Four and Twenty Beds

by Nancy Casteel Vogel

We were sitting at the kitchen table, having a council of war. The children were in bed.

Grant spread mustard thoughtfully on a cracker, and sprinkled sugar over the top. "If we had the light on inside the office, and people could see that someone was up, then they wouldn't have to worry that they'd be getting anyone out of bed, and they wouldn't be afraid to come in."

He crunched his cracker, while I watched with the horrified fascination his strange tastes still inspired in me, even after six years.

"I'm going to stay up tonight," he announced. "I'll sit in the doorway or walk around just outside the office door where they can't help seeing me, and I'll bet a horned toad I can bring us in three or four extra customers!"

And he did. His theory had been correct; people who hesitated about selecting a motel after midnight, who hated to rouse anyone from bed, came to our motel like flies to a dish of honey when they saw that our inside lights were on and there was someone up and moving about.

Grant kept that up for three nights, sleeping from dawn until it was time to go to work, and sleeping again from the time he got home until about ten o'clock. And for those three nights we averaged fifteen dollars more per night than our average for the previous nights had been. Our motel was catching at least ninety per cent of the late travelers who stopped on the east side of the business district. (During his night vigils, Grant saw what a small percentage of them went into any of the other motels around us.)

Of course, Grant couldn't keep that up, though. He was earning less than fifteen dollars a day digging trenches for the contractor; obviously, then, since he could do only one, the most sensible course would be for him to quit his job, sleep days, and spend the night pulling customers in off the highway.

So he quit his job, and began to stay up every night, sleeping seven or eight hours during the day. That left him time to help me clean the cabins, and to do the watering. Business continued substantially better, and life began to look brighter. We were afraid that neighboring motel owners, suffering from the slump as we had done, would imitate our methods and so distribute the customers more evenly and more thinly. But perhaps they never realized what we were doing; the weeks slipped past, and still Grant was the only one up during the tiny hours; and our motel continued to get more night business than all the others put together.

Grant was still as full as ever of good ideas. The walls of the showers in two of the cabins were beginning to get moldy, and even after he had scraped off the mold and painted them with a special damp-resistant paint, there was a faintly musty smell lingering in those cabins.

He took a bottle of my perfume and put a little on the back of each chair and on the drapes. Although the perfume didn't obliterate the musty odor, it blended with it--as Grant had hoped it would--so that the result was far from unpleasant. We tested the scent by going out of the cabins and coming back into them from the fresh air outside after a few minutes. The cabins had a faint, warmly sweet fragrance. Grant touched them up with additional drops of perfume for a few days until the musty odor wore off.