Free Gap Creek by Robert Morgan Page A

If I was going to have to work so hard anyway, I might as well be working for Hank and myself. I might as well work where I was, now that I was down on Gap Creek.
    I set the headboard up against the wall and got the sides out from under the mattress. I seen the bed could be fitted together again, but where the post had cracked it was going to have to be nailed. If it wasn’t nailed, the bed would just fall down again. I looked at the crack in the light from the window and seen it had been made a long time ago. Whoever had set the bed up had knowed it would come crashing down as soon as the frame was shook. And I was certain it was Mr. Pendergast who had set it up without nailing the crack. He must have been waiting in the night to hear the bed crash. And it was him laughing I had heard after we fell on the floor and everything was quiet.
    I marched down the steps and turned toward the kitchen table to ask where there was a hammer. But Mr. Pendergast was gone. His coffee cup and greasy plate and knife and fork was there, but he had disappeared.
    “Where is a hammer?” I called, but nobody answered. I looked on the shelf at the back of the kitchen, and then on the back porch where all kinds of tools hung on nails. I didn’t find a hammer, but discovered a hatchet that had a hammer back. And after a little more looking I found a half-rusty nail under a ball of binder’s twine.
    AFTER NAILING THE bedpost so it would hold the side, I put the bed together. It was an old bed and would creak no matter what you done to it. But I made it as firm and tight as I could. Since Hank and me would be sleeping there every night, I wanted to make it as quiet as possible. Mr. Pendergast might be downstairs listening every night, but at least the bed wouldn’t fall again.
    When I got back to the kitchen Mr. Pendergast was setting beside the cookstove whittling on a stick of kindling. He shaved curls off the piece of pine into the kindling box. He scratched with the knife on the white wood and hollowed out with the tip of the blade. It was a little figure of a person he was cutting. I didn’t want to speak to him again, because I thought he would say something short. He would take advantage of anything nice I said and give me an order to do something else. He seen I was just a young girl that had never been away from home. He seen I was at the disadvantage of being married and in a new place for the first time in my life. I figured it was better not to say anything.
    “I got some clothes that needs to be washed,” Mr. Pendergast said. He opened the door of the stove and throwed shavings into the fire.
    I hadn’t thought of doing a wash on my first day on Gap Creek. At home we had just washed on Mondays. And then I rememberedthat this was a Monday. We had got married on a Saturday and walked down to Gap Creek on Sunday.
    “Where is your clothes?” I said.
    “In the bedroom, behind the door,” Mr. Pendergast said.
    It was already nine according to the mantel clock. When I washed clothes I liked to heat water early in the morning. I’d have to build a fire and carry water from the spring. I looked in the front bedroom where Mr. Pendergast slept and you never seen such a mess. His clothes was scattered everywhere. The room looked like a rag pile. The bed probably hadn’t been made up in months. Clothes was piled on the bureau and on the nightstand. The room smelled of pneumony salve and camphor. I reckon Mr. Pendergast had rheumatism and rubbed the liniment on his joints. But there was a smell of dust also, and clothes that hadn’t been washed in a long time.
    I looked behind the door and there was a pile of clothes up to my waist, overalls and shirts, underwear and socks, heaped up and spilling over when I pulled the door back. Mr. Pendergast must not have washed clothes in months. It would take three armloads just to carry the clothes out to the backyard.
    I marched out of there and right back to the kitchen. “Where is the