Winterbound

by Margery Williams Bianco

  The two younger ones, twelve-year-old Martin and small Caroline, had heard her coming now and ran out from the Rowes’ barnyard, a little lower down the road. Many drivers would have objected to two children suddenly hurling themselves at the running board just as the car was making that last steep and narrow twist on the hill, but Edna, being Edna, only shouted: “You hang on tight now, young ’uns, and look out for my paint!”

  So with Martin clinging on one side and Caroline on the other the little gray Ford mounted the crest, eased itself cleverly between the big bowlder and the fence post and drew up beside the house, discharging its burden of two women, two children, and the accumulated packages of a week’s shopping.

  It was lucky Mrs. Ellis was fairly small, for even in the front seat she was wedged round with parcels, and had driven the last seven miles with a large white soup tureen under one arm and a parlor lamp, chimney and all, balanced on her knees, while from the rear the leg of a small upturned table threatened at every minute to poke her in the back. She disengaged herself carefully and stretched her legs with a breath of relief.

  “Well, we got everything home safe, thanks to luck and Edna’s driving.”

  “Luck is right,” said Edna, reaching behind her to help hand out the bundles. “You never know what you’re liable to find in a car. It reminds me of one time years ago I was walking into town in my best clothes and someone offered me a lift. There was something covered up with newspaper took up the whole floor of the car, and a pie sitting on the back seat. I’d already got one foot in before the silly fool said, ‘Look out for the ice!’ and sure enough I’d stepped on the ice and I slipped and sat right smack on the pie. I was never so embarrassed in my life. It was a custard pie, too,” she added in afterthought.

  “Mother’s been to an auction!” Caroline piped, as though the fact were not sufficiently apparent.

  “Wasn’t it nice, there was one just outside town, and Edna took me. I got this lamp and the tureen and a little bedside stand for Kay, and a length of rag carpet, oh, and a lot of old junk and garden tools that maybe Garry can use around. And children, I found a stove for the living room! The men are bringing that and the tools and the carpet tomorrow.”

  “Yes, she was all set to fetch it home in the car with us,” Edna put in, “but I was sort of afraid it might slip down back of the cushions or something, and we’d lose it on the road.”

  There was a laugh, and Mrs. Ellis said: “Edna, you’re an angel on earth to bring all this truck back. I hope we haven’t scratched anything for you.”

  “If some of my fussy customers knew the kind of things that go riding in this car when their backs are turned they’d have a big surprise,” Edna told her. “This load’s nothing to it sometimes.”

  “Take the groceries, girls,” said their mother. “That parcel is meat, Martin, and the big bag is oranges. Look out, Garry, those are eggs right on top!” For Garry had seized the biggest carton and was hoisting it to her shoulder. “Edna, you can stay and have supper with us, can’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.” Edna had two inflections for this characteristic phrase and the present one, the Ellises knew, was negative. “I promised my sister’s young ones I’d take them in to the movies tonight and they’ll have the house down if I’m not back on time.” She climbed in and prepared to back the car around. “When that stove does come, mind you don’t set it where someone’s liable to trip over it without noticing. I’d kind of hate to stub a toe on it myself!”

  And she drove away, as they all trooped with their bundles into the house.

  The new lamp, a real old parlor relic, with pink roses round its fat china waist, was cleaned and filled, the groceries and provisions stacked in the pantry, and while Garry got supper, it being her turn for the job, Kay bore her little table upstairs to the room they shared together, where it just fitted between her bedhead and the wall. It would have to be brought down again later and scraped, she decided, for the wood underneath was better looking than the dingy pea-green paint with which it had been coated, but meantime it was ready for use, for Kay liked to read in bed and a hand lamp on a bedroom chair had been her best contrivance up to now.

  It was the largest of the upstairs rooms, with sloping ceiling and a little alcove room off it where Caroline slept, and which in turn communicated, through a big closet, with her mother’s bedroom. Martin had the little room downstairs next to the pantry—very handy if he got hungry in the night—where he could come and go as he pleased and felt himself very much the man of the household. Anyone looking at the sisters’ bedroom could have told a good deal about the two who shared it. Kay’s side was tidy and orderly, her toilet things set out on the bureau top, cold cream and face powder and the bottle of hand lotion that Garry laughed at. The bed was made just so, a strip of old embroidery and a bowl of autumn flowers on the shelves that held her books, and a few pictures and prints on the whitewashed wall.

  On Garry’s side there was one picture, an unframed landscape of Kay’s. On her bureau were a ship’s lantern and various boxes stacked one on another, and the only jar, a wide glass one, had wire gauze for a cover and held not face cream but two tree toads in an improvised garden of pebbles and moss. The bed was pushed against the wall to make room for a large flat table with two shelves above it, and shelves and table were littered with a collection of books, old copies of the National Geographic Magazine, newspaper cuttings, seed catalogues, and various zoölogical and agricultural pamphlets, the whole comprising what Garry called her “reference library,” with an aged typewriter taking up most of the space. Being practical, she had set the table close enough to her bed to enable her to reach any of this attractive literature without too-much effort, and a nail in a convenient beam just behind her head served to hang the ship’s lantern on at night.

  The whitewashed walls were clean and pleasant, but their plaster showed cracks in many places and they did, in Kay’s opinion, cry aloud for a pretty, old-fashioned wallpaper to cover their bareness. She reverted to the question again that evening at the supper table.

  “Do you suppose he’d let us buy some, mother, and take it off the rent?”

  “No,” returned Mrs. Ellis promptly. “We are getting this house very reasonably as it is, and I’m not going to ask anything more. From what Mr. Roberts told us the owner is a busy man and he made it clear that he wouldn’t be bothered over trifles. We’ll have to do it ourselves some day or go without.”

  “I bet he’s got loads of money,” Martin put in. “Jimmie Rowe said he drove out here last spring when he was buying the place, and he has a swell car. It was a fat gray-haired man and he had another man with him. It had been raining and their car got stuck on the hill turning around and Jimmie’s father had to go and help them to get out. Jimmie said he seemed kind of snooty, but the other man was all right.”

  “He’ll probably have the place all landscaped and lily-pooled, with evergreen plantings and a concrete swimming pool.” It was evident that Kay felt resentful: “I know the kind!”

  “Wish he’d let me have a hand in the landscaping, before someone else wrecks it all,” Garry said. She had wandered up to the low, deep-eaved house on the hill many times, and planned just what she would do with the garden if she had a free hand in it, and without disturbing the beautiful old lilac trees and syringa, and the great clumps of lemon lilies and iris that flanked the worn stone doorstep. So much could be done with that garden if only someone didn’t come along and spoil it all with the wrong ideas.

  “Jimmie’s father says it’s about the oldest house anywhere around,” Martin went on. “Jimmie and I climbed in through a window one day and it’s got this paneling stuff and all sorts of queer cupboards, and three staircases in it. And the chimney was all full of chimney swallows; you could hear them fluttering around.”

  “It certainly is a lovely old house,” said their mother, “and if anyone took a fancy to buy it, in an inconvenient place like this, miles off a good road, it’s probably because they li
ke the place for itself and wouldn’t want to spoil it, though I don’t suppose that simple thought ever entered your heads. To hear you girls talk, anyone might think you had the monopoly of all the good taste there is in the world.”

  “But we have, Penny darling, we have,” Garry exclaimed, “and you know it perfectly well! It’s all part of the general brilliance of the up-and-coming young generation—just in the air, you know. Nobody hides their light under a bushel these days.”

  “An old-fashioned pint pot would about cover your light very well, and you needn’t call me darling, either,” retorted her mother.

  Garry was unabashed.

  “Penny always feels guilty when she’s been to an auction,” she explained to the table generally, buttering herself a last slice of bread. “And then she takes it out on us poor innocents. It’s very hard to be young and unappreciated.”

  Small Caroline had listened to all this with a grave and preoccupied air. She slid from her chair now and stood for a moment gazing into space.

  “Mother, what did Edna mean when she told you to be careful not to trip over the stove?”

  Coming on top of Garry’s remark, this made Mrs. Ellis blush unaccountably.

  “She meant that a stove is a very hard and unpleasant thing to stub your toes on, and as you are the person who does most of the toe-stubbing around here, she was probably thinking of you.”

  “But she said you,” Caroline persisted.

  “She meant all of us. Now if you’ve finished your supper you can go out and play till it’s time to dry the silver.”

  “Can I go over and play with Shirley?”

  “You can not. You can play in the yard.”

  “I wish I could go and play with Shirley!”

  “If you spend any more time in wishing,” said her mother pleasantly, “it will be too dark to play anywhere, and then you’ll have to go to bed.”

  Caroline trailed half-heartedly towards the door, as Kay and Garry began to gather up the plates.

  “There’s one of you, anyway,” said Mrs. Ellis, “that’s going to be brought up right.”

  A muttered sound reached them, and she added aloud: “What was that you just said, Caroline?”

  Caroline faced round, her hand on the screen door. “I only said ‘shucks!’”

  Kay smiled, and Garry turned to her mother.

  “You see, Penny dear—you’d far better give it up! It isn’t the least use in the world!”

  Listeners Hear No Good

  “MOTHER, Mr. Rowe’s going to take apples over to the cider mill. Can we go with him?”

  “I don’t know if he wants you . . .” Mrs. Ellis began.

  “He does,” Martin insisted. “He saved it for Saturday so we could all go along.”

  “Is Shirley going, too?” For Caroline was hopping in the background, as impatient as her brother.

  “Yes. Her mother said she could!”

  “Then run along! Caroline, you’d better take a coat.” They dashed off down the road to where Neal Rowe was waiting with his dilapidated truck, already loaded with two empty barrels and the heaped apples, a mountain of them, red and yellow and speckled, that Martin and Jimmie had helped all morning to rake up under the orchard trees. Shirley and Caroline sat in front and the two boys climbed in behind, hollowing a nest for themselves among the apples and holding to the sides of the truck as it lurched and swung down the bumpy road.

  It was a clear day, with a sky of that deep burning blue that only comes in fall, and a tang of brush smoke and wild grapes on the air. Virginia creeper and poison ivy were scarlet along the stone walls, and asters and goldenrod still bloomed here and there by the roadside. The mill to which Neal always took his apples was not the big affair down the state road but a smaller one some few miles away, reached by a narrow back road that wound up and down hill, now through woods, now between stony pastures thick with sumac, becoming less and less traveled as it went, till at the last dip it joined the beginning of an old corduroy road crossing a tract of swamp land.

  This road had originally been built for logging. Years ago all the big timber had been cut from the swamp and now there was only a sparse second growth, with the old water-logged stumps dotting the ground and here and there a dead tree, gray and gaunt like a skeleton, and everywhere the rank emerald swamp growth thrusting up through the black spongy soil. The air was close and heavy with the smell of rotting wood and stagnant water. There was a legend that bears lived—or had lived—in this swamp, which stretched on either side for a couple of miles, and Jimmie and Martin felt an excited thrill as they peered between the trees, while the little girls pressed close together, staring down fearfully at the dark water that oozed between the logs as the truck pushed slowly forward.

  “Don’t know how good this road is any more,” Neal said as he steered carefully, watching his front wheels. “It’s all of a year since I was over it last. If the old truck gets stuck, boys, you’ll have to help pull her out!”

  But the old truck didn’t stick, for the swamp water had preserved the logs and the corduroy road, though broken in places, was still good for a long time to come. Soon the skeleton trees and dead stumps gave way to thick undergrowth, alder and scarlet swamp maple, the corduroy to a firmer wagon road, and with the wayside bushes brushing the windshield as the truck forced its way through, they came out again into open country.

  “There’s the old house I was born in, and where I lived most of the time I was a boy,” said Neal, pointing presently to a gray weathered frame house with a red barn near it. “There’s the same old woodshed, and the same old pump where I drawed water many a time.”

  He slowed up to wave to a youngish man who was splitting wood outside the house.

  “Hello, Neal!”

  “How’s the folks?”

  “Fine. Takin’ your apples over?”

  “They ain’t much good this year. I figure we might get a barrel out of the whole lot. Where’s Bert?”

  “Over to the mill. They been workin’ there all morning. Guess they’ll be able to put yours through now.” “Gid-dap!” said Neal, addressing the truck.

  Two little girls who had come out from the house door stared gravely at the truck and its passengers. The four children stared back. There was a lurch and Martin clutched at the rolling mound of apples behind him. They rode on, turned at a crossroad. The roofs of buildings showed between the trees. They had reached the cider mill.

  In spite of early morning frosts the weather had still held so mild that Garry found plenty to do yet in the garden. She had set the missing glass in her cold-frame, built from a few boards and some old sash found in the cellar and set in a sunny angle by the woodshed. She was sowing cabbage, cauliflower, and lettuce in one side to come up early in the spring, and in the other seeds for the flower garden she still hoped to have next summer. By a contrivance of her own involving various boxes of earth, some old matting, and a considerable portion of the floor space in that part of the shed adjoining the kitchen, she planned to keep the family supplied with salad and fresh parsley during the winter, little realizing as yet what a Connecticut winter could be like.

  The famous living-room stove had arrived the day after the auction, and Edna’s dark hints were explained. Requiring the efforts of two men to transport her piecemeal from the truck to the spot where she now stood finally assembled, Big Bertha, as the Ellis children had instantly christened her, belonged to the days when stoves were stoves. Towering and immense, she took up the whole hearth, all but blocking the fireplace that had been Kay’s joy. No modern simplicity of design about Bertha. She was ornate and dreadful, with scrolls and curlicues everywhere about her. Her bulging cast-iron sides displayed a design in high relief, strikingly inappropriate, of storks wading on one leg amid a lake of bulrushes, while her summit, overtopping Mrs. Ellis’s head, was graced by a strange ornament resembling a lopsided funeral urn. But hideous as she was she promised warmth and comfort; she had already an air of presiding over the famil
y welfare, and Mrs. Ellis, feeling guiltily responsible for her looks, defended her warmly.

  “It isn’t so easy to pick up a good second-hand stove like that at the beginning of winter, and looks aren’t half as important as comfort, if you can’t have both. If you ask me, we’re pretty lucky. . . .”

  But here she was obliged to stop, for Penny’s comment in almost every situation involving minor doubts or criticisms usually began, “we’re pretty lucky”—and the phrase had become a household word.

  “It wouldn’t be so easy to pick up that stove any time,” Garry agreed, and Martin giggled promptly.

  “Garry might bring some of her boxes of earth in here, and we could train morning-glories up it,” Kay proposed sarcastically. “They’d go well with the storks!” But Caroline had the most practical suggestion.

  “We could fence off the fireplace in back with chicken wire and raise baby chicks there. Shirley said they knew a woman and she raised baby chicks in her fireplace all winter, and they slept under the stove to keep warm.” “Heavens!” cried Garry. “Can you see Big Bertha hatching out a family? How would you like a lot of little chicks running about on cast-iron legs?”

  “I said back of the stove,” retorted Caroline, who was extremely literal-minded. “And I don’t see why you always make fun of me when I have an idea!”

  So far the first official kindling of Big Bertha had been put off, for it was still possible to use the fireplace, even though obscured by her portly presence, and when the logs were blazing and she stood silhouetted against the glow the effect suggested a fat hippopotamus basking genially in the warmth.

  On the afternoon that the children drove to the cider mill Garry took a basket and went up the hill for frost grapes. It was a bit late to gather them, but Mrs. Rowe had said they were good for jelly, and Garry knew where there was a big vine, not too high for easy reach, for as a rule frost grapes are like squirrels and cling to the highest branches. She climbed the rise behind the house, crossed two steep pastures, and sat down on the last stone wall to rest and gaze about her. The sun lay warm on the lichen-covered rocks, a woodpecker was busy on a dead chestnut tree close by, and a chipmunk slipped out from a chink in the wall, ran a few inches in his curious jerky way, exactly as if he were being pulled on a wire, Garry thought, stared at her and slipped back again.