She suddenly loathed herself, her budding, curving young body that she had taken such innocent delight in as she bathed for her journey. She wanted to shrink and shrink and shrink, until she was a little girl again, too young to know “the facts of life,” as Mrs. Stone, blushing and embarrassed, had called the half-truths she had told Sally. She wanted to climb over the door of the car, drop into the hot dust of the road, and run like a dog-chased rabbit back into the safety of the Home. There were no men there—no queer, different male beings who would want to “take liberties”—
“My land! Scared of me?” Clem Carson chuckled. “You poor little chicken! Don’t mind me, Sally. I don’t mean no harm, teasing you for a kiss. Land alive! I got a girl of my own, ain’t I? Darned proud of her, too, and I’d cut the heart outa any man that tried to take advantage of her. Ain’t got no call to be scared of me, Sally.”
She smiled waveringly, shyness making her lips stiff, but she relaxed a little, though she kept as far away from the man as ever. In spite of her dread of the future and her bitter disappointment over Miss Pond’s disclosures as to her mother, she was finding the trip to the farm an adventure. In the twelve years of her life in the State Orphans’ Asylum she had never before left the orphanage unaccompanied by droves of other sheep-like, timid little girls, and unchaperoned by sharp-voiced, eagle-eyed matrons.
She felt queer, detached, incomplete, like an arm or a leg dissevered from a giant body; she even had the panicky feeling that, like such a dismembered limb, she would wither and die away from that big body of which she had been a part for so long. But it was pleasant to bump swiftly along the hot, dusty white road, fringed with odorous, flowering weeds. Houses became less and less frequent; few children ran barefoot along the road, scurrying out of the path of the automobile. Occasionally a woman, with a baby sprawling on her hip, appeared in the doorway of a roadside shack and shaded her eyes with her hand as she squinted at the car.
As the miles sped away Carson seemed to feel the need of impressing upon her the fact that her summer was not to be one of unalloyed pleasure. He sketched the life of the farm, her own work upon it, as if to prepare her for the worst. “My wife’s got the reputation of being a hard woman,” he told her confidentially. “But she’s a good woman, good clean through. She works her fingers to the bone, and she can’t abide a lazy, trifling girl around the place. You work hard, Sally, and speak nice and respectful-like, and you two’ll get on, I warrant.”
“Yes, sir,” Sally stammered.
“Well, Sally,” he told her at last, “here’s your new home. This lane leads past the orchards—I got ten acres in fruit trees, all of ’em bearing—and the gardens, then right up to the house. Pretty fine place, if I do say so myself. I got two hundred acres in all, quite a sizeable farm for the middle west. Don’t them orchards look pretty?”
Sally came out of her frightened reverie, forced her eyes to focus on the beautiful picture spread out on a giant canvas before her. Then she gave an involuntary exclamation of pleasure. Row after row of fruit trees, evenly spaced and trimmed to perfection, stretched before her on the right. The child in her wanted to spring from the seat of the car, run ecstatically from tree to tree, to snatch sun-ripened fruit.
“You have a good fruit crop,” she said primly.
“There’s the house.” The farmer pointed to the left. “Six rooms and a garret. My daughter, Pearl, dogged the life out of me until I had electric lights put in, and a fancy bathtub. She even made me get a radio, but it comes in right handy in the evenings, specially in winter. My daughter, Pearl, can think of more ways for me to spend money than I can to earn it,” he added with a chuckle, so that Sally knew he was proud of Pearl, proud of her urban tastes.