“I thought you liked having David Nash sit at table with us,” Mrs. Carson reminded her.
“Well, David’s different. He’s a university student and a football hero,” Pearl defended herself. “But the other hired men and the Orphans’ Home girl—”
Clem Carson appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Supper ready?”
“Yes, Papa. Thanks for the candy, but I do wish you’d get it in a box, not in a paper sack,” Pearl pouted. “I’ll ring the bell. Hurry up and wash before the others come in.”
While Clem Carson was pumping water into a tin wash basin, just inside the kitchen door, Pearl swung the big copper dinner bell, standing on the narrow back porch, her lavender silk skirt fluttering about her thick legs.
Sally fled to the dining room then, ashamed to have David Nash see her in the betraying uniform of the orphanage.
She had obediently set nine places at the long table, not knowing who all of those nine would be, but she found out before many minutes passed. Clem Carson sat at one end of the table, Mrs. Carson at the other. And before David and the other hired men appeared, a tiny, bent little old lady, with kind, vague brown eyes and trembling hands, came shuffling in from somewhere to seat herself at her farmer son’s right hand. Sally learned later that everyone called her Grandma, and that she was Clem Carson’s widowed mother. Immediately behind the little old lady came a big, hulking, loose-jointed man of middle age, with a slack, grinning mouth, a stubble of gray beard on his receding chin, a vacant, idiotic smile in his pale eyes.
At sight of Sally, shrinking timidly against the chair which was to be hers, the half-wit lunged toward her like a playful, overgrown puppy. One of his clammy hands, pale because they could not be trusted with farm work, reached out and patted her cheek.
“Pur-ty girl, pur-ty sister,” he articulated slowly, a light of pleasure gleaming in the pale vacancy of his eyes.
“Now, now, Benny, be good, or Ma’ll send you to bed without your supper,” the little old lady spoke as if he were a naughty child of three. “You mustn’t mind him, Sally. He won’t hurt you. I hope you’ll like it here on the farm. It’s real pretty in the summertime.”