Strawberry Girl

by Lois Lenski

  Miss Liddy returned to the back room.

  “Your Ma’s takened the leghorn for you and a black straw with a feather for herself. She says for you to wait here till she comes back from the hardware store. Azuloy’s fixin’ to make some wax roses to take to church tomorrow. Would you like to help?”

  “I’d be proud to, ma’am,” said Birdie.

  Azuloy, a fifteen-year-old orphan, was Miss Liddy’s helper. She did everything from threading needles to sweeping floors. She had a table spread with tissue paper and wire, and a pot of paraffin melting on the little laundry stove.

  Azuloy’s blond hair was puffed up in front, and her single pigtail was tied at the back with a large black ribbon bow. Her face was thin, but her eyes were bright and eager. She wore a large white apron over her long full skirt.

  “First you cut and shape the petals,” she explained. “Then you twist paper around the wire stem and fasten the flower on the end.”

  They made pink and yellow and red roses. They dipped them in the melted wax. After they were dried, they looked like real ones, freshly picked from a living rosebush.

  “Only they will never wilt,” said Azuloy, smiling.

  Birdie wished her new hat had a bright red rose on it instead of the black velvet band and streamers.

  “They’re for ornament,” explained Azuloy, giving Birdie a bunch of the wax roses to take home with her. “Keep them in a vase on your parlor table. I can see you like pretty things as much as I do.”

  Birdie thanked her. Then the Slater baby began crying again. So did two others who had been brought in. Miss Liddy kept a supply of cold baked sweet potatoes handy. Birdie gave one to each of the babies and joggled them in turn on her shoulder.

  A door from the millinery store opened into Wilkins’ dry goods store beyond. Birdie glanced in and saw Jefferson Davis Slater, wearing his same old black felt hat and a clean suit of overalls, walking down the aisle. She called to him.

  “Hey!” came the reply. “You in town too?”

  “Yes,” said Birdie. “Miss Liddy asked me to mind your Ma’s baby.” She walked into the dry goods store.

  “Buyin’ somethin?” asked Shoestring.

  “Ma and me’s got us new summer hats,” said Birdie.

  Shoestring bit his lip. “I ain’t never seed my Ma wear a hat on her head in all my life.”

  “And Pa’s fixin’ to git us a cookin’ stove,” Birdie went on.

  “Cookin’ stove!” snorted the boy. “Fireplace not good enough?”

  “Ma gits tired bendin’ over,” said Birdie. “Pa promised her one, did we move to the Roddenberry place. And Pa’s fixin to buy him barbed wire. Thought I’d tell you. He’s studyin’ to use it for fencin’ stid of rails.”

  “Fencin’!” repeated the boy. He looked at her in silence.

  “What you doin?” asked Birdie, after a while.

  “Buyin’ overalls,” said Shoestring.

  “You shore need ’em,” said Birdie, glancing at the ragged holes on his knees.

  “Three new pairs,” added the boy. He pointed to the garments spread out on the counter.

  “You-all must be gittin’ rich!” teased Birdie.

  “Pa brung in a steer to the butcher,” explained Shoestring. “I watched the butcher cut it up. Tough ole feller. Cow meat ain’t fitten for nobody to eat. Hog meat’s what makes you healthy! Give me a cup of gravy and some grits, ary time o’ day, and I can make me a meal offen it.”

  “Did your Pa git paid for the steer?” asked Birdie.

  “Not yet. He done tole Ma and Gus and Joe and me what he’s gonna git for it and he tole us what we might could buy.

  Then he went off to celebrate, he was feelin’ so good.” The boy bit his lip. After a while he added: “I got me three pair of new overalls anyhow.”

  “I’m proud,” said Birdie. “Sorry too.” The Slater baby on her shoulder began to whimper. “When’s your Ma comin’ back?”

  “Dunno,” said the boy. He reached for his package.

  “Where’s your money?” demanded the clerk.

  “Pa will pay for it this evenin’,” explained Shoestring. “Can’t I take ’em now?”

  “Not till they are paid for.” The clerk put the package under the counter and turned his back.

  Shoestring had no more than left the store when a loud commotion broke out. Dogs barked and howled, people screamed and ran.

  “Dogses!” cried Miss Liddy. “Another dog fight! Can’t get through a Saturday without a dog fight. Birdie, run fetch them two pails of water from the back room. I always keep ’em handy.”

  Birdie hurried and put the baby down on the couch. Pails in hand, she followed at Miss Liddy’s heels, out the side door. Two dogs were at each other’s throats, while a group of boys pelted them with rotten oranges. Shoestring’s hound was one of them, and he was trying to get hold of its collar, to pull it off.

  “Stop chunkin’ them oranges!” yelled Shoestring.

  Miss Liddy took first one pail from Birdie’s hands, then the other. With swift movements, she dashed the water into the dogs’ faces. Surprised, they let go their hold, stopped their growling, and were easily parted. Shoestring wiped the water off his face, took his hound up in his arms and walked away.

  “He might a said thank you,” said Birdie.

  “My!” said Miss Liddy, as they went back into the store. “The millinery business is shore lively—you got to lend money, tend babies, make wax flowers and stop dog fights!”

  When Mrs. Boyer came back, it was time to eat. The Boyers took the dinner basket out of the wagon and ate on a bench in the square. Shoestring passed by, munching biscuit, his limping hound at his heels, but he did not glance their way.

  A man brought a campstool and sat down near them. He opened a box and began to spread things out.

  “What’s he sellin?” asked Ma.

  “Safety-pins, likely,” said Pa. “Horse trader was here last week. Peddlers often come too sellin’ everything under the sun. Medicine shows, too, sometimes. They like the big crowd on Saturdays. Traveling preachers come on Sundays to preach.”

  The man set a canvas on a small easel, lifted a palette and began to paint with a long-handled brush. People strolled up to watch. Soon a crowd gathered.

  “Can I go see?” asked Birdie.

  “Shore can, young un,” said Pa, smiling.

  Birdie had never seen anything like it before. A landscape of green fields, trees and sky began to grow under the magic of the man’s hand. Soon a road wound up the hill and disappeared on the horizon. Small specks of cows dotted a distant field. A flock of birds winged their way across the blue.

  “See the Lightning Artist!” cried the man. He held up the picture which he had painted in ten minutes and said the price was three dollars. A man dug into his pants pocket for the money and took the wet painting away with him.

  While the people looked on and admired, he began to paint a second landscape. Between strokes he unwrapped a whole gallery of other landscapes and sold them to bystanders.

  “Sure money!” laughed Mr. Boyer. “Better than horse trading!”

  “Ain’t it wonderful!” cried Birdie. “Paintin’ pictures fast as lightnin’ is nicer than playin’ the organ even!”

  “Now, gal,” said her mother, “don’t you go gittin’ silly notions in your head.”

  Shoestring Slater and his hound passed by again.

  “Ain’t he wonderful!” cried Birdie, pointing.

  But the boy did not look up or listen. He strode past with his eyes fixed on the ground, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

  “Where’s your package?” called Birdie. “Your new overalls?”

  He went on without speaking.

  The afternoon passed all too quickly, and it was time to start for home. Birdie went with her father and mother to the hardware store and watched the men load the new stove and the rolls of barbed wire on the back of the wagon. The new stove was very black and shiny. On the oven door, in
fancy letters, were the words Charter Oak.

  It was when they came out of the store that they saw the Slaters. Mrs. Slater and her two little girls and Shoestring were huddled in a group, with the sad-looking hound dog at their feet. They were all crying but Shoestring.

  Mrs. Slater dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron. She looked at the Boyers defiantly.

  “Jeff said you-all was here buyin’ a new cookin’ stove!” she sniffed. “Gittin’ more biggety than ever! Think you’re better than other folkses, don’t ye? And barbed wire! Fixin’ to fence” in your land, ain’t ye?” Then she began to cry in earnest. “Whyn’t you-all stay up there in Marion County where you come from? Why you gotta come down here and spoil everything?”

  Birdie looked at Shoestring. The boy stood wretchedly by, leaning first on one foot then on the other. He didn’t know what to do any more than Birdie did.

  “What’s the matter, Mis’ Slater?” asked Mrs. Boyer kindly. “Can I do anything to help you?”

  The next moment Mrs. Slater was in Mrs. Boyer’s arms.

  “Sam takened all the money he got from the steer and blew it in. He gambled most of it and got drunk with the rest,” sobbed Mrs. Slater.

  “Gus and Joe takened the horse and wagon and Pa in it and gone off,” wailed Essie.

  “We gotta walk home,” added Zephy. “Such a fur piece.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Mr. Boyer. “You-all can ride with us. We can make room.”

  “I hate to be beholden to you,” said Mrs. Slater, “but I’m shore obliged.”

  First Shoestring had to return all the purchases his mother had made that day, and collect the money. Then he went back to Miss Liddy’s. Birdie walked with him. He handed Miss Liddy the money his mother had borrowed. Birdie got the Slater baby from the back room and carried it.

  “Did your Pa get a good price for the steer?” asked Miss Liddy.

  “Yes ma’am,” said the boy.

  “And your mother done got her all the things she needed?”

  “No ….yes ma’am!”

  “And new overalls for you too, I hear.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Birdie looked at the holes in the knees of the boy’s old ones, and understood how fierce was his pride. As they left the store, Miss Liddy’s voice floated out after them:

  “Tell your Ma to come again soon. …”

  CHAPTER VI

  The Storm

  BIRDIE FILLED THE GOURD with cold water. She gulped it down but it did not seem to quench her thirst.

  “Me thirsty too,” said Bunny. “And me,” said Dovey.

  As she held the gourd for them, she sighed. Everything seemed to be going wrong somehow. Perhaps it was because it was so terribly hot. September was always the worst month, for it came at the end of the long, hot summer. After the September blows and rains, they would be able to breathe again. But day after day of sultry heat brought no rain.

  Pa sent the children out to the field right after breakfast. The first thing they found was that something had been eating the vegetables. Something had torn down the stalks of corn and had stripped them of their ears. Coons? Gophers? The collard and turnip greens had been eaten. Gophers? Rabbits? Pa was cross when he saw all the damage. Even when you fenced against your neighbors’ critters, there were plenty of wild ones to pester you, thought Birdie to herself.

  Pa set the children to work in the strawberry field.

  The strawberry plants which had lived through the summer heat had covered the ridges with runners. Pa said September was good setting weather. The runners had to be clipped off and re-set in the rows where the cowpeas and some of the corn had been taken out.

  The old plants were left in place to grow strong for bearing fruit. They had to be weeded. Buzz had hoed them and left the weeding for the children. The grass and weeds around the plants had to be picked out by small fingers.

  “You gotta goose-pick ’em,” said Pa, “like geese eating grass—pull out every little ole grass blade you see.”

  Dovey, who was only six, soon got tired and kept begging for another drink.

  “Ma said not to drink too much,” cautioned Birdie. “It’ll make you sick.”

  The heat was oppressive. It beat down upon the open field in waves. The sky was dark and lowering.

  “Fixin’ to rain soon,” said Dovey. Her big eyes looked dark in her puny face. She had never been very strong.

  “I mean!” replied Birdie. “Won’t it feel good?”

  “I’m fixin’ to stay right out in the storm and get soaked to the skin,” said Dan.

  They begged for drinks again. So Birdie took them over to the well. It was simply a pipe coming up out of the ground, with a cap on the top. She lifted the cap and filled the gourd from the flowing stream.

  “Hit’s cold,” said Dovey, smacking her thin lips.

  “That’s because there’s a big underground lake right under us,” said Dan. “I heard about a barn that fell right down in a big hole and was never seen again. It was a sinkhole leading to the lake. If you dig a well big enough, the water will spurt right up, high as the sky!”

  Dovey opened her eyes wide.

  “He means an artesian well,” said Birdie. “Pa says we’re lucky to have six flowin’ wells on the place. All he had to do was drive pipes down in the sand, and the water came up of itself.”

  “The Slaters got a sinkhole,” said Dan, “but it goes dry in hot weather. So they got to tote their water a fur piece.”

  The children went back to their weeding.

  “Pa opened up all six of his wells and let the water run in the strawberry rows to water ’em,” said Birdie. “That’s why the berry plants never dried up.”

  “Wisht they had,” said Dan. “Then we wouldn’t have to weed ’em.”

  “But jest think, next summer we’ll have all the strawberry jam we can eat,” promised Birdie. The thought was a cheering one, but neither Dovey nor Dan responded.

  “It’s too hot out here,” wailed Dovey.

  “Up north, they got snow,” said Birdie. “They make snowballs out of it and throw them.”

  “Wisht I might could see snow,” said Dovey. “I’d eat some.”

  “Dixie might could come and help us,” suggested Dan.

  “Ma needs her in the house,” said Birdie.

  “My tooth’s achin’ again,” said Dan. He began to cry.

  “’Count of that cold water you drank,” said Birdie.

  She left the two to their weeding and went to resetting the runners. She brought a pail of water to water them, and when she looked around, Dan was gone.

  “He went that-a-way,” said Dovey, “off in the scrub.”

  The scrub, that big wild stretch of dry and sandy land, where scrub oaks, scrub pines and palmettos grew, was an unexplored wilderness, always beckoning the children. Birdie could not blame him.

  She worked awhile in silence. Then she noticed that Dovey was sitting in the row doing nothing. The child’s face was very red under her checked sunbonnet and she looked sick. Birdie took her by the hand and hustled her to the house.

  Mrs. Boyer had her sewing machine out in the breezeway, but she said it was hotter there than indoors. She told Birdie to sponge Dovey off with cool water and put her to bed. After that Birdie came out on the porch.

  Suddenly she saw a great swarm of grasshoppers, three inches long, with red and yellow wings, settle down in the yard. Her amaryllis bulbs had come up nicely and had made a brave showing of gay bloom on both sides of the front path. In the early summer she had seen tiny black grasshoppers eating their leaves, but never as many as this. The grasshoppers had grown to maturity and they were devouring every lily leaf in sight.

  Birdie forgot the heat. She took her long brush-broom and beat and whipped and swept grasshoppers. But she couldn’t get rid of them. Another swarm came as soon as she stopped to rest.

  “I can’t kill all the grasshoppers in the world!” she wailed.

  They did no
t leave till all the leaves of her lilies were stripped. She sat down on the porch floor and cried.

  “Hush up, honey!” scolded Ma, taking her foot off the pedal of the sewing machine. “Go find Bunny. I hear him crying.”

  Birdie walked round the house and found Bunny sitting in an ant hill, crying loudly. He was covered with ants. She shook and brushed him, then gave him a bath in the tin tub to get all the dirt off.

  At dinner Pa scolded the children for leaving their weeding. When Ma announced that it was too hot to live, let alone work in the field, he said nothing more. He did not even inquire where Dan was.

  After dinner, Ma had a headache and went in to lie down beside Dovey. Dixie got busy and scrubbed the kitchen floor with the cornhusk scrubbing broom. She set Bunny on it to hold it down, as she pushed it around by its long handle. Then Bunny fell off and got a bad bump. He cried long and loud, and Dixie had a hard time to quiet him.

  Because so many things went wrong all day, Birdie was glad when she heard the boys’ voices. Dan had come back and Shoestring was with him. All the dogs were barking. She went out on the porch.

  “What you-all got?” she asked.

  “Gophers! Fixin’ to race ’em!” said Dan, his toothache forgotten.

  Each boy carried a large gopher tortoise in his arms. They were enormous land turtles a foot across, with high, arching shells.

  “Caught ’em in boxes,” said Shoestring. “We found two gopher tunnels and set boxes in front of the holes, and they walked right in.”

  “Shoestring says they come out at twelve o’clock each day,” said Dan.

  “Don’t believe it!” scoffed Birdie. “How they know what time it is?”

  The boys roared with laughter.

  “Caught ’em anyhow!” bragged Shoestring.

  “The dogs had a mind to tear the tunnels to pieces,” Dan went on. “Thought they’d catch ’em some gopher snakes and rabbits and a skunk or two hidin’ down in them holes.”

  “We’ll race ’em,” said Shoestring. “They’ll race straight back to their holes, iffen they’re young. If they’re a hundred years old, they’ll curl up under their shells and never move.”