Something happened. A gush of cold sticky stuff over her fingers, a little glass-like tinkle of breaking eggshell in her hand, and there in the bowl were the contents of the egg, the golden yolk swimming roundly in the transparent white.
“Hurrah! Good for you!” shouted her father admiringly.
But Helen found in her heart a new conscience which made her refuse to accept too easily won praise. “No, that’s not right,” she said, frowning at the crushed, dripping shell in her hand. “When Mother does it, the stuff comes out nice and clean, with each half of the shell like a little cup.”
She closed her eyes, summoned all her willpower and thought back to the times when she had watched Mother cook.
Mother held it so (Helen went through the pantomime), she brought it down with a little quick jerk, so, and then. … “Oh, goody! goody! I know!” she cried, hopping up and down. “I know. She turns it over after she’s cracked it, with the crack on the upside, and then she pries it open. Give me another egg.”
Well, it certainly was a far cry from those early fumbling days, wasn’t it, to now, when both she and Father could crack and separate an egg with their eyes shut and one hand tied behind their backs, so to speak; when they thought nothing of turning out in a Saturday morning a batch of bread, two pies, and enough cookies to last them a week. They didn’t even talk about their cooking much any more, just decided what they were going to make and went ahead and made it, visiting together as they worked like a couple of magpies chattering.
Father often told her poetry as she stepped to and fro; the kitchen seemed to her just chock-full of poetry. Father had said so much there the walls seemed soaked with it. Sometimes in the evening when she went in just before she went to bed to get a drink of water or to see that the bread sponge was all right, it seemed to her, especially if she were a little sleepy, that she could hear a murmur of poetry all around her, the way a shell murmurs when you put it to your ear. …
“Now all away to Tir na n’Og are many roads that run,”
“Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere.”
“Waken, lords and ladies gay!
To the greenwood haste away!”
“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea. …”
It was not water that Helen Knapp drank out of the tin dipper hung over the sink. It was ambrosia.
And Father told her stories, too, all kinds, lots of funny ones that set them into gales of laughter!
And they talked, talked about everything, about her writing, and what she was reading in school, and the last book she had got out of the Library, and once in a great while Father would tell her something about when he went to the State University and what an exciting time he’d had finding out how much he loved books and poetry. Helen had never heard Father speak of those years till now. He seemed to feel, the way she did, that it was easier to talk about things you cared awfully about when you were working together. Helen often wondered why this was, why she didn’t feel so queer and shy when she was doing something with her hands, buttering a cake-tin, or cutting animal-shaped cookies out of the dough that Father rolled so beautifully thin. She even found that she could talk to Father about “things.”
By “things” Helen meant all that she had always before kept to herself, what she had never supposed you could talk about to anybody—the little poems that sprang up in your head; what you felt when the spring days began to dapple the sidewalks with shadows from the baby leaves; what you felt when you woke up at night and heard the freight-trains hooting and groaning to and fro in the yards—Helen loved living near the railroad—what you thought about growing up; what you thought about God; what kind of a husband you would like to have when you were big; what kind of children you hoped you’d have. “I’d kind of like a little baby boy with curly yellow hair,” she said thoughtfully one day, as she bent her head over the butter and sugar she was creaming together.
“Henry was like that when he was little,” her father said reminiscently. “It was nice. You were an awfully nice baby, too, Helen. Of course, being the first, you made the biggest impression on me. You had ideas of your very own from the time you began to creep. You never would go on your hands and knees like other babies. You always went on your hands and feet, with your little behinder sticking up in the air like a ship’s prow.”
Helen laughed over that. She loved to have her father tell all about when she had been a baby, and how much he had loved her, and how smart she had been, and sometimes how funny, as on the day when she had thought Mrs. Anderson had stayed long enough and had toddled over to her, putting out a fat little hand and saying firmly, “Bye-bye, Mis’ Anderson. Bye-bye!”
Gracious! How long ago that seemed to Helen, and how grown-up it made her feel, now that she was such a big girl, thirteen years old, helping to do up the week’s baking and all. She felt old and ripe and sure of herself as she listened to those baby-stories and wrung out the dishcloths competently. (She and Father had wrestled with the question of how to hold the dishcloths when you wrung them out, as
