Man of the Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

and to hurry so I wouldn’t be late for school in the afternoon. If I’d had Lady I could have done it in fifteen minutes, but without her I had to run most of the way.
    When I got home Mother met me at the back door. She didn’t give me a chance to find out what she wanted the spoons and gloves for, but passed me out a glass of milk to drink, and some sandwiches to eat on my way back to school. Then, before she closed the door, she said to hurry straight home that afternoon; she had a very important job for me.
    As I came up the lane from school, I saw a Jersey cow tied to one of the cottonwoods in front of our house. Of course, I knew Carl had brought her, and I supposed that taking care of her was the important job Mother had for me. But I couldn’t figure out why we needed rubber gloves and picnic spoons to take care of a cow.
    Mother knew how to cook really good things to eat—from just common groceries. She’d learned most of it from her mother, down in Maine. She could bake beans that were golden brown, didn’t get mushy, and glistened in their own syrupy juice. She knew how to steam New England brown bread—the kind that’s made with two cups of sweet milk and one cup of sour, two cups of Injun meal and one cup of flour. And she could make Injun pudding that would set with whey lumps like jelly all through it. I never tasted doughnuts as good as Mother’s, nor apple pie, either.
    That was what Mother wanted the rubber gloves for. She and Grace had been cooking all day, and Mother had to wear a glove over her still tender hand. When I came into the kitchen she had a pot of baked beans, one of Injun pudding, an apple pie, doughnuts, and two loaves of brown bread all laid out—piping hot—on the table. She and Grace were putting a piece of three-inch plank into the oven when I came through the door, and the kitchen was hotter than Tophet.
    Mother told me to sit down at the table because she wanted to talk to me. When she came over, her face was bright red and her hands were trembly. “Ralph, I am giving you a very responsible job,” she said, “but I’m sure you can do it very nicely. We’ve got to begin making our own living, and we must make it through things we can do at home, so we may all be together and help each other. Most people like New England cooking, and there’s a good profit in it if we can sell it. Do you think you could go from door to door with these samples and see if we could get enough orders to make it worth while?”
    I didn’t see how I could carry all the things on the table from door to door and write down orders at the same time, but I nodded my head, and Mother went right on as though she knew what I was thinking. “I have planned it all out,” she said. “You can take Hal’s little gocart”—Mother always called Hal’s little wagon a gocart—“and we’ll put a piece of hot wood in the bottom to keep everything warm. Then you can wheel the cart right up to the doors—always go to the back doors—and ask the ladies if they would like to come out and sample your mother’s New England cooking. Never ask them if they’d like to order some until after they’ve sampled it. Do you think you could do that?”
    I nodded my head again, and Grace brought a little writing pad and a pencil.
    â€œNow the prices are very important,” Mother went on. “I’ll write them down here on the first page, where you can look back at them if you forget. Baked beans and Injun pudding are fifteen cents a quart. Brown bread—five-pound lard pail size—is ten cents. Doughnuts are ten cents a dozen, and apple pies are twenty cents each. That may sound high for an apple pie, when they’re selling for ten cents in the stores, but you point out to the ladies that my pies are larger and have a lot more apple in them. We’ll make our first delivery next