Free Mary Emma & Company by Ralph Moody

to the owner of the big house on Spring Street and got it for us. On Tuesday morning Mother gave me the first month’s rent before she went to work, and I took it to Mrs. Perkins, the landlord’s wife, when I went to deliver her groceries.
    Then, on Wednesday night, I sat up and played cribbage with Uncle Frank until nearly ten o’clock. After we’d finished he picked up the paper and read it as I made up my bed on the floor. I was all ready to crawl into it when he called to Mother, “Mary Emma, this might be a chance for you to pick up some furniture. Old Grandma Maddox, over on Myrtle Street, died yesterday, and they’re going to have the funeral Friday. Her son’s coming down from New York, but I don’t have a notion he’ll want to ship the stuff back there. He might sell it for a pretty reasonable price.”
    â€œDid Mrs. Maddox have a nice home?” Mother asked.
    â€œLooked nice and neat from the outside,” Uncle Frank answered, “but I was never in it. I expect the stuff is pretty old-fashioned; Grandma must have been in her nineties.”
    â€œI’m afraid her things would be too expensive for us, Frank,” Mother called back from the kitchen. “We’re going to start off with just as little as we can, then add to it as we go along.”
    â€œWell, you might find this Maddox a pretty reasonable fellow,” Uncle Frank called back. “It says here that he’s a big lawyer, and the bigger they are the harder they fall.”
    The second he said “big lawyer,” it was as if somebody had turned on a light in my head. I jumped up and called out, “I know him!” Then I remembered that I didn’t, but I was sure he must be the same Maddox boy that let the hogshead of molasses get away from him in the grocery store. I started to tell the whole story to Uncle Frank, but Mother called, “Some other time, Son! You’ll have to be up early in the morning and it’s time you were asleep.”
    I was up good and early the next morning, and while Mother was getting breakfast and Uncle Frank was shaving I found the piece he’d been reading in the paper, cut it out and put it in my pocket. As soon as I got down to the store I showed it to Mr. Haushalter and asked him if the lawyer wasn’t the same boy who used to work in the store.
    â€œWell, well, well! Bless my soul!” he said when he’d read it. “Couldn’t be no other but him. Richard. Richard. Now ain’t it curious I couldn’t think of his first name. But come to think of it, nobody never called him that around here; he was always Dickie, Dickie Maddox. Well, well, well. Ain’t seen or heard tell of him in twenty-five years.”
    Mr. Haushalter had just put his morning’s sliver of tobacco in his mouth when I took the piece of paper from him. He sort of gathered the quid together with his tongue, rolled it over a couple of times, and poked it away in his cheek. “Poor old Grandma Maddox, passed on and gone,” he said in a sorrowful voice. Then he gave the chew another little poke with his tongue, and said, “Don’t know why I said that anyways. Kind of expect the poor old soul was sort o’ glad to go. Expect lots of ’em is glad to go when their time comes. Old lady hadn’t took much interest in life since Henry passed on—he was her husband; Dickie’s pa. Don’t calcalate Dickie’ll stay on ’ceptin’ to close up the house and maybe sell it.”
    â€œDo you think Mr. Maddox would sell the furniture?” I asked.
    â€œLord love you, ’course he’d sell it! What else would he do with it? Don’t have a notion there’s a stick of it less’n sixty years old. What would a big lawyer like him want with old stuff the likes of that?”
    â€œI know,” I said, “but I meant at a price somebody could afford to pay.”
    â€œOh, I don’t