“You’re a big help, Jackie. Your aunt’s awful busy outside, and I’m not as quick on my feet as I was. Some days it seems like I’d never get through step-stepping.”
Well, when a little old lady says a thing like that to you, of course you can’t flop down on the dining-room couch with a story paper and leave her to work all alone. So while Nellie kept an eye on Freddie and Annie, Jacqueline went upstairs with Grandma and did the chamber work and had her first lesson in bed-making. As there were four beds, besides Freddie’s crib, she had had quite a lot of practice by the time they finished.
“Make a handsome bed, you’ll get a handsome husband, they used to tell me when I was a girl,” chuckled Grandma. “You want to do your best, Jackie, unless you aim to be one o’ these new women that get along without men folks.”
After the beds were made, Jacqueline and Nellie each had a piece of gingerbread, and they took two big pieces for Dickie and Neil, and went out to them in the garden. It was quite a big garden, with poles of beans and rows of peas, trained up on dry bushes, tomato plants and cucumber vines, beets and lettuce, squash and pumpkins. But there were no onions. You got onions by the peck out of the great fields that spread all round the farm. For the Conways, like their neighbors, put all their land into onions, and on the price of onions their fortunes hung.
They dined at noon at the Conway farm, and dinner was all of cold things, so as not to heat the kitchen in the middle of the day. There was ready cooked cereal, and a pitcher of milk. There were great slices of home-made bread, with home-made plum jam. (Jacqueline had gone down with Grandma into the deep cold cellar where the food was kept, and she had seen the shelves where the jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables lived. Next time she could go down herself and save Grandma’s old legs.) There was cottage cheese, and lettuce, and sliced tomatoes. There was gingerbread—all the gingerbread that any one could wish to eat.
After the dinner dishes were cleared away and left to be washed at night when it was cooler, Aunt Martha and Grandma sat down to sew and mend for their big family.
“We’ll have to count on you to do your own mending,” Aunt Martha told Jacqueline. “But you just run out to the barn now, and play.”
Jacqueline went. She wanted to see those kittens. She also wanted to try some hazardous stunts that she had thought up, as soon as she had seen the beams and ladders in the barn. Neil and Nellie came with her, and Dickie presently joined them. Of course Dickie could do acrobatic feats that none of them could equal. But Jacqueline felt she did pretty well at balancing on her hands for the first time, and she could put her ankle behind her neck as well as any of them.
She thought they had been playing only the least little while, but really it was in the middle of the afternoon when the big bell rang. They scampered at once to the house. That was the law of the farm: always run when you hear the bell, or you may miss something you wouldn’t like to miss.
Aunt Martha was on the doorstone, talking to a bearded man in a muddy Ford.