Moose County Legends

There was a farmhouse there. The barn was at the other end. In between: nothing but apple trees. The barn was a drive-through, with doors big enough to admit a horse-drawn wagon piled high with apples. Pickax folks considered the barn pretentious. Too big, too showy. Don’t know how they felt about the family themselves. Per-haps the Trevelyans mixed only with other Trevelyans—all of whom, I might say, seemed to be hard working and successful.

“Anyhow, the farmhouse was struck by lightning. The farmwife and her youngest child died in the fire that de-stroyed their home. Where was the farmer? Where were the older children? No one knows. They didn’t have a real newspaper in those days. That same year all the apple trees began to wither, struck by blight. Then the horses died.

People thought they were poisoned. Then the farmer hanged himself from a rafter in the barn. It was a curse, the locals said. No one would touch the property with a ten-foot pole—until Fanny Klingenschoen bought it and let it rot.”

“Was there never an investigation?”

“Could be they didn’t know what the word meant in those days. The good folk of Pickax concluded it was a 쑽쑽쑽

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Short & Tall Tales curse! That was a handy way of dismissing the whole incident. But you can’t help wondering. Did someone have a grudge against the family? Were they too prosperous? Was someone jealous? Had the farmer done some awful thing that had to be avenged?”

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24.

Matilda,

a Family Heroine

Why Was There No Surname

on Her Gravestone?

Lisa Compton, whose maiden name was Campbell, was one of the volunteers who tidied thehistoric Campbell burial ground this spring,and she called me with an answer to a questionthat has puzzled her family in the past. This isthe whole story, as related by Lisa.

—JMQ

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Do you know the Campbell graveyard south of Purple Point, Qwill? It goes back to 1850 and was long ago outgrown. The family keeps it up as a place of solace in troubled times. There was one stone that puzzled me:

“Matilda, age 14”. Was she not a Campbell? If not, why was she there? Usually the stones are chiseled with all kinds of information: cause of death, names of heirs, even the names of family pets! There was only the date—1897, I think. Was there a scandal?

I’m like you, Qwill. I can’t stand to be in the dark. So I called Thornton Haggis to see if the Monument Works had any record, and he delved in the archives. No answer. So I went to the bank where my grandmother’s diaries are kept in a large lockbox. That dear woman! I found out that Matilda was a cat! The relatives wouldn’t object to burying 쑽쑽쑽

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Lilian Jackson Braun an animal in the private cemetery, but they wouldn’t want her to be called Matilda Campbell.

Anyway, here’s the story, Qwill. Matilda was a gray mouser who went out every night and was always pregnant.

That was normal.

But on one occasion she had catfits all day and all night. It was the night the little green lights appeared in the sky. We call them UFOs, but they called them “visi-tors”. They weren’t unfriendly—just interesting. They visited every seven years.

Sure enough, seven years later, Matilda went through the same performance! . . . But four years later, when she was fourteen—and pregnant again—she made another great fuss. My grandfather said, “I smell a tornado! We’re going to a safe place!” He loaded the family and their valuables and the hunting dogs in the wagon, but Matilda was under the floor of the barn and wouldn’t come out; they could hear her mewing. She was giving birth—again. The sky was turning black; they had to leave.

Good choice!—as they say nowadays. They returned to find the house wrecked. But the barn and Matilda and her four kittens were safe. When she died the next year, of natural causes, Grandmother insisted on burying her in the Campbell plot, among all the intrepid, illustrious Campbells.

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25.

How Pleasant Street

Got Its Name

Does the Name of a Street

Affect Its Quality of Life?