Downstairs in the home rooms there was plenty of trouble.
Etta was still so sick that she couldn’t sleep crowded three in a bed. The shades were drawn and the dark room smelled bad with a sick smell. Etta’s job was gone, and that meant eight dollars less a week besides the doctor’s bill.
Then one day when Ralph was walking around in the kitchen he burned himself on the hot kitchen stove. The bandages made his hands itch and somebody had to watch him all the time else he would bust the blisters. On George’s birthday they had bought him a little red bike with a bell and a basket on the handlebars. Everybody had chipped in to give it to him. But when Etta lost her job they couldn’t pay, and after two installments were past due the store sent a man out to take the wheel away. George just watched the man roll the bike off the porch, and when he passed George kicked the back fender and then went into the coal house and shut the door.
It was money, money, money all the time. They owed to the grocery and they owed the last payment on some furniture.
And now since they had lost the house they owed money there too. The six rooms in the house were always taken, but nobody ever paid the rent on time.
For a while their Dad went over every day to hunt another job.
He couldn’t do carpenter work any more because it made him jittery to be more than ten feet off the ground. He applied for many jobs but nobody would hire him. Then at last he got this notion.
‘It’s advertising, Mick,’ he said. I’ve come to the conclusion that’s all in the world the matter with my watch-repairing business right now. I got to sell myself. I got to get out and let people know I can fix watches, and fix them good and cheap.
You just mark my words. Fm going to build up this business so I’ll be able to make a good living for this family the rest of my life. Just by advertising.’
He brought home a dozen sheets of tin and some red paint. For the next week he was very busy. It seemed to him like this was a hell of a good idea. The signs were all over the floor of the front room. He got down on his hands and knees and took great care over the printing of each letter. As he worked he whistled and wagged his head. He hadn’t been so cheerful and glad in months. Every now and then he would have to dress in his good suit and go around the corner for a glass of beer to calm himself. On the signs at first he had: Wilbur Kelly Watch Repairing Very Cheap and Expert. ‘Mick, I want them to hit you right bang in the eye. To stand out wherever you see them.’
She helped him and he gave her three nickels. The signs were O.K. at first. Then he worked on them so much that they were ruined. He wanted to add more and more things--in the corners and at the top and bottom. Before he had finished the signs were plastered all over with ‘Very Cheap’ and ‘Come At Once’ and ‘You Give Me Any Watch And I Make It Run.’
‘You tried to write so much in the signs that nobody will read anything,’ she told him.
He brought home some more tin and left the designing up to her. She painted them very plain, with great big block letters and a picture of a clock. Soon he had a whole stack of them. A fellow he knew rode him out in the country where he could nail them to trees and fenceposts. At both ends of the block he put up a sign with a black hand pointing toward the house.
And over the front door there was another sign.
The day after this advertising was finished he waited in the front room dressed in a clean shirt and a tie. Nothing happened. The jeweler who gave him overflow work to do at half price sent in a couple of clocks. That was all. He took it hard. He didn’t go out to look for other jobs any more, but every minute he had to be busy around the house. He took down the doors and oiled the hinges--whether they needed it or not. He mixed the margarine for Portia and scrubbed the floors upstairs. He worked out a contraption where the water from the ice box could be drained through the kitchen window. He carved some beautiful alphabet blocks for Ralph and invented a little needle-threader. Over the few watches that he had to work on he took great pains.
Mick still followed Mister Singer. But she didn’t want to. It was like there was something wrong about her following after him without his knowing. Two or three days she played hooky from school. She walked behind him when he went to work and hung around on the corner near his store all day. When he ate his dinner at Mister Brannon’s she went into the cafe and spent a nickel for a sack of peanuts.
Then at night she followed him on these dark, long walks. She stayed on the opposite side of the street from him and about a block behind. When he stopped, she stopped also--and when he walked fast she ran to keep up with him. So long as she could see him and be near him she was right happy. But sometimes this queer feeling would come to her and she knew that she was doing wrong. So she tried hard to keep busy at home.
She and her Dad were alike in the way that now they always had to be fooling with something. She kept up with all that went on in the house and the neighborhood. Spare-rib’s big sister won fifty dollars at a movie bank night. Baby Wilson had the bandage off her head now, but her hair was cut short like a boy’s. She couldn’t dance in the soiree this year, and when her mother took her to see it Baby began to yell and cut up during one of the dances. They had to drag her out of the Opera House. And on the sidewalk Mrs. Wilson had to whip her to make her behave. And Mrs. Wilson cried, too. George hated Baby. He would hold his nose and stop up his ears when she passed by the house. Pete Wells ran away from home and was gone three weeks. He came back barefooted and very hungry. He bragged about how he had gone all the way to New Orleans.
Because of Etta, Mick still slept in the living-room. The short sofa cramped her so much that she had to make up sleep in study hall at school. Every other night Bill swapped with her and she slept with George. Then a lucky break came for them.
A fellow who had a room upstairs moved away. When after a week had gone by and nobody answered the ad in the paper, their Mama told Bill he could move up to the vacant room.
Bill was very pleased to have a place entirely by himself away from the family. She moved in with George. He slept like a little warm kitty and breathed very quiet.
She knew the night-time again. But not the same as in the last summer when she walked in the dark by herself and listened to the music and made plans. She knew the night a different way now. In bed she lay awake. A queer afraidness came to her. It was like the ceiling was slowly pressing down toward her face. How would it be if the house fell apart? Once their Dad had said the whole place ought to be condemned. Did he mean that maybe some night when they were asleep the walls would crack and the house collapse? Bury them under all the plaster and broken glass and smashed furniture? So that they could not move or breathe? She lay awake and her muscles were stiff. In the night there was creaking. Was that somebody walking--somebody else awake besides her--Mister Singer? She never thought about Harry. She had made up her mind to forget him and she did forget him. He wrote that he had a job with a garage in Birmingham. She answered with a card saying ‘O.K.’ as they had planned. He sent his mother three dollars every week. It seemed like a very long time had passed since they went to the woods together.
During the day she was busy in the outside room. But at night she was by herself in the dark and figuring was not enough. She wanted somebody. She tried to keep George awake. ‘It sure is fun to stay awake and talk in the dark. Less us talk awhile together.’ He made a sleepy answer. ‘See the stars out the window. If s a hard thing to realize that every single one of those little stars is a planet as large as the earth.’
‘How do they know that?’
‘They just do. They got ways of measuring. That’s science.’
‘I don’t believe in it’ She tried to egg him on to an argument so that he would get mad and stay awake. He just let her talk and didn’t seem to pay attention. After a while he said: ‘Look, Mick! You see that branch of the tree? Don’t it look like a pilgrim forefather lying down with a gun in his hand? ‘ ‘It sure does. That’s exactly what it’s like. And see over there on the bureau. Don’t that bottle look like a funny man with a hat on? ‘ .Naw,’ George said. ‘It don’t look a bit like one to me.’