The Eighth Day (9 page)

She called on Mr. Kenny, carpenter, housepainter, and undertaker.

“Mr. Kenny, would half a dollar and a dozen eggs be enough if I asked you to make a sign to put on a house?”

“Well, now, what kind of a sign would that be, young lady?”

Sophia drew out a piece of torn wallpaper on which she had written
THE ELMS ROOMS AND BOARD
.

“I see. I see. When would you want this?”

“Could you have it by tomorrow evening, Mr. Kenny?”

“Yes, I could.” (Life's funny! Spit and image of her father. So they want to take in boarders. Well, well! Not likely.) “And you can pay me around New Year's time, if you see your way to it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kenny.” Lady to gentleman.

On the way down the hill she met Porky. He talked quickly. “I got a table for you. At the Tavern rooms are fifty cents and seventy cents. Breakfast is fifteen cents; with steak, twenty-five cents. Dinner is thirty-five cents. Here are some tacks. Put up a notice in the post office where those cards are about lost dogs and purses. Drummers go in and out of the post office all day. Those schoolteachers hate to eat at the Tavern. I hear them talking about it all the time. Say ‘home cooking.'”

“Yes, Porky.”

“Sophie, listen. You can do it, but you've got to be patient. Maybe nothing will happen for quite a while. If I have any ideas, I'll tell you. You aren't going to expect anything big right off, are you?”

“Oh, no, Porky.”

Sophia saved the Ashley family through the exercise of hope. “Saved” was her brother's and sisters' word for what she accomplished.

She had had a long experience of hope. Hope (deep-grounded hope, not those sporadic cries and promptings wrung from us in extremity that more resemble despair) is a climate of the mind and an organ of apprehension. Later we shall consider its relation to faith in the life of Sophia's father, who was a man of faith, though he did not know that he was a man of faith.

Sophia, at fourteen, had lived a long and busy life, burdened with responsibilities, fraught with joy and suffering. She had administered a large hospital. She was a veterinarian. In addition to raising chickens she had made splints for the mangled paws of dogs; she had rescued cats from torture on those long summer dusks when boys don't know what to do with themselves; she had saved fledglings fallen from the nest—blue and featherless on the sidewalks; she had reared young foxes and badgers and gophers and released them to their outdoors. She knew cruelty and death and escape and new life. She knew weather. She knew patience. She knew failure.

It is doubtful whether hope—or any of the other manifestations of creativity—can sustain itself without an impulse injected by love. So absurd and indefensible is hope. Sophia's was nourished by love of her mother and sisters, but above all by love of those two distant outcasts, her father and her brother.

So defenseless is hope before the court of reason that it stands in constant need of fashioning its own confirmations. It reaches out to heroic song and story; it stoops to superstition. It shrinks from flattering consolations; it likes its battles hard won, but it surrounds itself with ceremonial and fetish. Sophia slept with the three green arrowheads beside her. There are no rainbows in the narrow gorge at Coaltown, but she had seen two in her life on picnics along the Old Quarry Road. She knew their promise. Above the secret hiding place for her money she lightly drew an arc and wrote “J.B.A.” and “R.B.A.” Because it is irrational, hope rejoices in evidence of the marvelous. She drew strength from the inexplicable mystery of her father's rescue. Hope—the daring—is subject to intermittent overthrow, to black hours. Sophia drew into herself, lowered her head and waited, like an animal in a snowstorm. The Ashleys attended church every Sunday, but there were no religious exercises in the home. Sophia felt that it would be a weakness to pray for any astonishing reversal. Her petitions did not extend beyond asking that she be given some “good ideas” on the morrow; she asked that her mind be “bright.”

So on the night following her visit to Mr. Kenny she slipped into her sister Lily's room. In one hand she carried a lighted candle, in the other the beautiful sign reading
THE ELMS ROOMS AND BOARD
. She sat down on the floor, leaning the sign against her knees.

“Lily! Lily, wake up!”

“What is it?”

“Look!”

“Sophie! What's that?” Sophia waited. “Sophie, you're crazy.”

“Lily, you must help me with Mama. She listens to you. You must make her see that it's important. Lily, we've got to do it. We'll starve. And, Lily: we'd meet people. We can't go on forever without seeing anybody. There'd be old people and young people and it would be fun. You and Mama could cook and Constance and I would make the beds.”

“But, Sophie, they'd be awful people!”

“Everybody isn't awful. We could have lamps all over the house. And you could sing to the people. I know where there's a piano we could get.”

Lily raised herself on one elbow.

“But Mama wouldn't let strange men come into the house.”

“If a man came to the door who wasn't nice, Mama could say all the rooms were full. Will you help me with Mama, Lily?”

Lily put her head on the pillow. “Yes,” she said faintly.

“I see people every day, but you and Connie don't see anybody. It's bad for you. You'll get uninteresting. Maybe you'll get ugly.”

After supper the next afternoon Lily was reading aloud from
Julius Caesar.
Her mother was sewing. Her sisters were seated on the floor unraveling old baby blankets to make balls of yarn. Lily came to the end of a scene and glanced at Sophia.

“Are your eyes tired, dear?” asked her mother. “Shall I read?”

“No, Mama. Sophia has something she wants to say.”

“Mama,” said Sophia slowly. “This is a big house. It's too big for us. Don't you think it would be a good idea to turn it into a boardinghouse?”

“What! What, Sophia?”

Sophia brought out the sign and rested it against her knees. Her mother stared at it and rose, a distraught expression on her face.

“Sophia, I think you've lost your mind. I don't know where you get such ideas. Where did you find that dreadful thing? Put it away this minute. You're too young, Sophia, to know what you're talking about. I'm astonished at you!”

Voices were never raised at “The Elms.” Constance began to cry.

Lily said, “Mama! Mama, dear, stop and think.”

“Think!”

Sophia raised her eyes from the floor and looking into her mother's said with measured directness, “Papa would wish us to. Papa would want it.”

Her mother stared at her as though she had been struck. “What do you mean, Sophia?”

“People who love people think about them all the time. Papa's thinking about us. He's hoping we do something just like this.”

“Girls, leave me alone with Sophia.”

“Mama,” said Lily, “I want to stay. Constance go into the garden a minute.”

Constance flung herself at her mother's knees, “I don't want to go out of the room alone. Mama, don't send me out of the room.”

The effect of Sophia's words was such that her mother, after her first outburst, was unable to control her voice. She walked to the farthest window, trembling. She felt cornered, dragged back into life.

“Mama, Papa wouldn't want us to live without lamps at night and to go around in bad clothes. He hopes we're well and happy and we hope he is. Winter's coming. You've put up all those vegetables and fruit, but we'll have to buy flour and things. Anyway, Constance ought to have some meat at her age. That's what the book upstairs says. Mama, it would be wonderful to tell Roger that he doesn't have to send us money. Maybe he needs it more than we do. It would be hard for some people, but you're such a wonderful housekeeper you'd know in a minute how to make a boardinghouse.”

Lily went across the room to her mother and kissed her. “Mama, I think we ought to try,” she said in a low voice.

“But, Sophia, Sophia, you don't understand:
no one would come!
”

“Mr. Sorbey at the Tavern is always very nice to me. He let me sell lemonade in the lobby one day when it rained and he said I could do it again whenever I wanted to. Sometimes the Tavern's so full that men and even ladies have to sit up downstairs all night. He used to send them to Mrs. Blake's, but Mrs. Blake broke her hip, and can't take them any more. Somebody told me that the high school teachers hate eating at the Tavern. They'd all come here to dinner. I think they'd want to live here and not at Mrs. Bowman's and Mrs. Haubenmacher's.”

Her mother turned her head from side to side. “But, Sophia, we have no chairs, no bureaus, no beds, no sheets.”

“Lily and I don't need our bureaus and I can sleep in Lily's bed. Miss Thoms is going to give me two chairs. Porky's going to give me a bed, a chair and a table and two rugs. He can fix that bed we found in the attic. We've got enough for two rooms. We can start.”

“Let's try,” said Lily.

Constance rushed to her mother and put her arms around her. “Then we can start living like other people!”

“Very well,” said their mother. “Light a candle. Let's go up and look at the rooms.”

“Mama,” said Sophia, “I have some kerosene. Let's put a lamp in this sitting room now. Nobody'd want to come to a house that looked like everybody was sad.”

The next noon, on September 15, Lily stood on a chair and nailed the sign on an elm by the front gate. The women of Coaltown increased their evening strolls past the house to behold this evidence of a laughable delusion. “They ought to call it ‘Jailbirds' Nest.'” “No, ‘Convict's Corner.'”

The next day Dr. Gillies, driving his buggy down the main street, drew up beside Sophia.

“Hey, you—Sophie!”

“Good morning, Dr. Gillies.”

“Well, well! You look as happy as a butcher's cat.”

“I am, a little.”

“What's this about your opening a boardinghouse?”

“We are, Dr. Gillies.—Dr. Gillies, I was thinking that maybe sometime you might have a patient who was getting well and wanted to be quiet. Mama's a wonderful cook. We'd take awfully good care. . . . ?”

Dr. Gillies smote his forehead. “Just the thing!” he exclaimed. “Tell your mother I'm coming over to see her at seven o'clock tonight.” He arranged for the convalescent Mrs. Guilfoyle to stay at “The Elms” for two weeks. “Chicken broth, some of your famous applesauce, a coddled egg every now and then.”

Sophia called on Mr. Sorbey at the Tavern and told him about the project. “If the Tavern's crowded sometime, Mr. Sorbey, maybe you could send somebody to us. Mrs. Guilfoyle's at the house now and she's very contented.” Three days later he sent over an itinerant preacher, Brother Jorgenson, who was making himself obnoxious by trying to save souls in the barroom.

Sophia stopped a new high school teacher on the street. “Miss Fleming, I'm Sophia Ashley. My mother's opened a boardinghouse at ‘The Elms'—you can see it behind those trees there. We have dinner at twelve o'clock. It's thirty-five cents, but if you came every day of the week you'd get one dinner free. My mother's a wonderful cook.” Delphine Fleming came to dinner, asked to see the rooms, and stayed two years. The news aroused displeasure in the school board, but Miss Fleming came from the east—that is, Indiana—and it was assumed that her moral discriminations were not of the finest. Some older commercial travelers discovered the place. The stewed chicken with dumplings and the
Rostbraten
began to be reported when drummers got together—as was Lily's singing. “Joe, I'm telling you the truth; I never heard anything like it. ‘Mid pleasures and palaces!' A murderer's daughter, too!” A third and a fourth room were fitted out. Sophia persuaded her mother to bake tray after tray of her admired German ginger cookies. She sold them in the Tavern's lobby during holidays. She made savings, too, following Mrs. Whittimore's example. On slaughtering days she dragged her little wagon three miles down the road to the Bell Farm (Roger had hoed and hayed and milked there during his summer vacations) and returned with hog fat. She made soap from it which her mother freshened with lavender. She continued her own yeast. The stove was lit from flint and steel. Penny-pinching is anything but dull. She confronted the tradesmen without shyness. The pitying indulgence toward her began to be replaced by a surprised respect. Men greeted her cordially; a few women began to return her greetings with a curt nod. Her former schoolmates whispered and giggled when she passed. Boys jeered, “Rags, bottles, and sacks, Sophie. Y'want to buy any rags, bottles, and sacks?”

Some odd things happened.

One day, a week after “The Elms” had announced that it offered rooms and board, Eustacia Lansing, dressed in the deep mourning that so became her, called at Porky's shoe-repair store. She chose the hour of two o'clock when the streets of Coaltown are almost deserted. There was a matter of resoling one of Félicité's shoes. As she prepared to leave she said: “Porky, you see the Ashleys from time to time, don't you?”

“Once in a while I do.”

“Is it true they're opening a boardinghouse?”

“People say that.”

“Porky, you can keep a secret, I'm sure. I think you'll do something for me and keep it secret.”

Porky's face remained impassive.

“I want you to call at my house for a large parcel and I want you to leave it at the back door of the Ashley house without anybody knowing anything about it. The parcel contains a dozen sheets and pillow cases and a dozen towels. Could you find time to do that, Porky?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Can you pick it up just after dark? It will be behind my front gate.”