Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

he was just going easy, wasn’t he? Then thinking about it I guess the need gets stronger; he looked down wondering what was the matter, and soon he’s fairly clawin’ and yankin’ every which way, trying all he can to get himself free. But I’d sewed him up good and strong. I wonder when it hit him, what’d been done?”
    “Right then, I’d think. He was never stupid.”
    “He never was. So he must’ve put it all together. The lemonade and all. The one thing I don’t guess he ever thought of was us hid up in the granary. Or else would he’ve done what he did next?”
    “He wouldn’t have,” said my mother firmly.
    “I don’t know though. He might’ve been past caring. Eh? He just finally went past caring and gave up and ripped down his overalls altogether and let ’er fly. We had the full view.”
    “He had his back to us.”
    “He did not! When he shot away there wasn’t a thing we couldn’t see. He turned himself sideways.”
    “I don’t remember that.”
    “Well, I do. I haven’t seen so many similar sights that I can afford to forget.”
    “Dodie!” said my mother, as if at this too-late point to issue a warning. (Another thing my mother quite often said was, “I will never listen to smut.”)
    “Oh, you! You didn’t run away yourself. Did you? Kept your eye to the knothole!”
    My mother looked from me to Aunt Dodie and back with an unusual expression on her face: helplessness. I won’t say she laughed. She just looked as if there was a point at which she might give up.

The onset is very slow and often years may pass before the patient or his family observes that he is becoming disabled. He shows slowly increasing bodily rigidity, associated with tremors of the head and limbs. There may be various tics, twitches, muscle spasms, and other involuntary movements. Salivation increases and drooling is common. Scientifically the disease is known as paralysis agitans. It is also called Parkinson’s disease or shaking palsy . Paralysis agitans affects first a single arm or leg, then the second limb on the same side and finally those on the other side. The face begins to lose its customary expressiveness and changes slowly or not at all with passing moods. The disease is typically one of elderly people, striking mostly persons in their sixties and seventies. No recoveries are recorded. Drugs are available to control the tremor and excess salivation. The benefits of these, however, are limited . [Fishbein, Medical Encyclopedia .]
    My mother, during this summer, would have been forty-one or forty-two years old, I think, somewhere around the age that I am now.
    Just her left forearm trembled. The hand trembled more than the arm. The thumb knocked ceaselessly against the palm. She could, however, hide it in her fingers, and she could hold the arm still by stiffening it against her body.

    Uncle James drank porter after supper. He let me taste it, black and bitter. Here was a new contradiction. “Before I married your father,” my mother had told me, “I asked him to promise me that he would never drink, and he never has.” But Uncle James her brother could drink without apologies.
    On Saturday night we all went into town. My mother and my sister went in Aunt Dodie’s car. I was with Uncle James and Aunt Lena and the children. The children claimed me. I was a little older than the oldest of them, and they treated me as if I were a trophy, someone for whose favor thy could jostle and compete. So I was riding in their car, which was high and old and square-topped, like Aunt Dodie’s. We were coming home, we had the windows rolled down for coolness, and unexpectedly Uncle James began to sing.
    He had a fine voice of course, a fine sad, lingering voice. I can remember perfectly well the tune of the song he sang, and the sound of his voice rolling out the black windows, but I can remember only bits of the words, here and there, though I have often tried to remember more, because I liked the song so well.
    As I was a-goen over Kil-i-kenny Mountain …
    I think that was the way it started.
    Then further along something about pearly , or early and Some take delight in —various things, and finally the strong but sad-sounding line:
    But I take delight in the water of the barley .
    There was silence in the car while he was singing. The children were not squabbling and being hit, some of them were even falling asleep. Aunt Lena with the youngest on her knee was an unthreatening dark shape. The