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Updated: July 1, 2025
They're Kentucky mountaineers, and as the father says, 'a fur piece from home'." It was through the eldest girl that the children became acquainted: the girl and her toothbrush. Rose-Ellen was brushing her teeth at the door, and Dick was saying, "I ain't going to.
The lady of the house was gathering flowers, and she held out a bunch to Rose-Ellen. "Don't prick yourself," she warned. "Are you the one they call Rose-Ellen?" "Yes, ma'am," said Rose-Ellen, burying her nose in the flowers. "I had a little sister named Rose-Ellen," the woman said gently. "You come play on the grass sometime, and we'll pick flowers for your mother."
They had time to set up "chicken-housekeeping," as Rose-Ellen called it, before the last of May, when beet work began. They made a pretty cheerful place of this new home; though, of course, it had no floor and no window glass, and sun and stars shone in through its roof, and the only running water was in the irrigation ditch.
"They make me feel funny," Rose-Ellen complained, "like seeing too many folks and too many stars." "They've got so many vegetables they dump them into the sea, because if they put them all on the market, the price would go down. But there's not enough so that those that pick them get what they need to eat," said Grandpa. "Sometimes too much is not enough."
It was queer country, the highway running between swamps of black water, where gray trees stood veiled in gray moss. Gray cabins sat every-which-way in the clearing, heavy shutters swinging at their glassless windows. A pale, thin girl talked to Rose-Ellen. She was Polish, and her name was Rose, too.
That night she made herself a sunbonnet out of an old shirt, sitting close to a candle stuck in a pop bottle. "I clean forgot to look over the beans and put them to soak," she said wearily, from her bed. Rose-Ellen scooped herself farther into her layer of straw. She ought to offer to get up and look over those beans, but she simply couldn't make herself.
All the children watched that strip of pavement with the hot air quivering above it, but still the car did not come. Suddenly Rose-Ellen clutched Dick's arm. "Those two men look like . . . look like. . . . They are Grampa and Daddy. But what have they done with the car?" "Where's the car?" Dick shouted, as the men came up. "W'ere tar?"
It was while they were hungrily munching the dry bread and cheese that another car came upon them and with it another swift change in their changing life. Two young women stepped out of the chirpy Ford sedan. Neither of them looked like Her, nor even Her No. II yet Jimmie whispered excitedly to Rose-Ellen, "I bet you a nickel they're Christian Centerers!" And they were.
The picking baskets stood almost as high as Rose-Ellen's shoulder, and she and Dick were proud of filling one apiece, the first day they worked. These baskets held sixty pounds each more when the weather was not so dry and sixty pounds meant ninety cents. School had not started yet, so the children worked all day. Sometimes Rose-Ellen could not keep from crying, she was so tired.
Dick tried to get ready in one room and Rose-Ellen in the other, and everything she wanted was in his room and everything he wanted in hers. Their small belongings had to be packed in boxes, and all the boxes emptied out to find them. Clean clothes still unironed, of course had to be hung up, and they could not be covered well enough so flies and moth-millers did not speck them.
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