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name’s a’ready wrote down on the bad-boy book at the station house and you’ll have to be watchin’ your step. They keep a sharp eye on the lads what’s got their name on the book.”
    Mother hadn’t spanked me since Father died, but I think she would have that night if Uncle Frank hadn’t helped me out.

4
    â€œA Pleasant Little Walk”
    A FTER that one bad day at school, the rest of our first week in Medford went fine for me. Mr. Haushalter let me wait on some customers, and when Saturday night came he gave me a dollar and a half. He said I had earned every penny of it, and that the job would be mine as long as I tended to business the way I had been doing. Then, besides teaching me how to keep from falling off the bicycle, Uncle Frank taught me to play cribbage. Two nights running, Mother let me sit up till nearly ten o’clock to play with him, and I even beat him once.
    Of course, Grace got along all right; she always did. Before the week was out she’d found enough odd jobs, washing dishes and tending babies, that she’d made as much as I did. But Mother didn’t have any luck at all. Every day she went to Boston to see if she could find curtains to be laundered and stretched, or furniture that we could afford to buy, but she didn’t find either. And I think she looked at every vacant house in the Glenwood end of Medford without finding one that wasn’t too much run-down to live in or where the rent wasn’t too high.
    When I got home from work that Saturday night Mother looked as near discouraged as I’d ever seen her, but Sunday seemed to straighten things out for her. After she’d scrubbed my neck until it felt as if she were using sandpaper, she sent the older four of us to Sunday School. Then, when it was time for church service, she came with Hal and Elizabeth. We waited for them at the door, and though Mother never liked to do it, we had to go way up to the front of the church. The third pew was the only one where there was enough room for all of us to sit together.
    Grace and I had always liked Sunday School. Maybe it was because we knew more of the Bible stories than the others and could answer more of the lesson questions. But neither of us liked church very well, and I think it was for about the same reason: ever since I could remember—except when we had company or when she was so tired she couldn’t keep awake—Mother had read a few verses from the Bible to us before we went to bed. When she read, whether it was the Bible or any other book, it never sounded like reading. She’d glance down at the page for a second or two, then look up at us and tell the story as if she were just talking naturally. None of the ministers we’d ever had did it that way. Some of them sounded as if they were reciting a piece in a Sunday School play, some of them tried to make it sound too grand, and others just read along in a singsong. Most of them preached their sermons the same way they read the scripture.
    Mr. Vander Mark, the minister in our new church, read almost exactly the way Mother did, and he didn’t read a whole long chapter—only a few verses, and ones that I think I’d always known by heart. Usually, when the minister was reading scripture that I knew, I just sat with my hands folded in my lap and thought about something else until he had finished, but that morning I found myself listening as if it had been a brand-new story.
    I don’t think Mr. Vander Mark was much older than Mother, and only a couple of inches taller, but he had gray hair and a voice that seemed too big to come from so short a man. It was neither loud nor rough, but filled the whole church—like the low notes from the organ. The big Bible was open on the stand in front of him, but he didn’t look down at it. He just folded his arms on it, leaned a bit forward, and talked to us as if Mother and we children were the only ones in the