The Diamond Mine

Marguerite Julia Bartlett was the baby of the family. When Ma Bartlett moved to Arundel with all her girls from the reserve in Canada, Maggie was only eight years old. My mother and everybody else called her Aunty Mag, but I called her Godmummy.

Godmummy told stories and since I spent much time with her I heard them all many times. She told me about how one day Ma had to go to the dentist in Kennebunk to have a tooth pulled. Ma didn’t think much of the dentist and hadn’t been to see him before. Ma sat down on the dentist chair and said, “Indians have roots to their teeth that go all the way down to their feet and wrap over their big toe.” “Ma told me”, Godmummy said, “that the dentist tried to pull the tooth like he would anybody's but found he couldn’t even budge it”.Pretty soon he had one knee against Ma’s thigh and was yanking. The dentist finally gave up, so Ma went home and had Pa do it with a string and the doorknob.

One favorite story of Mag's was covered in mystique. She said that Ma owned a diamond mine; that wild horses roamed there. Aunt Mag took at least two trips up to Nova Scotia to look for the mine. She told me that how she remembers it was that there were wild horses running around there. When Uncle Bob and I went up to visit Aunt Elsie in Saulnierville, I told her about Aunt Mag’s story about how Ma was supposed to have had a diamond mine. Aunt Elsie didn’t laugh. Instead, she told me about the time Aunt Mary Rose (our “Ma”, also Aunt Mag's mother) came with her young niece Madeline and stayed in a tent out on the lawn all summer. Ma made bean hole beans and baskets for sale. Aunt Elsie said that Ma got her old friend Henry, and a man whose name I can't recall, to take her out to Bartlett’s Cove where Ma said there were diamonds everywhere. The two friends took her out there and they broke into three directions to scour the cove all day. Ma told them you had to just look around you for sparkles.