Across the Fruited Plain

by Florence Crannell Means

There he was, standing behind the counter in the shadowy shop, his shoulders drooping like Daddy's. He was a big, kind-looking old man, his gray hair waving round a bald dome, his eyes bright blue. He was looking at a newspaper. It was a crumpled old paper that had been wrapped around someone's shoes; the Beechams didn't spend pennies for newspapers nowadays.

The long brushes were quiet from their whirling. On the rack of finished shoes two pairs awaited their owners; on the other rack were a few that had evidently just come in. Yet Grandpa looked as tired as if he had mended a hundred pairs.

He looked up when the bell tinkled. "Oh, Ellen-girl! Anything wrong?"

"Only Gramma says please come to supper. Everything's getting spoiled."

Grandpa glanced at his old clock. It said half-past five. "I keep tinkering with it, but it's seen its best days. Like me."

He took off his denim apron, rolled down his sleeves, put on his hat and coat, and locked the door behind them. But not before he had looked wistfully around the little place, with its smell of beeswax, leather and dye, where he had worked so long. Its walls were papered with his favorite calendars: country scenes that reminded him of his farm boyhood; roly-poly babies in bathtubs; a pretty girl who looked, he said, like Grandma--a funny idea to Rose-Ellen. Patched linoleum, doorstep hollowed by thousands of feet--Grandpa looked at everything as if it were new and bright, and as if he loved it.

Starting home, he took Rose-Ellen's small damp hand in his big damp one. The sun blinded them as they walked westward, and the heat struck at them fiercely from pavement and wall, as if it were fighting them. Rose-Ellen was strong and didn't mind. She held her head straight to make her thick brown curls hit against her backbone. She knew she was pretty, with her round face and dark-lashed hazel eyes; and that nobody would think her starchy short pink dress was old, because Grandma had mended it so nicely. Grandma had darned the short socks that turned down to her stout slippers, too; and Grandpa had mended the slippers till the tops would hardly hold another pair of soles.

"Hi, Rosie!" called Julie Albi, who lived next door. "C'm'out and play after supper?"

"Next door" was the right way to say it. This Philadelphia street was like two block-long houses, facing each other across a strip of pavement, each with many pairs of twin front doors, each pair with two scrubbed stone steps down to the sidewalk, and two bay windows bulging out upstairs, so that they seemed nearly to touch the ones across the narrow street. Rose-Ellen and Julie shared twin doors and steps; and inside only a thin wall separated them.

At the door Dick overtook Grandpa and Rose-Ellen. Dick was twelve. Sometimes Rose-Ellen considered him nothing but a nuisance, and sometimes she was proud of his tallness, his curly fair hair and bright blue eyes. He dashed in ahead when Grandpa turned the key, but Grandpa lingered.