Man of the Family (9 page)

I wasn't really hurt; it was just that my eyes stung. And I didn't want her to be frightened, so I pulled the handkerchief off my face, and said, “See, they're not hurt a bit; they don't even burn any more.”

After Grace found I was all right, she tried to act grown up, and scolded me for not having any better sense than to get close to Le Beau. Then she made me promise to go right home with her so Mother could see if I'd need the doctor.

While she was gone to get the other children, Hi walked out toward the gate with me. He wanted to know if I was going back to school in the fall, and if I thought Mother would let me come back to Cooper's ranch to work if he promised to look out for me. Then he told me that I could probably do better right there in town, helping Mother with the cookery route and picking up odd cattle jobs when I could find them. He said Mr. Batchlett had his eye on me now that I'd won the race from Le Beau, and that he could throw lots of jobs my way.

“Batch ain't near as mean a hombre as folks makes him out to be,” he said. “Him and me punched longhorns in Texas when we wasn't no bigger'n you. He ain't hard inside of him, Little Britches, he's jest been in a tough game so long it's some of it rubbed off on him. By doggies, I wisht you could have saw him peel that Le Beau kid off'n his chestnut and slap the whey out of him. No sirree, old Batch he don't go for them kinda tricks.”

Mother was a little upset when we got home. She didn't like my having ridden in the match race. She pinched her lips right up tight while she was bathing my eyes with milk. Then she said, “I have never raised much objection to your riding in honest contests with your cowboy friends, but these match races are nothing more nor less than gambling devices. I will
not
have you take any part in gambling.”

11

We Really Spill the Beans

T
HAT
summer was the hottest we'd had since we moved to Colorado. Mr. Wilke had a good big onion field down on the bottom land near the river. It was sandy ground, and the sun made it as hot as a frying pan. And it seemed as though those onions had to be weeded on the very hottest days. Sometimes I used to tell myself it really was a frying pan, and that I was the egg on it. I could almost feel my outside edges turning brown and curling up.

It wasn't too bad for me, though. Once in a while I could get a whiff of cool air from the river. It was Grace and Mother who really got the worst of it. A good many of the ladies in Littleton must have stopped cooking altogether, and the hotter it got the bigger my cookery orders grew. I didn't have sense enough to tell people I'd taken all the orders Mother could bake, and the third Wednesday in July I came home with a list as long as my arm.

Mother started baking early Friday morning, and I don't believe she'd stopped for a wink of sleep till I came home Saturday noon to take the stuff out. She didn't have it all ready even then. She was just putting the meringue on the last lemon pies when I came into the kitchen. She flipped it with the back of her spoon so as to make it stand up like a row of white mountain peaks all around each pie, and then slid them into the oven to brown.

It didn't seem to me she needed to have done it. The whole kitchen was as hot as the inside of an oven. Sweat was dripping off Grace's forehead, and Mother's face was as red as fire. When she straightened up from the oven she put both hands on her back, and she looked ten years older than she had at New Year's. Her face and shoulders were so much thinner, but she looked saggy around the middle. It seemed as though she had sort of melted a little and run down. I watched her for a minute or two, and then said, “I'm afraid you're going to kill yourself, working so hard over that hot stove. You're getting awfully thin on top and fat in the middle. I think you ought to see Doctor Browne—don't you think so, Grace?”

Mother didn't give Grace a chance to answer me. She dropped her hands from her back, pulled herself up straight, and said, “No. No. I'm perfectly all right.” Then she smoothed her apron down, and said, “My, My! I've become so careless about myself since Father died. I must get a new pair of corsets; these are getting all stretched out of shape. Now, Son, you'd better run and nail shelves into two more of those apple boxes. There are twenty-six of these lemon pies and we'll need a separate shelf for each one; keep them at least four inches apart.”

It took Mother, Grace, and me nearly half an hour to load the cookery wagon. Besides the beans, brown bread, and lemon pies, there were twenty-two dozen doughnuts, sixteen apple pies, and four bean pots of Injun pudding. The pie boxes were stood one on top of another, with the crocks and stone jars around them. It took our whole clothesline to tie them so they wouldn't slide off.

When it was all loaded, Mother said, “Gracie, why don't you go along with the boys today? It would be good for you to get out in the fresh air after this hot kitchen, and you could be a big help to Ralph by taking care of the money. This is going to be the most profitable load we've ever sent out.”

The wagon wheels began squeaking as soon as we'd left the house. It wasn't the kind of a squeak a dry axle makes; it was more of a groaning. They were wooden wheels with iron tires, and the sound made shivers go up my back. We hadn't had any rain for weeks, and I knew I should have had sense enough to have soaked the wheels to tighten them, but, of course, it was too late to do anything about it then.

The load was so high that every little rough place in the lane would make it sway, and at every sway, the wheels yelled louder. With all that weight, I was afraid one of them might buckle if we let the load rock too much. I didn't want to worry Grace about it, and I didn't want to take any chances, so I told Philip and Grace that we'd better stop for a little rest. When we went on, I had Philip pull in the shafts, and Grace and I each pushed on a back corner. I explained to her that we'd have to sort of balance the load as we pushed, so as to keep anything from slipping.

Before we started up the rise to the highroad, we stopped and rested again. That time, Philip and I walked ahead, and I showed him how we'd go: straight up over the rise to the middle of the road, and then make a slow swing onto the crowned-up center.

Usually, going up a steep little rise, it's best to go fast, but I didn't dare try it that time. And I didn't dare get stuck part way up and have the wagon roll backward. When we were all ready, I told Grace and Philip that we'd have to go like oxen, one step after another, but we couldn't let the wheels stop. We didn't. They squealed like hungry pigs as they turned, but the load held steady till we reached the crown of the road.

Then as we turned, it swayed toward my side. I braced my shoulder against the pie boxes to hold it, and Grace came running around to help me. Maybe we pushed too hard. The load rocked back the other way, teetered, and leaned toward us again. The big hind wheel on our side shrieked as if it were frightened. Then the spokes began to dish outward. Grace and I both had our shoulders against the boxes and our feet braced. But the road dust kept slipping under them, and the load leaning farther and farther toward us. Then the wheel groaned, buckled, and went down. Grace and I went, too.

Nothing heavy fell on us, and we weren't hurt, but we were terribly messed up. That load went over in such a way that it spilled every single thing on the wagon—about half of it on Grace and me. We both sat up and wiped our faces with our hands. Then we just sat there sort of dumb for a minute, watching beans go floating away on a river of brown juice, with lemon-pie shirts on and little chunks of meringue for caps.

“What in the world is the matter with you?” Grace yelled. “Didn't you have any better sense than to start it rocking? No wonder the wheel caved in; you had all the heavy things on the back end. You'd better get yourself right home and tell Mother what you've done. You make me so mad I could rub your nose in the mess. Just look at it! Just . . . look . . . at . . . it.” By that time she was crying so hard she couldn't say any more, and I was having all I could do to keep from it myself. Philip had started with the first crunch of the wheel.

And I knew Grace well enough to know that she'd just gotten mean with me because she was trying so hard not to cry. “I know it's all my fault,” I said. “If I'd had sense enough to soak the wheels, it wouldn't have happened.”

“It is not. It would, too,” Grace cried. “I rocked it just as much as you did, and it would have tipped over even if the wheel hadn't broken. I'll go home and tell Mother myself.”

Of course, with it really being my fault, I couldn't let her do that. But I don't know when I ever hated to do anything as badly as I hated to go home and tell Mother what had happened to the cookery. Before I went, we pawed around in the wreck to see if we could find even a doughnut that hadn't been ruined, but we couldn't. Those that weren't broken were either smeared over with lemon pie or soaked in bean juice. Even the big stone crock was split down the middle.

Muriel and Hal were playing out in the yard, and Mother was lying down when I got back home. She was lying on the sofa in the parlor, but she must have seen my face the minute I came through the kitchen door. She just swung her feet around and sat up on the edge of the sofa. “What's the matter, Son? Did the wagon break down?” she said. She wasn't cross, and she said it as quietly as she'd have said, “Is it cloudy?”

I don't think I'd have cried if she'd been cross, but to have her be so gentle when I felt so bad was what did it. I don't remember kneeling down by her, but I do remember her brushing my hair back with her hand, and saying, “Now, now, Son. That's no way for a man to act. Why, every business has its setbacks; that's one of the expenses of doing business. The thing for us to do is to see how much of it can be salvaged.”

I told her there wasn't even one good doughnut in the whole mess, and that none of it looked fit for pigs to eat. She picked my cap up off the floor and pushed it onto my head from the front, so that all the hair went back under it. “Why, we didn't lose nearly as much as you think we did,” she said; “every scrap of it will make excellent chicken feed. Now you run right along and tell Gracie to come home and get a couple of pails on Hal's little gocart, while you go around and tell your customers that we had a little accident and won't be able to fill their orders today. You don't need to tell them what happened. If anyone asks what the accident was, you can just tell them no one was hurt.”

Mother had me wash the streaks off my face before I went to tell the ladies on my route about the accident. While I was doing it, she said, “It's really all my own fault. I should have known better than to let you try to take any such a load on that little wagon. Isn't it nice to think that you children have done so well this summer that we can lose a whole load of cookery without being hurt too badly?”

I suppose I loved Mother as much every day as I did that one; I just didn't think so much about it. All the way along the route, I kept thinking about her not scolding me a bit for tipping the cookery over, and remembering how tired and sagged down she had looked when she was straightening up from the oven. Before I got to the last house on my route I knew just what I was going to do.

Mr. Wilke had been away on a bat for the last three days, but Mrs. Wilke was at home, and I hadn't been paid since the Fourth of July. It hadn't made any great difference, because we hadn't needed the money. But as soon as I'd told the last customer about our accident, I headed for Wilke's as fast as I could run. I only stopped long enough to look in the window of The One Price Cash House on Main Street for a couple of minutes—we always called it the O.P.C.H. And I came up to Wilke's back door from the river side, so nobody could see me from our house.

At first Mrs. Wilke said she didn't have any money in the house, but when I told her that I just had to have a dollar she got me three quarters, two dimes, and five pennies from somewhere in her bedroom. And she made me sign a receipt so Mr. Wilke would be sure to take it out of my pay.

I knew Mrs. Richards in the O.P.C.H. She went to the Presbyterian Church, and I knew she knew Mother. When I went in, Mrs. Richards was selling dress cloth to some women who lived on a ranch out near Cooper's, so I stood a little ways down the aisle and waited till she got through. Mrs. Richards was a nice lady, and was just the right size for working in a dry goods store. All she had to do to measure off a yard of cloth was to put one end of it up to the point of her nose and stretch her arm out as far as it would reach. The women bought twelve yards of dress cloth.

After they had gone, I went over and told Mrs. Richards that I wanted to buy a pair of corsets for my mother, and that I didn't want the eighty-nine cent ones, but the kind they had in the window for a dollar. At first she looked at me kind of funny, then she said, “Oh, you're Mrs. Moody's little boy, aren't you? Let me see, your mother is . . . Your mother has been getting rather stout lately, hasn't she?”

“No, she hasn't,” I told her; “she's just been so busy since Father died that she got a little careless, and her old corsets got all stretched out over the hot stove.”

Mrs. Richards turned around back to me and fumbled with some boxes, but there weren't any corsets in them. We had to go way over to the other side of the store to get to the place where they kept them. And when she'd wrapped them, she said for me to bring a note from Mother if they weren't the right size, so she could exchange them.

When I got home with her new corsets, Mother's eyes got teary. She laid the corsets back in the box and said she was going to put them away for Sunday best. I was afraid I hadn't got the right kind, but she said they were exactly what she would have bought herself, only that she'd have taken the eighty-nine cent kind instead of spending a whole dollar.