Winterbound (5 page)

“Jane, where is Suzanne? She has run off again. Go and call her; we must go, Charles, it is hours to drive! But I just want to look at the upstairs once more.”

“That settles it,” said Garry to herself. “Might have known I wouldn't get a break. Wants to make sure where they're going to put the tiled bathrooms in, I suppose. How about just stepping out and saying I'd dropped in to look over the house? But I'd never get away with it; not with that Gina woman. Better beat it, quick!”

But where? Suddenly she remembered the woodshed
ell. There must be a room somewhere at that end. Her feet crunched loudly on some fallen plaster, but it was too late to worry about that as she sped on tiptoe, making for the far end of the house. By luck she found what she had hoped for, a small room with a window giving on the woodshed roof. The window was nailed, but insecurely; in a moment she had wrenched it loose, pushed up the sash as noiselessly as she could, and slipped through.

As she dangled for an instant, her legs over the edge of the shingles, she heard a peculiar and smothered sound below. A small snubby face, with bat ears and bulging scandalized eyes, stared up at her, undoubtedly the missing Suzanne. There was a moment of suspense; then the yelp that had been visibly gathering died in Suzanne's throat. Evidently the sight of Garry's overalled legs, hanging as it were from heaven, struck terror to her small-dog soul. She gulped and fled.

Garry let herself drop, snatched her basket, and dodged through the overgrown bushes to the orchard. A moment later, the basket on her arm, she was strolling with careful indifference down the road past the house.

Turning her head, she could see the young man standing by the car, his back turned to her. Too bad; she would have liked to see at last what poor Charles really looked like. Gina was still invisible, but Suzanne was there, still suffering under a sense of outrage and yelping
hysterically at the girl in the white beret. But small dogs fortunately can tell no tales.

The children returned from their expedition at dusk, Martin carrying a gallon jar of new cider and Caroline a smaller brown demijohn to be put aside for vinegar, gifts from the Rowes. They were full of all they had seen on the drive, Martin especially. They had gone through the famous swamp, they'd stopped at a house where an old man had two tame coons in his corncrib; they had watched the apples being crushed, and the mill was worked by a gas engine like the one Neal used to saw wood, and they had drunk the fresh juice in tumblers as it ran from the press. It was good, Martin said, but not very fizzy yet. Neal Rowe had said it couldn't hurt anyone, it was just like drinking fresh apples.

Nevertheless it became evident, from Caroline's increasing air of aloofness, that all was not entirely well within; she refused supper, let Martin do most of the talking, and only roused once to say with an injured air:

“Shirley drank just as much cider as I did, and I don't see why she hasn't got just as worse a stomach ache as I've got!”

“How do you know she hasn't?” Kay asked.

“I
know
she hasn't, because I asked her coming home on the truck.”

“I expect she is more used to it than you are,” Mrs. Ellis suggested.

“If you ask me, you're both of you little pigs,” said Garry with sisterly bluntness. “Martin hasn't got any stomach ache.”

“Martin's a boy,” Caroline returned, as though that settled the question. “It don't matter what boys eat an' drink!”

“If I did have I wouldn't talk about it, anyway,” Martin told her, conscious of an uncomfortable tightness about his own waistband but unwilling to admit it. “If you aren't careful, Caroline, it might all turn to vinegar inside you, because that's what cider does when you leave the cork out.”

“Then I should think you'd some of you might have told me about it before I went!” Caroline sniffled, and was led off to bed with a hot water bottle for comfort.

“The new people were up at the house again today,” Kay announced as the two girls were washing supper dishes. “Mrs. Rowe saw them drive by.”

“Yes? I thought I noticed a car there, coming home.”

“What's the joke about it?”

“Oh, nothing. Sometime maybe I'll tell you.”

And that was all Garry would say.

Across the Road

AFTER Thanksgiving the weather turned suddenly cold—a sharp businesslike cold, with an air of having come to stay. “Nearly an inch of ice on the rain barrel this morning,” Garry would announce cheerfully, warming her chilled fingers as she watched through the window four bobbing heads in woolen caps—Shirley and Caroline, Martin and Jimmie—hurrying down the hill to catch the school bus. Big Bertha did her duty nobly, though her huge stomach seemed to consume as much wood as might run a locomotive until Mary Rowe, slipping over one morning to borrow some coffee, gave them a lesson in the proper setting of drafts.

“Wood stoves are all right,” she said, “but I guess you've got to be brought up with them to know their ways. There—now your heat'll go where it belongs, not all up the stovepipe.”

“Does it often get much colder than this?” asked Kay, who was the shivery one of the family.

“Colder?” Mary Rowe laughed. “It hasn't started to get cold yet! Why, I haven't even looked out the children's heavy underwear. You wait a bit!”

She looked anything but wintry herself, with slim bare ankles above her keds and only a thin windbreaker over her cotton house frock. “I guess this house ought to be pretty comfortable for you. It was when we lived in it.”

“I never knew you lived here,” said Garry.

“Two years, before we bought our place. Before Shirley was born; Jimmie was a baby. The hill keeps the north wind off, but you'll get it from the south, and that's a mean wind in winter. How are your windows, pretty tight?”

“They were drafty yesterday,” Mrs. Ellis told her. “That wind seemed to come in everywhere!”

“It's the old sash. I'll get Neal to look at them.” She went over and held her hand against the window sills, here and there. “Feel that? I tell you what you do. You get strips of newspaper and fill in all those cracks, poke it right down; that'll make a difference. There's plenty of little tricks to make a place comfortable, only you've got to know them. If you live in the country long you soon learn!”

Next to Edna, of whom they saw little these days, the Rowes were rapidly becoming the mainstay of the Ellis family. Besides fixing the windows and planning the
doors—details which hadn't mattered so much in warm weather but were important now—it was Neal who helped them bank the house with leaves and earth on the north side and nail over the woodshed cracks; Neal who cut and hauled their cord wood for them and sawed it up, not with the gas engine which, like many of the Rowe possessions, had permanently broken down—“giv' up the ghost,” as its owner cheerfully remarked—but by means of the faithful truck harnessed to an improvised saw table, till there rose in the side yard a mountain of stove wood which the Ellises innocently imagined would more than last them all winter. It was Mary who advised in all household emergencies and who came miraculously to the rescue—dropping everything to dash bareheaded across the road the time their stovepipe caught fire, which it inevitably did before long, they having supposed that all one needed to do with a stovepipe was to set it up and leave it there.

Martin and Caroline made no bones about preferring the Rowe household to their own. Jimmie was just a year older than Martin, while Shirley and Caroline could almost share birthdays. To see the two little girls together one might easily have taken pink-cheeked Caroline for the country child, for she was far sturdier in build, Shirley being slight and fair, with a pointed elfish face, upturned faintly freckled nose, and gray dark-lashed eyes
that looked too big for the rest of her features. While she and Caroline sewed, played dolls, and kept house, Martin and Jimmie were deep in their own plans and occupations. They spent evenings poring over the mailorder catalogues and knew by heart every item in the saddlery, gun, and hunting pages, their chief interests at this moment.

The two were well matched. Jimmie owned a .22 rifle and could be trusted with it, since he took hunting seriously and would have scorned to shoot at a small bird or a squirrel; he had a born instinct for woodcraft and knew the name, habits, and ways of every bird and beast around, while Martin, though he had never handled a gun in his life, had more than the average boy's knowledge of natural history, and moreover owned a father who knew all about prehistoric animals and dinosaurs' eggs and was at this very moment away on a scientific expedition in Central America—enough in itself to invest him with an aura of magic and importance to Jimmie, who had never seen a museum or zoo in his life, had access to few books, and had long ago exhausted all that the school library could offer on the subject nearest to his heart. When the two boys were not outdoors together or confabulating in their special corner of the Rowe kitchen they were usually shut up in Martin's room at home, deep in his model engine or his microscope, possessions which had taken on
new interest since this friendship began; while all Martin's books in turn found their way across the road in exchange for copies of cowboy stories and other periodical Western literature.

The Rowe kitchen had a special attraction for the younger Ellises. There were other rooms in the house, including all upstairs and the parlor with its old furniture, braided rugs on the oak floor, and a case of stuffed humming birds on the mantelshelf, but compared with the kitchen they might as well have been non-existent. It was in the kitchen that family life centered. It was a long low room (the Rowes, being country people, had preferred to keep the largest room in the house for its original use) with the stove at one end, flanked by a piled wood-box on one side and an old comfortable sofa on the other, set back in a sort of alcove and wide enough for the little girls to play house there of an afternoon and for three-year-old Tommy to take his midday nap on in cold weather, tucked under a patchwork quilt. Behind the stove the old chimney-breast bulged out, making a wide shelf on which the boys liked to sit dangling their legs and watch whatever was cooking on the stove top. An old pine dresser and a chest stood along one side of the room; on the other, Mary's house plants occupied one sunny window and her sewing machine another. At the far end a row of outdoor coats hung from pegs, with a
jumble of rubbers and boots below them, and Neal's rifle and an old shotgun leaned in the corner next to the back door. Either Sam, the old black-and-tan foxhound, or Dolly, half hound, half pointer, usually lay stretched under the table in the middle of the floor, safe there from being trodden on or stumbled over, while Jimmie's Ranger, a brown-and-white nondescript and the best woodchuck dog in the neighborhood, shared with three cats the warmer refuge under the stove.

Here, when schoolwork was finished, Martin liked to spend his evenings, discussing plans with Jimmie in the sofa corner, reading at the table under the kerosene lamp, or, if Neal was in a talkative mood, listening to the hunting tales he would tell them as he lounged in the big wooden rocker, pausing now and then to reach out to the wood-box for a fresh stick to put on the stove, while Mary Rowe, who never seemed to sit down except at meals and not always then, moved on errands of her own about the room or just stood, to join in the talk.

Garry, too, like the Rowes' kitchen, for it was a room she felt thoroughly at home in, and Mary shared her own eagerness about gardening and flowers—especially wild flowers, and would drop whatever she was doing at any moment to look something up in the botany book or to exchange descriptions of plants she had seen or knew, and whereabouts they were to be found. She and Neal
between them had at their fingertips, too, the history of every old house, abandoned or occupied, for miles around, of the people who had lived in them and of certain queer things that had happened there, stories just as exciting to Garry as hunting tales were to Martin.

Martin was there one evening—Caroline too, for the next day was a Saturday—when Neal, who had been working late, came in, bringing a draft of cold air with him from the opened door.

“Going to snow before morning,” he said, hanging up his leather jacket and coming over to the stove. “You can smell it coming, on the air.”

“About time,” said Mary. “We've had one or two flurries but no real snow yet. Generally it comes earlier than this. Want some supper, Neal? It's right in the oven here.”

“I had some over to George's. They were just sitting down to it before I left. But I could do with a slice of that apple pie, if you've got any left, and a cup of coffee. And I guess the boys could, too—hey, Martin? Jimmie I don't have to ask, nor yet Caroline there; she looks like she could eat pie any hour of the day. I guess they don't feed you right, over home. Kind of wasting away, you are!”