the chief mechanic of the Wheeler farm, and when the farm
implements and the automobiles did not give him enough to do, he
went to town and bought machines for the house. As soon as
Mahailey got used to a washing-machine or a churn, Ralph, to keep
up with the bristling march of invention, brought home a still
newer one. The mechanical dish-washer she had never been able to
use, and patent flat-irons and oil-stoves drove her wild.
Claude told his mother to go upstairs and dress; he would scald
the separator while Ralph got the car ready. He was still working
at it when his brother came in from the garage to wash his hands.
“You really oughtn’t to load mother up with things like this,
Ralph,” he exclaimed fretfully. “Did you ever try washing this
damned thing yourself?”
“Of course I have. If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think
mother could.”
“Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman. Anyhow, there’s no point in
trying to make machinists of Mahailey and mother.”
Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude’s bluntness. “See
here,” he said persuasively, “don’t you go encouraging her into
thinking she can’t change her ways. Mother’s entitled to all the
labour-saving devices we can get her.”
Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he
was trying to fit together in their proper sequence. “Well, if
this is labour-saving”
The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat. He
never quarrelled. Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful,
how much Ralph would take from Claude.
After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler
drove to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just
bought a blooded bull. Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes
down behind the barn. Claude told Mahailey he was going to the
cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that
the rats couldn’t get at her vegetables.
“Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don’t know what does make the rats so
bad. The cats catches one most every day, too.”
“I guess they come up from the barn. I’ve got a nice wide board
down at the garage for your shelf.” The cellar was cemented, cool
and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and
groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of
photographer’s apparatus. Claude took his place at the
carpenter’s bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious
objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries,
old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as
those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were
left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes,
when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.
Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a
wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but
Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would
hurt Ralph’s feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some
day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would
have put a boy through college decently.
While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from
the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.
She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated
herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush
“spring-rocker” with one arm gone, but it wouldn’t have been her
idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
contentment in them as she followed Claude’s motions. She watched
him as if he were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in
her lap.
“Mr. Ernest ain’t been over for a long time. He ain’t mad about
nothin’, is he?”
“Oh, no! He’s awful busy this summer. I saw him in town
yesterday. We went to the circus together.”
Mahailey smiled and nodded. “That’s nice. I’m glad for you two
boys to have a good time. Mr. Ernest’s a nice boy; I always liked
him first rate. He’s a little feller, though. He ain’t big like
you, is he? I guess he ain’t as tall as Mr. Ralph, even.”
“Not quite,” said Claude between strokes. “He’s strong, though,
and gets through a lot of work.”
“Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them
foreigners works hard, don’t they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked
the circus. Maybe they don’t have circuses like our’n, over where
he come from.”
Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained
dogs, and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish
smile; there was something wise and far-seeing about her smile,
too.
Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia
family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of
pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was
nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no
one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a
savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for “him” to
bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
packages. “That’s a big A.” she would murmur, “and that there’s a
little a.”
Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
thing about the kitchen.
On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey