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Updated: May 23, 2025
So poor Absalom's reception at her hands was even colder than her father's greeting at the kitchen door; for since Tillie's election to William Penn, Mr. Getz was more opposed than ever to her marriage, and he did not at all relish the young man's persistency in coming to see her in the face of his own repeated warning.
Tillie still lay on the kitchen settee, her father sitting at her side, when the doctor and Sammy arrived. The other children had all been put to bed, and Mrs. Getz, seated at the kitchen table, was working on a pile of mending by the light of a small lamp. The doctor's verdict, when he had examined his patient's tongue, felt her pulse, and taken her temperature, was not clear.
It was half-past four o'clock when they reached the farm-house, and they found the weary, dreary mother of the family cleaning fish at the kitchen sink, one baby pulling at her skirts, another sprawling on the floor at her feet. Miss Margaret inquired whether she might see Mr. Getz. "If you kin? Yes, I guess," Mrs. Getz dully responded.
Getz, rallying, "I'll bring it up in Board meeting that you mebbe leave the scholars borry the loan of novels off of you." "But you can't prove it. I shall hold the Board to their contract. They can't break it." Miss Margaret was taking very high ground, of which, in fact, she was not at all sure. Mr. Getz gazed at her with mingled anger and fascination. Here was certainly a new species of woman!
It was an hour later when, as Tillie still lay motionless on the settee, and Mrs. Getz was dishing up the supper and putting it on the table, which stood near the wall at one end of the kitchen, Mr. Getz came in, tired, dirty, and hungry, from the celery-beds. The child opened her eyes at the familiar and often dreaded step, and looked up at him as he came and stood over her. "What's the matter?
"Won't she be here to-night to leave us see her oncet?" "She won't, but her pop will," answered Nathaniel Puntz; and Mr. Getz vaguely realized in the expressions about him that something unusual was in the air. "What do we want with her pop?" he asked. "We want his wote!" answered Adam Oberholzer which sally brought forth hilarious laughter.
"Howdy-do, missus," he briskly addressed the mother of the brood, pushing his hat to the back of his head in lieu of raising it. "And how's the patient?" he inquired with a suddenly professional air and tone. "Some better, heh? HEH? Been cryin'! What fur?" he demanded, turning to Mr. Getz. "Say, Jake, you ain't been badgerin' this kid again fur somepin?
"Well, to be sure," granted Mrs. Getz, "I'd like keepin' Tillie home to help me out with the work still. I didn't see how I was ever goin' to get through without her. But I thought when Absalom Puntz begin to come Sundays, certainly you'd be fur her havin' him.
"Can't you tell pop what's hurtin' you, Tillie?" "No sir." Mr. Getz looked doubtfully and rather helplessly at his wife. "It's a bad sign, ain't, when they can't tell what's hurtin' 'em?" "I don't know what fur sign that is when they don't feel nothin'," she stoically answered, as she dished up her Frankfort sausages. "If a person would just know oncet!" he exclaimed anxiously.
I says to him, 'Tillie's pop, there, bein' one of your bosses, you better make up to Tillie, I says, and he sayed, 'You don't mean to tell me that that Mr. Getz of the School Board is the father of this girl? 'That's what, I says. 'He's that much her father, I says, 'that you'd better keep on the right side of him by makin' up to Tillie, I says, just to plague him.
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