My duties were very slight and Mrs. Kadish’s accusation that I was overpaid was quite true. The reason was not, however, that Mrs. Brunson was a spendthrift, but that the cook, Maudie, shocked by my pallor and emaciation, did all my work while she kept me in the pantry eating beef sandwiches and doughnuts, and drinking eggnog. Maudie was not a native of New England, but had come here from Idaho because she had always wanted to see “the spreading chestnut tree and Plymouth rock and that old bridge where they disappointed the British.” And so, when her husband was thrown by a “spooked” horse and died of a skull fracture, and her two sons had got married, she set out with her insurance money to see what she called “the old country.” She was a horsy, red-cheeked, raw-boned woman, nearly six feet tall. On her day off, she lounged in a one-room house not far from the Brunsons’, drinking whiskey and reading magazines called Lariat, West, and Rio Grande Romances. The combination of the liquor and literature produced in her a virulent homesickness which was contagious to her cronies—all men—so that her shack rocked with sighs toward evening when the men had gathered after work, as Maudie, in a plaintive, guttural voice, “My whiskey tenor,” she called it, told anecdotes of horses, cattle, and bears, for all of whom she was lonesome. “Why don’t you go back, Maudie?” the men would ask. “Oh, hell,” she would reply, “it wouldn’t be the same. My husband’s dead and that dear old bench that throwed him is dead, and without them two Idaho’d be an ornery outfit. She was a little strawberry roan by the name of Skylark and she loved him like another horse and he loved her like another human. I often say it’s good they went together.” She would relapse into a dreamy silence. The men were deeply touched.

During the week she was never sad. She sang a great deal, but she had a very small repertoire. I think she knew only “Home on the Range,” “I’ll Build a Coffin of Pine,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and the obscene verses of “Frankie and Johnny,” and she had only one tune to which she fitted all the words, like square pegs in round holes, as Dr. Brunson said. Finally she was asked to stop. She did, but the moment the kitchen door banged to and she was on her way home, her voice came thundering back to us.