The Able McLaughlins Margaret Wilson (best ebook reader under 100 TXT) 📖

a word. Once he called it “the gruntings of the inarticulate forthright.” Mrs. Alex McNair was the only one that spoke pure anything, he declared. John seemed to like that woman, strange to say. Wully suspected he listened to her because her pronunciation fascinated him, but at Wully’s he was intolerant of any tendency towards Scotticisms. Wully’s and Chirstie’s articulation he supervised continually, their grammar and their diction. They were not allowed to say before John, “She won’t can some,” or “I used to could.” A less happy man than Wully might have resented correction from a younger brother. Wully took it gratefully, feeling he was getting not a poor substitute for the schooling he had been forced to miss. And when he saw his mother, he would repeat John’s innovations to her with gusto. “Indeed!” she exclaimed upon one such occasion. “The gruntings of the inar⁠—what, Wully? Lawsie me! You did well to remember that!” “Yes,” cried Wully. “But John didn’t remember them, mother. He makes them up!” Chirstie would have been annoyed sometimes by John’s attitude, if her son had not been so devoted to his uncle. Wee Johnnie refused to go to sleep in the evening till he had had his daily romp with John on the doorstep. And even if he did treat her like an unimportant younger sister, she had to like her baby’s playmate.

The child was by this time the joyous little husky heart of the family. John had noticed him dutifully at first because he was Wully’s, but he came speedily to love him for his own diverting charms. There had been an evening nearly two years ago, when he came into the little room where he and his sister cooked their meals, and had found her stretched out on the bed crying. He read the letter she gave him in explanation. His mother had written about the impending disgraceful baby. John hadn’t forgotten his sensation of amazement, or the sharp wound that his disdainful sense of superiority sustained, but now he seldom recalled either. It outraged his sense of the fitness of things that he so well understood that scrape; that he had to wonder at times that passion was ever less rampant, less controlled, than in the case he had to consider. The information encouraged a budding cynicism within him. If it had been anyone but Wully⁠—even Allen⁠—he would have understood it better. He had read the letter, and stood looking at it. Then without a word he went out, and walked about the streets through the dusk. And never a mention of it passed between the brother and sister. And then when he came home, and saw Wully⁠—when that brotherly, honest geniality shone out simply towards him⁠—he couldn’t think of that story. Wully’s presence denied it, obliterated it. That was all. And wee Johnnie justified himself.

John was, of course, keen about having his nephew speak English undefiled, and between their little games he begged him patiently to say “Uncle John.” But, after hours of slipping gleefully away from effort, the baby came no nearer the desired sounds than “Diddle!” He had lovely, twinkling ways of making light of instruction. He would duck his curly head, and hold it reflectingly to one side, and purse up his little lips enough to have spoken volumes. Yet when he saw his uncle coming towards the house, he would sing out that absurd “Diddle,” delightedly, waiting an award for such perfect enunciation. When his grandmother got him into her arms, she would beg him to say “Grannie.” And he would say it, in a way that satisfied him entirely. Only he called the word “Pooh!” And in that absurdity, too, he persisted. “Mama” he said, and “Papa” and “chickie” and “Diddle” and “Pooh.” And that was all. No coaxing could elicit more from him. Chirstie grew vexed at times hearing other women tell how early and plainly their children had talked. She longed to have Johnnie shine vocally. Sometimes she almost wondered if he wasn’t “simple.” But her mother-in-law consoled her by telling about her John. He had spoken hardly a word till he was three, and she was really getting alarmed about it, when suddenly he seemed to join the family conversation, so rapidly he learned words and sentences.

So with that foolish “Ayn?” which was his question, and with the “Ayn” which was his consent, Bonnie Wee Johnnie went on ruling his domain. The men never started to the fields with a team without letting the baby ride a few steps on the back of the old mare. No one plowed into a bird’s nest without saving an egg to show the baby. No one ran across a long gaudy pheasant’s feather without saving it for Johnnie’s soft fingers to feel. At noon John carried him out to pat the colt’s nose, or to see the little pigs nosing their way among one another to their mother’s milk. The baby had just naturally become Wully’s child. Wully could never bear the thought of Peter Keith. He kept it resolutely out of his mind. He had to. He shrank from it as he had never shrunk from the face of an enemy. Making the baby his own helped the forgetting. Barbara McNair said to Isobel McLaughlin that she had never seen a man with such a way with a baby as Wully had with that child. And Isobel McLaughlin answered that it was small wonder Wully had a way with babies, since he had carried one in his arms ever since he was three years old. Month by month Wully became in the eyes of that prairie-bound world a more exemplary and unsuspected father to Chirstie’s son.

June came and went. The corn began hiding the black soil at its roots entirely from sight. It was “knee-high by the Fourth of July” according to the Scriptures. There was to be a great celebration that year in Woolsey’s woods, and Wully had, of course, planned to take