Guestward Ho! (12 page)

But now all of our guests were gone. Having once complained about a houseful of guests and ho help, I was
now complaining even more bitterly about having a houseful of help and no guests.

James B. Smith—he seemed to have no shorter appel
lation and always referred to himself as "James B. Smith,
Ma'am"; I never asked what the B was for, but I
think
I
know—was feeding us well and economically, but every
time I looked at the deficit book, my blood ran cold.

"But, I tell you, Barbara," Bill said, frowning at my
frown, "these kids don't
cost
anything."

"Maybe you call the aggregate five hundred dollars a
month we're paying them nothing, in addition to a cook
and a cook's absent wife and a wrangler. But
I
call it
something, and subtracted from the big round zero we're
taking in every day it makes for quite a pretty deficit. If we don't get some guests for all the employees to take care of, I'll go stark, raving mad!"

And I wasn't the only one. Our overabundant but
underworked staff was getting a little odd, too, what with
twenty-four hours a day to spend and not a single guest
to spend them on. I will say that our amateur help—Nan and Sue and Dick—managed to keep busy and out of
mischief, and during subsequent summers we discovered that high school and college kids really do make nicer,
brighter, politer employees than those hard and embit
tered old professionals. But the old pros, Curly and James
B. Smith, were just
itching
for trouble.

James B. Smith was the first to crack. I was awakened
at six one morning by the sound of some tinny blues being played very badly on the piano. "Do you hear music?" I muttered to Bill.

"Certainly riot," he groaned.

"Then what's that noise?"

"It's noise, but it isn't music," Bill said, and rolled over.

"Well, it might be John Cage or Arnold Schönberg or someone
very
modern and atonal," I mused. I was getting
interested by this time. "But then, we might have left the
radio on or . . ." My music appreciation lecture was cut
short by a terrible crash of chords and the distinct sound of glass breaking.

That settled it. I got up and marched into the lounge,
where I found James B. Smith, as drunk as a billy goat,
playing wistfully to a captive audience of Nan and Sue,
who sat there with great big eyes and tight little set faces. James B. Smith, it seemed, had got them up at
four in the morning by telling them that there were secret
guests in the house—pixyish little guesties that Miz Babs and Mister Bill didn't know anything about. Mystified and
half asleep, the girls had dressed and come over to the main house, only to be faced by a two-hour blues con
cert I could have played better with my left foot, and no
guests whatsoever.

The poor girls had made a valiant effort to silence
James B. Smith—or at least to turn his volume down so
low that Bill and I wouldn't hear him—and coerce him
into going back to bed to sleep it off. But every time they
tried to lock the piano and nudge our cook out of the
room, he became twice as unruly and showed his mild
displeasure by smashing a vase. So poor Nan and Sue
had stuck it out for two long hours until the noise had routed me out of bed as mad as a wet hen.

When he saw me, he launched into a long, loud eight-to-the-bar concerto of his own composition, I believe, and
kept roaring that his wife was due to arrive that day and
how much he loved that no-good woman. Now it just so
happens my antisocial or Blue Period occurs every morning before I've had coffee, and this morning was no excep
tion. "You listen to me, James B. Smith," I began
wearily, but I never got a chance to say anything further.
Bill came bounding-in, a tower of fury in gray pajamas.
"Out!" Bill roared. "Out! Out!
Out!"

If you think
I'm
testy in the mornings, you should see
my mate!

"Mister Bill, I'm . . ." James B. Smith started.

"You're drunk, that's what you are," Bill bellowed. "You're drunk and you're also finished. Start packing!"

"But Mister Bill, I was just celebrating because my wife is comin'."

"Fine. She won't even have to get off the bus. You can
celebrate together all the way back to Albuquerque. You're finished here!" With that, Bill pounded back to
bed, his bare feet thundering on the floor. I sent the girls
back to their rooms and urged James B. Smith to get a
little rest, too. So we all slept off his big evening.

We put him on the noon bus, just as his wife was getting off it. They didn't seem in the least glad to see
each other, and Bill was feeling a little crestfallen, too,
since James B. Smith was the first employee he had ever really fired in anger. James B. Smith gave us a sad little
wave of the hand as the bus started off, and we thought
we had seen the last of him. How very wrong we were!

The next troublemaker was also a cook, and her name
was Delphine.

Delphine came with excellent references. (I've become
very cynical about cooks' references; as a rule, the better
they are, the more anxious the former employers have
been to get rid of them.) Her two or three dozen former
mistresses said, to a woman, that Delphine was sober,
settled, pious, and marvelous with chicken. What they
didn't say was that Delphine was also crazy, a religious
fanatic, noisy, and unable to cook anything
except
chicken.

During the few days she was with us we had chicken
salad, chicken pot pie, chicken fricassee, chicken cro
quettes, roast chicken, fried chicken, smothered chicken,
coq au vin, chicken stew, broiled chicken, and every
other form of chicken you care to mention until the men were growing wan and pale for lack of red meat.

Delphine was also a saint in the Happiness Church—a sect I had never heard of before or, happily, since—and she took that far more seriously than her cooking.
She even brought along a tinny phonograph with a re
markably limited collection of Happiness Church hymns,
which she played steadily and
loudly
from six in the
morning until eleven at night. My Bill has a mechanical
bent of sorts in that he can break almost any motor-
driven device permanently in less time than it takes to tell
about it. On the third day of nonstop hymn playing, Del
phine's phonograph developed an added squeak that made
every note sound like fingernails on a blackboard and
I spent the day in perpetual goose flesh until Delphine
prevailed upon Bill to do a little deep surgery.

"Mistah Bill," she whined, "my grammyphone is bust.
Maybe you'd take a look at it for me?"

"Well, Delphine," Bill began, "I'm not sure that I can . . ."

"Of
course
he'll fix it, Delphine," I said, anticipating
the blessed silence that would be mine as soon as our boy
mechanic got to work. "Go
ahead,
Bill."

Tongue between his teeth, Bill got seriously to work on the
phonograph and, as I had expected, the evil machine wa
s rendered utterly soundless within fifteen minutes.

Delphine felt terrible. The rest of us felt wonderful. I
sat down with a good book and looked forward to a long,
lovely day of peace and quiet. But did I get it? I did
not. Within half an hour Delphine had triumphed over
tragedy and the air was thick with Delphine's unbeautifu
l voice singing the dismal repertoire of hymns and the
odor of chicken frying.

Nor were hymns and chicken Delphine's only shortcomings. Not being a student of comparative religions, I
don't know the exact precepts of the Happiness Church,
but Saint Delphine had some notions about the sexual
relationships of unmarried boys and girls that seemed
awfully advanced to one of my simple Presbyterian up
bringing.

Delphine felt that young people were put on earth to
pleasure one another, with or without benefit of clergy.
And so every morning while she fed Nan and Sue and
Dick and Curly in the kitchen, she urged the girls to play up to the boys, to wait on them hand and foot, all to the
accompaniment of some of Delphine's more aphrodisiac
Happiness Church hymns. Curly loved it, naturally. Dick
was embarrassed, naturally. And the girls were perfectly
furious—even more naturally.

Finally Nan and Sue came to me and complained. In
any other circumstances I might have been amused by the
ludicrous incongruity of the situation. But since I func
tioned not only as employer but also as chaperone to Nan
and Sue and Dick, the news came to me as something
of a shock. If there was one duty I did not plan to under
take, it was writing a polite note to some genteel mother
beginning:

Dear Madam:

It may interest you to know that your daughter was mar
ried to our imbecilic wrangler, Curly, Wednesday last at a
quiet Happiness Church ceremony. The bride—radiant in shades of blue—was attended by our cook, Saint Delphine,
etc.

And besides being responsible for the well-being of the kids, I wasn't in the least anxious for either of my
nice young girls to get involved with—or even interested
in—a dope like Curly. So I told Delphine in no uncertain
terms to stop her advice to the unlovelorn and to start cooking a ham, a steak, a haunch of venison—
anything
except chicken—for dinner.

Delphine was unable to follow either of my instructions and, armed with phonograph, records, hymn book, and religious tracts, she left us, admitting that she didn't
do our kind of cooking so well, but she sure could cook
chicken. She sure could. The minute she was gone I tucked up my sleeves, tossed a rib roast into the oven,
and served it almost bleeding raw. We all loved it.

Saint Delphine was replaced by another couple who
actually lasted out the
whole
summer! He did the cook
ing, she helped out generally, they had two children, two
dogs, and one cat. That meant that there were ten of us—
not counting livestock—to feed at each meal, and still
not a single paying guest! But we were booked solidly for the remainder of June and all of July and August,
so I felt that Bill and I could endure the idleness and the
loneliness and the expense for a few more days if only the staff could behave its collective self.

But do you think such a miracle could possibly come to pass? Not on your tintype!

Curly cracked.

We had all gone to the local drive-in movie one night, leaving Curly and Dick in charge of the ranch. When we
returned the place was in darkness and everything
seemed
in order. So far so good. Since it was after eleven,
we naturally assumed that both Curly and Dick had gone
to bed, which was just what we were dying to do.

I was brushing my teeth as noisily as ever when Bill
rapped on the bathroom door.

"Globble, globble?" I said through the foam and bristles.

"Barbara, don't you hear horses galloping?" Bill said.
I couldn't have been more irritated. Taking the tooth
brush out of my mouth and sending a fine spray into the
washbasin, I glared at the closed door and said: "Of
course
I do. It's the Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane. Now go to bed and I promise to call the psychiatrist first
thing in the morning."

"No, Barbara," Bill said. "Turn off the water and listen."

Well, anything for peace. "Very well," I said, twisting
the handle of the faucet. "Just to show you that you're
fancying things I'll . . ." Then I stopped. There it was, just as plain and as eerie as a radio sound effect-
hoofs on the driveway. I snapped off the bathroom light
and peered through the window. Two horses galloped up
the driveway and headed off toward the corral. From the
flamboyant, overly-showy style of one of the riders—which
was even more flamboyant and more overly-showy that
night—I was certain one of them was Curly.

"It's only Curly and Dick, probably," I said to Bill.

"Damn that Curly," Bill growled, "I
told
him he was
in charge, but that doesn't mean galloping over the coun
tryside in the dead of night and . . ."

"Oh, well, don't worry," I said, getting into bed. "Nothing's missing."

How wrong I was. In less than five minutes it was pain
fully evident that a great deal was missing—and all of it liquor.

The two boys lurched and staggered toward the bunk-house in such a fashion as to leave little question, in even
the most charitably disposed, as to what the true trouble
was. They were higher than kites, and Bill, feeling not
in the least charitable at the moment, was out for blood.