Free Mary Emma & Company by Ralph Moody Page B

it’s all right to charge stuff to most of the folks that comes in here, but there is them that you’ll have to fight shy of, and seein’ you alone in the store they’d be just the ones that might come in and get a raft of stuff charged. You know the Smitherses, in the house you folks has rented; well, them. And then there’s the Foxes—not the ones on Washington Street, but the ones down by the brickyards. If any of them comes in, just tell ’em it’ll have to be for cash before you fetch out the stuff. Oh, yes, that littlest Jacobs boy; if you have to get him kerosene or somethin’-or-other out of the back room, he’ll snitch an orange if you don’t keep an eye on him.”
    It was about half-past-nine when Mr. Haushalter left for the funeral, and I’d made up my mind that while he was gone I’d do things just the way he always did them. The first thing I did was to go to the tobacco case, get out the long plug of black B-L, and slice off a sliver exactly the width of the dent mark. Then I folded it four times before I put it into my mouth, just the way Mr. Haushalter did. I’d barely started gathering it into a quid with my tongue when Miss Heath, my Sunday School teacher, came in for a gallon of kerosene.
    If I hadn’t known her, or if she’d just said, “A gallon of kerosene, please,” I’d have been all right, I think. But she didn’t. As she came down the two steps inside the door she sang out, “Isn’t this a lovely morning? Do you have mornings like this in Colorado?”
    I managed to say “Yes’m,” sort of around the chew, without having any trouble. And I got by pretty well when she asked if I was tending the store all alone. But when she asked me why Mr. Haushalter wasn’t there and where he’d gone, I was licked. There were only two things I could do: either run the risk of having the chew fall out of my mouth if I tried to talk around it, or swallow it. I swallowed it. But it didn’t stay down more than ten seconds after I’d got hold of Miss Heath’s kerosene can and escaped into the back room. And I didn’t feel a bit well when I took the can back to her and asked, “Charge it?”
    Miss Heath seemed to be nearly as shaken up as I felt, and she looked at me as if she were terribly worried. “What happened to you?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself? Why, you’re as white as a pillow case, and I thought I heard a sound as if you were crying back there.”
    My stomach felt as if it were on fire, and my mouth was almost running over with the saliva that kept pouring into it, but I managed to say, “No, ma’am, I just got a little dizzy spell for a minute, but I’m all right now.”
    I had to answer four or five more questions—and hope I wouldn’t be sick again—before she went out, saying she must talk to Mother about my having dizzy spells.
    From the minute Mr. Haushalter had mentioned letting me tend the store alone I’d been hoping I’d have lots of customers, so I could show both them and him what a good job I could do. After Miss Heath went out I didn’t want to see anybody—or have anybody see me—but it didn’t work that way. Half of the women in the neighborhood must have come in, and every one of them chattered like a blue jay; asking me if I didn’t feel well, and where Mr. Haushalter was, and if it wasn’t a lovely morning.
    For me it wasn’t. My stomach still felt as if there were a fire in it, the water ran into my mouth so fast that I had to swallow every time I tried to answer a woman’s question, and the swallowing gave me the hiccups. I could usually stop hiccups by taking nine swallows of water without catching my breath, but I was already swallowing more water than I could handle, so I decided to try cold buttermilk. It would always soothe sunburn for me, or the stinging burn