“Now hear me gossip! I am fairly ashamed!” Susan cried out.
The barn was sweet with hay. Part of the season’s pumpkins were piled in the grain room, and lit up the dusk with their dark gold. Some of them still lay in golden piles in the barn-yard. The ears of corn, yellow and red, lay in separate heaps.
“I miss Mother!” Susan said (she spoke of Sam’s mother, who had passed on the year before). “She saw to all the pretty things about the farm. She used to hang the corn in patterns on the ceiling-hooks, red and yellow. She’d place the onions in amongst the corn, in ropes or bunches, and contrive all kinds of pretty notions.”
Susan sighed, and called the two collies to her, and patted and fondled their heads. As I said before, she and Sam have no children.
Sam went to get our honey, saying that he should be stung to death, and never mourned for, for nobody missed a left-handed fellar; and Susan took us into the house, and brought out doughnuts, a pumpkin pie, and cream so thick that it could hardly be skimmed.
When Sam came back with the honey there was a to-do, for Susan’s Jersey calf, outside in the orchard, had tangled itself in its rope, and fallen and sprained its shoulder. The little creature was trembling all over. Susan rubbed in fresh goose-oil, while Sam asked if she “didn’t want he should get him up a nice pair of crutches.”
For our cranberries, we were to go on a mile further, to a farm on the slope of the next hill, the Pennys’.
“The old woman’s deaf, but you can make her hear by shouting. Most likely she’ll be the only one of the folks at home. They’re odd folks,” Susan called, shading her eyes to look after us, after Sam had succeeded in packing our purchases in the wagon, laughing and talking about the way Noah filled the ark, and Susan had given my little sister a wistful kiss.
The Pennys’ was an out-of-the-way place. The farm was on the northern slope of a hill, the house a tiny unpainted one, weathered almost to black. The corn was standing among the golden pumpkins in stacks that looked like huddled witches. A wild grapevine grew over the shed, but the grapes were already shriveled.
Old Mrs. Penny was shriveled too, and witch-like, and she was smoking a pipe. It was hard to make her understand what we wanted, but at last she came out, with a checked shawl held over her head, and pointed out a path which led through a thicket and across the flank of the hills, to the cranberry bog in the hollow.