The Best of Gene Stratton-Porter

by Gene Stratton-Porter

  “Yes. Got a wife and four children.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Sorry!” the carpenter shrilled the word. “Sorry! Well that’s the best I ever heard! Am I sorry I married Nell and got the kids? Do I look sorry?”

  “I am not expecting to be, either,” said the Harvester calmly. “I think I have done fairly well to stick to my work and live alone until I am twenty-six. I have thought the thing all over and made up my mind. As soon as I get this house far enough along that I feel I can proceed alone I am going to rush the marrying business just as fast as I can, and let her finish the remainder to her liking.”

  “Well this ought to please her.”

  “That’s because you find your own work good,” laughed the Harvester.

  “Not altogether!” The carpenter polished the board and stood it on end to examine the surface as he talked. “Not altogether! Nothing but good work would suit you. I was thinking of the little creek splashing down the hill to the lake; and that old log hewer said that in a few more days things here would be a blaze of colour until fall.”

  “Almost all the drug plants and bushes leaf beautifully and flower brilliantly,” explained the Harvester. “I studied the location suitable to each variety before I set the beds and planned how to grow plants for continuity of bloom, and as much harmony of colour as possible. Of course a landscape gardener would tear up some of it, but seen as a whole it isn’t so bad. Did you ever notice that in the open, with God’s blue overhead and His green for a background, He can place purple and yellow, pink, magenta, red, and blue in masses or any combination you can mention and the brighter the colour the more you like it? You don’t seem to see or feel that any grouping clashes; you revel in each wonderful growth, and luxuriate in the brilliancy of the whole. Anyway, this suits me.”

  “I guess it will please her, too,” said the carpenter. “After all the pains you’ve taken, she is a good one if it doesn’t.”

  “I’ll always have the consolation of having done my best,” replied the Harvester. “One can’t do more! Whether she likes it or not depends greatly on the way she has been reared.”

  “You talk as if you didn’t know,” commented the carpenter.

  “You go on with this now,” said the Harvester hastily. “I’ve got to uncover some beds and dig my year’s supply of skunk cabbage, else folk with asthma and dropsy who depend on me will be short on relief. I ought to take my sweet flag, too, but I’m so hurried now I think I’ll leave it until fall; I do when I can, because the bloom is so pretty around the lake and the bees simply go wild over the pollen. Sometimes I almost think I can detect it in their honey. Do you know I’ve wondered often if the honey my bees make has medicinal properties and should be kept separate in different seasons. In early spring when the plants and bushes that furnish the roots and barks of most of the tonics are in bloom, and the bees gather the pollen, that honey should partake in a degree of the same properties and be good medicine. In the summer it should aid digestion, and in the fall cure rheumatism and blood disorders.”

  “Say you try it!” urged the carpenter. “I want a lot of the fall kind. I’m always full of rheumatism by October. Exposure, no doubt.”

  “Over eating of too much rich food, you mean,” laughed the Harvester. “I’d like to see any man expose his body to more differing extremes of weather than I do, and I’m never sick. It’s because I am my own cook and so I live mostly on fruits, vegetables, bread, milk, and eggs, a few fish from the lake, a little game once in a great while or a chicken, and no hot drinks; plenty of fresh water, air, and continuous work out of doors. That’s the prescription! I’d be ashamed to have rheumatism at your age. There’s food in the cupboard if you grow hungry. I am going past one of the neighbours on my way to see about some work I want her to do.”

  The Harvester stopped for lunch, carried food to Belshazzar, and started straight across country, his mattock, with a bag rolled around the handle, on his shoulder. His feet sank in the damp earth at the foot of the hill, and he laughed as he leaped across Singing Water.

  “You noisy chatterbox!” cried the man. “The impetus of coming down the curves of the hill keeps you talking all the way across this muck bed to the lake. With small work I can make you a thing of beauty. A few bushes grubbed, a little deepening where you spread too much, and some more mallows along the banks will do the trick. I must attend to you soon.”

  “Now what does the boy want?” laughed a white-haired old woman, as the Harvester entered the door. “Mebby you think I don’t know what you’re up to! I even can hear the hammering and the voices of the men when the wind is in the south. I’ve been wondering how soon you’d need me. Out with it!”

  “I want you to get a woman and come over and spend a day with me. I’ll come after you and bring you back. I want you to go over mother’s bedding and have what needs it washed. All I want you to do is to superintend, and tell me now what I will want from town for your work.”

  “I put away all your mother’s bedding that you were not using, clean as a ribbon.”

  “But it has been packed in moth preventives ever since and out only four times a year to air, as you told me. It must smell musty and be yellow. I want it fresh and clean.”

  “So what I been hearing is true, David?”

  “Quite true!” said the Harvester.

  “Whose girl is she, and when are you going to jine hands?”

  The Harvester lifted his clear eyes and hesitated.

  “Doc Carey laid you in my arms when you was born, David. I tended you ’fore ever your ma did. All your life you’ve been my boy, and I love you same as my own blood; it won’t go no farther if you say so. I’ll never tell a living soul. But I’m old and ’til better weather comes, house bound; and I get mighty lonely. I’d like to think about you and her, and plan for you, and love her as I always did you folks. Who is she, David? Do I know the family?”

  “No. She is a stranger to these parts,” said the unhappy Harvester.

  “David, is she a nice girl ’at your ma would have liked?”

  “She’s the only girl in the world that I’d marry,” said the Harvester promptly, glad of a question he could answer heartily. “Yes. She is gentle, very tender and—and affectionate,” he went on so rapidly that Granny Moreland could not say a word, “and as soon as I bring her home you shall come to spend a day and get acquainted. I know you will love her! I’ll come in the morning, then. I must hurry now. I am working double this spring and I’m off for the skunk cabbage bed to-day.”

  “You are working fit to kill, the neighbours say. Slavin’ like a horse all day, and half the night I see your lights burning.”

  “Do I appear killed?” laughingly inquired the Harvester.

  “You look peart as a struttin’ turkey gobbler,” said the old woman. “Go on with your work! Work don’t hurt a-body. Eat a-plenty, sleep all you ort, and you CAN’T work enough to hurt you.”

  “So the neighbours say I’m working now? New story, isn’t it? Usually I’m too lazy to make a living, if I remember.”

  “Only to those who don’t sense your purceedings, David. I always knowed how you grubbed and slaved an’ set over them fearful books o’ yours.”

  “More interesting than the wildest fiction,” said the man. “I’m making some medicine for your rheumatism, Granny. It is not fully tested yet, but you get ready for it by cutting out all the salt you can. I haven’t time to explain this morning, but you remember what I say, leave out the salt, and when Doc thinks it’s safe I’ll bring you something that will make a new woman of you.”

  He went swinging down the road, and Granny Moreland looked after him.

  “While he was talkin’,” she muttered, “I felt full of information as a flock o’ almanacs, but now since he’s gone, ‘pears to me I don’t know a thing more ’an I did to start on.”

  “Close call,” the Harvester was thinking. “Why the nation did I admit anything to her? People may talk as they please, so long
as I don’t sanction it, but I have two or three times. That’s a fool trick. Suppose I can’t find her? Maybe she won’t look at me if I can. Then I’d have started something I couldn’t finish. And if anybody thinks I’ll end this by taking any girl I can get, if I can’t find Her, why they think wrongly. Just the girl of my golden dream or no woman at all for me. I’ve lived alone long enough to know how to do it in comfort. If I can’t find and win her I have no intention of starting a boarding house.”

  The Harvester began to laugh. “‘I’d rather keep bachelor’s hall in Hell than go to board in Heaven!’” he quoted gaily. “That’s my sentiment too. If you can’t have what you want, don’t have anything. But there is no use to become discouraged before I start. I haven’t begun to hunt her yet. Until I do, I might as well believe that she will walk across the bridge and take possession just as soon as I get the last chair leg polished. She might! She came in the dream, and to come actually couldn’t be any more real. I’ll make a stiff hunt of it before I give up, if I ever do. I never yet have made a complete failure of anything. But just now I am hunting skunk cabbage. It’s precisely the time to take it.”

  Across the lake, in the swampy woods, close where the screech owl sang and the girl of the golden dream walked in the moonlight the Harvester began operations. He unrolled the sack, went to one end of the bed and systematically started a swath across it, lifting every other plant by the roots. Flowering time was almost past, but the bees knew where pollen ripened, and hummed incessantly over and inside the queer cone-shaped growths with their hooked beaks. It almost appeared as if the sound made inside might be to give outsiders warning not to poach on occupied territory, for the Harvester noticed that no bee entered a pre-empted plant.

  With skilful hand each stroke brought up a root and he tossed it to one side. The plants were vastly peculiar things. First they seemed to be a curled leaf with no flower. In colour they shaded from yellow to almost black mahogany, and appeared as if they were a flower with no leaf. Closer examination proved there was a stout leaf with a heavy outside mid-rib, the tip of which curled over in a beak effect, that wrapped around a peculiar flower of very disagreeable odour. The handling of these plants by the hundred so intensified this smell the Harvester shook his head.

  “I presume you are mostly mine,” he said to the busy little workers around him. “If there is anything in my theory of honey having varying medicinal properties at different seasons, right now mine should be good for Granny’s rheumatism and for nervous and dropsical people. I shouldn’t think honey flavoured with skunk cabbage would be fit to eat. But, of course, it isn’t all this. There is catkin pollen on the wind, hazel and sassafras are both in bloom now, and so are several of the earliest little flowers of the woods. You can gather enough of them combined to temper the disagreeable odour into a racy sweetness, and all the shrub blooms are good tonics, too, and some of the earthy ones. I’m going to try giving some of you empty cases next spring and analyzing the honey to learn if it isn’t good medicine.”

  The Harvester straightened and leaned on the mattock to fill his lungs with fresh air and as he delightedly sniffed it he commented, “Nothing else has much of a chance since I’ve stirred up the cabbage bed. I can scent the catkins plainly, being so close, and as I came here I could detect the hazel and sassafras all right.”

  Above him a peculiar, raucous chattering for an instant hushed other wood voices. The Harvester looked up, laughing gaily.

  “So you’ve decided to announce it to your tribe at last, have you?” he inquired. “You are waking the sleepers in their dens to-day? Well, there’s nothing like waiting until you have a sure thing. The bluebirds broke the trail for the feathered folk the twenty-fourth of February. The sap oozed from the maples about the same time for the trees. The very first skunk cabbage was up quite a month ago to signal other plants to come on, and now you are rousing the furred folk. I’ll write this down in my records—‘When the earliest bluebird sings, when the sap wets the maples, when the skunk cabbage flowers, and the first striped squirrel barks, why then, it is spring!’”

  He bent to his task and as he worked closer the water he noticed sweet-flag leaves waving two inches tall beneath the surface.

  “Great day!” he cried. “There you are making signs, too! And right! Of course! Nature is always right. Just two inches high and it’s harvest for you. I can use a rake, and dried in the evaporator you bring me ten cents a pound; to the folks needing a tonic you are worth a small fortune. No doubt you cost that by the time you reach them; but I fear I can’t gather you just now. My head is a little preoccupied these days. What with the cabbage, and now you, and many of the bushes and trees making signs, with a new cabin to build and furnish, with a girl to find and win, I’m what you might call busy. I’ve covered my book shelf. I positively don’t dare look Emerson or Maeterlinck in the face. One consolation! I’ve got the best of Thoreau in my head, and if I read Stickeen a few times more I’ll be able to recite that. There’s a man for you, not to mention the dog! Bel, where are you? Would you stick to me like that? I think you would. But you are a big, strong fellow. Stickeen was only such a mite of a dog. But what a man he followed! I feel as if I should put on high-heeled slippers and carry a fan and a lace handkerchief when I think of him. And yet, most men wouldn’t consider my job so easy!”

  The Harvester rapidly pitched the evil-smelling plants into big heaps and as he worked he imitated the sounds around him as closely as he could. The song sparrow laughed at him and flew away in disgust when he tried its notes. The jay took time to consider, but was not fooled. The nut-hatch ran head first down trees, larvae hunting, and was never a mite deceived. But the killdeer on invisible legs, circling the lake shore, replied instantly; so did the lark soaring above, and the dove of the elm thicket close beside. The glittering black birds flashing over every tree top answered the “T’check, t’chee!” of the Harvester quite as readily as their mates.

  The last time he paused to rest he had studied scents. When he straightened again he was occupied with every voice of earth and air around and above him, and the notes of singing hens, exultant cocks, the scream of geese, the quack of ducks, the rasping crescendo of guineas running wild in the woods, the imperial note of Ajax sunning on the ridge pole and echoes from all of them on adjoining and distant farms.

  “‘Now I see the full meaning and beauty of that word sound!’” quoted the Harvester. “‘I thank God for sound. It always mounts and makes me mount!’”

  He breathed deeply and stood listening, a superb figure of a man, his lean face glowing with emotion.

  “If she could see and hear this, she would come,” he said softly. “She would come and she would love it as I do. Any one who understands, and knows how to translate, cares for this above all else earth has to offer. They who do not, fail to read as they run!”

  He shifted feet mired in swamp muck, and stood as if loath to bend again to his task. He lifted a weighted mattock and scraped the earth from it, sniffing it delightedly the while. A soft south wind freighted with aromatic odours swept his warm face. The Harvester removed his hat and shook his head that the breeze might thread his thick hair.

  “I’ve a commission for you, South Wind,” he said whimsically. “Go find my Dream Girl. Go carry her this message from me. Freight your breath with spicy pollen, sun warmth, and flower nectar. Fill all her senses with delight, and then, close to her ear, whisper it softly, ‘Your lover is coming!’ Tell her that, O South Wind! Carry Araby to her nostrils, Heaven to her ears, and then whisper and whisper it over and over until you arouse the passion of earth in her blood. Tell her what is rioting in my heart, and brain, and soul this morning. Repeat it until she must awake to its meaning, ‘Your lover is coming.’”

  Chapter 5

  When the Harvester Made Good

  The sassafras and skunk cabbage were harvested. The last workman was gone. There was not a sound at Medicine Woods save the babel of bird and animal notes and the never-ending
accompaniment of Singing Water. The geese had gone over, some flocks pausing to rest and feed on Loon Lake, and ducks that homed there were busy among the reeds and rushes. In the deep woods the struggle to maintain and reproduce life was at its height, and the courting songs of gaily coloured birds were drowned by hawk screams and crow calls of defiance.

  Every night before he plunged into the lake and went to sleep the Harvester made out a list of the most pressing work that he would undertake on the coming day. By systematizing and planning ahead he was able to accomplish an unbelievable amount. The earliest rush of spring drug gathering was over. He could be more deliberate in collecting the barks he wanted. Flowers that were to be gathered at bloom time and leaves were not yet ready. The heavy leaf coverings he had helped the winds to heap on his beds of lily of the valley, bloodroot, and sarsaparilla were removed carefully.

  Inside the cabin the Harvester cleaned the glass, swept the floors with a soft cloth pinned over the broom, and hung pale yellow blinds at the windows. Every spare minute he worked on making furniture, and with each piece he grew in experience and ventured on more difficult undertakings. He had progressed so far that he now allowed himself an hour each day on the candlesticks for her. Every evening he opened her door and with soft cloths polished the furniture he had made. When her room was completed and the dining-room partially finished, the Harvester took time to stain the cabin and porch roofs the shade of the willow leaves, and on the logs and pillars he used oil that served to intensify the light yellow of the natural wood. With that much accomplished he felt better. If she came now, in a few hours he would be able to offer a comfortable room, enough conveniences to live until more could be provided, and of food there was always plenty.