A Flickering Light Read Online Free PDF

explanation for the bloody sleeves, an account she hoped would meet her mother’s muster and the critical eyes of F. J. Bauer, the photographer. The loudest voice she heard as she raced along was Lilly’s: “How could you risk losing a necessary job the whole family needs for something as frivolous as a photograph?” Jessie didn’t have an answer for that.

A Hesitating Heart
    T HERE WERE TIMES IN J ESSIE G AEBELE’S young life when she hadn’t thought about having a career, but those times were long ago. At thirteen, she’d been employed by the Jones and Kroeger Printing Office for two dollars a week. She had been hired to bind books, but she fell in love with the pictures. Eleven girls worked there. Once a girl had stolen Jessie’s wages from her coat pocket. The lights had gone out—they often flickered, but this time the windowless room turned black—and when they came on again, the money was gone. Jessie knew who took it. The girl was the only one who’d been in the coat closet during the blackout. Jessie’d been so angry she told the girl, “The money will burn in your pocket, and wherever you work you’ll be fired.”
    She’d told her employer, but it couldn’t be proved. At Jessie’s next paycheck, though, Mr. Kroeger gave Jessie the additional wages along with her current earnings. And the girl was fired, at least from the bindery. Jessie supposed she should have held her tongue, as such loathsome words weren’t exactly Christian, as her mother would later tell her. Then earlier this winter, Jessie cried when Mr. Kroeger told her she needn’t come back the next day, and only felt a little better when he told her a man with children to support had asked for work, and the owner decided to give him the job. A man’s job mattered more, her mother reminded Jessie when she arrived home, and Jessie guessed she agreed. Lilly said maybe she’d been a poor performer and that’s why she’d been let go, but her mother hushed Lilly. Jessie had to find employment. And then there’d been this perfect opening, so maybe the worst thing—losing her job—could be converted into a good thing. When the Bauer job advertised, her mother said there were angels looking out for her. They must have been sleeping earlier at the bicycle shop , Jessie thought as she rushed along.
    Work was what Jessie did. Even before they moved to Winona, while living on the farm there’d been chores to do—important tasks, such as taking the cows the three miles to the water each day, then herding them back up the bluff to the barn without the benefit of a dog. In the winter, before walking down the valley to the village of Cream and school, the girls cracked pond ice so the cows could drink. They wore thin leather shoes, and the drifts were deep with no trails except what their feet pressed. Her sandwiches often froze by the time they arrived at the still-chilly one-room school.
    Today, as Jessie walked toward the impending interview, the cool breeze forcing her to pull her shawl more tightly around her, she remembered arriving at her school late one chilly winter day because of the snow and cold. She and Tillie, her seatmate, were always getting in trouble for chattering, and on that day the one-armed schoolteacher, Mr. Buchmuller, Tillie’s uncle, had arrived late too, so the school still felt as cold as the woodshed. While he hated gum-chewing, he hated whispering more, and when he turned from lighting the fire, he heard the pst-pst sound and thought it was Tillie and Jessie. It hadn’t been, but the burdens of life fall unfairly, Jessie soon learned. To punish the girls, he sent them to the boys’ side of the room and made them each share a seat with a boy for the day.
    She’d been furious at the injustice, made to sit by smelly boys. But the boys had made her laugh, and she and Tillie winked at each other, and Jessie decided to enjoy her day as the room heated up and filled with the scent of drying-out woolen stockings. The