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Updated: May 26, 2025
They often reached the kitchen at the same moment, and she would shake her finger at him and say, "You come down to help me, you nice boy, you!" At least he was of some use to Mahailey. His father could hire one of the Yoeder boys to look after the place, but Mahailey wouldn't let any one else save her old back. Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Mahailey, enjoyed that fall.
"I surely ought not to take it out on her," Claude thought, when he saw her disappointment. He rose and patted her on the back. "That's all right, Mahailey. Thank you for saving the peaches, anyhow." She shook her finger at him. "Don't you let on!" He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path up the hill. Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August, and Mr.
Wheeler's old double sleigh from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles, most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But the Wheelers always kept everything. Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a sleigh-ride.
When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look that is in a chained coyote's eyes when a boy is showing him off to visitors and saying he wouldn't run away if he could. "Go on with your work," Ralph snapped. "Don't stand there watching me!"
He and Ralph used to ride her over to the Yoeders' when they were barefoot youngsters, guiding her with a rope halter, and kicking at the leggy colt that was always running alongside. When he entered the kitchen and asked Mahailey for warm water to wash his hands, she sniffed him disapprovingly. "Why, Mr.
Wheeler did not forget to eat altogether, as she was apt to do when she fell to remembering things that had happened long ago. Mahailey was in a happy frame of mind because her weather predictions had come true; only yesterday she had told Mrs. Wheeler there would be snow, because she had seen snowbirds.
"I'll clean it today, if you say so. I won't be here next Sunday. I'm going away." Something in his tone made Mahailey get up, her eyes still blinking with the smoke, and look at him sharply. "You ain't goin' off there where Miss Enid is?" she asked anxiously. "No, Mahailey."
If we don't get our wheat in, those people over there won't have anything to eat, you know." The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she could faintly remember the Civil War.
Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for "him" to bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair of brutal fists.
"Claude," she said fearfully, "the cedars in the front yard are all but covered. Do you suppose our cattle could be buried?" He laughed. "No, Mother. The cattle have been moving around all night, I expect." When the two men started out with the wooden snow shovels, Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey stood in the doorway, watching them.
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