Jerome, A Poor Man | Page 5

work.
As Jerome spaded, the smell of the fresh earth came up in his face.
Now and then a gust of cold wind, sweet with unseen blossoms, smote
him powerfully, bending his slender body before it like a sapling. A
bird flashed past him with a blue dazzle of wings, and Jerome stopped
and looked after it. It lit on the fence in front of the house, and shone
there in the sunlight like a blue precious stone. The boy gazed at it,
leaning on his spade. Jerome always looked hard out of all his little
open windows of life, and saw every precious thing outside his daily
grind of hard, toilsome childhood which came within his sight.
The bird flew away, and Jerome spaded again. He knew that he must
finish so much before dinner or his mother would scold. He was not
afraid of his mother's sharp tongue, but he avoided provoking it with a
curious politic and tolerant submission which he had learned from his
father. "Mother ain't well, you know, an' she's high-sperited, and we've

got to humor her all we can," Abel Edwards had said, confidentially,
many a time to his boy, who had listened sagely and nodded.
Jerome obeyed his mother with the patient obedience of a superior who
yields because his opponent is weaker than he, and a struggle beneath
his dignity, not because he is actually coerced. Neither he nor his father
ever answered back or contradicted; when her shrill voice waxed
loudest and her vituperation seemed to fairly hiss in their ears, they
sometimes looked at each other and exchanged a solemn wink of
understanding and patience. Neither ever opened mouth in reply.
Jerome worked fast in his magnanimous concession to his mother's will,
and had accomplished considerable when his sister opened the kitchen
window, thrust out her dark head, and called in a voice shrill as her
mother's, but as yet wholly sweet, with no harsh notes in it: "Jerome!
Jerome! Dinner is ready."
Jerome whooped in reply, dropped his spade, and went leaping down
the hill. When he entered the kitchen his mother was sitting at the table
and Elmira was taking up the dinner. Elmira was a small, pretty girl,
with little, nervous hands and feet, and eager black eyes, like her
mother's. She stretched on tiptoe over the fire, and ladled out a
steaming mixture from the kettle with an arduous swing of her sharp
elbow. Elmira's sleeves were rolled up and her thin, sharply-jointed,
girlish arms showed.
"Don't you know enough, without being told, to lift that kettle off the
fire for Elmira?" demanded Mrs. Edwards of Jerome.
Jerome lifted the kettle off the fire without a word.
"It seems sometimes as if you might do something without being told,"
said his mother. "You could see, if you had eyes to your head, that your
sister wa'n't strong enough to lift that kettle off, and was dippin' it up
so's to make it lighter, an' the stew 'most burnin' on."
Jerome made no response. He sniffed hungrily at the savory steam
arising from the kettle. "What is it?" he asked his sister, who stooped

over the kettle sitting on the hearth, and plunged in again the
long-handled tin dipper.
Mrs. Edwards never allowed any one to answer a question when she
could do it herself. "It's a parsnip stew," said she, sharply. "Elmira dug
some up in the old garden-patch, where we thought they were dead. I
put in a piece of pork, when I'd ought to have saved it. It's good 'nough
for anybody, I don't care who 'tis, if it's Doctor Prescott, or Squire
Merritt, or the minister. You'd better be thankful for it, both of you."
"Where's father?" said Jerome.
"He 'ain't come home yet. I dun'no' where he is. He's been gone long
enough to draw ten cords of wood. I s'pose he's potterin' round
somewheres--stopped to talk to somebody, or something. I ain't going
to wait any longer. He'll have to eat his dinner cold if he can't get
home."
Elmira put the dish of stew on the table. Jerome drew his chair up. Mrs.
Edwards grasped the long-handled dipper preparatory to distributing
the savory mess, then suddenly stopped and turned to Elmira.
"Elmira," said she, "you go into the parlor an' git the china bowl with
pink flowers on it, an' then you go to the chest in the spare bedroom an'
get out one of them fine linen towels."
"What for?" said Elmira, wonderingly.
"No matter what for. You do what I tell you to."
Elmira went out, and after a little reappeared with the china bowl and
the linen towel. Jerome sat waiting, with a kind of fierce resignation.
He was almost starved, and the smell of the stew in