2018.05.14

It's Monday.

The walls were solid and the house was large, much larger than the tent. It was a nice house. Mr. Edwards said he would go home now, but Pa and Ma said he must stay to supper. Ma had cooked an especially good supper because they had company. There was stewed Jack rabbit with white flour dumplings and plenty of gravy. There was a teaming-hot, thick cornbread flavored with bacon fat. There was molasses to eat on the cornbread, but because this was a company supper they did not sweeten their coffee with molasses. Ma brought out the little paper sack of pale-brown store sugar. Mr. Edwards said he surely did appreciate that supper. Then Pa brought out his fiddle. Mr. Edwards stretched out on the ground, to listen. But first Pa played for Laura and Marry. He played their very favorite song, and he sang it. Laura liked it best of all because Pa’s voice went down deep, deep, deeper in that song. “Oh I am a Gypsy King! I come and go as I please! I pull my old nightcap down And take the world at my ease.” Then his voice went deep, deep down, deeper than very oldest bullfrog’s. “Oh, I am a Gypsy KING!” They all laughed. Laura could hardly stop laughing. She cried to ask Pa to sing it again, before she remembered that children must be seen and not heard. Then she was quiet. Pa went on playing, and everything began to dance. Mr. Edwards rose up on one elbow, then he sat up, then he jumped up and he danced. He danced like a jumping-jack in the moonlight, while Pa’s fiddle kept on rollicking and his foot kept tapping the ground, and Laura’s hands and Mary’s hands were clapping together and their feet were patting, too. Mr. Edwards shouted admiringly to Pa that Pa was a fiddlin’est fool that he had ever seen. He didn’t stop dancing, Pa didn’t stop playing.