“Yes, lamb.” Two dollars in her pocket. All yesterday’s grim toil, and all to-day’s, and months of labour behind those two days. Two dollars in the pocket of her black calico petticoat. “We’ll get something to eat when we drive out a ways. Some milk and bread and cheese.”
The sun was very hot. She took the boy’s hat off, passed her tender work-calloused hand over the damp hair that clung to his forehead. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” she said. “Like an adventure. Look at all the kind people we’ve met. Mr. Spanknoebel, and Mr. Talcott——”
“And Mabel.”
Startled, “And Mabel.”
She wanted suddenly to kiss him, knew he would hate it with all the boy and all the Holland Dutch in him, and did not.
She made up her mind to drive east and then south. Pervus had sometimes achieved a late sale to outlying grocers. Jan’s face if she came home with half the load still on the wagon! And what of the unpaid bills? She had, perhaps, thirty dollars, all told. She owed four hundred. More than that. There were seedlings that Pervus had bought in April to be paid for at the end of the growing season, in the fall. And now fall was here.
Fear shook her. She told herself she was tired, nervous. That terrible week. And now this. The heat. Soon they’d be home, she and Dirk. How cool and quiet the house would seem. The squares of the kitchen tablecloth. Her own neat bedroom with the black walnut bed and dresser. The sofa in the parlour with the ruffled calico cover. The old chair on the porch with the cane seat sagging where warp and woof had become loosened with much use and stuck out in ragged tufts. It seemed years since she had seen all this. The comfort of it, the peace of it. Safe, desirable, suddenly dear. No work for a woman, this. Well, perhaps they were right.
Down Wabash Avenue, with the L trains thundering overhead and her horses, frightened and uneasy with the unaccustomed roar and clangour of traffic, stepping high and swerving stiffly, grotesque and angular in their movements. A dowdy farm woman and a sunburned boy in a rickety vegetable wagon absurdly out of place in this canyon of cobblestones, shops, street-cars, drays, carriages, bicycles, pedestrians. It was terribly hot.
The boy’s eyes popped with excitement and bewilderment.
“Pretty soon,” Selina said. The muscles showed white beneath the skin of her jaw. “Pretty soon. Prairie Avenue. Great big houses, and lawns, all quiet.” She even managed a smile.