She talks differently with the two characters. With Henry, Elisa only talks for a little while and has a little small talk here and there. “At it again,” he said. “You’ve got a strong new crop coming.”
Elisa straightened her back and pulled on the gardening glove again. “Yes. They’ll be strong this coming year.” In her tone and on her face there was a little smugness.
You’ve got a gift with things,” Henry observed. “Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across. I wish you’d work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big.”
Her eyes sharpened. “Maybe I could do it, too. I’ve a gift with things, all right. My mother had it. She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. She said it was having planters’ hands that knew how to do it.”
“Well, it sure works with flowers,” he said.
“Henry, who were those men you were talking to?”
“Why, sure, that’s what I came to tell you. They were from the Western Meat Company. I sold those thirty head of three-year-old steers. Got nearly my own price, too.”
“Good,” she said. “Good for you.
“And I thought,” he continued, “I thought how it’s Saturday afternoon, and we might go into Salinas for dinner at a restaurant, and then to a picture show—to celebrate, you see.”
“Good,” she repeated. “Oh, yes. That will be good.”
Henry put on his joking tone. “There’s fights tonight. How’d you like to go to the fights?”
“Oh, no,” she said breathlessly. “No, I wouldn’t like fights.”
“Just fooling, Elisa. We’ll go to a movie. Let’s see. It’s two now. I’m going to take Scotty and bring down those steers from the hill. It’ll take us maybe two hours. We’ll go in town about five and have dinner at the Cominos Hotel. Like that?”
“Of course I’ll like it. It’s good to eat away from home.”
“All right, then. I’ll go get up a couple of horses.”
She said, “I’ll have plenty of time to transplant some of these sets, I guess.” But when she talks with the repair man, she talks for a while about her chrysanthemums and they also talk about what life is like as a repair man and what he does.
His eyes left her face and fell to searching the ground. They roamed about until they came to the chrysanthemum bed where she had been working. “What’s them plants, ma’am?”
The irritation and resistance melted from Elisa’s face. “Oh, those are chrysanthemums, giant whites and yellows. I raise them every year, bigger than anybody around here.”
“Kind of a long-stemmed flower? Looks like a quick puff of colored smoke?” he asked.
“That’s it. What a nice way to describe them.”
“They smell kind of nasty till you get used to them,” he said.
“It’s a good bitter smell,” she retorted, “not nasty at all.”
He changed his tone quickly. “I like the smell myself.”
“I had ten-inch blooms this year,” she said.
The man leaned farther over the fence. “Look. I know a lady down the road a piece, has got the nicest garden you ever seen. Got nearly every kind of flower but no chrysanthemums. Last time I was mending a copper-bottom washtub for her (that’s a hard job but I do it good), she said to me, ‘If you ever run acrost some nice chrysanthemums I wish you’d try to get me a few seeds.’ That’s what she told me.”
Elisa’s eyes grew alert and eager. “She couldn’t have known much about chrysanthemums. You can raise them from seed, but it’s much easier to root the little sprouts you see there.”
“Oh,” he said. “I s’pose I can’t take none to her, then.”
“Why yes you can,” Elisa cried. “I can put some in damp sand, and you can carry them right along with you. They’ll take root in the pot if you keep them damp. And then she can transplant them.”
“She’d sure like to have some, ma’am. You say they’re nice ones?”