Read Online The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz - Free Book Online Page A

went up to my room and lit the candle and set it on my dresser. That’s when I saw my precious books were missing. The two round stones I use as bookends were there, and the Bible — even Father wouldn’t dare to burn Holy Writ. But the books that Miss Chandler gave me —
Dombey and Son,
and
Ivanhoe,
and
Jane Eyre
— were all gone. I stood aghast. I might have misplaced one of them — left it on the bed or even in the kitchen. But for all three to be missing —
    Then I knew. I knew what Father had done, and I knew why a fire had been kindled in the stove. A different kind of father — not mine — might have taken my books as a rebuke, to be returned after I promised to be more respectful. But my books were gone for good. I knew it.
    I had to make sure. I guess there was one part of me that cherished a hope that maybe
one
of the books mightn’t have burned to ashes; that I might be able to save just one. I ran downstairs to the kitchen and opened the stove. There was nothing but a bed of cinders.
    I saw the book covers lying in the slop pail, and I shrieked. The slop pail! Leather stinks when it burns, so Father tore the books out of their bindings — I could see the tattered linen webs, with only a few shreds of paper still attached. It made it worse that my books had been mauled like that. I seemed to see Father wrenching out the pages that contained my dearest friends: Jane and Mr. Rochester, Wamba and Rebecca, Florence and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots. I remembered Miss Chandler’s handwriting on the flyleaves: “To Joan.” She wrote that in
Jane Eyre
and
Dombey and Son,
but “To dear Joan”— that’s what she wrote inside
Ivanhoe.
    I ran straight to Father’s bedroom and yanked open the door. I wasn’t afraid, not one bit, not then; not even when I saw that Father was undressing. He’d lowered his braces and taken off his stockings and boots; he was unbuttoning his shirt. “My books!” I cried. “How could you? You burned my books! You cruel, wicked man, you unnatural father!” And then I echoed Jane Eyre’s very words: “You are like a Roman emperor — you are like a murderer —”
    “That’s enough,” said Father. “You shut up about those books, you hear me? They’re burned up and good riddance.”
    “I
won’t
shut up,” I said. At that moment, I was fearless. In one of Miss Chandler’s books — I think it was
Oliver Twist —
I read that when a woman is thoroughly roused, no man dare provoke her. I think I must have been in just that state, because Father seemed startled by my defiance. I screamed at him, “You
are
like a murderer! You’ve murdered me — taken away everything I care about, and I’ll never forgive you! My books, that Miss Chandler gave me, my only source of —” But there I broke down and sobbed, because I couldn’t even say what those books meant to me. During bad times, I’ve turned to them the way a pious girl might turn to her Bible. There was wisdom in them, though they were storybooks. And poetry. They might not have been books of verse, but they were poetry to me. Miss Chandler says that life isn’t worth living if you haven’t a sense of poetry.
    But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that. Maybe not here at Steeple Farm, but somewhere. It
has
to be.
It has to be.
    I glared at Father through my tears, and he no longer seemed like my father but like some misshapen fiend. “Why are you so horrible to me?” I demanded. “You don’t show me one bit of kindness or affection; you treat me with miserable cruelty! And now you destroy my books! What have I ever done to you?”
    “What I’ve done to
you
?” echoed Father. “What about what you’ve done to me? What about what you took from me?”
    I threw up my hands. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done