Chapter XVII

Every one eating food. Dick Moorehead when he went off to the country fared pretty well. Lots of people came out all right about food. Some women were naturally good cooks, others weren’t. A groceryman sold food in his store and could bring things home. John, working in the factory, had to have something substantial. He had grown tall now and looked almost a man. When he was at home, nights and on Sundays, he was silent like the mother. It may have been because he was worried, maybe he had to work too hard. He worked in a place where they made bicycles but he did not have one. Tar often went past the long brick factory. In the winter all the windows were closed and there were iron bars across the windows. That was to prevent thieves breaking in at night but it made the building look like the town jail, only much larger. After a time Tar would have to go there to work and Robert would take care of the paper selling. It was almost time.

Tar dreaded the thought of the time coming when he would be a factory hand. He went around having queer dreams. Suppose it should turn out he wasn’t a Moorehead at all. He might have been the son of a rich man who was leaving for foreign parts. The man had come to his mother and had said, “Here is my child. Its mother is dead and I must leave for foreign parts. If I do not return you may keep him as your own child. Do not ever let him know. Some day I may return and then we shall see what we shall see.”

When he had been having some such dreams Tar looked at his mother closely. He looked at his father, at John, Robert and Margaret. Well, he tried to imagine he did not look like the others. The dream made him feel a little disloyal. He felt his nose with his fingers. It wasn’t the same shape as John’s or Margaret’s nose.

When the fact that he was of different stock was finally made known he would never take advantage of the others. He would have money, oodles of it, and all the Mooreheads would be treated exactly as though they were his equals. Perhaps he would go to his mother and say--“Do not let the others know. The secret is buried in my breast. It shall stay there sealed forever. John shall go to college, Margaret shall have fine clothes, Robert a bicycle.”

Having such thoughts made Tar feel very tender about all the other Mooreheads. What fine things he would buy for his mother. He had to smile to think of how Dick Moorehead would go about town cutting a swath. He could have fancy vests, a fur-lined overcoat. He wouldn’t have to work, could just put in his time being leader of the town band or something like that.

Of course John and Margaret would laugh if they knew what was going on in Tar’s head, but no one need know. It wasn’t true of course, just something to think about nights after he got into bed and when he was going through dark side streets on winter evenings with his papers.

Sometimes when a well-dressed man got off a train it almost seemed to Tar that his dream was about to come true. If the man had walked right up to him and had said, “My son, my son. I am your father. I have been in foreign parts and have accumulated a huge fortune. Now I have come to make you rich. You shall have everything your heart desires.” If something of that sort should happen Tar thought he would not be too much surprised. He was ready for it to happen anyway, had thought it all out.

Tar’s mother and his sister Margaret always had to be figuring on food. Three meals every day for hungry boys. Things to clean up. Sometimes when Dick had been away in the country a long time, he came home bringing a lot of country sausage or pork.

At other times, in the winter specially, the Mooreheads got pretty low. They only had meat about once a week, no butter, no pie--even on Sunday. They had corn meal baked into cakes and cabbage soup with pieces of fat pork floating in it. You can soak your bread in that.

Mary Moorehead got pieces of salt pork and fried the grease out of it. Then she made gravy. That was good on bread. Beans go a long way. You make a stew with some salt pork in it. It isn’t half bad and fills you up, anyway.

Hal Brown and Jim Moore sometimes urged Tar to go home with them to their houses to eat. Small town people are always doing that. Perhaps Tar had helped Hal do his chores and Hal had gone with him on his paper route. It’s all right to go to some one else’s house, now and then, but if you do it often you ought to be able to ask them to your house. Corn meal mush or cabbage soup will do at a pinch but you don’t want to ask a guest to sit down to it. If you’re poor and hard up you don’t want the whole town to know and be talking.

Beans or cabbage stew, eaten maybe at the table in the kitchen by the kitchen stove, huh! Some winters the Mooreheads couldn’t afford to have more than one fire. They had to eat, get their lessons, undress for bed, do everything in the kitchen. When they were eating, Tar’s mother got Margaret to dish things up. It was so the children couldn’t see how much her hands trembled after a day’s washing.

At the Browns’, when Tar went there, such an abundance. You wouldn’t think there was so much in the world. If you took all you could stuff, no one ever noticed. Just to look around the table made your eyes ache.

They had big dishes of mashed potatoes, fried chicken with good gravy--maybe little pieces of good meat floating in it--not thin either--a dozen kinds of jams and jellies in glasses--it looked pretty that way, so pretty you couldn’t bear hardly to take a spoonful and spoil the way it looked--sweet potatoes baked in brown sugar--the sugar melting and making a thick kind of candy over it--big bowls full of apples, bananas and oranges, beans baked in a big dish--all brown over the top--turkey sometimes when it wasn’t Christmas, Thanksgiving or anything, three or four kinds of pie, cakes with layers and brown sweet stuff between the layers--white frosting on top with sometimes red candies stuck in it--apple dumplings.

Every time when Tar went there different kinds of stuff on the table--plenty of it and always good. It was a wonder Hal Brown wasn’t fatter. He was as skinny as Tar.

If Ma Brown didn’t do the cooking one of the big Brown girls did. They were all good cooks. Tar would have bet that Margaret, if she had the chance, could do some swell cooking, too. You have to have the stuff to cook with, plenty of it.

No matter how cold it is, after a feed like that you feel all warm. You can go around outdoors with your coat all unbuttoned. You almost sweat, even outdoors and when it’s zero weather.

Hal Brown was Tar’s age in a family where all the others were grown up. The Brown girls, Kate and Sue and Sally and Jane and Mary, were all big strapping girls--five of them--and there was an older brother who worked downtown in the Browns’ store. He was called Shorty Brown because he was so long and big. Well, he was six feet three. The Brown kind of eating had built him up, all right. He could take hold of the collar of Hal’s coat with one hand and of Tar’s collar with the other and he could lift them both off the floor, do it without half trying. Ma Brown wasn’t so big. She wasn’t as tall as Tar’s mother. You could never guess how she could have had such a son as Shorty or such daughters as she had. Tar and Jim Moore used to talk about it sometimes. “Gee, it doesn’t seem as though it could be done,” Jim said.

Shorty Brown had shoulders like a horse. Maybe it was the food. Maybe Hal would be that way some time. Still the Moores fed pretty well and Jim wasn’t as tall as Tar, if he was a little fatter. Ma Brown ate the same food the rest did. Look at her.

Pa Brown and the girls were big. When he was at home Pa Brown--he was known as “Cal”--hardly ever said a word. In the house the girls made a racket and so did Shorty, Hal and the mother. The mother was always scolding but she didn’t mean a thing and no one paid any attention. The children laughed and cracked jokes and after supper, some nights, all of the girls got at Shorty and tried to put him on the floor. If they broke a dish or two Ma Brown scolded but no one cared much. When they were at it Hal tried to help his bigger brother but he didn’t count. It was a sight to see. If the girls got their dresses torn it made no difference. No one got mad.

Cal Brown, when he got through supper, went into the front room and sat down to read a book. He was always reading books like Ben Hur and Romola and Dickens’ Works and if one of the girls came and banged on the piano he went right on.

Such a man to always have a book in his hand when he was at home! He owned the biggest gents’ clothing store in town. There must have been a thousand suits of clothes all laid out on long tables. You could have a suit for five dollars down and a dollar a week. Tar and John and Robert got theirs that way.

When there was hell going on in the Browns’ house, after supper on a winter evening, Ma Brown kept screaming and saying, “Now behave yourselves. Don’t you see your Pa’s reading?” but no one paid any attention. Cal Brown didn’t seem to care a lick. “Ah, let ’em alone,” he said when he said anything. Mostly he never even noticed.

Tar stood a little to one side, trying to hide himself. It was good to come to the Browns’ house to eat but he couldn’t do it too often. Having a father like Dick Moorehead, a mother like Mary Moorehead, was not like belonging to such a family as the Browns.

He couldn’t invite Hal Brown or Jim Moore to come to the Moorehead’s and eat cabbage soup.

Well, food isn’t the only thing. Jim or Hal might not care. Mary Moorehead would, though, Tar’s older brother John would, Margaret would. The Mooreheads were proud. In Tar’s home everything was concealed. You are in bed and your brother John is lying beside you in the same bed. In the next room Margaret is sleeping. She has to have a room by herself. That is because she is a girl.

You are in bed and you lie thinking. John may be doing the same thing, Margaret may be doing it. A Moorehead said nothing at such a time.

Concealed in his corner of the big dining room at the Browns’, Tar watched Hal Brown’s father. The man was getting old and gray. He had little wrinkles about his eyes. When he read a book he put on spectacles. The clothing store man was the son of a large farmer who had been prosperous. He had married the daughter of another farmer. Then he had come to town and had started a store. When his father died he got the farm and later his wife also got money.

Such people had lived in one place always. There had always been plenty of food, clothes, warm houses. They did not drift about, living in little mean houses, leaving suddenly because the rent was due and they could not pay it.

They were not proud, did not have to be proud.

In the Browns’ house the feeling of warm safety. Great strong girls wrestling with their tall brother on the floor. Dresses being torn.

The Brown girls could milk cows, could cook, do anything. They went off with young men to dances. In the house, sometimes, in the presence of Tar and their own younger brother, they said things about men and women and animals that made Tar blush. If, when the girls were cutting up like that, their father was there, he never even spoke.

He and Tar were the only silent ones in the Browns’ house.

Was it because Tar did not want any of the Browns to know how glad he was to be in their house, to be so warm, to see all the fun going on and be so filled with food?

At the table when some one asked him to have a second helping he always shook his head and said, “No,” in a faint voice, but Cal Brown, who was serving, paid no attention. “You pass his plate,” he said to one of the girls and it came back to Tar heaping full. More fried chicken, gravy, another great heap of mashed potatoes, another wedge of pie. The big Brown girls and Shorty looked at each other and smiled.

Sometimes one of the Brown girls would begin to hug and kiss Tar right in front of the others. It was after they all got up from the table and when Tar was trying to hide himself by getting into a corner. When he could do that he kept quiet and watched, saw the little wrinkles about Cal Brown’s eyes as he read his book. There was always something laughing in the merchant’s eyes but he never laughed out loud.

Tar hoped a wrestling match would start between Shorty and the girls. Then they would all get absorbed and leave him alone.

He couldn’t go to the Browns’ or to Jim Moore’s too often, because he didn’t feel like asking them to come to his house to eat just one dish, off the kitchen table, the baby maybe crying.

When one of the girls took it into her head to kiss him he couldn’t help blushing and that made the others laugh. The big girl, almost a woman, did it to tease him. The Brown girls all had strong arms and great motherly breasts. The one who was teasing him held him tight and then turning his face up kissed him while he struggled. Hal Brown whooped with laughter. They never tried to kiss Hal because he didn’t blush. Tar wished he didn’t. He couldn’t help it.

* * * * *

Dick Moorehead, during the winter always going around visiting farm houses, pretending he was looking for painting and paper-hanging jobs. Maybe he was. If a big girl at some farm house, some girl like one of the Brown girls, tried to kiss him, he wouldn’t ever have blushed. He would have liked it. Dick wasn’t the blushing kind. Tar had seen enough to know that.

The Brown girls and Shorty Brown weren’t the blushing kind but they weren’t like Dick.

Dick, off in the country that way, always got plenty to eat. People liked him around because he was entertaining. Tar got invited to the Moores’ and the Browns’. John and Margaret had their friends. They got invited, too. Mary Moorehead stayed at home.

A woman, when she has kids, when her man isn’t a very good provider, gets the worst of it, all right. Tar’s mother was the blushing kind just like Tar. When Tar got a little older he would get over it maybe. Women like his mother never did.