Growing Pains Read Online Free

sister to step into her shoes. Our small son is muchyounger and very delicate. His father accuses me of coddling him, but he is the only boy I have left—I lost three.”
    Father kept sturdy me as his pet for a long time.
    “Ah,” he would say, “this one should have been the boy.”
    The very frailness of her little son made Mother love him harder. She did not mind the anxiety and trouble if only he lived.
    Father insisted that I be at his heels every moment that he was at home. I helped him in the garden, popping the bulbs into holes that he dug, holding the strips of cloth and the tacks while he trained Isabella. I walked nearly all the way to town with him every morning. He let me snuggle under his arm and sleep during the long Presbyterian sermons. I held his hand during the walk to and from church. This all seemed to me fine until I began to think for myself—then I saw that I was being used as a soother for Father’s tantrums; like a bone to a dog, I was being flung to quiet Father’s temper. When he was extra cranky I was taken into town by my big sister and left at Father’s wholesale warehouse to walk home with him because my chatter soothed him. I resented this and began to question why Father should act as if he was God. Why should people dance after him and let him think he was? I decided disciplining would be good for Father and I made up my mind to cross his will sometimes. At first he laughed, trying to coax the waywardness out of me, but when he saw I was serious his fury rose against me. He turned and was harder on me than on any of the others. His soul was so bitter that he was even sometimes cruel to me.
    “Mother,” I begged, “need I be sent to town any more to walk home with Father?”
    Mother looked at me hard. “Child,” she cried, “what ails you? You have always loved to be with your father. He adores you. What is the matter?”
    “He is cross, he thinks he is as important as God.”
    Mother was supremely shocked; she had brought her family up under the English tradition that the men of a woman’s family were created to be worshipped. My insurrection pained her. She was as troubled as a hen that has hatched a duck. She wanted to question me but her loyalty to Father forbade.
    She said to me, “Shall you and I have a picnic?”—She knew that above all things I loved a picnic.
    “All to ourselves?” I asked.
    “Just you and I.”
    It was the most wonderful thing she could have suggested. I was so proud. Mother, who always shared herself equally among us, was giving to me a whole afternoon of herself!
    It was wild-lily time. We went through our garden, our cow-yard and pasture, and came to our wild-lily field. Here we stood a little, quietly looking. Millions upon millions of white lilies were spangled over the green field. Every lily’s brown eye looked down into the earth but her petals rolled back over her head and pointed at the pine-tree tops and the sky. No one could make words to tell how fresh and sweet they smelled. The perfume was delicate yet had such power its memory clung through the rest of your life and could carry you back any time to the old lily field, even after the field had become city and there were no more lilies in it—just houses and houses. Yes, even then your nose could ride on the smell and come galloping back to the lily field.
    Between our lily field and Beacon Hill Park there was nothing but a black, tarred fence. From the bag that carried Mother’s sewing and our picnic, she took a big key and fitted it into the padlock. The binding-chain fell away from the pickets. I stepped with Mother beyond the confines of our very fenced childhood. Pickets and snakefences had always separated us from the tremendous world. Beacon Hill Park was just as it had always been from the beginning of time, not cleared, not trimmed. Mother and I squeezed through a crack in its greenery; bushes whacked against our push. Soon we came to a tiny, grassy opening, filled with