Winterbound

by Margery Williams Bianco

  “Look out—what you want to go treading on my feet like that for!” he snapped, but his voice was a whisper. “Leggo, can’t you?”

  “It’s—dark!” Caroline whimpered. “I can’t see where I’m going!”

  “Then hold my hand and walk where I tell you.”

  “I’m scared of the fox.”

  “Don’t be so silly! Foxes don’t hurt you. That fox went off ages ago; he’s way up the hill by now.”

  Never had home seemed so far away. For a moment Martin almost felt himself in Neal’s shoes, years ago; he thought he knew now just how Neal must have felt on that old corduroy road. Suppose it were true that big things did come down, sometimes, still, from the forests? And the swamp was not so very far away, after all.

  It was certainly a mercy that the gray fox did not choose that particular moment to “holler” again, as Neal called it. As it was, a rustling in the dead roadside bushes ahead of them brought Martin to a sharp standstill, his heart pounding, while Caroline let out a strangled squeal. But it was only Garry, groping her way towards them.

  “It’s so dark I thought I’d come out and meet you; I saw the door open. You must have been there for hours!”

  Caroline clung to her, as she had clung a moment ago to Martin but with far greater confidence. With Garry around nothing could happen.

  “Garry, did you hear the fox?”

  “I heard something a while back; sounded like a cat fight.”

  The road was familiar again. Light showed faintly through the chinks where Kay had drawn the curtains.

  “Look out for the rock there, Caroline; here’s where the path turns in. Not a star out! Wasn’t it pretty black coming up the hill there?”

  “Not so bad. It’s only a step, anyway,” said Martin.

  Next morning there was a queer stillness outside the little house, and it seemed lighter than usual. Martin, first to wake, stumbled to his window and pulled aside the shade. Field and hillside lay smooth and white, blanketed under a three-inch snowfall.

  The Boll Weevil

  “TWO letters for Kay, one for you, Penny, and the newspaper,” Garry announced, stamping the snow off her feet as she came in from the mailbox. “Why I never get any mail in this household I don’t know. I shall start writing letters to myself soon.”

  She knew the writing on one of the envelopes she dropped into Kay’s lap and smiled as she slipped it uppermost.

  “Nothing from father?” said Mrs. Ellis. “Well, he never does write often.”

  “It’s only ten days,” Garry reminded her. “If father writes once in three weeks he’s doing wonders. The best way is for us to miss writing to him, once in a while.”

  Her mother read through her letter slowly and then sat for a moment holding the thin close-written pages on her knee, her face troubled.

  “Nothing wrong with Aunt Margaret?”

  “No, she’s all right. Peggy isn’t very well. She was a long time getting over that flu, and now the doctor says she has a spot on her lung and he wants her to go straight off to New Mexico for the winter.”

  “Tough luck. Poor Peggy! Is she very bad?” Garry asked, while Kay looked up from her letter.

  “No, he thinks the winter out there should put it right. But she has to be pretty careful. The trouble for Aunt Margaret is that she can’t possibly go down there with her now that she has this job and Peggy can’t go alone; there’s got to be someone to look after her. She wants to know if I could go; she says she would rather have me than anyone because she’ll feel so much easier if I’m there, but I don’t see . . .”

  “Could I be any use?” asked Kay quickly.

  “My dear, I’d propose it in a minute, but you know how Aunt Margaret is, and you know what Peggy is like. It’s got to be some older person who can keep her in order and make her mind. You’re both too much of an age for you to have any sort of control over her, and it isn’t even as if she were actually ill and had to stay in bed. It was through all this racketing around and late hours that she got sick in the first place, and I imagine that’s one reason why the doctor wants to get her right out of town. No, Kay, I wish you could, for it would be a grand chance for you and perhaps later Aunt Margaret would be glad of it, but you’d be no use just now. And I can’t think of anybody else.”

  “Of course you can go,” said Garry promptly. “We can get along here perfectly well by ourselves and it would do you a whole lot of good, too. How long is it for?”

  “Aunt Margaret thought for a month or so anyway, till she could make some other arrangement. She really is at her wit’s end, this happening just now. She says she insists on making it a business arrangement; someone would have to go anyway, and Peggy’s uncle is helping with the expenses.”

  “Then that settles it. The idea of an Ellis turning down a job, and in New Mexico at that! I call it a rank piece of luck,” Garry decided.

  “It wouldn’t be much, I imagine, but at least it would pay for someone to stay here with you while I’m away, and I shall have practically no expenses myself to think of. I do hate to refuse if it can be managed, for Aunt Margaret has always been so good to us and this would be a chance to help her out in return.” Mrs. Ellis’s face cleared as she spoke.

  “Yes, when I think of relations I never count Aunt Margaret in with them. She’s quite different,” Garry agreed.

  “We won’t need anyone,” Kay said. “Garry and I can manage perfectly and you won’t have to worry about the children, for one of us will write to you every two days. And there are the Rowes right across the way. It isn’t a bit like being alone here.”

  “Yes, I’m glad of that; we couldn’t have kinder neighbors. But there has got to be someone in the house; I wouldn’t dream of it otherwise, in winter and all.”

  “I don’t suppose it’ll be any worse winter than it is now,” Garry said, “and anyway someone else in the house isn’t going to prevent it. What we will do before you go is to have a telephone put in; then we can always call up if we need to without going across the road in bad weather, and you’ll feel safer about us. That’s much more important. Now you write your wire to Aunt Margaret so as to set her mind at rest and I’ll take it right over to Mary’s, and then we can talk about the rest.”

  Garry had a way of clinching matters.

  The telephone was put in; hitherto they had managed without it, for the two houses were so near it was very little trouble to slip across. But about the “someone” Mrs. Ellis was firm. Edna would have been the real person but Edna couldn’t leave home, and there was no one else in the neighborhood. In the end, and reluctantly, Cousin Carrie was appealed to, after much groaning from Kay and Garry. Cousin Carrie was interested in various kinds of social work and could generally be relied upon to “know of someone” among her many protégés. She knew of someone now.

  “It is difficult,” she wrote, “to find exactly the type of person you want at such short notice, for most of the women I know who are out of jobs and might be glad of such an opportunity are far too young. I think I have been fortunate therefore in getting hold of Mrs. Cummings. She has been living with a married daughter recently but before that worked as housekeeper and caretaker for several good families. She is used to the country and thoroughly reliable, elderly but quite capable of light assistance and general supervision, and with two grown girls in the house that is all that should be necessary. She would be willing to come to you for forty dollars a month and her keep, but I gather that under the circumstances would expect to be treated as one of the family.”

  “What else would one expect?” commented Garry when the letter was read aloud. “We’re plain people; no room here for a servants’ hall if we wanted one. But I think if she’s only going to give light assistance and be treated as one of the family forty dollars is a lot of money these days. I’d expect to work for forty dollars a month.”

  Mrs. Ellis privately thought so too, for forty dollars all but swallowed up the little sum that her sister would be able to pay
her and she had hoped to be able to send something home as well, for little extra comforts. But Cousin Carrie evidently knew, and there was no time to pick and choose, as she reminded herself; the main thing was to have someone responsible in the house.

  “What does she mean by ‘general supervision’?” Kay wondered. “She isn’t going to be in charge of us, anyway.”

  “It’s Cousin Carrie’s delicate way of suggesting a chaperone,” Garry explained. “Obsolete term, to be found in all good Victorian dictionaries. Look it up, Kay.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said her mother. “Cousin Carrie just means that she’s capable and responsible. She’s probably just some nice middle-aged person who will be glad of a good home and a little change.”

  “She’ll probably get the little change, all right,” Garry said. “I don’t know so much about the pleasant home. Don’t look that way, Penny dear! You know we are perfect models always when you aren’t around to set a bad example. I expect she’ll teach me knitting stitches of an evening while Kay reads the paper aloud.”

  Penny was to leave as soon as possible, so the next few days were busy ones. Martin was frankly envious of anyone going to New Mexico; it was just the sort of thing that would happen to a girl and not a boy, who would have known how to appreciate it. He had no sympathy at all for Peggy, and thought her plain lucky. Kay felt secretly a little the same way. She was glad for her mother to have the change and experience but would have given a great deal to be in her shoes, for Santa Fe called up visions of everything she would most have loved, sunlight and color and a world of new impressions, and most likely the chance of meeting painters and writers as well. A great deal of longing and some bitterness of feeling—not for her mother but with life in general—was packed into the suitcase along with the rolled stockings and underwear. Things always happened, she thought, to people who didn’t particularly want them at the moment, never to those who did.

  Caroline took the upheaval calmly, as she did most things. Her own small life always went on steadily in the middle of whatever might be whirling about her. But one never knew just what special detail would take root in Caroline’s mind, to be brooded over quietly, and Garry, coming into the tiny alcove room one night to tuck her up, found her sitting up in bed with a deep and thoughtful expression.

  “Garry, what is a spot on your lung?”

  Garry thought a moment.

  “It’s when you’ve had a bad cold and haven’t taken care of it or something, and it gets down in your lungs and starts trouble, and then if you aren’t careful you get t.b.”

  “Do you suppose I could have got a spot on my lungs?”

  “I don’t think it’s at all likely.”

  “Then what,” asked Caroline dramatically, “would you say this is!” And she pulled her flannelette nightgown open, exposing a small red dot on her firm chest.

  “That,” said Garry, moving the candle so as to examine it attentively, “is probably a last summer’s mosquito bite.”

  “But it’s right where my lungs are, and I’ve had it for months. It doesn’t ever go away.” Caroline’s voice sounded sepulchral.

  “That’s because you keep on scratching it,” said her sister, dashing all Caroline’s carefully built dreams of importance to the ground at one unfeeling blow. “Now shut your eyes and go to sleep.”

  It seemed only a day between Aunt Margaret’s letter and the final moment when Edna drew up at the house, cheery as usual.

  “Just you have a good time and don’t you worry about the family, Mrs. Ellis,” she said, while Garry and Martin were hoisting suitcases into the back of the car. “I’ll drive out once in a while to keep an eye on them. I’d take the whole bunch down to the station now only I’ve got another job and I wouldn’t be able to get them back in the time. Here, I brought a cushion to tuck in back of you. This road’s awful bouncy now the ruts are all frozen up.”

  And Mary Rowe came flying across the road, bareheaded as usual.

  “Good-bye, and you remember Neal and I are right across the way here. If the chimney burns down or the weather gets too cold they can all come over and live with us. There’s plenty of room. I mean it. Jimmie wants you to mail him a horned toad from New Mexico if you find one, but I told him you’d be far too busy. And I hope the niece gets well soon!”

  “I don’t suppose it will be for more than a few weeks,” Mrs. Ellis said as they crowded round for the last hug. “I expect Aunt Margaret herself may be able to come down there later, or someone else will. Take good care of yourself and write to me every week!”

  Then the car was off, growing smaller and smaller as it jolted down the hill. Mary promptly took Caroline back with her to bake cookies with Shirley; Martin went off whistling a little louder than usual to hide his feelings; and the two girls were left to the sympathy of Mrs. Cummings, hovering with a helpful air in the background.

  Mrs. Cummings had arrived the day before. Edna drove her up from the station, and Edna’s face was a study as she helped the old lady out. Mrs. Cummings was smiling and voluble and what Garry called “mousey.” She was sure, before she had been ten minutes in the house, that everything was “very nice,” and that she and the dear girls—an expression which enraged Kay from the start—were going to get along very nicely, very nicely indeed. And they mustn’t bother about her or put themselves out in any way, she could make herself comfortable anywhere.

  They had arranged for her the little parlor off the living room, which had a fireplace, and which with a little change of furnishings made a very pleasant bedroom. Here, with her trunk and suitcase, she was left to unpack before supper, expressing great contentment that everything was so nice, although Kay, happening to glance back as she left the room, saw her scuttle noiselessly to the bedside and turn up a corner of the mattress to see what it was made of.

  On the whole she seemed, as Mrs. Ellis tried to think after a short interview, a pleasant and homely sort of person who would fit without too much difficulty into the household.

  But if anything could have made Kay and Garry more homesick in those first few days after their mother left, it was Mrs. Cummings’s presence. Home alone, even empty as it seemed, would not have been so bad, but complicated by a stranger’s presence it was dreadful. Especially one, who, like Mrs. Cummings, seemed to pervade the whole household.

  Whatever they might think of Cousin Carrie’s choice, the two girls did their best to make the old lady feel comfortable and at home. With an instinctive sense of how they themselves might feel under similar circumstances in a strange household, they tried to treat her as they would any other middle-aged guest, on a friendly footing, with the inevitable result that Mrs. Cummings became, before very long, rather like the cuckoo in the sparrows’ nest.

  Her possessions, and she had a surprising number of them, began to spill over from her own room. Kay, who was perhaps a little exaggerated about orderliness and always tried to keep the house looking its best, had to get used to seeing the old lady’s spectacles, her shawl, her crochet, the sweater she thought she would wear and afterwards took off, the newspaper she thought she was going to read later on, left lying about the living room, or worse, bestowed in certain nooks and receptacles which Mrs. Cummings had adopted, squirrel-like, for her own; one being Kay’s pet Chinese bowl on the cupboard top, another the mantelpiece, which Kay liked to keep in a certain studied arrangement and which the old lady thought particularly adapted for keeping minor articles she was liable to mislay and wanted in full sight. There was only one really good lamp in the living room, and this Mrs. Cummings managed firmly to arrange in such a position on the table that it threw plenty of light on the comfortable armchair she occupied near the stove, and none at all anywhere else.

  “I told you she was mousey,” said Garry after a few days.

  In the kitchen it was just as bad. She wanted everything arranged in a different way.

  “Don’t you think it would be handier if we kept the cups and saucers here and the bread box
there?”

  “Don’t you think it would be handier if the oranges went into the pantry instead of that blue bowl, and then we’d have the chest free to stack dishes on?”

  “Don’t you think . . .”

  Garry, who with Martin’s help looked after the few outdoor chores, had her own troubles. She had always kept the wood-box filled and the stoves attended to, but as early as three o’clock Mrs. Cummings would begin to worry about whether the firewood was going to last through the evening or whether it wasn’t. And then it would be: “Don’t you think, while it’s still nice and light . . .”

  “Take my advice,” said that young woman one morning, sternly setting the blue bowl of oranges back where it had always been kept. “If you let her get one triumph—just one—we’ll be done for.”

  Nevertheless and imperceptibly the household began to find itself organized according to Mrs. Cummings’s ideas of comfort. Not that she did very much herself, after the first week, except sit around and keep warm, but she loved to suggest, and Cousin Carrie’s reference to general supervision became only too clear. Meal hours were changed about. Mrs. Cummings ate no breakfast, so she usually began to feel faintish about noon, and supper was an hour earlier so that things could be “got out of the way.” Getting things out of the way and having things “handy,” though apparently contradictory terms, were among her firm beliefs. Worst of all, she referred to the absent Penny frequently and invariably as “your dear Ma.”