The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
EARLY one summer day I decided I would transform the unfinished storeroom into a much-needed bedroom. Wallpaper had been bought for it, but Carl never had had the time to clean out the room and put it up, and I had felt the job would be too much for me to tackle alone.
On that day I awoke full of zing and vigor. I must have been under a spell, because I had the peculiar illusion that I could paper a dozen rooms that day, if I wanted to.
First I mixed a dishpan full of bread dough for our weekly batch of homemade whole-wheat bread, and set it to rising in the kitchen. Then I attacked the storeroom. It would make a good child’s bedroom; although it was small, with sloping ceilings, it had a large window and was conveniently located at the end of the upstairs hall and right next to the bathroom. It had never been used, except as a catch-all for a dozen ministers’ families before us. I carted old lumber, boxes of mildewed books, and other junk down the stairs, out to the converted garage-barn, and up the ladder steps to the unused hayloft above. After the cobwebs and dirt had been swept out, I unrolled the wallpaper down the upper hall, cut it into the proper lengths, and flipped the stack upside down over newspapers. Downstairs in the kitchen I mixed up a bucket of wallpaper paste. At last I was ready to begin.
The doorbell rang.
“Hello,” I said, wiping my hands on my apron.
It was our neighbor, an elderly man from the “old country” who lived alone in a shack down the street. His faded overalls were tucked into high boots, and his frayed blue shirt was open at the neck. Although his nose wasn’t overly huge, he reminded me of Jimmy Durante, with his wistful, crooked smile.
“Hullo,” he said, and rolled his battered felt hat in his gnarled hands.
The children swarmed to the door from all directions to cluster around me.
“Where’s the milk?” Donny asked. Our neighbor milked another neighbor’s cow for half the milk, selling us what he couldn’t use.
“I apologize, no milk. The cow she go dry. After she fresh again, I bring milk, okay?”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“How come the cow hasn’t got any more milk?” Donny asked.
The old man knelt down to the children’s level, and they crowded about him. “Well you see this Mama cow will pretty soon go out for walk in meadow. What nice surprise you think she gonna find in bushes?”
“Ice cream?” Teddy said.
“No, no! This Mama cow, she gonna find something she like better. She find little baby calf! Then, after she get her calf, she have more milk for all us peoples to drink.”
“Oh,” Donny said. He thought a moment, then lifted his round blue eyes. “When did you take her to see the Daddy cow?”
I saw the red flushing through the sunburn on the old man’s grizzled neck. “Donny,” I said quickly, “would you run out to the kitchen and see if that’s a faucet running?”
“Don’t hear any faucet running,” Donny said. “Will the cow—”
“Donny! Mother asked you to go and see.”
Donny went skipping off, and the old man fumbled with his hat and glanced shyly at me.
“What I really want to ask,” he explained, pointing to our cherry tree, “is would you want me pick cherries? I pick for half of crop, you want that?”
“I would,” I said. Our tree, which had borne a niggling yield the year before, was this year about to break under its load. The fruit was a tiny pie-cherry, too sour for eating out of hand, but excellent for canning. I knew that Carl could never get around to them.
“Okay,” he smiled, replacing his comical hat on his white hair. “I get ladder and buckets.”
Back in the kitchen I found Donny with dough and flour paste covering his arms beyond his elbows, and all over the front of him.
“I punched down your bread dough,” Donny said. “It was puffing up and falling over the dishpan. I punched down the dough in the bucket, too, but it’s all gooey.”
I pulled my own hair to keep from pulling his. “Oh, Donny! That’s paste for the wallpaper in that bucket.” As I scraped the goo from his clothes, washed him, and found a clean set of clothes, I wondered why I couldn’t reason with a five-year-old. I soon found out.
“See how much work you’re making?” I appealed. “I know you want to help Mama, and I appreciate it. But you should ask, first. How would you feel, when you are grown up, and then your little boy made a mess like this? Right when you were busy—”
“No bother,” Donny said earnestly, his face untroubled. “I’d have my wife clean it up.”
I lugged the paste bucket upstairs and began brushing paste on the back of the first wallpaper strip. It was evenly smeared when the doorbell rang again. I ran downstairs. The old man was standing outside the door with a shy smile and two buckets of cherries. I thanked him and emptied my fruit into a large kettle, returning his buckets to him. I started back to my job. All the way up the stairs were small, whitish footprints. In the upper hall the footprints were black, all down the length of pasted paper. I turned at the top of the stairs.
“Children!” I called.
Five heads poked around the corner from the downstairs playroom.
“Who walked all over Mama’s pasted wallpaper?”
“Us had to go to the baff-room,” Susie said.
“It’s a nice day,” I suggested. “Why don’t you children all go play in the back yard, until Mama gets the wallpaper up?”
I rushed to put the first strip up, but it wouldn’t stick around the edges, where the paste had dried. When I pulled it from the wall to repaste it, a piece stuck and left a hole in the middle of the paper. Again the doorbell rang. I flew downstairs, tripping over a pull-toy at the bottom of the steps.
“You hurry too fast,” the old man sympathized through the screen door, as he held up his buckets, again full of cherries. “Shouldna hurry, I got lotsa time. I no hurry.”
He exaggerated. It seemed he was picking our tree with a lightning speed that kept increasing in tempo. All my pots and pans were rapidly filling with cherries.
I detoured to the yard, to check on the children. They had been busy. From tin cans out of the trash barrel they had torn labels, and slapped them to the side of the house with a paste of mud.
“Pitty, hmmmm?” Susie asked, pointing to the uneven rows of gaily pictured tomatoes, beans, peas, and applesauce.
“But not there!” I pleaded. “Please, if you want to paste, I’ll give you some scrapbooks. But good heavens, not on the walls!”
“You pasting on the walls,” Laura pointed out.
After we gathered up the labels and washed off the side of the house, the children followed me back upstairs. The next time I ran down to answer the doorbell and dump cherries in the kitchen, the children tracked up and down again on the freshly pasted strip.
“Us all had to go baff-room,” Rita explained.
In desperation I put all five of them into the big, old-fashioned bathroom, laid a chair on its side across the doorway, and handed in a box of assorted toys.
“How about staying in there like little angels?” I asked. “You can watch Mama, or play with your toys, while I finish my job.”
“Us wants to help,” Susie said.
“Believe me,” I said. “This is the best way you can help.”
I brushed paste on a strip of ceiling paper, having decided it would be better to finish the top before I did the other sides to the room. Teetering on a board across two chairs, I tried to pound one end of the paper up with my dry smoothing brush, but the other end kept coming down. I shoved it back hard and my fist poked a hole through the damp paper. Then the first end plopped down in my face and wrapped around my neck. I lost my balance and fell with a loud crash.
Teddy, craning his neck around the bathroom door, called, “See, Mama? You should of let us help.”
After a hot lunch, the children all took naps. They had been awake, and back playing in the bathroom, as I began on the last wall.
The doorbell was still ringing regularly. All afternoon I had protested to our neighbor that we really had plenty of cherries now, that he was welcome to the rest. He thought I was just being polite.
“Plenty cherries for me, already,” he said with his disarming smile. “So many you can use, with all these little kids you got.”
I felt like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, who, in the absence of his master, started a broom to fetching water—which it did, faster and faster, until the place was threatened with inundation. Like that apprentice, I felt vaguely responsible for starting the whole business, yet at my wit’s end for the magic word which could stop it. Every time the old man hurried up our front steps with his heaping buckets, I remembered the symphonic scherzo which Paul Dukas wrote as a musical illustration to the old folk tale; the melody ran through my head like a stuck record.
I ran out of places to empty the prolific cherry buckets. All my pots and pans were full, the sink was full, and the bread was overflowing in the dishpan. When I went back upstairs, the water was overflowing in the washbowl and running down the hall on top of my wallpaper strips.
“No, no, no!” I shouted, as I waded through the bathroom to turn off the faucet.
“We were sailing boats,” Donny said.
“You gave us boats,” Susie said. “In that toy box, boats.”
I mopped up the water and went doggedly on with my papering. Just three more strips, and I would be through.
The doorbell rang again. There was no counter space left in the kitchen, no empty pans, no boxes. I dumped the cherries on the floor under the kitchen table, and dragged back upstairs. The children were busy. Donny was cutting pictures from the middle of the next wallpaper strip, and Teddy and Laura were pasting them in one of Carl’s books. Rita was stirring the paste, slopping it all over the floor, and Susie was doing finger painting on the woodwork. When they saw me coming, they scrambled back over the chair into the bathroom and turned up innocent faces.
“You said we could paste in a book,” Donny argued.
The doorbell rang in the middle of my clean-up.
The busy bucket-bearer looked sad. “So sorry, but all picked, now. Not one cherry left on tree.”
I wanted to jump in the air and kick my heels, but I was too tired. I emptied those last buckets of cherries on the kitchen floor and thanked my neighbor profusely. The deluge was over!
I finished cleaning up the mess upstairs, put up the last strip of paper, and surveyed the new bedroom. It was depressing beyond words. Although I had worked like a dog all day, the room looked terrible. It looked like the kind of wallpapering job that Donny might have done. I led the children downstairs, fed them supper out of cans, and stared gloomily at the surrounding avalanche of cherries. Donny and Teddy took their wagon to ask the lady across the vacant lot for the loan of her wash-boiler, for the hot-water canning. I made sugar syrup and laboriously began to pit the cherries with a knife. By the children’s bedtime, one lone quart jar was ready to process.
After I had my offspring tucked into bed, I stared in frustration at the ripe fruit spilling over the kitchen. It would take me from then until Carl graduated from seminary to pit that many pigmy cherries. I decided to throw them into jars, seeds and all. The first panfuls had to be washed in the bathtub upstairs, since the sink was full of cherries and the dishpan full of dough.
At five-thirty the next morning I had taken my last loaf of bread from the oven and lifted the last gleaming jar of canned cherries from the steaming boiler. I was too weary to go to bed, so I just staggered to the couch and flopped, the way I had done during those long months when Susie and Laura were on night bottles.
At six-thirty the children piled downstairs in their pajamas, shouting happily for their breakfast.
At seven-thirty the front doorbell rang. It was the old man, with two full buckets of cherries.
“Why, I thought all our cherries were picked!” I gasped, horrified.
“Yes ma’am. But the nice lady around the block, I do odd jobs for her, and she say, take from her tree all cherries I want, she already take all she want.”
What could I say, when he stood there so wistful, so happy because he thought he was making someone else happy? The deluge was on again, and it seemed as if all the cherry trees in Hebron were pouring their fruit into our kitchen.
The following day I was droopy from lack of sleep, but as I gazed at my loaded fruit shelves in the basement, and my newly papered room at the end of the upstairs hall, I felt almost smug with satisfaction. The room had turned out to be a far more professional job than I dreamed it could. The wrinkles had smoothed out, the patched holes and rips didn’t show, and the dark paste smears had dried to invisibility.
When Carl came home from seminary that night, he took me into his arms. “How’s my girl?” he asked. “Have you been working hard?”
“Oh, I did a bit of papering, and canned a few cherries,” I said.
Things were never so bad as they seemed, when you looked back on them afterwards.