THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
63
"It's this way, girlie. A woman can take a whole-."
Mule jumped up in_bed, grinding out like a cornblower in
his fury.
Elsa laughed, "Come on, boy, be a sport. It's only a little
fun. And I've been married once too."
Murf swiftly cackled the answer.
Elsa lay back, laughing till her breasts leaped and picked at
her dress.
She hummed her way downstairs to play the melodeon.
The boss came out of his office with his chewed cigar. She sang
in her deep breaking voice of sweet Susanna with the buckwheat
in her mouth and the tear in her eye, of love's old sweet song,
of home, sweet home, for no matter where you roam there is no
place like home, sweet home.
Mule and Steve said nothing. They lay on their cots, sons
of a poor Cayuga Indian renter and a Yankee girl, two of the
old tough breed of farmhands, who started working the earth
and girls when they were
12.
Young Slim, the apple of their
eye, the only one of a large brood to even get to high school.
Last time they walked with queer Slim in the asylum garden he
couldn't add
2
and
2,
caught a pigeon on the path, bit her head
off, mouth stuffed with blood and feathers. The little Mule had
ever been able to grind together wiped out by Stayhot Electric
Iron Corporation whose shares peddled to farmers, hands, vil–
lage shopkeepers dropped low as horsedock and drove half a
county into the ditch. "Home, Sweet Home": the Toolbox,
Turkey Roost, the Phrenologist. Always the cylinders in an–
other man's machine, the drills in another man's earth for an–
other man's grain.
And Elsa playing softly now, "Goodnight, Ladies."
The boss sighed, "Makes a man forget the darned mill.
I'll get the tuner come fix the old box."
Murf said, "The boss'll skin a louse and build a butcher
shop to sell the fat. Listen to him. What's he up to now?"
But Mule turned to the wall, his body sprawled as if it
were being yanked in all directions, didn't answer goodnight with
Murf peeling off his socks, groaning: "There's a gal with the
goods. Makes a man feel he can build a home round her. The
old woman' d think such language was bleeding old Christ a
second time. More a sister to a man than anything else. Harder
to handle than high water after Stayhot wiped us clean and
grabbed the shop, forcing us to another fellow's land. When
