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Archiver > SOCAL > 1999-05 > 0925655955
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Subject: Aunt Charlotte's boo ( Mr. and Mrs Cave)
Date: Sun, 2 May 1999 10:39:15 EDT
Mr. Cave was a gentleman in the finest sense of the word. He had been a
singing teacher and he taught me to read the old "buckwheat" notes. Music was
written then in funny little three-cornered characters. They looked like
grains of buckwheat scattered over a page. He was big and fine looking ready
to help anyone in trouble, generous with the little that he had and always
cheerful and contented, but he was a poor manager. Like the cricket, he "sang
the summer away" and winter would find his little family often without
anything at all stored away.
I always loved to go there. Perhaps it would be only a dish of boiled
parsnips that would be set on the table, but I knew that it was the best they
had and the cheerful spirit that went with it made it peculiarly satisfying.
I remember staying all night with Partheny. I went with her to the garden to
dig the parsnips. We scrubbed and scrubbed them till they were as white as
could be, then scraped them and boiled them till they were as tender as
marrow. They had nothing to season them with except salt, but we ate them and
laughed and joked and sang and listened to the stories that he was a past
master in telling. We drank the parsnip juice and were as satisfied as though
we had dined with a king.
Mrs. Cave was ill when they lived near us in the little cabin by the
old well. She was consumptive and lingered for months and months. Father and
Mother often went there and took her nourishing and dainty things to eat. So
the night that she died, Mr. Cave sent one of the boys to our house and we
went home with him. The home was only a hut without windows and stood in a
swale. It had been raining for weeks and the water stood on the low ground
everywhere. Ash trees grew very fine and tall about the little cabin.
Slithers of rotting leaves lay brown and thick under our horses feet. Dead
ferns hung from broken stems, water dripped from them and they were slimy
with the ooze of decay. A sudden, dreary picture it made. There was only one
room and the dead woman lay in the pitifully poor bed where she had died, a
couple of boards taking the place of the old straw tick. There was nothing in
that hut except the few old things that they had crossed the plains with.
Their outfit had been meager even then, a rickety table and two or three
benches. The cupboard was two clapboards resting on pegs driven into the
wall. It was a poor, poor cupboard and it was quite empty.
Two or three other neighbors came in to sit through the long night by
the fire.There was a handful of meal in a bag. Partheny mixed it with water
and baked it in the ashes. It was broken in pieces and passed around. It was
raining very hard and I remember that there was a leak in the roof. Mother
had fixed a little pallet on the floor and had put me to bed. I lay there and
listened to the drip, drip, drip, of the leak and saw the pitifully small ash
cake, and the bare cupboard and the outline of the little, wasted form under
the old patchwork quilt. My heart pounded and my throat ached.
When daylight came, Mother sent home for things to eat and a fine
white sheet and a needle and thread. She made a shroud of the sheet and
father made a neat pine coffin, stained red with vermilion and lined with a
soft white blanket.
Mrs. Cave was buried in a spot that she herself had selected a month
or so before. While she was yet strong enough to endure the sad journey, the
little family had gone into the hills that Mrs. Cave had always loved. Mr.
Cave led the gentle horse and the small boy, Reuben, had ridden behind the
frail little Mother to hold and support her in his arms.
They came to a small knoll almost at the foot of the hills,
themselves. It was maybe a couple of hundred feet or so above the valley
level. On one side lay the timbered, rolling hills and below, the valley
stretched away to the river and beyond it for miles, even to the high cascade
range and the several snow peaks that rise above it.
The little family carefully marked the spot that she indicated,
marked it with a round stone. The round stone is there yet. It is the only
mark. There is nothing to tell passers by who lies there, through the spot
became the burying ground for all that great valley. Many of the monuments
are pretensions, some of them far beyond the simple, unassuming lives of the
people who lie beneath them, but at the very top of that beautifully quiet
spot, is a sunken grave that has been there more than seventy five years. A
round, gray boulder marks the head of it.
Blackberry vines grew over a mound of rotten logs and covered the
ground for many rods around the spot where the little hut once stood. My
children and my children's children were warned not to go too deeply into the
thicket, for under it, no one could tell exactly where, was hidden an old
well, all that is left of the poor little home in the swale, where the ash
trees grew and where the water still stands in puddles in the winter time.
Walt Davies
Monmouth, OR
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