The canning, like everything but beginner’s luck, improved with practice. It also proceeded at fever pitch, since Cuffy was expected home on Saturday. The males of the Melendy household had a dreary five days of it, being hustled through breakfast, forgotten at lunch, and given any old thing for supper.
Daily at eight-thirty Mr. Titus arrived and presided over the culinary rites like an aproned Buddha. Randy and Mona, his handmaidens, peeled and washed vegetable after vegetable; hovered about the stove till their cheeks were crimson, opened the oven door and frowned in at the contents, lifted the lid of the enormous boiler on top of the stove releasing great steaming fogs; and gradually on every hand appeared the result of their labors. Jars upon jars of tomatoes, of tomato juice, and yellow tomato preserves. Jars of dill pickles and of India relish. While the fever was on them the girls spent their pocket money (and whatever they could wheedle out of Rush and Oliver) on crates of peaches and plums, and put up quarts of each. Intoxicated by the great sacks of extra canning sugar which Cuffy had stocked, they went even farther; experimenting with jams and conserves.
Each morning they got up early, eager to be at work. Each night they staggered upstairs glassy-eyed with fatigue, the kitchen clock ticking loudly under Mona’s arm. Upon its dial its shocked hands might be pointing at anything from nine o’clock to quarter to eleven. Promises to Cuffy concerning early retiring were temporarily suspended.
“After all, it’s what they call an essential industry,” Mona justified it to Randy.
“Well, maybe the vegetables and the fruit. But plum and apple conserve? And blackberry jam? Do you think they’d be called essential?” Randy was tired. She was going upstairs on all fours like a dog.
“Yes, I do,” replied Mona firmly, and that was that.
On Friday night they finished. Mr. Titus went home with six assorted quarts in a basket and the lifelong gratitude and devotion of Mona and Randy credited to his account.
That night, the alarm clock stayed in the kitchen and kept its mouth shut in the early morning. Mona and Randy slept the well-deserved sleep of hard workers, and in spite of the gagged alarm clock woke from force of habit at six-fifteen and stayed awake. When Mona, shoes in hand, crept down the stairs to the kitchen she found Randy there before her, sitting on the high stool in her blue pajamas and yawning, while an egg bubbled and hissed in the frying pan.
“I wonder if we’re going to keep on waking up at dawn like this for the rest of our lives,” said Mona.
“I like it. The day feels so unused.”
Sunshine lay against the wall in pinkish bands, and out of doors a late-nesting wren sang its bubbling clear song.
Mona got an egg for herself. Pausing on her way back to the stove she looked out the window. The dew was so heavy on the grass that all the lawn was coated lightly with silver. There was blue in the shadows and Willy’s sunflowers were hanging their heavy yellow heads; if they had had faces they would have looked like the flame-fringed suns in old Russian fairy tales.
“Summer’s almost over,” sighed Mona.
“Oh, don’t say it. Don’t say it! I don’t want it ever to end.”
“Neither do I. But it will; and in the middle of September I’ll be working on the radio again.”
Mona couldn’t help smiling as she pried her egg loose from the pan. It would be fun to go back to work. To be acting again, to know again the exciting blend of make-believe and reality. To study anew the art of her profession; to work, and learn, and try to make a perfect thing of the part she played. Yes, and to be flattered a little once more. Mona’s vanity rose and arched itself like a small cat, purring in anticipation.
Randy was eating her breakfast looking gloomily at nothing. She hated to part with each passing moment; and now, in the realization that it was nearly over, the summer gained a poignant value. How had it slipped away, carelessly expended, gloriously wasted? She had planned to try to make perfume out of honeysuckle and rose petals; and now it was too late. The honeysuckle was over long ago. She had been going to learn all the different bird songs. But now almost every bird had stopped singing. When had they stopped?
“Well, I’m not going to waste any more of it!”
“H-m-m?” said Mona, still smiling. She was thinking about her fan mail.
“Ow!” she exclaimed indignantly a second later. “The bacon spat at me. Ouch. I’ve got a burn on my wrist. Where’s the soda, Ran?” Once more chance circumstance had given a tweak to her vanity.
“What aren’t you going to waste any more of?” she asked, patting soda and water on her offended wrist.
“The summer,” Randy explained. “I’m going to appreciate it. I’m going to walk in the woods noticing everything, and ride my bike on all the roads I never explored. I’m going to fill a pillow with ladies’ tobacco so I can smell it in January and remember about August. I’m going to dry a big bunch of pennyroyal so I can break pieces off all winter and think of summer. I’m going to look at everything, and smell everything, and listen to everything so I’ll never never forget—”
“You know what Cuffy tells you, Randy, whenever you begin hating to have things change, something about the way ‘blessings brighten as they take their flight!’”
“But why shouldn’t they?” argued Randy. “If they didn’t brighten just when you’re about to lose them you’d never appreciate them. You’d just live from one day to another, not knowing or caring about anything, like—like a turnip.”
“Turnips care deeply about many things,” remarked Rush, appearing suddenly. “Turnips are strongly emotional vegetables; and anyway what’s Randy doing recommending change when she always says she hates it?”
Randy, baffled, retired from the field.
“I don’t know, Rush, I’m all mixed up. You’re too smart for me.”
“Maybe I ought to get a job with the Quiz Kids,” said Rush thoughtfully, and he began assembling his favorite breakfast; the one he always ate when Cuffy wasn’t there to stop him. First he ate a large bowlful of Grape-Nuts with brown sugar, cream, and a sliced peach. Then he made a sandwich out of two thick slices of toast, butter, marmalade, and bacon. Then he made another, adding peanut butter for variety.
“Where’s Mark? Where’s Oliver?”
“Mark was in the shower when I came down,” Rush said. “He spends hours in the shower; he can’t get over it. I suppose it’s because he never saw one before. Oliver’s still asleep, the little slug. Mr. Titus coming again today?”
“No, we’re all through canning.”
“Halleluiah!” said Rush. “Now we can take up the broken threads of our lives once more, and eat a good, hot dinner in the middle of the day.”
“But look at the job we’ve done, will you?” cried Randy. “Just look at it, Rush. We’ve left it all out for Cuffy to see!”
Rush nodded slowly. “It’s something!” he agreed.
It was something. The quart jars were arranged on the shelves, and the windowsills, where the light could best reveal their amber, purple, and vermilion splendor. In front of the quarts stood the pints; filled with pickles and preserves.
“How beautiful they are,” sighed Randy. “I hate to think of eating them.”
“Not me,” Rush said. “I can hardly wait for winter.”
“I wonder where Mark will be this winter,” remarked Mona. “I wish Father would come home and decide things.”
“I wish he would, too. And I wish Mark could just go on staying with us forever,” said Randy wholeheartedly.
“He’s a swell guy, all right,” agreed Rush. “He knows more about the names and habits of plants and animals and things than anybody I ever saw. Did you know that grouse like to bury themselves in the snow in wintertime, for instance? Did you know that a bee dies after he stings you? And that there’s a star called Aldebaran? And that around the tenth of August, any year, you can look up at the sky at night and see dozens and dozens of shooting stars? Have you ever seen a plant eat an insect? I have, right in Bagget’s pasture, in the boggy place. Have you ever seen a dragonfly grub? Or a geode? Did you even know there was such a thing as a geode? I didn’t, either. I learned about all those things from Mark.”
“Maybe he ought to join the Quiz Kids,” Mona said wickedly. “I’d like him even if he couldn’t tell all about bugs and things. I just like him because he’s nice, and doesn’t think he’s smart the way some people do. He’s good, without being too good, you know, and kind of sensible but fun, too.”
“Sh-sh, here he comes,” warned Rush. “He’d hate to hear all the slush we’ve been talking about him.”
Mark came in, scrubbed and shining. Mona broke another egg into the pan.
“Gee, I’m late,” Mark said. “Half past seven! I never ate breakfast so late in my life!”
“I hope you’re not getting soft,” Rush said.
“It’s the farm I’m thinking about. Farmers can’t afford to sleep late.”
“Or to fool around in luxurious shower baths half the day,” added Rush, and Mark reached across the table and almost succeeded in pushing his face into the marmalade.
For the last four days Mark had been spending a large part of his time at Oren’s farm trying to keep up with the work. Willy helped him when he could, and so did Rush and Herb Joyner. When it came time to cut and stack the field corn and do other heavy jobs there would, of course, be still more volunteers; but even so the work was hard and demanding and continuous. Mark said little about it, but the Melendys sensed his underlying feeling of anxiety and responsibility.
“I certainly do wish Father would come home,” Mona repeated, almost angrily. “I bet the President of the United States, and Congress, and everyone, could figure things out by themselves for a couple of days. Just for a couple of days! If they’d just let him come home for a mere, simple weekend!”
“Mo-na!” called a rumpled voice from somewhere upstairs. “I can’t find my snee-kers!”
“Oh, dear,” cried Mona, as she ran out of the kitchen. “They’re probably outdoors, soaked with dew, or they’ve fallen into the brook or something.”
After breakfast Rush and Mark departed for Oren’s farm. Oliver went to the garden and Mona and Randy set about cleaning house so that it would look nice for Cuffy.
“It’s terrible what a state the place got into while we were canning,” groaned Mona. She had her hair tied up in a towel, and was wearing one of Cuffy’s aprons wrapped around twice, and she looked awful. “How do you suppose people do it? Real housewives with children and all?”
Randy shook her head, at a loss. “When I grow up I’m going to be a famous painter and dancer, and live in a hotel.”
“And I’m going to be a famous actress with lots of flowers in my dressing room. I’ll live in a hotel too.”
“We won’t ever have to cook anything.”
“Or can anything.”
“It was fun, though.”
“Yes, thanks to Mr. Titus. Won’t Cuffy be pleased?”
“And surprised?”
“Absolutely thunderstruck. Oh, dear,” said Mona, “I wish I weren’t so scared of the vacuum cleaner. I hate the way it swells up and roars the second I press the button.”
“I know. And the way it sort of insists on going where it wants to. I’ll take turns with you, though.”
The house hadn’t been swept or dusted for a week. Mona and Randy rushed about feverishly, dusting the same surfaces twice, sweeping little heaps of lint into corners and forgetting about them, misplacing cleaning cloths, and repeatedly allowing brooms and mops to fall with sharp clatters to the floor. The vacuum cleaner buzzed all morning like a mighty bee, and Randy and Mona called to each other above it, like people in a multitude.
At noon Mark, Oliver, Rush, and Willy trooped into the kitchen with expectant faces. Smiles dying as they looked, they saw only a lifeless stove, devoid of pots and pans, and a bare table with no signs of the preparation of food. The floor was clean and empty except for Mona’s two shoes, one a little in front of the other, exactly as she had stepped out of them hours ago.
“This is too much,” said Rush. “This is too much!” He leaped like a maddened Mohawk through the door toward the sounds of buzzing and shouting which were issuing from upstairs.
“—WITH CURLS ON TOP,” Randy was braying loudly.
“I LIKE IT LONG,” Mona brayed back. “SORT OF TURNED UNDER AT THE ENDS. PAGE BOY, THEY CALL IT.”
“Page boy,” repeated Rush in disgust as Mona turned off the vacuum cleaner. “Page boy! Why not bellboy, or busboy, for heaven’s sake? And where’s our dinner?”
“Oh, my,” said Mona, letting the vacuum cleaner fall beside the prone broom and mop. Rush really did look pretty mad. “Is it noon already?”
“Noon! It’s half past twelve, and you have four dangerously hungry men on your hands. We could forgive scarce meals while you were canning, but now there is no excuse!”
“Scrambled eggs,” hissed Randy, “they’re easy, and I’ll make a salad.”
“Eggs,” groaned Rush. “You’re always falling back on eggs. I’ve eaten so many since Cuffy’s been away that I’m beginning to grow pin feathers.”
After a hastily assembled meal they all went back to work. Gradually the house regained its normal expression: a look of reasonable order, and unprosperous but homely comfort. Rush had brought in flowers and Mona arranged them; great armfuls of zinnias, petunias, marigolds, and coreopsis. Willy was even prevailed upon to cut some of the lesser sunflowers.
“What am I ever going to put them in?” pondered Mona. “They’re so huge.”
In the end the only container large enough to hold them proved to be a small aluminum garbage can. Mona hid it tactfully behind a leather tuffet, and above it, against the living-room wall, the sunflowers blazed in a fiery constellation.
Cuffy’s room was a regular bower. Oliver contributed to it an arrangement of his own: wild flowers stuffed into a kitchen tumbler, vervain and clover and black-eyed Susans, all picked too short and rather wilted from the firm grasp with which he had held them.
“Those flowers say Oliver all over. I’ll put them on the table by her bed,” Mona said, and removed her own tasteful bouquet of late moss roses and forget-me-nots in a little white vase.
Through the open windows came a sound of lawn mowers. Rush had borrowed Mr. Titus’s and Willy was using the Melendy one, and they were performing a sort of double concerto on the grass. Every time they met, pushing and rolling, Rush would say, “Ships that pass in the night,” or “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” or “There’s a lawn, lawn trail a-winding,” or some other silly remark. Isaac gamboled about Rush and barked frantically at the mower, which kept spraying grass at him. John Doe gamboled and barked about Willy’s mower. It was noisy, rather pleasant work.
Oliver was cultivating the vegetable garden. He hoed and raked, hoed and raked, and now and then pulled up a fat purslane plant, first killing it with an imaginary machine pistol. “D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- Pow-oo. Pow-oo. Got him!”
Drops of perspiration flew out from under Oliver’s hat, but the song of the crickets cheered him on, and the tall, stout sunflowers stood about him like a gathering of friends.
Randy had washed all the week’s canning-stained dish towels, and they flapped mildly on the clothesline, adding an odor of Clorox to the summer air. She had also scrubbed out both the bathtubs, and was now frantically trying to bring order out of the chaos that was Rush’s room. It was a masterly confusion of bird’s nests, snakeskins, books left open facedown, sheets of music, symphony scores, war posters, disbanded chemical sets, microscope lenses, fishing tackle, old letters and postal cards, and odd stamps which had escaped from his stamp album. A hammer and saw, some nails, a bottle of varnish, and an empty Coca-Cola bottle with a straw in it were among the articles on the bureau, and on the bed were two old comic books, a model airplane, and a volume of the life of Beethoven. As Cuffy had predicted, shoes and articles of clothing were draped about the floor. Rush no more had the instinct to hang up his discarded clothes than a snake has the instinct to hang up its shed skin. It nearly drove Cuffy mad.
Among the shoes and clothes were scattered pages of lined music composition paper. At the top of each was written “Opus III: Sonata in E Flat”; underneath in smaller letters were the words “by Rush Melendy,” and at the left, still smaller, the words “Largo Maestoso.”
“Goody,” said Randy, seeing this. Largo Maestoso was her favorite tempo. It was the tempo of funeral marches, which she enjoyed, and also it was easier to play than things like scherzo and allegro. You had time, between chords, to think what you were going to do next.
All the music sheets contained notes. Some only a few, some a great many, but none of the pages was completed. The notes scampered frantically up and down their lines like black pollywogs, and across one of the sheets there was an angry scribble, and the words “This stinks” written in red pencil.
Randy did what she could with the room, which, since time was getting short, consisted largely of stuffing things into drawers and closets. When she got fed up she leaned out the window and yelled at Rush.
“I don’t care if you’re a genius or not, you’ll just have to clean the rest of your room yourself!”
Then she went up to the Office and painted a big poster saying WELCOME CUFFY. Around these words she painted angels with harps. All the angels looked like movie stars, it was only by the wings that you could tell.
Heavenly smells came from the kitchen. A kettle of leek and potato soup was simmering on the stove, and in the oven a cake was performing its fragrant mystery. Mona had mopped the floor, the quart jars of preserves glowed like somber jewels on the windowsill, and the alarm clock ticked with that sure, contented sound that one hears only in well-ordered kitchens.
The Melendys were pleased with their day’s work. They had a right to be.
“Now all we have to do is to get clean ourselves,” Mona said. “I’m going to wear my new white dress.”
At five o’clock Willy hitched Lorna Doone to the surrey, stuck two red zinnias into her bridle, and drove her around to the front door.
“Come on, all,” called Willy. “Time t’ go meet Cuffy.”
Randy climbed down from the railing. She had been pinning the welcome sign up over the front door. She had on a clean yellow dress and was wearing shoes and socks for a change. The other children appeared, one by one, all unusually well-groomed.
“I wish Mark could have come with us,” Randy said.
“Well, he has to milk,” Mona told her. “And anyway I think he felt kind of—you know—delicate about it.”
They piled into the surrey. Isaac and John Doe wanted to go, too, but they were not allowed. They sat side by side on the doormat under the welcome sign and stared reproachfully at the departing surrey. Isaac’s lip was tucked in sulkily: he thought for a moment or two of running away again and giving everybody a good scare, but then he remembered the skunk episode, and abandoned the idea. He lay down flat with a thump, gave a sigh like the air going out of a blacksmith’s bellows, and glared at the world. He would have nothing to do with John Doe, who sat upright beside him tongue hanging rakishly out of the side of his mouth; his eyes, nose, and ears joyfully alert to possibilities.
Lorna Doone clip-clopped along the highway, her mane blowing in the summer wind; the whip glittered in its holster, the fringes tossed. No one talked. They had all worked hard and were comfortably tired. Autumn was coming soon, all right. The air was full of thistledown and milkweed floss, high in the sky, low, skimming the grass, all flying, all traveling: shimmering in the sunny air like phoenix feathers.
The mullein had finished blooming, and stood up out of the pastures like dusty candelabra. The flowers of Queen Ann’s lace had curled up into birds’ nests, and the bee balm was covered with little crown-shaped pods. In another month—no, two maybe—would come the season of the skeletons, when all that was left of the weeds was their brittle architecture. But the time was not yet. The air was warm and bright, the grass was green, and the leaves, and the lazy monarch butterflies were everywhere.
“I wonder if she’s changed,” mused Oliver.
“Who?” said Rush.
“Cuffy. I wonder if she’s changed.”
“In two weeks? I doubt it.”
“Heavens, is it only two weeks?” cried Mona. “It feels like months or years. Think of everything that’s happened. The fire, and—Oren, and having Mark with us, and learning to can, and all. I feel years older.”
“I wonder if Cuffy’ll think we’ve changed,” said Rush, rather taking to the idea.
“I doubt it,” Willy said. “Look ’bout the same to me, all of you. Course Oliver’s lost a tooth. And maybe you’re a mite thinner, Rush—”
“It’s the meals I’ve been getting,” Rush sighed. “No, but I mean in our characters.”
“Oh, characters,” Willy said. “Well, time’ll tell, time’ll tell. When you’re a kid your character’s kinda quick an’ easy, bendin’ this way, that way, changin’ itself overnight. ’Tain’t set yet. When you’re old it’s set, all right, and there ain’t nothin’ to be done. You got it like you got the shape of your bones. Maybe you’ve lost all your hair, and then again maybe you mighta lost your nerve. Maybe you’re farsighted when you look at the paper, and kinda nearsighted when you look at the truth—”
“Maybe you have flat feet, or a flat sense of humor,” interrupted Rush. “Maybe hardening of the arteries, or hardening of the heart. And then you could have either a false set of teeth or a false set of values, or both. Gee, I could keep this up for hours. Willy, you should have been a preacher. That was quite a sermon.”
“Aw, quit,” Willy said. “Remember you ain’t got no character at all yet. It’s still just growin’, bendin’ this way an’ that way. Nothin’ but a little jellyfish still.”
“Jellyfish! Listen, I’ve got a strong character! Why, listen, I—”
“Nothin’ but a jellyfish,” repeated Willy peacefully. “All of you. Just a lot of little jellyfish.”
“Some jellyfish sting, don’t forget,” said Rush.
He stared at Lorna Doone’s tail and wondered about his character. He was sure he had a strong character but when he began to think hard about it there didn’t seem to be anything to take hold of. Am I generous? wondered Rush. I guess so. But only when I want to be, so I guess I’m not. Have I a good disposition? Yes, except when I’m mad and then it’s fierce. Gee, remember the time I threw the tapioca at Mona and she had to have her hair washed; remember the time I socked fat, old Floyd Laramy; remember the time I—but no, better not think about disposition. Am I talented? Rush brightened a little. Sure, he was talented. He played the piano better than any kid he’d ever heard, he earned money giving lessons, didn’t he? And he composed music, what’s more. He began to think about Opus III: Sonata in E Flat. He kept getting stuck in the middle of it. Stuck and still stucker; he couldn’t seem to pull out of the bog. He thought of the sheet on which he had scribbled, “This stinks.” Oh, nuts to character.
“Oh, nuts to character!” Rush said out loud.
“Well, at least you’re a good athlete,” said Mona. “And you understand a lot about music.”
“Yes, and you know how to make people laugh. I wish I did,” said Randy, and Rush realized that he was not the only one who had been analyzing his own character.
In fact Oliver was the only person who hadn’t been. He was sitting contentedly squashed between Rush and Willy, smelling Lorna Doone’s lovely smell and dreamily imagining himself in the act of catching a twelve-pound catfish, just like Mr. Titus.