Family Reminders (5 page)

“Oh, fiddle, Daniel. I’m doing laundry anyway. Besides, poor Mr. Stewart is an old man and needs the help,” Mama said, pouring Daddy more coffee.

“Well, I don’t like it, and I don’t want you to do it.”

“Daniel, you listen to me,” Mama said as she sat down beside him. Her voice was quiet. “I’m tired of sitting around here worrying. Worrying about money and waiting for things to change; that’s all I seem to do lately. I mean to do what I can until you’re back on your feet again.”

Daddy brooded for a minute. I saw his jaw clench and unclench. Then he stood, reaching unsteadily for his crutches. “Don’t you mean
foot
, Liddie?” he said. The low hush of his anger trailed behind him as he hobbled out of the kitchen.

“That man is as stubborn as a mule,” Mama said to me as she dished up the oatmeal into my bowl.

“Can I help you with the laundry, Mama?” I asked.

“You have school, Mary.”

“But, Mama, I can help before school. Or after. I can help with the ironing. Or getting the wood.”

Mama didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know, Mary,” she said uncertainly.

“Mama, I’m tired of worrying and waiting, too. Please let me help.”

Mama laughed. “You’re worse than your daddy for stubbornness, that’s for sure.”

“I heard that,” Daddy said from his bedroom.

And then we all laughed. It felt good.

Even before the accident
, Wednesday was always wash day.

Before the sun was up, I awoke to the sound of Daddy singing as he hauled in the big steel washtub
.

“Women’s work is harder than mining,” he joked as he brought in the last load of wood. He liked helping Mama around the house. “Makes me feel useful,” he told me as we sat down to our breakfast and watched Mama bustle around the kitchen
.

“For once,” Mama teased him, dishing him up a second bowl of oatmeal
.

Now Daddy stood helplessly by and watched Mama and me lug the tub in. He directed us as to where it should go in the center of the kitchen until Mama shooed him out of the way. “Daniel, I’ve been doing laundry all these years without your help. I’m capable of carrying on without interference!”

Daddy snatched up his carving knife and a piece of wood. “What am I supposed to do when you’re working?” he asked as he hobbled angrily out of the room.

“Well, since you asked, a little music might help things along,” Mama answered. She began heating up water on the stove. I trudged back and forth to the woodpile in the still, gray morning.

“Just one more load should do it,” Mama said as I placed yet another armful into the wood box.

Mr. Stewart had already stopped by with his dirty clothes. Just before I left for school, Mama put a pair of his red, sagging long johns into the tub to soak.

Giggling at the sight, I said, “Looks like he really does need your help.”

Mama laughed, too. “Off with you now. Mr. Stewart’s underclothes are no concern of yours,” she said as she stirred the clothes into the soapy water with her long-handled paddle.

I hated to leave the steamy warmth of the kitchen. Mama looked happy as she bent over the washboard, her sleeves pushed up, her arms up to her elbows in soapsuds. She was humming to herself as I let myself out the door.

The folded clothes were ready in a wicker basket by the front door when Mr. Stewart came by on his way home from work. He was accompanied by another miner, Mr. O’Brien, who had a basket of dirty clothes and a question in his eyes. Mama laughed and said yes, she could have the clothes done by tomorrow, and would this be a regular job. They shook hands when he said yes.

I peeked around the kitchen door as Mr. O’Brien left and Mr. Stewart stepped up to claim his long johns. Mr. Stewart had come to America to find his fortune. After crisscrossing the mountains, following one gold strike after another, he ended up in Cripple Creek. “Mighty obliged to you, ma’am,” he said shyly. “Between working all day, cooking dinner, and trying to keep the house livable, this old bachelor just plain don’t have time for anything else.” As he talked he pressed a crinkled dollar into Mama’s hand. Then he bowed slightly and backed out the door.

Mama called me into the parlor. “Look at this,” she squealed. “One dollar! My goodness!” Mama let out a long whistle and picked up the hem of her skirt, dancing a jig.

Daddy clumped in from the kitchen and stood there, leaning on his crutches and watching Mama dance. “What’s going on here?” he finally asked.

“Well, for starters, Daniel,” Mama said pointedly, “I’m dancing in the parlor without any music.”

Daddy just shrugged.

Mama looked at him for a moment, a challenge flashing in her eyes. “For another, I’m happy because Mr. Stewart paid me one whole dollar for doing his laundry. And I already have another job for tomorrow. See, I can help out until you get back on … until you get better.”

“Don’t you understand, Liddie? I’m not going to get better. I’m always going to be missing a leg. Let’s face it, nobody’s going to hire a one-legged miner.”

Mama’s smile faded against the rough truth of Daddy’s words. Then in carefully woven words, as soft as flannel, she said, “Daniel, you’re right, no one is going to hire a one-legged miner … to mine. But don’t you understand that you are
more
than a miner, one-legged or two? Or at least I always thought so.”

She reached up to hug him, but Daddy, stiff and unbendable, held on tightly to his crutches, eyes straight ahead. Mama shook him gently by the shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. Then, putting her money in her apron pocket and her chin in the air, she flounced out of the room.

Daddy came over to me where I sat on the sofa. Smiling weakly, he dropped a Reminder in my lap. It was a carving of a woman bent over a washboard, her sleeves rolled up and her hair falling down around her face.

“It looks just like Mama,” I said as I inspected it, turning it round and round.

Daddy nodded and limped slowly out of the room.

Before I followed him into the kitchen I put the carving carefully on the shelf with all the other Reminders.

“Would you run down
to Brown’s Emporium for me?” Mama asked as soon as I walked in from school and dropped my book bag on the kitchen chair.

“Oh, Mama, can’t I do it tomorrow?” I asked, breathing in the delicious, warm smell of just-baked bread.

“No. Daddy is out of pipe tobacco,” Mama said in a tone that made it perfectly clear that there was to be no argument. She handed me a piece of bread slathered with wild raspberry preserves. “Here, have a snack before you go,” she said, softening her voice and kissing me on the head as she went back to her chores. One sweet-sour bite brought the memories of last summer flooding back.

Mama, Daddy, and I left the house early one morning to pick raspberries. We hiked up the road past the house until it was no longer a road but a dusty trail into the mountains. Daddy whistled as he carried the picnic basket and his fishing pole. Mama and I both carried tin buckets. Up and over the ridge we climbed until we reached a scraggly mountain meadow dotted with wildflowers. The creek bubbled and rushed along past the raspberry bushes, their branches full of knobby, red fruit
.

“Heaven on earth,” Daddy said, taking in a deep breath. I breathed in, too, big gulps of moist air that smelled of the river, pine, and the sweetness of ripe fruit
.

Mama and I rolled up our sleeves and went to work plucking ripe, plump raspberries off the prickly branches
.
Daddy gathered firewood and started a campfire. Then he stuck a worm on his hook and began to fish. The sun climbed higher and hotter in the sky, and the only sounds were the rustle of the raspberry branches and the rushing of the river
.

Finally Daddy called us to a lunch of trout cooked over the campfire. “Why is it that food always tastes better on a picnic?” Mama asked, after cutting into the tender trout with her fork, washing it down with the icy stream water, and topping her meal off with fresh, sweet raspberries
.

“It must be my cooking,” Daddy said, with a wink
.

After lunch Mama stretched out on a blanket in the shade and read her book. Daddy leaned against a tree, pulled out his knife, and began to whittle, and I waded in the river. So the afternoon passed until dark thunderstorms rumbled down from the peaks and chased us home
.