The Misadventures of Maude March (4 page)

But there was far more than daily cooking and housework
and wood chopping to be done. The church floor had to be swept twice a week, the pews needed a coat of wax, and wax took a lot of rubbing to make it shine. Two extra pairs of hands could not complain if they were put right to work.

Children were underfoot at every turn, running through the sweepings, dipping their fingers into whatever they were told to stay away from. Mrs. Peasley did not run what Aunt Ruthie would have called “a tight ship.”

Maude's voice was deep, which scares small children sometimes, and besides that, Maude tended toward swatting people when they annoyed her severely. I had taken my fair share of swats and stood immune, but the Peasley children had never dealt with the likes of Maude, and in a week's time, they all stood afraid of my sister.

My voice was also deep, but I had the good sense to make it higher when I spoke to little ones, which made me seem friendlier, even if I was scolding. Also, the two oldest were boys, six and eight, and all I had to do to get them to go along with me was to promise to read them a dimer later on. Joe Harden was their favorite hero, and they had both of them concocted an ending for the dimer that quits just as Joe sights a cave where a wounded killer has no doubt taken shelter.

Because she was judged to have little patience with small children, and because Mrs. Peasley was growing round with her next baby, Maude took on the work that needed hours of standing up. She baked cakes and pies for ladies' meetings, for the sick or elderly, and for Tuesday night box suppers.

Mrs. Peasley had gotten a good start on collecting clothing for the poor, and much of that needed ironing, if not a good wash as well. There were socks to be mended and sizes
to be sorted. Finally I tied things together with bristly twine as full sets of clothing for the needy.

Just in time to begin the canning.

I worked mostly at preparing the vegetables. I was only grateful I was too short to stand at the stove. That fell to Maude. When she wasn't baking, she was lifting steaming jars from the canning pots. It made me feel bad to leave her with all the work when I went back to school in September.

Maude didn't go, but I had to. A new teacher had been found to take Aunt Ruthie's place. It wasn't that I expected Aunt Ruthie to show up there. I hadn't really thought about it, not out loud in my mind like, but somewhere inside myself I did think her classroom would stand empty, like our house.

I never mentioned it to Maude, who went on baking cakes and pies and doing the wash. If that room stood empty in her mind, that was fine by me. But if I hoped to spare her sentimental values, that was not to be. Once I went back to school, it fell to Maude to tie up the old-clothing parcels.

Aunt Ruthie's clothes made their way into the pile of giveaways. It had given Maude quite a jolt to find one of Aunt Ruthie's few dresses there. She had tied it into the middle of a bundle to hide this fact from me, but I was the one sent to get the clothes when Mrs. Peasley was all set to ride out on an errand of mercy. I spotted the fabric, Aunt Ruthie's practical brown cotton, as I put the bundles in the buggy.

“I see she's given away Aunt Ruthie's clothes,” I said to Maude, so she would know the secret was out. “I guess it's too bad for her that Aunt Ruthie wasn't partial to pretty calicoes or tartans.”

“Don't bother about it, Sallie,” was Maude's reply. But
her mouth was held tight in the way she had copied from Aunt Ruthie.

Mrs. Peasley told us how fortunate she believed herself to be to have all this help with her duties. She said this as she wrote a list of things to be done by Maude and me, and another list of people who needed the balm of her visits to them.

As the days wore on, I wanted something more than a thank-you. It was not that I was not grateful to be taken in, but it did seem to me that we were also taken for granted.

It made me angry that Reverend Peasley would turn a smile on me as I helped to scrub his floors, or wiped up after feeding his youngest child, or peeled the potatoes he would be getting for his supper, and yet he did not think to help.

But he was not the one making up daily lists. I said to Maude, “That Mrs. Peasley doesn't know when to say whoa.”

“I know, I know,” Maude agreed. “But at least you get away some of the time. If Reverend Peasley calls me an 'answer to a prayer' one more time, I'm going to hit him on the head.”

I didn't think this would improve matters much.

I said, “Don't you think we ought to just tell them it's not right to work us from morning till night? Even Aunt Ruthie let us play a game in the evenings. She let us pop corn and read by the fire. We got to visit with the other girls for an hour after Sunday service, instead of rushing back to the kitchen work.”

I had never felt such an appreciation for Aunt Ruthie. I understood now; she didn't smile much, but she never used us either. Whatever we did, she did just as much.

“Maybe we should get ourselves taken in by someone who doesn't have so much work to do,” I said.

“And maybe we'll get taken in by someone worse,” Maude said with a dark look on her face. “They could have separated us.”

So maybe I shouldn't have held it against the Peasleys that they made good use of us. But I did hold it against them.

I went in to make up the little children's cots one morning and found they had been, without ever saying one word to us, covered over in Aunt Ruthie's quilts. Worse, these were not her everyday quilts, but the ones that had taken blue ribbons at the fair. I finished my chores with my lips atremble.

When Mrs. Peasley went out for a minute, I brought Maude to have a look. The matter was not lost on her. “She kept those in her cedar chest at the foot of her bed,” she said. “They're going through all her things.”

“What are we going to say?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” Maude said.

It got to the point where Reverend Peasley would smile on me, and I would turn an upside-down smile with lots of teeth back at him. He'd look at me like his eyes couldn't be trusted and make a deliberate smile. “Sallie? You don't look like yourself. Sallie?”

And I would smile back just as nice as you please.

I hoped to wreck his mind.

It surprised all of us, I think, when the Toleridge boy tried calling on Maude. That is, he would call, and she would shut the door in his face, refusing to see him.

The reverend wondered if Maude felt it was too soon after Aunt Ruthie's death to think about marriage. He cleared his throat, then said, “Not that I would have you rush into
anything, Miss Maude. But there is the matter of your house. The Toleridge boy…”

Had enough money to buy it back from the bank. Or his family did. That's what Reverend Peasley was too particular to say.

“I don't like the Toleridge boy,” Maude told Reverend Peasley. At this, Mrs. Peasley's mouth pinched up like she was sucking on a lemon drop.

“He never was nice to dogs or cats or even little children in the schoolyard,” Maude went on saying. “He couldn't be trusted. I would never think of marrying the likes of him.”

“Maude, I thought you would do anything to get the house back,” I said to her that night. We did most of our talking in the dark, in the few minutes between blowing out our candle and falling asleep.

“I thought so too,” she said. “But that boy is too big a dose of 'anything' for me.”

“Do you still want the house back?” I asked her, wondering if there weren't some things she'd still want from it. Maude was sentimental that way.

“I do,” she whispered. “I want it something terrible. I want Aunt Ruthie too.”

I think it soured the reverend on us a little when Maude turned away the Toleridge boy. I'm not sure why. I only know he started to take a firm tone with us.

About that time, Mr. Wilburn took to coming to dinner every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday evening. At first he brought small gifts to Mrs. Peasley. Then he began bringing them to Maude. An embroidered case for her scissors. A silver thimble. A comb for her hair.

Mr. Wilburn was a grandfatherly sort of man, and I was still of an age when I thought I might like to have a grandfather. Especially one who brought me his already-been-read-twice dime novels, like Mr. Wilburn did, once he learned I liked them. He spared them out, one each week, which was fine by me; it made a Christmas of every Friday evening.

It took Maude till October to figure out that Mr. Wilburn was sweet on her. “I could never marry that old man,” Maude said to me. “Why, he could be our grandfather.”

I was sorry to have to be the one to say it, but Maude didn't have all that many charms. Not the kind men are said to go for. Maude was good, she was honest and true. But she was plain. Wren brown hair, ordinary brown eyes, and stick thin from neck to foot. It wasn't likely many others were going to come calling.

“Just be nice to him,” I said.

Meanwhile, the leaves on the trees had turned yellow and orange and began to fall. The Peasleys were getting fewer and fewer pats on the back for having taken us in. The church ladies had begun to be sorry they hadn't taken us in themselves.

“Those five Peasley children must be a handful for you to look after,” one of them said to me.

“They're all right,” I said. “They're just little, is all.”

I overheard another of them saying, “Mrs. Peasley used to pay me a little to bake bread, as well as all those cakes and pies.” I gathered she was feeling the crimp in her coin purse now that Maude was doing the baking.

“We're working harder here than we did at home, with
Aunt Ruthie driving us like sled dogs,” I said to Maude as we cleaned up after a Sunday dinner.

“What kind of dogs?”

I'd read about sled dogs in
Wild Woolly, Lost in the Yukon.
There were several Wild Woolly books, I gathered, but I only had the one where Wild Woolly was lost, possibly to die out there in the blinding snowstorm the book left off with. It occurred to me that Mr. Wilburn might have the means to get the other books from somewhere. I desperately wanted to know what happened to Wild Woolly.

I remembered Mr. Wilburn had recently brought Maude a box of writing paper with little flowers painted in the corners of the pages. She had no one to write to, but the paper was so pretty Maude got a little misty at the surprise of it. I wondered if maybe she was softening a little in her opinion of him.

“Unless you get married, we don't have anything to look forward to but working for room and board in this house,” I said.

“If you like him so much,” Maude said, “you marry him.”

“I can't marry him, I'm only twelve years old.”

“You're eleven, and you can't expect me to marry him either.”

D
O YOU REMEMBER UNCLE ARLEN?” I ASKED MAUDE ONE
night before we went to sleep.

“I remember he sang songs. He used to dance with Momma because Daddy couldn't dance at all.” She stopped there, but I only gave her the look of, and what else? So she dredged her memory and came up with a little more.

“I think he was pretty for a man, but maybe he was only young. I was nine, after all, so I never gave these things much thought.”

“You must remember more than that.”

“He put sugar in our milk until Aunt Ruthie put a stop to that. He was around the house quite a bit, but maybe he lived somewhere else.” She thought for a minute, then said, “That's about it. Not much, I know.”

She was right; it wasn't nearly enough.

Even so, I said, “Maybe we ought to try to find him.” I fully expected Maude to shoot that idea down. To my surprise, she looked at me like this was the first good idea she'd heard. The next morning, she brought the subject up with Reverend Peasley.

He laughed right out loud. “I can assure you that your uncle wasn't the kind to survive out west. His nose ran all the time. We gave him quite a hard time about it in the school-yard, as I remember.”

He seemed to me to remember this very fondly. I had a sudden picture of the Toleridge boy come to mind.

“Where was he headed? Independence?” Mrs. Peasley said, like she was trying to remember something funny she'd heard. “ 'To ride the tail of the Oregon Trail.' He didn't even have a wagon, did he?”

“One mule,” Reverend Peasley said in the unmistakable tone of, and good riddance.

“How far to Independence?” I asked. Independence was beginning to sound real good to me.

“It must be three hundred miles,” he said, “maybe more.”

“How long would it take to get there on a mule?” Maude asked.

“Weeks,” said Reverend Peasley. “Far longer, walking.”

“I thought you said he had a mule,” I said.

“The mule carried supplies,” Reverend Peasley said. “Your uncle walked.”

“Here, let's stop talking about this,” Mrs. Peasley said suddenly. “Independence is no place for young ladies to set their sights for.”

“I suppose not,” Maude said, and even Reverend Peasley heard the disappointment in her tone.

“He never was the kind to listen to good advice either,” the reverend said, beefing up his argument. “He didn't do any planning; just one minute he was doing a little smithing, and the next minute he fancied he could set down his anvil out
there in Independence and get to be a rich man. He didn't even leave here with enough food to take him that far.”