The Lion of Farside John Dalmas
The Lion of Farside John Dalmas
PART 1: To Waken The Lion
1: Varia
None of my family knew where Aunt Varia really came from. Evansville, we figured—that’s what she’d let on. Uncle Will had met her at Salem, at the Washington County Fair, and it was love at first sight, he told me once. For him, anyway. “And at second sight and third,” laughing when he said it. He claimed she was the best wife a man ever had.
Sometimes she seemed a bit peculiar, but of course she wasn’t the only peculiar one in Washington County. Not even the only peculiar Macurdy. Fact is, she had to be a little strange to have married Will. For one thing, from his eighteenth birthday on, the only time he stuck his nose inside church was for his own wedding. Unless you count his funeral, and I don’t think he had any nose then. Of course, Ma and Gramma were the only ones in the family that were really churchy; most of us were semi-churchy.
Plus he’d get strange notions from time to time. One time Max tells about, before Varia came on the scene, he and Will were helping Dick Fenton butcher steers, and Will caught some hot blood in a tin cup and drank it down like milk. Said it was good for the muscles and glands. Dick said considering how Will didn’t have any girl friend, his glands weren’t doing him much good anyway, unless he was servicing the livestock. Strong as the Macurdies are, especially Will, we had a reputation as easy going, which no doubt was why Dick figured he could get away with saying that. But just then Will took another notion: He punched Dick right between the eyes, which also broke his nose.
But whenever the family gathered on a holiday, or Ma and Gramma would be feeding a harvest crew, Aunt Varia would be in Ma’s big kitchen, or sometimes Julie’s in later years, helping do the things women do when a big feed is getting fixed. Fact is, Gramma and Ma both said Varia was a magician in the kitchen. And she was always easy to get along with. When folks were gathered around the table or in the sitting room, Varia would sit there not saying much. Not shy; only quiet and watchful. She’d just sit there, the really really pretty one, listening and smiling.
She had two smiles, actually. The usual one was purely friendly and cheerful, but the other one, which I’d only see now and then, seemed kind of spooky to me. As if she knew things other people didn’t, and sometimes I wondered what they might be.
I wasn’t the only one. I remember Ma saying once she wondered what Varia thought about behind those peculiar eyes. Not the Bible, she’d bet; Aunt Varia didn’t go to church any more’n Will did. She did read a lot of books, though. Library books about history and science, Will said. I remember once he laughed and said that if he died, she could go off to Bloomington and be a professor, after all she’d read. He told me she’d even read Darwin’s book on evolution, but not to tell Ma or Gramma or he’d kill me.
Another thing about Varia—she wore her hair long. Not braided, but in two bunches like a pair of shiny copper-red horses’ tails, only kind of out to the sides. That was a time when women hardly ever wore their hair long. Some old ladies Gramma’s age let theirs grow long, but they tied it up back of their head in a bun. Ma wished she’d wear it different; the way it was showed her ears, which were kind of pointy. I always thought it looked pretty, though I didn’t say so, and her ears went with her eyes just fine.
When I was young, I always thought that what was oddest about Aunt Varia was how she’d laugh, now and then, when no one else did. I remember once we had a new preacher over for supper, and he was standing up saying the blessing when Varia laughed like that. First thing he did was look down to see if his pants were unbuttoned or anything. Most of us saw him look, and Frank and me laughed. Couldn’t help it. Threw the reverend off his prayer so bad, he just sort of limped on through to the amen. A lot quicker than he might have, which was fine by Frank and me.