“Now then,” Aunt May Hill said. She rubbed her hands together, signaling readiness. Her fingers would not have fit into the lady’s gloves, but they were surprisingly thin. It seemed, even though it wasn’t true, that her lips, dry but fulsome, were for just a second turned up into something nearly like a smile. She appeared to be taller in her house and because she wasn’t wearing a hat or bandanna, an article that was always a part of her outside apparel, I could see her gray hair, which—and this was maybe the very strangest thing—was pulled back into a ponytail. May Hill with a little ponytail? I looked at Amanda, who was staring rudely at the beefy eyebrows. There was the broad, bony front, May Hill flat-chested, May Hill thin in some parts but she had a thick middle, her jeans zipping up snugly over the swell of the stomach, those jeans snapping halfway up her rib cage. You didn’t want to think about that middle part of her, or her wide, flat bottom. Gloria naturally should find someone to love but you’d never, ever think so about Aunt May Hill. My father always said she wasn’t a misfit, that no one should ever have called her by that cruel name. Whatever she was, I might tell him, she had a ponytail.
She walked back and forth, inspecting her showcase items, touching some of the books, wondering, it seemed, where to start. Although we had made a list of questions according to Mrs. Kraselnik’s specifications we didn’t remember any of them, nor did we recall that the instructions were in my pocket, or that I had a notepad and pen in my hand.
From the far table she picked up a small clothbound book. “The diary,” she murmured, “of Elizabeth Morrow Lombard.” She smoothed the first page before she looked at us. “Do you know who that is?”
We did not. We knew nothing.
She stood blinking, considering how to explain any of her card tables to people such as us. “Elizabeth was the cousin of your great-great-great-grandmother,” she said slowly, “born in 1801 in New Hampshire.” May Hill didn’t have a lisp exactly, but there was a slushiness when she hit an s or a th, which no one had ever mentioned. She lifted a pair of glasses that hung around her neck by a shoelace, set them on her nose, and began to read so quietly we had to sit forward.
I cannot recall a more dreary June, the dampness will be the death of us. Father has taken the two ponies off to Mr. Harding in hopes of a fair trade for a pair of oxen. I am desolate without Mother, and Cudworth is too sick to be of any use.
First of all, Cudworth? And second, was it possible that in real life May Hill was reading to us? Again, I couldn’t think how such a thing had happened. As she read on about Elizabeth’s day scrubbing the kettle and weeding the turnips and airing the bedding, you might have thought May Hill was in the middle of a murder mystery. She was glued to the page, and her voice, so quiet at first, was getting louder. Her energy made me feel sick once more, as if somehow my stomach had become the eardrum, the words going straight to that sensitive place, and also, it was as if her excitement was something sad. Amanda was slouching in her chair and swinging her legs. It almost seemed—almost—that May Hill was nothing but a regular old lady. Someone pitiful who lived alone, who had nothing to care about but the diary of a pioneer. What if she had brought out the card tables in order to make the displays just for us? That notion was a heavy sinking thing, something I didn’t want, something I was trying to forget—but wait! Suddenly there was an Indian in Elizabeth Lombard’s house. An old-fashioned redskin in a loincloth. Amanda stopped the swinging. I sat up straight. “The smell was terrible,” May Hill was reading. “He looked weak, his chest frail, but his eyes were blazing at me with hatred.” There followed three sentences in which Elizabeth Lombard snatched an ax and brained that savage.
We both covered our mouths. May Hill looked up and that time I was sure of it, certain she was smiling at me. It wasn’t a large goofy grin or a pretty showing of teeth, but instead a smile of satisfaction, of having expertly accomplished a task. Her blue eyes, which were ordinarily cast down, were wide, those eyes asking the question, What do you think of that!
“The bleeding on Mother’s braided rug was something awful,” she read, “and I could not help but think, with the swiftness of the death, and what I could see was an easy acquiescence, that he had been ill, that he’d been feverish.”
I lifted my feet from the rug because if it was the very same rug that had absorbed the Native American’s blood, then, as we’d been taught in school, you should not ever touch someone else’s bodily fluids, wet or dry, because of AIDS.