BY the end of summer Emma and Ora had both learned their trades well. They were good spoolers. The first week Emma made only a few cents. Now she and Ora filled their boxes quickly, yet the amount that came in on their pay checks seemed very inadequate for all the expenses. They had bought a few extra fixings. There was a bed for Granpap and John paid by instalment, and an alarm clock. The man came around regularly every week for his dollar. They took out insurance, and the insurance man never failed to come for his toll. The electricity was a fine thing to have in the house. It was still a new experience to twist the button and get light. But the pay for electricity took something every week from the pay check, more than would have been given for oil.
Frank had been put in the slasher room, to run the warp through a starch bath. The hot starch made a vapor in the room, and when a draft came in from an open door or window Frank often got a bad cold. Ora was anxious about him.
“Hit’s nothing,” he said to her when he got over a spell of coughing. “And hit’s a good place to work.” Even when he had a very bad cough he went on working, for he had heard from others that the management did not like people who stayed out on account of sickness. And since they were docked if five minutes late, a day’s absence would take too much off the check.
Young Frank was working at hauling spools, but he had been promised that he might go to school when it opened. When Young Frank went in the mills John wanted to go, though he was younger. Emma knew from talking to others that the preacher would sign a paper that he was old enough, as he had done for other young ones, but she felt what people told her was true: “once in the mill always in the mill.” And she wanted John to get some schooling. So she asked him, “Do ye want schooling or work?” And he said, “Schooling.”
Ora had wanted to do the same with Young Frank and kept him out as long as possible. But one day after work Frank met her outside the mill and said, “They want me in the office.”
They looked at each other, and each wondered what was coming. Ora waited for Frank. He came out looking as if he had heard bad news.
“Have ye lost—your work, Frank?” she asked, wanting to meet the trouble.
“No—hit’s something else . . . . He says since Sally has left, we must send Young Frank into the mill. He’s the age.”
“No,” Ora told him. “Frank ought t’ have his one year at school. That much anyway.”
“He says hit’s better for him to be working than running around loose, getting into trouble, or eating candy and making himself sick.”
“I’d see about the candy and the trouble,” Ora said.
“There don’t seem any other way, Ora.”
There was nothing to do but send Young Frank. Ora promised him and promised herself that at the end of summer the boy must go to school with the others. For he wanted to go. He did not say much; he was more like Frank there. But long before he had spoken his wish, and she wanted it for him.
Granpap and John took long walks during the summer. Sometimes they went part of the way to the mountains. They had a secret together, for neither one had told Emma or the others about Granpap getting drunk in the city and losing the name of the street from his mind. They had blamed coming back earlier than had been expected on John’s burns, and to each other they did not speak of that night in the street. Granpap had told Emma, “I forgot your quilt at the lady’s house.” And Emma said, “Hit was just like ye.” She might have said more but she wanted to hear over and over about the house and the big meeting and the fires in the street.
John said nothing to Granpap about that night, but each felt that the other remembered, and it became a secret between them. And John felt something else. For a night he had taken care of Granpap, and since then his feelings toward the old man had changed. There was a difference in their relationship. Now, at times, John spoke his mind as if he was a grown-up person.
Granpap wanted to go back up to the mountains, and it was John who said, “Wait, maybe there’ll be some work yet.” There was no work yet in the factory. Granpap was angry when they took Young Frank. “Hit seems they want just the young,” he said to John. “And the young ought to be out a-playing and enjoying. Hit’s like in the Bible where they used to put babies in the red hot arms of the idol. I’m a-getting to believe the factory’s an idol that people worship and hit wants the young for a sacrifice.”
There was no work for him in town. He knew how to cut wood and tend a garden, but this sort of work was done by the black men. “If hit wasn’t for niggers,” Granpap said to John while they were sitting at the side of the road, “I could get work; but they want niggers, because the black man charges less than the white.”
Granpap found it hard to keep himself busy, and sometimes with the few cents Emma could give him he bought foolish things. Sometimes he went to the restaurant where the McEacherns brought their liquor and, sitting in the Blind Tiger, filled himself as far as the money would go.
Once he bought an ornament for the house to bring to Emma. He felt that it would please her, and it did after she got over the feeling that he shouldn’t have spent the money. It was a large piece of cardboard decorated with colored flowers. At the top in gold letters was a sign that said, according to the man who sold it, “GOD BLESS OUR FAMILY.” At the left was a smaller sign that said, “MARRIAGES,” and under this was space to write the names of those married. At the right was “DEATHS,” and at the bottom “BIRTHS.”
“When you young ones learn to write,” Granpap said to John and Bonnie, “you can write all our names in the places up there. Maybe,” he said, for he was feeling mournful before the family these days, “maybe ye can soon write John Kirkland under the deaths.”
They hung the picture on the wall in Ora’s front room where everyone could look at it while they sat. Emma put her Bible that Basil had given her on the table Ora bought from the instalment man. They covered the table with a clean towel and laid the Bible on top. In this room they invited neighbors who stopped to talk. Not many came. Everyone seemed busy with his own household, especially the women. There was plenty to do at home, without gallivanting to other people’s houses.
The Mulkeys lived next door. Mrs. Mulkey was sick with pellagra and sometimes she had spells. Mr. Mulkey worked in the factory. They had three rooms and kept a boarder, Mrs. Mulkey’s younger sister Alma. She worked in the factory, in the warp room, so Mrs. Mulkey was at home during the day with the three small children. The preacher came to see her once a week, for she and Mr. Mulkey were both very religious. It was Mr. Mulkey who came over one night when Granpap was playing “Bile them cabbage down” on his fiddle and asked him to stop playing dance tunes. No one had asked that before, and Granpap stopped only because Mrs. Mulkey was sick, and if he worried her it might bring on a spell. The Mulkeys were not alone in their feelings against dance tunes. The preacher—not the one they had stayed with the first night in the village, for he was of another sect—their own preacher, spoke against dance tunes at church, and many in the village did not approve. Granpap fretted because he was forced by the opinion around to give up his playing, and sometimes he got out his fiddle and played anyway, to show that he was not to be ruled.
The Mulkey children ran about just as they pleased because their mother was sick. Sometimes they were very dirty, and always ragged. Mr. Mulkey did some of the cooking, for Alma was lazy and refused to work much, since she was a boarder. Yet she was very smart, for she could read and write well; and it was Alma who had taught Bonnie how to find time on the alarm clock, so that Bonnie could teach the others. Often when supper was over Alma had beaus who took her to the store for soda water or to church. Then the oldest Mulkey child, Annie, who was eleven, washed dishes and cleaned. Most of the time she did the cooking instead of Mr. Mulkey, who liked to talk about how hard he worked at home.
Ora’s young ones played with the Mulkey children, though Bonnie had to watch carefully to see that they did not run off and get into mischief, begging at the store or getting wet in the creek, led by young States Mulkey who almost seemed to like getting other people into trouble, and slipping out himself. He was ten, but very large for his age, and his fair face had a big mouth almost clear across from ear to ear. His whole name was Statesrights after someone in Granpap’s war.
Mrs. Mulkey was very important because the preacher came to her so often, and occasionally the Company doctor, who owned a drug store in the village. She was a sort of mystery to the McClures, for Mr. Mulkey seemed not to welcome company and none of them had ever seen her. They had heard from Alma about her spells. And some days when Bonnie was in the yard she looked at the windows of the house next door fearfully, thinking she had heard a call from the sick woman. She wanted to see, yet dreaded going there, for she knew there were times when Mr. Mulkey had to force his wife back to bed to keep her from walking down the street in her nightgown.
One day Annie, who was a year older than States, came running into the house where Bonnie was getting some dinner ready for the young ones.
“Please come, Bonnie,” she begged, “come quick.”
Without thinking a second time, Bonnie went right over, running.
“I can’t get her back in bed,” Annie panted out, over and over. That seemed the important thing, to get her lying down again.
In the front room, where the curtains were drawn to keep out the hot sunlight, Mrs. Mulkey walked up and down. Annie stopped at the door. Bonnie went inside. Her heart was beating as if it was getting ready to jump from her mouth right on the floor at Mrs. Mulkey’s feet. Mrs. Mulkey was tall as Ora. She had a long white face with big dark eyes, and her fair hair hung in strings around her face. The long nightgown she wore was not long enough to cover her bare feet. They were long, like her face, and stuck out queerly from under the gown.
She saw Bonnie staring and stopped short in her walking.
“People say I look like a ghost,” she said, and laughed a tinkling sort of laughter. “I reckon I do look like a ghost.”
She began to walk again from wall to wall. Bonnie went up close to her. “Will ye come to bed?” she asked.
“I was naked, and ye clothed me,” Mrs. Mulkey said, talking very sensibly to Bonnie, as she would talk to a friend. “I was hungered and ye fed me. I was thirsty and ye gave me to drink.”
Bonnie was trembling. She wanted to run from the room. Yet she knew something must be done at once. All the young ones, the Mulkeys and Ora’s, were at the door watching, crowding against each other to see. Bonnie slipped her shaking hand into Mrs. Mulkey’s.
“Hadn’t ye better go to bed?” she asked, and pulled Mrs. Mulkey toward the bed.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Mrs. Mulkey said. She pulled away from Bonnie, trying to get her hand loose. She kept walking back and forth and Bonnie had to follow. The little girl twisted her fingers around the woman’s. She could feel the dry bony hand. It felt as if there was no flesh there, only bones for her to hold.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” Mrs. Mulkey said again, and tried again to pull her hand away.
“The Lord wants ye in bed,” Bonnie told her. For the first time Mrs. Mulkey stopped trying to get away.
“Do you think He does?” she asked earnestly.
“Yes’m,” Bonnie told her. “I know He does.”
Mrs. Mulkey’s hand went limp, and she allowed Bonnie to lead her back to the bed and get her covered. Almost immediately she went off to sleep. Bonnie watched over her for a few moments, then tiptoed out, shooing the young ones in whispers away from the door.
All those days Bonnie was very busy. She was head of the house during the day, caring for the children. She liked this, yet there were times when she felt ready to run, and on those days she was cross and ill natured with the young ones. As the end of summer came it was better, for she could remember that she would soon be starting school and that thought was enough to make her patient with the others.
Some days she had a big baby on her hands. For Granpap was as much trouble as any when he was at home. He fretted so. And since this fretting was unlike Granpap it made everything about him seem unnatural and wrong.
When no one was looking John made up for Bonnie’s worry by helping with the dishwashing and cooking. He even scrubbed the floors when Ora and Emma had no time to do so. Ora and Emma, having to do washing on Saturdays and ironing Monday nights, had little time for scrubbing. It would have been against the feelings of the whole community for them to do scrubbing and ironing on Sunday. Yet in secret they sometimes did this, and probably the other women did this, too, and never told outside.
All through the summer Granpap was worrying Emma to go back to the hills. She reminded him that sometimes in the winter up there they had starved. In the village there was sure money and the store to buy from, near by, and there was the school, which was most important.
The summer went by, and it was almost time for school to begin. Changes had to be made, and many things decided—one of them whether Emma or Ora should go on the night shift. For in order to care for the young ones during the day, one of them must work at night so she could be at home while Bonnie attended school.
A few days before school began Emma came home to find Bonnie crying. She was sick at heart at first, thinking Ora’s young, or John, had been hurt.
“What is it, Bonnie,” she asked. “Now you tell me.”
“Hit’s Granpap,” Bonnie said.
“What about Granpap?” Emma asked and shook Bonnie again.
“He’s gone,” Bonnie said.
Granpap had put a piece of bread in his pocket, taken his fiddle from the trunk and left for the hills.