12. The Craigs Plan a Barbecue
Breakfast at Woodhow was supposed to be seven-thirty, but the girls and Tommy got up at about six and spent the hour before out in the garden. It was so fascinating, Doris said, to be out-of-doors in the early morning. Sometimes when the air was warmer than the ground there would be a morning mist out of which rose clumps of tree tops like little islands.
The following day, at five-thirty exactly, Jean wakened drowsily to find Kit standing by her bed, already dressed in blue jeans and a sweater.
“I want you to look at this clock and be a witness that I’m up on time,” she said briskly, holding up an alarm clock. “It’s perfectly gorgeous outside, Jean. I don’t see how you can lie and sleep with all nature calling.”
“Nature didn’t call you before, did she, Kathleen? Go away and let me sleep.”
“Well, I get the records anyway.” She seated herself blithely on the foot of the bed. Jean sat up and hurled her pillow at her, but Kit dodged and ran, laughing, down the hall.
After breakfast though, when the dew was gone from the meadow grass, Jean had Buzzy saddle Princess, the mare, and declared she was going to ride over and get Sally to take her visiting. Kit and Tommy were busy out in the kitchen garden, and Doris was helping with the dusting. For some reason Jean wanted to go without them on this first reconnoitering expedition.
She rode down the hill toward Elmhurst, bowed with a little rising flush of color to the group in the front of the feed store, and stopped before the brown and white house where the Hancocks lived.
“Hello, Jean,” called Sally buoyantly, beating some oval-braided rugs out on the clothesline. “Can you stop in?”
Jean leaned forward, the reins held loosely in her hand. “I wanted to see if you couldn’t go riding with me. Just so I can meet some of the girls. We want to give a barbecue or some sort of a party to get acquainted with our neighbors.”
“Why, the idea,” Sally exclaimed, dropping her stick and pushing back her hair. “I think that’s awfully nice. Wait till I ask Mother if I can go.”
Jean waited and presently Mrs. Hancock stepped out on the side porch and down the steps. She was rather like Buzzy and Sally, curly-haired and young-looking, with deep dimples and eyes that still held an abiding happiness in their blue depths. Her face was careworn and there were lines around her mouth that told of repressed pain, but it was the look in the eyes that held you. Luella Trowbridge may have gone through trouble, but she had married the man she loved and had been happy with him. She stretched out both hands to Jean.
“Buzzy’s told us so much about all of you up there that it seems as if I know every single one of you,” she said pleasantly. “You’re Jean, aren’t you? Of course Sally can go along if she wants to. Don’t forget the new girl over at the old Parmelee place.”
Jean never forgot that morning. They rode miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the material upon which she had to work.
At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.
“Ingeborg belonged to a basketball team,” Astrid said. “I can swim and play tennis best.”
The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Rebecca’s. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother’s skirts at the stranger on horseback and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.
“They like very much to come, you see?” she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. “Tony, I have shame for you, ma petite. Why don’t you come out and say hello? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, quick!”
Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to give to Jean and Sally. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must ride around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.
Last of all came the Icelandic farm, and here Jean found only the hired men, two grave-faced, light-haired transplanted vikings, who eyed her curiously and silently. Hedda, the daughter, and her mother had driven over to sell two young pigs at the Finnish place.
“Oh, golly,” laughed Jean, “let’s go home. I feel as if I had been riding like Peer Gynt, all over the world, just touching at countries here and there. Let’s go right straight home, so I can talk to Mother and get a perspective on it all.”
“Better ask the Mill girls over while you’re about it,” Sally suggested, so they made one last stop at the red sawmill in the valley below Woodhow. “They’re Americans. My friend lives here, Lucy Peckham. She’s got five sisters and three brothers, but Lucy’s the whole family herself.”
The three brothers worked in the sawmill after school, and Jean didn’t see them, but Lucy sufficed. She came running out of the kitchen with a brown and white checked apron covering her up, and her red hair streaming behind her. She was short and freckled and not one bit pretty, unless good health and happiness and smiles made up for beauty. But the instant you met Lucy you recognized executive ability concentrated in human form.
“Billy, keep out of those lettuce beds,” she called to a younger brother, strayed somehow from the mill. “How do you do, Miss Craig—”
“Oh, call me Jean,” Jean said quickly. “We’re close neighbors. If we didn’t hear your whistle we’d never know what time it is.”
“Well, we’ve been intending to get up the valley to see you, but Mother hasn’t been well, and all the girls are younger than I, so I help around the house. We’ve got twins in our family, did Sally tell you? Sally and I named them. We thought of everything under the sun, Martha Washington and Betsey Ross, and Ruth and Naomi, and Mercy and Faith, and then we got it all at once. We’ve had twins in our family before, Josephine and Imogene, that’s Mother and Aunt Jo, but we didn’t want to repeat. Somehow, it didn’t show any imagination.” She laughed and so did Jean. “So we called ours Elva and Sylvia. We say Elvy and Sylvy for short. Anne and Charlotte are twelve and nine and the twins are only five. They’re too cute for anything. Wish you’d all come down and see us Sunday afternoon.”
“Lucy’d ask the whole world to supper Sunday afternoon,” Sally said as they finally turned up the home road. “She’s just a dear, and she has to work all the time. She never has a single day to herself, and she doesn’t mind it a bit. She does manage to get away to sing in the choir Sunday mornings, but that’s all. And even if she isn’t pretty, she’s got a voice that makes gooseflesh come out all over you, and you shut your eyes and just tingle when it rises and falls. I think she’s wonderful. Isn’t her hair red?”
“It’s coppery and it’s beautiful,” Jean answered decidedly. “I think she’s swell. Why can’t Anne and Charlotte buckle down and help, so that Lucy can get away once in a while?”
“Her mother says she can’t do without her.”
Jean pondered over that and finally decided it was too deep for her to settle. It had been a very profitable afternoon, and after she had taken Sally home, she rode into the home drive, feeling as if she really had a line on Elmhurst girls. Tommy came running down to meet her as she jumped off, while Buzzy came to take care of Princess. Tommy’s eyes were shining with excitement.
“Jeannie, what do you suppose has happened?”
“Something’s sprouted,” Jean guessed laughingly. Tommy spent most of his time watching to see if any of the seeds had started to sprout.
“No. It isn’t that. Gypsy’s got little chickens. She marched into the barnyard with ten of them, as proud as anything. And nobody knows where she hatched them at all.”
Jean had to go immediately to see the new brood. Gypsy had cuddled them around her in the barn on a pile of hay and steadfastly refused to be removed. If ever a hen looked nonchalant she did, quite as if she would have said, “I can do it just as well as any of these ridiculous nesters that you’re so proud of, and my chicks are twice as perfect as theirs.”
“They’re wonderful babies, Gypsy,” Jean told her. “Be careful of them now. Mothers have to behave themselves, you know. No more gallivanting off to the woods.”
“She probably will. I’m going to put them into a little coop tomorrow and her too.”
It only proved, as Kit remarked, what children would do for a flighty and light-minded person.
Jean changed into a dress and ran down into the kitchen to help get lunch and tell her experiences of the day, which proved so entertaining and comical that Mrs. Craig finally came out and asked if they were ever to have anything to eat.
“Dad’s tray is all ready, Mom,” Jean replied, sitting up on the kitchen stool beside the stove, “I’m just waiting for the biscuits to bake, and Kit’s fixing a beautiful jelly omelette. Mother, you never saw anything so funny as these precious inhabitants, but they’re all gold, just the same, and I like them. And we’re going to have a barbecue.”