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Page 8
`Down to the kitchen' struck me as curious; it was always `out in the
kitchen' at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her
through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This
basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a
kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the
plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts.
The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were
little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and
wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen, I sniffed a
pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with
bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench
against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and
cold water. When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was
used to taking my bath without help. `Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are
you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.'
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water
through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed
himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my
grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,
`Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!' Then she came laughing,
waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her
head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at
something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to
believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that
were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements.
Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious
inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with
due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little
strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then
fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was
dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a
stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of
the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work.
While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on the wooden
bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat-- he caught not only
rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on
the floor travelled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked
about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she
said they were to be our nearest neighbours. We did not talk about the
farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the
men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper table,
then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and
neighbours there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke
kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The
thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of
an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular--so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had
a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at
each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he
was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an
adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His
iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had
drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in
Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he had
been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had
been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a
`perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I
wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was
a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for
me before sundown next day. He got out his `chaps' and silver spurs to
show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in
bold design-- roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
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