Living Up to Billy Part 7

I am having a dandy time! This is an awful pretty place. It is kinda in the country, yet it is right in the city. Captain Thomas Ca.s.sidy must have been a very saving man, or else he didn't let many things get by him, to be able to buy a nice little home like this. Yet, perhaps, he bought it when this was real country, and cheap. The house has got a parlor and a dining room and another room and a kitchen and a laundry down stairs, and up stairs there are five bed rooms and a bath, and a great big attic where Billy can play when it rains. There is a big yard, both front and back. The front yard has flowers and belongs to Mrs.

Ca.s.sidy, and the back yard has a vegetable garden, and belongs to Jack and Tom, half and half. You would laugh to see them two great big babies quarreling over their vegetables. Tom comes home and takes off his uniform and his collar and fusses around his garden every night. He weeds and sweats and swears, and his garden ain't nothing like Jack's.

All Jack has to do is to look at a cabbage and it grows, and their poor mother has an awful time keeping peace in the family. If they have lettuce from Jack's garden, Jack says to her, "Mother, ain't that the finest lettuce you ever et?" And Tom drops his knife and looks up sudden at her, and she says careful-like, "It is awful good lettuce, Jacky bye, but that we had yesterday was most as good," and then Tom goes on eating. Jack has just finished his farm schooling, and he is dippy about it. Onions is his graft. Why, he will talk about an onion for an hour.

He got me in a corner one day, and he talked about the money there was in raising onions, how many bushels there was eaten in the world, and how many thousands of bushels there was brought in from some place down south, and the price of onions a bushel, and how many million could be raised on an acre, well, my head whirled before he got through, and I felt as if everybody had made a mistake by not turning the whole earth into an onion farm. I said to him one day, "What are you studying farming for, that don't pay? Why don't you go into the police like your father and like Tom?" "Ah," he said, "who wants to walk up and down a hot street all day and bat a drunk over the head or pinch a kid for hooking a watermelon. I am going out in the country where I can see things grow." His mother said, "He do be taking after my people. He is just like me feyther, who always had to have his little bit of garden and his pig." Here Jack started in again talking so fast you could hardly understand him, he gets so excited and his eyes get bright and he waves his hands around in the air--he is awful funny. Tom and his mother set back in a chair and laugh at him, just like I did when he started on pigs. He said, "Now for pigs, there is more money in pigs--" Just then Tom hollered, "Choke him, Nan, choke him, if he gets started on pigs we are done for. Onions is bad enough, but pigs is pigs." Jack gets awful mad and hates to be laughed at, and his mother has to smooth him down.

She says to him running her hand soft up and down his coat sleeve, "Never you mind, Jacky me bye, it is yourself that will be making the family fortune one of these days, with your onions and your pigs." Tom laughed and says, "Yes, if he feeds the onions to the pigs." But I think Jack is right, and I hope some day he has a chance to get a farm, cause it would be a shame for a person to love a thing the way he loves it, and not be able to work at it. I asked him one day if he thought he could make it pay, and he said, "Sure, don't the Italians and the Chinamen out West make truck farming pay? The trouble with us is, we don't go at it right. We go at it too big, and raise corn and oats and barley instead of vegetables. Why, a farm near a big city like this, if it was run right, ought to just coin money."

I am teaching, the boys to dance. You would kill yourself a laughing watching them. After supper we push the kitchen table back, cause the kitchen is a big old-fas.h.i.+oned kind, and Tom takes off his coat, because he goes at it as if he was going to saw a load of lumber, and Jack runs the phonograph and I try to teach Tom to dance, but you might just as well teach an elephant to walk a tight rope. Tom is all feet. To begin with, he is six feet two, and I come to about the second b.u.t.ton on his coat, and I have an awful time trying to get him around. He tries so hard, he puckers his face all up in worried lines, and he sweats and he breathes hard, and then when he gets through, he falls into a chair just done up, mops his face and the back of his neck with a handkerchief or a handy towel, and says, "Talk about work, why I would rather load a dray all day." Then when he gets cooled off, he runs the phonograph for Jack.

Jack dances lovely. He is awful light on his feet. You don't have to show him a step but once when he knows it, but he don't care much for dancing, not half as much as Tom does, who would never learn the tango if he lived a thousand years. But it is funny to see Tom. When Jack is a dancing Tom will take an onion and go in front of Tom, holding it just out of reach and moving just as Jack moves, as if he was trying to chase the onion. When I say Jack is a good dancer, Tom says, "Sure, he is, cause he thinks he is chasing an onion. Now if we only had a pig, no tellin' what he'd do."

The one that can beat them all out is Mrs. Ca.s.sidy. At first she wouldn't get up and try, and said, "The likes of an old woman like me dancing around," but I gave her a great line of talk, told her how all the old ladies was dancing, that if she went down to the restaurants where I danced, she would see women old enough to be her grandmother, having the time of their lives. First she wouldn't listen to it, and said, "Gwan, they are trying to make a fool of me in my old age," but finally I got her to try, and say, she done grand. Like all Irish girls, she used to dance when she was young, and it all come back to her, and she took to the new steps just natural. It was fun to see her. Her face flushed, her eyes got bright, and she didn't seem to be old no more. Tom and Jack were tickled to death. When she got through, they clapped their hands, stamped their feet on the floor, just like the hoodlums do in the gallery, when the hero rescues the maiden. Mrs. Ca.s.sidy flushed, was half ashamed, and half tickled, and said she would never make a fool of herself again, but she does and she likes it, and she and Jack can do the hesitation waltz beautiful.

I mustn't write you any more, Kate. I am awful happy here. I think of you all the time, and your letters are so good.

Yours, _Nan_.

x.x.xV

_Dear Kate_:

I got your letter and I know how you feel. If Jim was no good, he was your husband and you cared for him, and you were a mighty good wife, too. I am sorry if I said things that hurt you about him, but oh, Kate, I am glad for one thing, that is, you begin to see that crookedness don't pay, whether it is right or whether it is wrong, it just _don't pay_. Look at Jim and his crowd. He is dead and five of his friends are in prison, and most of the rest of them are afraid to lift their heads for fear they will see a cop a watching them. I am so glad you see it that way now, and I like to hear you say you have had enough of prison.

You will never see one again, Kate, except to admire the architecture from the outside.

You are right about one thing. You can brace up in New York just as well as outside of it. There is no reason in the world why you should leave this little old berg. We will get up in the Bronx somewhere in a little flat like Charlie Haines', and you won't never need to see the old crowd. Something will turn up some way for you to do, and anyway, I can make enough to keep us three. Why, Kate, I would dance my legs off to have you and Billy with me, and you a playing the game straight. So cheer up, old lady, everything is fine and dandy, and you are going to be the happiest woman one of these days in the buzum of your family.

Yours, _Nan_.

x.x.xVI

_Dear Kate_:

What do you think? Billy is an heir! Before the Smiths went away they tried to sell their place over in New Jersey, but they was going away too soon, and an agent couldn't sell it for them in such a hurry, so they made a will, that if Mrs. Smith died, the place was to go to Mr.

Smith, and if Mr. Smith died first the place was to go to Mrs. Smith, and if they both died, the place was to go to their adopted son, William Smith, and that is Billy. Now, what do you know about that? A lawyer came to me and told me all about it, and the will has been done something to in court, and I have had to sign some papers, and Billy is a landowner. Why, we was all so excited when we heard it, we all talked at once, and when Jack heard it was a farm, he talked onions and pigs at the same time. We went over there last Sunday, and it looked just as pretty as ever. It made me feel awful bad about the Smiths, and I cried at first a lot. The house seemed lonesome with blinds all shut, and no pigs nor chickens or cattle around the barn, or in the pasture. The house inside was just as Mrs. Smith left it, cause they had hoped to sell it furnished, and there was even pickles and preserves in the cellar. We ate our lunch on the kitchen table which we put under the big tree looking out over the lake. It was awful pretty. The water was just like a looking gla.s.s, and once and a while a little spurt of wind would come and ruffle it all up and then it would die down quiet again. Mrs.

Ca.s.sidy said it made her think of her home back in Ireland, which is by a lake, and she talked a long time about her man who has been dead ten years, "who was one of the finest" in New York and that meant something in those days. Mrs. Ca.s.sidy set down in the shade with Billy, and Tom and Jack and me went over the place. Jack was crazy about it. He would take little handfuls of mud and smell it or taste it, and say, "too sour," or "it needs salt" or "there ain't lime enough," just kinda talking to himself all the time. He found the pasture with a brook running through it, and said it would be just the right thing for pigs, and he saw about ten acres he said the Lord intended for an onion field.

He made over the barn in his mind, and filled it full of holsteins, and I think if it had not begun to get late and we had to catch a train, that he would have all the holsteins mothers of growing families, cause he just located the right kind of a calf pen when we took him by the coat-tails and dragged him away.

We got home awful tired, and everybody went to bed except Jack, who set down with a pencil and paper to figure out how much money it would need to make Lake Rest the model farm of New Jersey.

Good bye, Kate, don't feel too bad. Remember you are going to be just as happy as me some day, and that's going some.

Yours, _Nan_.

x.x.xVII

_Dear Kate_:

I got the grandest idea. I just can't wait to tell you. I thought it all out in the middle of the night, and I had to talk to somebody, so I got up and went into Mrs. Ca.s.sidy's room and got in bed with her and we talked till most morning. She was awful nice, and we talked it over and over. Here it is now, Kate, don't you think it is wonderful? You and Billy and Jack can live at Lake Rest when you come out! now what do you think of it! The house is there all furnished, and Jack will do the farming. He is just crazy about it, and he says sure he can make it pay.

Tom says he will cough up and buy the things Jack needs to start, if the little money Jack's father left him ain't enough. You give the farm and the house, and Jack will furnish the farming things and the work, and you can go halves. That sounds all right, doesn't it? Anyway, even if you don't make much the first few years, you get your living, which is about all we get anyway, ain't it, Kate? I feel awful bad that I can't do much, but my money all went to Jim, but I will live on eggs and b.u.t.termilk, and every cent I make will go into the place. You can't help but get along, Kate, and out there the old crowd will never get on to you, n.o.body will ever know nothing about you, and you can begin again as if you was new born.

Oh, I think it is grand, Kate! I can see Tom and Mrs. Ca.s.sidy and me coming to see you on a Sunday morning, and you and Billy and Jack waiting for us at the station when the train pulls in, and we will drive over to the place and look at the chickens and scratch the pig and pick the cabbage and hear about the onions, and then after supper we will set on the porch and listen to the frogs and the whip-o-wills and see the shadows come on the lake, and feel that everything is all right, and Somebody must be a sure taking care of us.

Write me soon, Kate, and tell me you are as glad about this as I am.

_Nan_.

x.x.xVIII

_Dear Kate_:

I feel so kind of shamed, kind of choked up and happy, that it is awful hard for me to put down on paper just what I am a feeling, I don't know what you will say about it, Kate, and I know that you will nearly drop dead when you read this, but I am going to get married and--wait a minute--I am going to marry a cop! Can you beat that? Me, Nancy Lane, who has been brought up since a kid to feel that cops is her natural enemy, and to hate a uniform as the devil hates holy water. But some way I never think of Tom as being a policeman, he is so kind and good and big hearted, always doing something nice for people, and he is so nice at home, just like a great, big boy. He loves his little mother and jollies her and laughs at her, he is just like a good pal to both her and Jack, and they simply wors.h.i.+p the ground he walks on, and I don't blame them, Kate, because--put your head down close--dear, I do too. It is the first time I dared say it out loud even to myself. I didn't know what was the matter with me, I used to be so anxious to get up in the morning to see him at the breakfast table, and I liked to pour his coffee, and fasten his stick in his belt and go to the gate with him. It seemed like the day would never go by until he got back. Sometimes he would call me up on the telephone. Why, Kate, I couldn't hardly talk to him and he would notice it and his voice would get worried and he would ask me if I was sick. When he would come home at night, we would all have supper, and set around and josh and laugh and talk, him and Jack half quarreling in a good natured way over their vegetables, or we would dance, or just set out on the front porch with some of the neighbors who'd come in. I didn't know I was loving him cause I wanted to be close to him, but when he was a setting by me, I didn't want to talk or nothing, I was happy just being near him. One night everybody went in and left us on the porch together. He was quiet for a long while, then he moved over closer to me and put his arm around me and he said soft and quiet-like, "Nan, are you happy here with us?" And I said, "Why, I ain't never been so happy in my life," and he said, "Do you think you could stand it to stay always," and I kinda edged away from him and said, "I can't stay always, I must go to work next week," and he said, "No, you ain't going to work no more, Nan, except for Tom Ca.s.sidy. You have got a life-long job teaching him to tango." I laughed kinda nervous-like. "That ain't no lie. It would take more than one life to teach you to tango." Tom took hold of my face and leaned my head back, and said, "Nannie, little girl, I just want you. Won't you marry me?"

"Oh, Tom," I said, and I couldn't say no more, and he said, "I don't know how to make love much, but I do love you, Nan. From the first minit I laid eyes on you I wanted to take you up in my big arms and take care of you, you seemed so little and alone--and you crept right inside of my uniform and stuck around my heart till there ain't room for nothing else. Why everything I hear says your name, and your face goes dancing before me as I walk up and down my beat, and when I looked up sudden the other day at the captain, hanged if for a minit he didn't have red, curly hair. Say you will marry me, Nancy, and we will be the happiest bunch in the Bronx." When he had been talking to me it seemed I was just choked up two ways, one with happiness and the other with misery. I said to him, "Oh, Tom, I couldn't marry you." He said, "Why not, don't you love me?" "It ain't that, Tom," I said, "but my family is all crooks.

You couldn't marry _me_." He said, "Well, what has that got to do with it? I don't see how they can stop me marrying you. Most of them is in jail anyway." I couldn't help but laugh, as he was so earnest about it, but I said, "Why, Tom, if they knowed down at Central Office that you had married me, they might break you. All the bulls know father." And then Tom got mad. "Break me--what would they break me for? I guess I got the right to marry the finest little girl in New York if I want to and I would just as soon take you right up to the chief himself and say 'Chief, this is Nancy Lane and I am going to marry her. Her father is old Bill Lane, and the worst crook this side of the Pacific, but my little girl is white and clean right through.' And do you know what he would do? He would give you one look over with that clever eye of his, and say, 'Put a rose in your hair and go as far as you like, _and_ because you have shown common sense for once in your life, you will be made a captain next week.'" I laughed and couldn't say nothing much, and he moved over close to me again and laid my face against his coat, and put his head down on my hair, kinda patting my face soft with his big hand. He said, "Nancy darling, you do like me a little bit, don't you? I will be so good to you, little one, and I will stand between you and all your troubles. You have had your share, and you never need to have no more, cause when things don't go right, all you need to do is to run to big Tom Ca.s.sidy, and rub your little face up and down the front of his big coat, and squeeze a little water out of one eye, and put a little tremble in your voice, and he would go out and lick a St. Patrick's Day procession for you." Then he was quiet but went on after a while soft and tender like, "I sure do love you, little one. Don't you care for me a little?" "Oh, Tom," I said, "it ain't little, it is lots." Then he said, "Why won't you say we will be married?" And I said, "Tom, I care more for you than for anything in the world, but I wouldn't hurt you for nothing." And he said, "The only way you can hurt me, Nan, is to say you won't have me and you don't say that, do you dear?" I looked up at him for a minit and he must a saw what was in my eyes, cause he was quiet, just a looking deep into my eyes. Then he drew my face to him with his two hands and kissed me. Kate I went all of a tremble and it seemed my heart came right up on my lips when I felt his touch mine, and when he said, "Say, 'I love you, Tom,'" I only needed to whisper it for him to hear, and I was glad cause I couldn't have spoke it out loud to save my soul.

Oh, Kate, I didn't know there was such a thing in the world as what I am feeling. I am so happy it keeps me quiet, and I like to set by myself and think of Tom, how big and strong he is, how he will always fight my troubles. But I feel I will never have troubles if I live with him, cause he is so good and kind and gentle, that sorrow could never come near him or his.

I won't write you more, cause if I wrote you a hundred pages, I couldn't say more than that I'm the happiest girl in the world, cause I love him, love him, love him.

_Nan_.

x.x.xIX

_Dear Kate_:

Tom told his mother this morning at the breakfast table and she put down her saucer of coffee, and come over to me and kissed me, and said, "Faith, the Gosoon, I thought he never was going to do it. Sure he's not the son of his father, or he'd a asked you the question the second day you was here. I've always wanted a daughter and now I've got one that couldn't a suited me better if I'd ordered her making."

She was so happy, she spent the whole morning making plans for the future, how she would pa.s.s part of the time with me and Tom, and then when we got tired of her, she would go over to see you and Jack. And Kate you sure will love her. She is just a dear little Irish woman who has always had a great big husband or a son to stand between her and anything that might hurt her. And just think, dear, I won't never have to be alone no more, never have to worry about things all by myself, cause I, too, am going to have a great big man all my own.

Your happy _Nan_.