South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [108]
Gladys and Arbutus took an interest in everything. They came every day to inspect her progress. Arbutus couldn’t climb the steps so stayed in the lobby—looking happiest when Pete was nearby tinkering—but Gladys liked to come Upstairs. Madeline wondered if she had happy memories of her early married days with Frank here. Even with things less fraught between them, it couldn’t be Madeline’s company she was after. No, she was excited about the hotel, that was all.
She’d tell stories while Madeline scrubbed away at walls and floors and furniture. “Are you writing some of this down?” Madeline asked now and then. She’d picked Up a journal for Gladys while she was in Chicago, one with hard black covers and creamy pages and a spiral binding that made it easy to flip open on itself, buying it with the five-dollar bills Gladys had sent over the years. She’d meant it as a sort of peace offering and because she really did think Gladys should write her stories down, but it had gone over like a lead balloon.
“Who’d want to read anything I put down?” Gladys always said.
The sisters’ friends began to stop in, the spryest ones climbing the stairs and drinking cup after cup of the coffee Madeline kept brewed in an electric drip pot she bought at the hardware, eating Gladys’s cardamom rolls, or Finn buns as all of them called them. Madeline had splurged in Chicago on coffee beans that she ground fresh for every pot. The ladies—and once in a while a husband—liked this. “Good coffee,” they’d say, nodding their approval, and Madeline would feel a splash of pride, as if she’d really done something. She added coffee beans to her mental list of things she might sell in the shop she was imagining downstairs.
Gladys mentioned one day while Madeline was cleaning the floors that Mabel had been a lumber camp cook over by Gallion. Mabel sat in the sewing chair, knitting.
“Oh, pshaw, Glad, that was a million years ago.”
“You were a good cook, everybody said so.”
“Only because I replaced Toivo Ylimaki. That man couldn’t parboil shit for a tramp.”
“Frank claimed Toivo put mice in the stew to stretch it. Why, they ran him right out of camp one spring. Chased him out and threw his pots and pans after him.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if he did put mice in. There were enough of them.”
“Frank’s sandwiches Used to freeze solid before he got to them on the cold days.”
“Yes, I remember. They’d build a fire at lunchtime to thaw them out.”
Madeline Unbent from her hands-and-knees stance down on the floor to listen. “How many did you cook for?”
“Oh, twenty or thirty, most times, it was a small outfit.”
“Was it hard?”
Mabel didn’t look Up from her knitting. “It was what it was, it was work. I didn’t think anything of it. I got Up at four a.m. and was in bed by ten at night if I was lucky. I did it all. Split the wood, hauled the water, fixed the food, cleaned Up after.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Times were different. Life was plain.”
Madeline knew that Mabel did not consider it extraordinary that at ninety she still lived in her own house and walked a mile or two every day and organized all the church potlucks. It seemed not to faze her to have lived so long that she had cooked for thirty lumberjacks on a wood-fired stove and also had driven to the Soo and bought a computer and learned to surf the Internet and sell things on eBay. Her expression said Madeline was peculiar and naïve but harmless. At least she made decent coffee.
“The food was plain,” Gladys said. “That’s a big difference.”
Mabel grinned. “Potatoes and meat one night, milk potatoes the next. All kinds of variety.”
“Potatoes, bread, venison, fish, milk. That’s what I remember.”
“Oatmeal,” Mabel said.
Gladys nodded, a nod that said oatmeal was a given. “Remember Fred Ooman?”
Mabel