Elia Wilkinson Peattie - An Astral Onion

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information and to find out
how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Read
and recorded by Betsy Bush Marquette, Michigan, October two thousand six.

(00:22):
An astral onion by Eliah Wilkinson Petey. When Tig Braddock
came to Nora Finnegan, he was red headed and freckled,
and truth to tell, he remained with these features to
the end of his life, a life prolonged by a lucky,
if somewhat improbable incident. As you shall hear, Tig had

(00:47):
shuffled off his parents, as Saurians of some sorts do
their skins. During the temporary absence from home of his mother,
who was at the bridewell, and the more extended vacation
of his father, who, like Villon, loved the open road
and the life of it, Tig, who was not a
well domesticated animal, wandered away. The Humane Society never heard

(01:12):
of him, the neighbors did not miss him, and the
law took no cognizance of this detached citizen. This lost
plead Tig would have sunk into that melancholy, which is
a tendant upon hunger, the only form of despair which
Babyhood knows if he had not wandered across the path
of Nora Finnegan, Now Norah shone with steady brightness in

(01:37):
her orbit, and no sooner had tig entered her atmosphere
than he was warmed and comforted. Hunger could not live
where Nora was. The basement room where she kept house
was redolent with savory smells, and in the stove in
her front room, which was also her bedroom, there was

(01:57):
a bright fire glowing when fire was kneel. Nora went
out washing for a living. But she was not a
poor washerwoman, not at all. She was a washerwoman triumphant.
She had perfect health, an enormous frame, an a bounding
enthusiasm for life, and a rich abundance of professional pride.

(02:20):
She believed herself to be the best washer of white
clothes she had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and
the value placed upon her services, and her long connection
with certain families with large weekly washings, bore out this
estimate of herself, an estimate which she never endeavored to conceal.

(02:40):
Nora had buried two husbands without being unduly depressed by
the fact. The first husband had been a disappointment, and
Nora winked at providence when an accident in a tunnel
carried him off, that is to say, carried the husband off.
The second husband was not so much of a disappointment
as a prize. He developed ability of a literary order

(03:04):
and wrote songs which sold and made him a small fortune.
Then he ran away with another woman. The woman spent
his fortune, drove him to dissipation, and when he was dying,
he came back to Norah, who received him cordially, attended
him to the end, and cheered his last hours by
singing his own songs to him. Then she raised a

(03:28):
headstone recounting his virtues, which were quite numerous, and refraining
from any reference to those peculiarities which had caused him
to be such a surprise. Only one actual chagrin had
ever nibbled at the sound heart of Nora Finnegan, a
cruel chagrin with long white teeth such as rodents have.

(03:49):
She had never held a child to her breast, nor
laughed in its eyes, never bathed the pink form of
a little son or daughter, never hell to tugging of
little hands at her voluminous calico skirts. Nora had burnt
many candles before the statue of the Blessed Virgin without
remedying this deplorable condition. She had sent up unavailing prayers,

(04:15):
and had at times wept hot tears of longing and loneliness.
Sometimes in her sleep she dreamed that a wee form,
warm and exquisitely soft, had pressed against her firm body,
and that a hand with tiniest pink nails crept within
her bosom. But as she reached out to snatch this

(04:36):
delicious little creature closer, she woke to realize a barren
woman's grief, and turned herself in anguish on her lonely pillow. So,
when Tig came along, accompanied by two curs, who had
faithfully followed him from his home, and when she learned
the details of his story, she took him in curs

(04:58):
and all, and, having bayed the three of them, made
them part and parcel of her home. This was after
the demise of the second husband, and at a time
when Nora felt that she had done all a woman
could be expected to do for hymen. Tig was a
preposterous baby the curs were preposterous curs. Nora had always

(05:21):
been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter, laughter which
had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the
lack of the really comic in the surroundings of the poor.
But with a red headed and freckled baby boy and
two trick dogs in the house, she found a good
and sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn

(05:42):
the cave where Echo lives with her mirth had that
cave not been as such an immeasurable distance from the
crowded neighborhood where she lived. At the age of four,
Tig went to free kindergarten. At the age of six,
he was in school and made three grades the first
year and to the next. At fifteen, he was graduated

(06:04):
from the high school and went to work as errand
boy in a newspaper office, with a fixed determination to
make a journalist of himself. Nora was a trifle worried
about his morals when she discovered his intellect, But as
time went on and Tig showed no devotion for any
woman save herself, and no consciousness that there were such

(06:26):
things as bad boys or saloons in the world. She
began to have confidence. All of his earnings were brought
to her, Every holiday was spent with her. He told
her his secrets and his aspirations. He admitted that he
expected to become a great man. And though he had
not quite decided upon the nature of his career, saving

(06:48):
of course, the makeshift of journalism, it was not unlikely
that he would elect to be a novelist, like well,
probably like Thackeray. Hope, always a charming creek, put on
her most alluring smiles for Tig, and he made her
his mistress and feasted on the light of her eyes. Moreover,

(07:09):
he was chaperoned, so to speak, by Nora Finnegan, who
listened to every line Tig wrote, and made a mighty applause,
and filled him up with good Irish stew, many colored
as the coat of Joseph, and pungent with the inimitable
perfume of the rose of the cellar. Nora Finnegan understood

(07:29):
the onion and used it lovingly. She perceived the difference
between the use and abuse of the pleasant and obvious
friend of hungry man, and employed it with enthusiasm but discretion.
Thus it came about that whoever ate of her dinners,
found the meals of other cooks strangely lacking in savor,

(07:50):
and remembered with regret the soups and stews and broiled
steaks and stuffed chickens of the woman who appreciated the onion.
When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day,
she took it in such a jocular fashion that Tig
felt not the least concern about her, And when two
days later she died of pneumonia, he almost thought at

(08:13):
first that it must be one of her jokes. She
had departed with decision such as such characterized every act
of her life, and had made as little trouble for
others as possible. When she was dead, the community had
the opportunity of discovering the number of her friends. Miserable
children with faces which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless

(08:37):
boys with vicious countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity. Women with
bloated faces came to weep over Nora's beer, and to
lay a flower there, and to scuttle away, more abjectly
lonely than even sin could make them. If the cats
and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she

(08:57):
had shown kindness could also have attended her funeral. The
procession would have been, from a point of numbers, one
of the most imposing the city had ever known. Tig
used up all their savings to bury her, and the
next week, by some peculiar fatality, he had a falling
out with the night editor of his paper and was discharged.

(09:21):
This sank deep into his sensitive soul, and he swore
he would be an underling no longer, which foolish resolution
was directly traceable to his hair, the color of which
it will be recollected was red. Not being an underling,
he was obliged to make himself into something else, and
he recurred passionately to his old idea of becoming a novelist.

(09:45):
He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work
on a battered typewriter, did his own cooking, and occasionally
pawned something to keep him in food. The environment was
calculated to further impress with the idea of his genius.
A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story,

(10:07):
and Tig wrote one and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations,
and interlineations, which would have reflected credit upon honor acute
Balzac himself. Then he wrought altogether with splendid brevity and
dramatic force, Tig's own words, and mailed the same. He

(10:29):
was convinced he would get the prize. He was just
as much convinced of it as Nora Finnegan would have
been if she had been with him. So he went
about doing more fiction, taking no especial care of himself,
and wrapped in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough
for the weather, permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever.

(10:50):
He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments
as the condemned in rheumatic no, depending on one of
Nora's former friends to come in twice a day and
keep up the fire for him. This friend was aged
ten and looked like a sparrow who had been in
a cyclone. But somewhere inside his bones was a wit

(11:11):
which had spelled out devotion. He found fuel for the
cracked stove somehow or other. He brought it in a
dirty sack which he carried on his back, and he
kept warmth in Tig's miserable body. Moreover, he found food
of a sort cold horrible bits often, and Tig wept
when he saw them, remembering the meals Nora had served him.

(11:35):
Tig was getting better, though he was conscious of a
weak heart and a lamenting stomach. When, to his amazement,
the sparrow ceased to visit him. Not for a moment
did Tig suspect desertion. He knew that only something in
the nature of an act of providence, as the insurance
companies would designate it, could keep the little bundle of

(11:56):
bones away from him. As the days went by, he
became convinced of it, for no sparrow came, and no
coal lay upon the hearth. The basement window fortunately looked
toward the south, and the pale april sunshine was beginning
to make itself felt, so that the temperature of the
room was not unbearable. But Tig languished, sank, sank day

(12:20):
by day, and was kept alive only by the conviction
that the letter announcing the award of the thousand dollar
prize would presently come to him. One night, he reached
a place where, for hunger and dejection his mind wandered,
and he seemed to be complaining all night to Nora
of his woes. When the chill dawn came, with chittering

(12:43):
of little birds on the dirty pavement and an agitation
of the scrawny willow pusses, he was not able to
lift his hand to his head. The window before his
sight was but a glittering square. He said to himself
that the end must be at hand. Yet it was cruel, cruel,
with fame and fortune so near. If only he had

(13:07):
some food, he might summon strength to rally just for
a little while, impossible that he should die, And yet
without food there was no choice. Dreaming so of Nora's dinners,
thinking how one spoonful of a stew such as she
often compounded, would now be his salvation, he became conscious

(13:30):
of the presence of a strong perfume in the room.
It was so familiar that it seemed like a subconsciousness.
Yet he found no name for this friendly odor. For
a bewildered minute or two, little by little, however, it
grew upon him that it was the onion, that fragrant
and kindly bulb, which had attained its apotheosis in the

(13:54):
cuisine of Nora Finnegan of sacred memory. He opened his
languid eyes to see mayhap the plant had not attained
some more palpable materialization. Behold, it was so before him,
in a brown earthen dish, a most familiar dish was
an onion, pearly white in placid seas of gravy, smoking

(14:19):
and delectable. With unexpected strength, he raised himself and reached
for the dish, which floated before him in a halo
made by its own steam. It moved toward him, offered
a spoon to his hand, and as he ate, he
heard about the room the rustle of Nora Finnegan's starched skirts,

(14:43):
and now and then a faint, faint echo of her
old time laugh, such an echo as one may find
of the sea in the heart of a shell. The
noble bulb disappeared little by little before his veracity, and
in contentment gra later than virtue can give, he sank
back upon his pillow and slept. Two hours later, the

(15:06):
postman knocked at the door, and, receiving no answer, forced
his way in tig half awake, saw him enter with
no surprise. He felt no surprise when he put a
letter in his hand bearing the name of the magazine
to which he had sent his short story. He was
not even surprised when tearing it open with suddenly alert hands,

(15:30):
he found within the check for the first prize, the
check he had expected all that day. As the April
sunlight spread himself upon his floor, he felt his strength grow.
Late in the afternoon, the sparrow came back, paler and
more bony than ever, and sank, breathing hard upon the

(15:52):
floor with his sack of coal. I've been sick, he said,
trying to smile, terrible sick. But I come as soon
as I could. Build up the fire, cried Tig in
a voice so strong it made the sparrow start as
if a stone had struck him. Build up the fire

(16:12):
and forget you are sick, For by the shade of
Nora Finnegin you shall be hungry no more. And of
an astral Onion by Eliah Wilkinson Petey