It was waiting and waiting and every day saying, “Have they sent us a letter?” And the lady who was the mother of Fritzie said, “Maybe your father and mother sent you here to get rid of you, but I don’t want you, you needn’t think I want you”; I saw her count green dollar bills with Ida. And I thought, that is the money that Papa gave for us to go to the farm and Ida was counting two heaps of the money and they each had a heap and maybe it was true, maybe they had gone to the World’s Fair and would never come back, but I was afraid to ask Cousin Clarence because the lady smiled so much and talked with him, and seemed kind and said she was so glad to have us and it was a pity but the farm he had chosen for us was too far away and anyhow old Mrs. Apfelholzer was not anxious to have the children; she said, “She couldn’t have them,” and that was a lie.
This grown lady told a lie, because the old lady said she wanted us to help her with the hens.
Ida didn’t seem like she was and when we were going home at last, she said, “Tell your mother you had a good time, will you,” and she gave me a quarter.
I did not know what to do, but when Gilbert started saying he had caught frogs with Fritzie, I didn’t say anything. It is a dreadful thing if your mother and father go to the World’s Fair and you cannot write a letter and you cannot even read a letter if it comes and even if it comes and you might be able to steal it and take it to Cousin Clarence to read. The lady who was the mother of Fritzie got the letters first and we could only just read our names on the envelope but she kept the letters.
No, I did not really think of all this, when I saw the picture of the apple orchard and the cow, but that funny thing happened that sometimes happens, when there is a hole in the floor or a stone on a walk will open and I will step in and fall down and then I stop running and walk around the stone.
It is something that happens. I never tell anyone about it, for I really do not know what it is about, but it seemed to be there all the time that summer when we were at that hot little brick house, with a horrid flower called a fuchsia that she said “Don’t step on” all the time, and none of our toys and books because we were going to a farm where there was a barn and pigs and cows and hens and where we could live like farmer’s children and where they said we could get eggs.
Cousin Clarence had written Mama about it and then this lady said old Mrs. Apfelholzer didn’t want us and that was a story; it was a grown person who was Ida’s cousin, telling a lie.
Cousin Clarence did not know she was telling a lie and he took Harold and me to a nice place to sit on their porch and they gave us lemonade in blue glasses and they gave us apples and they said, “I wish you were staying here with us,” but we had to go back to the hot little house and the lady said, “Well don’t eat it then,” when I did not like the sausage and pickles and she just took my plate away and she said to Ida, “That will learn her.”
So I didn’t have any lunch and I didn’t tell Cousin Clarence.
Eric turned the pages and he said, “You’ve almost painted all this book, haven’t you?”
He turned the pages back again quickly and bits of the different edges of the pictures were there, and I saw a red slice of paint or a blue, or green of the grass before the big house that looked like the Ashurst’s house, where there were bees in the round bed of heliotrope.
The pieces of color did not fit together and seemed to go very fast, like turning that kaleidoscope, it was called, that we took apart and it was little pieces of colored glass and we could not put it together again. It was like that old round box that was at Aunt Millie’s house, that Mama had played with when she was a little girl. You put in a strip of long colored pictures, the pictures were like the different pictures of a long funny picture in Puck or Judge, but they were all in one long piece and were not funny; they were a girl rolling a hoop or a boy jumping a pony over a fence or a lady, like our circus-page in this book, jumping through a hoop in the same kind of clothes, or a man walking with a bear until it stood up on its hind legs.
The colors were separate and bright like the colors in this book, so now when Eric turned over the pages so quickly, it was like lying on the floor with the round box of the gyroscope going round and round. It made you dizzy after a while; you looked through little slats that were just one large slat when the box went fast. Now that was like this.
I held on to the table edge because the box was going so fast and I remembered only a bit of color, the pink and ugly red of the fuchsia flowers that were so ugly and the blue glasses that they gave us and the lemonade, a different color in the glass, and then the old lady, like a good old witch with a broom, who said, “But I always wanted children to hunt my eggs, I need children on this farm,” and a picture of an old witch with Hansel and Gretel, because really old Mrs. Apfelholzer (her name was) could not have been a bad old woman in a dirty house like they said, but it was Ida’s cousin who was bad and divided the money up with Ida.
I saw the green of the dollar bills as they counted them out like counting cards, for there were three of us and we were to be at that farm while they were at the World’s Fair in Chicago, and this was the money for it.
I saw the soap bubble in the tree out of the bathroom window, but that was a whole soap bubble like a balloon made of glass, like the glass mountain the princess climbed, but it was with nails that she climbed up.
I saw the face of the man on the stairs and the way his beard was curly like my doll’s hair, and Mama said if Papa cut off his beard she would leave him and everybody laughed; I would not leave Papa if he cut off his beard.
Eric has no beard.
Even the table goes round like the gyroscope on the floor of Aunt Millie’s conservatory that isn’t a conservatory anymore, but she keeps her old things there and boxes on the shelves where there used to be flowerpots.
Aunt Jennie gave me a Chinese lily that you plant in a bowl with pebbles.
The bowl Aunt Jennie gave me was blue and shiny, the same kind of shine that the green saucer has that Eric puts his ash in.
Eric puts his ash in the saucer, he throws the end of the cigarette down and it smokes beside the matchstick.
The ash curls up and I go on looking at the smoke of the cigarette.
Eric shuts the book.
Gilbert is standing by the piano, looking at Papa’s wallet.
The table is round like a big wheel.
There was that man in the milk cart who asked me if I wanted a ride, coming up the Black Horse Hill, home from school, and I said “Yes,” and I climbed in.
The horse was pulling at the milk cart, going up the hill, and I was thinking it was fun to have a ride in the milk cart. They drove the carts in, early, to the market on Market Street in Philadelphia, and they came home and slept while the horse climbed Black Horse Hill. The milk cans rattled in the back of a cart, and the horse’s back came straight when we came to the top of the hill. There was Fetters’ Farm at the top of the hill and the switch where the cars met each other; and the cart jerked and the horse began to run.
I looked at the man and I saw he was … he had … and he said … but I said, “I get out here, I live here,” but I did not live at the Fetters’ Farm.
I thought he might not stop the horse, so I slid out and I jumped over the wheel that was going fast and I stood by the switch and I saw Mr. Fetters was driving some cows out of their front field and Mrs. Fetters was shelling peas on the porch.
I could pretend to go in at the Fetters’ gate, if the man looked to see where I was going, but he did not stop. I saw the back of the cart and the milk tins that rattled and I crept under the fence, so as to get out of the road, and went home through the field, by the side of the road.