Never did I see beefsteak so thick. There was a garnish of fried
onions. There was a separate sea of gravy. There was a hill of butter,
a hill of thickly sliced bread. There was a delectable mountain of
potatoes. That was all. These people were living the simple life,
living it in chunks.
At table, as everywhere, the husband solemnly deferred to the wife.
She was to him a druid priestess. And so she was radiant, as woman
enthroned is apt to be. Of course, no young lady from finishing school
would have liked the way we tunnelled and blasted our way through the
provender. We were gloriously hungry and our manners were a hearty
confession of the fact.
My passion for the joys of the table partially sated, I began to
realize the room. There were hardly any of the comforts of home. There
was a big onyx time-piece, chipped, and not running. Beside it was a
dollar alarm-clock in good trim.
There were in the next room, among other things, two frail gilt parlor
chairs, almost black. The curtains were streaked with soot and poorly
ironed. She said she had washed them yesterday. But, she continued, “I
just keep cheerful, I don’t keep house. Doesn’t seem like I can, this
street is so awful dirty and noisy and foreign.”
“Yet you like it,” said the husband.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s because I’m half Irish. The Irish were born
for excitement.”
“What’s _your_ ancestry?” I asked the husband.
“My father was a mountain white. Moved here from North Carolina, and
dug coal and married a Pennsylvania Dutch lady.”
“It’s your turn,” she said to me. “You are a preacher?”
“That’s a kind of an excuse I make.”
“You can’t be any worse than the preacher we had here,” continued the
wife. “He lived down toward Shickshinny. He preached in an old chapel.
He wouldn’t start a Sunday school. We needed one bad enough. He just
married folks. He hardly ever buried them. They say he was afraid.
And,” she continued, with a growing tone of condemnation, “it’s a
preacher’s BUSINESS to face death.
“Just about the time two of our children died of diphtheria, was when
he came to these parts. He was a Presbyterian, and I was raised a
Presbyterian, and he wouldn’t preach the funeral of my two babies. He
promised to come, and we waited two hours. So I just read the Bible at
the grave.”
This she recounted with a bitter sense of insult.
“And the same day he locked up his mother, too.”
“Locked up his mother?”
“Yes. Some said he wanted to visit a woman he didn’t want her to know
about. They said he was afraid she would follow him and spy. He locked
up the old lady, and she about yelled the roof off, and the neighbors
let her out.
“And then,” continued my hostess, “when he was dying, he sent for a
Wilkesbarre priest.”
“Sent for a priest?” I exclaimed, completely mystified.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He must have been a Catholic all the time. And
the priest wouldn’t come either. _That’s what that old preacher got for
being so mean._”
She continued: “That preacher wasn’t much meaner than the man is in the
company store.”
She was bristling again.
“He won’t deliver goods up here unless you run a big bill. If I want
anything much while big Frank here is at work, I have to take Jimmy’s
little play express-wagon and haul it up.”
And now she was telling me of her terrible fright three days ago, down
at the company store, when there was a rumor of an accident in one of
the far tunnels of the mine.
“All the foreign women came running down the hill, half-crazy. I am
used to false alarms, but I could hardly get up to this house with my
goods. I was expecting to see big Frank brought in, just like he was
before little Frank was born, eight years ago.”
Little Frank lifted his face from its business of eating to listen.
“The first thing that boy ever saw was his father on the floor there,
covered with blood.”
“You don’t remember it, Frank?” asked his father, grinning.
“Nope.”
The wife continued: “There was only one doctor came. We had a time
between us. The other doctor was tendin’ the men husband had dug out.
The coal fell on them and mashed them flat. It couldn’t quite mash
husband. He’s too tough,” she said, lovingly. “He grabbed his pick and
he tunnelled his way through, with the blood squirting out of him.”
Husband grinned like a petted child. He said: “It wasn’t quite as bad
as that, but I was bloody, all right.”
She continued with a gesture of impatience: “This is cheerful Sunday
night talk. Let’s try something else. What kind of a poem are you goin’
to read?”
“It tells boys how to be great men, but it’s for fellows of from
fifteen to twenty. You’ll have to save it for your sons till they grow
a bit.”
She was at the foot of the stairway like a flash.
“Son, dress and come down to supper.”
Son was down almost as soon as she was in her chair, pulling on a
stocking as he came. And he was hungry. He ate while we talked on and
on.