Living Up to Billy — Reading Companion

They had a great big stable opening on to a pasture where there was calves and cows and horses and pigs. I think I stood half an hour looking at the pigs. It is funny, but I always thought a pig a sort of a ham hanging up in the window of a delicatessen, instead of being a live, friendly animal that will come when you call it. There were a lot of chickens, white leghorns, I think the woman called them, and they looked friendly and home-like wandering around the place talking and singing to themselves like a bunch of happy women. Mrs. Smith let me feed them. She gave me a milk pan full of corn and told me to hit on its edge with a spoon, and they came flocking from every direction, some half flying, half running, as if they were afraid they would miss the party. They were so tame that I had to hold the pan up high to keep some of the sassy roosters from climbing into it. Mrs. Smith knows them all and can tell if one is missing, though they all look alike to me. She says she hates to kill them cause it seems like eating some of the family. Her husband laughed and said, "I will tell you the tragedy of the wrong hen." He said, "You know once a week we have chicken pot pie, and for seven days Mary goes mourning around wondering which one of her precious chickens she can part with,--and live. We hear the virtues and the vices of each old biddy, cause my wife loves each feather. The other day after heart breakening talks Mary decided that Peggy could be killed, and a motherly old hen who wanted to set should be tied up. We caught them at night and put a blue string on Peggy, and a white string on the motherly hen, and tied them to the ice-house door. Mary took an hour and a half to explain to me that the chicken with the blue string was to be eaten, and she of the white string was to be left tied to the ice-house door until her longings toward motherhood would stop. In the morning when I went out to see those chickens, blest if I could tell which was to be killed, and which was not, but I thought I would take my chance on the fattest, and I took her head off. I suppose you noticed Mary's eyes--it was the wrong head."

Billy and the kid played out-doors all day and his face got sun burnt and his eyes sparkled, and he looked just like another baby. Her boy is only six months older than Billy, but he is so much bigger, and it just makes me sick to think I can't give this to Billy and let him have a chance to grow up big and strong like other boys. All the way in on the train, I kinda cussed under my breath, to think I had to take him back to that dirty little room, and the girls who were always talking to him and feeding him things he orter not have, and him a hearing things that perhaps he will remember when he grows up, and it may make him do a lot of thinking by himself. I wish I could do something, but I don't know what I can do. I feel helpless, as if my hands was tied down by my sides, and I couldn't get them loose. Good-bye, I am kinda sore to-night. Seems to me we got in wrong somewhere, Kate, and I don't know where nor how. It ain't your fault, and it ain't mine, but it don't seem to me we have had our chance like other women have. I saw a picture the other day on a calendar. It was a happy looking woman dressed in a long blue gown carrying a baby up a beautiful stairs with flowers everywhere, and they were looking over her shoulder at the father down below. Now, can you imagine anything nicer than that to be in a home of your own with a pretty dress on, your baby in your arms, going to put it in its bed and your husband looking up at you proud? Nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to be afraid of. That is the biggest kind of heaven I know, but I guess it ain't for us. We got in wrong from the start, but oh, Kate, I do wish things was different. I don't care so much for myself, but I do want to get Billy out of this life where thieving and being a crook is the natural thing, and a person on the level is looked upon as being queer. Sometimes when I see Billy do some little thing or have a look in his face like Jim, my heart most stops beating. I don't pray, but I do say, "Oh, if there is such a thing as a God, don't let Billy grow up like his father." And, there are a lot of your little ways that I would just as soon not see cropping out in him.

Well, good night, I am glad you are getting along so well. I can't send you any money this time, cause I am flat broke since I paid your storage bill, but I will give you twenty next month. Do write me a decent letter, Kate. Your last letter was simply a touch from the beginning to the end, and between you and your friends, I am kept pretty well cleaned up.

Say, but I am a happy girl! What do you think, Billy and me is in the country. I am going to stay a week, and Billy is going to stay always, I hope. After I had made that first visit to Mrs. Smith, I kept seeing that place with the pigs and the chickens and the trees and the lake and the nice green grass and the kids rolling over on it, and the room here got smaller and hotter, and Billy got whiter, and I felt I couldn't stand it, so I sat down and wrote Mrs. Smith, and asked her if she wouldn't take Billy to board. She was real nice and came over to see me one day, and ended up by taking me and Billy back with her. She asked me to stay a week so Billy would get used to her and the place and not be lonesome. The manager kicked, but I said I was sick, and I got a week's leave. Mrs. Smith offered to take Billy for nothing, but I wouldn't stand for that and we settled on $3.50 for his board. I offered to pay more, but she would not listen to me. She says he will be company for her baby, and that two is easier to take care of than one anyway.

This life here don't seem real to me. I went to bed at nine o'clock, which I don't remember I have ever done in my life before. Even as a kid I was on the streets until ten or eleven o'clock and, in the last three years, three in the morning has been my bye-bye time. I went up to a little room under the roof, and lay awake until almost morning, hearing such a lot of strange sounds that I was as nervous as a hen. There was a big tree by the corner of the house, and its branches would swish across the roof as if a ghost was trying to get in the window. Talk about the quiet of a country night, I never heard so many sounds in all my life and they all seemed sad. The little frogs go chug, chug, as if their hearts was broken, and every once in a while, the tinkle of the cow-bell from some pasture down below, would come to me. There is a night bird called the whip-o-will that set in a tree up near the barn and called another one across the lake whose answer I could just hear. There is a funny animal up here called the bull-frog, who sets upon a log over at the back of the lake and hollars at his friends. The first time I heard them, it nearly scared a lung from me, but now I lie in bed and laugh when they commence. I thought the Smiths were joshing me when they showed me the little thing that made such a big noise. Wouldn't it be nice if we could make a noise as big according to our size as the bull-frog does to his? I know lots of people that I would like to sit on a log and hollar at.

It seemed I had just shut my eyes when they called me to breakfast, but it was beautiful. We ate out in front of the kitchen door and saw a gray mist rise over the lake all turning to rose when the sun touched it. It looked like a pink silk dancing petticoat under a gray chiffon skirt. Did you ever eat at a table under a great big tree looking out on the water? You know you eat different. You eat slow, and you think of the things you love, the things you have read about, and of what you would like to be. The toast seems crisper, and the coffee tastes better, and you forget the rotten crowd and old New York and the hot, dry streets and the Childs restaurants and the dance halls and the whole bum world. Then our evenings are so happy! We row around the lake and afterwards come home and water the flowers. We must pump the water from the pump in the kitchen and carry it in pails. I had one side of the lawn and Mrs. Smith had the other side, and last night my flowers took fifteen pails. It makes my back ache, and the pump coughs as if it had the T. B., but the flowers are so pretty, and they look so happy and so old fashioned in the big green tubs, that I am willing to do anything for them. Mrs. Smith has learnt me their names. There are pansies with purple and yellow faces, and proud red dahlias, and China astors and hollyhocks against the wall, and flox all mixed together in a way that shows, as Mrs. Smith says, that there is no social standing in the country. There are some poor tea roses that by mistake got planted in a bed of merrigolds, and they are not doing very well and act unhappy. Each morning I go over them all and take away the foolish green worms that always crawl back in the night, although I throw them over the fence.

Then, when all the "chores," as Mr. Smith calls them are done, we shut the boat-house door and set on the veranda and watch the moon as it goes down over the tree tops. It shines so beautiful through the pine trees at the edge of the lake. Everyone is quiet. Even the babies snuggle down in our arms and stop their chattering. There are two great toads that live under the front veranda, who come out on the walk and look at each other as only toads in love can look, and there is a cricket in the tree down by the lake that calls to a lady cricket who lives over by the ice house. She answered lovingly for two evenings, but I guess now she is gone, and he sets in his lonely tree, and calls and calls, and no soft-voiced cricket says, "Yes, dear." There is a loud-voiced cricket that sets near the boat-house door, and says, "Come to me, come to me," and I fear my lady cricket has gone to him.

Then we take our little lamps and go to bed, and I have the baby near me if I want to speak to him. I use to have to read till I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, but now sleep seems to come to me just like a friend. Some way I feel that this is the right life, and if I only could live it long enough, I might become a woman after all.

I have had the grandest week. It is Billy's birthday, and I come out to stay two days with him and have stayed on and on and won't go back until next Monday. I brought out both the kids a white pique suit and white shoes and stockings, and they look awful cunning. I always buy something for Paul, because it seems kind of selfish to give to Billy and not to the other one. I don't think the Smiths have much money. He was a teacher in a school in England, and his health broke down and he come to America because he thought he could do better here, but I don't think every thing is going just as he thought it would. His brother is in Australia, and is doing fine, and I guess they wish that they had gone there instead. He is an awful nice man and knows all about the birds, and the trees, and the flowers, and he tells it to me and it has changed lots of things for me, because I know all the sounds now and what they mean, and they talk to me instead of being just noises.

I am learning to be a housekeeper, and "I help round," as Mrs. Smith says, all day. We washed Monday and I never knew it took such work to just wash clothes. I have washed handkerchiefs and some of Billy's things up in my room, but here we wash sheets and pillow cases and table clothes and shirt waists. Talk about shirt waists! I use to tell Mrs. Murphy that did mine up, that she was an old thief, cause she charged me twenty cents for them, but now I know she earned her money all right. First Mrs. Smith soaked the clothes over night with some white powder in the water. Then Mr. Smith fished the washing machine out of the lake where it was put where its seams would swell up, and I turned the handle of the thing, till I thought my arm would come off, but it was rather fun, as it was out-of-doors and I could watch the chip-monks as they come looking for scraps from the kitchen. There is some squirrels in the trees, and they look so pretty setting up on their haunches with their long bushy tails curled over their backs, nibbling away at a nut. If I lived in the country, I wouldn't keep a cat, because it kills the chip-monks and birds. The young black birds are just now trying to leave their nests, and sometimes they fall out and set on the ground under the bushes and call their father and mother with a funny little chirp sound, and the cat hears it and creeps with her stomach close to the ground till she is close to the baby bird, and then pounces like lightening on him, and the poor little chap cries for help most like a human baby. The mother bird will fight for her little ones, as long as she can, and sometimes I wish she would peck the old cat's eyes out. I spent a good share of my time chasing the cat from place to place, but even after doing that and watching the chip-monks and squirrels and stopping to keep the children from falling off the dock, I got the washing done at last, and Mrs. Smith rinsed and blued the clothes and hung part of them up on a line and part she spread on the grass to bleach. My clothes looked surprised as they never found themselves in such a place before, laying on nice clean grass with the hot sun blazing down on them. They seemed sort of happy, and they took such odd positions that I looked at them in wonder, hardly knowing my old friends. But they got whiter and whiter, and we gathered them in when the dusk come and they smelled so sweet, that I am sure I will have to carry clean thoughts for the rest of the week.

Mrs. Smith lets me gather the vegetables for dinner. Every morning after the dishes are washed, I go across the road to the garden and pick the string-beans and gather summer squash and grub around the nice smelly earth for potatoes. I get the dirt all under my finger nails, and can just see the duchess at Gimble's who manicures me, when she takes my lily-white hands in hers next time. I pick the cucumbers from the vines, and I never in all my life saw such big tomatoes. Then we come down the path, Billy carrying a cucumber in each hand, because they don't break if he drops them, and Paul with a summer squash swinging by the neck, and me with my apron piled full of things that smell of the vines.

There is nothing to drink up here, and I don't miss it and I don't bring cigarettes with me. My friends think it ain't nice to smoke, and I would not hurt them for worlds. Their friendship and the love they show me is worth more than all the drinks or smokes in little old New York. Why, I would give up anything just to see the look in their faces when they meet me at the station, and I know they really want me to come.

It rained yesterday, not a dull, drizzling rain like we have in the City, but a happy "I am good for you" rain, that washed old mother earth's face and left quiet gray shadows on the lake. I never thought I could think a rain was pretty, but yesterday it was just beautiful as it came down slantwise on the water. We heard it coming long before it got to us, sounded just like the patter patter of soft footed things on a chifon carpet, and way across the lake we could see a blue-gray wall that come nearer and nearer till it got to us. Then when the rain was finished, the lake looked like a dull looking glass with every leaf and tree showing in its face. The birds began to call to one another again, and the robbins came out on the lawn looking for worms. There is one saucy robbin who comes toward me and cocks his little head and says, "Am I not a little dandy? Do I not hold myself as a gentleman should?" Then he finds a big fat worm and pulls and tugs until he gets him loose and flies away to his wife and babies because, although his vest is far too gay for a person who is the main support, quite likely of a large and growing family, he don't seem to have the air of a bachelor. There is a loon at the other end of the lake that laughs just like a person, and twice I have seen a big bird walking around on the edge of the water that Mr. Smith says is a blue heron. When we go up into the woods, little red lizzards with gold spots run across the path, and the babies try to get them. I have been fishing twice, but I won't do it no more, as I can't bear to take the hooks out of the fish's mouth, so when the others go I will stay on shore and watch the funny water-bugs that make such big jumps. If we could jump like them, one good hop would take us from 14th Street to the Grand Central, and there would be no use for the subway.

I just live out-of-doors, setting on the veranda watching the mist rise over the lake, or, when I am not helping Mrs. Smith, spending long hours lying flat on my back looking up at the sky and wondering if there is some path for me, and if I will ever find it. I think it is good to get close to the ground, and I tell it all my secrets. It gives me strength, and a sort of hope I never had before.