17

Another Mark Against Me

MOTHER was as anxious to have me finish building the shelves in the laundry room as I was to do it. While we were eating breakfast Monday morning, she asked, “Ralph, do you think Philip’s sled would be sturdy enough to carry as many boards as you’ll need to finish out those shelves for us?”

“Sure it would,” I told her. “We only need ten boards, and if they’re white pine they won’t weigh over a hundred pounds, and that sled is stout enough to carry nearly half a ton.”

“I’ll betcha it would carry a whole ton!” Philip sang out. “I could get the boards for you, Mother. If I start right after breakfast I could be back in plenty of time for school.”

Mother smiled and said, “I’m afraid that’s a little too big a job for a ten-year-old. But if you boys were to hurry right home from school this noon I could have lunch all on the table, and a note ready for the lumberman. Ralph, do you think that would give you time enough that you positively wouldn’t be late for school?”

“I guess so,” I told her, “but if you had sandwiches ready, so we could eat them on the way, I’d be positive.”

“Very well,” Mother said. “I’m anxious to have those shelves all ready by the time we start our ironing, and with all this snow on the ground I doubt that the lumberman would send out a special wagon with so small a delivery. Then, too, that would leave Philip with his sled free for picking up the ladies’ baskets after school.”

If we had still been in Colorado I could have been out of school within half a minute after the twelve o’clock bell rang, but it didn’t work that way in Medford. We had monitors that brought our coats and caps and rubbers from the coatroom when the bell rang. And after we had them on we had to form lines outside our classrooms, marking time like soldiers, while a teacher played the piano in the downstairs hall and Mr. Jackman went all around the building to inspect us. I don’t think he liked me very well since I hit him by mistake when we first moved to Medford, and he always seemed to inspect me the hardest.

That day I was thinking about wanting to get out in a hurry, and about what I was going to say to the lumberman, and I sort of forgot about marking time until I heard Mr. Jackman call out, “Feet high, children! One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four,” as he came down our line toward me. He was almost to me before I noticed that I wasn’t lifting my feet, and I didn’t want to give him any excuse for scolding me, so I started lifting them in a hurry, but I started a little bit too hard. My knee bumped the girl in front of me when Mr. Jackman was right beside her.

She squealed and jumped about a foot high, and Mr. Jackman pounced on me like a coyote on a prairie dog. He jerked me out of line and shook me till my teeth rattled like stones in a tin can. Then he told me that he wouldn’t tolerate any smart aleck boy getting fresh with the girls in Franklin School, and that if he ever caught me at it again he’d expel me altogether. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him that I didn’t do it on purpose, and made me stand marking time until the very last line had marched out of the schoolhouse. Before he let me go he called me into his office and told me, “I shall report this matter to the authorities. If your mother can’t control your waywardness, it’s high time the police were keeping an eye on you.”

It was a lucky thing that I suggested the sandwiches to Mother. If I’d come home ten minutes late after she’d told me to hurry, she’d have made me tell her the reason for it, and even though I hadn’t really done anything bad, I didn’t want her to know I’d had any trouble at school. As it was, it worked out all right. Philip was waiting for me at the corner of Spring and Washington Streets, with his sled, Mother’s note, and the bag of sandwiches. By one of us riding and eating while the other ran and pulled the sled, we made up the lost time in going the mile to Medford Square. Of course Philip wanted to know why I was so late, but I just told him that some boy messed things up when we were forming our lines to march out of school. There wasn’t any sense in telling him that I was the one.

When we went into the lumberyard office a woman who was writing in some books came over to the counter and asked us what we wanted. Instead of giving her Mother’s note, I said, “I want to see your boss. Last week he sent us down some bad lumber and charged us number-one price for it, and now we want . . .”

Before I could tell her we wanted some straight pine boards without any knots in them a big, gray-haired man came out of the little office and said roughly, “What’s this you’re talking about?”

“Last week you sent us some number nine, ten and eleven lumber, and charged us number-one price for it,” I told him.

“Who told you that?” he demanded.

“My Uncle Levi, and he knows,” I told him. “Every piece of it was brittle hard pine or hemlock, and it was so crooked that Uncle Levi said it was a wonder your man could get it through a doorway.”

“Is that so?” the man said, but his voice wasn’t rough when he said it. “Where was it sent to?”

“To Mrs. Moody’s, at 46 Spring Street,” I said.

“That the old Perkins house?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” I told him. “Mr. Perkins is our landlord.”

“Well, now,” he said, “I recall the order, but I didn’t see the stuff that went out on it, or the billing. Miss Northrup, let me see the billing on that Moody order, will you?”

When the woman brought him a copy of the bill that came with our lumber, Mother’s first note was pinned to it. After he’d looked at both of them he said, “The order don’t specify grade; just calls for three two-by-fours and a dozen one-by-twelves, but the price on the bill is for number one all right. You wait a minute till I find out about it.”

He went out to the yard and was gone five or six minutes. When he came back he said, “Sorry, son. They sent number two on that order, and with all the bad weather we’ve had this winter it might not have been too straight. We’ll pick it up and send you some number-one stuff.”

“It’s too late for that,” I told him. “It’s already made into a table and a frame for shelves, but we need ten more ten-foot, one-by-twelve, number-one clear white pine boards, and Uncle Frank said . . .”

“Well, now, that’s getting right down to specifications,” he said. “Did you have all your uncles in on the kill?”

“No, sir,” I told him, “only Uncle Levi and Uncle Frank, but . . .”

While I was telling him he began writing figures down on the bill, and he didn’t let me finish. “Let’s see,” he said, sort of to himself, “a hundred foot of clear . . .” Then he looked across the counter at me and asked, “If I called it a dollar fifty for the one-by-twelves could we come out friends?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him, “good friends.”

He put his big hand across the counter, shook hands with me, and said, “I see you got a sled with you; think you boys can haul the stuff, or want me to send a team down with it?”

“We can haul it all right,” I told him, “but we’ll have to hurry or we’ll be late for school.”

Usually my only worry about being late for school was what Mother might say, but that noon I didn’t want to risk any more trouble with Mr. Jackman, so we ran as much of the way home as we could. Even with the boards on it, the sled pulled easy where the sidewalks had good hard snow on them, but some people had shoveled their walks too close, and getting the sled across those places was like trying to pull a cow out of a bog.

I slid into my seat at school just as the late bell rang, and I was real careful about marking time when we lined up to go out at half-past-three. Mr. Jackman didn’t even scowl at me, and I thought he might have forgotten about reporting me to the authorities, but he hadn’t. Cop Watson was waiting in the store when I came in for work, and the first thing he said to me was, “What’s this report I’m after gettin’ about you molestin’ the girls at school?”

“I didn’t molest any girls,” I told him. “I was just marking time when we were waiting to march out, and I happened to lift my knee too high, and it bumped Marion Newell. I guess I was a little closer to her than I thought, and she’s sort of fat, and . . .”

Mr. Haushalter slapped both hands down on his thighs and hooted, but Cop Watson looked at him hard, and said, “Molestin’ females is no laughing matter at all, at all, Gus, and it’s no interference I’ll be havin’. Now go on, lad. What was you sayin’?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess it kind of scared Marion and she squealed, and . . .”

“Ah, then,” he said, “so she tattled on you, did she?”

“No, sir,” I told him, “she didn’t tattle. In the first place I don’t think she would have, and in the second place she didn’t need to. Mr. Jackman was right beside her and couldn’t help hearing her.”

Cop Watson nodded his head and said, “So. So. Then she didn’t squeal at all, at all; she hollered.”

“Well, it was more of a squeal than a holler,” I told him, “but anyway, Mr. Jackman shook the daylights out of me and told me he’d expel me if I ever did it again, and that he was going to report it to the authorities.”

“Then he’s a man of his word,” Cop Watson told me. “The call come into the station house at twelve-naught-seven. Your name’s wrote down on the book again, and I’ve orders to be keepin’ a close eye on you. How’s Marion feeling about the whole goin’s-on?”

“All right, I guess,” I told him. “On the way home from school this afternoon she and the other girls were laughing about the way she squealed.”

“Then I’m thinkin’ there’s no call to set up the gallows yet awhile,” Cop Watson told me, “but mind your step, lad. Since you poked that principal in the nose, intentional or not, it’s no love he has for you, and it goes hard with a lad when he gets his name wrote down three times or more in the bad-boy book. Yours is down twice a’ready. And once it’s wrote down, guilty or not, there’s no livin’ way to get it unwrote.”

That night Mother let Philip stay up until ten o’clock to help me with the new shelves, and I was surprised at what a good carpenter he turned out to be. Of course, our job was an easy one, as compared to the one Uncle Levi and Uncle Frank did on Sunday. The new boards were soft and straight, and the edges were milled so smooth and true that they fitted together without any planing. All we had to do was to lay the boards out on the floor in pairs, mark them by the pattern, saw the ends straight, notch out squares to fit around the uprights, and nail them into place. While I chiseled out the notches, Philip sawed the ends square; for some reason a saw would follow a mark better for him than it would for me. Then we nailed them in place with finish nails that Uncle Levi had left for us, set the nail heads deep, and filled the little holes in with putty. It was just ten o’clock when we finished the job, and Mother said it looked as well as if Uncle Levi had done it himself.

Grace and Mother didn’t start their washing until Tuesday morning, and they didn’t have to rush with it the way they did the week before. Mrs. Humphrey sent a big basketful, with a note telling Mother to charge her double the regular laundry price for sheets and pillowcases and towels, but Mrs. Sterling sent only stiff bosomed shirts, cuffs, collars and fancy women’s clothes.

That Tuesday when I came home for lunch Mother was worried about Mrs. Sterling’s bundle being so small, and about the way we were using up our ton of coal. “Good heavens,” she said, “that ton of coal is disappearing like dew before the sun! Nearly a quarter of it is gone since Friday, and it cost six dollars. We’ll have to keep the fire spanking right along to dry these clothes in the cellar, and it will take just as much coal for this small batch of Mrs. Sterling’s as it would for a big batch. My, I shall be thankful when the weather moderates enough that we can dry clothes in the back yard! I wonder, Gracie, if it was wise for me to have written those notes saying that we couldn’t afford to do flat work at laundry prices. There’d be an extra dollar in Mrs. Sterling’s work, even at laundry prices, if she’d sent all her flat pieces. That would just about pay for the coal we’ll burn today and tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Gracie told her, “and I wouldn’t take any flat work at laundry prices if I were you. If we got ourselves loaded up with that kind of stuff we wouldn’t have room or time to handle the fancy work that we hope to get, and we might get the name of doing any old kind of washing.”

“I know, Gracie, I know,” Mother told her, “but about all we have right now is hope that we’ll get more fancy work, and that furnace is eating coal like a steam engine. Maybe if we . . .”

Grace had been biting her teeth hard together, and she sort of exploded when Mother got that far. “But we’re not going to!” she said. “With Mrs. Humphrey paying us double for flat work, we’ll come out as well this week as we did last, and how can we charge Mrs. Humphrey double and other people only single? And besides, this cold weather isn’t going to last forever. Before long we’re bound to get a thaw, and until that time comes we can run the furnace only on the days we’re drying clothes; the rest of the time the kitchen stove will give us all the heat we really need—if we go to bed early enough.”

If I’d talked that way to Mother she’d have sent me right up to my room, but all she said to Grace was, “I suppose you’re right, dear, but I hate to think of our living cooped up in a kitchen when we have such a lovely house to enjoy. And, of course, spring will come sooner or later.”