Free A Buss from Lafayette by Dorothea Jensen Page B

nature. I stirred in silence for a while, thinking about what I had just learned. But she still married Father and is trying to replace Mother in my affections, I thought. I might be a little sorry for my stepmother, but I am not quite ready to forgive her for that.
    Just then Joss came into the kitchen, lugging two large buckets, one empty and the other full of charcoal. With a frown on his face, he set down the bucket, and then reached around me to open the door to the firebox under the pot I was stirring. He shook the riddle so the ashes fell down beneath, then carefully scooped them into the empty bucket with a metal shovel. He took fresh charcoal from the other bucket and added it to the firebox. Then he did the same to the firebox under Prissy’s pot.
    When he finished these tasks, Joss wiped the sweat from his face. But not the frown. “It is deucedly hot work keeping these fires going,” he said.
    “At least you only need come into this oven of a kitchen once in a while, Joseph Hargraves. Just you try stirring for awhile!” I said.
    Joss harrumphed. “Well, if you count all the work I have already done making this charcoal in the first place, then lugging it in here, taking out the ashes, and adding fresh charcoal to the fires, I think I have done my share.”
    I knew he did indeed labor very hard every winter, felling trees and splitting the wood, then covering it with a mound of dirt and leaves and slowly burning it into charcoal. “Yes, but do not forget that Father let you trade two bushels of the charcoal you made at the store to get your ice skates. Not to mention your secret hoard of peppermints,” I added with a sly look.
    Joss put on the most innocent expression he could manage. “Peppermints? Secret hoard? I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
    “Oh, yes, you do, and I know where it is,” I teased in a singsong voice guaranteed to annoy my brother. “By the way, Joss, did you know that our very own stepmother here was actually switched with a ferule by a schoolmistress?”
    “Really? Stings like the very devil, does it not, ma’am?” Joss winced at the memory.
    Father came into the kitchen and took a concerned look at his wife. “Priscilla, you should not be stirring that. You need to get off your feet, my dear.”
    “But it needs constant stirring, Samuel.”
    “Joss will take over for you,” Father said decidedly.
    “Father!” exclaimed Joss. “Cooking is women’s work! It is bad enough that I had to pick strawberries all day yesterday!”
    Father said that he had important business with the bank in Concord, or he himself would stir the jam. “Now help your mother, son,” he said in a tone that brooked no refusal.
    Joss grudgingly picked up the long-handled spoon.
    “I will cut up the paper to cover the jars,” Prissy said, with an apologetic look at Joss. “I should be able to handle that chore sitting down!”
    “And you must take off that silly mobcap, Priscilla,” Father went on. “It is broiling hot in here. You need to uncover your head to stay as cool as possible. And take that silly betsy off your neck as well. There is no need to be so modest on such a hot, hot day!”
    “That would be most unladylike, Samuel,” she protested.
    Father laughed. “Who cares? Nobody in this kitchen does, believe me! I would rather have you bareheaded and bare-necked, no matter how scandalous that might seem to you, than to have you faint dead away on the floor. It is especially sticky today, with all this spilled sugar syrup and crushed strawberries and such. You would not enjoy hitting this floor, my dear. Not at all.”
    He was right about the floor. Joss and I were even wearing our shoes to protect our feet from all the stickiness.
    Prissy looked at her husband reproachfully, but reached up and pulled off her white cap and ruffled collar. After the betsy came off, I could see the gold locket that she always wore on a chain around her neck. I knew that within it was a