Winterbound (10 page)

“It does seem a lot, just for eating. What do you do—make the list just as you think?” For so far the housekeeping had been entirely in Kay's hands.

“I go through the pantry and order what we're out of and what I think we'll need. It's how Penny always did. I guess I'm so scared of running out of things that I get more than we really want, each time. It's all right only instead of spending less since Penny left we seem to be spending more,” said Kay ruefully. “We're going to be awfully short this month when we get everything paid up and I hate to ask for more. She wrote us she had that dentist bill down there and I never told her I paid Mrs. Cummings that extra month. Those forty dollars would just put us right, now.”

“I hope she chokes on them,” said Garry, referring to Mrs. Cummings, not to Penny. “But if she did I suppose we wouldn't hear about it, so that's no comfort. I wish there was some way we could make money. The big idea
would be to make more, not to spend less. But I don't suppose there's a thing.” She gazed round the room. “Rugs. But they take forever to hook, and then who's going to buy them.”

“All New England is full of hooked rugs. That's no good. I did have an idea, but it never came to anything. There was a man I met last spring and he saw some of my work and liked it, and he thought maybe he could get me some work illustrating. He knows some magazine people and publishers, and he wanted to show them a few drawings I had. I didn't hear anything for months and months, and I was kind of hoping about it still, and then he wrote me the other day.” Kay paused. “He said they liked them but it wasn't the kind of work they wanted, and I didn't know enough about the way drawings have to be made for reproduction. They all thought what I needed was to take a year in illustrating class before I could turn out anything they'd be able to use. He was quite nice about it, and I guess he took quite a lot of trouble, but there it is.”

“Kay, what a darn shame! You never said a word about it.”

“There wasn't any good. I wouldn't have told you now, only I hate to be just sitting round at home as if I wasn't even trying to do anything.”

“You
can
draw,” said Garry hotly.

“I can draw, but I can't draw well enough. Oh, I know all that, but what does make me mad is people wanting to give you good advice and telling you all the things you know for yourself when they don't even understand your circumstances. I know well enough what I ought to be doing, but I just can't do it. I need to work and study and see things, and maybe go around and talk to publishers myself, and learn a whole lot I don't know, but you can't do all that from up here.”

“Why can't you go to town for a while. I can look after things.”

“It wouldn't be any use,” Kay shook her head. “I've just got to wait, that's all. I don't know why I have to spill all this on you, except that I can't help getting sore sometimes when there's such a lot I want to do and no chance of doing it. I think everybody ought to be selfsupporting by the time they're nineteen, and look at me!”

There was a tap at the door. Neal came in.

“Good morning. Did I break up the meeting?”

“Not a bit. We were just having a ways-and-means committee.” Kay bundled the slips back into the table drawer.

“You're lucky, at that,” Neal grinned. “We can't even
do that over home. We got the ways, but we ain't always got the means.”

Garry laughed. “Neither have we, always. How's Shirley?”

“Better. She's cutting out paper dolls on the sofa. Mary wanted to know could you spare us a little coffee, 'cause I won't be gettin' down to the store till around supper time. And I thought I'd just take a look how your woodpile was holdin' out. I guess there's likely to be a cold snap coming on most any day, now.”

“More snow?” Kay asked.

“It's banking up for that, by the looks of it. The way I figure it, we'll get a good old-fashioned snowfall, an' then our cold weather'll follow right back of it. If we do, Garry, I'll get the old sleigh out and we'll all go sleigh riding. Pack all the kids in and have a real family party.” “Grand!”

Kay didn't look so happy. “Do you mean it'll get colder than this?”

“Why, we haven't had any real cold yet,” Neal told her. “Not what I call cold. This here is just mild ordinary winter weather. You wait and see.”

That evening Garry, looking through a pile of papers and magazines that she was tidying up, stopped to reread a few lines that had caught her eye.

“Listen, Kay. Look at this. Here's the very thing we want.”

It was a copy of a weekly literary review that had come with some other magazines from Cousin Caroline, who remembered the country relatives from time to time when papers accumulated. Garry pointed to the advertisement at the foot of one column:

WANTED. By writer, quiet
room and plain board with country
family, or would share small
cottage. Working privacy essential.
Reasonable. Z.Y.3.

“You mean a sort of paying guest? You're crazy!”

“I'm not. It would settle our whole question. Listen. She can have the parlor here. It's warm and quiet, we'll fix it up nicely and she can shut herself in and write all day if she wants to. And she can have meals with us, or separately. If she wants privacy she needn't see anything of us if she doesn't want to; so much the better. That means we won't have to do any entertaining or bothering about her. And it would be someone staying in the house, too, and that will stop Penny worrying—you know she did, last letter, about our being alone here. And instead of us paying her, she'll be paying us. I think it's a swell idea!”

Garry threw the paper down with her characteristic
air of having decided everything, once and for all.

“But Garry—we don't know a thing about the kind of person she is, even. Suppose it's someone terribly fussy?”

“Only nice people would advertise in that kind of paper, anyway,” said Garry firmly. “And if she's fussy, she can't be any fussier than the Cummings was. It says plain board, and heaven knows our board is plain enough to please anyone. When she's here, maybe we can afford to have it a little fancier. What date is that paper?”

Kay turned it over.

“Three weeks old.”

“Never mind. There's always a chance she hasn't found anything to suit her yet. Kay, we'll have to get that letter written tonight, right now.”

Garry began to rummage in the desk for paper and envelopes.

“It mightn't be such a bad idea,” Kay considered. “If we only knew . . .”

“Knew what?” Garry's head lifted impatiently. “I tell you it's a swell idea. Sit down here. How would you begin?”

Kay thought it over, staring at the sheet of paper in front of her.

“Dear Madam, having seen your advertisement . . .”

“No,” said Garry after a moment. “That's what everybody would write. We don't want to sound like a tea
room or a boarding house. Leave this to me, Kay. We've got to write something that will make her interested, to start with.”

She took a pad and pencil and settled herself in the sofa corner, overalled knees drawn up to her chin as usual in moments of deep thought.

“Don't put a whole lot of stuff that will make her think the place nicer than it is,” Kay advised, beginning after the first shock to get really interested.

“What do you think I am? I'm going to tell her the worst, then there won't be any come-backs.”

For ten minutes Garry scribbled, with many pauses and a good deal of scratching out. Presently she said: “Listen to this:

“Dear Z.Y.3,

“If you really want a place in the country where you can write in peace and quiet we have a comfortable ground-floor room, with open fireplace. We are four in the family, and my sister is an artist. This is genuine country. We have no modern conveniences except the telephone. You could have plain meals either with us or by yourself and we can undertake that you will not be disturbed in your work unless you want to be, because we are usually pretty busy ourselves. There is no radio and we
are seven miles from the railroad. We like it here and I think that you would.

“Yours sincerely,          

“M
ARGARET
E
LLIS
.    

“And a darn good letter too, I call it.”

“Why did you say that about me?” Kay objected.

“To show her the sort of people we are. She'd want to know, if she's going to live with us. And you can't say I haven't been strictly truthful.”

“You've been too truthful,” Kay groaned. “Do you suppose anyone in their senses would want to come here, after reading that?”

“Anyone like you or me would. Like me, anyway. And most writers hate radios; that's why I said we hadn't got one. So she won't have that to worry about.”

“She'll have plenty else! You never said what we would charge.”

“Do I have to? I thought she'd say that. Good Lord, Kay, what should we charge?”

“Five dollars a week?”

“You're nuts. Fifteen is more like it.”

“Garry, we
can't!
There isn't even a bathroom.”

“I sort of hinted as much, didn't I? There's our old zinc tub in the kitchen, and we'll include Cousin Carrie's
bath salts, free. Now listen here. This has got to cover our grocery bill, don't forget. Down at that farm over near the lake they charge sixteen a week; Mary told me. But they give you cream, and we don't have cream. Suppose we charge her fourteen? That's fifty-six dollars a month, and if you're a writer and want peace and quiet—and that's what she's willing to pay for—you just try living anywhere for fifty-six dollars a month, and see what you get!”

“It seems an awful lot to me.”

“We've got to be businesslike,” said Garry. And she added at the foot of the letter: “Would fourteen dollars a week be too much ?”

It was not until after the letter, duly copied and addressed in Garry's square sturdy hand, had been stamped and left on the mantelpiece for next morning's mail, and Garry herself was just dropping off to sleep in bed, the covers pulled up to her ears, that there came a dubious whisper from across the dark room.

“Garry ... I was thinking. That advertisement never said it was a woman. Suppose it's a man?”

Garry's voice was muffled by blankets.

“All the better. If it's a man we can make him chop our kindling for us. He'll want some sort of exercise.”

Kay sighed.

“Well, I suppose we'll know when we get an answer. If we ever do.”

But a good deal was to happen before that answer came.

Winterbound

NEAL was right. Next morning there was an ominous grayness in the air. By midday the snow began to fall, first in big whirling flakes, then closer and denser, shutting out the landscape like a white curtain, packing against the door sill and drifting high in the hollows. The children came home from school shouting and red-cheeked, snow clinging thickly to their clothing and sifted down their necks, shaking themselves like dogs as they ran in through the door that Garry held ajar against the rising wind.

“There's four inches now. If it keeps up Jimmy says we won't get down to the state road tomorrow, not unless they get the snow plows out.”

It did keep up. Garry and Martin worked hard bringing in armloads of wood before the big outdoor woodpile should get snowed under, till their fingers were frozen through their wet gloves.

“Gosh, there's enough here to last us through a blizzard!
” Martin exclaimed, dropping his last heavy load on the shed floor.

“So you think,” said Garry darkly. It was her job to tend Big Bertha and she knew how much that monster ate.

By supper time the snow had piled halfway up the windowpanes on the north side of the house, and when Caroline pulled the curtain aside it was to peer out on a white and buried world.

There was no going to school next day. The kitchen door opened onto a snowbank, and Martin stepped out above his knees. Jimmie brought the milk over a good hour later than usual, floundering through unbroken drifts, and between them they shoveled a narrow path as far as the mailbox. Later Neal hitched his two horses to the homemade snow plow, three heavy timbers spiked together to make a rough triangle, and the boys and Caroline clung squealing to the back bar while it swung and slithered down the hill, breaking a track and pushing the snow into high banks against either side of the road.

Down on the lower road the town plow was busily forging its way, an impressive yellow monster that threw the loose snow up in showers as it chugged along. Neal, about to turn his horses at the foot of the hill, drew up and waited with the children to see it pass.

“Hey, what you tryin' to do—spoil the sledding?” he shouted as the engine drew abreast.

The driver grinned back.