THE GAY FINANCES
Sarah continued to bathe her pig every day. In fact she omitted no
slightest detail that could contribute to his health and comfort; and
the amount of care and affection she lavished on "that porker," as Mr.
Hildreth referred to Bony, would have amazed anyone unacquainted with
Sarah's trait of exceeding thoroughness. Whatever she found to
do--providing it was to her liking--this small girl did with all her
might.
But naturally the most interesting of pigs could not occupy all her
time. Bony was young and he craved sleep. It was during his rest
periods that Sarah would consent to accompany her sisters to the Gay
farm. Once there, she was like the boy who, led protestingly to the
party, had to be dragged home.
"Oh, dear, I'm sorry you have to find the house in such a mess," Louisa
Gay apologized one morning, across the table filled with dirty dishes
and pots and pans piled high in confusion. "I was helping Alec in the
field all day yesterday and just let the dishes pile up. This morning
I meant to wash everything in sight--I was too tired to touch a plate
last night."
"We'll help," said Rosemary sympathetically. She knew that the four
younger Gays were forbidden to light a fire in Louisa's absence--she
and Alec were most strict about this--and that, for this reason, they
could not heat water and wash the dishes for their sister.
"We'll help," repeated Rosemary cheerfully. "I have washed tons of
dishes in cooking class; and Sarah will dry them for us."
"I will, if Kitty will," qualified Sarah, hastily, having no mind to be
tied down to domestic duties while someone else played.
"Kitty is in bed," said Louisa severely. "I told her to make the beds
yesterday and she never touched one. She said she forgot. So now she
has to stay in bed till dinner time to make her remember."
"I'm going to get up now, Louisa!" shrilled the wrathful voice of Kitty
from the upstairs hall.
"You go back to bed and stay there, till I tell you you can get up,"
directed Louisa. "Unless you want to be locked in your room and your
dinner."
Kitty retreated--they heard the door of room slam--and Louisa went on
with her plate scraping.
"There's the baby!" Louisa started nervously. "Kenneth must have
stopped rocking her."
At that moment Kenneth appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking
distinctly cross.
"I don't see why I always have to rock the baby!" he grumbled. "Alec
wants me to stake Dora down by the brook and when am I going to get any
time to help him if I have to keep June quiet?"
"Let me rock her," said Shirley. "I can rock just as nice--can't I,
Rosemary?"
"Well, I think you could," admitted Rosemary, smiling. "You must touch
the cradle very gently, you know, Shirley--don't rock June as though
she were in a boat at sea."
She went in to the darkened room off the kitchen with Shirley and
showed her how to sway the old-fashioned cradle with a soothing motion.
When she came back to Louisa, Kenneth had disappeared and Sarah with
him.
"I declare, sometimes I get so discouraged, I don't know what to do,"
confided Louisa, filling the heavy tea kettle at the sink and lifting
it to the stove. "We do everything the wrong way and yet I don't see
where we can take time to do them any better.
"For instance, there's June. I know she shouldn't be rocked to
sleep--but the one day I tried to break her of the habit and make her
go to sleep quietly by herself, I didn't get a thing done. The other
children got into mischief, Alec was hurt trying to pitch hay and
manage the team without help and, after all, June didn't learn a thing.
She acted worse the next day, so I had to give it up and go back to the
cradle rocking."
"I suppose it is hard because she is used to the cradle now," said
Rosemary, busily clearing a place on the table for the clean dishes.
"Yes, that's the reason," agreed Louisa. "And we spend a lot of time
staking Dora around in different places--she was in the front yard that
day you came over with Richard. She was there because the front yard
has the one decent piece of fencing left on the farm. She would give
more milk if we could let her go free in the pasture--but Kenneth has
to stake her with a staple and rope because the fences are so
poor--where there are any--that the only way to keep her home is to tie
her."
"You're tired," said Rosemary quickly. "You worked too hard yesterday,
Louisa. I wish you'd go off somewhere--find a nice, cool place--and
rest; I'll do these dishes."
Louisa did look tired. More than that, she looked discouraged. She
had not taken pains to brush her hair as carefully as usual and it was
"slicked back" in the tightest possible knot. Her dress was perfectly
clean, but so faded and mended that it would have taken a merry-hearted
girl to have been quite happy in it. Louisa was far from merry-hearted.
"But the potatoes will bring in some money, won't they?" urged
Rosemary, who now knew a great deal about the Gay finances.
"They will, if they're not all sunburned, before Alec gets them into
the barn," responded Louisa gloomily, pouring hot water over a pan of
dishes. "Last year the yield was poor, too. Ken and Jim try to help,
but neither Alec nor I can bear to keep such little boys working in the
hot sun all day long. It isn't right."
Louisa was not given to complaint and Rosemary guessed something of the
pressure the slender shoulders must be enduring.
"I wish I had a million dollars!" burst out Rosemary, putting her arm
about Louisa. "I'd give it all to you!"
To her distress, Louisa began to cry. She was standing near the
kitchen table and she just put her head down on her arms and "let go"
as Rosemary later told her brother. Shirley, who had ventured to leave
the cradle, after several cautious tests to determine the depth of
June's slumbers, peered in aghast. Rosemary motioned to her to go on
and Shirley dashed out into the sunshine, glad to escape.
"You're so sweet to me!" choked Louisa, raising her tear-stained face.
"And you're so pretty--I never saw a girl as pretty as you are. I wish
I could look the way you do and have the clothes you do!"
So the faded dress had had something to do with it, after all.
Rosemary had always taken her pretty summer frocks for granted. Now
she looked from her own blue and white gingham to Louisa's old dress
and remembered the freshly-ironed linens and ginghams hanging in her
closet. Not many, perhaps, but dainty and pretty, every one, and
neither old-fashioned nor faded.
"I wish you'd let me give you a couple of mine," said Rosemary
impulsively. "We're almost the same size and you would look so nice in
blue, Louisa. I wouldn't tell a single soul."
Louisa dried her eyes and reached for the dish mop.
"I'm ashamed of myself," she declared briskly. "I don't know what made
me cry like that--Alec and the boys would think I had lost my mind.
No, I couldn't take a dress from you, Rosemary--I don't really need it,
anyway. Thank you, just the same. We need so many things that I vow
there is no place to begin to replenish; a dress would be a drop in the
bucket."
They both laughed a little at Louisa's mixed metaphor and the laughter
cleared away the last trace of the tears. As they washed and dried the
mountains of dishes, Louisa explained that what was really troubling
her, was the interest.
"The interest on the mortgage, you know," she said earnestly. "It is
due the first of September. Mr. Greenleaf holds the mortgage and Alec
is desperately afraid he will foreclose."
Rosemary's experience with mortgages dated from that minute, but she
sensed the importance of the interest.
"Perhaps the potatoes--" she suggested hopefully, having great faith in
Alec's main crop.
"We owe for the seed and the fertilizer," answered Louisa. "And last
year's taxes are not paid; and if we do manage to scrape together
enough to pay the interest, I don't see what we're going to live on the
rest of the year."
Rosemary had to admit that the outlook was discouraging. She scoured a
paring knife thoughtfully and polished it off before she ventured a new
suggestion.
"Why doesn't Alec go to this Mr. Greenleaf, and tell him that he is
having a hard time?" Rosemary proposed. "Ask him to wait a little
longer for his money. Hugh waits when people can not pay him; I heard
Winnie say that he never collects a bill, but waits for the money."
Louisa looked graver than ever.
"The one thing we must never do, and you must never, never tell," she
said impressively, "is to go to Mr. Greenleaf. Just as soon as it is
known in town that we are having a hard time to get along, do you know
what will happen? They'll take the farm away from us and send us to
the poor farm--probably bind Alec and me out and separate the family
for good and all. My father and mother would rather have us dead than
paupers."
"Could anyone take the farm away from you and do that?" asked Rosemary,
much shocked.
"Of course--it's often done," said Louisa, her light blue eyes gazing
intensely at her friend. "They'd take us to the poor farm in a minute,
if they knew we couldn't hold the farm."
"Perhaps it is pleasant at the poor farm," Rosemary was trying to find
the cloud's silver lining. "You might like it there; did you ever see
it?"
"No, and I never want to," retorted Louisa with finality.
Then Rosemary asked what it was to be "bound out" and Louisa told her
that children old enough to work were bound out to families who agreed
to give them their board and clothes and send them to school in return
for their services.
"It would mean that until we are eighteen we'd never have a cent to
call our own," declared Louisa. "We couldn't do a thing for the
younger children and, worst of all, we should be separated."
It was a very sober Rosemary who helped with the remainder of the work
that morning. She spread dish towels to bleach, she swept the porch,
made the beds--visiting for a brief moment with the unrepentant Kitty
who clamored to be allowed to get up and finally was released a half
hour ahead of time on her promise to pick the "greens" for dinner--and,
at Louisa's request, showed her how a simple soup was made in cooking
class at the Eastshore school. But she was unusually silent while she
did all this.
Walking home across the fields at noon--they steadfastly refused to
burden the harassed family with three extra mouths to feed--Sarah
noticed her sister's abstraction.
"What's the matter, Rosemary?" she asked curiously and Shirley echoed
the question.
"Oh--I'm thinking," said Rosemary.