that’s that.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!” Elvira said. “They let me write up a sale and ring it on the cash register. And I helped Mrs. Rabel find the thread she needed. I felt so grown-up, Cousin Nell.”
“There’s a little coffee left from supper,” Nell said. “I’ll heat it while you get into your nightdress.”
“Oh, don’t bother. It’s only nine-thirty. I thought I’d look in at the dance. I wish you’d come with me.”
Pulling on the old alpaca coat that hung to the floor and had once been a man’s, Elvira kissed Nell’s cheek. “I know, I know. It wouldn’t be proper for you to come.” And then she was gone.
Smiling, Nell drew the rocker close to the lamp and opened the copy of Sense and Sensibility she’d come across in Bender’s Second Hand while searching through used housewares for another iron skillet.
So much about Elinor in this book reminded Nell of herself. Her calm, her self-sufficiency. And wasn’t it a good thing to have an aspect of one’s nature illuminated by a character? A book could be a mirror helping one to understand oneself, accept oneself—maybe even one’s more refractory parts. We were ourselves probably the sphere we least understood.
On a typical afternoon, when the three-o’clock dismissal bell rang in the school tower, Elvira bundled Hilly up, walking him up Main Street and into the school. In the third-grade room, Nell corrected papers by a kerosene lamp and entered the marks in her grade book.
Impressed by the school, Elvira invariably exclaimed to Hilly, “Isn’t this the biggest building you ever saw?” While they waited for Nell to finish, Elvira carried the little boy to the windows, pointing to the rim of the western horizon where a spectacular sunset yielded to the icy blackness of a winter night. In the darkening village, lamps flared to life inside houses where wives tossed more wood into cookstoves.
Catching sight of the sudden flame of a freshly lit lamp, Hilly threw his head back, laughed, and pointed. “Light,” Elvira told him. He tried to repeat the word, but “light” was difficult, and every time came out as “wite.” Still, Elvira told him that he was a good boy.
Sometimes they helped Nell by picking up items fallen to the floor, or checking the cloakroom for lunch buckets and mittens. If the appointed monitor had failed to stay behind to wash the chalkboard, Elvira and Hilly carried the galvanized pail to the pump in the yard and fetched water to scrub it. “Isn’t this fun?” Elvira asked, and the lad clapped his hands.
On the way home, the three occasionally stopped in the pharmacy for aspirin or mentholatum. Inhaling odors edgy and foreign, Elvira lingered over exotic treasures, identifying each for Hilly. “Dr. Aspenwall’s Cure for Gout, whatever that is. We’ll ask your mama. And here’s Neat’s-Foot Oil. Ma puts that on her feet in the winter.” In the grocery store, shopping for potatoes, Elvira cooed, “Green beans in a can, Hilly, imagine that.”
Elvira soon became a familiar face in Harvester. She was a friendly little thing, eager to know everything she could be taught, whether it was the meaning of “gout” or the price of a railway ticket to Chicago. “Not that I plan to go there,” she told the depot agent, “But you never know . . . do you?”
The Lundeens were taken with her. “That girl knows how to work,” Mr. Lundeen told Nell when she ran into him in the meat market. “We’ll have work for her through January, maybe later. Juliet thinks Elvira’s the cat’s whiskers.”
By now, young George Lundeen had returned from his Grand Tour, a graduation gift from his parents. At the dry-goods store, he was training to take over management from his father, who was increasingly tied up at the new Square Deal Lumberyard across the street from the depot.
Sitting at the battered oak table one night, spreading apple butter on a slice of bread, Elvira told Nell, “Mr. George really hoped to go into the bank, but his pa wants to start him out in the store.”
“My goodness, how do you know that?”
“You hear things.”
“Have you met him?”
“Last Saturday. He’s very nice. No airs, even though he’s been to Paris and Rome and almost everywhere.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him,” Nell said, cutting cheese into small pieces for Hilly. “He must have graduated from high school about the time Herbert and I came here.”
“He’s very good looking.”
“I heard somewhere—maybe at sodality—that he’s engaged to a girl from the East.”
“Boston,” Elvira said.
“You do have your ear to the ground.”
“In a dry-goods store you hear a lot. Especially about the owners.”
“I suppose.” Nell held a cup of milk to Hilly’s mouth. “Think of it. Europe. It takes my breath away.”
“Mine too. I’ve never even been to St. Bridget!”—the county seat.
Sitting on the living-room floor by the three-foot-square hot-air register, Hilly played with a spoon and pie tin while Nell and Elvira washed and dried the dishes.
“My Christmas vacation begins at the end of this week,” Nell told the girl. “If you’re planning to go home for a visit, better have someone fetch you.”
“I don’t think they can spare me from the store,” Elvira said. “It’s so busy now, Mr. George says they can use me every day till Christmas.” She added, “That is, if you don’t mind looking after Hilly.” She wrung out the dishcloth and wiped down the oilcloth.
“Are you disappointed not to go home?”
“I’ve bought little presents for everyone. Mrs. Lundeen helped me pick out nice things I could afford, and then she gave me a discount because I’m an employee. Isn’t that something?” Setting the teakettle over a burner, Elvira continued, “Everybody at home’s going to be knocked off their feet. They never get anything new-bought except, you know, like a plow. When they see those presents, they’ll never miss me.”
The little group celebrated Hilly’s third birthday on a December Sunday when the store was closed and Elvira could be present. After early Mass, Nell baked a cake and, once they’d all eaten potatoes and sausage, Elvira ran out to gather a bowl of fresh snow.
“Hilly, it snowed just for you,” she told him as she stirred a little maple syrup into the bowl and spooned some of the mix over a slice of cake that Nell had torn into pieces. “Taste that, you little dumpling.”
He dug in with both hands, stuffing cake into his mouth. “Nithe,” he mumbled.
Once Hilly was asleep, Elvira sat near Nell and said, “When I told Mrs. Lundeen we were having Hilly’s birthday tonight, she sent this home for him.” She handed Nell
