“She needn’t give herself airs,” said Aunt Maw. “When Mark first saw her, she was hoein’ corn in a field.”
Childless at forty-five, Mag was a tall, rather gaunt, white-faced woman, with cold eyes, a thin nose, and a bitter, sneering mouth. She had been handsome, but for twenty years she had been under the spell of a neurosis which had held her in the unshakable conviction that she was suffering from consumption, cancer, heart disease, and pernicious an?mia. She was under constant medical attention. She spent half her waking hours extended in white terror on her bed, in a room chemical with shelves and tables full of bottles, and sealed against a draft of air.
She was, as a matter of fact, a strong, healthy, and well-nourished woman.
George sometimes went along with Aunt Maw when she crossed the intervening strip of lawn to visit Mag in her new and ugly house of bright red brick. They would find her in her sealed room in a sickening enervation of red-hot stove heat.
“Come here!” Aunt Mag would say in her harsh, sneering voice, drawing the boy’s unwilling figure beside her bed. “Lord a’ mercy!” she would add, staring up into his face with her bitter laugh. “He smells like a Webber! Do your feet stink, boy?”
These pleasantries, delivered to the accompaniment of sneering laughter, and a bending down of her thin, pious mouth as she pretended to sniff the air with disgust, did not increase George’s love for his aunt.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, boy!” she would scream at him. “You ought to get down on your knees every night and thank the Lord for having a good Christian home like this! Where would you be if it wasn’t for me? I made your Uncle Mark take you in! If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been sent to an orphan asylum—that’s where you’d be!”
Under this goading, the boy would mumble his gratitude, but in his heart he often wished he had been sent to an orphanage.
MAG WAS A Baptist, and very active in her church. She donated liberally; she fattened the preacher at her Sunday table; above all, she contributed large sums for the maintenance of the Baptist orphanage, and kept in her service at all times two or three children whom she had taken under her generous wing. This charity got the thick coatings of flattery which assure a Baptist of success on earth and favor in heaven. The minister, speaking to his Sunday hundreds, would say:
“…And now I know we will all be glad to hear that the heart of another orphan child has been made happy through the generosity of Sister Joyner, who, in the great goodness of her heart, is giving a comfortable home to Betsy Belcher, a little girl who lost both her parents before she was eight years old. This makes the sixth orphan that the good woman has taken into her loving care. I know, when we see her giving to the Lord so freely, that there are others here who will be led to give a little in the furtherance of the great work which the good Brothers and Sisters at the orphanage are doing.”
And as Mag, bridling and ludicrously humble, advanced to the pulpit after the preacher’s harangue, he would bend with greased unction over her hand, saying:
“And how is the good woman today?”
Mag took in these wretched children and made them drudges of all trades about the house. One of them was a boy of fourteen whose name was Willie, a thick-headed, smiling, perpetually bewildered idiot. Willie never played with the boys in the neighborhood because he was always kept busy doing chores, and George rarely saw him except on his visits of duty to Aunt Mag, when the orphan boy would be summoned into her room on a fire-building errand.
“Did you ever see such an idiot?” Mag would say, with her sneering laugh. “Lord a’ mercy!”
And the boy would smile back at her, doubtfully, idiotically, fearfully, not knowing why.
One time Willie was left with Aunt Maw when Mark and Mag went to Florida. He worked like a dog. Aunt Maw stuffed him with food and gave him a little room in which to sleep. She did not abuse him. She and George laughed constantly at him, and he was absurdly pleased and grateful to know that he amused them, smiling his wide, idiot grin.
His hair was a tangled, uncut jungle which fell in matted lengths almost to his shoulder. Nebraska Crane told him solemnly, one day, that he was an experienced barber, and Willie submitted joyfully to the operation. Nebraska capped his large head with an inverted chamber pot, and laughed quietly from time to time as he sheared off all the hair that fell below the edges of the pot. And Willie, under the pot, continued to smile at them in friendly, puzzled idiocy while Nebraska and George caved slowly inward with laughter.