Great Uncle Bert

Not much disturbed the placid dullness of our little town of Massnahut, Maine. All local color disappeared when my Uncle Bub, Father's profoundly stupid brother Bob, ran off with the circus. Then, the country went dry.

Prohibitions adoption by the country had whetted Mother's conviction to cure Father's unholy addiction to the back room of Doc Griggs' drug store and the "elixir".

Somehow, the fermented fruit compote she tended in the cellar managed to escape her moral outrage. She would frequently sample its sweet and heady nectar and go about her chores loudly whistling "The Stars and Stripes Forever".

Mother believed the only music that did not issue directly from the putrid bowels of Hell was contained in the Methodist Hymnal and the marches of John Philip Sousa.

So it was, that summer, she invited Great Uncle Bert and Aunt Matilda to visit. Since Mother's hints that Father should develop a tolerance for heat had fallen on deaf ears, she reasoned that, with their influence, he would be saved from the "creature."

They were a pair of eccentric and fevered Calvinists who had left Maine for, of all places, Georgia. Only there, Uncle Bert reasoned by some arcane parsing of Scripture, would they be delivered from the impending doom he so gleefully anticipated.

Several years before, they and their two sons had sat in a corn field decked out in white choir robes awaiting the Second Coming which had been erroneously predicated by some misguided divine. Disappointed but undeterred, they soldiered on in a sinful world.

Aunt Matilda impressed me as a vaguely sinister and cheerless woman of ponderous size and frog-like appearance who smelled of bug spray and sported a peculiar growth on her chin from which sprang a cluster of misshapen hairs.

Uncle Bert was a cadaverous, steely eyed, square jawed Yankee. He was an Elder in the "Brethren of Divine Retribution" and proud owner of four hundred pounds of black powder, impatient for the coming battle with the Godless.

A week of Matilda's dismal hymns and Uncle Bert's lengthy sermonizing graces and dinner diatribes laced with descriptions of the reaching flames had pushed Father's hospitality to the limit.

The next day he came home with a gallon of ice cream. With a glint in his eye he suggested it would be a rare treat for the visiting kinfolk to taste Mother's wonderful compote.

I remember his smile as they shoveled it down and asked for more.

After three servings they were draining the last of the creamy syrup by drinking directly from the bowls.

In the early hours, Constable Johns delivered Uncle Bert to Father at the back door.He was weaving unsteadily, wet to the knees in his long handles. Apparently he had been wading in the town pond singing "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder."

Aunt Matilda was found asleep in the privy.

They left without saying good-bye to me.


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