Man of the Family (19 page)

Mother just glanced up at me for a moment, and said, “If he smoked.” Then she went right on talking to Grace. “The broken threads are very easy to mend. While the curtain is on the stretching frame, they are simply replaced with twist of the right shade. Of course, the knots must be very neatly made so as not to show, and the broken thread must be snipped away. But it's the larger holes that worry me. I imagine they have to be mended on the stretcher too, and there must be a trick to doing it so that the mended place will neither pull nor sag.”

When it came to figuring things out, Grace could beat anybody I ever knew. And she must have figured the mending out before Mother ever mentioned it. “I don't think it would be very hard,” she said. “If you washed and starched the twist right along with the curtain, they'd probably shrink and stretch about the same amount. Then, if you did the weaving-in while they were both wet, I'd think it would be just about like tuning a harp; just getting the same tightness on all the strings.”

I shouldn't have done it, but I blurted out, “When did you ever tune a harp?”

Grace didn't even bother to look around at me. She just said, “Never, but I think I could.” I thought she probably could, too. She went right on talking to Mother, so I kept quiet till she'd finished. “If Ralph could go right down to the village, he could get us a spool of twist before the O.P.C.H. closes, and then we could try it on the unrighteous one as soon as he has the frame made.”

I'd been wondering about the rest of the curtains in the bag ever since Mother took the first one out, so I said, “Well, why don't we look at the rest of the curtains first? I'll bet there are a lot . . .”

Mother didn't look up from her plate, but Grace scowled as though I'd done something terrible. She didn't let me finish what I was going to say, but snapped, “If you don't hurry, the O.P.C.H. will be closed before you get there.”

The One Price Cash House didn't close till six o'clock, and I knew I had enough time, but I knew I'd better keep quiet, so I finished my supper and went out to put the saddle on Lady. When I led her out of the barn, Grace was waiting for me. She held a little piece of curtain out toward me, and said, “Now remember, it's silk twist you want and not thread. Show them this piece and tell them the color has to match exactly.”

“All right,” I said, “but you don't have to be so crabby about everything.”

“Well, why don't you use your head once in a while?” she snapped back at me. “Don't you think Mother knows just as well as you do what kind of curtains are probably in that bag? But she won't look at them till after we've gone to bed. And you'd better hurry, so you can get the frame made. She won't sleep a wink till she knows how that first one is coming out.”

I couldn't get exactly the right shade of twist, but it was pretty close. And I was back home with it in less than twenty minutes.

While Mother was giving me the tool-chest key again, she said, “Now, this can't be any slap-dash job. The corners will have to be square and true. And measure carefully to see that you get it just exactly four feet by eight feet.”

“Inside or out?” I asked her.

Before she could answer, Grace said, “Neither! That's the size in the middle of the strips where the brads go.”

I was real careful about making the frame. I measured the sides exactly eight feet and two inches long and the ends four feet and two inches, then mitered the corners just the way I'd seen Father make picture frames.

I'd been so busy I hadn't noticed how the time was getting away from me, and it was nearly nine o'clock when I took the frame in to show Mother. At first, she said, “Oh, what a beautiful job you've done.” Then she stood back and looked at it with her head cocked over a little. “There's something just a little bit strange about it. Let me see now. . . . I believe the Jordans' stretcher had legs on it.”

“Well,” I said, “I've got four two-foot pieces left over. I can put legs on it easy enough.”

Grace was holding up the far end of the frame and looking at my corner joint. Almost before I had my mouth closed, she said, “If you'd left them right on there, we could let it out and take it in by just changing the bolt holes.”

It made me a little bit mad to have her finding fault with my job, so I said, “What do you know about being a carpenter, anyway? How'd you think you could keep the edges level if you left the ends on?”

Mother clapped her hands together, and said, “No more bickering! It's a lovely job, and I think it will work beautifully if you just tack some legs onto it so we can stand it up against the wall. Now to see how far apart the brads should go.”

Grace was humming; not any real tune, but that you-just-wait-and-see-what's-going-to-happen hum, like a mosquito in a bedroom. She only stopped long enough to say, “Three-quarters of an inch,” and was still humming when I took the frame back to the barn.

When I had it finished and took it into the house, Grace and Mother were waiting for me. They had the curtain and the twist all washed and lying in the starch water. The curtain had shrunk quite a bit in the washing, and it took all three of us to get the top edge stretched out and hooked over the brads.

But that first edge was nothing, compared to the other three. The brads weren't strong enough and they'd bend if we didn't push each loop of thread clear down to the bottoms of them. And the heads had rough edges that scratched our fingers when we tried to stretch the loops over them. Before I realized I'd cut it, one of my fingers bled on the curtain. Mother was afraid she might not be able to get the stain out if it dried, so we had to stop while she sponged it and put court plaster on my finger. All three of us had to have court plaster on our fingers long before we got the last edge hooked onto the brads. Some of the holes had torn a little bigger in the stretching, we'd got the edges bloody in a dozen places, and the pattern of the mesh was all scrambled up.

We'd been so busy that we'd forgotten all about the time. It wasn't until the last loop was hooked that Mother noticed the clock. She caught her breath as though it had frightened her, and said, “Good Heavens! Has something happened to the clock? Why . . . why, it's after one o'clock. You children get to bed just as fast as you can stivver. My! I shouldn't have let you stay up like this! And tomorrow our cookery day!”

All Grace said was, “You're coming too, aren't you? There's nothing more we can do tonight.” But I had to put my foot in my mouth again.

“Hadn't we better take the curtain off before we go?” I said; “it won't be any good this way.”

Grace was standing right beside me. She dug her thumb nearly half an inch into my back, and Mother clamped her mouth up as tight as a new buttonhole. For a minute her face was red, and I thought she was going to scold me, but she didn't. She just let her breath out easy, and her voice was real quiet when she said, “Yes, we will have to do it over, but we have gained considerable experience. I don't think it will hurt anything for it to hang right there till we have our cookery order behind us. Now, run right off for bed; I'll be up in a few minutes.”

21

Inventing and Blacksmithing

I
DIDN'T
wake up the next morning till nearly six o'clock, but there wasn't a sound in the house. I wanted Mother to sleep as long as she could, so I took my shoes in my hand, and kept my feet wide apart on the stairs so they wouldn't squeak. But I wasn't the first one up. A lamp was already burning in our kitchen. Grace was there but didn't hear me till I'd opened the door. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the curtain stretcher, and seemed to be studying it as though it were a painting.

She didn't say a word when she saw me there; just glanced up at me and then looked back at the curtain. I knew why as soon as I got around where I could see. The whole thing looked like an old dilapidated chicken-yard fence with half the posts rotted out. As the curtain had dried and shrunk, it had warped and twisted the frame all out of shape. The lace was as stiff as parchment paper, and broken threads stuck out around the edges of the holes like clawing fingers. The chewed-off corner was hunched up as though a dog had crawled through it, and there was a rust stain around every brad.

I sat down beside Grace, and said, “Don't you think we'd better let this one go, and do our practicing on a good one?”

Grace didn't say a word for at least two minutes. She just kept looking at the curtain. Then she said, “There isn't a good one in the bag. I just looked.”

“Are they all as bad as this one?” I asked her.

At first, she just shrugged her shoulders. Then, after a couple of minutes, she shook her head, “No,” she said, “but they're just a bunch of old discarded stuff. I don't think any two are the same size or shape, and they've all got holes in them. This one could be the worst.”

“Do you think they gave us bad ones on purpose?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “They didn't want to tell Mother she couldn't try it, and they gave her these old ones to discourage her.”

I looked at the old rag hanging on my ruined stretcher, and said, “Well, it looks like they did a pretty good job of it.”

“Hmf,” Grace sniffed, “that's because they don't know Mother. What I want to know is how we're going to build a whole new corner on this one.”

We were both looking at the place where the corner should have been, when we heard Mother coming down the stairs. Grace got up quickly and drew one finger across her lips. I knew what she meant, so I picked up my shoes, cap, and coat, then took the milk bucket and tiptoed out to the woodshed. I waited to light the lantern till I was inside the barn.

I didn't think much about my chores that morning, but kept trying to figure out a way to make a curtain stretcher that would do three things at one time. It would have to be strong enough not to twist or get sway-backed; it would have to fit any size curtain; and the brads would have to be made so they'd slide along and wouldn't rust. By the time I got around to feeding the hens, I thought I had an idea.

After breakfast, I rode down to Mr. Nutting's lumberyard. When I went into his office, he looked up from the papers he was working on, and said, “Hi'ya, Little Britches! What can I do for you?”

“I don't know,” I told him, “because I don't know if it can be done; but can a buzz saw cut an L into a piece of oak lumber?”

“Spur him, cowboy; you got him goin' backwards!” he hollered. “What you mean is, can a buzz saw cut an L
out
of a piece of lumber.”

“No, I don't either,” I told him; “the L's got to be inside.”

“Here, you draw me a picture of it,” he said, as he brought a piece of paper and a pencil over to the counter. Then, when I'd drawn it, he said, “Well, that's sure an L
into
a piece of lumber, but a buzz saw wouldn't cut it. What you want to cut a piece of lumber that way for?”

After I'd told him all about the curtain business and how I planned to make the frame, he had me come into his office. Then he made me a set of drawings for a stretcher that would fit any size curtains, that wouldn't warp, and grooved so the brads would slide. After the drawing was all finished, Mr. Nutting said, “How about working out a deal here? You folks do up Annie's lace curtains for her, and I'll furnish the stretcher frame; you'll have to furnish your own hooks.”

I stuck my hand out across the drawing board, and said, “It's a deal if you'll have it made by tonight; we might have to work on curtains tomorrow.”

Mr. Nutting shook hands with me, and said, “Fair enough. Let's go back to the sash mill and talk to Lou Neff; he's not too busy today.” We went back, but I didn't do any of the talking. Lou did most of it as he went over the drawing, and about all Mr. Nutting had to tell him was to use hard maple lumber instead of oak because it would be smoother.

Of course, ordinary brads wouldn't work for the new stretcher. Instead, I'd planned to make hooks—like a capital letter S—that would slide in the grooves. They had to be strong enough so that they wouldn't bend easily, and they had to be made of something that wouldn't rust.

They had most every kind of thing in the Nimble Nickel, so I went down there as soon as we'd finished talking to Lou, and found just what I needed. There was a whole tray of little hooks for hanging curtain rods. They were made of brass, and there was an inch of smooth wire before the thread started. The sign on them said, “Ten for five cents,” but when I asked the manager how many I could have for a dollar, he told me two gross.

I didn't want to spend that much till I was sure they'd work, so I just took ten, and carried them over to Mr. Langworthy's blacksmith shop. He always knew the easiest way to do things with metal, and it seemed to me it would be a big job to make my hooks one by one.

Mr. Langworthy was shoeing a horse when I went into the shop, so, as he burnt the shoe in place, cooled it, and nailed it on, I found a little piece of soft wire and bent it into the shape I wanted. Then I showed him my curtain-rod hooks and the bent piece of wire. “Is there any easy way you know of,” I asked him, “to bend these brass hooks like this piece of wire and still not break them? I've got to make two hundred and eighty-eight of them.”

Of course, he wanted to know what I was going to do with them. So I drew a plan on the floor to show him how the curtain stretcher was going to look, and how Lou was going to make the L-shaped slots for the hooks to slide in. As I was making the drawing, Mr. Langworthy pushed a pair of new horseshoes into the center of the forge and looped his arm over the bellows pole. He never seemed to think about pumping it any more than he thought about breathing. His arm just floated up and down a little with the pole, the way a trout's fins do when he's resting.

When I'd finished, he was turning the little curtain hooks over and over in his big, rough fingers. “Dinky little things, ain't they?” he said. “Take a man all day to bend that many one by one. Have to get 'em all just alike or they won't slide good.” As he talked, he broke the screw end off the hook with his thumbs and fingers. “Pretty soft brass,” he said; “have to work it hot to make good bends. Tell you what: I ain't got time to make 'em for you, but I'll tell you what to do as you go along. Then we'll see what kind of a mechanic you are.”

After I'd gone back to the Nimble Nickel for the rest of the hooks, I started my blacksmithing. Mr. Langworthy told me how to lay them side by side on an iron bar, clamp them down with another bar, then heat them in the forge and hammer the bends in the whole row at one time. He explained each part of the job before I did it, and I was careful to do exactly as he told me. In less than an hour I was hammering the last bend into the line of red-hot hooks.

I think Mr. Langworthy was almost as proud of my job as I was. After he'd shut one eye and sighted along the row of little brass hooks, he said, “By the Lord Harry, given three times your weight, you'd make a blacksmith. Couldn't a'been more alike if they'd been bent in a die.”

While he was loosening the hand screws and cooling the bar of hooks in the water tub, I asked Mr. Langworthy how much I owed him, but he just laughed at me. “Didn't put in over five minutes work on 'em myself,” he said, “and that couldn't come to over a dime. Supposin' we settle it with bellows pumpin' one of these days?”

I knew I didn't really need to do it, but I wanted Harry Nutting to see what a good job I'd done on the curtain hooks, so I put them in my pocket as soon as they were cooled and took them up to his lumberyard. All the way up Main Street, I planned what I'd say to him so it wouldn't sound too much like bragging. He was looking over a load of lumber when I got there, so I waited till he was through. Then I took a handful of them out, and said, “I just brought these up so you could see if I'd made them right for fitting in the slots Lou Neff cut in the stretcher.”

“Whoa, back up!” Mr. Nutting told me. “You haven't been gone an hour. How d'you expect Lou to have that contraption made? It'll take him half a day.”

Then he held his hand out for me to give him the hooks. He picked up three or four of them and fitted them side by side in his fingers. “Where'd you find these?” he asked me; “never saw anything just like them.”

“I made them,” I told him. “Mr. Langworthy showed me how. They're out of those little curtain-rod screw hooks they have at the Nimble Nickel.”

Mr. Nutting fitted a few more of them together, took a rule from his hip pocket, and measured them all around, then hollered, “Oh, Lou! Come take a look at this!”

When Lou came, Mr. Nutting said, “Remember telling me that Charlie Moody could make anything he wanted out of anything he had? Look what his boy has made in the last hour out of a bunch of curtain hooks. Every one of 'em measures right to the T.”

I would have liked to just let it go at that, but of course I couldn't, so I said, “It was Mr. Langworthy that made them come out right; I only did what he told me to.”

They said some more nice things about what Father used to do, then I gave Lou the rest of the hooks and went home. I didn't even take one of the little hooks to show Grace. I wanted Mother and her to have the biggest surprise they could when I brought home the finished stretcher.

Mother and Grace were behind with the cookery order, and they didn't even want me to come into the kitchen until it was all ready to load on the wagon. Mother gave Muriel things to make us boys a picnic lunch out in the barn, and we stayed right there till Grace called me to get the wagon ready.

Philip went with me on the cookery route, and we hurried as fast as we could. We finished by half-past four, took the money we'd collected to Mr. Shellabarger, and were at the lumberyard before five o'clock. Mr. Nutting and Lou Neff were waiting in the office for me. They had the stretcher opened to its largest size and standing in the middle of the office floor. The maple wood was as white and smooth as a slice of snow apple, and the little brass hooks looked as though they might be pure gold.

I was anxious to take it home and show it to Mother and Grace, so, after we'd played with it a little while, we loosened all the wing nuts and folded it up like a bundle of poles. Then Lou helped me take it out to our wagon. I didn't want to get it all dirty before I even got it home, so Philip drove and I sat in the back of the wagon with the frame across my lap.

Usually, I took care of Lady the first thing I did when I got home, but that night I left her standing out by the front gate while Philip and I carried the stretcher into the house. And then I forgot all about her for at least half an hour. Mother and Grace, and the rest of the children too, were about as excited with the new stretcher as I. At first, they wouldn't believe that I planned a lot of it myself, and then Grace said it looked as though I might turn out to have some common sense after all. When she liked me best, she always said sort of mean things like that. Before Mother remembered about supper and I remembered about Lady, we'd set the stretcher to nearly every size there could be.

I never did my chores any faster than I did that night, and Mother waited supper till I had them finished. When I brought the milk bucket in, I noticed that she had the raggedy old curtain all washed again and soaking in a pan of starch water.

There was all the difference in the world when we started the job. Grace must have been thinking a lot about the chewed-out corner. We'd hardly tightened the last wing nut when she said to Mother, “Wouldn't it be easier for you to fix that broken place at the top than to kneel down to this corner? I'd have to be reaching up over my head all the time if I did the top.”

They had basted the mending twist into the lace so it wouldn't get tangled in the washing and starching. Grace slid out three long lengths of it, held the ends of them in her teeth, and twisted them with her fingers until she had a thin rope. Before she started, the chewed-out corner looked big enough for a hog to crawl through, but after she'd pulled the two old border strings tight with her new rope, a cat could hardly have got through. Within twenty minutes, she'd knotted strings of twist between each row of lace mesh, so that they looked for all the world like little harp strings. I never saw her fingers work so fast as they did when she was twisting in the cross strings and drawing them tight to make the new mesh.

I'd been so busy watching Grace that I'd almost forgotten about Mother. But when I looked up, she'd worked new threads into the broken edge so carefully that I could hardly tell where it had been. I wanted to have done some weaving myself, but I think Mother knew I'd be too clumsy. At first, she told me I'd done my share in getting such a good stretcher, but later she let me sprinkle the curtain so the lace would stay soft.

That evening was nice enough to make up for all the trouble we'd had the one before. I knew Mother and Grace would do the best they could, but I didn't have any idea they'd ever be able to make that old rag look like a lace curtain again. And I really don't believe they thought so either. We were all kind of proud of each other.