A Basket of Apples

a story by Shirley Faessler

THIS morning Pa had his operation. He said I was not to come for at least two or three days, but I slipped in anyway and took a look at him. He was asleep, and I was there only a minute before I was hustled out by a nurse.

“He looks terrible, nurse. Is he all right?”

She said he was fine. The operation was successful, there were no secondaries, instead of a bowel he would have a colostomy, and with care should last another —

Colostomy. The word had set up such a drumming in my ears that I can’t be sure now whether she said another few years or another live years. Let’s say she said five years. If I go home and report this to Ma she’ll fall down in a dead faint. She doesn’t even know he’s had an operation. She thinks he’s in the hospital for a rest, a checkup. Nor did we know — my brother, my sister, and I — that he’d been having a series of X rays.

“It looks like an obstruction in the lower bowel,” he told us privately, “and I’ll have to go in the hospital for a few days to find out what it’s all about. Don’t say anything to Ma.”

“I have to go in the hospital,” he announced to Ma the morning he was going in.

Site screamed.

“Just for a little rest, a checkup,” he went on, patient with her for once.

He’s always hollering at her. He scolds her for a meal that isn’t to his taste, finds fault with her housekeeping, gives her hell because her hair isn’t combed in the morning and sends her back to the bedroom to tidy herself.

But Ma loves the old man. “Sooner a harsh word from Pa than a kind one from anyone else,” she says.

“You’re not to come and see me, you hear?” he cautioned her the morning he left for the hospital. “I’ll phone you when I’m coming out.”

I don’t want to make out that my pa’s a beast. He’s not. True, he never speaks an endearing word to her, never praises her. He loses patience with her, flies off the handle and shouts. But Ma’s content. Poor man works like a horse, she says, and what pleasures does he have. “So he hollers at me once in a while, I don’t mind. God give him the strength to keep hollering at me, I won’t repine.”

Night after night he joins his buddies in the back room of an ice-cream parlor on Augusta Avenue for a glass of wine, a game of klaberjass, pinochle, dominoes: she’s happy he’s enjoying himself. She blesses him on his way out. “God keep you in good health and return you in good health.”

But when he is home of an evening reading the newspaper and comes across an item that engages his interest, he lets her in on it too. He shows her a picture of the Dionne quintuplets and explains exactly what happened out there in Callander, Ontario. This is a golden moment for her — she and Pa sitting over a newspaper discussing world events. Another time he shows her a picture of the Irish Sweepstakes winner. He won a hundred and fifty thousand, he tells her. She’s entranced. Mmm-mm-mm! What she couldn’t do with that money. They’d fix up the bathroom, paint the kitchen, clean out the backyard. Mmm-mm-mm! Pa says if we had that kind of money we could afford to put a match to a hundrcd-dollar bill, set fire to the house and buy a new one. She laughs at his wit. He’s so clever, Pa. Christmas morning King George VI is speaking on the radio. She’s rattling around in the kitchen, Pa calls her to come and hear the King of England. She doesn’t understand a word of English, but pulls up a chair and sits listening. “He stutters,” says Pa. This she won’t believe. A king? Stutters? But if Pa says so it must be true. She bends an ear to the radio. Next day she has something to report to Mrs. Oxenberg, our next-door neighbor.

I speak of Pa’s impatience with her; I get impatient with her too. I’m always at her about one thing and another, chiefly about the weight she’s putting on. Why doesn’t she cut down on the bread, does she have to drink twenty glasses of tea a day? No wonder her feet are sore, carrying all that weight. (My ma’s a short woman a little over five feet and weighs almost two hundred pounds.) “Go ahead, keep getting fatter,” I tell her. “The way you’re going you’ll never be able to get into a decent dress again.”

But it’s Pa who finds a dress to fit her, a Martha Washington Cotton size 52, which but for the length is perfect for her. He finds a shoe she can wear, Romeo Slippers with clasticized sides. And it’s Pa who gets her to soak her feet, then sits with them in his lap scraping away with a razor blade at the callouses and corns.

Ma is my father’s second wife, and our stepmother. My father, now sixty-three, was widowed thirty years ago. My sister was six at the time,

I was five, and my brother four when our mother died giving birth to a fourth child who lived only a few days. We were shunted around from one family to another who took us in out of compassion, till finally my father went to a marriage broker and put his case before him. He wanted a woman to make a home for his three orphans. An honest woman with a good heart, these were the two and only requirements. The marriage broker consulted his lists and said he thought he had two or three people who might fill the bill. Specifically, he had in mind a young woman from Russia, thirty years old, who was working without pay for relatives who had brought her over. She wasn’t exactly an educated woman; in fact, she couldn’t even read or write. As for honesty and heart, this he could vouch for. She was an orphan herself and as a child had been brought up in servitude.

Of the three women the marriage broker trotted out for him, my father chose Ma, and shortly afterward they were married.

ACOLOSTOMY. So it is cancer . . .

As of the second day Pa was in hospital I had taken to dropping in on him on my way home from work. “Nothing yet,” he kept saying, “maybe tomorrow they’ll find out.”

After each of these visits, four in all, I reported to Ma that I had seen Pa. “He looks fine. Best thing in the world for him, a rest in the hospital.”

“Pa’s not lonesome for me?” she asked me once, and laughing, turned her head aside to hide her foolishness from me.

Yesterday Pa said to me, “It looks a little more serious than I thought. I have to have an operation tomorrow. Don’t say anything to Ma. And don’t come here for at least two or three days.”

I take my time getting home. I’m not too anxious to face Ma — grinning like a monkey and lying to her the way I have been doing the last four days. I step into a hospital telephone booth to call my married sister. She moans. “What are you going to say to Ma?” she asks.

I get home about half past six, and Ma’s in the kitchen making a special treat for supper. A recipe given her by a neighbor and which she’s recently put in her culinary inventory — pieces of cauliflower dipped in batter and fried in butter.

“I’m not hungry, Ma. I had something in the hospital cafeteria.” (We speak in Yiddish; as I mentioned before, Ma can’t speak English.)

She continues scraping away at the cauliflower stuck to the bottom of the pan. (Anything she puts in a pan sticks.) “You saw Pa?” she asks without looking up. Suddenly she thrusts the pan aside. “The devil take it, I put in too much flour.” She makes a pot of tea, and we sit at the kitchen table drinking it. To keep from facing her I drink mine leafing through a magazine. I can hear her sipping hers through a cube of sugar in her mouth.

I can feel her eyes on me. Why doesn’t she ask me, How’s Pa? Why doesn’t she speak? She never stops questioning me when I come from hospital, drives me crazy with the same questions again and again. I keep turning pages, she’s still sucking away at that cube of sugar — a maddening habit of hers. I look up. Of course her eyes are fixed on me, probing, searching.

I lash out at her. “Why are you looking at me like that!”

Without answer she takes her tea and dashes it in the sink. She spits the cube of sugar from her mouth. (Thank God for that; she generally puts it back in the sugar bowl.) She resumes her place, puts her hands in her lap, and starts twirling her thumbs. No one in the world can twirl his thumbs as fast as Ma. When she gets them going they look like miniature windmills whirring around.

“She asks me why I’m looking at her like that,”she says, addressing herself to the twirling thumbs in her lap. “I’m looking at her like that because I’m trying to read the expression in her face. She tells me Pa’s fine, but my heart tells me different.”

Suddenly she looks up, and thrusting her head forward, splays her hands out flat on the table. She has a dark-complexioned strong face, masculine almost, and eyes so black the pupil is indistinguishable from the iris.

“Do you know who Pa is!” she says. “Do you know who’s lying in the hospital? I’ll tell you who. The captain of our ship is lying in the hospital. The emperor of our domain. If the captain goes down, the ship goes with him. If the emperor leaves his throne, we can say good-bye to our domain. That’s who’s lying in the hospital. Now ask me why do I look at you like that.”

She breaks my heart. I want to put my arms around her, but I can’t do it. We’re not a demonstrative family, we never kiss, we seldom show affection. We’re always hollering at each other. Less than a month ago I hollered at Pa. He had taken to dosing himself. He was forever mixing something in a glass, and I became irritated at the powders, pills, and potions lying around in every corner of the house like mouse droppings.

“You’re getting to be a hypochondriac!” I hollered at him, not knowing what trouble he was in.

I reach out and put my hand over hers. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Ma. Pa’s fine, honest to God.”

She holds her hand still a few seconds, then eases it from under and puts it over mine. I can feel the weight of her hand pinioning mine to the table, and in an unaccustomed gesture of tenderness we sit a moment with locked hands.

“You know I had a dream about Pa last night?'’ she says. “I dreamt he came home with a basket of apples. I think that’s a good dream?”

MA’S immigration to Canada had been sponsored by her Uncle Yankev. Yankev at the time he sent for his niece was in his mid-forties and had been settled a number of years in Toronto with his wife, Danyeh, and their six children. They made an odd pair, Yankev and Danyeh. He was a tall two-hundred-and-fifty-pound handsome man, and Danyeh, whom he detested, was a lackluster little woman with a pockmarked face, maybe weighing ninety pounds. Yankev was constantly abusing her. Old Devil, he called her to her face and in the presence of company.

Ma stayed three years with Yankev and his family, working like a skivvy for them and without pay. Why would Yankev pay his niece like a common servant? She was one of the family, she sat at table with them and ate as much as she wanted. She had a bed and even a room to herself, which she’d never had before. When Yankev took his family for a ride in the car to Sunnyside, she was included. When he bought ice-cream cones, he bought for all.

She came to Pa without a dime in her pocket.

Ma has a slew of relatives, most of them émigrés from a remote little village somewhere in the depths of Russia. They’re a crude lot, loudmouthed and coarse, and my father (but for a few exceptions) had no use for any of them. The Russian Hordes, he called them. He was never rude; anytime they came around to visit he simply made himself scarce.

One night I remember in particular; I must have been about seven. Ma was washing up after supper and Pa was reading a newspaper when Yankev arrived, with Danyeh trailing him. Pa folded his paper, excused himself, and was gone. The minute Pa was gone Yankev went to the stove and lifted the lids from die two pots. Just as he thought — mamaliga in one pot, in the other one beans, and in the frying pan a piece of meat their cat would turn its nose up at. He sat himself in the rocking chair he had given Ma as a wedding present, and rocking, proceeded to lecture her. He had warned her against the marriage, but if she was satisfied, he was content. One question and that’s all. How had she bettered her lot? True, she was no longer an old maid. True, she was now mistress of her own home. He looked around him and snorted. A hovel. “And three snotnose kids,” he said, pointing to us.

Danyeh, hunched over in a kitchen chair, her feet barely reaching the floor, said something to him in Russian, cautioning him, I think. He told her to shut up, and in Yiddish continued his tirade against Ma. He had one word to say to her. To watch herself. Against His advice she had married this no-good Rumanian twister, this murderer. The story of how he had kept his first wile pregnant all the time was now well known. Also well known was the story of how she had died in her ninth month with a fourth child. Over an ironing board. Ironing his shirts while he was out playing cards with his Rumanian cronies and drinking wine. He had buried one wife, and now was after burying a second. So Ma had better watch herself, that’s all.

Ma left her dishwashing and with dripping wet hands took hold of a chair and seated herself facing Yankev. She begged him not to say another word. “Not another word, Uncle Yankev, I beg you. Till the day I die I’ll be grateful to you for bringing me over. I don’t know how much money you laid out for my passage, but I tried my best to make up for it the three years I stayed with you. by helping out in the house. But maybe I’m still in your debt? Is this what gives you the right to talk against my husband?”

Yankev, rocking, turned up his eyes and groaned. “You speak to her,” he said to Danyeh. “It’s inipossible for a human being to get through to her.”

Danyeh knew better than to open her mouth.

“Uncle Yankev,” Ma continued, “every word you speak against my husband is like a knife stall in my heart.” She leaned forward, thumbs whirring away. “Mamaliga? Beans? A piece of meat your cat wouldn’t cat? A crust of bread at his board, and I will still thank God every day of my life that he chose me from the other two the shadchan showed him.”

IN THE beginning my father gave her a hard time. I remember his bursts of temper at her rough ways in the kitchen. She never opened a kitchen drawer without wrestling it — wrenching it open, slamming it shut. She never put a kettle on the stove without its running over at the boil. A pot never came to stove without its lid being inverted, and this for some reason maddened him. He’d right the lid, sometimes scalding his lingers — and all hell would break loose. We never sat down to a set or laid table. As she had been used to doing, so she continued; slamming a pot down on the table, scattering a handful of cutlery, dealing out assortedsize plates. More than once, with one swipe of his hand my father would send a few plates crashing to the floor, and stalk out. She’d sit a minute looking in our faces, one by one, then start twirling her thumbs and talking to herself. What had she done now?

“Eat!” she’d admonish us, and leaving table would go to the mirror over the kitchen sink and ask herself face to face, “What did I do now?” She would examine her face profile and front and then sit down to eat. After, she’d gather up the dishes, dump them in the sink, and running the water over them, would study herself in the mirror. “He’ll be better,” she’d tell herself, smiling. “He’ll be soft as butter when he comes home. You’ll see,” she’d promise her image in the mirror.

Later in life, mellowed by the years perhaps (or just plain defeated — there was no changing her), he became more tolerant of her ways and was kinder to her. When it became difficult for her to get around because of her poor feet, he did her marketing. He attended to her feet, bought her the Martha Washingtons, the Romeo Slippers, and on a summer’s evening on his way home from work, a brick of ice cream. She was very fond of it.

Three years ago he began promoting a plan, a plan to give Ma some pleasure. (This was during Exhibition time.) “You know,” he said to me, “it would be very nice if Ma could see the fireworks at the Exhibition. She’s never seen anything like that in her life. Why don’t you take her?”

The idea of Ma going to the Ex for the fireworks was so preposterous, it made me laugh. She never went anywhere.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to give her a little pleasure once in a while,”

He was quite keen that she should go, and the following year he canvassed the idea again. He put money on the table for taxi and grandstand seats. “Take her,” he said.

“Why don’t you take her?” I said. “She’ll enjoy it more going with you.”

“Me? What will I do at the Exhibition?”

As children, we were terrified of Pa’s temper. Once in a while he’d belt us around, and we were scared that he might take the strap to Ma too. But before long we came to know that she was the only one of us not scared of Pa when he got mad. Not even from the beginning when he used to let fly at her was she intimidated by him, not in the least, and in later years was even capable of getting her own back by taking a little dig at him now and then about the “aristocracy” — as she called my father’s Rumanian connections.

Aside from his buddies in the back room of the ice-cream parlor on Augusta Avenue, my father also kept in touch with his Rumanian compatriots (all of whom had prospered), and would once in a while go to them for an evening. We were never invited, nor did they come to us. This may have been my father’s doing, I don’t know. I expect he was ashamed of his circumstances, possibly of Ma, and certainly of how we lived.

Once in a blue moon during Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur after shul, they would unexpectedly drop in on us. One time a group of four came to the house, and I remember Pa darting around like a gadfly, collecting glasses, wiping them, and pouring a glass of wine he’d made himself. Ma shook hands all around, then went to the kitchen to cut some slices of her honey cake, scraping off the burnt part. I was summoned to take the plate in to “Pa’s gentle folk.” Pretending to be busy, she rattled around the kitchen a few seconds, then seated herself in the partially open door, inspecting them. Not till they were leaving did she come out again, to wish them a good year.

The minute they were gone, my father turned on her. “Russian peasant! Tartar savage, you! Sitting there with your eyes popping out. Do you think they couldn’t see you?”

“What’s the matter? Even a cat may look at a king?” she said blandly.

“Why didn’t you come out instead of sitting there like a caged animal?'’

“Because I didn’t want to shame you, she said, twirling her thumbs and swaying back and forth in the chair Yankev had given her as a wedding present.

My father busied himself clearing table, and after a while he softened. But she wasn’t through yet. “Which one was Falik’s wife?” she asked in seeming innocence. “The one with the beard?”

This drew his fire again. “No!” he shouted.

“Oh, the other one. The pale one with the hump on her back,” she said wickedly.

So . . . notwithstanding the good dream Ma had of Pa coming home with a basket of apples, she never saw him again. He died six days alter the operation.

It was a harrowing six days, dreadful. As Pa got weaker, the more disputatious we became —— my brother, my sister, and I — arguing and snapping at each other outside his door, the point of contention being should Ma be told or not.

Nurse Brown, the special we’d put on duty, came out once to hush us. “You’re not helping him by arguing like this. He can hear you.”

“Is he conscious, nurse?”

“Of course he’s conscious.”

“Is there any hope?”

“There’s always hope,” she said. “I’ve been on cases like this before, and I’ve seen them rally.”

We went our separate ways, clinging to the thread of hope she’d given us. The fifth day after the operation I had a call from Nurse Brown: “Your father wants to see you.”

Nurse Brown left the room when I arrived, and my father motioned me to undo the zipper of his oxygen tent. “Ma’s a good woman,” he said, his voice so weak I had to lean close to hear him. “You’ll look after her? Don’t put her aside. Don’t forget about her — ”

“What are you talking about!" I said shrilly, then lowered my voice to a whisper. “The doctor told me you’re getting better. Honest to God, Pa, I wouldn’t lie to you,” I whispered.

He went on as it I hadn’t spoken. Even a servant if you had her for thirty years, you wouldn’t put aside because you don’t need her anymore —

“Wait a minute,” I said, and went to the corridor to fetch Nurse Brown. Nurse Brown, will you tell my father what you told me yesterday. You remember? About being on cases like this before, and you’ve seen them rally. Will you tell that to my father, please. He talks as if he’s —”

I ran from the room and stood outside the door, bawling. Nurse Brown opened the door a crack. “Ssh! You’d better go now; I’ll call you if there’s any change.”

At five the next morning, my brother telephoned from hospital. Ma was sound asleep and didn’t hear. “You’d better get down here,” he said. “I think the old man’s checking out. I’ve already phoned Gertie.”

My sister and I arrived at the hospital within seconds of each other. My brother was just emerging from Pa’s room. In the gesture of a baseball umpire he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, signifying OUT.

“Is he dead?” we asked our brother.

“Just this minute,” he replied.

Like three dummies we paced the dimly lit corridor, not speaking to each other. In the end we were obliged to speak; we had to come to a decision about how to proceed next.

We taxied to the synagogue of which Pa was a member, and roused the shamus. “As soon as it’s light I’ll get the rabbi,” he said. “He’ll attend to everything. Meantime go home.”

In silence we walked slowly home. Dawn was just breaking, and Ma, a habitually early riser, was bound to be up now and in the kitchen. Quietly we let ourselves in and passed through the hall leading to the kitchen. We were granted an unexpected respite; Ma was not yet up. We waited ten minutes for her, fifteen — an agonizing wait. We decided one of us had better go and wake her; what was the sense in prolonging it? The next minute we changed our minds. To awaken her with such tidings would be inhuman, a brutal thing to do.

“Let’s stop whispering,” my sister whispered. “Let’s talk in normal tones, do something, make a noise, she’ll hear us and come out.

In an access of activity we busied ourselves. My sister put the kettle on with a clatter, I took teaspoons from the drawer, clacking them like castanets. She was bound to hear, their bedroom was on the same door at the front of the house but five minutes elapsed and not a sound from the room.

“Go and see,” my sister said, and I went and opened the door to that untidy bedroom Pa used to rail against.

Ma, her black eyes circled and her hair in disarray, was sitting up in bed. At sight of me she flopped back and pulled the feather tick over her head. I approached the bed and took the covers from her face. “Ma”

She sat up. “You are guests in my house now?”

For the moment I didn’t understand. I didn’t know the meaning of her words. But the next minute the meaning of them was clear — with Pa dead, the link was broken. The bond, the tie that held us together. We were no longer her children. We were now guests in her house.

“When did Pa die?” she asked.

“How did you know?”

“My heart told me.”

Barefooted, she followed me to the kitchen. My sister gave her a glass of tea, and we stood like mutes, watching her sipping it through a cube of sugar.

“You were all there when Pa died?”

“Just me, Ma,” my brother said.

She nodded. “His kaddish. Good.”

I took a chair beside her, and for once without constraint or self-consciousness, put my arm around her and kissed her on the cheek.

“Ma, the last words Pa spoke were about you. He said you were a good woman. ‘Ma’s a good woman,’ that’s what he said to me.”

She put her tea down and looked me in the face. “Pa said that? He said I was a good woman?” She clasped her hands. “May the light shine on him in paradise,” she said, and wept silently, putting her head down to hide her tears.

Eight o’clock the rabbi telephoned. Pa was now at the funeral parlor on College near Augusta, and the funeral was to be at eleven o’clock. Ma went to ready herself, and in a few minutes called me to come and zip up her black crepe, the dress Pa had bought her six years ago for the Applebaum wedding.

The Applebaums, neighbors, had invited Ma and Pa to the wedding of their daughter, Lily. Right away Pa had declared he wouldn’t go. Ma kept coaxing. How would it look? It would be construed as unfriendly, unneighborly. A few days before the wedding he gave in, and Ma began scratching through her wardrobe for something suitable to wear. Nothing she exhibited pleased him. He went downtown and came back with the black crepe and an outsize corset.

I dressed her for the wedding, combed her hair, and put some powder on her face. Pa became impatient; he had already called a cab. What was I doing? Getting her ready for a beauty contest? The taxi came, and as Pa held her coat he said to me in English, “You know, Ma’s not a bad-looking woman?”

For weeks she talked about the good time she’d had at the Applebaum wedding, but chiefly about how Pa had attended her. Not for a minute had he left her side. Two hundred people at the wedding and not one woman among them had the attention from her husband that she had had from Pa. “Pa’s a gentleman,” she said to me, proud as proud.

Word of Pa’s death got around quickly, and by nine in the morning people began trickling in. First arrivals were Yankev and Danyeh. Yankev, now in his seventies and white-haired, was still straight and handsome. The same Yankev except for the white hair and an asthmatic condition causing him to wheeze and gasp for breath. Danyeh was wizened and bent over, her hands hanging almost to her knees. They approached Ma, Danyeh trailing Yankev. Yankev held out a hand and with the other one thumped his chest, signifying he was too congested to speak. Danyeh gave her bony hand to Ma and muttered a condolence.

From then on there was a steady influx of people. Here was Chaim the schnorrer! We hadn’t seen him in years. Chaim the schnorrer, stinking of fish and in leg wrappings as always, instead of socks. Rich as Croesus he was said to be, a fishpeddling miser who lived on soda crackers and milk and kept his money in his leg wrappings. Yankev, a minute ago too congested for speech, found words for Chaim. “How much money have you got in those gutkess? The truth, Chaim!”

Ma shook hands with all, acknowledged their sympathy, and to some she spoke a few words. I observed the Widow Spector, a gossip and troublemaker, sidling through the crowd and casing her way toward Ma. “The Post” she was called by people on the street. No one had the time of day for her; even Ma used to hide from her.

I groaned at the sight of her. As if Ma didn’t have enough to contend with. But no! here was Ma welcoming the Widow Spector, holding a hand out to her. “Give me your hand, Mrs. Spcctor. Shake hands, we’re partners now. Now I know the taste, I’m a widow too.” Ma patted the chair beside her. “Sit down, partner. Sit down.”

At a quarter to eleven the house was clear of people. “Is it time?” Ma asked, and we answered, Yes, it was time to go. We were afraid this would be the breaking point for her, but she went calmly to the bedroom and took her coat from the peg on the door and came to the kitchen with it, requesting that it be brushed off.

The small funeral parlor was jammed to the doors, every seat taken but for four up front left vacant for us. On a trestle table directly in front of our seating was the coffin. A pine box draped in a black cloth, and in its center a white Star of David.

Ma left her place, approached the coffin, and as she stood before it with clasped hands I noticed the uneven hemline of her coat, hiked up in back by that mound of flesh on her shoulders. I observed that her lisle stockings were twisted at the ankles, and was embarrassed for her.

She stood silently a moment, then began to speak. She called him her dove, her comrade, her friend.

“Life is a dream,” she said. “You were my treasure. You were the light of my eyes. I thought to live my days out with you — and look what it has come to.” (She swayed slightly, the black shawl slipping from her head — and I observed that could have done with a brushing too.) “If ever I offended you or caused you even a twinge of discomfort, forgive me for it. As your wife I lived like a queen. Look at me now. I’m nothing. You were my jewel, my crown. With you at its head my house was a palace. I return now to a hovel. Forgive me for everything, my dove. Forgive me.”

(“Russian peasant,” Pa used to say to her in anger, “Tartar savage.” If he could see her now as she stood before his bier mourning him. Mourning him like Hecuba mourning Priam and the fall of Troy. And I a minute ago was ashamed of her hiked-up coat, her twisted stockings and dusty shawl.)

People were weeping; Ma resumed her place dry-eyed, and the rabbi began the service.

It is now a year since Pa died, and as he had enjoined me to do, I am looking after Ma. I have not put her aside. I get cross and holler at her as I always have done, but she allows for my testiness and does not hold it against me. I’m a spinster, an old maid now approaching my thirty-seventh year, and she pities me for it. I get bored telling her again and again that Pa’s last words were Ma’s a good woman, and sometimes wish I’d never mentioned it. She cries a lot, and I get impatient with her tears. But I’m good to her.

This afternoon I called Moodey’s, booked two seats for the grandstand, and tonight I’m taking her to the Ex and she’ll see the fireworks.