After that, and when summer came and the family was trying hard to adjust itself to the new conditions, there came another disaster. Up to the very moment when it happened it looked as though Tom Appleton, the house painter, was in for a prosperous season. The two boys, Fred and Will, were to be his assistants that year.
To be sure Fred was only fifteen, but he was one to lend a quick alert hand at almost any undertaking. For example, when there was a job of paper hanging to be done, he was the fellow to spread on the paste, helped by an occasional sharp word from his father.
Down off his step ladder Tom Appleton hopped and ran to the long board where the paper was spread out. He liked this business of having two assistants about. Well, you see, one had the feeling of being at the head of something, of managing affairs. He grabbed the paste brush out of Fred’s hand. “Don’t spare the paste,” he shouted. “Slap her on like this. Spread her out—so. Do be sure to catch all the edges.”
It was all very warm, and comfortable, and nice, working at paper-hanging jobs in the houses on the March and April days. When it was cold or rainy outside, stoves were set up in the new houses being built, and in houses already inhabited the folks moved out of the rooms to be papered, spread newspapers on the floors over the carpets and put sheets over the furniture left in the rooms. Outside it rained or snowed, but inside it was warm and cosy.
To the Appletons it seemed, at the time, as though the death of the mother had drawn them closer together. Both Will and Fred felt it, perhaps Will the more consciously. The family was rather in the hole financially—the mother’s funeral had cost a good deal of money, and Fred was being allowed to stay out of school. That pleased him. When they worked in a house where there were other children, they came home from school in the late afternoon and looked in through the door to where Fred was spreading paste over the sheets of wall paper. He made a slapping sound with the brush, but did not look at them. “Ah, go on, you kids,” he thought. This was a man’s business he was up to. Will and his father were on the step ladders, putting the sheets carefully into place on the ceilings and walls. “Does she match down there?” the father asked sharply. “Oh-kay, go ahead,” Will replied. When the sheet was in place Fred ran and rolled out the laps with a little wooden roller. How jealous the kids of the house were. It would be a long time before any of them could stay out of school and do a man’s work, as Fred was doing.
And then in the evening, walking homeward, it was nice, too. Will and Fred had been provided with suits of white overalls that were now covered with dried paste and spots of paint and looked really professional. They kept them on and drew their overcoats on over them. Their hands were stiff with paste, too. On Main Street the lights were lighted, and other men passing called to Tom Appleton. He was called Tony in the town. “Hello, Tony!” some storekeeper shouted. It was rather too bad, Will thought that his father hadn’t more dignity. He was too boyish. Young boys growing up and merging into manhood do not fancy fathers being too boyish. Tom Appleton played a cornet in the Bidwell Silver Cornet Band and didn’t do the job very well—rather made a mess of it, when there was a bit of solo work to be done—but was so well liked by the other members of the band that no one said anything. And then he talked so grandly about music, and about the lip of a cornet player, that everyone thought he must be all right. “He has an education. I tell you what, Tony Appleton knows a lot. He’s a smart one,” the other members of the band were always saying to each other.
“Well, the devil! A man should grow up after a time, perhaps. When a man’s wife had died but such a short time before, it was just as well to walk through Main Street with more dignity—for the time being, anyway.”
Tom Appleton had a way of winking at men he passed in the street, as though to say, “Well, now I’ve got my kids with me, and we won’t say anything, but didn’t you and I have the very hell of a time last Wednesday night, eh? Mum’s the word, old pal. Keep everything quiet. There are gay times ahead for you and me. We’ll cut loose, you bet, when you and me are out together next time.”
Will grew a little angry about something he couldn’t exactly understand. His father stopped in front of Jake Mann’s meat market. “You kids go along home. Tell Kate I am bringing a steak. I’ll be right on your heels,” he said.
He would get the steak and then he would go into Alf Geiger’s saloon and get a good, stiff drink of whisky. There would be no one now to bother about smelling it on his breath when he got home later. Not that his wife had ever said anything when he wanted a drink—but you know how a man feels when there’s a woman in the house. “Why, hello, Bildad Smith—how’s the old game leg? Come on, have a little nip with me. Were you on Main Street last band meeting night and did you hear us do that new gallop? It’s a humdinger. Turkey White did that trombone solo simply grand.”