"Everybody can feather their nest, but it's not just anybody that can lay an egg!"
Posted June 16, 2020 / Arabella Mundee
At a time when small children as young as six or seven were sent to work down coal mines, up chimneys, and in-between the death dealing jaws of industrial machinery, it was remarkable how unwilling Miss Matilda had been to let her anywhere near “front of house” when the saloon was open for business. But needs must when the Devil drives, and it wasn’t long before business had increased to such a high pitch (entirely due to Arabella’s influence, of course) that she had ended up waiting on tables, collecting up empties, and generally running up and down like a zany, fetching this, that and whatnot for Mr Flandry, while the assorted assembly of ranch hands, cowpokes, and rough and tumble men, laughed, drank, fought, farted, argued, gambled, throttled each other, and then laughed all over again; and all to the background music of that incessant jangling ‘pianner’ in the corner.
Not all of these ruffians appreciated being waited on by a “skinny little girl”: they were hoping for something a little more developed to go with their two fingers of red eye, and oft times would chide and tease her as she brought over a tray loaded with grog or beer or even tasty pastries, prepared by Miss Em’ over the road. There was a lot to criticize, but for some reason, these varmints seemed to take exception most of all to the extreme pallor of Arabella’s skin. “Ugh, it’s that whey-faced kid again! We wanna see a real woman!”, “By Jiminy, she’s as white as a sheet, what are you girl, a ghost?! Ha ha ha!”
Depending on the group at hand, sometimes she’d ignore them, sometimes she’d call them names right back, and sometimes (the cruelest retort of all) she’d plain bust out crying, accompanied by a wild claim that her mother had just died that day, and how could they be so mean? Sometimes it was her brother or sister or Father who had kicked the bucket, but generally it was killing off her mother that worked the best. She’d had a whole bunch of mean looking gunslingers in tears with that sorry lie on occasion, and another time the feller who’d insulted her nearly got his teeth kicked in by his outraged companions, until that old spoilsport Mr. Flandry had stepped in and broke it up.
However, sometimes, if the group of ruffians was of the right sort of temper, and the place was pretty quiet, and that dang-blasted pianner wasn’t jangling in the corner of the room, she would lean in conspiratorially to her tormentors and say something along the lines of “Well, If you gentlemen are brave enough to listen, I will tell you the true story of how I got this a-way…”
"Everybody can feather their nest, but it's not just anybody that can lay an egg!"
Posted June 19, 2020 / Arabella Mudd
The four drifters seated in the saloon on this quiet Wednesday evening went by the arresting sobriquets of ‘Curly’, ‘Rowdy’, ‘Pete’ and ‘Short’. Whether they were straight up honest cowboys, or God forsaken rustlers, gunslingers or bounty hunters, nobody knew, and nobody really cared. They’d be here today and gone tomorrow, and if they made a little noise and acted a little rough, well at least they paid for their liquor promptly and in good hard cash.
Miss Matilda, as Arabella and Cookie called her, didn’t like the pallid little girl being out front: most folks assumed it was due to an unexpected protective and maternal side to the tow-haired, petite firebrand who ran the Stardust Saloon, others opined that it was more likely to do with Arabella’s short lived (but worryingly effective) attempt to start a Temperance movement from behind the bar of the place. When the management had realized exactly why mean and dusty looking cowhands were rolling up to the bar sporting a blue ribbon pinned to their shirts and ordering a sarsaparilla instead of two fingers of red eye, they soon put a stop that that, and Arabella was lucky not to be kicked back out into the snow.
That was one of many occasions when Cookie, for all her complaining about Arabella’s mischief, nonsense and good-for-nothingness, stood up for the girl. The rotund black woman had some practical good reasons in wanting to keep her there, of course; Arabella was a mighty useful help about the kitchen, and liked nothing better than to run both ways to all the stores and pick up whatever Cookie needed, without her herself having to venture forth onto those treacherous Kalispell boardwalks. There was something more personal and emotional, too.
As soon as Arabella had met the talented and versatile cook, on that cold January morning when she had turned up for an unexpected and unannounced ‘interview’, the skinny girl had run up and thrown her arms around her plump waist, with a cry of “Aw, you just like my Aunt Rosie!” and just about once a day ever since, she’d done the same, usually with a excited cry of “Oooh, Ah just love my Mammy Cookie!” or words to that effect. It wasn’t much, but Arabella was about the only person in Kalispell who’d shake the black woman’s hand, let alone give her a hug. And then there was the songs. Oh, those two would just about sing the day away: washing, cleaning, polishing, peeling, baking, griddling. You name the chore, they’d sing to it. There repertoire was vast, and they’d teach each other songs, too. But their favorite combination was scrubbing the bottom of blackened cooking pots to their warbled strains of “Kingdom Coming and the Year of Jubilee.”
Of course, Arabella had her faults, too: her constant chatter, her inability to lift anything heavier than a tray of drink or food, and a knack of making a two minute run to the store, or to Miss Em’s place, turn in to a two hour adventure from which the girl would return panting, laughing fit to burst and possessed of a funny story about what had happened, but not with whatever she had been sent out to fetch in the first place. But all in all, Cookie liked to have the child around.
Anyways, this night, Arabella was the one delivering the grog to the table of the four strangers…