As Pat had foreseen Silver Bush was overrun with the Binnie tribe. May’s brothers flicked cigarette ashes all over the house. Her sisters and cousins came in what Judy called “droves,” filled the house with shrieks, and listened behind doors. Judy caught them at it. And they were always more or less offended no matter how they were treated. If you were nice to them you were patronizing them; if you left them alone you were snubbing them. Olive would bring her whole family.

Olive did not believe in punishing children. “They’re going to enjoy their childhood,” she said. Perhaps they enjoyed it but nobody else did. They were what Judy called “holy terrors.” Judy found a dirty gray velvet elephant in her soup pot one day. Olive’s six-year-old had slipped it in “for fun.”

Mrs. Binnie came over frequently and spent the afternoon in Judy’s kitchen, proclaiming to the world that as far as she was concerned all was peace and good-will. She rocked fiercely on the golden-oak rocker May had introduced into the kitchen…rather fortunately, Judy thought, for certainly no Silver Bush chair could be counted on to bear up under the strain of Mrs. Binnie’s two hundred and thirty-three pounds.

“No, no, two hundred and thirty-six, ma,” May would argue.

“I guess I know my own weight, child,” Mrs. Binnie would retort breezily. “And I ain’t ashamed of it. ‘Why don’t you diet?’ my sister Josephine keeps telling me. ‘Not for mine,’ I tell her, ‘I’m contented to be as God made me!’”

“Oh, oh, I do be thinking God had precious little to do wid it,” said Judy to Tillytuck.

Mrs. Binnie had a little button nose and yellowish-white hair screwed up in a tight knot on the crown of her head. Gossip was her mother-tongue and grammar was her servant, not her master. Also, her “infernal organs” gave her a good deal of trouble. Pat used to wonder how Sid could bear to look at her and think that May would be like her when she was sixty.

“I’d like to give that hair of hers a bluing rinse,” Rae would whisper maliciously to Pat, when Mrs. Binnie was laying down the law about something and nodding her head until a hairpin invariably slipped out.

Mrs. Binnie, unlike May, “couldn’t abide” cats. They gave her asthma and, as May said, she started gasping if a cat was parked within a mile of her. So when Mrs. Binnie came out went the cats. Even Bold-and-Bad was no exception. Bold-and-Bad, however, did not hold with self-pity and made himself at home in Tillytuck’s granary.

“But I’d like to have seen ye try it on Gintleman Tom,” Judy used to think malevolently.