Mary Emma & Company (7 page)

Then she looked over at Grace and asked, “Gracie, have you had any further chance to look for a house for us? If I'm able to keep on improving as rapidly as I have this week, it won't be too long before we could think about starting a little business of our own. Bessie tells me the laundry charges twenty-five cents apiece for fancy shirtwaists, and I did up seventeen of them today. If we could get prices like that, and I could pick up my speed a little, I think we could afford to pay as much as twelve or thirteen dollars a month for rent. Let's see, it was seven we paid in Colorado, wasn't it?”

“Mmm, hmm,” Grace said, “but the only one I've seen that would be big enough, and wouldn't cost nearly twenty dollars, is down by the brickyards. We wouldn't have to live in it forever, and we wouldn't have to be like those people down there just because we lived among them.”

“No!” Mother said. “No! I will not do it! If necessary, I'll stay right in that laundry until I can turn out enough work that we can afford twenty dollars a month, but I will not have our home in that neighborhood. Now you run along and take care of Mrs. Benk's dishes; I'll help Aunt Hilda with ours.”

Right behind the tobacco case at the store there was an old roll-topped desk with rows of little pigeonholes where the charge-account pads were kept; most of the delivery orders were charge-it, and so was about half of the business from people who came into the store. The last thing every night, Mr. Durant sat down at the desk, added whatever had been bought during the day onto the pads, and then totaled them. He never looked up from the desk when he was working on the pads, and, right at the beginning, Mr. Haushalter had told me I must never disturb him. I did it the Friday night of that week without meaning to.

As soon as I came in from school I started washing the top shelf, way at the back end of the store; moving things as I went along, then putting them back as soon as I had that section of the shelf washed and dried. By half-past-six I'd finished all but the last section—the one where we kept the lamp chimneys, right beside Mr. Durant's desk. I moved the stepladder in beside the desk real carefully, so that I didn't make any noise, and then climbed up to move the chimneys. The ladder must have teetered a little, or I must have slipped. Anyway, I almost lost my balance, and in grabbing hold of the shelf I knocked a lamp chimney down. It broke into a thousand pieces on the high top of the desk, and chips of glass showered all over Mr. Durant and the pads. He ducked, then looked up quick, and I was sure he was going to scold me, but he just asked, “How is your mother getting along?”

I guess it was because I was a little bit nervous, but after I got started talking there didn't seem to be any place to stop. I told him about her working in the laundry so she could learn how to do up fancy shirtwaists worth twenty-five cents apiece, and about Bessie helping her, and about her saying she wouldn't let us live down by the brickyards, and about second-hand furniture being so high. I don't remember all that I did tell him, but I couldn't seem to get stopped until he told me to sweep up the glass while he finished his bookkeeping. Maybe it was because I talked so long that he forgot to, but he never did scold me for breaking the lamp chimney.

All the way home from the store that night I was ashamed of myself; not so much for breaking the chimney as for not knowing when to stop talking, but I think it worked out good instead of bad. When I came in from making a delivery Saturday afternoon Mr. Durant was putting up an order, but he called me over to him. “Could your mother pay fifteen dollars rent?” he asked me.

“Well, she said she could afford to pay twelve or thirteen. I guess we could go as much as fifteen if we had to,” I told him.

“Do you know the big gray house down the street, next to the fire station?” he asked as he watched the scale beam and sifted a few more grains of sugar into the bag.

“The one where Mr. La Plante, the fireman, lives upstairs?” I asked him.

Without taking his eyes away from the beam, he nodded and said, “Folks downstairs are being evicted at the end of the month. Your mother might get that for fifteen; not less. And at that price the owner wouldn't spend any money to fix it up. But there is a big room at the back of the cellar; might work out for a laundry room. Tell your mother I'll speak to the owner if she wants. There are extra bedrooms in the attic. Whole place will be dirty, but it appears you're pretty good at scrubbing, and wallpaper's cheap.”

On Saturday nights I worked till nine o'clock, and Mother wasn't home from the laundry when I went to Uncle Frank's for supper, so I didn't have any chance to tell her about the house until just before I went to bed. But Sunday morning she and Grace and I went to look at it before Sunday School time. Of course we could only look at it from the outside. The downstairs windows were dirty, and there were no shades at them, but the second floor and the outside of the house and the yard looked fine.

We walked past three or four times, and it was easy to see that Mother wanted the house right from the first. “Oh, my!” she said when I pointed it out to her. “Regardless of the rent, we could never afford it. Why, at the prices they're asking for used furniture, we couldn't begin to furnish it.”

“Well, we could furnish one or two rooms to begin with, couldn't we?” Grace asked. “Then, as we made some money, we could furnish the others, one at a time. We could get along all right for a while with just a stove, and a table or two, and some chairs, and a few more bedclothes.”

“I suppose we could,” Mother said slowly, “but it would be a big undertaking, and we have no definite assurance that we could find enough customers to make more than a bare living . . . although Mr. Vander Mark tells me he has spoken to several of the well-to-do parishioners at our church and they'd like to see samples of my work.”

“Then let's take it,” Grace said as we turned to walk past the house again.

“Let's not be hasty,” Mother told her. “We're far from out of the woods yet. The amount I make in the laundry would barely pay our grocery bill, and you and Ralph together are making scarcely more than the fifteen dollars it would take for rent alone.”

“That's just for right now,” I told her. “When school vacation time comes I'll make twice as much. And then, too, if I get up bright and early in the mornings I could carry a paper route before I go to work in the store.”

“Oh, Son, you're always so impulsive!” Mother said, almost as if she were scolding me. “I know how hard all you children would work to help out, but I shall not let us get into anything where there will be need for you to work beyond your strength, or where we'll have to dip into what there is left of our money for ordinary living expenses.”

As she spoke, Mother had been looking at the other houses along the street, and at the James School, next to the fire station. “I should love to think that we might have this nice big house, in this good neighborhood and right close to the children's school, but it seems to me that it is way beyond our means right now; it would take a fabulous amount to ever furnish it properly.”

When Grace kept quiet during any argument it was because she was thinking, and the longer she kept still the better job of thinking she usually did. She did a pretty good job that time. Without looking up from the sidewalk, and without seeming to be talking to anybody, she said, “Trust in the Lord and do. . . .”

Mother didn't let her finish. She just said to me quickly, “Tell Mr. Durant I should be glad to have him speak to the landlord. We must hurry or you children will be late for Sunday School.”

7

A Pretty Reasonable Fellow

W
ITH
us, good luck and bad luck always seemed to come in waves, and we seemed to be right in the middle of a good-luck wave. On Monday Mr. Durant talked to the owner of the big house on Spring Street and got it for us. On Tuesday morning Mother gave me the first month's rent before she went to work, and I took it to Mrs. Perkins, the landlord's wife, when I went to deliver her groceries.

Then, on Wednesday night, I sat up and played cribbage with Uncle Frank until nearly ten o'clock. After we'd finished he picked up the paper and read it as I made up my bed on the floor. I was all ready to crawl into it when he called to Mother, “Mary Emma, this might be a chance for you to pick up some furniture. Old Grandma Maddox, over on Myrtle Street, died yesterday, and they're going to have the funeral Friday. Her son's coming down from New York, but I don't have a notion he'll want to ship the stuff back there. He might sell it for a pretty reasonable price.”

“Did Mrs. Maddox have a nice home?” Mother asked.

“Looked nice and neat from the outside,” Uncle Frank answered, “but I was never in it. I expect the stuff is pretty old-fashioned; Grandma must have been in her nineties.”

“I'm afraid her things would be too expensive for us, Frank,” Mother called back from the kitchen. “We're going to start off with just as little as we can, then add to it as we go along.”

“Well, you might find this Maddox a pretty reasonable fellow,” Uncle Frank called back. “It says here that he's a big lawyer, and the bigger they are the harder they fall.”

The second he said “big lawyer,” it was as if somebody had turned on a light in my head. I jumped up and called out, “I know him!” Then I remembered that I didn't, but I was sure he must be the same Maddox boy that let the hogshead of molasses get away from him in the grocery store. I started to tell the whole story to Uncle Frank, but Mother called, “Some other time, Son! You'll have to be up early in the morning and it's time you were asleep.”

I was up good and early the next morning, and while Mother was getting breakfast and Uncle Frank was shaving I found the piece he'd been reading in the paper, cut it out and put it in my pocket. As soon as I got down to the store I showed it to Mr. Haushalter and asked him if the lawyer wasn't the same boy who used to work in the store.

“Well, well, well! Bless my soul!” he said when he'd read it. “Couldn't be no other but him. Richard. Richard. Now ain't it curious I couldn't think of his first name. But come to think of it, nobody never called him that around here; he was always Dickie, Dickie Maddox. Well, well, well. Ain't seen or heard tell of him in twenty-five years.”

Mr. Haushalter had just put his morning's sliver of tobacco in his mouth when I took the piece of paper from him. He sort of gathered the quid together with his tongue, rolled it over a couple of times, and poked it away in his cheek. “Poor old Grandma Maddox, passed on and gone,” he said in a sorrowful voice. Then he gave the chew another little poke with his tongue, and said, “Don't know why I said that anyways. Kind of expect the poor old soul was sort o' glad to go. Expect lots of 'em is glad to go when their time comes. Old lady hadn't took much interest in life since Henry passed on—he was her husband; Dickie's pa. Don't calcalate Dickie'll stay on 'ceptin' to close up the house and maybe sell it.”

“Do you think Mr. Maddox would sell the furniture?” I asked.

“Lord love you, 'course he'd sell it! What else would he do with it? Don't have a notion there's a stick of it less'n sixty years old. What would a big lawyer like him want with old stuff the likes of that?”

“I know,” I said, “but I meant at a price somebody could afford to pay.”

“Oh, I don't expect he'd want all outdoors for it, why?”

“Well,” I said, “you know we rented the big house next to the fire station, beginning the first of the month, and we haven't any furniture for it, and . . .”

“Well, bless my soul, if I ain't gettin' simpler minded by the year! 'Course you need furniture! Now what was the matter with my head that I didn't think about it? And there ain't no reason Dickie Maddox couldn't sell the old lady's stuff for most anything he was offered. Let me see . . . let me see. Funeral's goin' to be up to the Baptist Church at ten o'clock, ain't it? If things was so I could get away from the store tomorrow mornin' . . .”

“I could take care of the store for you,” I told him. “Mother will always write me a note if I have to stay out of school for something important.”

“Hmmmm, hmmmm. Don't doubt me you could do it for a couple of hours in a pinch; how many beans in a quart?”

“A pound and fourteen ounces,” I told him.

“How much is kerosene?”

“Fourteen cents a gallon, but eight cents for half a gallon,” I said.

“Well, well, well. Learnin' fast, ain't you? Best to get on with washin' them windows; time's a-flyin'. Just might happen I'll take in old Grandma Maddox's funeral—ain't seen or heard tell of Dickie in more'n twenty-five years—don't have a notion he'd remember me noways. I'll think 'bout it endurin' the day and leave you know before you go home tonight.”

I think Mr. Haushalter wanted to talk to Mr. Durant before he said it would be all right for me to tend store while he went to Mrs. Maddox's funeral, but just before we locked up that night he told me, “If your ma's agreeable to you stayin' out of school in the forenoon tomorrow, I don't know but what I'd take in old Grandma Maddox's funeral. 'Course I'd come down and get you started off in good shape before I went, and haply I wouldn't go out to the buryin' grounds at all; that way I'd prob'ly be back well afore noontime.”

I told him I'd tell Mother, and that I was sure she'd say it would be all right. Then, when I was nearly up to Uebel's drug store, he called me back and told me, “Now don't say nothin' 'bout the old lady's furniture; a man's in bad business when he counts his chickens afore he's put the hen a-settin'.”

I was waiting outside the store door when Mr. Haushalter got there the next morning. He was a few minutes late, but he was all dressed up in a blue serge suit and a white shirt, and he had his shoes shined till they sparkled in the light from the street lamp. The suit was one I think he must have had for a long, long time; the lapels of the coat were wide but no longer than my hand, it buttoned right up to the knot of his tie, and it was tight enough around the middle that there were scallops between the buttons. After he'd unlocked the doors and the cash drawer under the counter, he only fed Matilda and looked at her kittens. Then he kept away from things that might get his suit dirty and told me how to get the fire going good, and things I'd need to know while he was away.

I think Mr. Haushalter and I were both kind of anxious for the funeral time to come. He kept walking up and down the length of the store, as if he didn't know what to do with himself, and I wanted to have as much time as I could to run the store alone before Mr. Durant would get in with his morning orders. On just about every other trip Mr. Haushalter made up and down the floor, he'd think of something else he should have told me.

Of course, I don't remember them all, but one time he stopped and told me, “Now it's all right to charge stuff to most of the folks that comes in here, but there is them that you'll have to fight shy of, and seein' you alone in the store they'd be just the ones that might come in and get a raft of stuff charged. You know the Smitherses, in the house you folks has rented; well, them. And then there's the Foxes—not the ones on Washington Street, but the ones down by the brickyards. If any of them comes in, just tell 'em it'll have to be for cash before you fetch out the stuff. Oh, yes, that littlest Jacobs boy; if you have to get him kerosene or somethin'-or-other out of the back room, he'll snitch an orange if you don't keep an eye on him.”

It was about half-past-nine when Mr. Haushalter left for the funeral, and I'd made up my mind that while he was gone I'd do things just the way he always did them. The first thing I did was to go to the tobacco case, get out the long plug of black B-L, and slice off a sliver exactly the width of the dent mark. Then I folded it four times before I put it into my mouth, just the way Mr. Haushalter did. I'd barely started gathering it into a quid with my tongue when Miss Heath, my Sunday School teacher, came in for a gallon of kerosene.

If I hadn't known her, or if she'd just said, “A gallon of kerosene, please,” I'd have been all right, I think. But she didn't. As she came down the two steps inside the door she sang out, “Isn't this a lovely morning? Do you have mornings like this in Colorado?”

I managed to say “Yes'm,” sort of around the chew, without having any trouble. And I got by pretty well when she asked if I was tending the store all alone. But when she asked me why Mr. Haushalter wasn't there and where he'd gone, I was licked. There were only two things I could do: either run the risk of having the chew fall out of my mouth if I tried to talk around it, or swallow it. I swallowed it. But it didn't stay down more than ten seconds after I'd got hold of Miss Heath's kerosene can and escaped into the back room. And I didn't feel a bit well when I took the can back to her and asked, “Charge it?”

Miss Heath seemed to be nearly as shaken up as I felt, and she looked at me as if she were terribly worried. “What happened to you?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself? Why, you're as white as a pillow case, and I thought I heard a sound as if you were crying back there.”

My stomach felt as if it were on fire, and my mouth was almost running over with the saliva that kept pouring into it, but I managed to say, “No, ma'am, I just got a little dizzy spell for a minute, but I'm all right now.”

I had to answer four or five more questions—and hope I wouldn't be sick again—before she went out, saying she must talk to Mother about my having dizzy spells.

From the minute Mr. Haushalter had mentioned letting me tend the store alone I'd been hoping I'd have lots of customers, so I could show both them and him what a good job I could do. After Miss Heath went out I didn't want to see anybody—or have anybody see me—but it didn't work that way. Half of the women in the neighborhood must have come in, and every one of them chattered like a blue jay; asking me if I didn't feel well, and where Mr. Haushalter was, and if it wasn't a lovely morning.

For me it wasn't. My stomach still felt as if there were a fire in it, the water ran into my mouth so fast that I had to swallow every time I tried to answer a woman's question, and the swallowing gave me the hiccups. I could usually stop hiccups by taking nine swallows of water without catching my breath, but I was already swallowing more water than I could handle, so I decided to try cold buttermilk. It would always soothe sunburn for me, or the stinging burn of poison ivy, so I tried it, but it wasn't any good for that tobacco burn in my stomach, or the hiccups either.

The big icebox was in the back room, and we kept the two-gallon can of buttermilk right in the compartment with the ice, so it was always good and cold. The first excuse I could find for going back there, I opened the ice compartment door, tipped the can down, and tried to take nine big swallows without catching my breath. It might have worked all right if I hadn't had a hiccup right in the middle of the fifth swallow. It came so quick and so unexpected that I didn't have any chance to tip the can up, and buttermilk ran down the sides of my cheeks and my neck and into my shirt. As soon as I'd stopped being sick I wiped out as much of the buttermilk as I could reach with my handkerchief, but I didn't get it all, and it didn't smell very good.

Mother had taught us all that it was wicked to lie, but I just had to lie to those women that morning. I couldn't tell them what had started all the trouble, and I didn't want them to know I was being sick, so I just told the different ones anything that came into my head, and I don't think very many of them believed me. The longer that buttermilk was down inside my shirt the worse it smelled, and my mouth tasted even worse than that. As I got a chance, I tried a piece of peppermint candy, and some Blackjack gum, and even a bite of a raw onion, but they all turned out bad instead of good. And, before Mr. Durant came in with his morning orders, I'd promised myself a thousand times that I'd never try to chew tobacco again.

When Mr. Durant did come in I stayed as far away from him as I could, and if I was still looking a little puny he didn't seem to notice it. After he'd asked me how business was, he went right to work on putting up his orders. Then, when twelve o'clock came and Mr. Haushalter wasn't back, he told me to run along and get my lunch while he tended store. About the last thing in the world that I wanted was lunch, so I told him that I wasn't hungry and would wait till Mr. Haushalter came back, but he pushed some packages together on the counter and said, “No, you run along. Your aunt ordered this stuff and I told her I'd send it by you at noontime.”

I hated to go back to Uncle Frank's house that noon, smelling and feeling the way I did, but there was nothing else I could do. I wasn't so much worried about Aunt Hilda, but Grace was as nosy as a hound dog, and her smeller was just about as good. Before I left the store I bit good and deep into an onion, and I chewed a piece of licorice all the way to the house, but I don't think I fooled Grace at all. She could always ask the kind of questions that would catch me if I was lying, and she caught me two or three times while I was trying to explain why I was pale and didn't want any lunch. She didn't come right out and tell me that I'd never go to heaven, but all the time she was washing the dishes she kept singing a church hymn about “Someone will knock at the pearly gates, by-yye and bye, by-yye and bye; hear a voice saying, ‘I know you not,' by-byye and bye, by-yye and bye.” It got on my nerves so much that the tune kept going over and over in my head all the rest of the day.