The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Read Free Page A

to her it never really made much difference. Even the auction sale and leaving the home she had known so long she could barely remember any other, no longer seemed such a great upheaval, in fact, seemed already done with, accustomed to. Now, instead of her own, she would have a steady succession of her children’s houses to look after, their children to bring up, just the same old thing when you got right down to it. It must be wonderful to look ahead and find in the days coming up a choice of ways to spend them. There were only the same old ways of doing the same old things, so she always fell back on the past; what else was there to think about?
    She liked to sit like this and figure up how many diapers she must have washed in her time, how many times she had scrubbed this floor, how many strokes she had taken on the churn, and as the numbers climbed beyond her reckoning, she would sit back and rock inside herself in contented amazement. She liked best of all to recall suddenly that she had borne Mr. Hardy ten children.
    Pregnancy had taken her by surprise. Mr. Hardy had to tell her she was in the family way. Her ignorance touched him. He thought it becoming; the truth was, as near as she could guess, it had not occurred to her. She had raised so many children not hers, children who had never known their own mothers, beginning at home with her brother and sister, then two cousins and then Mr. Hardy’s boys, maybe she had forgot that children could have mothers of their own, that living women might have children.
    Taken by surprise, she hadn’t enjoyed that first confinement much, Mrs. Hardy thought. She had been scared. There was no time to store up memories of it, not time even to think up a name for the child, only time to think that if it was a boy she couldn’t name it Charles Junior and, despite all she could do, to get to disliking the little boy who already bore that name through no fault of his own. The sickness and the pain she remembered and, as though it was yesterday, the feeling that came over her when they laid the child, raw and red, in her arms and she remembered that this was not new to Mr. Hardy, that he had gone through it for the first time with someone else. The doctor smiled and said she would be all right. She thought of how the other woman had gone through all this twice for Mr. Hardy and trying once again, died at it for him.
    She made up her mind to live for Mr. Hardy. Out of bed a week her joy in the child grew such that she determined to have another as soon as possible. For twenty years she was never happy unless she was with child or brought to bed of one.
    She had her favorites but didn’t show it. Mr. Hardy had none and that had always made her feel he didn’t like any of them well enough. He made a little joke, that, to be frank, she never had found so funny, of telling the children she was never pleased with any of them and would keep on having more until she was. Her pains were severe. She loved them all and the more she had the more she loved Virgie’s as well, but her own she never forgave the travail they cost her coming into the world. “Lord!” she could gasp at one of them still, unable still to understand how she had endured it, unable to understand how the boy could spend his time except in making it up to her every minute of the day, “the trouble I had with you!”
    She remembered getting up from that first one dissatisfied. How could she have let so many things slide or just stay the way they were when she came to Mr. Hardy’s house? They made the upstairs over into rooms for the children. Mr. Hardy let her have every whim. He was glad, he said, to be able to give hers all the things that Virgie’s children never had.
    Mrs. Hardy went through the chests and halfheartedly made a pile of ragdolls and teething rings, baby slippers, a moth-eaten hairbrush, a gold-plated diaper pin, and found herself working up a quarrel against her