Read The Path Was Steep for Free Online Page A

generation had brought naked arms into view, and legs, too, and some even wore low-backed dresses. Not many though, for a woman’s body from neck to knee was almost sacred. Even bathing, we wore a suit with a skirt longer than miniskirts today, and the neck was respectably high. The doctor must have shook with silent laughter, but he made no comment when, instead of my belly, I presented my arms for the shots. They became pretty sore, and I could do less work than usual.
    Poor Sharon! Not only did she suffer from a sore belly, but never was a child watched so carefully. Miss Mildred and I thought a person “going mad” would have a rabid fit if she even saw water.
    We kept the windlass* pretty busy as we drew water from the well, and we almost drowned Sharon. Obediently, she tried to drink the glasses of water we gave her. Sometimes she puffed and sighed. “I can hear it slosh around in my stomach,” she told me once. After that, I slacked off a little on the water bit. At least, I tried to slack. Yet, I’d start up suddenly, call her, and offer another drink. Drought or no drought, this was a deadly emergency.
    Minutes became hours, then days. The vaccine was completed and Sharon pronounced out of danger. Now I could worry about something else. There was still no news from David. A little green monster perched on my shoulder and whispered, “David is a very good-looking man. Besides, who wants to be tied down with family in these times?”
    “David has written to me,” I argued. “The letter has been lost.” And I ran all the way to the mailbox. My faith, I was convinced, had produced the two letters that were there. One had been mailed in Kentucky, the other in West Virginia. The date on the Kentucky letter was two weeks older than the other, so I read it first. “I’m asking my boarding mistress to mail this for me,” he had written. “There is a freight train out tonight, I’m catching it for W. Va. Will write as soon as I locate a job.” I cried a little, sent fiery darts towards the landlady in Kentucky for her delay in mailing the letter, and then I forgave her—she had mailed it finally.
    The Kentucky job had been impossible, the pay scarcely enough for board. Working conditions were almost unbearable; houses were small shacks on mountainsides, far from civilization. Reports from West Virginia were encouraging. He had decided to try there.
    David wrapped fifty cents in paper and enclosed it. “I’d send more,” he wrote, “but there just wasn’t anything left after I paid my board bill.”
    He must be almost hopeless, I thought, weeping. Leaving again penniless—he should have kept the fifty cents. His clothes growing thin, he was catching still another freight train, hunting work when millions were jobless and tracking from place to place, looking for nonexistent work.
    Then I read the West Virginia letter. He boasted a little. How could he help it after so many disappointments? One hundred men had applied for work the day he was there, and he alone was hired. Surely they were seasoned, robust miners. David was almost twenty-four. With his fair skin and bright curls, he looked all of nineteen. Besides his youthful look, he was handicapped with that almost perfect face.
    But there was an intensity about David, a determination, an unquestioning belief in himself. “If Dave needed a job and walked down the streets of a strange town,” Clarence used to say, “some man would walk up and offer him work.”
    I spared a few minutes to think of the line of despairing men who were not hired. I could almost see their gaunt, hopeless faces. They were growing familiar everywhere. Kimberly Mine had closed. Papa set aside a small field of okra. Anyone in need, black or white, was free to come and cut okra. Before summer was over, every day you could see two or three busy with knives, gathering supper.
    I read David’s letter again. Penniless, he had found work, but special clothes were required. The