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A DAUGHTER OF THE MORNING
[Illustration: Cosma]
A DAUGHTER OF THE MORNING
by
ZONA GALE
Author of
Friendship Village, When I Was a Little Girl
Neighborhood Stories, etc.
Illustrated by W. B. King
Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers
Copyright 1917
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Press of
Braunworth & Co.
Book Manufacturers
Brooklyn, N. Y.
A Daughter of the Morning
CHAPTER I
I found this paper on the cellar shelf. It come around the boys' new
overalls. When I was cutting it up in sheets with the butcher knife on
the kitchen table, Ma come in, and she says:
"What you doin' _now_?"
The way she says "now" made me feel like I've felt before--mad and ready
to fly. So I says it right out, that I'd meant to keep a secret. I says:
"I'm makin' me a book."
"Book!" she says. "For the receipts you know?" she says, and laughed
like she knows how. I hate cooking, and she knows it.
I went on tying it up.
"Be writing a book next, I s'pose," says Ma, and laughed again.
"It ain't that kind of a book," I says. "This is just to keep track."
"Well, you'd best be doing something useful," says Ma. "Go out and pull
up some radishes for your Pa's supper."
I went on tying up the sheets, though, with pink string that come around
Pa's patent medicine. When it was done I run my hand over the page, and
I liked the feeling on my hand. Then I saw Ma coming up the back steps
with the radishes. I was going to say something, because I hadn't gone
to get them, but she says:
"Nobody ever tries to save me a foot of travelin' around."
And then I didn't care whether I said it or not. So I kept still. She
washed off the radishes, bending over the sink that's in too low. She'd
wet the front of her skirt with some suds of something she'd washed out,
and her cuffs was wet, and her hair was coming down.
"It's rack around from morning till night," she says, "doing for folks
that don't care about anything so's they get their stomachs filled."
"You might talk," I says, "if you was Mis' Keddie Bingy."
"Why? Has anything more happened to her?" Ma asked.
"Nothing new," I says. "Keddie was drinking all over the house last
night. I heard him singing and swearing--and once I heard her scream."
"He'll kill her yet," says Ma. "And then she'll be through with it. I'm
so tired to-night I wisht I was dead. All day long I've been at
it--floors to mop, dinner to get, water to lug."
"Quit going on about it, Ma," I says.
"You're a pretty one to talk to me like that," says Ma.
She set the radishes on the kitchen table and went to the back door. One
of her shoes dragged at the heel, and a piece of her skirt hung below
her dress.
"Jim!" she shouted, "your supper's ready. Come along and eat it,"--and
stood there twisting her hair up.
Pa come up on the porch in a minute. His feet were all mud from the
fields, and the minute he stepped on Ma's clean floor she begun on him.
He never said a word, but he tracked back and forth from the wash bench
to the water pail, making his big black footprints every step. I should
think she _would_ have been mad. But she said what she said about half a
dozen times--not mad, only just whining and complaining and like she
expected it. The trouble was, she said it so many times.
"When you go on so, I don't care how I track up," says Pa, and dropped
down to the table. He filled up his plate and doubled down over it, and
Ma and I got ours.
"What was you and Stacy talkin' about so long over the fence?" Ma says,
after a while.
"It's no concern of yours," says Pa. "But I'll tell ye, just to show ye
what some women have to put up with. Keddie Bingy hit her over the head
with a dish in the night. It's laid her up, and he's down to the Dew
Drop Inn, filling himself full."
"She's used to it by this time, I guess," Ma says. "Just as well take
it all at once as die by inches, _I_ say."
"Trot out your pie," says Pa.
As soon as I could after we'd done the dishes, I took my book up to the
room. Ma and I slept together. Pa had the bedroom off the dining-room. I
had the bottom bureau drawer to myself for my clothes. I put my book in
there, and I found a pencil in the machine drawer, and I put that by it.
I'd wanted to make the book for a long time, to set down thoughts in,
and keep track of the different things. But I didn't feel like making
the book any more by the time I got it all ready. I went to laying out
my underclothes in the drawer so's the lace edge would show on all of
'em that had it.
Ma come to the side door and called me.
"Cossy," she says, "is Luke comin' to-night?"
"I s'pose so," I says.
"Well, then, you go right straight over to Mis' Bingy's before he gets
here," Ma says.
I went down the stairs--they had a blotched carpet that I hated because
it looked like raw meat and gristle.
"Why don't you go yourself?" I says.
"Because Mis' Bingy'll be ashamed before me," she says; "but she won't
think you know about it. Take her this."
I took the loaf of steam brown bread.
"If Luke comes," I says, "have him walk along after me."
The way to Mis' Bingy's was longer to go by the road, or short through
the wood-lot. I went by the road, because I thought maybe I might meet
somebody. The worst of the farm wasn't only the work. It was never
seein' anybody. I only met a few wagons, and none of 'em stopped to say
anything. Lena Curtsy went by, dressed up in black-and-white, with a
long veil. She looks like a circus rider, not only Sundays but every
day. But Luke likes the look of her, he said so.
"You're goin' the wrong way, Cossy!" she calls out.
"No, I ain't, either," I says, short enough. I can't bear the sight of
her. And yet, if I have anything to brag about, it's always her I want
to brag it to.
Just when I turned off to Bingy's, I met the boys. We never waited
supper for 'em, because sometimes they get home and sometimes they
don't. They were coming from the end of the street-car line, black from
the blast furnace.
"Where you goin', kid?" says Bert.
I nodded to the house.
"Well, then, tell her she'd better watch out for Bingy," says Henny.
"He's crazy drunk down to the Dew Drop. I wouldn't stay there if I was
her."
I ran the rest of the way to the Bingy house. I went round to the back
door. Mis' Bingy was in the kitchen, sitting on the edge of the bed. She
had the bed put up in the kitchen when the baby was born, and she'd kept
it there all the year. When I stepped on to the boards, she jumped and
screamed.
"Here's some steam brown bread," I says.
She set down again, trembling all over. The baby was laying over back in
the bed, and it woke up and whimpered. Mis' Bingy kind of poored it
with one hand, and with the other she pushed up the bandage around her
head. She was big and wild-looking, and her hair was always coming down
in a long, coiled-up mess on her shoulders. Her hands looked worse than
Ma's.
"I guess I look funny, don't I?" she says, trying to smile. "I cut my
head open some--by accident."
I hate a lie. Not because it's wicked so much as because it never fools
anybody.
"Mis' Bingy," I says, "I know that Mr. Bingy threw a dish at you last
night and cut your head open, because he was drunk. Well, I just met
Henny, and he says he's down to the Inn, crazy drunk. Henny don't want
you should stay here."
She kind of give out, as though her spine wouldn't hold up. I guess she
had the idea none of the neighbors knew.
"Where can I go?" she says.
There was only one place that I could think of. "Come on over with me,"
I says. "Pa and the boys are there. They won't let him hurt you."
She shook her head. "I'd have to come back some time," she says.
"Why would you?" I asked her.
She looked at me kind of funny.
"He's my husband," she says--and she kind of straightened up and looked
dignified, without meaning to. I just stood and looked at her. Think of
it making her look like that to own that drunken coward for a husband!
"What if he is?" I says. "He's a brute, and we all know it."
She cried a little. "You hadn't ought to speak to me so," she says. "If
I go, how'll I earn my living, and the baby's?" she says.
I hadn't thought of that. "That's so," I says. "You are tied, ain't
you?"
I couldn't get her to come with me. She's got the bed made up in the
front room up-stairs, and she was going up there that night and lock her
door, and leave the kitchen open.
"He may not be so bad," she says. "Maybe he'll be so drunk he'll tumble
on the bed asleep, or maybe he'll be sick. I always hope for one of
them."
I went back through the wood-lot. It was so different out there from
home and Mis' Bingy's that it felt good. I found a place in a book once
that told about the woods. It gave me a nice feeling. I used to get it
out of the school library whenever it was in and read the place over, to
get the feeling again. Almost always it gave it to me. In the real woods
I didn't always get it. They come so close up to me that they bothered
me. I always thought I was going to get to something, and I never did.
And yet I always liked it in the wood-lot. And it was nice to be away
from home and from Mis' Bingy's.
I forgot the whole bunch of 'em for a while. It was the night of a moon,
and you could see it in the trees, like a big fat face that was friends
with you. When a bird did just one note, it felt pleasant. After a while
I stopped still, because it seemed as if something was near to me; but I
wasn't scared, even if it was quite dark. I thought to myself that I
wisht my family and all the folks I knew was still and kept to
themselves same as the trees does, instead of rushing at you every
minute, out loud. I never knew any folks that acted different from that,
though. Luke was just like that, too.
I was thinking of this when I see him coming to meet me, down the path.
He ain't a big man, Luke.
"Hello, Cossy," he says. "That you?"
"Hello, Luke," I says. I dunno why it is--with the boys at home I can
joke. But Luke, he always makes me feel just plain. I just says "Hello,
Luke," and stood still, and waited for him to come up to me. He turned
and walked along beside me.
"I was afraid I wouldn't meet you," he says. "I was afraid I'd miss you.
My, it's a good thing to get you somewheres by yourself."
"Why?" I says.
"Oh, the boys are always around, or your pa, or somebody. I've got a
right to talk to you sometimes by yourself."
"Well, go ahead, then. Talk to me."
All of a sudden he stopped still in the path.
"Do you mean that?" he ask.
"Mean what?" I says. I couldn't think what he meant.
"That I can talk to you now? My way?"
"Oh," I says. I knew then. I guess I should have known before, if I'd
stopped to think. But someway I never could put my mind on Luke all the
time he was saying anything.
"Cossy," he says, "I've tried to talk to you; you always got round it or
else somebody else come in. You know what I want."
I didn't say anything. I sort of waited, not so much to see what he was
going to do as to see what I was going to do.
Then he didn't say anything. But he put his arm around me, and put his
hand around my arm. I let him. I wasn't mad, so I didn't pretend.
"Let's us sit down here," he says.
We sat under a big tree and he drew my head down on his shoulder.
"You're all kinds of a peach," he says, "that's what you are, Cossy--I
bet you've known for weeks I want you to marry me. Ain't you?"
"Yes," I says, "I s'pose I have."
He laughed. "You're a funny girl," he says.
"It's silly to pretend," I says.
"You bet," he says, "it's silly to pretend. Give me a kiss, then. Kiss
me yourself."
I did. I had to see whether I was pretending not to want to, or whether
I really didn't want to. I see right away that I didn't want to.
"Marry me, Cossy," he says. "Will you?"
I was twenty years old. For a long time Ma had been asking me why I
didn't marry some nice young man. "Marry some nice young man," she says.
"You'll be happier, Cossy." Why would I be happier, I wondered. What
would make me happy? There would be, I supposed, a great deal of this
kind of thing. I thought it was honest to talk it over with Luke.
"What for?" I says.
"Because I love you," says Luke serious; "and I want you."
I laughed out loud. "Them's funny reasons for a bargain," I says.
He kind of drew off. "Oh, well," he says, "it's all I've got. If you
don't think it amounts to anything--"
"That's why you should marry me," I says. "But I want to know why I
should marry you."
"Don't you love me?" says Luke.
"I donno," I told him. "I don't like to kiss you so very well."
"Cossy, listen," Luke said. "All that'll come. Honest, it will, dear.
Just trust me, and marry me. I need you."
"Well, but, Luke," I says, "I donno if I need you. I don't believe I
do."
"You listen here," he says, sort of mad. "You'll have a home of your
own--"
"Why, wouldn't I live on your folks's farm?" I says.
"Oh, well, yes," Luke says. "But--I love you, Cossy!" he ends up. "Can't
you understand? I love you."
He said it like the reason. I begun to think it was.
"You've got to marry somebody," says Luke.
I knew that well enough. Home was bad enough now, but when one of the
boys brought a wife there it would be worse. I'd have to marry somebody.
"I'd like to get away from home," I says. "Ma and I don't get along, and
Pa's like a bear the whole time."
"You'd ought not to say such things, Cossy," says Luke.
"Why not?" I says. "They're true. That is about the only reason I can
think of why I should marry you. That, and because I've got to marry
somebody."
I thought he'd be mad. Instead, he had his arms around me and was
kissing me.
"I don't care what you marry me for," he says. "Marry me, anyhow!"
I thought: "I s'pose I'd get used to him. I don't like the boys, either.
I can't bear Henny. Every girl seems to act as if it was all right,
after she gets away. Maybe it is."
Two people were coming along the path. Luke and I sat still--it was so
dark nobody could notice us where we were. I heard them talking and then
I heard Ma's voice. I knew right off Henny had told her about Keddie,
and she was going to try to get Mis' Bingy to come home with us.
" ... On my feet from morning till night," she was saying, "till it
seems as though I should drop. I don't know how I stand it."
Pa was with her. "Stand it, stand it!" he says. "Anybody'd think you had
the pest in the house. I'm sick of hearin' you whine."
"I know," says Ma, "nobody thinks I'm worth anything now. But after I'm
dead and gone--"
"Oh, shut up," says Pa. And they went by us.
I stood up, all of a sudden. Anything would be better than home.
"Luke--" I says.
In a few years maybe him and me would be talking the same as Ma and Pa.
Maybe he'd be hanging around the Dew Drop Inn, same as Keddie Bingy.
What of it? All women took the chance.
"Luke," I says, "all right."
"Do you mean you will?" says Luke. I liked him the best I'd ever liked
him, the way he says that.
"I said 'all right,'" I says. "You be a good husband to me and I'll be a
good wife to you."
Luke kind of scared me, he was so glad.
On the way home he didn't talk much. As soon as we got to our house I
made him go. I'd begun to feel the tired way I do every time I'm with
him--as if I'd ironed or done up fruit.
Ma and Pa hadn't come back yet. I went up to Ma's and my room and lit
the lamp. It was on a bracket, and stuck up behind it was a picture of
me when I was a baby. I just stood and stared at it. I hadn't thought of
it before--but what if Luke and I should have one?
"No, sir! No, sir! No, sir!" I says, all the while I put myself to bed.