The Misadventures of Maude March Read Online Free Page A

were boys, six and eight, and all I had to do to get them to go along with me was to promise to read them a dimer later on. Joe Harden was their favorite hero, and they had both of them concocted an ending for the dimer that quits just as Joe sights a cave where a wounded killer has no doubt taken shelter.
    Because she was judged to have little patience with small children, and because Mrs. Peasley was growing round with her next baby, Maude took on the work that needed hours of standing up. She baked cakes and pies for ladies' meetings, for the sick or elderly, and for Tuesday night box suppers.
    Mrs. Peasley had gotten a good start on collecting clothing for the poor, and much of that needed ironing, if not a good wash as well. There were socks to be mended and sizesto be sorted. Finally I tied things together with bristly twine as full sets of clothing for the needy.
    Just in time to begin the canning.
    I worked mostly at preparing the vegetables. I was only grateful I was too short to stand at the stove. That fell to Maude. When she wasn't baking, she was lifting steaming jars from the canning pots. It made me feel bad to leave her with all the work when I went back to school in September.
    Maude didn't go, but I had to. A new teacher had been found to take Aunt Ruthie's place. It wasn't that I expected Aunt Ruthie to show up there. I hadn't really thought about it, not out loud in my mind like, but somewhere inside myself I did think her classroom would stand empty, like our house.
    I never mentioned it to Maude, who went on baking cakes and pies and doing the wash. If that room stood empty in her mind, that was fine by me. But if I hoped to spare her sentimental values, that was not to be. Once I went back to school, it fell to Maude to tie up the old-clothing parcels.
    Aunt Ruthie's clothes made their way into the pile of giveaways. It had given Maude quite a jolt to find one of Aunt Ruthie's few dresses there. She had tied it into the middle of a bundle to hide this fact from me, but I was the one sent to get the clothes when Mrs. Peasley was all set to ride out on an errand of mercy. I spotted the fabric, Aunt Ruthie's practical brown cotton, as I put the bundles in the buggy.
    “I see she's given away Aunt Ruthie's clothes,” I said to Maude, so she would know the secret was out. “I guess it's too bad for her that Aunt Ruthie wasn't partial to pretty calicoes or tartans.”
    “Don't bother about it, Sallie,” was Maude's reply. Buther mouth was held tight in the way she had copied from Aunt Ruthie.
    Mrs. Peasley told us how fortunate she believed herself to be to have all this help with her duties. She said this as she wrote a list of things to be done by Maude and me, and another list of people who needed the balm of her visits to them.
    As the days wore on, I wanted something more than a thank-you. It was not that I was not grateful to be taken in, but it did seem to me that we were also taken for granted.
    It made me angry that Reverend Peasley would turn a smile on me as I helped to scrub his floors, or wiped up after feeding his youngest child, or peeled the potatoes he would be getting for his supper, and yet he did not think to help.
    But he was not the one making up daily lists. I said to Maude, “That Mrs. Peasley doesn't know when to say whoa.”
    “I know, I know,” Maude agreed. “But at least you get away some of the time. If Reverend Peasley calls me an 'answer to a prayer' one more time, I'm going to hit him on the head.”
    I didn't think this would improve matters much.
    I said, “Don't you think we ought to just tell them it's not right to work us from morning till night? Even Aunt Ruthie let us play a game in the evenings. She let us pop corn and read by the fire. We got to visit with the other girls for an hour after Sunday service, instead of rushing back to the kitchen work.”
    I had never felt such an appreciation for Aunt Ruthie. I understood now; she didn't smile much, but she