"we all have a crook in the elbow"

Melvina Dunreath* Terry Halsey |
B: Jun. 5, 1840,
D: Jun. 2, 1887
(*I just discovered the D. stands for Dunreath & she had 9 siblings)

from "Hatchment" by Jesse Halsey

With this recurring justification or alibi or reminiscence, we start again. A new England kitchen, big fireplace, brick oven, Saturday night and baked beans and brown bread. A red damask spic and span table cloth on a square walnut table; four persons seated. Kerosene lamp, flickers from the smoldering fireplace; the lazy hum of the tea kettle, now that the tea is brewed. A boy maybe twelve, and his older sister back to the wall, facing the fire; bewildered father at one end of the table, elderly aunt at the other.

Father seemed old to the boy whose mother was dead, he himself as one born out of due time; father seemed old, he was old, looked old, felt old (rheumatism; its antidote a jug of hard cider with whittlings of barberry in it; the boy often went a mile down the lane to Uncle Harvey's barberry for twigs and bark for the decoction). Mother had died, quite young, when boy was five or less; father lived ever under its shadow; older sisters always thought that if father had been less stubborn (loyal) and had the new doctor who had come fresh from Ann Arbor and never lost a case of pneumonia, likely mother would have lived--who knows.

Aunt Gussie's (her husband father's brother, she was mother's sister) husband, Uncle Will, our favorite out of a baker's dozen, at least, of uncles, had taken the boy, od six, his adult brother (and a neighbor's boy of five--Lewis Hildreth--on a clamming expedition. One horse box wagon, two wash tubs with ropes attached and down to Sebonac "gut" where the tide cuts in and out between the big bay and the cold spring, scallop bond--Ram Island and other ramifying creeks. (They say cricks down east, our way.) . . .

. . . No levity; but much wisdom in the meagre conversation. Meagre is the gossip ("Gossip" says father, who studies the dictionary and knew his Latin from Academy days, "'Gossip' was once a good word akin to Gospel"--let's make it that and when some really unpleasant sure enough bit of unsavory morsel of truth filtered in, Father would say, "As Biney (his wife, my mother) used to say, 'Maye, for we all have a crook in the elbow.'" Then he would add as was his Scriptural custom, "Charity covereth a multitude of sins."