The Hired Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

any friends; I’m not even allowed to borrow books. My life stretches ahead of me, empty save for drudgery, farm work and housework, day after day, season after season. That’s what Father’s life is like — mean and narrow, with the whole world wrapped up in
this farm.
    Only he doesn’t mind it. He wants me to be like him, yoked to the plow, toiling away, counting every penny, hating every kind of weather that falls from the sky. He never reads, he barely thinks, he has no God but Mammon, and he loves nobody.
    I wonder if he ever loved Ma. I don’t think he could have — not much, anyway, because if he’d loved her, she wouldn’t have been so unhappy. I once asked Ma why she chose to marry Father, and she smiled in a way that was like wincing. She said it wasn’t a question of picking and choosing. There was never anyone else. By the time Father came along, she was twenty-six and an old maid.
    I believe she wished she’d stayed an old maid. It wouldn’t have been easy for her, because she lived with Great-Aunt Alma, and Great-Aunt Alma is a horrible old woman. But I think life with Father was worse. Ma always warned me against getting married. She wanted something different for me.
    I remember when I was seven years old and first went off to school. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go, because the boys hated school. But Ma made me a new dress out of her old blue calico, and that tipped the scales in the other direction. I headed off to school in my new dress, determined to behave myself, because sometimes Luke was whipped in school and then Father whipped him again when he came home.
    My teacher was Miss Lang. She set the oldest girl in charge of the other students and took the whole primary class outside and had us sit under a tree. She sat in a chair and read to us from a book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. She read “Thumbelina.” I’d never heard such a story in my life. I could see it before my eyes, painted in the brightest, most delicate hues — that tiny little fairy child, rowing her flower-petal canoe. Oh, how I longed to be that fairy and row that tiny canoe! And then, how terrible it was that poor Thumbelina was carried off by a toad! Luke used to put toads down my back, and I’ve always hated them. And then, after Thumbelina got free of the toad, she was carried off by the horrid june bug!
    And
then
— when she was shut of
him
— Thumbelina found the poor dead swallow, resting in its tomb below the ground! I knew it would be shameful to cry in school, and I didn’t want the teacher to think I was a baby, so I bent my head to hide my tears. But I couldn’t bear the sorrow of the dead swallow. And the joy I felt, when Thumbelina nursed him and he turned out not to be dead after all! The joy and the wonder and the rightness of it!
    Only, after that, the stuck-up mole with the black velvet coat wanted to marry Thumbelina. She had nothing but trouble with the men, poor thing! Luckily the swallow rescued her, flying her away to a land of orange trees and butterflies and freedom. Oh, that story! I never, never could have thought of anything so beautiful. When it was over — I couldn’t help myself — I forgot to raise my hand, and I cried out, “Oh, please, teacher, read it over, read it over!”
    Then I was aghast because I had called out, and I thought Miss Lang would punish me. But she gave me a lovely smile and said, “When you learn to read, you will be able to read that story all by yourself.”
    I became a scholar that day. I hung on Miss Lang’s words and did whatever she told me to do. Miss Lang said that learning the letters was the beginning of reading. So when I lay in bed at night, I stroked my ABCs on my pillowcase and made consonant sounds under my breath. I learned to read — quickly, quickly. So quickly that Miss Lang came to visit Ma.
    I was peeling potatoes for supper. Ma told me to take them outside, so that she could talk to Miss Lang alone. I went out,