John Dalmas - The Lion of Farside

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.

Varia was still pretty young then. I mean actually, in years.

But what folks noticed first about her was her eyes. She had two, just like the rest of us, but they were different. Big and leaf green-leaf green!-and tilted up at the outside corners. Made her look foreign. She was a pretty woman though, the prettiest around, and those eyes were part of it. They suited her just right, as if any other color or size or shape would have spoiled her looks.

Along with her eyes, her build was what caught the eye most, even among women I think. A little slim, maybe, for some tastes, but not where it counted. When I was thirteen, fourteen years old, sometimes I'd get a hard-on when I looked at her. Whenever I did, she'd look at me and laugh, as if she knew. That killed it every time.

Not that it was a mean laugh. There wasn't any meanness to Varia at all.

I said earlier that she had to have been strange to marry Uncle Will. As a farmer, Will was seriously short on judgement, though otherwise he seemed reasonably smart. He'd take a notion to do the darnedest things. His place was right next to ours, with his northeast forty up against our northwest forty, and right in the middle of the two forties was a thirty-acre clay pocket too heavy and wet for growing anything but hay. So that's what we'd always used it for, a hay meadow. Anyway, this one spring day I was fixing fence and saw Will out there plowing his half of it, turning over that nice stand of grass. His team had all it could do to pull the moldboard through it.

Naturally I was curious, so I went over and asked how come he was plowing it. "Gonna plant potatoes," he told me. Potatoes in clay! Was it anyone else, I'd have thought he was fooling. What he ended up with was a worn-out team, busted up harness, and twelve acres of ground that, when the top dried out, was like a cobblestone pavement. Afterward, when he tried harrowing it, the disks just hopped along the top. I was only fourteen at the time, but I sure as heck knew better'n to do something like that. When Pa saw it, he just shook his head. So far as I know, he never said anything to Will about it. Wouldn't have done any good.

But if Will was a little short sometimes between the ears, he made up for it further down. The Macurdy men were well known for their strength, but Will was almost surely the strongest man in Washington County, and fast-moving. He could outwork most two men. Even if he didn't have hair on his chest, or any whiskers beyond a little peach fuzz. That was typical of Macurdy men, too, and a little embarrassing when I was a teenager.

Anyway he got so he did a lot of work off the farm, which was just as well, considering the kind of farming decisions he sometimes made. Most of his land he rented to Pa, and didn't keep much stock to tend to. A few pigs, a couple of cows that Varia milked, and a team of horses he used logging. He worked for the barrel works a lot of the time, logging white oak cooperage, and cutting up the tops for the Barlow brothers' brick kiln.

And it wasn't just Will's muscles that were big. The Bible says you mustn't show yourself nekkit to folks, but we all figured that rule didn't hold down by the Sycamore Bend. That's where us boys used to swim. And Harley Burton used to have easily the biggest one of all the kids that swam there. (Course, I was only nine, ten years old then. By the time I turned fourteen, and seemed likely to beat him out, Harley was off to France in the Army, helping teach the Kaiser a lesson.) Anyway, when I was about ten, I mentioned to Pa how big Harley's was, and Pa said he'd be surprised if Harley's was near as big as Will's. Said there was someone like that in every generation of Macurdies, but Will had outdone himself. After that I was always a little curious to see what Will had, but of course I never did.

Will was the youngest of three boys, Pa being the oldest. (The Macurdies had always been cursed with what folks around there considered small families; I'd find out more about that later.) I was a little kid five years old when he married Varia. Will was about twenty-five at the time. Even then, I wondered why such a pretty girl would marry someone strange as Will. Some months later she got with child, and when she was supposedly about five months along, Will took her into town. She'd take the train to Evansville, she said, to get cared for and midwifed by her gramma on her mama's side. Some folks thought that was an insult to the Macurdy clan, and to Doc Simmons, and it seemed awful soon, only five months along. But Will was content, so no one in the family said anything. Us Macurdies have always been easy going; let folks pretty much be what they are. And Varia'd said the women in her family had a lot of trouble carrying to full term and birthing, so she wanted to be with her own gramma.