1911 EFFLORESCENT IN MAINE
Penny Rutland was an only child. She was also an only grandchild on her father’s side. The uniqueness of this status placed a heavy burden upon the twelve-year-old. For the last six years, she had been sent to her paternal grandparents’ landed estate on the Western Promenade in Portland to spend the summer in the constant company of her sixty-year-old forebear who, though under-demonstrative in her affection for the girl, did love her in her own way and sought to instruct her in all those things that a young lady of good breeding and cultivated refinement should know. Penny would have liked to romp and play with the servants’ children, but she couldn’t risk soiling her pinafore. She would have liked to sit upon the vespertine verandah and listen to war stories told by Mrs. Rutland’s butler Jenkins, who had served as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, but there were, according to Penny’s grandmother, far more ladylike and much more productive things for the young girl to be doing in her postprandial hours.