Every one eating food. Dick Moorehead when he went off to the country
fared pretty well. Lots of people came out all right about food. Some
women were naturally good cooks, others weren’t. A groceryman sold food
in his store and could bring things home. John, working in the factory,
had to have something substantial. He had grown tall now and looked
almost a man. When he was at home, nights and on Sundays, he was silent
like the mother. It may have been because he was worried, maybe he had
to work too hard. He worked in a place where they made bicycles but he
did not have one. Tar often went past the long brick factory. In the
winter all the windows were closed and there were iron bars across the
windows. That was to prevent thieves breaking in at night but it made
the building look like the town jail, only much larger. After a time
Tar would have to go there to work and Robert would take care of the
paper selling. It was almost time.
Tar dreaded the thought of the time coming when he would be a factory
hand. He went around having queer dreams. Suppose it should turn out
he wasn’t a Moorehead at all. He might have been the son of a rich man
who was leaving for foreign parts. The man had come to his mother and
had said, “Here is my child. Its mother is dead and I must leave for
foreign parts. If I do not return you may keep him as your own child.
Do not ever let him know. Some day I may return and then we shall see
what we shall see.”
When he had been having some such dreams Tar looked at his mother
closely. He looked at his father, at John, Robert and Margaret. Well,
he tried to imagine he did not look like the others. The dream made him
feel a little disloyal. He felt his nose with his fingers. It wasn’t
the same shape as John’s or Margaret’s nose.
When the fact that he was of different stock was finally made known he
would never take advantage of the others. He would have money, oodles
of it, and all the Mooreheads would be treated exactly as though they
were his equals. Perhaps he would go to his mother and say--“Do not
let the others know. The secret is buried in my breast. It shall stay
there sealed forever. John shall go to college, Margaret shall have
fine clothes, Robert a bicycle.”
Having such thoughts made Tar feel very tender about all the other
Mooreheads. What fine things he would buy for his mother. He had to
smile to think of how Dick Moorehead would go about town cutting a
swath. He could have fancy vests, a fur-lined overcoat. He wouldn’t
have to work, could just put in his time being leader of the town band
or something like that.
Of course John and Margaret would laugh if they knew what was going on
in Tar’s head, but no one need know. It wasn’t true of course, just
something to think about nights after he got into bed and when he was
going through dark side streets on winter evenings with his papers.
Sometimes when a well-dressed man got off a train it almost seemed to
Tar that his dream was about to come true. If the man had walked right
up to him and had said, “My son, my son. I am your father. I have been
in foreign parts and have accumulated a huge fortune. Now I have come
to make you rich. You shall have everything your heart desires.” If
something of that sort should happen Tar thought he would not be too
much surprised. He was ready for it to happen anyway, had thought it
all out.
Tar’s mother and his sister Margaret always had to be figuring on food.
Three meals every day for hungry boys. Things to clean up. Sometimes
when Dick had been away in the country a long time, he came home
bringing a lot of country sausage or pork.
At other times, in the winter specially, the Mooreheads got pretty
low. They only had meat about once a week, no butter, no pie--even
on Sunday. They had corn meal baked into cakes and cabbage soup with
pieces of fat pork floating in it. You can soak your bread in that.
Mary Moorehead got pieces of salt pork and fried the grease out of it.
Then she made gravy. That was good on bread. Beans go a long way. You
make a stew with some salt pork in it. It isn’t half bad and fills you
up, anyway.
Hal Brown and Jim Moore sometimes urged Tar to go home with them to
their houses to eat. Small town people are always doing that. Perhaps
Tar had helped Hal do his chores and Hal had gone with him on his paper
route. It’s all right to go to some one else’s house, now and then, but
if you do it often you ought to be able to ask them to your house.
Corn meal mush or cabbage soup will do at a pinch but you don’t want
to ask a guest to sit down to it. If you’re poor and hard up you don’t
want the whole town to know and be talking.
Beans or cabbage stew, eaten maybe at the table in the kitchen by the
kitchen stove, huh! Some winters the Mooreheads couldn’t afford to have
more than one fire. They had to eat, get their lessons, undress for
bed, do everything in the kitchen. When they were eating, Tar’s mother
got Margaret to dish things up. It was so the children couldn’t see how
much her hands trembled after a day’s washing.
At the Browns’, when Tar went there, such an abundance. You wouldn’t
think there was so much in the world. If you took all you could stuff,
no one ever noticed. Just to look around the table made your eyes ache.
They had big dishes of mashed potatoes, fried chicken with good
gravy--maybe little pieces of good meat floating in it--not thin
either--a dozen kinds of jams and jellies in glasses--it looked pretty
that way, so pretty you couldn’t bear hardly to take a spoonful and
spoil the way it looked--sweet potatoes baked in brown sugar--the
sugar melting and making a thick kind of candy over it--big bowls full
of apples, bananas and oranges, beans baked in a big dish--all brown
over the top--turkey sometimes when it wasn’t Christmas, Thanksgiving
or anything, three or four kinds of pie, cakes with layers and brown
sweet stuff between the layers--white frosting on top with sometimes
red candies stuck in it--apple dumplings.
Every time when Tar went there different kinds of stuff on the
table--plenty of it and always good. It was a wonder Hal Brown wasn’t
fatter. He was as skinny as Tar.
If Ma Brown didn’t do the cooking one of the big Brown girls did. They
were all good cooks. Tar would have bet that Margaret, if she had the
chance, could do some swell cooking, too. You have to have the stuff to
cook with, plenty of it.
No matter how cold it is, after a feed like that you feel all warm. You
can go around outdoors with your coat all unbuttoned. You almost sweat,
even outdoors and when it’s zero weather.
Hal Brown was Tar’s age in a family where all the others were grown
up. The Brown girls, Kate and Sue and Sally and Jane and Mary, were
all big strapping girls--five of them--and there was an older brother
who worked downtown in the Browns’ store. He was called Shorty Brown
because he was so long and big. Well, he was six feet three. The Brown
kind of eating had built him up, all right. He could take hold of
the collar of Hal’s coat with one hand and of Tar’s collar with the
other and he could lift them both off the floor, do it without half
trying. Ma Brown wasn’t so big. She wasn’t as tall as Tar’s mother.
You could never guess how she could have had such a son as Shorty or
such daughters as she had. Tar and Jim Moore used to talk about it
sometimes. “Gee, it doesn’t seem as though it could be done,” Jim said.
Shorty Brown had shoulders like a horse. Maybe it was the food. Maybe
Hal would be that way some time. Still the Moores fed pretty well and
Jim wasn’t as tall as Tar, if he was a little fatter. Ma Brown ate the
same food the rest did. Look at her.
Pa Brown and the girls were big. When he was at home Pa Brown--he was
known as “Cal”--hardly ever said a word. In the house the girls made
a racket and so did Shorty, Hal and the mother. The mother was always
scolding but she didn’t mean a thing and no one paid any attention.
The children laughed and cracked jokes and after supper, some nights,
all of the girls got at Shorty and tried to put him on the floor. If
they broke a dish or two Ma Brown scolded but no one cared much. When
they were at it Hal tried to help his bigger brother but he didn’t
count. It was a sight to see. If the girls got their dresses torn it
made no difference. No one got mad.
Cal Brown, when he got through supper, went into the front room and
sat down to read a book. He was always reading books like Ben Hur and
Romola and Dickens’ Works and if one of the girls came and banged on
the piano he went right on.
Such a man to always have a book in his hand when he was at home! He
owned the biggest gents’ clothing store in town. There must have been a
thousand suits of clothes all laid out on long tables. You could have a
suit for five dollars down and a dollar a week. Tar and John and Robert
got theirs that way.
When there was hell going on in the Browns’ house, after supper on
a winter evening, Ma Brown kept screaming and saying, “Now behave
yourselves. Don’t you see your Pa’s reading?” but no one paid any
attention. Cal Brown didn’t seem to care a lick. “Ah, let ’em alone,”
he said when he said anything. Mostly he never even noticed.
Tar stood a little to one side, trying to hide himself. It was good
to come to the Browns’ house to eat but he couldn’t do it too often.
Having a father like Dick Moorehead, a mother like Mary Moorehead, was
not like belonging to such a family as the Browns.
He couldn’t invite Hal Brown or Jim Moore to come to the Moorehead’s
and eat cabbage soup.
Well, food isn’t the only thing. Jim or Hal might not care. Mary
Moorehead would, though, Tar’s older brother John would, Margaret
would. The Mooreheads were proud. In Tar’s home everything was
concealed. You are in bed and your brother John is lying beside you in
the same bed. In the next room Margaret is sleeping. She has to have a
room by herself. That is because she is a girl.
You are in bed and you lie thinking. John may be doing the same thing,
Margaret may be doing it. A Moorehead said nothing at such a time.
Concealed in his corner of the big dining room at the Browns’, Tar
watched Hal Brown’s father. The man was getting old and gray. He
had little wrinkles about his eyes. When he read a book he put on
spectacles. The clothing store man was the son of a large farmer who
had been prosperous. He had married the daughter of another farmer.
Then he had come to town and had started a store. When his father died
he got the farm and later his wife also got money.
Such people had lived in one place always. There had always been plenty
of food, clothes, warm houses. They did not drift about, living in
little mean houses, leaving suddenly because the rent was due and they
could not pay it.
They were not proud, did not have to be proud.
In the Browns’ house the feeling of warm safety. Great strong girls
wrestling with their tall brother on the floor. Dresses being torn.
The Brown girls could milk cows, could cook, do anything. They went off
with young men to dances. In the house, sometimes, in the presence of
Tar and their own younger brother, they said things about men and women
and animals that made Tar blush. If, when the girls were cutting up
like that, their father was there, he never even spoke.
He and Tar were the only silent ones in the Browns’ house.
Was it because Tar did not want any of the Browns to know how glad he
was to be in their house, to be so warm, to see all the fun going on
and be so filled with food?
At the table when some one asked him to have a second helping he always
shook his head and said, “No,” in a faint voice, but Cal Brown, who was
serving, paid no attention. “You pass his plate,” he said to one of the
girls and it came back to Tar heaping full. More fried chicken, gravy,
another great heap of mashed potatoes, another wedge of pie. The big
Brown girls and Shorty looked at each other and smiled.
Sometimes one of the Brown girls would begin to hug and kiss Tar right
in front of the others. It was after they all got up from the table
and when Tar was trying to hide himself by getting into a corner. When
he could do that he kept quiet and watched, saw the little wrinkles
about Cal Brown’s eyes as he read his book. There was always something
laughing in the merchant’s eyes but he never laughed out loud.
Tar hoped a wrestling match would start between Shorty and the girls.
Then they would all get absorbed and leave him alone.
He couldn’t go to the Browns’ or to Jim Moore’s too often, because he
didn’t feel like asking them to come to his house to eat just one dish,
off the kitchen table, the baby maybe crying.
When one of the girls took it into her head to kiss him he couldn’t
help blushing and that made the others laugh. The big girl, almost a
woman, did it to tease him. The Brown girls all had strong arms and
great motherly breasts. The one who was teasing him held him tight
and then turning his face up kissed him while he struggled. Hal Brown
whooped with laughter. They never tried to kiss Hal because he didn’t
blush. Tar wished he didn’t. He couldn’t help it.
* * * * *
Dick Moorehead, during the winter always going around visiting farm
houses, pretending he was looking for painting and paper-hanging jobs.
Maybe he was. If a big girl at some farm house, some girl like one of
the Brown girls, tried to kiss him, he wouldn’t ever have blushed. He
would have liked it. Dick wasn’t the blushing kind. Tar had seen enough
to know that.
The Brown girls and Shorty Brown weren’t the blushing kind but they
weren’t like Dick.
Dick, off in the country that way, always got plenty to eat. People
liked him around because he was entertaining. Tar got invited to the
Moores’ and the Browns’. John and Margaret had their friends. They got
invited, too. Mary Moorehead stayed at home.
A woman, when she has kids, when her man isn’t a very good provider,
gets the worst of it, all right. Tar’s mother was the blushing kind
just like Tar. When Tar got a little older he would get over it maybe.
Women like his mother never did.