The Hired Girl(12)

“And I’ll have books,” I said, taking up the story. “Lots of them. And a hat with feathers, and I’ll go to the circus every time it comes to town.” I’d never been to the circus, and it was a sore point with me.

“You’ll have your own money,” Ma said again. “If you want to spend it on the circus, you won’t have to ask permission. Whatever happens, you’ll have your own money and you won’t have to get married.” She always came back to that. “People will look up to you. A schoolmarm is always respected. You’ll have money and respect and you won’t have to work yourself to death.”

I was always frightened when she talked about working herself to death. I might have been young, but I knew she was doing just that. She was so thin her bones stuck out, and often she got short of breath. Sometimes she’d turn a funny color and drop into a chair. But another part of me couldn’t imagine that she could ever die and leave me. It happened quite suddenly. There was a dry spell the summer I was ten, and we didn’t want to lose the tomato plants. We were carrying water to them. All at once I heard her cry, and I saw her drop both buckets. I ran to her at once. But she was dead before the water soaked into the ground.

I thought the world had come to an end. I didn’t know how I could bear it. I even had an idea that if I couldn’t bear it, if I couldn’t, couldn’t bear it, God might relent and give her back to me. But though I suffered as much as any child could, she was gone. And overnight, I’d become the woman of the house. There was so much work to do, and nobody to help me get through it. I think Miss Lang was very good to me that first year, because I often fell asleep in school, and she never punished me for it. But I never forgave her for telling me I had to be cleaner about my person. I ought to have been grateful, I guess. But I never was and still am not, to this day.

And I feel the same way about what Father did today. I’ll never forgive the sound in his voice when he said no one would marry me. It sometimes seems to me as if I live in a world where everyone thinks I’m worth nothing — Luke and Father — and there’s nobody on my side at all, with Ma dead and Miss Chandler sent away. But I know I’m not nothing. And somehow I’m going to fight my way forward, though I don’t know how, and I don’t know where I’ll end up.



Thursday, June the twenty-second, 1911

How hard it is to write with refinement, when my life is so sordid and melancholy! But today there was a glimmer of light, a rare flash and gleam: the presence of Hope. It was not that the black clouds parted, revealing a sky of celestial blue — no, the stage of my life is shrouded by curtains of Stygian darkness. But lo! For a brief moment, a crooked thread of lightning defied the gloom.

It happened like this. I was shelling peas, and I set the newspaper pages from Miss Chandler’s bouquet on the kitchen table so I could read while I was working. We don’t often see a newspaper at Steeple Farm. Father says they’re a waste of money. I can’t say I mind much, because what’s going on in the world is confusing and often dismal. But I sat down to read, and the first article I came upon was about the Amalgamated Railroad Employees striking in sympathy with some locomotive workers.

At first my eye just passed over the words, because I don’t know what Amalgamated means and I have no way to look it up. I don’t even know if it’s the employees that are amalgamated, or the railroad. When you see a big word like that, it’s like finding a cherry pit in your piece of pie — you want to spit it out and get on with what you know. Though that is not an elegant metaphor, and I’m ashamed of it. The metaphor about the lightning and the Stygian darkness is much finer.

But the newspaper article started me thinking about strikes. Father says that any man who goes on strike is lazy and not fit to call himself a man. But Miss Chandler — at least sometimes — is in sympathy with the strikers. She especially pities the coal miners, who are so often killed below the ground, and she thinks it’s dreadful when their wives are left widows, and their little children have to go down the mines. She doesn’t believe it’s right to strike, but she prays for the strikers, and she says the mine owners are in the wrong. I wonder if she would pray for the Amalgamated Railroad Employees. Railroad work is dangerous, and it occurs to me that maybe the strikers aren’t lazy but only desperate to change their lives, as I am.

I started to think of what would happen if I went on strike. It seems to me the household would fall to pieces. If I just sat and folded my hands, the fire in the stove would go out and we’d have no hot water. There’d be no meals cooked, and no butter churned, and no clean clothes. Nothing would get mended or tidied. The privy would be filthy, and the garden would go to seed, and the birds would get the cherries and the blueberries and — well, I’d have to feed the chickens and give them fresh water, but I wouldn’t gather the eggs. Everything would be as nasty and untidy and inconvenient as it could be.