“I’ll tell ya Billie,” Otto said, and he laughed at what he was about to say. Otto stood outside the car, his head tilted as he looked at the baby. Then she sat in the front seat without glancing back again. Billie told me that she remembers looking down at Bonnie for a second, noting with distaste the way she pursed her lips as if she’d just bitten into a lemon. Otto placed baby Bonnie, nestled in her white wicker basinet, on the opera seat of the Buick. Otto, like most people, considered the almanac a solid prophecy of the weather, certainly more reliable than the old Pennsylvania Dutch women who thought they could tell you anything by simply scraping their claws along the bark of an elm. Otto had read the almanac that morning-it was sitting next to the toilet where Billie had left it for him-and it said there’d be no more snow in Pennsylvania until next December. It was cold out, about forty degrees, with a sky as clear as glass. Instead of taking the truck, Otto took the convertible Buick Century with the top folded down like a giant accordion into the nook behind the opera seat. My grandfather liked to say that Billie was as unbreakable as an iron rod.Ī month and a half after my mother was born, while Billie was still recovering from the delivery, Otto decided that he and Billie needed to go out for a drink. She had a delicate, simple face, but her backbone was as rigid as her temperament. Billie wore slacks at a time most women were in dresses. Otto had little use for girls and women, although he had always been fond of Billie who was female but not frilly in any way. And the last thing my grandfather, Otto, had wanted was a child who was not a boy. The last thing Billie had wanted was a spoiled child.
Never kiss the child and never talk to it in anything other than a voice as flat and firm as a sheet of aluminum. You feed it one bottle every four hours for six weeks, at which point you drop the night feedings. The rule in the house was that you don’t pick up a kid and cuddle it. The dogs watched her tiny limbs as if they were humming birds, and often Billie wondered how many minutes she’d have to leave the room before a dog snatched one of those humming birds in his mouth. Sometimes she’d give a whistling holler and whir her arms and legs like rotors. She was content to loll on the braided rug with the dogs, two liver-colored pointers who would lick the dried formula off her face.
Bonnie was a fine baby: round head, wide green eyes, an inscrutable gaze. My grandmother, Billie, was twenty when Bonnie was born. And for my mother, Bonnie Gandstetter, it was almost a short story-a life six-weeks long, coming to a near-end in a snow shower outside a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania. That’s the usual way, the only way, really. Why do you think the parents had a change of heart about how they treated the boy’s grandfather when they saw what he was doing?Ģ.It starts with a birth and finishes with a death. Header illustration by Pixabay LET’S CHAT ABOUT THE STORIES ~ IDEAS FOR TALKING WITH KIDSġ.
Then they took the old grandfather to the table, and henceforth always let him eat with them, and likewise said nothing if he did spill a little of anything. The man and his wife looked at each other for a while, and presently began to cry. ‘I am making a little trough,’ answered the child, ‘for father and mother to eat out of when I am big.’
‘What are you doing there?’ asked the father. They were once sitting thus when the little grandson of four years old began to gather together some bits of wood upon the ground. Then they brought him a wooden bowl for a few half-pence, out of which he had to eat. The young wife scolded him, but he said nothing and only sighed. Once, too, his trembling hands could not hold the bowl, and it fell to the ground and broke.
And he used to look towards the table with his eyes full of tears. His son and his son’s wife were disgusted at this, so the old grandfather at last had to sit in the corner behind the stove, and they gave him his food in an earthenware bowl, and not even enough of it. There was once a very old man, whose eyes had become dim, his ears dull of hearing, his knees trembled, and when he sat at table he could hardly hold the spoon, and spilt the broth upon the table-cloth or let it run out of his mouth. We would encourage parents to read beforehand if your child is sensitive to such themes. This is a vintage fairy tale, and may contain violence.