Move His Trumpery

During my Grandma Haynes’ later years, the neighborhood was plagued by an invasion of rats which bedeviled homes, granaries, and stores, and made themselves an especial nuisance in the barrels of molasses, crackers, coffee, and tea at, among others, the Haynes’ Store.

Visiting our home for his usual winter quarters was an old pack peddler whose name was Charles Reichelderfer but who passed under the alias of Charles Ailshire. This man was from Prussia and was allowed food and shelter at our home because he was known to be able to tell the past and future, and if asked, locate lost articles. He could also stop a wound from bleeding, and he dabbled in Satanic power through a book called The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a volume which I can well remember. He gave this book to my father, and his real name was written in beautiful handwriting at the front.

Having been informed of our rat situation, Old Charlie, as he was called by our family, said that he would take a look later at our granary, which he did. My father was told to remove all grain from one end of the room and sweep the floor clear. He was then told to empty a bushel basket of corn on the cleanly swept floor, all of which my father proceeded to do, as ordered. One ear of corn was moved slightly from the stacked bushel, and the rats were a thing of the past at our house.

Grandma Haynes, who delighted in talking German with Charlie, asked him if he would rid her place of rats, also. So it was agreed, one good German to another, that for fifty cents worth of smoking tobacco he would look into her rat situation, which he did.

They were “gone with the wind,” but when Charlie went up to the store for his fifty cents worth of tobacco, she laughed at him and told him she though the rats just left the premises and he had nothing to do with it since she had not found a dead one anyplace about. Charlie was furious, so he told her for every rat she had had, she would now have a hundred. The rats came back, bringing all their rat relatives, until Mr. Haynes was caught stripping them out of the molasses barrel by a customer, who had brought a jug for his customary filling of syrup. The customer protested loud and long, telling it all over the neighborhood.

I remember Charlie and his long-stemmed white china-bowl pipe. He would ask me to look at it and repeat over and over several times, “Wang, swang, wansee-woodle, wansee-woodle,” and I was asleep, out like a light, so that he and my father could talk without my interruptions of asking to b sung to sleep. This suited both men very well, I am sure, since I was an antsy child and hard to keep quiet.

My father enjoyed the company of this man who seemed to have traveled everywhere, while my mother thoroughly disliked him, and I am sure the feeling was mutual. Each afternoon, he would spoon out a teaspoon of laudanum, a type of painkiller or tranquilizer, and dip the red drug-coated spoon into the sugar bowl, then stir it in some water. After he drank the mixture, he would sit astride a kitchen chair and sleep, snoring loudly, and making a general nuisance of himself until suppertime, while she worked around him in the kitchen. 

One day she was ill and we had a telephone call that some cousins were coming to spend the day. Mother was hurrying to get some cleaning done around the hearth where Charlie kept his trunks, large and small, and both tightly locked. I happened in with some building blocks in my hands and dropped them to the floor. 

Rather testily, she remarked:

“I want everyone to move his trumpery away from the hearth so I can sweep.”

Old Charlie picked up his trunks, loaded them on his back, and went to my uncle’s where he received a cool reception by the women there. 

He never came back to our area again, but he had spent his winters with us for surely as long as 15 years, and neither my father or my uncle had any idea why he left and never came back. Both of them wondered about it.

Women had more courage than men in this case, for both men were afraid of this strange character. Oddly enough, the women would remark, “I wonder about that, too.”