A Daughter of the Morning. Gale Zona

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      A Daughter of the Morning

      CHAPTER I

      I found this paper on the cellar shelf. It come around the boys' new overalls. When I was cutting it up in sheets with the butcher knife on the kitchen table, Ma come in, and she says:

      "What you doin' now?"

      The way she says "now" made me feel like I've felt before – mad and ready to fly. So I says it right out, that I'd meant to keep a secret. I says:

      "I'm makin' me a book."

      "Book!" she says. "For the receipts you know?" she says, and laughed like she knows how. I hate cooking, and she knows it.

      I went on tying it up.

      "Be writing a book next, I s'pose," says Ma, and laughed again.

      "It ain't that kind of a book," I says. "This is just to keep track."

      "Well, you'd best be doing something useful," says Ma. "Go out and pull up some radishes for your Pa's supper."

      I went on tying up the sheets, though, with pink string that come around Pa's patent medicine. When it was done I run my hand over the page, and I liked the feeling on my hand. Then I saw Ma coming up the back steps with the radishes. I was going to say something, because I hadn't gone to get them, but she says:

      "Nobody ever tries to save me a foot of travelin' around."

      And then I didn't care whether I said it or not. So I kept still. She washed off the radishes, bending over the sink that's in too low. She'd wet the front of her skirt with some suds of something she'd washed out, and her cuffs was wet, and her hair was coming down.

      "It's rack around from morning till night," she says, "doing for folks that don't care about anything so's they get their stomachs filled."

      "You might talk," I says, "if you was Mis' Keddie Bingy."

      "Why? Has anything more happened to her?" Ma asked.

      "Nothing new," I says. "Keddie was drinking all over the house last night. I heard him singing and swearing – and once I heard her scream."

      "He'll kill her yet," says Ma. "And then she'll be through with it. I'm so tired to-night I wisht I was dead. All day long I've been at it – floors to mop, dinner to get, water to lug."

      "Quit going on about it, Ma," I says.

      "You're a pretty one to talk to me like that," says Ma.

      She set the radishes on the kitchen table and went to the back door. One of her shoes dragged at the heel, and a piece of her skirt hung below her dress.

      "Jim!" she shouted, "your supper's ready. Come along and eat it," – and stood there twisting her hair up.

      Pa come up on the porch in a minute. His feet were all mud from the fields, and the minute he stepped on Ma's clean floor she begun on him. He never said a word, but he tracked back and forth from the wash bench to the water pail, making his big black footprints every step. I should think she would have been mad. But she said what she said about half a dozen times – not mad, only just whining and complaining and like she expected it. The trouble was, she said it so many times.

      "When you go on so, I don't care how I track up," says Pa, and dropped down to the table. He filled up his plate and doubled down over it, and Ma and I got ours.

      "What was you and Stacy talkin' about so long over the fence?" Ma says, after a while.

      "It's no concern of yours," says Pa. "But I'll tell ye, just to show ye what some women have to put up with. Keddie Bingy hit her over the head with a dish in the night. It's laid her up, and he's down to the Dew Drop Inn, filling himself full."

      "She's used to it by this time, I guess," Ma says. "Just as well take it all at once as die by inches, I say."

      "Trot out your pie," says Pa.

      As soon as I could after we'd done the dishes, I took my book up to the room. Ma and I slept together. Pa had the bedroom off the dining-room. I had the bottom bureau drawer to myself for my clothes. I put my book in there, and I found a pencil in the machine drawer, and I put that by it. I'd wanted to make the book for a long time, to set down thoughts in, and keep track of the different things. But I didn't feel like making the book any more by the time I got it all ready. I went to laying out my underclothes in the drawer so's the lace edge would show on all of 'em that had it.

      Ma come to the side door and called me.

      "Cossy," she says, "is Luke comin' to-night?"

      "I s'pose so," I says.

      "Well, then, you go right straight over to Mis' Bingy's before he gets here," Ma says.

      I went down the stairs – they had a blotched carpet that I hated because it looked like raw meat and gristle.

      "Why don't you go yourself?" I says.

      "Because Mis' Bingy'll be ashamed before me," she says; "but she won't think you know about it. Take her this."

      I took the loaf of steam brown bread.

      "If Luke comes," I says, "have him walk along after me."

      The way to Mis' Bingy's was longer to go by the road, or short through the wood-lot. I went by the road, because I thought maybe I might meet somebody. The worst of the farm wasn't only the work. It was never seein' anybody. I only met a few wagons, and none of 'em stopped to say anything. Lena Curtsy went by, dressed up in black-and-white, with a long veil. She looks like a circus rider, not only Sundays but every day. But Luke likes the look of her, he said so.

      "You're goin' the wrong way, Cossy!" she calls out.

      "No, I ain't, either," I says, short enough. I can't bear the sight of her. And yet, if I have anything to brag about, it's always her I want to brag it to.

      Just when I turned off to Bingy's, I met the boys. We never waited supper for 'em, because sometimes they get home and sometimes they don't. They were coming from the end of the street-car line, black from the blast furnace.

      "Where you goin', kid?" says Bert.

      I nodded to the house.

      "Well, then, tell her she'd better watch out for Bingy," says Henny. "He's crazy drunk down to the Dew Drop. I wouldn't stay there if I was her."

      I ran the rest of the way to the Bingy house. I went round to the back door. Mis' Bingy was in the kitchen, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had the bed put up in the kitchen when the baby was born, and she'd kept it there all the year. When I stepped on to the boards, she jumped and screamed.

      "Here's some steam brown bread," I says.

      She set down again, trembling all over. The baby was laying over back in the bed, and it woke up and whimpered. Mis' Bingy kind of poored it with one hand, and with the other she pushed up the bandage around her head. She was big and wild-looking, and her hair was always coming down in a long, coiled-up mess on her shoulders. Her hands looked worse than Ma's.

      "I guess I look funny, don't I?" she says, trying to smile. "I cut my head open some – by accident."

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