Man of the Family

  “Of course, this is a trial batch. We won’t be paid anything for it, but if we can do a good job on them—and I’m sure we can—we’ll be paid thirty cents a pair, and we can have all we can do.”

  After I helped Mother down at our front gate, I unhitched Lady, watered her, and gave her another quart of the chickens’ cracked corn. Then I carried the bundle of curtains into the house. Mother was still upstairs changing her clothes, and Grace was with her. I put the bundle on the table in the dining room, and went over to look at the picture on our calendar. Every window on the front of the Brown Palace was draped with lace curtains.

  As they came down the stairs, I heard Mother telling Grace, “Except for the ruffles, there’s no ironing at all to doing up lace curtains. While they are still wet from the starch water, they are simply stretched onto a frame as a painter stretches his canvas.”

  Then she saw me, and said, “While Gracie and I are getting lunch ready, Son, do you think you could whack us together a frame for the curtains? I don’t think it should be very difficult. It’s just a matter of sawing off the pieces of narrow board, bolting the corners together firmly, and pounding in a row of brads all the way around the edge.”

  While Mother was talking, she went over to her writing desk, took out the key to Father’s big tool chest, and gave it to me. “Suppose you get the joint rule out of the tool chest,” she said. “The first thing we should do is to measure one of the curtains so as to find out just how large to make the frame.”

  I was only gone a couple of minutes to get the rule. When I came back, Grace and Mother had the bundle unwrapped. Inside, there was a cloth bag—like a great big pillowcase—stuffed full of wadded-up curtains. Mother reached her hand into the end of the bag and pulled one out. She gave it a sharp flip, the way she always shook a sheet before she hung it on the clothesline; then held it high in her outstretched hands. “Oh, my!” she said. “This is sort of a raggedy old one, isn’t it? Well, so much the better. It’s lucky I got hold of this one first. It will do very nicely to experiment with.”

  School was closed that Friday, and all the younger children were standing around watching Mother. “Now, let us see . . . let us see. Hmmm, we’ll have to find a space large enough to lay this out flat on the floor for measuring. Philip, could you and Muriel push the chairs way back off the parlor carpet. Here, Gracie, you and Ralph catch hold of the corners so we can spread it out nice and smooth.”

  I couldn’t do it, though. There was only one corner on my end of the curtain. The other one looked as though a puppy had chewed it off. I got hold the best I could, and we carried it into the parlor, but we couldn’t spread it out nice and smooth. The whole thing was stiff and crinkled up like a piece of crumpled chicken wire. And some of the holes in it were nearly big enough for me to crawl through.

  Mother pinched her upper lip with her thumb and finger. “Hmmm,” she said again. “If I washed and ironed it first, it would be . . . No, no, I can’t do that. It might shrink, and we have to know the exact size to make our frame. Now, let me see. . . . Suppose, Gracie, that you and Muriel each take a corner on this end while Philip and Hal take the other two. Then you can stretch it right out four ways, while Ralph and I do the measuring.”

  That didn’t work at all. Each of the edges curved in, and the corners pulled out to points till it looked like the label on a bar of Fels naphtha soap. The middle still humped up like a range of mountains, and the holes began to tear wider. “No—no—no,” Mother called, “we mustn’t injure it. Lace curtains have to be handled very carefully.”

  I didn’t see how we could injure it any more than it already was, but Mother had her head cocked over to one side and was pinching her upper lip again, so I kept quiet. “Now . . . let . . . me . . . see,” she said. “There must be some way to do this. Hmmm, hmmmm.”

  “Well, if it was chicken wire,” I said, “I’d lay a board along one side of it, then put something heavy on the board to hold it down while I straightened out the edge of the wire.”

  “Well, now!” Mother said. “If it would work with chicken wire, I can’t see why it shouldn’t work with a stiff curtain. But be sure you get a nice clean board.”

  The only clean board I could find was one of the shelves from the fruit cellar, but it worked all right. Philip was the heaviest, so we stood him on the end of the board to hold it down. Then Hal and Muriel stepped on as we pulled the curtain edge out straight and tight.

  Father used to say that if you measured twice you only had to saw once, but Mother wouldn’t let it go at that. And the more times we measured the more different answers we got. Mother thought the size should come out in even feet, but it didn’t. “Common sense says that it should come out to an even number of feet,” she kept saying, “and I’d hate to get our frame made up to the wrong size. Now, let’s start all over again, and see if it won’t stretch out to an even eight feet without tearing.”

  It wouldn’t. It tore in the middle when we tried to make it go past seven feet and nine inches. When it popped, Mother straightened up on her knees, and said, “Oh, isn’t that a shame! Well, as my father used to say, ‘Oft we mar what’s good by trying to do better.’ Let’s just call it seven feet and nine inches . . . though I do think it might stretch a little farther when it’s wet.”

  I guess everybody else had forgotten about our not having had any lunch, so I said, “Well, if I’m going to get the frame made before chore time, we’d better start measuring the end.”

  Even then, Mother didn’t think about lunch. She pinched her lip some more, and said, “It might be a waste of time, but let’s measure the other side so to make assurance doubly sure. I don’t want to make any mistakes on this first batch, and so much depends on the frame being just right.”

  With one corner chewed off, the second side was twice as hard to measure as the first. Grace was the one who finally figured out where the corner would have been if there’d been one. Then we always came out with a length on that side of eight feet and four inches. After all the practice we’d had on the sides, the ends went fairly easy. The top was three feet and seven inches, and the bottom was four feet and four inches.

  Mother put both hands on her hips, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Now . . . let . . . me . . . see. Were the Jordans’ curtains wider at the bottom than they were at the top? No . . . no . . . I’m sure they weren’t. I can see that stretcher in my mind’s eye now.”

  She squinnied up one eye a little. “No,” she said, “no, it was perfectly oblong.” Then she stopped to pinch her lip a few times. “Now let’s see . . . what is the average of . . . what were those measurements?”

  I’d forgotten most of them, we’d had so many, but Grace hadn’t. “Oh, yes,” Mother said. “Now: seven feet times twelve inches, plus nine inches; and that plus eight feet times twelve inches, plus . . . No, that isn’t the easy way to do it. Let’s take seven feet plus eight feet, plus nine inches plus . . .”

  We didn’t very often interrupt when we knew Mother was thinking, but Grace blurted out, “Eight feet and half an inch long; by three feet, eleven and a half inches wide.”

  Mother let her hands drop from her hips, and said, “Whewww. Well, that’s a load off my mind. You see it averages out to being within half an inch each way of being in even feet; four by eight. And that’s very logical: just twice as long as they are wide. My! I was worried for fear they might be odd shapes and sizes, but I feel a lot better now.”

  Mother let me take her hand and help her a little as she got up onto her feet. Her knees seemed to be a little stiff, but she walked right out to the calendar on the dining room wall. “See!” she called to us. “It’s just as I thought. With the exception of those arched windows on the seventh floor, this little row around the top, and these big ones on the rounded corner, all the windows in the Brown Palace are exactly the same size. My! For a few minutes I thought we might have to make several different sizes of stretchers, and that would have been quite expensive.”

/>   We’d used up so much time in measuring the curtain that I had to get right after my chores, and Mother wanted to have an early supper. Curtains were the only thing talked about while we ate. Right after I’d finished saying the blessing, Mother said to Grace, “I’m just a little bit worried about the mending. Of course, this curtain we’re using to experiment with is more holey than righteous, but I’m sure we’ll find nothing worse than a broken thread here and there in the others. As beautiful a hotel as the Brown Palace would never put anything but the very finest curtains in its windows. Still, a careless guest might leave a window open, so that a curtain could blow out, catch on something, and tear.”

  I was serving Hal’s plate, but I wasn’t thinking much about it. I was remembering the kind of people I’d seen going into the Brown Palace that morning, and without really meaning to, I said, “Or one of those rich men might burn a hole in it with his cigar.”

  Mother just glanced up at me for a moment, and said, “If he smoked.” Then she went right on talking to Grace. “The broken threads are very easy to mend. While the curtain is on the stretching frame, they are simply replaced with twist of the right shade. Of course, the knots must be very neatly made so as not to show, and the broken thread must be snipped away. But it’s the larger holes that worry me. I imagine they have to be mended on the stretcher too, and there must be a trick to doing it so that the mended place will neither pull nor sag.”

  When it came to figuring things out, Grace could beat anybody I ever knew. And she must have figured the mending out before Mother ever mentioned it. “I don’t think it would be very hard,” she said. “If you washed and starched the twist right along with the curtain, they’d probably shrink and stretch about the same amount. Then, if you did the weaving-in while they were both wet, I’d think it would be just about like tuning a harp; just getting the same tightness on all the strings.”

  I shouldn’t have done it, but I blurted out, “When did you ever tune a harp?”

  Grace didn’t even bother to look around at me. She just said, “Never, but I think I could.” I thought she probably could, too. She went right on talking to Mother, so I kept quiet till she’d finished. “If Ralph could go right down to the village, he could get us a spool of twist before the O.P.C.H. closes, and then we could try it on the unrighteous one as soon as he has the frame made.”

  I’d been wondering about the rest of the curtains in the bag ever since Mother took the first one out, so I said, “Well, why don’t we look at the rest of the curtains first? I’ll bet there are a lot . . .”

  Mother didn’t look up from her plate, but Grace scowled as though I’d done something terrible. She didn’t let me finish what I was going to say, but snapped, “If you don’t hurry, the O.P.C.H. will be closed before you get there.”

  The One Price Cash House didn’t close till six o’clock, and I knew I had enough time, but I knew I’d better keep quiet, so I finished my supper and went out to put the saddle on Lady. When I led her out of the barn, Grace was waiting for me. She held a little piece of curtain out toward me, and said, “Now remember, it’s silk twist you want and not thread. Show them this piece and tell them the color has to match exactly.”

  “All right,” I said, “but you don’t have to be so crabby about everything.”

  “Well, why don’t you use your head once in a while?” she snapped back at me. “Don’t you think Mother knows just as well as you do what kind of curtains are probably in that bag? But she won’t look at them till after we’ve gone to bed. And you’d better hurry, so you can get the frame made. She won’t sleep a wink till she knows how that first one is coming out.”

  I couldn’t get exactly the right shade of twist, but it was pretty close. And I was back home with it in less than twenty minutes.

  While Mother was giving me the tool-chest key again, she said, “Now, this can’t be any slap-dash job. The corners will have to be square and true. And measure carefully to see that you get it just exactly four feet by eight feet.”

  “Inside or out?” I asked her.

  Before she could answer, Grace said, “Neither! That’s the size in the middle of the strips where the brads go.”

  I was real careful about making the frame. I measured the sides exactly eight feet and two inches long and the ends four feet and two inches, then mitered the corners just the way I’d seen Father make picture frames.

  I’d been so busy I hadn’t noticed how the time was getting away from me, and it was nearly nine o’clock when I took the frame in to show Mother. At first, she said, “Oh, what a beautiful job you’ve done.” Then she stood back and looked at it with her head cocked over a little. “There’s something just a little bit strange about it. Let me see now. . . . I believe the Jordans’ stretcher had legs on it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got four two-foot pieces left over. I can put legs on it easy enough.”

  Grace was holding up the far end of the frame and looking at my corner joint. Almost before I had my mouth closed, she said, “If you’d left them right on there, we could let it out and take it in by just changing the bolt holes.”

  It made me a little bit mad to have her finding fault with my job, so I said, “What do you know about being a carpenter, anyway? How’d you think you could keep the edges level if you left the ends on?”

  Mother clapped her hands together, and said, “No more bickering! It’s a lovely job, and I think it will work beautifully if you just tack some legs onto it so we can stand it up against the wall. Now to see how far apart the brads should go.”

  Grace was humming; not any real tune, but that you-just-wait-and-see-what’s-going-to-happen hum, like a mosquito in a bedroom. She only stopped long enough to say, “Three-quarters of an inch,” and was still humming when I took the frame back to the barn.

  When I had it finished and took it into the house, Grace and Mother were waiting for me. They had the curtain and the twist all washed and lying in the starch water. The curtain had shrunk quite a bit in the washing, and it took all three of us to get the top edge stretched out and hooked over the brads.

  But that first edge was nothing, compared to the other three. The brads weren’t strong enough and they’d bend if we didn’t push each loop of thread clear down to the bottoms of them. And the heads had rough edges that scratched our fingers when we tried to stretch the loops over them. Before I realized I’d cut it, one of my fingers bled on the curtain. Mother was afraid she might not be able to get the stain out if it dried, so we had to stop while she sponged it and put court plaster on my finger. All three of us had to have court plaster on our fingers long before we got the last edge hooked onto the brads. Some of the holes had torn a little bigger in the stretching, we’d got the edges bloody in a dozen places, and the pattern of the mesh was all scrambled up.

  We’d been so busy that we’d forgotten all about the time. It wasn’t until the last loop was hooked that Mother noticed the clock. She caught her breath as though it had frightened her, and said, “Good Heavens! Has something happened to the clock? Why . . . why, it’s after one o’clock. You children get to bed just as fast as you can stivver. My! I shouldn’t have let you stay up like this! And tomorrow our cookery day!”

  All Grace said was, “You’re coming too, aren’t you? There’s nothing more we can do tonight.” But I had to put my foot in my mouth again.

  “Hadn’t we better take the curtain off before we go?” I said; “it won’t be any good this way.”

  Grace was standing right beside me. She dug her thumb nearly half an inch into my back, and Mother clamped her mouth up as tight as a new buttonhole. For a minute her face was red, and I thought she was going to scold me, but she didn’t. She just let her breath out easy, and her voice was real quiet when she said, “Yes, we will have to do it over, but we have gained considerable experience. I don’t think it will hurt anything for it to hang right there till we have our cookery order behind us. Now, run right off for bed; I’ll be up in a few minute
s.”

  21

  Inventing and Blacksmithing

  I DIDN’T wake up the next morning till nearly six o’clock, but there wasn’t a sound in the house. I wanted Mother to sleep as long as she could, so I took my shoes in my hand, and kept my feet wide apart on the stairs so they wouldn’t squeak. But I wasn’t the first one up. A lamp was already burning in our kitchen. Grace was there but didn’t hear me till I’d opened the door. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the curtain stretcher, and seemed to be studying it as though it were a painting.

  She didn’t say a word when she saw me there; just glanced up at me and then looked back at the curtain. I knew why as soon as I got around where I could see. The whole thing looked like an old dilapidated chicken-yard fence with half the posts rotted out. As the curtain had dried and shrunk, it had warped and twisted the frame all out of shape. The lace was as stiff as parchment paper, and broken threads stuck out around the edges of the holes like clawing fingers. The chewed-off corner was hunched up as though a dog had crawled through it, and there was a rust stain around every brad.

  I sat down beside Grace, and said, “Don’t you think we’d better let this one go, and do our practicing on a good one?”

  Grace didn’t say a word for at least two minutes. She just kept looking at the curtain. Then she said, “There isn’t a good one in the bag. I just looked.”

  “Are they all as bad as this one?” I asked her.

  At first, she just shrugged her shoulders. Then, after a couple of minutes, she shook her head, “No,” she said, “but they’re just a bunch of old discarded stuff. I don’t think any two are the same size or shape, and they’ve all got holes in them. This one could be the worst.”