The Eighth Day (7 page)

“Now, Sophie, I don't want you to get downhearted one minute. I'd hate to hear that. You just stay yourself like you are. It's up to you and me.”

Here he gazed at her a moment, his silence freighted with all the unspoken.

“I'm going to write Mama once a month and send her some money. But I'm not going to give her my new name and address. Do you know why? Because the police are going to open every letter that comes to our house. I don't want the police to know where I am. That means that Mama won't be able to write me any letters; but for a whole half year and maybe more I don't want any letters from her. I've got to have my mind all fixed on just one thing, and do you know what that thing is, do you?”

Sophia murmured, “Money.”

“Yes. But I'm going to write you once a month, too. I'm going to send your letter to Porky, so that nobody will know. So, listen, Sophie. The first few days after the fifteenth of the month you go down the street past where Porky's working at his window. You keep your eyes right ahead of you, but out of the corner of your eyes you look and see if he's hung up that calendar in his window—you know, the one I gave him last Christmas with the pretty girl on it. If that calendar's in the window, that means there's a letter for you. Don't go in then, but go home and get some old shoes and go into his store as if you were a customer. Nobody,
nobody
, Sophie, must know that Porky's the person we're sending letters through. We could get him into trouble, too. This is all his idea. He's our best friend. Now, every time I write you I'm going to send you an envelope all stamped and addressed to me, and I'll put a piece of paper in it for you to write me on. So you go out of the house after dark and mail it in the mailbox at Gibson's corner. That's quite a long walk, but that's the way we ought to do it. Now, Sophie, write me everything that's going on here, and I mean everything. About Mama and how you all are. And write perfectly true—that's the chief thing I ask you.”

Sophie nodded quickly.

“Now, Sophie, remember this: What's happened about Papa isn't important. What's important is what starts right now. You and I. Don't you change. Don't you get silly like most girls. We'll need our wits about us.” He lowered his voice. “We've got to be fighters and the fight is all about money. I wouldn't be afraid to
steal
to get Mama some money.”

Sophia again nodded quickly. She understood that. It was less important than what was next on her mind. She said softly: “You've got to promise me something, Roger. You've got to promise me that you'll write me what's perfectly true. Like if you were sick or anything.”

Roger stood up. “You mustn't ask me that, Sophie. It's different with a man. . . . ? But I promise to write pretty truthfully.”

“No! No! Roger! If you got sick, very sick, or if you got terribly hungry and were alone someplace. Or if something happened to you like what happened to Papa. I won't promise to write what's true unless you promise to write what's true too. You can't ask somebody to be brave without giving them something to be brave about.”

There was a struggle of wills. “All right,” he said finally. “I promise. It's a bargain.”

Sophia looked up at him with an expression on her face which he was to remember all his life. He was to call it her “Domrémy look.” “Because, Roger I can tell you this: that if there were anything in the world you needed—like money or anything like that—I could get it. I could do anything.”

“I know it. I know that.” He put his hand in his pocket and brought out five dollars. “Sophie, the night Papa started off on the train he sent me his gold watch. Yesterday I sold it to Mr. Carey for forty dollars. I gave thirty dollars to Mama, and I saved five dollars for myself and five dollars for you. I don't think Mama's thinking very clear about money these days. You do the shopping, so you keep that five dollars secret until sometime you may need it.”

At the same time and without an additional word he gave her his greatest treasure—three Kangaheela arrowheads of green quartz, of chrysoprase.

“Well, I better get started.”

“Roger, is Papa going to write us?”

“That's what I keep thinking about. I don't see how he can without getting us into more trouble, and himself too. You know he's not a citizen any more. After a while—maybe after years—he'll find a way. I think it's best just not to think about him for a while. What we've got to do is live, that's all.”

Sophia nodded, then whispered, “Roger, what are you going to do? I mean: be?” Her question meant what kind of great man was he to be and Roger knew it.

“I don't know yet, Sophie.” He looked at her with a faint smile and nodded.

He did not kiss her. He took her elbows in his hands and pressed them hard. “Now you go in the house and find some way of keeping Mama out of the kitchen while I pick up my coat and go out by the chicken run.”

“Roger, I'm sorry. Roger, I'm sorry, but you've got to say goodbye to Mama. You're the only man we've got in the house now.”

Roger swallowed and squared his shoulders. “All right, Sophie, I will.”

“She's in the sitting room sewing, like it was evening.”

Roger went up the stairs the back way, pretending that he had forgotten something. He descended into the front hall and entered the sitting room.

“Well, Mama, I'd better be going.”

His mother rose uncertainly. She knew how he—and all Ashleys—hated to be kissed, hated birthdays and Christmas, and all occasions that strove to bring the unspoken to the surface. Her shortness of breath returned. Her words were barely audible. Beata Kellerman of Hoboken, New Jersey, reverted to the language of her childhood.

“Gott behüte dich, mein Sohn!”

“Goodbye, Mama!”

He left the house. For the first and only time in her life, Beata Ashley fainted.

Something had hovered unspoken behind the conversation between Sophia and her brother on the croquet court.

People who couldn't pay their taxes went to the poorhouse. The poorhouse at Goshen, fourteen miles from Coaltown, hung like a great black cloud over the lives of many in Kangaheela and Grimble counties. To go to jail was far less shameful than to go to Goshen. Yet the guests at Goshen enjoyed amenities hitherto unknown to them. The meals were regular and nourishing. The sheets on the beds were changed twice a month. The view from the great verandahs was uplifting. There was no coal dust in the air. The women were set to sewing for the state's hospitals, the men worked in the dairy and vegetable gardens and in winter made furniture. It is true that there was a persistent smell of cabbage in the corridors, but the smell of cabbage is not repellent to those who have spent a lifetime in indigence. Some congenial hours might have been arrived at in Goshen, but there were no smiles and no kindness; the burden of shame was too crushing. The institution was a limbo five days a week; on visitors' days it was hell. “Are you all right, Grandma?” “Do they make you comfortable, Uncle Joe?” We are enchained and we enchain one another. To go to Goshen meant that your life, your one life, had been a failure. The Christian religion, as delivered in Coaltown, established a bracing relation between God's favor and money. Penury was not only a social misfortune; it was a visible sign of a fall from grace. God had promised that the just would never suffer want. The indigent were in an unhappy relation to both the earthly and heavenly orders.

Goshen held a peculiar fascination and horror for children. Among Roger's and Sophia's schoolmates there were a number whose relatives were in the poorhouse. They bore the brunt of the other children's cruelty. “Go to Go-shun, you!” All had heard the account of Mrs. Cavanaugh's transference. She had lived in the big house next to the Masons' Hall, mortgaged and remortgaged. No taxes had been paid for years. She had been fed by members of her Baptist church; turn and turn about, they had left packages at her back door. But the Day came. She fled upstairs and hid in the attic while a matron packed her bag. She was brought down to the street, protesting at every step, clutching at every doorpost. She was carried down the front steps, her feet not touching the ground. She was pushed into the buggy like a recalcitrant cow. It was June and the neighbors' windows were open. Many a cheek turned pale as her cries filled the street. “Help me! Isn't there anybody who'll help me?” Mrs. Cavanaugh had once been proud, happy, and well-to-do. God had turned his face away from her. Roger and Sophia knew that their mother would walk toward Goshen's buggy like a queen. They knew they were her only defense.

Sophia went to work at once. It was midsummer. She bought a dozen lemons. She pushed the little cart on which she was accustomed to tote feed for her chickens to Bixbee's ice house and bought five cents' worth of ice. She made two signs:
MINT LEMONADE
3
CENTS
and
BOOKS
10
CENTS
. She set up a counter on an orange crate at the railroad station a quarter of an hour before the arrival and departure of all five daytime trains. She set a pail of water beside her in which she washed the glasses. She placed a vase of flowers beside the pitcher of lemonade. The station-master himself lent her a second table on which she ranged some books she had found in the attic and in old cupboards. They were Airlee MacGregor's books and some old textbooks that her father had used at his engineering school. By the second day, she had found other objects and made signs for their sale:
MUSIC BOX
20
CENTS, DOLL'S HOUSE
20
CENTS
and
BABY'S CRIB
40
CENTS
. She waited, smiling brightly. Within hours the news of this enterprise was carried from house to house. The women were electrified. (“Did anybody buy anything?” “How much did she sell?”) Men were rendered uncomfortable. It was Sophia's smile that had long offended and disconcerted. The child of shame and crime had the effrontery to smile. A spectacle of great misfortune, of happiness overthrown, of a desperate struggle for existence arouses conflicting emotions. Even those who are moved to sympathy find that their sympathy is touched with relief, even triumph; with fear or awe or repulsion. Often such reversals are called “judgments.”

The crowd of loungers who made it a habit to meet the trains doubled in numbers. The little saleslady sat alone, like an actress on the stage. The first glass of lemonade was bought by Porky. He gave no sign of knowing Sophia, but stood for ten minutes beside her counter slowly enjoying his beverage. Others followed. A traveling salesman bought
A First Year Calculus
and Mr. Gregg, the stationmaster, bought Robertson's
Sermons.
The second morning a group of boys set up a game of catch the length of the station platform. Their leader was Si Leyendecker. The ball flew back and forth over Sophia's tables; it became clear that it was the boys' intention to shatter the pitcher of lemonade.

“Si,” said Sophia, “you can play somewhere else.”

“Go fly a kite, Sophie.”

The bystanders watched in silence. Suddenly a tall man with a great curling beard strode onto the platform from the main street. He put a stop to the game with curt unanswerable authority. Sophia raised her eyes to his and said, “Thank you, sir”—lady to gentleman. He was a stranger, but it was not new to Sophia that it would be men and not women who would be useful to her.

Sophia waited until the fourth day to tell her mother. She left a note on the kitchen table: “Dear Mama, I will be a little late. Am selling lemonade at the depot. Love, Sophia.”

Her mother said, “Sophia, I don't want you to sell lemonade at the station.”

“But, Mama, I've made three dollars and ten cents.”

“Yes, but I don't want you to do it any more.”

“If you made some of your oatcakes, I know I could sell them all.”

“I think people will try to be kind the first days, Sophia, but it won't last. I don't want you to do it any more.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Three days later her mother found another note on the kitchen table: “Am having supper at Mrs. Tracy's.”

“What were you doing at Mrs. Tracy's, Sophia?”

“She had to go to Fort Barry. She gave me fifteen cents to cook the children's supper. Mama, she wants me to stay all night there and she'll give me another fifteen cents. She's afraid, because Peter plays with matches.”

“Is she expecting you there tonight?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You may go tonight, but when she comes back you thank her and tell her your mother needs you at home.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“And do not take the money.”

“But, Mama, if I do the work, can't I have the money?”

“Sophia, you're too young to understand these things. We don't need these people's kindness. We don't want it.”

“Mama, winter's coming.”

“What? What do you mean?—Sophia, I want you to remember that I know best.”

Three weeks after Roger's departure, on August 16, the postman delivered a letter at “The Elms.” Sophia received it at the door. She did as the Moslems do—she pressed it to her forehead and heart. She looked at it closely. It had been opened and clumsily resealed. She carried it to her mother in the kitchen.

“Mama, I think it is a letter from Roger.”

“Is it?” Her mother opened it slowly. A two-dollar bill fell to the floor. She looked at the message in a dazed way and passed it to Sophia. “Read . . . ? read it to me, Sophia,” she said hoarsely.

“It says, ‘Dear Mama, everything's fine with me. I hope things are fine with you. I'll be making more money soon. It's not hard to get work here. Chicago is very big. I can't send you an address yet because I don't know where I'll be. You'd laugh at how I'm growing. I hope I stop soon. Love to you and Lily and Sophie and Connie. Roger.'”