* * * * *

I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill.  She leans on a knobby cane.  She smokes a corn-cob pipe.  Her face is corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather.  She comes out of a high background of sky.  The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks.  Her legs are like broomsticks.

This is a vision of my great-grandmother’s entrance into my boyhood.

I had often heard of her.  She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt Rachel for a long time ... and now, since we were taking in boarders and could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.

At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being.  But when she dug out a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old lady.

She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove.  She had already reached the age of ninety-five.  But there was a constant, sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.

She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it originally because she’d heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the habit because she liked it).

Her corncob pipe—­it was as rank a thing as ditch digger ever poisoned the clean air with.

Granma Wandon was as spry as a yearling calf.  She taught me how to drown out groundhogs and chipmunks from their holes.  She went fishing with me and taught me to spit on the bait for luck, or rub a certain root on the hook, which she said made the fish bite better.

And solemnly that spring of her arrival, and that following summer, did we lay out a fair-sized garden and carefully plant each kind of vegetable in just the right time and phase of the moon and, however it may be, her garden grew beyond the garden of anyone else in the neighbourhood.

* * * * *

The following winter—­and her last winter on earth—­was a time of wonder and marvel for me ... sitting with her at the red-heated kitchen stove, I listened eagerly to her while she related tales to me of old settlers in Pennsylvania ... stories of Indians ... ghost stories ... she curdled my blood with tales of catamounts and mountain lions crying like women, and babies in the dark, to lure travellers where they could pounce down from branches on them.

And she told me the story of the gambler whom the Devil took when he swore falsely, avowing, “may the Devil take me if I cheated.”

She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.

The effect of these stories on me—?

I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for me.  Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.