# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 62

IT was things like this that made Alice ask herself with ever greater frequency, "Why do husbands complicate life so?" There was also a heresy that tormented her. It was, "Do children bring husbands and wives closer together?" Certainly the question of the chickens did not. Why did Tom think that chickens would suddenly make Robert responsible?
It is the theory held by all mothers that the care of animals is a developing thing for children, but every practical mother knows that even the most well-beloved animals will have to be fed by older people half the time. There is not a mother in her senses who believes that one can give a child a garden, or even a kitten, and not have to help along with interest and attention; and there is scarcely a father in the world who does not believe that by the giving of a plot of ground or a brood of chickens, responsibility will magically blossom, without any cultivating on his part.
Ever since there had been chickens enough so that Sara and Robert had to walk with a preserving kettle, to get table scraps for them at a neighbor's, life, it seemed to Alice, had been one long controversy. Even now she heard Tom proclaiming:
"Garbage shall not be carried in Jamie's cart! I bought this cart for Jamie."
To this Sara was heard pleading:
"Chicken scraps isn't garbage, Father. Chicken scraps isn't swill!"
Tom's mother turned an accusing eye on Alice.
​"Your children manage to use the most repulsive words," she reproved.
"You can call chicken scraps by any name you want to," came back Tom's voice, "but I say Jamie's cart is not to be used for it."
"It ain't fair!" cried Robert. "We have a nice, clean granite kettle that's washed every day. Chickens don't eat garbage—pigs eat it. And our arms get so tired carrying the things so far. You carry it and you'd see!"
A discussion of the shrillest arose. Sara's pathos over the long road and the hot sun soon became Gaelic in its quality; there was something in her wail which had in it the sorrow from which folk-songs are made.
In the turmoil Jamie alone remained calm. Technicalities as to whether what one fed to chickens was or was not garbage affected him not at all. He kept singing:
"It's my cart! You can't take my cart! It's my cart! You don't take my cart!"
Soon a cry arose from the older children:
"Why haven't we got a cart? If Jamie has a cart why can't we have a cart?"
To this Tom replied: "Jamie has to have something! You children are not going to use Jamie's cart." Then in sing-song came Jamie's little response:
"No, they can't have my cart! They can't have my cart!"
It seemed impossible that only four of them—one father and three children—came surging into the library, they having for the moment constituted Alice the Throne of Justice. In a tone which reminded her only too much of her eldest son, Tom Marcey burst out on his wife:
"Your children,"—and by this he meant, of course, ​Sara and Robert, having for the moment only retained Jamie as his child—"your children are the most unreasonable in all the world!"
Robert planted himself before Alice and made this assertion:
"Chicken scraps are not garbage, are they, mother?" and Sara heightened the dramatic effect by bursting into tears and proclaiming loudly:
"He's a mean old thing!" She cast upon her father a haughty look of anger. If Tom Marcey had repudiated Sara as his child for the moment, she had repudiated him as a parent.
"I don't see why they shouldn't have the cart," said Alice.
At this Tom's excitement vanished. He replied with an icy politeness:
"Because I have decided that Jamie's cart is not to be soiled by using it for any such purpose."
Again clamor arose. It had an unreasonable effect on Alice's nerves. Saying, "I hate hens!" she left the room.
But as she went out she heard Sara making a flank attack. Sitting on the floor, with dramatic solemnity she proclaimed:
"Then I won't go at all! They aren't my hens, anyway!" to which in one voice the men of Sara's family—Robert and Tom—replied:
"You've got to go!"
One gathered that physical violence was being used on her and that she was practising the awful counter violence of non-resistance.
Grandma's voice joined the rumpus. That good lady had maintained a dignified and disapproving silence. She now said:
​"I should think a little girl would love to help her brother."
"I don't!" cried Sara. "I hate helping him! I've always hated helping him! He makes me carry the empty kettle all the way"—here her voice broke again—"and he—he! What does he do? Flings stones at telegraph posts, and all the way up don't speak to me,—don't look at me—and I come dragging the pail and he never looking or speaking! I hate to help him!" she concluded with tense savageness.
Tom cut short the whole business as though with a knife.
"Both of you start along, and no more words about it!" and he too left the room.