THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
57
like way, "Couldn't help it, Mule. Told her you fellows was
boss. She's on trial. We know how
to
keep away from them
now. Same hard luck story, tossed around from one job
to
the
other like a hot potato." He raised his voice so he could be
heard at the other end of the farm. "Work girls are still plentier
than pumpkin seed or stone." He whipped away in the car to
the cidermill.
The girl was hired to feed the men who fed the mill.
Before prohibition the cidermill could shoot streams of money
into the boss's pockets some of which leaked into the farm. Now
not only the apples but also the corn, the milk, the hogs slaugh–
tered off under the Roosevelt reduction plan were pumped into
the mill. And so all spring long the men plowed their guts sore
to save the mill. Mule on the tractor from dawn till day sank
like lead. Steve behind the walking plow, his twitching face
turning lean and hornhipped. Murf on the sulky, full of hard
cider to oil up the old machinery of his bones.
The girl rushed around with that wild hunted look of hers
like a mouse caught in a threshing machine. Only once did
Steve catch her resting. She was smoking a butt, her legs thrown
up on a chair, one of them bound as in a legging. She baked
fresh bread every day. She brought a second breakfast out to
the fields. Steve cut himself a half dozen new sharp-smelling
goosequills for toothpicks. And the old blacksmith dropped into
a rocker near the cookstove at the end of the day, his washy
blue eyes closing wearily. He sniffed the roast. "Like old
days." He blinked thru the window. Over the hill behind the
beeches the cemetery mound with a marker like a breadboard.
Then he cracked up, "One day nearer hell, boys."
Only Mule kept sullen. When Elsa gave him special
sandwiches because he was out on the far fields, he left them
behind in the machine shed. When she served paper napkins
the boss's wife had stored away years ago, his she found later
in
the backhouse. When she asked how clover seed was drilled,
he growled, "With a shotgun." She had to search for his
clothes. She was the only housekeeper who washed the men's
clothes, socks full of dirt and grit like a cock's gizzard, shirts and
pants foul from the Black Leaf Forty spray.
The boss came around to look over the apple spraying. He
said to Mule, "Boy, I see you ain't happy. Out she goes."
Mule said, "Hell with her. Those two fellows think she's
