A Year Down Yonder

Spring arrives, as well as Mary Alice’s 16th birthday. Her parents, who are still struggling financially, send her a dollar. Bootsie has gotten fat from her cobhouse diet of mice. However, the sporadic thumping noises from the attic spook her, and she runs whenever she hears them. One day, she leaves a present on Mary Alice’s bed: a newborn kitten. Mary Alice names her April, hoping to keep her as a pet in her bedroom, but Bootsie soon takes her back to the cobhouse.

One exceptionally warm Saturday, Mary Alice and Grandma are washing their sheets in the yard when a stranger approaches. He says that he’s been going door-to-door looking for a room and that Grandma’s is the last house in town. He’s an artist from New York City, he explains, and has been hired by the Works Progress Administration to paint a social-realist mural in the town’s post office. Unexpectedly, however, the post office (a “one-room shanty”) is much too small for a mural. 

Annoyed that the government will be paying him $4 a day for no work, Grandma agrees to rent him a room for a month, plus use of the attic for his painting, for $2.50 a day, not including meals.