One of Ours | Page 8

from Claude.

After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler drove
to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just bought a
blooded bull. Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes down behind the
barn. Claude told Mahailey he was going to the cellar to put up the
swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that the rats couldn't get at her
vegetables.
"Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don't know what does make the rats so bad.
The cats catches one most every day, too."
"I guess they come up from the barn. I've got a nice wide board down
at the garage for your shelf." The cellar was cemented, cool and dry,
with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and groceries, bins for coal
and cobs, and a dark-room full of photographer's apparatus. Claude
took his place at the carpenter's bench under one of the square windows.
Mysterious objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric
batteries, old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement
fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens. The
mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as those
he had got tired of, were stored away here. If they were left in the barn,
Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes, when they happened
to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments. Claude had begged his
mother to let him pile this lumber into a wagon and dump it into some
washout hole along the creek; but Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think
of such a thing; it would hurt Ralph's feelings. Nearly every time
Claude went into the cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the
place out some day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage
cost would have put a boy through college decently.
While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from the
joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him. She made
some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated herself upon a
cracker box; close at hand there was a plush "spring-rocker" with one
arm gone, but it wouldn't have been her idea of good manners to sit
there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy contentment in them as she
followed Claude's motions. She watched him as if he were a baby
playing. Her hands lay comfortably in her lap.

"Mr. Ernest ain't been over for a long time. He ain't mad about nothin',
is he?"
"Oh, no! He's awful busy this summer. I saw him in town yesterday.
We went to the circus together."
Mahailey smiled and nodded. "That's nice. I'm glad for you two boys to
have a good time. Mr. Ernest's a nice boy; I always liked him first rate.
He's a little feller, though. He ain't big like you, is he? I guess he ain't
as tall as Mr. Ralph, even."
"Not quite," said Claude between strokes. "He's strong, though, and
gets through a lot of work."
"Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them foreigners
works hard, don't they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked the circus. Maybe
they don't have circuses like our'n, over where he come from."
Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained dogs,
and she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish smile; there was
something wise and far-seeing about her smile, too.
Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few
months old. She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia family
which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of pioneer
farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was nowhere for
Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in. Mahailey had no one to
take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no one to help her with the
work; it had turned out very well.
Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a savage
mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for her. She
could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside an empty
meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for "him" to bring home a
squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too often he brought
nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair of brutal fists. She
thought herself well off now, never to have to beg for food or go off
into the woods to gather firing, to be sure of a warm bed and shoes and

decent clothes. Mahailey was one of eighteen children; most of them
grew up lawless or half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her
husband, ended their lives in jail. She had