A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  “There goes my mother’s feather bed,” was Oliver’s laconic remark, as he fell into the work of wetting the gunny-sacks along with the others.

  When the last of the jaws of flame ceased reaching for their prey, the land across the creek was a desolate black waste, the trees on the north bank charred and gone. One more enemy was temporarily vanquished. But it had left its mark on the land and the fear of it branded forever in the minds of the settlers.

  The next spring, the State Board of Agriculture, through a resolution offered by J. Sterling Morton, a Nebraska City man, set aside the tenth of April, as a special day on which the settlers should plant trees. They called it Arbor Day. Although Will had set out a great many trees previously, he spent the day adding to his own windbreaks and hauling cottonwood saplings for Henry Lutz who was sick at the time.

  When Henry was up again, he built an addition of two rooms on to his house and opened a store in one of them, the stock consisting of six brooms, ten bolts of cloth, a dozen bottles of patent medicine and a few staple groceries. His first customer was Christine Reinmueller who bought brown denim for her baby’s dress. She put one corner of the goods between her teeth and pulled on it. “Everyt’ing . . . sie reis . . . rip.” She jerked the cloth to test its strength. “You t’ink dis sie reis . . . rip . . . nein?”

  A few rods to the east of the Lutz combination store and house, Oscar Lutz built a blacksmith shop and hired a blacksmith-preacher to do the work. For six days Sam Mowery labored at the anvil and on the seventh day the Reverend Samuel Mowery preached three miles away in the schoolhouse known by the appropriate appellation of Sodom College. A store and a blacksmith shop! People began saying, “Over to the Stove Creek store,” and then, “Over to Stove Creek.”

  Mail was brought now by a man on horseback, en route from Weeping Water to Ashland. Twice a week he would stop with the little packet at the Lutz store, as Henry had been made postmaster.

  They began to talk about getting a doctor to come in. Will heard of a young Dr. Hornby, who had just arrived at Nebraska City after graduating from Rush. He rode on horseback to interview him, and the young fellow returned on his own horse behind Will, his mutton-chop whiskers blowing back against his pink-cheeked boyish face, his medicine-case and a valise tied on the saddle.

  A store, a post office, a blacksmith shop, a preacher, a doctor,—and all in two buildings. The town had begun.

  It was Sarah Lutz and Abbie Deal who began talking about the crudeness of the “Stove Creek” title. They were both setting out little cedar trees, Sarah in a clump behind the store, Abbie in a row in front of the soddie.

  “Cedar City, Abbie,” Sarah said suddenly.

  “Or Cedartown,” Abbie added.

  “Yes, I believe I like that best . . . all in one word.”

  Cedartown! A store and a blacksmith shop! But the Deals and the Lutzes, the Reverend Samuel Mowery and his wife and Dr. Hornby would all correct any passerby who asked innocently if this was Stove Creek.

  “Cedartown,” they would say impressively. And so, Minerva-like, Cedartown had sprung forth from the brow of the prairie.

  The crop of that year, 1872, was as poor as that of the previous summer. In September, Abbie’s third child was born. Sarah was there helping, now, and Christine was at home with her own new baby. The child was a son, healthy, loud-voiced, hungry. Abbie and Will joked a little over the size of their family and they argued some over the newcomer’s name. Will wanted to call him John.

  “It doesn’t sound just right,” Abbie protested. “John Deal. It’s too short . . . like ‘Tick-tack’ . . . or ‘Pot-luck.’ ”

  “Oh, I don’t care,” Will gave in readily enough. “I just liked it. It sounds solid and substantial as though he might amount to something.”

  Abbie pulled the little soft sleeping form into the hollow of her arm. “I know he’ll amount to something.”

  After that she could not get the thought of the “John” out of her mind. “John Deal,” she said it over several times. “Will’s right. It just fits him. Some day people will say, ‘Go and ask John Deal. He’s a smart man. He can advise you.’ ” She lay and smiled at the vision. If the faith of all the mothers could blossom to its full fruition, there would be no unsuccessful men in the land.

  Mack was nearly six now and Margaret four, so that when Abbie was up again, and strong enough, she began to teach them their letters. Will painted a board with black paint and brought some soft chalk-like deposit from the Platte with which they could print. The oldest Reinmueller and Lutz children had started to school at Sodom College, but Abbie would not let Mack go so far. So to her other labors she now added teaching.

  All winter during the deep snows when they were shut in, she gave the children lessons to do, hearing them recite in their queer little ways, while she was mending or mixing bread or ironing. It was tiresome, shut in the small soddie, and spring was a welcome guest. On Easter morning, accompanied by the faithful dog, who would kill a snake whenever he found one, Abbie took Mack and Margaret and little John down to the creek bank for flowers. Will had made a wagon in which to pull John, the wheels of round disks cut from a young cottonwood, and now at seven months, the baby lay in it and blinked solemn eyes at the April sky. It was an advanced spring and they found blue and yellow violets, Dutchmen’s breeches, ferns, and the tiny red buds of the hawthorn.

  “Smell!” said Abbie, “smell the springtime on the prairie.” And Mack and Margaret stood and sniffed miniature olfactory organs.

  “What makes it smell sweet?” they wanted to know.

  “Because everything,—every little wild plum-blossom, every little tiny crocus and anemone and violet and every tree-bud and grass-blade is working to help make the prairie nice,” Abbie told them. [And who is there to say this was not a beginners’ class in philosophy?]

  The day was hot, with a strong wind from the south, so that they did not stay long at the creek bed. On the way back to the house it clouded, and by the time they had reached it, the drops were falling. In the night the rain changed to snow and when the family awoke in the early morning, the storm was shrieking around the soddie with cyclonic fury. Great wet clumps of snow were being hurled against the small half-windows and snow had been driven through the cracks of the door. The wind and the snow, whirling together in their wild Bacchanalia, seemed laughing drunkenly at the tiny pigmy inmates of the tiny prairie house.

  Will started to open the door to go to his stock and could scarcely shut it again against the storm’s rage. In the brief interval of its half opening, huge chunks of soft snow, with a rush and roar of wind had been blown the length of the room. With the life of the stock depending upon him, he made another attempt to leave the house in the afternoon. He succeeded in getting to the barn, but came back discouraged, for the snow had blown through every crack and crevice.

  By the third day of this holocaust of Nature’s, the storm abated. Will found some of the chickens dead, and his horses and three cows had stamped so much snow under their feet that their backs were nearly to the top of the shed. There were dead prairie chickens everywhere, and the trees along the creek bank where the little family had so recently picked violets, were packed so solid as to make a snow wall.

  The snows melted and the creek rose. The flowers bloomed again and summer was upon the land.

  But if the previous years had been hard, that one seemed to reach the lowest point of the settlers’ existence. The panic of 1873 was upon the state. The bottom of the market dropped out and prices were so low that it did not even pay to haul the scanty crop to market. When eggs were five cents a dozen and butter eight cents a pound, cattle and hogs two cents, wheat fifty cents a bushel, and corn eight, of what use to haul them all thirty or forty miles? Of what use to haul a load of corn a day’s journey and bring back a load of coal which cost much more than the corn? So Will and Abbie, along with the neighbors, began burning the corn for fuel. It made a fire of intensity, a fire that crackled and held its heat as
well as any coal. Sometimes, too, they used hard twisted hay. When winter came on, Will took Abbie’s washboiler and removing the two front lids of the cook stove, turned the boiler upside down over the open holes, forming a sort of drum that seemed to heat the room a little better.

  The crop of 1874 was the sixth crop and it seemed to give a little more promise than the previous ones. By the twentieth of July, Will had laid by all his corn. Most of his small grain was in the shocks, but one oat field of a few acres was still uncut. Standing there under the July sun, its ripened surface seemed to reflect back the yellow rays. In the afternoon Abbie went out to pick a mess of beans. The garden had come to be Abbie’s care. Aside from the potato crop, to which Will attended, she looked after the entire garden. It was quite generally so,—the men bending all their energies to bigger things, the corn and wheat and the stock, with the chickens and the gardens falling to the lot of the wives. Some of the women went into the fields. Christine Reinmueller was out beside Gus many days. Will drew the line at that. “When you have to do that, we’ll quit,” he said.

  Abbie, in her starched sunbonnet, began picking beans for supper. She could see Will and Henry Lutz working together, shocking the last of Henry’s oats. To-morrow the two would work together on Will’s last stand. It was nice for the men to be so neighborly.

  It seemed hazy in the west. By the time she had finished the long rows, a big panful of the yellow pods in her arms, Will had come home from the Lutzes’. In the welcome shade of the house Abbie took off her bonnet, wiped her flushed, perspiring face and waited for Will to come up.

  “My . . . it’s a scorcher.” She looked hot and tired.

  In a moment of tenderness, more to be desired because of its rarity, Will picked up Abbie’s hands. The slender nails were stubbed and broken,—the grime of the garden was on her tapering fingers. He lifted her hand suddenly and kissed the hollow of it. As his lips touched the calloused palms, his eyes filled with rare tears. He uttered a short swift oath, “I wish you didn’t have to, Abbie-girl. It’s tough for you. Some day . . . in a few years . . . we’ll pull out. Weather conditions may change . . . the land will be high. . . . You can have better things . . . and your organ. That singing and painting of yours . . . maybe we can get to a teacher then. . . .”

  It affected Abbie as it always did. In a moment like that it seemed the end and aim of everything . . . the family. All her dreams for herself were as nothing. In her own moment of emotion she returned, “We’ll make it, Will . . . don’t worry!”

  For a moment they stood together looking out over the raw rolling acreage. Even as they looked, the sun darkened and the day took on a grayness. They looked for the storm, and heard it as soon as they saw it,—a great black cloud roar out of the west, with a million little hissing vibrations. Their eyes on the sky, neither moved. Then there was a cessation of the roaring, a soft thud of dropping things, and the cloud of a billion wings lay on the fields.

  “Grasshoppers,” they said simultaneously, incredulously.

  The grasshoppers swarmed over the young waist-high corn and the pasture and the garden. By evening the long rows of sweet corn had been eaten to the plowed ground. The tender vines of the tomatoes were stripped down to the stalk. The buds of the fruit trees were gone. Part of the garden was a memory. The chickens had feasted themselves to the bursting point. Gus Reinmueller, driving up to the door, could hardly control his raring horses, so irritated were they by the bouncing, thumping pests. The farm was a squirming, greenish-gray mass of them.

  All evening Will sat by the stove with his head in his hands. It was the first time he had visibly lost his grit. Abbie went over to him and ran her hand through his hair. She tried to think of something to console him. “Don’t, Will. . . . There’s one thing we can do. There’s the string of pearls. We can always fall back on it. There must be jewelry stores in Omaha that would take it and pay well. You take the team and make the drive. . . . You can do it in three days, . . . and I’ll look after things here. When Mother gave the pearls to me, she said, ‘You’ll ne’er starve with them’ . . . and we won’t, Will. We’ll sell them for the children’s sake.”

  Will threw her hands away from his hair roughly and stood up. “Hell . . . no!” He yelled it at her. “I’ve taken your music away from you and your painting and your teaching and some of your health. But, by God, . . . I won’t take your mother’s present to you.”

  He slammed the rough soddie door and went out to the barn.

  CHAPTER XIII

  By the next night the stalks of field corn were skeletons, a few delicate veins of leaves left, like so many white bones bleaching on the desert of the fields. At the end of three days the oat field was stripped almost as bare as the day the plow had finished its work. The young orchard was a graveyard of hopes. Some of the small grain previously harvested had been saved, and luckily, one digging of early potatoes was in the hole in the ground in which Will always kept them. But everything else went through the crunching incisors of the horde. It was as though the little grayish-green fiends became a composite whole,—one colossal insect into whose grinding maw went all the green of the fields and the gardens, all the leaves and tender twigs of the young fruit trees, all the dreams and the hopes of the settlers.

  The pests were everywhere. With nightmarish persistence, they appeared in everything. As tightly as Will kept the well covered, he drew them up in the bucket, so that he began going back to the old spring for water. Abbie caught them eating the curtains of the little half-windows and sent them to a fiery death. She was forced to dry the weekly wash around the cook stove, her one attempt to hang it in the sun ending speedily with a dozen perforations in the first billowing garment.

  The garden was a total loss. They had tried to save some of the beans by putting gunny-sacks over them and weighting them down with stones from the creek bed. The grasshoppers, after eating the beans, had begun on the gunny-sacks.

  “Will they eat the stones, too, Mother?” Mack wanted to know. And they could not laugh at him.

  Abbie wrote a letter to her sister Mary, telling of this last hard piece of luck. Even letters were expensive luxuries so that one was made to do for the entire group of relatives back in eastern Iowa. She gave the letter to Will, who said that he would ride over to the little post office in the Lutz store as soon as he had finished caring for the stock. In an hour Will came in holding the letter by a corner. The edges of the envelope had been eaten all the way around with little neat flutings so that the two sides fell apart and the letter fluttered to the floor. The pocket of his old denim coat, where the letter had lain, was flapping down, cut on two sides by the same diabolical jaws.

  What could you do? You could not fight them. You could not kill them. They were an army with an uncanny and unnatural power. Abbie looked out upon the devastation of the fields and the garden upon which they both had worked so hard. The hot wind blew over the ruins with Mephistophelean laughter. She looked up at the cloudless blue,—huge, cruel, sardonic.

  “God, . . . you ought to help,” she cried aloud. “We can’t do it alone. You ought to help!”

  All through August, Abbie went about in a dull, stupid way, depressed by the last hard luck that had descended upon them and the knowledge that her fourth child was coming. She was nervous,—cross to Will and to the children. Sometimes, in a temper, she jerked one of her little tots by the arm or spanked one angrily,—figuratively standing off and looking at her own actions in contempt. She seemed doing things she did not want to do, seeing a nervous, cross woman, who was not herself, allow her love for husband and babies to begin slipping. The song in Abbie’s throat was stilled that summer and not even an echo of the melody lingered on. For the first time she was sorry about her condition, sorry and bitter. One more mouth to feed, she said to herself acridly,—she, who was a born mother. And then, in a sudden revulsion of feeling at her disloyalty to motherhood, she thought, “Oh, I don’t want to feel that way about a child. I ought not to say that . . . I
won’t . . . I never will again.”

  In the letter which came in time from her sister Mary, was the comforting word, “Well, Abbie, you ought to have married Dr. Ed Matthews. His wife was here visiting this summer and she had fine clothes,—a purple silk dress and a little lavender velvet bonnet with pansies on and the widest satin strings, and lavender silk mitts. She has a Paisley shawl, too, and a big cameo breast-pin.”

  Abbie let the letter fall into her lap and sat thinking of Ed Matthews in New York. Occasionally some one had written an item about him. “Ed Matthews and his bride came to visit. She is an eastern girl, and tremendous stylish.” And later: “They say Ed is in a New York hospital where they have as many as fifty beds.”

  And now sitting there with the hot wind blowing over the stripped fields, Abbie’s thoughts went back to the knoll near the Big Woods. “You’re wonderful, Abbie! You’re gorgeous! You coquette! I’ll take you with me. You can study all you want . . . with the best teachers. . . .”

  If she had known—if she could have foreseen—the drouth and the grasshoppers,—the blizzards and the winds that were never still—the hard work,—and the privations,—the song that might never be sung,—the four babies in eight years. “No. . . . No!” She pulled herself out of the dream. “No. . . . No! Don’t let me think it. Don’t let me think of thinking it. It’s wicked. There’s nobody but Will. It’s just the crop failures and the terrible hard luck that made me think it. Those things have nothing to do with love.” But even as she said it, Abbie knew that it was not true. Abbie knew that unless you are very strong, those things have something to do with love.