About once a week Joe would get spanked. Popper would come home from the Patent Office where he worked, angry and out of sorts, and the girls would be scared of him and go about the house quiet as mice; but Joe seemed to like to provoke him, he’d run whistling through the back hall or clatter up and down stairs making a tremendous racket with his stub-toed ironplated shoes. Then Popper would start scolding him and Joe would stand in front of him without saying a word glaring at the floor with bitter blue eyes. Janey’s insides knotted up and froze when Popper would start up the stairs to the bathroom pushing Joe in front of him. She knew what would happen. He’d take down the razorstrop from behind the door and put the boy’s head and shoulders under his arm and beat him. Joe would clench his teeth and flush and not say a word and when Popper was tired of beating him they’d look at each other and Joe would be sent up to his room and Popper would come down stairs trembling all over and pretend nothing had happened, and Janey would slip out into the yard with her fists clenched whispering to herself, “I hate him… I hate him… I hate him.”
Once a drizzly Saturday night she stood against the fence in the dark looking up at the lighted window. She could hear Popper’s voice and Joe’s in an argument. She thought maybe she’d fall down dead at the first thwack of the razorstrop. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then suddenly it came, the leather sound of blows and Joe stifling a gasp. She was eleven years old. Something broke loose. She rushed into the kitchen with her hair all wet from the rain, “Mommer, he’s killing Joe. Stop it.” Her mother turned up a withered helpless drooping face from a pan she was scouring. “Oh, you can’t do anything.” Janey ran upstairs and started beating on the bathroom door. “Stop it, stop it,” her voice kept yelling. She was scared but something stronger than she was had hold of her. The door opened; there was Joe looking sheepish and Popper with his face all flushed and the razorstrop in his hand.
“Beat me… it’s me that’s bad… I won’t have you beating Joe like that.” She was scared. She didn’t know what to do, tears stung in her eyes.
Popper’s voice was unexpectedly kind:
“You go straight up to bed without any supper and remember that you have enough to do to fight your own battles, Janey.” She ran up to her room and lay on the bed shaking. When she’d gone to sleep Joe’s voice woke her up with a start.
He was standing in his nightgown in the door. “Say, Janey,” he whispered. “Don’t you do that again, see. I can take care of myself, see. A girl can’t butt in between men like that. When I get a job and make enough dough I’ll get me a gun and if Popper tries to beat me up I’ll shoot him dead.” Janey began to sniffle. “What you wanna cry for; this ain’t no Johnstown flood.”
She could hear him tiptoe down the stairs again in his bare feet.
At highschool she took the commercial course and learned stenography and typewriting. She was a plain thinfaced sandyhaired girl, quiet and popular with the teachers. Her fingers were quick and she picked up typing and shorthand easily. She liked to read and used to get books like The Inside of the Cup, The Battle of the Strong, The Winning of Barbara Worth out of the library. Her mother kept telling her that she’d spoil her eyes if she read so much. When she read she used to imagine she was the heroine, that the weak brother who went to the bad but was a gentleman at core and capable of every sacrifice, like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, was Joe and that the hero was Alec.
She thought Alec was the bestlooking boy in Georgetown and the strongest. He had black closecropped hair and a very white skin with a few freckles and a strong squareshouldered way of walking. After him Joe was the bestlooking and the strongest and the best baseball player anyway. Everybody said he ought to go on through highschool on account of being such a good baseball player, but at the end of his first year Popper said he had three girls to support and that Joe would have to get to work; so he got a job as a Western Union messenger. Janey was pretty proud of him in his uniform until the girls at highschool kidded her about it. Alec’s folks had promised to put him through college if he made good in highschool, so Alec worked hard. He wasn’t tough and dirty-talking like most of the boys Joe knew. He was always nice to Janey though he never seemed to want to be left alone with her. She pretty well admitted to herself that she had a terrible crush on Alec.
The best day of her life was the sweltering summer Sunday they all went canoeing up to Great Falls. She had put up the lunch the night before. In the morning she added a steak she found in the icebox. There was blue haze at the end of every street of brick houses and dark summergreen trees when before anybody else was awake she and Joe crept out of the house round seven that morning.
They met Alec at the corner in front of the depot. He stood waiting for them with his feet wide apart and a skillet in his hand.
They all ran and caught the car that was just leaving for Cabin John’s Bridge. They had the car all to themselves like it was a private car. The car hummed over the rails past whitewashed shanties and nigger cabins along the canal, skirting hillsides where the sixfoot tall waving corn marched in ranks like soldiers. The sunlight glanced in bluewhite glare on the wavingdrooping leaves of the tassling corn; glare, and a whirring and tinkling of grasshoppers and dryflies rose in hot smoke into the pale sky round the clattering shaking electric car. They ate sweet summerapples Joe had bought off a colored woman in the station and chased each other round the car and flopped down on top of each other in the cornerseats; and they laughed and giggled till they were weak. Then the car was running through woods; they could see the trestlework of the rollercoasters of Glen Echo through the trees and they piled off the car at Cabin John’s having more fun than a barrel of monkeys.