3. Becky Steps In
Saturday came and went without the party. Once, and sometimes twice a day the doctor’s car turned into the broad pebbled driveway and the children went around with subdued voices and anxious faces. Even Lydia, down in her kitchen domain, looked foreboding, and told Rebecca that she had dreamed three times of three blackbirds perching on the chimneys, which was a sure sign of death, anyone could tell you, in her own country.
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” Becky laughed back. “If I were you, Lydia, I’d take something for my liver and go to bed a little earlier at night.”
All the same, her own face looked worried when she entered the sick room and looked down at Mr. Craig’s face on the pillows.
“It seems ridiculous for me to be lying here, Becky,” he would say to her, with the whimsical boyish smile she loved. “Why, there isn’t anything the matter with me only I’m tired out. Machinery’s out of whack is all.”
“No, nothing special only that you can’t eat or walk or sit up without keeling over.” Her keen hazel eyes were amused as she looked at him. “You know, Tom Craig, if it wasn’t for Margie, the girls, and Tommy, I’d take you straight home with me.”
He looked from her to the window. Jean had just brought in a bunch of daffodils in a slender glass vase and had set them in the sunlight.
“You’re not going soon, are you, Becky?”
Rebecca seated herself in the chair beside his bed. As she would have put it, there was a time for all things, and this seemed an opportune one for her to get something off her mind.
“I’ll have to pretty soon. It looks like an early spring, Tom, and there’s a heap of work waiting for me up there. Of course Matt knows how things go as well as I do, but I’ve been away over a month now, and I like to have the oversight of things. Men are only boys, after all, and you can’t expect too much from them. I want to get the barn shingled, and some more hen runs set out before the chicks begin to hatch, and all my berry patches need clearing out. You know that mass of blackberries along the stone wall in the clover patch below the lane—what’s the matter, Tom?” She glanced at him in alarm.
He had closed his eyes as if in pain, and his hand closed suddenly over her own as it lay on the blanket.
“It makes me homesick to hear you talk, Becky.”
Their glances met in a long look of sympathetic remembrance of the old days at Maple Grove.
“If it were not for the children,” he went on slowly. “They are all at an age now when they need the advantages of being near the city.”
“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” answered Becky dubiously. “I suppose you feel that you can do more for them down here, Tom, and it is a beautiful place to live, but you did pretty well yourself up at the old Green District, didn’t you?”
He smiled and nodded his head.
“I wonder what Margie would say to the Green District schoolhouse?” he asked. A vision of it arose out of the memories of the past, the little red schoolhouse that stood at the crossroads, with rocky pastures rising high behind it, and the long white dusty road curving before it. He had been just a country boy, born and bred within a few miles of Maple Grove at the old Craig homestead. He knew every cow path through the woods around Elmhurst, every big chestnut and hickory tree for five miles around, every fork and bend in the course of the wild little river that cut through the valley meadows. Somehow, in these days of weakness and fear that he was losing his grip on life, there had grown a great yearning to be home again, to find himself back in the shelter of the protecting hills. They had always been the hills of rest to him as a boy. He had often turned his thoughts to them longingly while he sloshed through jungles in the Pacific, but now they beckoned to him even more urgently to come back to peace and health.
“She isn’t country-bred, is she, Tom?”
The question called him to reality from his dreams. “No,” he answered gently, “no, Margie’s from California. I believe her people went out originally from New York State, but she herself was born in San Diego. Later, she lived on her father’s ranch for a while in the Coronado Valley, but she was educated in the city. She doesn’t know anything about farm life as we do.”
Rebecca looked nonplussed. California might just as well be Borneo, so far as her knowledge of it was concerned. It did seem rather too bad that Margie had come from such far-off stock, but still, she thought, a great deal could be excused in her on account of it, since it wasn’t given to everybody to be born in New England.
“Would she mind it just for a summer, do you suppose?”
“It would have to be for a longer time than one summer, Becky.”
Something in his voice made her suspicious. Mrs. Craig had walked out to meet the girls on their way home from the movies. A lone adventurous fly crept up the window curtain and Rebecca promptly slapped him with a ready hand.
“Pesky thing, doesn’t it know it’s not time for them to start pestering us,” she said. “What did you say, Tom?”
“I said that it would have to be for a longer time than just one summer. Things have not gone well with me for the past year. I haven’t got the guts to break the news to Margie now.”
“You should have,” said Becky promptly. “It isn’t fair to her not to share your sorrows with her as well as your joys.”
“Margie had enough to worry about in the years I was away when she was managing alone to keep the family together. I don’t want to have her worrying about money now.”
“Just like a man. So now you’ve backed yourself up against a stone wall and can’t see a way out. Can I help you? How much money do you need to tide you over?”
He laughed unsteadily.
“Dear old Becky. You’d give anyone your left ear if they needed it, wouldn’t you? You don’t understand how we live. It takes nearly every cent I get from the government to cover our current expenses. We’ve already made a large hole in our savings in order to get medicine and things. I’m wondering what we are going to do, and I dread even mentioning it to Margie.”
“Then let me do it,” said Miss Craig promptly. “I’d love to. Better yet, talk it over with the whole family if you’re strong enough. How long can you hold out here?”
“I’m not certain.” He looked weary and harassed. “We only rent the place and the lease is up the first of May.”
“I’ll wager you can rent a good farm up home for what you pay here, Tom—house, barns, pasture, hay fields, wood lots and all,” said Rebecca thoughtfully. “It’s a nice place here, but the cost of living is so high.” She looked out at the clean park-like territory around the large modern house. Winding drives swept in and out. Each residence stood in its own spacious grounds. There was an artificial pond where the children skated in winter, and the country club crowned the hill with a golf course sloping away to the shore on the north.
Down in the ravine stood the gray stone railroad station matching the real estate office over the way, and farther along were the village stores, the new high school of brick and concrete, and the two churches. Back and forth along the smooth highway slipped a never-ending line of cars and trucks coming and going like ants over an ant hill.
Becky turned her head toward the bed once more and asked, “Would you rather stay here than go up home with me?”
“It isn’t what I’d rather do. It’s what we may have to do unless I gain my old strength.”
“You’ll never get a bit better lying there worrying over unpaid bills and new ones stacking up. I’m going to talk to Margie.”
He shook his head with a little smile of doubt.
“But it would never be fair to take them away from this sort of thing, Becky. You don’t understand. Their friends are all here. And Jean has been taking up a course in applied design and ceramics, and Doris has her music. Kit’s deep in schoolwork and belongs to about five clubs outside of that. Even Tommy has a swimming class keeping him busy after school two days a week. Margie’s on more committees and things than I can count, and she believes we owe it to the children to give them the best social environment that we can. Perhaps we can get along in some way. There’s a little left at the bank.”
“How much?” demanded Rebecca uncompromisingly. “I mean, after you’ve paid up everything. I’ll bet there isn’t five thousand left.”
“Five thousand! I doubt much whether there is one thousand. Don’t tell Margie that. I still have a few securities I might sell and realize something on.”
“And you think that you’ve been a good husband to her. Land alive, what are men made of! Here she stands a chance of being left alone in the world with four children to bring up and you’ve never bothered her about your business. The sooner you get to it the better, I think.” Rebecca stood up and adjusted her glasses resolutely. She had seen what he could not, Margie coming leisurely up the walk, a loose cluster of pussy willows in her arms, and the girls following, all except Kit. “There they come now. I won’t say anything till you do, Tom.”
Just then Kit’s voice sounded at the door. Her short curls were rumpled and unbrushed, her eyes wide with excitement, as she hugged a heating pad to her face.
“I’ve heard almost every word you said,” she burst out. “I had an earache and stayed home this afternoon, and I’ve been asleep in there on the couch. Please don’t worry, Dad. I think it would be glorious for us all to go up into the country.”
She stopped as the front door banged and Tommy came crashing upstairs completely out of breath from a strenuous game of baseball.
“Well, child, keep your mouth shut till we know where we’re at,” warned Becky quickly. “Go back and lie down. Here they come.”
But Kit stood her ground, and Jean and Doris seemed to catch from her the fact that something was up as they came in behind their mother.
“It was a lovely walk,” said Mrs. Craig, removing her gloves as she sat down beside the bed and smiled at the patient. “We went past the Dunderdale place, Tom. It is simply lovely there. I never saw so many shrubs and trees and such beautiful landscaping. It made me think of the homes out in California. You’d enjoy the garden so this summer, and there is a screened-in porch across the back of the house. The garage is small, but it will do if we don’t get a new car this year.”
Right here Rebecca sniffed, a real, unmistakable sniff. She was a believer in quick action. If you had anything to do, the quicker you did it and got over it the better, she always said. So now she raised her head as they looked at her, and set them all back on their heels.
“You won’t get a new car this year, Margie, my dear, and you’re not going to move to any expensive house, either. I’m going to take the whole lot of you to Elmhurst, and see if Tom can’t get his health back up in that peaceful countryside.”