6

“Pop Goes the Weasel”

I THINK my idea about washing the ceiling at the store was one of the best I ever had. We had a heavy, wet snow the day after I started it, then a cold snap, and there was hardly an hour for the rest of the week when the temperature went above zero.

Whenever there was a cold snap like that we always had lots of coal orders at the store, and that week we were flooded with them. With the streets and sidewalks in frozen ridges I couldn’t push the cart, and when I tried to deliver coal on a sled it tipped over so often that I spent most of my time reloading it. Besides that, my hands got so cold I couldn’t hold onto the bags, and I thought my feet would freeze right off me. I didn’t say anything about it at the store, but I guess Mr. Durant noticed how cold I was when I came back from my second delivery, that first morning after the freeze-up. He never talked very much, and the most he’d ever said to me was where to deliver orders, but he came over when I was trying to get my mittens off, and said, “You’d better stay here in the store with Gus, and you might work on that ceiling some more when you get a chance; it’s needed it for a long time and you’re doing a good job on it. Till we get a thaw, the deliveries will have to be a shoulder job, and I’ll take care of it.”

For a small man, and one who must have been well past fifty, Mr. Durant was the hardest worker I’d ever known. He was all business, and didn’t smoke, or chew, or ever say a bad word. That week he carried out more than a hundred bags of coal, along with the grocery orders, and his hands and feet must have got just as cold as mine did, but he never stopped to warm them. He’d come in from a delivery with his face brick-red and stiff-looking from the cold, put two bags of coal on his shoulder, pick up a big basket of groceries, and go right out again. When he wasn’t out collecting orders or delivering them he was busy putting them up in the store. He always moved quickly, and he was careful in everything he did. He’d never cheat a customer out of a single bean, but if he put in one too many and the beam of the scale tipped a bit above level he’d take it out.

Mr. Haushalter was just the opposite. He never hurried, he liked to talk and laugh, and tell stories, and he never took out any beans unless the scale bumped down good and hard. There was only one thing he did that might seem like cheating a customer, and he explained to me about that.

When some men chew tobacco it’s a dirty habit; they’re always spitting, or talking as if they had a mouthful of marbles, and some of them leak juice at the corners of their lips. Mr. Haushalter chewed all the time, but I don’t believe anybody but Mr. Durant and I knew it. No one could ever have told by his talking, and he never spit when there was a customer in the store. Really, he didn’t spit at all; he’d pinch his lips together and fire a squirt of brown juice as if it were a dart, and he always hit Matilda’s sand box with it—sometimes from ten feet away.

Right at the beginning I thought he might be cheating the customers a little, because the first thing he’d do every morning was to take a long plug of black B-L out of the tobacco case, put it under the plug cutter, and slice off a sliver that wouldn’t be more than a sixteenth of an inch thick. He noticed me watching him the second morning I worked in the store, and maybe he knew what I was thinking. Anyway, he said, “Sugar and flour and tea and coffee gets sold by the pound, and you’re cheatin’ a customer if you don’t give him a fair tip o’ the scales, but tobacca gets sold by the piece, and a piece is a piece—five cents or ten cents, accordin’ to them dented lines on the plug. Now if you take note, I never shave off a sliver no thicker’n the dent line betwixt the pieces, and one sliver’ll go me half a day.”

It was fun working in the store with Mr. Haushalter, but I didn’t get as much ceiling washed that cold week as I should have. Most people had their groceries delivered instead of coming after them, so we didn’t have many customers in the store, and whenever there wasn’t anyone to wait on, Mr. Haushalter would come back to talk to me. Almost every time, he’d bring me a couple of pieces of candy, or a couple of cookies, or a wedge of cheese and some crackers; then he’d tell me, “Sit you down a jiffy and get that into you, Son, whilst I tell you about. . . .” And his stories were always about things that happened years and years before I was born; things that boys who worked there had done, or about peculiar customers, or about the days when people used to bring in an egg to trade for a needle. Sometimes he’d bring an old feather duster, and putter around the shelves near where I was working. But he always told stories as he dusted, and all the good he did was to stir the dust up on one shelf so it could settle on another”.

Though my job was fun, I knew that Mother’s wasn’t. She’d come back from the laundry at night so cold and tired she couldn’t eat her supper, but if anybody said a word about it she’d get edgy, almost cross. By Saturday night she had a whole row of raw blisters on her right hand, and half a dozen burns on her left, but she acted almost like a spoiled child for a minute or two when Uncle Frank said, “Mary Emma, don’t you think you’ve gone far enough with this foolishness? Can’t you see that you’re going to kill yourself if you try to go on with it?”

“I shall not quit,” Mother said sharply. “They may let me go because I am so slow and awkward, but I shall never quit until I can do my work as rapidly and as well as the very best of those women.”

When Mother began she was almost crying, but after she’d blown off steam a little she sort of wilted. “Oh, Frank,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be cross, and if I was it is all at myself. For years I have thought of myself as a capable, intelligent woman, but there is a colored girl who works on the bench next to mine who makes me appear as a clumsy, stupid oaf. Every garment she touches comes off her board beautifully done. The harder I try the worse I seem to do. I can’t stop the constant clack, clack, clack of the machinery from getting on my nerves, and I haven’t yet learned to regulate my gas-heated iron so that it won’t become either too hot or too cool. Today I scorched a beautiful shirtwaist, and I’m afraid I’ve ruined it. If Bessie, the colored girl, hadn’t insisted on putting several perfectly finished pieces over on my rack, I’m sure the foreman would have paid me off tonight.”

“It’s a shame he didn’t,” Uncle Frank told her.

“No, Frank, no,” Mother answered. “I realize that it wasn’t exactly honest of me to let Bessie put some of her work in with mine, but I couldn’t have stopped her without hurting her feelings, and she says I will do all right as soon as my blisters heal and I get into my . . . my stride.”

“Well, I still think it’s foolishness for you to go on with it,” Uncle Frank said, “but your friend Bessie might be right about your hitting your stride. You know, an athlete never wins a race until he learns to run relaxed; your biggest trouble might be that you’re all tightened up and trying too hard. Think about the whole thing over Sunday, and if you do go back Monday morning, try taking it easier. I have a notion that might cure a lot of your troubles.”

We all went to church and Sunday School the next day, just as we had the Sunday before, even to Mother’s staying to talk to the minister. When we got back to the house Uncle Levi was there. He was Grandfather Gould’s bachelor brother who lived in Boston, and he’d come out to see us, loaded with all the fruit and nuts and candy he could carry. From the smell of his breath and the way he acted when Mother first came in, I thought he might be loaded with something more than just fruit and candy. As soon as she opened the door he ran to her, threw his arms clear around her, and lifted her off her feet. As he hugged her he rubbed his chin into her neck and said, “By hub, Mary Emma, your old uncle’s awful glad to lay eyes on you. Didn’t calc’late I’d ever see you again when you and Charlie went off to Colorado. It’s a God’s wonder, havin’ you back again with all these healthy-lookin’ little shavers.”

He stood her down, held her away at arm’s length, and looked at her as if he were studying her face. “Curious how time gets away,” he said slowly. “Here you be, a woman going on . . . forty, ain’t it?”

Mother’s face looked as surprised and happy as it had when she first opened the door and saw him. “Why, Uncle Levi! How did you remember?” she asked. “Yes, it will be forty in the autumn. I’m getting to be an old lady. Didn’t you notice the gray that’s coming into my hair?”

“House always looks homier with a little snow on the roof,” he told her, “and forty ain’t more’n a starter for a Gould. Father, he lived to be ninety-six. But ain’t it curious how the time gets away from a body? Don’t seem more’n a year or two agone since I was daddlin’ you on my knee. Recollect how you used to make me sing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and ride you on my foot? By hub, I can see you now as plain as if ’twa’n’t more’n a week agone, ’stead of nigh onto forty years; no bigger’n a pint o’ cider, fat cheeks blazin’ red, pigtails a-flyin’, and squealin’ fit to kill. It’s a God’s wonder you didn’t wear the both of us out; never did seem to know when you’d had enough.”

If I’d ever seen Uncle Levi before, I couldn’t remember it, and I was having so much fun listening to him that I forgot that anyone else but Mother was there until Uncle Frank said, “She don’t know it any better now than she did then, Levi.” He always left the “Uncle” off.

Mother could be awfully quick about heading something off if she didn’t want it talked about, and she was quicker than usual that time. Before Uncle Frank had the last words out she was peeking over Uncle Levi’s shoulder at him, laughing and shaking her finger as if she were playing. “Now don’t you give me away, Frank,” she told him. “While Uncle Levi’s here we’re going to have fun, and I’ll bet a cookie he came just as he used to when I was a little girl on the old farm: loaded to the chin with fruit and candy.”

Mother had stepped close to Uncle Levi when she peeked over his shoulder, and as soon as she’d said we were going to have fun he grabbed her in his arms and swung her around in a dance. As they started off he began to sing, “’Round and ’round the cobbler’s bench, the monkey chased the weasel, and every time the monkey jumps, Pop goes the weasel.” Around and round they went in the middle of the parlor floor, and every time Uncle Levi sang out, “Pop” he’d swing Mother right up off her feet.

Mother was certainly right about our having fun while Uncle Levi was there. All afternoon, and until he went back to Boston late in the evening, he kept everybody laughing and happy. It’s a wonder the younger children didn’t wear him to a frazzle. If he sat down for as much as a minute, some one of them would make him cross his knees, then climb astraddle of his foot and bounce up and down as he sang “Pop Goes the Weasel.” And every time he’d come to the “pop,” he’d shout it and toss the rider nearly as high as his head.

Mother let all of us, except Elizabeth, stay up until Uncle Levi went home. Then, while she was helping Grace and me spread the shake-downs, she kept humming, “’Round and ’round the cobbler’s bench,” and when she’d come to the “pop,” she’d give an extra flip to the blanket she was spreading. When we’d finished, she said, “My, wasn’t this a lovely day! It’s done me more good than all the medicine in the world.” I think she was right; she was still humming when she went into her room and shut the door.

That next week went fine for all of us. I finished washing the ceiling at the store and got started on the shelves. Grace found a few more odd jobs and made nearly three dollars, besides helping Aunt Hilda with the housework. The weather turned mild enough that the children could play outside part of the time, and Mother didn’t seem nearly so tired when she came home from the laundry.

When we were eating supper—about Wednesday night, I think it was—she looked up at Uncle Frank and said, “My, Uncle Levi’s coming did me more good than anything that’s happened to me for years—and I think your telling me about the runner helped a great deal, too. So far this week I’ve turned out nearly as many garments as I did in all of last week, and they’re beginning to have a professional look about them. Bessie has shown me so many little tricks that I never would have dreamed of. That girl is a star; she’s just as kind and considerate of me as if she were my own daughter, and I suspect that she’s still slipping a piece or two of her beautifully finished work over onto my rack when I’m not looking.”

Then she laughed and said, “There’s only one thing that’s really bothering me. I’ve got that foolish little tune of Uncle Levi’s in my head and can’t get it out. I think it is the machinery that does it. All around the ceiling there are wheels and pulleys that churn out a monotonous, never-ending rhythm. Then, right above my head, there is a wheel that’s at one end of a long, wide belt. Just at the moment when the “pop,” in the song comes along, the splice on that belt pops as it goes over the wheel. Before six o’clock came tonight, I thought it would drive me frantic. I must learn to sing spirituals while I work, the way Bessie does, so as to break that terribly monotonous rhythm.”

Then she looked over at Grace and asked, “Gracie, have you had any further chance to look for a house for us? If I’m able to keep on improving as rapidly as I have this week, it won’t be too long before we could think about starting a little business of our own. Bessie tells me the laundry charges twenty-five cents apiece for fancy shirtwaists, and I did up seventeen of them today. If we could get prices like that, and I could pick up my speed a little, I think we could afford to pay as much as twelve or thirteen dollars a month for rent. Let’s see, it was seven we paid in Colorado, wasn’t it?”

“Mmm, hmm,” Grace said, “but the only one I’ve seen that would be big enough, and wouldn’t cost nearly twenty dollars, is down by the brickyards. We wouldn’t have to live in it forever, and we wouldn’t have to be like those people down there just because we lived among them.”

“No!” Mother said. “No! I will not do it! If necessary, I’ll stay right in that laundry until I can turn out enough work that we can afford twenty dollars a month, but I will not have our home in that neighborhood. Now you run along and take care of Mrs. Benk’s dishes; I’ll help Aunt Hilda with ours.”

Right behind the tobacco case at the store there was an old roll-topped desk with rows of little pigeonholes where the charge-account pads were kept; most of the delivery orders were charge-it, and so was about half of the business from people who came into the store. The last thing every night, Mr. Durant sat down at the desk, added whatever had been bought during the day onto the pads, and then totaled them. He never looked up from the desk when he was working on the pads, and, right at the beginning, Mr. Haushalter had told me I must never disturb him. I did it the Friday night of that week without meaning to.

As soon as I came in from school I started washing the top shelf, way at the back end of the store; moving things as I went along, then putting them back as soon as I had that section of the shelf washed and dried. By half-past-six I’d finished all but the last section—the one where we kept the lamp chimneys, right beside Mr. Durant’s desk. I moved the stepladder in beside the desk real carefully, so that I didn’t make any noise, and then climbed up to move the chimneys. The ladder must have teetered a little, or I must have slipped. Anyway, I almost lost my balance, and in grabbing hold of the shelf I knocked a lamp chimney down. It broke into a thousand pieces on the high top of the desk, and chips of glass showered all over Mr. Durant and the pads. He ducked, then looked up quick, and I was sure he was going to scold me, but he just asked, “How is your mother getting along?”

I guess it was because I was a little bit nervous, but after I got started talking there didn’t seem to be any place to stop. I told him about her working in the laundry so she could learn how to do up fancy shirtwaists worth twenty-five cents apiece, and about Bessie helping her, and about her saying she wouldn’t let us live down by the brickyards, and about second-hand furniture being so high. I don’t remember all that I did tell him, but I couldn’t seem to get stopped until he told me to sweep up the glass while he finished his bookkeeping. Maybe it was because I talked so long that he forgot to, but he never did scold me for breaking the lamp chimney.

All the way home from the store that night I was ashamed of myself; not so much for breaking the chimney as for not knowing when to stop talking, but I think it worked out good instead of bad. When I came in from making a delivery Saturday afternoon Mr. Durant was putting up an order, but he called me over to him. “Could your mother pay fifteen dollars rent?” he asked me.

“Well, she said she could afford to pay twelve or thirteen. I guess we could go as much as fifteen if we had to,” I told him.

“Do you know the big gray house down the street, next to the fire station?” he asked as he watched the scale beam and sifted a few more grains of sugar into the bag.

“The one where Mr. La Plante, the fireman, lives upstairs?” I asked him.

Without taking his eyes away from the beam, he nodded and said, “Folks downstairs are being evicted at the end of the month. Your mother might get that for fifteen; not less. And at that price the owner wouldn’t spend any money to fix it up. But there is a big room at the back of the cellar; might work out for a laundry room. Tell your mother I’ll speak to the owner if she wants. There are extra bedrooms in the attic. Whole place will be dirty, but it appears you’re pretty good at scrubbing, and wallpaper’s cheap.”

On Saturday nights I worked till nine o’clock, and Mother wasn’t home from the laundry when I went to Uncle Frank’s for supper, so I didn’t have any chance to tell her about the house until just before I went to bed. But Sunday morning she and Grace and I went to look at it before Sunday School time. Of course we could only look at it from the outside. The downstairs windows were dirty, and there were no shades at them, but the second floor and the outside of the house and the yard looked fine.

We walked past three or four times, and it was easy to see that Mother wanted the house right from the first. “Oh, my!” she said when I pointed it out to her. “Regardless of the rent, we could never afford it. Why, at the prices they’re asking for used furniture, we couldn’t begin to furnish it.”

“Well, we could furnish one or two rooms to begin with, couldn’t we?” Grace asked. “Then, as we made some money, we could furnish the others, one at a time. We could get along all right for a while with just a stove, and a table or two, and some chairs, and a few more bedclothes.”

“I suppose we could,” Mother said slowly, “but it would be a big undertaking, and we have no definite assurance that we could find enough customers to make more than a bare living . . . although Mr. Vander Mark tells me he has spoken to several of the well-to-do parishioners at our church and they’d like to see samples of my work.”

“Then let’s take it,” Grace said as we turned to walk past the house again.

“Let’s not be hasty,” Mother told her. “We’re far from out of the woods yet. The amount I make in the laundry would barely pay our grocery bill, and you and Ralph together are making scarcely more than the fifteen dollars it would take for rent alone.”

“That’s just for right now,” I told her. “When school vacation time comes I’ll make twice as much. And then, too, if I get up bright and early in the mornings I could carry a paper route before I go to work in the store.”

“Oh, Son, you’re always so impulsive!” Mother said, almost as if she were scolding me. “I know how hard all you children would work to help out, but I shall not let us get into anything where there will be need for you to work beyond your strength, or where we’ll have to dip into what there is left of our money for ordinary living expenses.”

As she spoke, Mother had been looking at the other houses along the street, and at the James School, next to the fire station. “I should love to think that we might have this nice big house, in this good neighborhood and right close to the children’s school, but it seems to me that it is way beyond our means right now; it would take a fabulous amount to ever furnish it properly.”

When Grace kept quiet during any argument it was because she was thinking, and the longer she kept still the better job of thinking she usually did. She did a pretty good job that time. Without looking up from the sidewalk, and without seeming to be talking to anybody, she said, “Trust in the Lord and do. . . .”

Mother didn’t let her finish. She just said to me quickly, “Tell Mr. Durant I should be glad to have him speak to the landlord. We must hurry or you children will be late for Sunday School.”