The Root Cellar (17 page)

“You got a lot of trouble, mister,” said Susan.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said crossly. “What about you youngsters? What brings you to the river late at night like this?”

Rose told him that they were brother and sister on their way to Washington to find their older brother. She told him about the man on the train and losing their money.

“But we’re going to get it back in New York City,” she said.

“I wouldn’t make no plans to that effect,” said the soldier dryly. “What’s more, I wouldn’t hang on too hard to that notion of findin’ your brother. They’re moving soldiers out of them hospitals as fast as they can move ’em. I know. I was in one of them places for this.” He shrugged his armless shoulder. Susan paled.
Rose, somewhat shamefacedly, turned her eyes away from the empty, pinned-up sleeve.

“If that brother of yours is still alive, chances are he’s on his way home and you’re gonna miss him. You might better turn yourselves right straight around and wait for him back there.”

The soldier told them his name was Joe Haggerty, and he said he didn’t know Will, though he had been in battle with the 81st regiment. By that time the chicken was ready. Holding the bird steady with one knee, Joe cut it up with the knife that had been so murderous only a little while earlier, put the pieces on his tin plate, and passed them around.

“I never stole nothin’ before I went in the army,” Joe Haggerty said mournfully around bites of chicken. “We soon found out if we was gonna get dinner to fight on, we was gonna have to help ourselves, and now I don’t mind a bit. If folks isn’t gonna share out the work, they’re just gonna have to share out the dinner anyways. Yessir, the miserable cussed, mean-minded, penny-pinchin’….” He spat out a bone with such force that it thunked against a tree.

Joe continued to call down God’s curses on the populace, the army, the hospitals, and his wife in particular, until finally he grew tired, retreated from them to make ready for the night, and settled down near the fire, his coat
flung over him. The girls followed his example, huddling close together for warmth.

The next morning, before the sun was up, they had left the riverside and followed Joe a half mile up the hill to the highway.

“You won’t find no work nor food following the river,” he told them. “You got to follow the road. Goes to the same place, New York City. If you’d take my advice, you’d get on home. Like I said, you ain’t gonna find your brother in Washington, not alive, you ain’t.” And with that last dismal warning, he gave a half-hearted wave with his good arm and turned north.

Rose looked at Susan. Susan looked at Rose.

“It ain’t so,” said Susan firmly, and Rose, responding to her assurance, took a deep breath and said, “So what we have to do now, is just go.”

“You always say that,” Susan laughed, and in that comradely frame of mind they set off on the road to New York.

A Dollar a Day

A
t the first farmhouse they came to, while Rose waited on the road, Susan went around to the back door and knocked. She was back in a minute. “She ain’t got work,” she said.

At the next farm, it was the same, and at the next. “They mostly got young ’uns as big as us who can do all they need done,” said Susan.

“They shouldn’t have so many youngsters,” grumbled Rose. “I’m starved. My stomach hurts.”

They had been walking for almost an hour when they reached a small village, its blacksmith, general store, church, and houses centered around a green. They got themselves a drink from the well that stood on the green, and sat down on a bench opposite a bakeshop. It was still early and the shopkeepers were just opening up for the day, shaking out carpets, sweeping their steps, setting out their wares.
They watched the baker put buns and cakes in his window.

“Rose.” Susan’s face brightened. “Rose, you got money. Remember? Yesterday when you went and got lemonade and I didn’t have none. You got twenty cents. Look in your pocket.”

Rose’s stomach tightened. Her face grew hot. “I lost it,” she said quickly.

“Look in your pockets. It’s got to be there.”

“It isn’t. I lost it. I forgot to tell you. I … Susan, why are you looking at me like that?”

“I ain’t sure.”

Rose got up from the bench and took a few steps across the grass. She could feel Susan’s eyes on her back. “Oh, all right,” she said crossly, whirling around, “all right. I spent it. I spent it on something to eat when I was mad at you because you left the tickets and the money on the train.”

Susan stared at her in disbelief. Tears came to her eyes. She stood up and without a word started toward the road, her head high, her back stiff.

“Susan, wait!” Rose came up beside her.

“I don’t want to walk with you.” Susan kept a brisk pace along the road that led out of the village.

Rose fell back. She felt hated, the way she had felt the time she had overheard Sam tell his mother how ugly and disagreeable she was.
And this time she knew she deserved it. She felt worse than she had after Aunt Nan’s accident. She was ashamed. She was willing to do any kind of work, ask anybody for anything if only Susan wouldn’t walk ahead like that—so fast, so stiff and straight, so cold.
I’ve never had a friend before
, she thought, and she was suddenly very much afraid of losing Susan’s friendship. She sat down on a fallen tree and let Susan get well out of sight before she started up again.

At the first house outside the village she stopped. An old man came to the door.

“Have you got any jobs?” she asked nervously.

“You’re the second youngster come along this way in ten minutes looking for work,” said the old man sourly and closed the door in her face.

Humiliated, she gritted her teeth and marched down the road. “I don’t suppose it’s much good us coming one after the other to the same house.” The next house was big and handsome, with white pillars around a curved porch in front, its lawns closely cropped and decorated with bright flowerbeds. As Rose reached it, a man galloped up on a horse.

“You, boy, how would you like to earn five cents?” he shouted as he leaped off at the front door.

When she ran up, nodding vigorously, he handed her the reins of his horse. “He’s gentle
but he needs to be held firmly,” said the man and ran up the wide curved steps of the house.

The horse, a big dapple gray, was gentle but willful, and he wanted to eat the asters and marigolds that grew along the walk. Rose spent a back-breaking half-hour tugging on his reins, around the drive, along the road and back, until her hand was blistered and her temper was sore.

“Will and Susan can both drown in the Atlantic Ocean! And I hate you, whatever your name is,” she whispered passionately in his ear, and tugged furiously at his reins to vent her feelings.

He gave a startled whinny and looked around at her. She was sure he was laughing. She grabbed the reins more tightly, but before she could give him the shake she intended, the man came out of the house.

Seeing her grim, red face and the horse craning his neck toward the flowers again, the man laughed heartily. He was a tall, thin man with a thin nondescript face, but when he laughed he whooped and bellowed and cackled with such pleasure that he became quite astonishing to watch, and Rose could not help laughing, too.

“He’s got the soul of a goat, that Hermes,” he said, “the soul of a goat. You’re fortunate he didn’t eat your shirt—eat your shirt, upon my word, you’re fortunate. You’re a good lad.” He
gave her ten cents and, with one quick leap, mounted his horse.

“Thank you,” said Rose weakly. “Thank you very much.”

The man looked down at her in surprise.

“You don’t come from around here,” he said.

“I come from Canada.”

“You’re a long way from home, little Canuck, God bless.” And off he rode.

Rose clutched the precious ten-cent piece in the hand that wasn’t blistered and raced down the road to find Susan.

“What if I can’t find her?” she whispered as she ran. “What if she’s working in some house? What if she decided to go home?”

“Rose.” Susan was sitting on a rail fence that edged a field beside the road.

Rose stopped. She walked over and held out the ten cents. “I owe you ten more,” she said awkwardly.

Susan didn’t take the money. “It ain’t so much the money, Rose. It’s just I didn’t know you was mean.”

Rose flushed from her toes to her scalp. She didn’t say anything. A squirrel scampered up a nearby chestnut tree, chattering.

“Come on,” said Susan shortly, climbing down from the fence. “We got to get us something to eat.”

Rose shook her head. “It’s your money. I don’t want anything.”

“Who’s going to carry you when you’re so hungry you faint?”

“You can leave me.”

“Rose, we got troubles enough without you should start feeling sorry for yourself. Now pick up and come on.”

Feeling both hated and hateful, Rose followed Susan down the road. At the next farmhouse they came to, their ten cents bought them a lot more than ten cents had bought at the railroad station in Albany. They ate eggs and bread and butter and drank a glass of milk each. The woman watched them suspiciously while they ate and told them they could wash at her well for another ten cents.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” said Susan.

Past farms and meadows, across streams, through three small villages they tramped and there was no work. They did not speak. Susan kept up a steady pace until Rose was so tired and footsore, so totally wretched, that she sat down at the side of the road and watched, without feeling, as a large green and black garter snake slithered away through the grass with a frog in its mouth. She put her head down on her knees and closed her eyes. After a time she felt Susan come and sit down beside her.

“It’s an awful hot place t’sit.”

“I don’t care.”

They said nothing more for a few minutes. It was past noon. The sun blazed down on them through a gray haze. Few birds sang in the noon heat. Only the cicadas with their fretful buzzing brought any sign of life to the wilting landscape. Traffic on the road was desultory. Now and then a buggy rattled by or a farmer’s wagon. Sometimes a horseman clop-clopped along. In the distance the train whistle tooted.

“We got to get going,” said Susan, rising to her feet. “The last milepost said we come sixteen mile from Albany, and if your calculation is right we got a long ways to go.”

Rose pushed her hands through her dusty, dirty hair, which was by this time a dull brown color and sticking out all over her head. She looked sideways at Susan.

“I’m sorry about the money,” she said.

“I expect you are,” said Susan and that, Rose felt sure, was all the word she was going to get out of Susan on that subject.

That afternoon they were lucky. They came to the village of Paiseley around five o’clock. It was a village very like the others they had passed through, with a cluster of houses and stores around a green on which stood the village well and a small bandstand. In addition, stretched out across the green, was a long table made up of several tables end to end, with
places set for all the people in the village.

A band was tuning up in the bandstand. The green was full of people—women setting the table with all kinds of pickles and relishes, platters of cold chicken and beef, salads, and fruits; small children running around, shouting, or being shouted orders by their mothers. “Here, you, Johnny, you take this paper and swat them flies!” “Alice, you run across t’Misses VanArpen ’n tell her we’re a mite short on butter!” And the men—young and old, soldiers in uniform—were gathered on the green in knots, talking and laughing. There was a great feeling of joy and excitement which did as much to pick up the girls’ tired spirits as did the sight of all the food.

“Can we help?” Susan asked an old man, who was sitting at the edge of the village green and seemed to be organizing the celebrations, waving his stick and rattling off directions.

“You passing through? Where’re you from? Where’re you headed, girl?”

Susan told him about Will. The old man looked at them both intently. “Wait here,” he said and, standing up carefully, went into a nearby house. He came back with a square of blue and white checked cloth in his hand. He went along the full length of the table, putting meat and cheese and buns and cakes into the square of cloth. “The vegetables is kind of skinny
on account of them locusts,” he said. Then he slowly and methodically tied the four corners of the cloth together and handed it to Rose.

“Here, young feller, you carry this, and never let anyone say that James Campbell ain’t a thankful man nor that the village of Paiseley don’t know how to celebrate. We’re celebrating the return of our boys, and may the good Lord bring your soldier home safe as he brung mine.” He thrust the bundle of food into Rose’s hand and turned back to fussing over how the preparations were coming along.

“Thanks, mister,” said Susan. “God bless you.”

The little scene had gathered a small audience, which so embarrassed Rose that she forgot to say thank you.

Once out of sight of the village, Rose was all for sitting down beside the road and eating the food right there, but Susan said, “No, this ain’t the place to stop.” Almost a mile and a half later they came to a little wood where they found a stream, and there Susan stopped. Gratefully they took off their shoes and stockings and sat with their feet in the stream while they ate their way through all but two pieces of cheese and two buns. “We got to save them for breakfast,” said Susan. Reluctantly Rose agreed and they settled into a silence which, although not as companionable as it might have been,
was easier than anything they had achieved since morning.