Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Page B

hurries around the house on the slippery walk. From around the corner he hears the steady sound of a woman’s voice.
    Emily Ellis’s porch is less porch than command post. It is fifteen feet deep and runs across the entire front of the cottage, railed and low-eaved and sheltered even in the worst weather. I never saw it empty of people, never saw it without a partly solved jigsaw puzzle spread out on a card table and the swing full of dominoes, rummy, and Chinese checkers, rarely saw it without someone playing bridge, either Aunt Emily teaching some children or Aunt Emily and George Barnwell engaged in their intent, competitive afternoon rubbers with Uncle Dwight and Aunt Heather.
    The bridge table is at the far end, out of the traffic, which is incessant. Though the Ellis daughters are grown, Charity out of Smith, Comfort halfway through, there are innumerable cousins, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews, neighbor children, and the children of visitors and guests. Just inside the door is a circulating library of wholesome books, among which I have noted
The Wind in the Willows, The Boy Scout Handbook,
the entire
Pooh
canon,
Black Beauty, Little Women, The Yearling.
There are also piles of the
National Geographic.
    Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn’t much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide. When the children go on a hike, she packs bird and flower guides into their knapsacks, and quizzes them on their return to see if they have learned anything. When she accompanies them on an overnight camping trip, sleeping in her own worn pup tent, they can count on instructive fireside talks on the stars. And on rainy days such as this she sits like a confident spider in the midst of her web until boredom drives all the children on the Point to her porch, where she reads to them or teaches them French.
    What she is doing now is reading
Hiawatha.
She is fond of Longfellow, whose house is a landmark on Brattle Street hardly a block from her own, and she perceives the rightness of
Hiawatha
in this setting of northern woods. She reads loudly, to be heard above the rush and patter of rain.
    By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
    All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.
    When he heard the owls at midnight,
Hooting, laughing in the forest,
“What is that?” he cried in terror.
“What is that?” he said. “Nokomis?”
And the good Nokomis answered:
“That is but the owl and owlet,
Talking in their native language,
Talking, scolding at each other.”
    Some of those children, years later, may awaken in the night from a dream of that strong voice chanting Iroquois myths in Finnish trochees, and their souls will yearn within them for the certainty and assurance and naturalness and authority of the time Aunt Emily dominated.
    In primitive cultures, Aunt Emily will tell anyone with whom she discusses the rearing of children, the young learn by imitating their parents. Girls learn household tasks and the feminine role, including motherhood, by playing house and looking after their younger brothers and sisters. Boys follow their fathers to field and forge, and ape their ways with tools and weapons. Both boys and girls may be