.. and I looked into the empty
palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.
"--that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.
"Yep!"
"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"
"No!--got up to take a drink of water."
"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating
in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He
continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."
"I did. I bumped my head into the door."
* * * * *
I visited Aunt Millie last.
I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her
cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as
ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.
Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her
in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the
yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile
... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man
had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost
have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see
this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted
virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several
buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.
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