One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

a large feather bed which came plumping through the trap door. A moment later Mahailey herself descended backwards, holding to the rungs with one hand, and in the other arm carrying her quilts.

“Why, Mahailey,” gasped Mrs. Wheeler. “It’s not winter yet; whatever are you getting your bed for?”

“I’m just a-goin’ to lay on my fedder bed,” she broke out, “or direc’ly I won’t have none. I ain’t a-goin’ to have Mr. Ralph carryin’ off my quilts my mudder pieced fur me.”

Mrs. Wheeler tried to reason with her, but the old woman took up her bed in her arms and staggered down the hall with it, muttering and tossing her head like a horse in fly-time.

That afternoon Ralph brought a barrel and a bundle of straw into the kitchen and told Mahailey to carry up preserves and canned fruit, and he would pack them. She went obediently to the cellar, and Ralph took off his coat and began to line the barrel with straw. He was some time in doing this, but still Mahailey had not returned. He went to the head of the stairs and whistled.

“I’m a-comin’, Mr. Ralph, I’m a-comin’! Don’t hurry me, I don’t want to break nothin’.”

Ralph waited a few minutes. “What are you doing down there, Mahailey?” he fumed. “I could have emptied the whole cellar by this time. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.”

“I’m a-comin’. You’d git yourself all dusty down here.” She came breathlessly up the stairs, carrying a hamper basket full of jars, her hands and face streaked with black.

“Well, I should say it is dusty!” Ralph snorted. “You might clean your fruit closet once in awhile, you know, Mahailey. You ought to see how Mrs. Dawson keeps hers. Now, let’s see.” He sorted the jars on the table. “Take back the grape jelly. If there’s anything I hate, it’s grape jelly. I know you have lots of it, but you can’t work it off on me. And when you come up, don’t forget the pickled peaches. I told you particularly, the pickled peaches!”

“We ain’t got no pickled peaches.” Mahailey stood by the cellar door, holding a corner of her apron up to her chin, with a queer, animal look of stubbornness in her face.

“No pickled peaches? What nonsense, Mahailey! I saw you making them here, only a few weeks ago.”

“I know you did, Mr. Ralph, but they ain’t none now. I didn’t have no luck with my peaches this year. I must ’a’ let the air git at ’em. They all worked on me, an’ I had to throw ’em out.”

Ralph was thoroughly annoyed. “I never heard of such a thing, Mahailey! You get more careless every year. Think of wasting all that fruit and sugar! Does mother know?”

Mahailey’s low brow clouded. “I reckon she does. I don’t wase your mudder’s sugar. I never did wase nothin’,” she muttered. Her speech became queerer than ever when she was angry.

Ralph dashed down the cellar stairs, lit a lantern, and searched the fruit closet. Sure enough, there were no pickled peaches. When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look that is in a chained coyote’s eyes when a boy is showing him off to visitors and saying he wouldn’t run away if he could.

“Go on with your work,” Ralph snapped. “Don’t stand there watching me!”

That evening Claude was sitting on the windmill platform, down by the barn, after a hard day’s work ploughing for winter wheat. He was solacing himself with his pipe. No matter how much she loved him, or how sorry she felt for him, his mother could never bring herself to tell him he might smoke in the house. Lights were shining from the upstairs rooms on the hill, and through the open windows sounded the singing snarl of a phonograph. A figure came stealing down the path. He knew by her low, padding step that it was Mahailey, with her apron thrown over her head. She came up to him and touched him on the shoulder in a way which meant that what she had to say was confidential.

“Mr. Claude, Mr. Ralph’s done packed up a barr’l of your mudder’s jelly an’ pickles to take out there.”

“That’s all right, Mahailey. Mr. Wested was a widower, and I guess there wasn’t anything of that sort put up at his place.”

She hesitated and bent lower. “He asked me fur them pickled peaches I made fur you, but I didn’t give him none. I hid ’em all in my old cookstove we done put down cellar when Mr. Ralph bought the new one. I didn’t give him your mudder’s new preserves, nudder. I give him the old last year’s stuff we had left over, and now you an’ your mudder’ll have plenty.” Claude laughed. “Oh, I don’t care if Ralph takes all the fruit on the place, Mahailey!”

She shrank back a little, saying confusedly, “No, I know you don’t, Mr. Claude. I know you don’t.”

“I surely ought not to take it out on her,” Claude thought, when he saw her disappointment. He rose and patted her on the back. “That’s all right, Mahailey. Thank you for saving the peaches, anyhow.”

She shook her finger at him. “Don’t you let on!”

He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path up the hill.

XIV

Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August, and Mr. Wheeler wrote back that late in the fall he meant to ship a carload of grass steers to the home farm to be fattened during the winter. This, Claude saw, would mean a need for fodder. There was a fifty-acre corn field west of the creek⁠—just on the skyline when one looked out from the west windows of the house. Claude decided to put this field into winter wheat, and early in September he began to cut and bind the corn that stood upon it for fodder. As soon as the corn was gathered, he would plough up the