To Make My Bread (32 page)

“Do you think the boy was bad hurt?” he asked.

“His eyelids were fluttering.”

“Was the blood still flowing?”

“I think so.”

“Then he wasn't dead.” Granpap thought a little. “Basil's working in the town,” he said, as if he regretted telling this. “He's living with Preacher Warren, who's got the church in there. I talked to Basil one morning. He works in the cotton warehouse by the station. I don't know what Basil would do for his folks. This much I know. All the high-ups go to Preacher Warren's church. So the superintendent must go there. You go to the station and see Basil and get him t' ask Preacher Warren to speak to the superintendent.”

Then he added, “I'll see Basil myself and ask him this morning if I can. Now ye go right back to Emma. She's probably plumb crazy by now a-worrying over ye.”

John had to go back.

During those three days Emma had very little sleep. The first night none of them knew why the boy did not come home. Emma had to go to work, but Frank went up and down the road for miles and called out. He came in about ten and went out again. There was no sign.

The second day Bonnie came from school with the whole story. John had fought with the superintendent's son and had nearly killed him. Not exactly that, for Albert was back at school that day with his head bandaged. But the teacher sent word to Emma that John must apologize to Albert, or take a whipping if he wanted to come back.

That morning when John walked into the kitchen, Emma stood by the stove and looked at him. She could not move. He was so pale she wanted to cry.

“Why, John,” she said, and they were not the words she wanted to say, “look how you've torn your clothes.” John did not look at her. “My belly's plumb empty,” he said and sat down on a chair, because he was weak.

She gave him food, and after eating he went off to sleep on the chair. She got him into bed, first stripping off his jeans to see if he was hurt anywhere. In between looking after Ora's young she went in to look at him. Now he was growing up he looked like Kirk. She went to the front room and got Kirk's picture from the Bible and compared them. But the picture was not as like Kirk as John was, lying in the bed with the hair back from his forehead.

Emma could not persuade John that he must go back. He would neither apologize to Albert nor take a whipping. She couldn't get it out of her mind that he was keeping something back. He left it that Albert had fought him and he had fought back. And he seemed to feel himself in the right. But she wanted him to have the schooling.

“We've got to do what the higher-ups say,” she told him. “Down here hit's what they say that counts.”

It didn't matter to John. He would not go back.

Whether Granpap saw Basil and arranged matters, no one knew. On the day after John returned Bonnie came back with word from the teacher. There was a note that Emma was to send back which said that Emma had punished John to teach him not to fight. Bonnie signed Emma's name at the bottom as she did on the reports, and Emma made her cross on the paper. The next day John carried the note to the teacher. Emma had not punished her son. She felt that telling a lie was against the teaching of a church. But she would not give her boy a hiding for something he had a right to do. If the higher-ups demanded a lie she was willing to give them what they wanted, if it meant that John could go back.

To his surprise John found little trouble at school. Everyone knew by this time that he had got his man and gone up into the hills to hide like an outlaw. Because the boys had not dared to tell what they had done to him, John had the best of it. Soon most people forgot. But there was a feeling left with those who kept on living in the village that John McClure was a wild boy and one not easily frightened or fought down.

T
HE
mill sat over them like an old hen and clucked to her chickens every day. In the morning she said, “Get up, get up.” In the day she said, “Eat, eat,” and at night, “Go home, go home.” But to Emma, working all night, the mill said other things.

There was a story the teacher told the young ones at school, and Bonnie, playing teacher, told it over to the children at home. “And the ogre said, ‘I'll grind your bones to make my bread, ” At first the throb of the mill had been like the throb of a big heart beating for the good of those who worked under the roof, for it gave hope of desires to be fulfilled. A woman, one of the weavers, said to Ora and Emma one lunch hour during the summer, “The weave room has a sound different from the other rooms. It's like the sound of sinners' teeth grinding in hell.”

Now to Emma the throb of a heart had changed. She was feeling the grind of teeth. The mill crunched up and down—“I'll grind your bones to make my bread.”

Walking before the frames in the night in her stocking feet with her head tied up to keep the lint out, Emma thought about the mill and considered where her work there was taking her. She thought of all she had promised herself. Now Granpap was up in the hills, and Basil was in the town, maybe, because he had become educated, getting the things that she had planned to get for all of them. At first when she talked to John she had thought more of him because he had been lost for three days, and less of what he said of Granpap and Basil. Now it came to her that Basil had been living in town for some time and had not come for a visit to his folks. Granpap had gone back to the hills, but sent word that he would come again, and he remembered her with two dollars.

The money was at home, and in the night Emma planned the different ways in which she might spend it. Of course it should have been spent for necessary things, but she decided to make this something for herself. It made the walking easier, when she planned what to buy. In this way she could escape from her sore feet and the night tiredness.

That Saturday afternoon she spoke to Ora, when Ora had come from work and they were settled around the fire with the pleasant settling that comes from the knowledge of a day and a half of no mill ahead. “Ora, I'd like to go to the town for once. I'd like to buy a hat for church. Will ye come?”

“Go to town like this?” Ora asked. She pointed to her big belly. The youngest child, who had been weaned in preparation for the next one, stood by her knees trying to reach up to her. “Stop that,” she said to him. “Hit ain't for you, any more.” She dragged him on her lap where he had to sit perched on the end of her knees, so that he might not interfere with the one inside.

“I'm s' tired, Emma.”

“Hit'll do ye good, Ora.” Emma's eyes had a shine to them. She had never been to town except the time she went to get the coat at Reckowitz's store, and that was on a side street, almost an alley.

“The washing's got to be done.”

“For once hit'll have to go. And Bonnie here can care for the young ones.”

“I'd like to go,” Bonnie said.

She tried to frown and look grieved, but she was so healthy it was hard for her to look sad. School agreed with her. And this was the time when the “first flush of womanhood was creeping into her cheeks.” That is what the preacher called it. He said, “It is when the first flush of womanhood is creeping into the cheeks of your daughters that they need a mother's care most.”

“Take her instead of me,” Ora told Emma.

“No, Ora. Hit'll do ye good. Don't ye want Ora to get a little airing, Bonnie?”

“Yes, but sometimes I want to go to town.”

“Well, you'll go one day. I'll take ye.”

Ora always looked queer when she was with child. She was so lean and tall the baby stood right out from her. It was not for that reason, though, that Ora and Emma walked down side streets going to the business part of the town. No mill people, even the young ones with beaus, liked to walk on the streets where the fine houses stood, though that was the quickest way. There was a feeling that the rich didn't want the sight of poor on their streets. Mill hands' clothes didn't go well with the fine houses, and the pleasures of wealth.

“Let's go behind Mr. Wentworth's place,” Emma said. “Hit's quicker to town and I'd like t' see hit if only from the back.”

Perhaps it was meanness and envy, but most people in the village made fun of those who lived on Strutt Street. Some of the men had got their places by hard work, but all of them licked the boots of the bosses, the managers and superintendent. For there were plenty of hard workers who hadn't risen. The higher-ups had to short the regular hands in weighing and making out the pay checks in order to make as much money for the mill as possible. It was a known fact that the high-ups had to do this as part of their job. But the best ones hated to do this against a neighbor, so it kept them from rising. In the case of the overseer, it was whispered his wife had lived with Burnett once, with him making no murmur against it. This was gossip, and perhaps not true.

Though there was the attitude toward the high-ups on Strutt Street, there was no such feeling toward the really big ones, those who lived in the town. There was interest, and if the man who owned the mill, who lived in Washington, came down, there was excitement. Everybody said he was as common as mill people and spoke to all as if he was on their level. His son, who lived in the town, was the same. This was the young Wentworth whose house Emma wanted to see from the back.

Emma and Ora went down a street and up another side one and came out right behind the son's house. With the lawn it covered a whole block. There were no leaves on the trees, so they could see the large white house, very clearly, with the big central part and a wing on each side. The lawn, blue-green with winter grass, came down to the edge of the sidewalk where it was protected by a stone fence about two feet high.

They stood and looked.

“I reckon one of those rooms is as big as our whole place,” Ora said.

“The back yard is clean as if hit was the front.”

“Hit must have a hundred rooms . . . and I'd be willing to say . . .”

“Look, Ora!”

The back door opened. A black man in a white coat and dark trousers came onto the porch pushing a baby carriage. He let it down the steps into the yard. Behind him came a black girl, and in her arms was a white baby wrapped up in a warm looking pink blanket.

“Hit's that baby.”

“Maybe we'd better go along, Ora.”

“I helped give hit that present. I've got a right to look.”

“I gave ten cents, and had to tell Bonnie to wait for a tablet till the next week.”

“Frank gave a quarter for both of us.”

“Wasn't hit pretty, Ora? Gold and silver with a silver spoon.”

“Maybe they've got the goblet now in the carriage.”

“Let's look if she comes closer.”

“Hit must be four months old now.”

“Look, he's put the carriage under that tree in the spot of sunshine.”

“Did you ever see anything like hit? Hit's like a baby hearse.”

“We'd better go, Ora. They're a-looking at us.”

“Wait, Emma. She's going to put him in. I can see his feet, in little shoes.”

“They're a-looking at us.”

“Look at the blankets she's laying on him. They're little, like they was made for a baby.”

“We'd better go, Ora.”

Someone called the black man from the back window. He went below the window and looked up.

“I've got a right here, Emma. I helped give hit a present.”

The black man came toward the street, as if he wanted to speak with them.

“I'm a-going, Ora, and you can stay.” Emma started walking away down the sidewalk, and Ora had to follow.

“I don't think he meant anything, Emma,” Ora complained. “I wanted t' see more. Maybe the black girl would have let us go close.”

Emma walked on.

“They say that baby owns stock in the mill,” Ora said, trying to keep up. Emma slackened in her walk now she was some distance from the house.

“I haven't yet exactly known what stock is.”

“I don't know myself. But hit seems to mean that ye get money out of the mill.”

“We get money out of the mill.”

“Well, I think hit means ye get money without working. Like that baby, now. He's got stock and he sure is too little t' work any.”

“Maybe. Granpap said Mister Heilman that spoke at the reunion owned stock in the mill, and hit's right I don't see him around working any.”

They turned up another street that led toward the square.

“Ye know,” Emma said, laughing at herself, “at first I thought stock was us. You know how Hal Swain used t' say he owned twenty head of stock or thirty. I thought hit meant we was the stock and they owned us.”

“That was right foolish.”

“I know. Hit made me mad, thinking of being owned, till Granpap set me right, because Hal Swain had told him about the Congressman, the same that got him out of jail, owning stock in this mill and others. I know hit's something on paper that brings in money, but still I don't understand.”

Now they were just off the big square where the large stores were. Emma stopped before a store window. The window was full of photographs of people. Bride and groom stood together in some of the pictures and smiled happily if a little foolishly at the world. Girls looked over their shoulders coquettishly. In the center of the window was a crayon portrait in a large frame with glass over it.

“Hit would be fine to have something like that on the wall,” Emma said.

“Hit must cost a lot of money.”

“I'd like to have a big one like that of Kirk.”

“Hit's a fine sight. I wonder that anybody can make a likeness like that with a pencil on paper.”

“Johnny made a likeness of some apples. The teacher put hit on the wall, it was so good.”

“Johnny can make a likeness, I know. He's smart, Emma.”