Belles on Their Toes (17 page)

The soil was fairly good, but the Department of Agriculture bulletins were unanimous in agreeing that fertilizer should be added for best results. When Martha telephoned the seed store to price fertilizer, she was appalled by the cost. She broke the news to us out in the garden, where Tom was watering and the rest of us were surveying our work and digging up an occasional seed to see if it had begun to sprout.

“It’d cost $10—maybe more—to do the job right,” Martha said gloomily. “We want to surprise Mother, but not with any bill for $10.”

Tom’s hands were blistered and his back was stiff. His original enthusiasm had waned, but he was determined that his work wasn’t going to be wasted.

“You should of thought about the $10 before you half kilt me,” he told Martha angrily. “Whatever it is, we want best results.”

“It’s fertilizer,” Martha explained. “They want $10 for the commercial kind and $12 for manure.”

“They want $12 for
that
?” Tom shouted. “Are they crazy? Don’t let them cheat you!”

“That’s what I told them,” Martha agreed. “I told them not to think I was born yesterday.”

“I’ll get you all of that stuff you want,” Tom promised. “And it ain’t going to cost you a cent.”

Martha said that was grand, but Ernestine wasn’t sure Mother would approve.

“We don’t want you to spend your money for it,” she told Tom. “Maybe we can get along just as well without it.”

“Don’t worry about me, Doochess,” Tom cackled. “I wasn’t born yesterday, neither. But I got friends and I know where to get it wholesale.”

Later that afternoon, he nailed a wooden box onto the express wagon, got three snow shovels out of the garage, and summoned Frank and Bill. They went out the back way, so the girls wouldn’t see them, and started to tour the neighborhood. Milk and ice still were delivered from horse-drawn wagons, and some of the streets near our house were used as bridle paths.

No sparrow ever swooped down on what the trio was looking for, with more delight than did Tom.

“Henc, henc,” he snorted while he shoveled. “I got friends all right. Some of my best friends is horses.”

“Twelve dollars!” Frank said scornfully. “We ought to go into the business.”

“I never thought I’d live to see the day when they sold it for money,” Tom nodded. “Pull the wagon over closer, Billy. My back is broke from that hoeing.”

The neighborhood was a fashionable one, and most of the residents knew us or Mother. Some of them waved from porches or opened windows, as Tom and the two boys paraded along the street with shovels on their shoulders and eyes optimistically peeled on the roadway.

A few chauffeurs wandered down their drive-ways for a closer look, but they were fortunately aware of Tom’s reputation for belligerence, and they avoided trouble. None of them said any more than hello.

Tom seemed disappointed that he had no hecklers.

“Go ahead,” he taunted one chauffeur, who must have been thirty years younger and eighty pounds heavier than he. “Why don’t you ast me what we’re doing?”

“Take it easy, Tom,” the chauffeur humored him. “You’re too tough for me. I’m not opening my mouth.”

“You’d better not, neither, said Tom, looking significantly into the cart. “When I got through with you, you wouldn’t dast to close it.”

It took a couple of hours to fill the box. Tom and the boys brought the wagon home and dumped it behind the back fence, where the pile was out of sight.

“We’ll go out every afternoon,” Tom told Frank and Bill, “as long as you behave yourself. If you ain’t good, I’m going to leave you home.”

The two boys, who had enjoyed themselves as much as Tom, promised they’d be good.

“Don’t say nothing to the girls,” Tom warned. “I think Martha would take it all right. But the Doochess would say it hurt her social standin’.”

The boys got home in the afternoons ahead of the high school girls, and thus could get away without being noticed. It took a good deal longer the second day to fill the box, because they were covering the same territory. On subsequent days, they were forced to go farther and farther away from home. But the pile behind the fence grew steadily. And even after they knew the pile was high enough, they found excuses to go after more.

“We might need some for next year,” Tom pointed out. “And every year there is fewer horses.”

They soon found out which were the most productive streets, and how many days they should allow to elapse before going back over a street. Sometimes there’d be an argument about whether it would pay to go around a certain block, and the person who had advocated the detour would either crow or eat crow, depending on the pickings.

“Maybe we did go up there yesterday,” Tom would say. “But I see sparrers. And where sparrers is, is what we’re looking for.”

Tom was invariably right in selecting the streets. He may have had some sort of sixth sense. Or, as Frank and Bill suspected, he may have cased the neighborhood during the morning, while they were in school, so as to impress them with his infallibility. At any rate, he swore he saw birds when neither of them did, and he could predict with exactness what would be found around a curve in the street.

The sport—because that’s what they considered it—might have continued for weeks, if they hadn’t bumped into Ernestine. They had carefully avoided the streets she and Martha took coming home from school. But on that particular afternoon, Ernestine had been given a ride part of the way home, and was off her accustomed path. She was walking with a fellow.

The boys and Tom didn’t see her approaching. Bill had maneuvered the express wagon into position, and Tom and Frank were shoveling.

“Henc, henc,” Tom was chuckling. “I tole you I seen sparrers. You can’t fool old eagle eye. This is always a good place. This is an every day street from now on.”

“That’s eleven for Tom, and only five for us,” Bill said enviously. “He can spot it a mile away.”

“I’m the champeen,” Tom crowed. “Ain’t no doubt about that. It’s the biggest one today, too. Those little ones of yours we might as well of throwed back.”

He looked up then and saw Ernestine.

“Duck,” he warned, squatting behind the cart, “or she’ll have us beheadet when she gets us back to the palace.”

Ernestine’s friend was intent in a conversation. Frank and Bill had never seen him before, and he wasn’t paying any attention to them. Ernestine had seen them and was watching them out of the corner of her eye. She was blushing and furious. She held her head high, and she tried to make believe she was listening to every word of the conversation.

Frank and Bill turned their backs, because they didn’t want to embarrass her any more than they already had. Tom, peeking guiltily from behind the cart, started mumbling about how the robbers at the seed store wanted to charge $12.

Ernestine passed, without her friend’s being aware that she knew them. But as she walked down the street, she didn’t feel right about it. No matter what they were doing, they were kith and kin. It was a cheap thing to pretend not to know them. And, after all, they were out collecting what they were collecting to save the family money.

“Just a second,” she told her friend. “Wait up.”

She turned and walked back to the wagon, and looked into it.

“Hello, Frank,” she said loudly. “Hello, Bill. Hello, Tom.”

They said hello, Ernestine.

“That’s a fine load,” she told them. “I think you’d better take it home, now.”

They said they were glad she liked it, and that they were headed home.

Ernestine rejoined her friend, who hadn’t seemed to be paying much attention.

“They’re my brothers,” she said defensively. “At least the two boys are. We’re going to have a vegetable garden.”

“That stuff will make it grow,” he nodded. “We use it on our lawn.”

“It sure will,” Ernestine agreed.

“It’s much better than the commercial kind.”

“It sure is,” she nodded.

“You might tell them we passed some of it back there a ways. Didn’t you notice?”

“I don’t think so,” said Ernestine. “Anyway, they’ve got plenty of it already.”

“It seems a shame to miss it. It gets more expensive every year.”

Ernestine and her friend continued down the street. She wondered how romance was supposed to flourish for any member of a family with so many younger brothers. She wondered why, with all the topics of conversation in the world to choose from, they had to end up on that one.

BEFORE MOTHER CAME HOME
from the hospital, Ernestine warned the boys not to mention how they got the fertilizer. She thought Mother had enough on her mind without worrying about the fact that almost every one of her friends in town must have seen Frank and Bill making the rounds with their cart.

But the soil did look fine and rich, and it was one of the first things Mother noticed.

“Where in the world did you get that lovely fertilizer?” she asked. “I didn’t see any check stub made out for that.”

“It’s a long story,” said Ernestine. “It seems that Tom has certain friends.”

“I guess you’d better not tell me,” Mother smiled. “I have an idea it’s one of those things that the less I know about, the better I’ll feel.”

“Have you ever heard of Pegasus?” Ernestine asked brightly. “Well, once upon a time …”

“Never mind, dear,” Mother interrupted. “I saw the box on the express wagon.”

“It won’t happen again,” Ernestine promised. “And you ought to see all that’s left over, out by the back fence.”

Mother thought the garden was a wonderful idea. The seeds started to come up before long. The jobs of weeding and cultivating were added by Ernestine and Martha to our work assignment charts, and we were fairly faithful about them.

We may not have got best results because, as the agriculture bulletins pointed out, manure is supposed to be aged before it is applied as fertilizer. But we did, at least, get good results. There were corn, beans, peas, carrots, tomatoes, beets, kale, and lettuce. The girls canned some of them for winter use.

Later we got a dozen hens, and that cut expenses some more, and helped solve the fertilization problem for future years. Fred and Dan thought it would solve the problem altogether if we should buy a pony, but the older ones reluctantly vetoed that idea.

Tom named and made pets of the hens, and they’d follow him around the yard and jump up and perch on his finger. When their laying lagged, he’d make a show of spiking their mash with Quinine Remedy. The results after such dosings were spectacular. The poultry bulletins, which we also had written for, said the most you could expect from a dozen hens was eight or ten eggs a day. Sometimes we’d find twenty-five or thirty eggs in the nests when we got home from school.

Sometimes, too, we’d see empty, store-bought egg containers poking out from under old newspapers in the kitchen wastebasket. We didn’t want to spoil Tom’s joke. When he wasn’t looking, we pushed them down out of sight.

16.
Then There Were Ten

A
NNE FELL IN LOVE
with a doctor at the University of Michigan and this time it was the real thing. She wrote Mother that she had an engagement ring, and that her fiancé expected to go into practice soon. He was a few years older than she. He had to work pretty hard, and she didn’t have a chance to see as much of him as either of them would like.

Anne didn’t say so, but she wasn’t interested in college any more. She was interested only in getting married. But she felt she had obligations to the family, and she didn’t want to do anything that would upset Mother.

She was moody and nervous when she returned home for spring vacation. She spent a good deal of time in her room, writing special delivery letters. And she didn’t look up any of her friends in Montclair.

Mother’s nose had turned out as handsomely as she had predicted, and she was back, full-time, on the grindstone again. But now she was concerned about Anne, who didn’t seem to want to confide in anyone.

“I know what it’s like,” Mother said one night, dropping down beside Anne on her bed. “Goodness knows I went through the same thing when I was engaged to your father. I was in California and he was three thousand miles away in Boston.”

“No one knows what it’s like,” Anne said hopelessly. “Nothing was keeping you from getting married.”

“Well, I was some older than you,” Mother admitted. “I had already graduated from college. But you’ve only got a little more than a year to go.”

“We’d like to get married right away,” Anne whispered. She threw her arms around Mother. “Oh, Mother, what am I going to do?”

“It’ll work out all right,” Mother promised.

“It sounds selfish, I know that,” Anne said. “But that’s what we’d like—to get married right away.”

“It doesn’t sound selfish at all,” Mother told her. “It sounds like the most natural thing in the world. If you didn’t feel that way, I’d know you’d picked the wrong man. But I think it would be better for you to wait a while, dear.”

“I know it,” Anne burst into tears. “I know you’ll need me here to help run the house until the younger children are grown.”

“Lie down, dear, and let me rub your back.”

“I know it, and he knows it,” Anne sobbed. “We know it’s out of the question.”

“Why the children won’t be grown for fifteen years,” Mother said. “You don’t think I mean for you to wait that long! I don’t need you to help run the house. I just want you to wait until you finish college.”

“But it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be.”

“Of course it would be right. Ernestine helps run the house now, just as well as you used to. And Martha will do just as well as either of you—even better, I suspect—when Ernestine goes off to Smith this autumn.”

“Go ahead and rub,” said Anne, lying on her stomach and drying her eyes on the pillowcase.

“You don’t think I want a bunch of spinsters around the house, scolding me because the dusting isn’t done properly, do you?” Mother asked, rubbing.

“You really don’t?”

“And you don’t think I want to support you forever, do you?” Mother teased.

“Well, naturally, I thought you’d want me to get a job.”