by B. M. Bower
“And so—I like yuh,” said Marthy, in a tone that was half defiance, “because I can’t help likin’ yuh. You’re growin’ up sweet and purty, jest like I wanted my little Minervy to grow up. In some ways you remind me of her, only she was quieter and didn’t take so much notice of things a young one ain’t s’posed to notice. Now I don’t want you askin’ no more questions about her, ’cause I ain’t going to talk about it ag’in; and if yuh pester me, I’ll send yuh home and tell your maw to keep yuh there. If you’re the nice girl I think yuh be, you’ll be good to Marthy and not talk about—”
Billy Louise opened her eyes still wider, and licked the honey off one whole corner of the slice without really tasting anything. Marthy’s square, uncompromising chin was actually quivering. Billy Louise was stricken dumb by the spectacle. She wanted to go and put her arms around Marthy’s neck and kiss her; only Marthy’s neck had a hairy mole, and there was no part of her face which looked in the least degree kissable. Still, Billy Louise felt herself all hot inside with remorse and sympathy and affection. Physical contact being impossible because of her fastidious instincts, and speech upon the subject being so sternly forbidden, Billy Louise continued to lick honey and stare in fascinated silence.
“I’ll wash the dishes for you, Marthy,” she offered irrelevantly at last, as a supreme sacrifice upon the altar of sympathy. When that failed to stop the slow procession of tears that was traveling down the furrows of Marthy’s cheeks, she added ingratiatingly: “I’ll put six raisings on the cookie I’m going to make for you.”
Whereupon Marthy did an unprecedented, an utterly amazing thing. She got up and gathered Billy Louise into her arms so unexpectedly that Billy Louise inadvertently buried her nose in the honey she had not yet licked off the bread. Marthy held her close pressed to her big, flabby bosom and wept into her hair in a queer, whimpering way that somehow made Billy Louise think of a hurt dog. It was only for a minute that Marthy did this; she stopped almost as suddenly as she began and went outside, wiping her eyes and her nose impartially upon her dirty apron.
Billy Louise sat paralyzed with the mixture of unusual emotions that assailed her. She was exceedingly sticky and uncomfortable from honey and tears, and she shivered with repugnance at the odor of Marthy’s unbathed person. She was astonished at the outburst from phlegmatic Marthy Meilke, and her pity was now alloyed with her promise to wash all those dirty dishes. Billy Louise felt that she had been a trifle hasty in making promises. There was not a drop of water in the house nor a bit of wood, and Billy Louise knew perfectly well that the dishpan would have a greasy, unpleasant feeling under her fastidious little fingers.
She sighed heavily. “Well, I s’pose I might just as well get to work at ’em,” she said aloud, as was her habit—being a child who had no playmates. “I hate to dread a thing I hate.”
She looked at the messy slice of sour bread and threw it out to the speckled hen that had returned and was standing with one foot lifted tentatively—ready for a forward step if the fates seemed kind—and was regarding Billy Louise fixedly with one yellow eye. “Take it and go!” cried the donor, impatient of the scrutiny. She picked up the wooden pail and went down to the creek behind the house, by a pathway bordered thickly with budding rosebushes and tall lilacs.
Billy Louise first of all washed her face slowly and with a methodic thoroughness which characterized her—having lived for ten full years with no realization of hours and minutes as a measure for her actions. She dried her face quite as deliberately upon her starched calico apron. Then she spent a few minutes trying to catch a baby trout in her cupped palms. Never had Billy Louise succeeded in catching a baby trout in her hands; therefore she never tired of trying. Now, however, that rash promise nagged at her and would not let her enjoy the game as completely as usual. She took the wooden pail, and squatting on her heels in the wet sand, waited until a small school swam incautiously close to the bank, and scooped suddenly, with a great splash. She caught three tiny, speckled fish the length of her little finger, and she let the half-full pail rest in the shallow stream while she watched the fry swimming excitedly round and round within.
There was no great fun in that. Billy Louise could catch baby trout in a pail at home, from the waters of the Wolverine, whenever she liked. Many a time she had kept them in a big bottle until she tired of watching them, or they died because she forgot to change the water often enough. She could not get even a languid enjoyment out of them now, because she could not for a minute forget that she had promised to wash Marthy’s dishes—and Marthy always had so many dirty dishes! And Marthy’s dishpan was so greasy! Billy Louise gave a little shudder when she thought of it.
“I wish her little girl hadn’t died,” she said, her mind swinging from effect back to cause. “I could play with her. And she’d wash the dishes herself. I’m going to name my new little pig Minervy. I wish she hadn’t died. I’d show her my little pig, if Marthy’d let her come over to our place. We could both ride on old Badger; Minervy could ride behind me, and we’d go places together.” Billy Louise meditatively stirred up the baby trout with a forefinger. “We’d go up the canyon and have the caves for our play-houses. Minervy could have the secret cave away up the hill, and I’d have the other one across from it; and we’d have flags and wigwag messages like daddy tells about in the war. And we’d play the rabbits are Injuns, and the coyotes are big-Injun-chiefs sneaking down to see if the forts are watching. And whichever seen a coyote first would wigwag to the other one…” A baby trout, taking advantage of the pail tipping in the current, gave a flip over the edge and interrupted Billy Louise’s fancies. She gave the pail a tilt and spilled out the other two fish. Then she filled it as full as she could carry and started back to pay the price of her sympathy.
“I don’t see what Minervy had to go and die for!” she complained, dodging a low-hanging branch of bloom-laden lilac. “She could wash the dishes and I’d wipe ’em—and I s’pose there ain’t a clean dish-towel in the house, either! Marthy’s an awful slack housekeeper.”
Billy Louise, being a young person with a conscience—of a sort—washed the dishes, since she had given her word to do it. The dishpan was even more unpleasant than experience had foretold for her; and of Marthy’s somewhat meager supply there seemed not one clean dish in the house. The sympathy of Billy Louise therefore waned rapidly; rather, it turned in upon itself. So that by the time she felt morally free to spend the rest of the afternoon as she pleased, she was not at all sorry for Marthy for having lost Minervy; instead, she was sorry for herself for having been betrayed into rashness and for being deprived of a playmate.
“I don’t s’pose Marthy doctored her right, at all,” she considered pitilessly, as she returned down the lilac-bordered path. “If she had, I guess she wouldn’t have died. I’ll bet she never gave her a speck of sage tea, like mommie always does when I’m sick—only I ain’t ever, thank goodness. I’m just going to ask Jase if Marthy did.”
On the way to the root cellar, which was dug into the creek-bank well above high-water mark, Billy Louise debated within herself the ethics of speaking to Jase upon a forbidden subject. Jase had been Minervy’s father, and therefore knew of her existence, so that mentioning Minervy to him could not in any sense be betraying a secret. She wondered if Jase felt badly about it, as Marthy seemed to do. On the heels of that came the determination to test his emotional capacity.
At the root cellar her attention was diverted. The cellar door was fastened on the outside, with the iron hasp used to protect the store of vegetables from the weather. Jase must be gone. She was turning away when she heard him clear his throat with that peculiar little hacking, rasping noise which sounded exactly as one would expect a Jase to sound. Billy Louise puckered her eyebrows, pressed her lips together understandingly—and disapprovingly—and opened the door.
Jase, humped over a heap of sprouting potatoes, blinked up apathetically into the sudden flood of sweet, spring air and sunshine. “Why, hello, Billy Louise,”
he mumbled, his eyes brightening a bit.
“Say, you was locked in here!” Billy Louise faced him puzzled. “Did you know you was locked in?”
“Yes-s, I knowed it. Marthy, she locked the door.” Jase reached out a bony hand covered with carrot-colored hairs and picked up a shriveling potato with long, sickly sprouts proclaiming life’s persistence in perpetuating itself under adverse circumstances. He broke off the sprouts with a wipe of his dirty palm and threw the potato into a heap in the corner.
“What for?” Billy Louise demanded, watching Jase reach languidly out for another potato.
“She seen me diggin’ bait,” Jase said tonelessly. “I did think some of ketchin’ a mess of fish before I went to sproutin’ p’tatoes, but Marthy she don’t take no int’rest in nothin’ but work.”
“Are the fish biting good?” Billy Louise glanced toward the wider stream, where it showed through a gap in the alders.
“Yes-s, purty good now. I caught a nice mess the other day; but Marthy, she don’t favor my goin’ fishin’.” The lean hands of Jase moved slowly at his task. Billy Louise, watching him, wondered why he did not hurry a little and finish sooner. Still, she could not remember ever seeing Jase hurry at anything, and the Cove with its occupants was one of her very earliest memories.
“Say, I’ll dig some more bait, and then we’ll go fishing; shall we?”
“I—dunno as I better—” Jase’s hand hovered aimlessly over the potato pile. “I got quite a lot sprouted, though—and mebby—”
“I’ll lock you in till I get the bait dug,” suggested Billy Louise craftily. “And you work fast; and then I’ll let you out, and we’ll lock the door agin, so Marthy’ll think you’re in there yet.”
“You’re sure smart to think up things,” Jase admired, smiling loose-lipped behind his scraggly beard, that was fading with the years. “I dunno but what it’d serve Marthy right. She ain’t got no call to lock the door on me. She hates like sin t’ see me with a fish-pole in m’ hand—but she’s always et her share uh the messes I ketch. She ain’t a reasonable woman, Marthy ain’t. You git the bait. I’ll show Marthy who’s boss in this Cove!”
He might have encouraged himself into defying Marthy to her face, in another five minutes of complaining. But the cellar door closed upon him with a slam. Billy Louise was not interested in his opinion of Marthy; with her, opinions were valueless if not accompanied by action.
“I never thought to ask him about Minervy,” occurred to her while she was relentlessly dragging pale, fleshly fishworms from the loose black soil of Marthy’s onion bed. “But I know she was mean to Minervy. She’s awful mean to Jase—locking him up in the root cellar just ’cause he wanted to go fishing. If I was Jase I wouldn’t sprout a single old potato for her. My goodness, but she’ll be mad when she opens the cellar door and Jase ain’t in there; I—guess I’ll go home early, before Marthy finds it out.”
She really meant to do that, but the fish were hungry fish that day, and the joy of having a companion to exclaim with her over every hard tug—even though that companion was only Jase—enticed her to stay on and on, until a whiff of frying pork on the breeze that swept down the Cove warned Billy Louise of the near approach of supper-time.
“I guess mebby I might as well go back to the suller,” Jase remarked, his defiance weakening as he climbed the bank. “You come and lock the door agin, Billy Louise, and Marthy won’t know I ain’t been there all the time. She’ll think you caught the fish.” He looked at her with a weak leer of conscious cunning.
Billy Louise, groping vaguely for the sunbonnet that was dangling between her straight shoulder-blades, stared at him with wide eyes that held disillusionment and with it a contempt all the keener because it was the contempt of a child, whose judgment is merciless.
“I should thing you’d be ashamed!” she said at last, forgetting that the idea had been born in her own brain. “Cowards do things and then sneak about it. Daddy says so. I don’t care if Marthy is mad ’cause I let you out, and I don’t care if she knows we went fishing. I thought you wanted Marthy to see she ain’t so smart, locking you up in the cellar. I ain’t going to bake you a single cookie with raisings on it, like I was going to.”
“Marthy’s got a sharp tongue in ’er head,” Jase wavered, his eyes shifting from Billy Louise’s uncompromising stare.
“Daddy says when you do a thing that’s mean, do it and take your medicine,” Billy Louise retorted. “The boy of me that belongs to dad ain’t a sneak, Jase Meilke. And,” she added loftily, “the girl of me that belongs to mommie is a perfeck lady. Good day, Mr. Meilke. Thank you for a pleasant time fishing.”
Whereupon the perfect lady part switched short skirts up the path and held a tousled head high with disdain.
Jase, thus deserted, went shambling back to the cellar and fell to sprouting potatoes with what might almost be termed industry.
It pained Jase later to discover that Marthy was not interested in the open door, but in the very small heap of potatoes which he had “sprouted” that afternoon. There was other work to be done in the Cove, and there were but two pairs of hands to do it; that one pair was slow and shiftless and inefficient was bitterly accepted by Marthy, who worked from sunrise until dark to make up for the shirking of those other hands.
It was the trail experience over again, and it was an experience that dragged through the years without change or betterment. Marthy wanted to “get ahead.” Jase wanted to sit in the sun with his knees drawn up, just—I don’t know what, but I suppose he called it thinking. When he felt unusually energetic, he liked to dangle an impaled worm over a trout pool. Theoretically he also wanted to get ahead and to have a fine ranch and lots of cattle and a comfortable home. He would plan these things sometimes in an expansive mood, whereupon Marthy would stare at him with her hard, contemptuous look until Jase trailed off into mumbling complaints into his beard. He was not as able-bodied as she thought he was, he would say, with vague solemnity. Some uh these days Marthy’d see how she had driven him beyond his strength.
When one is a Marthy, however, with ambitions and a tireless energy and the persistence of a beaver, and when one listens to vague mutterings for many hard laboring years, one grows accustomed to the complainings and fails to see certain warning symptoms of which even the complainer is only vaguely aware.
She kept on working through the years, and as far as was humanly possible she kept Jase working. She did not soften, except toward Billy Louise, who rode sometimes over from her father’s ranch on the Wolverine to the flowery delights of the Cove. The place was a perfect jungle of sweetness, seven months of each year; for Marthy owned and indulged a love of beauty, even if she could not realize her dream of prosperity. Wherever was space in the house-yard for a flower or a fruit tree or a berry bush, Marthy planted one or the other. You could not see the cabin from April until the leaves fell in late October, except in a fragmentary way as you walked around it. You went in at a gate of pickets which Marthy herself had split and nailed in place; you followed a narrow, winding path through the sweet jungle—and if you were tall, you stooped now and then to pass under an apple branch. And unless you looked up at the black, lava-rock rim of the bluff which cupped this Eden incongruously, you would forget that just over the brim lay parched plain and barren mountain.
When Billy Louise was twelve, she had other ambitions than the making of cookies with “raisings” on them. She wanted to do something big, though she was hazy as to the particular nature of that big something. She tried to talk it over with Marthy, but Marthy could not seem to think beyond the Cove, except that now and then Billy Louise would suspect that her mind did travel to the desert and Minervy’s grave. Marthy’s hair was growing streaked with yellowish gray, though it never grew less unkempt and dusty looking. Her eyes were harder, if anything, except when they rested on Billy Louise.
When she was thirteen, Billy Louise rode over with a loaf of bread she had baked all by herself, and she put this problem to Marth
y:
“I’ve been thinking I’d go ahead and write poetry, Marthy—a whole book of it with pictures. But I do love to make bread—and people have to eat bread. Which would you be, Marthy; a poet, or a cook?”
Marthy looked at her a minute, lent her attention briefly to the question, and gave what she considered good advice.
“You learn how to cook, Billy Louise. Yuh don’t want to go and get notions. Your maw ain’t healthy, and your paw likes good grub. Po’try is all foolishness; there ain’t any money in it.”
“Walter Scott paid his debts writing poetry,” said Billy Louise argumentatively. She had just read all about Walter Scott in a magazine which a passing cowboy had given her; perhaps that had something to do with her new ambition.
“Mebby he did and mebby he didn’t. I’d like to see our debts paid off with po’try. It’d have to be worth a hull lot more ’n what I’d give for it.”
“Oh. Have you got debts too, Marthy?” Billy Louise at thirteen was still ready with sympathy. “Daddy’s got lots and piles of ’em. He bought some cattle and now he talks to mommie all the time about debts. Mommie wants me to go to Boise to school, next winter, to Aunt Sarah’s. And daddy says there’s debts to pay. I didn’t know you had any, Marthy.”
“Well, I have got. We bought some cattle, too—and they ain’t done ’s well ’s they might. If I had a man that was any good on earth, I could put up more hay. But I can’t git nothing outa Jase but whines. Your paw oughta send you to school, Billy Louise, even if he has got debts. I’d ’a’ sent—”
