Mary Emma & Company by Ralph Moody Page A

beginning I thought he might be cheating the customers a little, because the first thing he’d do every morning was to take a long plug of black B-L out of the tobacco case, put it under the plug cutter, and slice off a sliver that wouldn’t be more than a sixteenth of an inch thick. He noticed me watching him the second morning I worked in the store, and maybe he knew what I was thinking. Anyway, he said, “Sugar and flour and tea and coffee gets sold by the pound, and you’re cheatin’ a customer if you don’t give him a fair tip o’ the scales, but tobacca gets sold by the piece, and a piece is a piece—five cents or ten cents, accordin’ to them dented lines on the plug. Now if you take note, I never shave off a sliver no thicker’n the dent line betwixt the pieces, and one sliver’ll go me half a day.”

    It was fun working in the store with Mr. Haushalter, but I didn’t get as much ceiling washed that cold week as I should have. Most people had their groceries delivered instead of coming after them, so we didn’t have many customers in the store, and whenever there wasn’t anyone to wait on, Mr. Haushalter would come back to talk to me. Almost every time, he’d bring me a couple of pieces of candy, or a couple of cookies, or a wedge of cheese and some crackers; then he’d tell me, “Sit you down a jiffy and get that into you, Son, whilst I tell you about. . . .” And his stories were always about things that happened years and years before I was born; things that boys who worked there had done, or about peculiar customers, or about the days when people used to bring in an egg to trade for a needle. Sometimes he’d bring an old feather duster, and putter around the shelves near where I was working. But he always told stories as he dusted, and all the good he did was to stir the dust up on one shelf so it could settle on another”.
    Though my job was fun, I knew that Mother’s wasn’t. She’d come back from the laundry at night so cold and tired she couldn’t eat her supper, but if anybody said a word about it she’d get edgy, almost cross. By Saturday night she had a whole row of raw blisters on her right hand, and half a dozen burns on her left, but she acted almost like a spoiled child for a minute or two when Uncle Frank said, “Mary Emma, don’t you think you’ve gone far enough with this foolishness? Can’t you see that you’re going to kill yourself if you try to go on with it?”
    â€œI shall
not
quit,” Mother said sharply. “They may let me go because I am so slow and awkward, but I shall never quit until I can do my work as rapidly and as well as the very best of those women.”
    When Mother began she was almost crying, but after she’d blown off steam a little she sort of wilted. “Oh, Frank,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be cross, and if I was it is all at myself. For years I have thought of myself as a capable, intelligent woman, but there is a colored girl who works on the bench next to mine who makes me appear as a clumsy, stupid oaf. Every garment she touches comes off her board beautifully done. The harder I try the worse I seem to do. I can’t stop the constant clack, clack, clack of the machinery from getting on my nerves, and I haven’t yet learned to regulate my gas-heated iron so that it won’t become either too hot or too cool. Today I scorched a beautiful shirtwaist, and I’m afraid I’ve ruined it. If Bessie, the colored girl, hadn’t insisted on putting several perfectly finished pieces over on my rack, I’m sure the foreman would have paid me off tonight.”
    â€œIt’s a shame he didn’t,” Uncle Frank told her.
    â€œNo, Frank, no,” Mother answered. “I realize that it wasn’t exactly honest of me to let Bessie put some of her work in with mine, but I couldn’t