Annie Johnston - Aunt 'Liza's Hero, and Other Stories

These stories first appeared in the Youth's Companion . The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors in permitting her to republish them in the present volume.

Messrs. L. C. Page and Company wish also to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors in granting them permission to use the original illustrations.

Aunt 'Liza Barnes leaned over the front gate at the end of the garden path, and pulled her black sunbonnet farther over her wrinkled face to shade her dim eyes from the glare of the morning sun. Something unusual was happening down the street, judging from the rapidly approaching noise and dust.

Aunt 'Liza had been weeding her little vegetable garden at the back of the house when she first heard the confused shouting of many voices. She thought it was a runaway, and hurried to the gate as fast as her rheumatic joints would allow.

Runaway teams had often startled the sleepy streets of this little Indiana village, but never before had such a wild procession raced through its thoroughfares. Two well-grown calves dashed past, dragging behind them an overturned, home-made cart, to which they were harnessed by pieces of clothes-lines and rusty trace-chains.

Behind them came a breathless crowd of shouting boys and barking dogs. They were gasping in the heat and the clouds of yellow dust their feet had kicked up. Aunt 'Liza's black sunbonnet leaned farther over the gate as she called shrilly to the boy who brought up the rear, "What's the matter, Ben?"

The boy dropped out of the race and came back and leaned against the fence, still grinning.

"Running isn't much in my line," he panted, as he wiped his fat, freckled face on his shirtsleeve. "But it was too funny to see them calves kick up their heels and light out. One is Joe Meadows's and one is Jeff Whitman's. They're broke in to work single, and pull all right that way. But the boys took a notion to make 'em work double. This is the first time they've tried it. Put bits in their mouths, too, and drive 'em with reins like horses. My! But didn't they go lickety-split!"

Aunt 'Liza chuckled. Seventy-five years had made her bent and feeble, but her sense of fun and her sympathies were still fresh and quick. Every boy in the place felt that she was his friend.

In her tumble-down cottage on the outskirts of the town she lived alone, excepting when her drunken, thriftless son Henry came back to be taken care of awhile. She supported herself by selling vegetables, chickens, and eggs.

Most people had forgotten that she had once lived in much better circumstances. Whatever longings she may have had for the prosperity of her early days, no one knew about them. Perhaps it was because she never talked of herself, and was so ready to listen to the complaints of others, that everybody went to her with their troubles.

The racing calves soon came to a halt. In a few minutes the procession came back, and halted quietly in front of the little garden gate. Jeff was leading the calves, which looked around with mild, reproachful eyes, as if wondering at the disturbance.

"Aunt 'Liza," said Jeff, "can you lend me a strap or something? The reins broke. That's how they happened to get away from me."

"You can take the rope hanging up in the well-shed if you'll bring it back before night."

"All right, Aunt 'Liza. I'll do as much for you some day. Just look at Daisy and Bolivar! We're going to take them to the fair next fall, and enter them as the fastest trotting calves on record."

"Boys are such harum-scarum creatures," said the old woman, as she bent painfully over her weeding again. "Likely enough Jeff'll never think of that rope another time."

But after dinner, as she sat out on a bench by the back door, smoking her cob-pipe, Jeff came around the house with the rope on his arm.

"Sit down and rest a spell," insisted the old woman. "I get powerful lonesome day in and day out, with scarcely anybody to pass a word with."

"Where's Henry?" Jeff asked.

"Off on another spree," she answered, bitterly. "I tell you, Jeff, it's a hard thing for a mother to have to say about a son, but many and many's the time I've wished the Lord had a-taken him when he was a baby."

"Maybe he'll come all right yet, Aunt 'Liza," said Jeff.

"Not he. Not an honest day's work has he done since he left the army," she went on. "He was steady enough before the war, but camp life seemed to upset him like. He was just a boy, you see, and he fell in with a rough lot that started him to drinking and gambling. He's never been the same since. Pity the war took my poor Mac instead. He never would 'a' left his old mother to drudge and slave to keep soul and body together."

Jeff listened in amazement to this sudden burst of confidence. He had never heard her complain before, and scarcely knew how to answer her.

"Why, Aunt 'Liza, I never knew before that you had two sons!" he said.

"No, I suppose not," answered the old woman, sadly. "I suppose everybody's forgotten him but me. My Mac never had his dues. He never had justice done him. No, he never had justice done him." She kept repeating the words.

"He ought to have come home a captain, with a sword, for he was a brave boy, my Mac was. His picture is in the front room, if you've a mind to step in and look at it, and his cap and his canteen are hanging on the peg where he left them. Dear, dear! what a long time that's been!"

Jeff had all a boy's admiration for a hero. He took the faded cap reverently from its peg to examine the bullet-hole in the crown. He turned the battered canteen over and over, wishing he knew how it came by all its dents and bruises. The face that looked out from the old ambrotype with such steadfast eyes showed honesty in every line.

"Doesn't look much like old Henry," thought Jeff.

"Won't you tell me about him, Aunt 'Liza?" he asked, as he seated himself on the door-step again. "I always did love to hear about the war."

It was not often she had such an attentive listener. He questioned her eagerly, and she took a childish delight in recalling every detail connected with her "soldier-boy." It had been so many, many years since she had spoken of him to any one.

"Yes, he was wounded twice," she told him, "and lay for weeks in a hospital. Then he was six months in a Southern prison, and escaped and joined the army again. He had risked his own life, too, to save his colonel. Nobody had shown more courage and daring than he. Everybody told me that, but other men were promoted and sent home with titles. My boy came home to die, with only scars and a wasting fever."

Thrilled by her story, Jeff entered so fully into the spirit of the recital that he, too, forgot that McIntyre Barnes was only one among many thousands of heroes who were never raised above the rank of private. Mother-love transfigured simple patriotism into more than heroism.

As age came on she brooded over the thought more and more. Even the loss of one son and the neglect by the other did not cause her now such sorrow as that her country failed to recognize in her Mac the hero whom she all but worshipped.

Jeff found himself repeating the old woman's words as he went toward home late in the afternoon:

"No, Mac never had justice done him – he never had his dues."

Several days after that Jeff and Joe stopped at the house again to borrow a pail.

"We forgot to water the calves this morning," Jeff explained, "and they've had a pretty tough time hauling brush. They pull together splendidly now. We've been clearing out Mr. Spalding's orchard."

"Look around and help yourselves," Aunt 'Liza answered, briskly. "When once I get down on my knees to weed I'm too stiff to get up again in a hurry. You'll find how it is, maybe, when you get into your seventies."