THE
NEW HOUSEKEEPER
71
ing the horn. She limped out dragging her leg, looking away
from the men.
Mule sat up in the machine shed reading the Gun Hill news–
paper laboriously. His brother had the light on in the bedroom.
When the car lurched in, Mule walked out towards the kitchen
porch. Elsa flung goodnight over her shoulder to the boss. She
moved thru the wet grass slowly. She stopped, her powder
smell sweeping over him like a mist. She touched him with her
hand. "Mule, Mule,
I-."
He stiffened back. The boss hur–
ried forward coughing. She slammed the door and walked
heavily up to her room.
"Steve's on his ear about the girl," whispered the boss. He
offered his foreman a cigar, lit one himself. The light flowed
up his face in a grin. "We don't want any trouble, damn it.
Soon's the cider mill's finished off and I hear from Gun Hill, we
can settle who's to hang on for winter."
Left alone, Mule couldn't thumb out what it was that kept
bothering him again.
A
she all over, soft as rabbit's foot clover
one puff, the next hard as bullhorns. Hell, the boss couldn't
mean any of the men. He fingered the fat cigar shaped like a
barrel spigot and flung it away in disgust. The boss was still
in the office, as he climbed to his room.
Next morning Elsa was swollen-faced, said nothing to any–
body.
At the end of the week the boss lost the cidermill. The
bank wouldn't give him an extension. He burned bushels of
bills, rammed around the farm rooting up things with plans to
turn the farm into a money mill.
Elsa continued dragging around, dogged and pale, until
Murf decided it was the turns she had. When worry and the
turns hit a woman at the same time, it's a one-two blow that
knocks the devil out of the spunkiest one. The old man had a
strong patent medicine with a label showing a sick family kneel–
ing to an angel with outstretched wings like a gander.
Elsa flung out, "Fool, silly old damn fools. That's you
men, always running it down to the same things. God, God."
The old man crawled off to the brothers. "Even if it ain't,
it won't do no harm to make things easy for her. She jumps on
us.
That's the way a fellow was brought up, that to be the
leaning stick. The boss said before he fires, he'll talk it over.
Meantime, help a little. Get her something special to eat. That
wild
celery down Chesapeale Bay, that's full of iron I read in
