Girl Alone. Anne Austin
I got it sharpened, Dave,” Carson answered curtly. “You oughta get in another good hour with the cultivator before dark. You run along in the back door there, Sally. Mrs. Carson will be needing you to help her with supper.”
The change in Carson’s voice startled her, made her wince. Why was he angry with her—and with David, whose gold-flecked hazel eyes were smiling at her, shyly, as if he were a little ashamed of Carson for not having introduced them? But, oh, his name was David! David! It had had to be David.
In the big kitchen, dominated by an immense coal-and-wood cook stove, Sally found Mrs. Carson busy with supper preparations. Her daughter, Pearl, drifted about the kitchen, coughing at intervals to remind her mother that she was ill.
Pearl Carson, in that first moment after Sally had bumped into her at the door, had seemed to the orphaned girl to be much older than she, for her plump body was voluptuously developed and overdecked with finery. The farmer’s daughter wore her light red hair deeply marcelled. The natural color in her broad, plump cheeks was heightened by rouge, applied lavishly over a heavy coating of white powder.
Her lavender silk crepe dress was made very full and short of skirt, so that her thick-ankled legs were displayed almost to the knee. It was before the day of knee dresses for women and Sally, standing there awkwardly with her own bundle and the parcels which Carson had thrust into her arms, blushed for the extravagant display of unlovely flesh.
But Pearl Carson, if not exactly pretty, was not homely, Sally was forced to admit to herself. She looked more like one of her father’s healthy, sorrel-colored heifers than anything else, except that the heifer’s eyes would have been mild and kind and slightly melancholy, while Pearl Carson’s china-blue eyes were wide and cold, in an insolent, contemptuous stare.
“I suppose you’re the new girl from the Orphans’ Home,” she said at last. “What’s your name?”
“Sa-Sally Ford,” Sally stammered, institutional shyness blotting out her radiance, leaving her pale and meek.
“Pearl, you take Sally up to her room and show her where to put her things. Did you bring a work dress?” Mrs. Carson turned from inspecting a great iron kettle of cooking food on the stove.
“Yes’m,” Sally gulped. “But I only brought two dresses—my every-day dress and this one. Mrs. Stone said you’d—you’d give me some of P-Pearl’s.”
She flushed painfully, in humiliation at having to accept charity and in doubt as to whether she was to address the daughter of the house by her Christian name, without a “handle.”
Pearl, switching her short, lavender silk skirts insolently, led the way up a steep flight of narrow stairs leading directly off the kitchen to the garret. The roof, shaped to fit the gables of the house, was so low that Sally’s head bumped itself twice on their passage of the dusty, dark corridor to the room she was to be allowed to call her own.
“No, not that door!” Pearl halted her sharply. “That’s where David Nash, one of the hired men, sleeps.”
Sally wanted to stop and lay her hand softly against the door which his hand had touched, but she did not dare. “I—I saw him,” she faltered.
“Oh, you did, did you?” Pearl demanded sharply. “Well, let me tell you, young lady, you let David Nash alone. He’s mine—see? He’s not just an ordinary hired hand. He’s working his way through State A. & M. He’s a star, on the football team and everything. But don’t you go trying any funny business on David, or I’ll make you wish you hadn’t!”
“I—I didn’t even speak to him,” Sally hastened to reassure Pearl, then hated herself for her humbleness.
“Here’s your room. It’s small, and it gets pretty hot in here in the summer, but I guess it’s better’n you’re used to, at that,” Pearl Carson, a little mollified, swung open a flimsy pine door.
Sally looked about her timidly, her eyes taking in the low, sagging cot bed, the upturned pine box that served as washstand, the broken rocking chair, the rusty nails intended to take the place of a clothes closet; the faded, dirty rag rug on the warped boards of the floor; the tiny window, whose single sash swung inward and was fastened by a hook on the wall.
“I’ll bring you some of my old dresses,” Pearl told her. “But you’d better hurry and change into your orphanage dress, so’s you can help Mama with the supper. She’s been putting up raspberries all day and she’s dead tired. I guess Papa told you you’d have to hustle this summer. This ain’t a summer vacation—for you. It is for me. I go to school in the city in the winter. I’m second year high, and I’m only sixteen,” she added proudly. “What are you?”
Sally, who had been nervously untying her brown paper parcel, bent her head lower so that she should not see the flare of hate in those pale blue eyes which she knew would follow upon her own answer. “I’m—I’m third year high.” She did not have the courage to explain that she had just finished her third year, that she would graduate from the orphanage’s high school next year.
“Third year?” Pearl was incredulous. “Oh, of course, the orphanage school! My school is at least two years higher than yours. We prepare for college.”
Sally nodded; what use to say that the orphanage school was a regular public school, too, that it also prepared for college? And that Sally herself had dreamed of working her way through college, even as David Nash was doing?
Eight o’clock was the supper hour on the farm in the summertime, when every hour of daylight had to be spent in the orchards and fields. When the long dining table, covered with red-and-brown-checked oilcloth, was finally set, down to the last iron-handled knife, Sally was faint with hunger, for supper was at six at the orphanage.
Sally had peeled a huge dishpan of potatoes, had shredded a giant head of pale green cabbage for coleslaw, had watched the pots of cooking string beans, turnips and carrots; had rolled in flour and then fried great slabs of round steak—all under the critical eye of Mrs. Carson, who had found herself free to pick over the day’s harvest of blackberries for canning.
“I suppose we’ll have to let Sally eat at the table with us,” Pearl grumbled to her mother, heedless of the fact that Sally overheard. “In the city a family wouldn’t dream of sitting down to table with the servants. I’m sick of living on a farm and treating the hired help like members of the family.”
“I thought you liked having David Nash sit at table with us,” Mrs. Carson reminded her.
“Well, David’s different. He’s a university student and a football hero,” Pearl defended herself. “But the other hired men and the Orphans’ Home girl—”
Clem Carson appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Supper ready?”
“Yes, Papa. Thanks for the candy, but I do wish you’d get it in a box, not in a paper sack,” Pearl pouted. “I’ll ring the bell. Hurry up and wash before the others come in.”
While Clem Carson was pumping water into a tin wash basin, just inside the kitchen door, Pearl swung the big copper dinner bell, standing on the narrow back porch, her lavender silk skirt fluttering about her thick legs.
Sally fled to the dining room then, ashamed to have David Nash see her in the betraying uniform of the orphanage.
She had obediently set nine places at the long table, not knowing who all of those nine would be, but she found out before many minutes passed. Clem Carson sat at one end of the table, Mrs. Carson at the other. And before David and the other hired men appeared, a tiny, bent little old lady, with kind, vague brown eyes and trembling hands, came shuffling in from somewhere to seat herself at her farmer son’s right hand. Sally learned later that everyone called her Grandma, and that she was Clem Carson’s widowed mother. Immediately behind the little old lady came a big, hulking, loose-jointed man of middle age, with a slack, grinning mouth, a stubble of gray beard on his receding chin, a vacant, idiotic smile in his pale eyes.
At sight of Sally, shrinking timidly against the chair