I hesitated. This was the part that had to be got over, before I could be sure of my place. “I would. That’s only right, for as I have said, I will work as hard as a man for my keep.”
James Melton looked away from the fire then. “We must give her wages if her work is satisfactory. I’ll not have it said that I did otherwise.”
“I need the money to pay the doctor for my care. Just enough for that. But I don’t eat overmuch, and I’m not particular about where I bed down, long as it ain’t out in the cold.”
A look passed between them, for however separate the ways of man and wife, they can still speak without words before outsiders. Ann glanced back at me, and shrugged. “If she works in the house and the fields, all summer long, mind you, I reckon we could pay her something, so she can buy her medicine.”
James Melton nodded mournfully. “Doctors ain’t cheap.”
“But remember we are giving her room and board besides.”
“Well, if I have somebody to help with the chores and the farming, I’ll be able to do some more shoemaking and wagon building. That will bring in a little money, and that’s worth something.”
I looked hopefully at James Melton, trying to keep my face a blank, so as not to push him into reconsidering. If I looked at all pleased, he might doubt that he was getting the best end of the deal.
“I think we could run to ten or eleven cents a day,” he said at last. “Would that suit?”
I stared at the floor, thinking of working from sun-up until dark for a penny an hour. Why, I could make more than that in an hour with soldiers and drovers, but the armies were gone and drovers were scarce in winter. Beggars cannot be choosers, and beggar I was. But I could see that they didn’t have much to spare. Times were hard for everybody in this winter after the War, and I saw that he meant to be kind. There were plenty of people who would have expected more from me and offered less. And to me working for paltry wages was cheaper than having to pay lip service with gratitude for my keep.
“Thankee. It will do me just fine,” I said, summoning up a smile.
PAULINE FOSTER
If you ever take a notion to hire yourself out as a maid of all work, I advise you not to go hat in hand to any relatives you may have, for your kinfolks will treat you worse than ten strangers ever would, and they’ll think themselves charitable while they are doing it.
I settled in to the household, peculiar as it was, and I suppose it might have been worse. Since I did the cooking and the washing up, there was no question of begrudging me food. I ate same as they did. And they didn’t expect me to sleep in the barn, though when the weather turned warm, it crossed my mind a time or two.
That first night we sat up by the fire for another hour or so, not saying much, and finally when Ann began to yawn, I said, “Where do you want me to sleep?”
“With me, I reckon,” she said, pushing her stool back from the fire.
I looked over at the two narrow beds, set a few feet apart, for I had been hoping to have one to myself. I glanced over at James Melton, who was sitting at the pine table, with his shoemaker’s tools in front of him, and he was crafting the leather sole of a lady’s slipper. “But what about him?”
“One bed is his’n and one’s mine,” said Ann. “You can take your pick I reckon.”
So man and wife didn’t sleep together. Well, that was interesting. But I didn’t want him no more than she did, and it was no part of the work I had bargained for, so I said, “I’d as lief share with you, cousin.”
“That will do-but not every night.” She gave me a little cat-in-the-cream-jug smile, and added, “Some nights I might have company.”
I had judged right about Ann’s attitude toward work-which was that she never did any if she could avoid it, and mostly she could. Every morning at daybreak I dragged myself out from under the pile of quilts, taking no care at all to be quiet about it, but that lump under the covers next to me might as well’ve been a log for all it ever moved at that hour.
A while later, once I had built the fire back up from embers, when the milk gravy was hot in the skillet, the biscuits were near done, and the scrawny winter apples from the storeroom were stewing back to sweet plumpness in hot water, why then, with many a yawn and groan, Miss Ann would hoist herself out from her warm burrow, and throw on her day clothes in time to be the first one at the table. By then James would have brought in more wood, and most days he’d fetch me a pail of water for cooking while he was outside, so the both of us had done an hour’s work before the tip of Ann’s perfect nose ever poked out from under the covers. The way I saw it, part of my eleven cents a day was wages to keep my opinions to myself about such as this, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was here in the first place because I was sick, and I minded having to work so hard in the shadow of a spoilt little poppet, who couldn’t even spare a thank you for them that kept her fed and warm. If I ever meet another woman as handsome as Ann Melton, I mean to ask her:
Her husband never acted like he minded her idleness, though. He must have thought it the most natural thing in the world for me to go out to milk the cows and slop the hogs, and empty the chamber pots, and scour the pans, while she sat there at the table, picking at her food, or chattering away at me as I went past with my mop and pail.
Since it was still bleak winter when I started working, there was little enough to do beyond the household chores, and once I got the cabin scrubbed and tidied, I could put it to rights in an hour or so, if I put my mind to it. There was sewing to be done, for Ann could never be bothered to mend her own clothes, much less those of her husband, but I could do that chore by firelight after supper, and, even then, no more clothes than they had, I soon had that done as well.
After a couple of days, Ann got used to me about the place, and she wasn’t particular enough about housekeeping or cooking to find much fault with the way I did things, so we got along tolerably well. She would never be a woman’s woman, but it pleased her to have someone to talk to, although she cared little enough to hear anything back from me. Mostly, I think, she just wanted to think out loud, and I was the excuse for it. Some people like the society of people who work for them, so that they can have their own way all the time, and so that there’ll be no backchat or fault-finding, whatever they care to say. I figured that being Ann’s devoted companion was just another chore, and I did it, same as I did the rest.
I did not think about whether Ann Melton was happy. To my mind, she had more than most women in this world ever get: beauty, a meek and uncomplaining husband, a home of her own, and little enough asked of her in return. It seemed enough to me, for I had never had any of those things.
A few days after I settled in, though, when the sky had cleared to a watery blue, and the wind died down a notch, I saw my cousin Ann as if she were somebody else altogether. I was outside, about to wring the neck of a chicken for our dinner, when Ann strode into the hen yard, all cloaked and bonneted as if she meant to be outdoors for more than her usual run to the privy.
“James is doing a spell of shoe-making now, so he can tend the fire. We could go off visiting this afternoon, since the weather broke.”
I wondered who she aimed to call on, since nary a soul had come to the cabin in all the days I had been there, but before I could ask who she intended to grace with her presence, she froze in her tracks, looking past me, and her whole face lit up like firelight.
She was taking no more notice of me at all, so I turned to see what had left her dumbstruck, thinking maybe she had caught sight of a rainbow up over the hills. I was still looking for that rainbow a few seconds later, when it finally hit me that the wonder she had beheld wasn’t nothing but a scrawny dark-haired fellow in an old brown coat coming toward us out of the pine woods.
In a couple of heartbeats she had collected her wits about her again, and I don’t believe the young man even noticed it, but I never forgot that look, for it set me to wishing that I could want anything in this world as bad as my
