Free And Condors Danced by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page B

was buttering. After a moment he nodded and said, “Aunt Mehitabel’s carriage house. Yes, indeed. I’d be very much surprised if there wasn’t a bit of axle grease among all those boxes and barrels. Saint Luke must have had Aunt Mehitabel in mind when he spoke of the ‘soul that hath much goods laid up for many years.’ Charles, you can stop at Greenwood tomorrow and see what Woo Ying can spare.”
    Father’s pale bushy eyebrows had leveled and his voice dropped to its normal range. He nodded again, and from the corners of her eyes Carly could see Nellie and Charles nodding, too, relieved that Father was no longer angry, even if his anger hadn’t been directed at them.
    Then Father asked Mama how she was feeling and she sighed and said, “A little better,” which was what she almost always said, and Father said that was good and began to talk about the apricot crop.
    There was going to be a good crop this summer, and with the unusually hot weather the pitting would be under way very soon. The workers’ campground was already beginning to fill up, and Father and Arthur had spent most of the morning dealing with the usual problems. The Hooper clan and the Garcías were squabbling already. José and his new wife had set up their tent in a shady spot by the creek that Luther Hooper’s brood had staked a claim to, and Luther was threatening to take all his womenfolk up to work at the Hamiltons’ pitting shed. Arthur, Father said, had gotten a quick education, this morning, in the problems involved in being shed boss.
    “Isn’t that right, Arthur?” Father said.
    “Yes, sir,” Arthur said. “Grammar school, high school, and college, all in one morning.” Then in a low voice, under cover of Mama’s request for a pillow for her back, he added, “Failed in every subject, I’m afraid.”
    On her way to the parlor for Mama’s back pillow, Carly couldn’t help grinning. Arthur was undoubtedly right about being a failure as boss of the pitting shed. She couldn’t imagine Arthur successfully keeping track of the boxes pitted by dozens of workers, settling their squabbles, and handling their problems, while Father was busy overseeing the crews in the orchards. But Father had already tried Charles and it had been a disaster. According to Father, every kind of mischief went on under Charles’s very nose without his even noticing. Arthur, Carly thought, would notice every bit of mischief—and be right in the middle of it. Carly could just imagine Arthur flirting with one of the pretty Mexican girls like Estrellita García, while the rest of the pitting crew quarreled and loafed and packed up dried apricots to sell to their relatives when they got back home. So there was probably going to be another disaster—and it would be one more thing to blame on Alfred Bennington Quigley.
    It was Quigley’s fault because he was the one who had made the Hartwicks lose Carmen. For several years, ever since she was fifteen, Nellie, who was a natural-born shed boss, had worked in the pitting shed. But that was when Carmen worked for the Hartwicks, cooking and cleaning and taking care of Mama. Now, however, with money so scarce, Father had let Carmen go, and so Nellie could no longer be spared from her housekeeping duties. So the Hartwicks lacked a shed boss, just as they lacked a telephone and an indoor toilet, and all of it was because of the Quigleys.
    The discussion of the pitting-shed problems and the feud between the Hoopers and the Garcías had held Carly’s attention, but when she returned to the table with Mama’s pillow, Father had begun to talk about politics and what President Roosevelt had said about Cuba. So she stopped listening and began to think about condors, and for a while she almost forgot about being in trouble with Nellie. But when dinner was over and she was helping with the dishes, she found that she was not yet forgiven.

Chapter 13
    T HAT NIGHT, AS Carly helped with the after-dinner cleanup, neither