The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay Read Free Page A

forward. “Come, girls, I’ll take you up.”
    “Where’s Bill?” Mother asked as Mrs. Doncaster was closing the door. “Elsie, get Bill. He should be here.”
    “Mrs. Jaegel’s gone to tell him, dear.” She paused. “You all right down here?”
    Mother nodded. “Just so tired all of a sudden.” She gave a little wave with her hand and blew them a kiss, then lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes.
    “That father of yours.” Mrs. Doncaster shook her head as she ushered Avis and Idella up the stairs. She was whispering under her breath as she came up behind them, but Idella could make out what she was saying. “Damn fool if he’s drunk.” She watched the girls climb into bed. “Now, I don’t want to hear a peep from this room till morning,” she warned, and she softly closed the bedroom door.
    Avis and Idella lay staring up at the ceiling. “Do you think he’s drunk?” Avis asked.
    “Could be.”
    “Do you think it’s ’cause it’s a girl?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Maybe he didn’t want one more baby.”
    “Too late. It’s here.” Idella turned toward the window and pulled the blanket up over her shoulder.
    “Quit hogging.” Avis pulled it back. “I’m here, too, you know.”
    The door opened downstairs. The girls listened. Dad’s footsteps crossed the kitchen. The steps of a man sound different, Idella thought. They land so heavy on the floor.
    “He’s going into the bedroom,” Avis said, lying flat again.
    “If he’s drunk, at least he’s not roaring,” Idella whispered.
    “I hope he ain’t.” Avis kicked out from under the blanket entirely. “It’s kind of funny looking, don’t you think?”
    “I couldn’t see much face to it.” Idella had been alarmed by the puckeriness of the face. She knew that sometimes babies didn’t come out right.
    “Are you sleepy?” Avis was sitting up.
    “Maybe.” Idella pulled herself tighter into a ball.
    “I’m not,” Avis said. But she lay down, and soon enough Idella heard the familiar sounds of slow, steady breathing.
    Idella couldn’t make her thoughts stop, even when she kept her eyes closed for a long time. She opened them and stared at the window. The sweep of the trees made soft sounds outside, their branches studded now with tiny buds. She could feel how full up the house was. It felt heavy with people. And there was the new baby.
    It seemed to her that they had plenty of people in the family already. Where was the need? “You take what you get,” she’d heard Mother say once to Aunt Francie. Idella wasn’t sure if they’d been talking about babies. She’d just heard that phrase, and it stuck with her.
    Another time Mother told Aunt Francie that they were “always scraping.” Idella thought that was a funny thing to say. She thought about all the scraping she did: scraping the dishes, scraping the floor, especially where the mud got dried all over from the men’s boots, scraping the potatoes from out of the field. That was a lot of scraping. It was like the rows of potatoes would never end. And they scraped the fish insides. Guts, the men called them. She didn’t do that scraping. But she held up the lantern so the men could, when they came in off the water at dawn.
    Oh, and she helped Mother scrape wallpaper. That was fun. They got the water real hot and took big rags, sopping-wet ones, and rubbed them all up and down the walls in Mother and Dad’s bedroom. Then they put up the new. Lovely blue cornflowers all over the walls. Mother had ordered it from a catalog, and it came on the train from down in Portland, where she grew up. Dad said he felt like a “goddamned mealy bug going to sleep with all them flowers.” Idella’d felt bad when he said that, but Mother had laughed and said it wasn’t the first field of flowers he’d laid down in.
    When Mother had first said, “Idella, we’re going to have a new baby come spring,” Idella’d looked at her for a long time and then finally asked, “Does Dad know?”