A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  In an overwhelming return of affection for the children, she picked little John up and covered him with kisses, her tears on his cheeks. She drew Margaret to her and cuddled her, too. Margaret’s little hand had a dingy rag around it to cover a cut, and in an ecstasy of mother-emotion, Abbie kissed the little hand, kissed the plump baby neck between the soft brown ringlets and the colorless calico dress. She went to the door and called, “Mack, come in.”

  “What do you want, Mother?”

  “Nothing, Mack, . . . nothing but to kiss you, darling. Oh, little son, I love you so. Kiss Mother, Mack.”

  Mack, who was seven now and a little superior to the demonstration of women folks, stood the ordeal with fortitude and then pulled quickly away. “I’m helping Father sort things, . . . all the nails for him, . . . the little ones, . . . and the horseshoe ones, . . . and . . .”

  “That’s it. That’s a good boy. Always help Father, Mack. He’s the best father in the world. You’ll never forget it, will you, darling?”

  She did not want Will to know what Mary had written, so she read the letter aloud to him, blithely skipping the tart reference to Ed Matthews.

  During that summer the whole family went in the wagon along the creek to scour the thickets for wild grapes and wild plums. Abbie rode three miles on horseback to a Mrs. Tomlinson’s to get some late pieplant which had miraculously escaped the scourge of the robber insects. And when Will came in one day with two huge beets which he had found when taking down a pile of boards, Abbie sent word to Henry Lutz’s to come over and the two families feasted on potatoes, corn bread and sliced boiled beets.

  Every one was in want. In the early fall people began going past the house. “Going home,” they all reported. Many times parties of them stayed all night. They had their own quilts and would arrange their beds on the mainroom floor. They were beaten, they said. One could stand a few disappointments and failures, but when everything turned against one, there was no use trying to fight.

  “The land hasn’t turned against us,” Will would argue stubbornly. “It’s the finest, blackest loam on the face of the earth. The folks that will just stick it out. . . . You’ll see the climate change, . . . more rains and not so much wind . . . when the trees grow. We’ve got to keep at the trees. Some day this is going to be the richest state in the union . . . the most productive. I’ll bet anything next year . . .”

  Always “next year”! It was a mirage, thought Abbie, an apparition that vanished when one came to it. Six times now they had said, “Next year, the crops will be fine.”

  And so she could not throw off the blue mood that had descended upon her, a horde of worries that had come upon her even as the horde of grasshoppers had come upon the land. The thought that there was nothing to do with; that they could scarcely keep body and soul together; that she probably would never be able now to do anything with her voice; that another child was coming,—they all harassed and tormented her. All fall there was in her mind a tired disinterest over things. In spite of what he said, that surface courage which he pretended had returned to him, Abbie detected that Will, too, was morose. To her keen eye he seemed dull and stoical, underneath an assumption of cheerfulness.

  Before cold weather, the old grasshoppers were gone, but first they had taken infinite pains to leave a reminder of themselves in the newly broken prairie everywhere,—holes the size of lead pencils in which they laid one to two dozen eggs in a sack. In a six-inch square of ground, Will testing their number, found a double handful of the next year’s hatching. There seemed not even a hope for the following crop.

  It was in November that the barrel and box came from the folks back home. Will drove up to the soddie with rattling announcement of their arrival. A letter from Grandpa Deal had been the forerunner of the donations and already Abbie knew that an old brass horn of Dennie’s was among the things for Mack. She determined to slip it out without his knowledge and put it away for Christmas. They all gathered around the barrel while Will pried open the top, Mack and Margaret dancing about in an ecstasy of excitement. The first thing to be taken out was an envelope marked “For Abbie,” in Grandpa Deal’s handwriting. In it was twenty dollars. Abbie cried a little, tears of love and homesickness, happiness and relief, and put it away with secret thoughts of the desired organ. She sensed that Grandpa had slipped it in with his one hand the last thing, so Grandma would not see it.

  There were flower seeds and sugar and beans, seed-corn and dried apples in the barrel. Mother Mackenzie had tied and sent two thick comforts. Regina Deal sent an old soiled white silk bonnet with a bead ornament and a cluster of three little pink feathers on it,—“tips,” Abbie told the children they were,—and a pair of dirty white “stays” and some old white hoop-skirts. Abbie laughed until she cried at the sight of them.

  “Maybe I could put the hoops over some stakes next summer and keep the setting hens in them,” she suggested. She put them on over her work dress, the hoops and the stays both, and perched the dirty bonnet on her red-brown hair, dancing about in them, the three noble tips nodding with uncertain dignity as though, like their former owner, they had no sense of humor. She pushed Will and Mack and Margaret into position for a square dance and showed the children how to “whirl your partner” and “alamand left.” The four of them pranced around in the impromptu dance, the children in their patched dingy clothing, Will in his denim work things, and Abbie in the foolish soiled castoffs which Regina had sent with so little thought. The two older children laughed and clapped their hands and shouted that they had never had so much fun in their lives, and little John toddled in and out and between them in an ecstasy of bubbling spirits.

  It broke something in Abbie, some tight-bound band around her heart and throat, which had not been loosed for months. She hid the old brass horn of Dennie’s in the bedroom. She put away the precious dried apples and pop-corn, the seed-corn and the big solid Greenings from the orchard behind Grandpa Deal’s house. She hugged the huge warm quilts as though they were the fat pudding-bag body of Maggie Mackenzie. The bad luck was temporary. They were young and well. The children were all healthy youngsters. Why, how wicked she had been! She was only twenty-seven. She mustn’t let her voice rust the way she had done this summer. In another year or so she could have an organ and maybe even get to a music teacher. She mustn’t let youth slip away and her voice go with it. She was ashamed of herself that she had not sung for months.

  “Oh! the Lady of the Lea,

   Fair and young and gay was she.”

  Her voice rose full-throated, mellowed now with tribulations and sympathy. The children clapped their hands that Mother was singing.

  “Beautiful exceedingly,

   The Lady of the Lea.”

  She replenished the fire of twisted hay and corn-cobs in the stove with the four holes and the iron hearth in front. She cooked cornmeal mush for supper and set the table. Several times she sang the same verses over.

  “Many a wooer sought her hand,

   For she had gold and she had land,”

  The teakettle sang and the children chattered happily at the window. She lighted the coal-oil lamp with the red flannel in the bowl and washed her hands in the tin basin. The prairie twilight came on. The winds died down.

  “Everything at her command,

   The Lady of the Lea.”

  Will came in from doing the chores.

  “It’s the nicest time of day . . . isn’t it, Will . . . the red fire of the corn . . . and the steaming teakettle . . . supper ready . . . and the children all alive and well . . . and you and I together?”

  Will put his arm around her for a brief, rare moment.

  “It’s the nicest time of day, Abbie-girl.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  Yes, the coming of the barrel seemed to put something back into Abbie which had been gone temporarily,—laughter and hope, courage and faith. She began planning right away for Christmas. Mack was nearly eight, Margaret six and little John two. They were going to hav
e the finest Christmas they had ever known. To Abbie’s pleasure, Will entered into the preparations, too. He was as glad to see Abbie come to life as she was to see him throw off a little of his moroseness.

  She told Gus and Christine Reinmueller their plans.

  “Ach!” Christine snorted. “So? Gans närrich . . . voolish.”

  “A hell of a Christmas we’ll have,” was Gus’s equally enthusiastic response.

  But Abbie found sympathy in Sarah Lutz,—Sarah, with her little black beady eyes and her cheerful, energetic way.

  “You know, Sarah, I think every mother owes it to her children to give them happy times at Christmas. They’ll remember them all their lives. I even think it will make better men and women of them.”

  “I think so, too, Abbie. We’re going to have a cedar tree hauled up from the Platte. Henry can get you one, too.”

  All day long Abbie worked at the tasks that demanded attention, washing, ironing, patching, mending, baking, churning, caring for the chickens,—all with meager equipment or no equipment at all. Two wooden tubs, three heavy, clumsy flat-irons, a churn with wooden dasher, scissors, needles and thread, and a baking board with a few heavy dishes and utensils. But from them, clean clothes, sweet butter, neatly made-over suits and dresses and food that was palatable. The tapering Mackenzie fingers were calloused and burned and pricked. As tired as all these tasks left her, she would get the children to bed early and then bring out the Christmas things and begin working on them.

  She got out the precious paints Mrs. Whitman had given her and worked on a picture for Will when he was away. It was a scene of the prairie with a clump of cottonwoods in the foreground. She tried to get the afterglow of the sunset but even though she worked faithfully, she could not get it. “If I only had some one to help a little,” she would say. “Some day I want to take some painting lessons again. If I could just make a picture as I want to,—it would satisfy something in me.”

  From the barn she got clean husks and made a family of dolls for Margaret. She made the bodies, heads and limbs from the husks and braided the corn-silk for hair. A man, a lady and a baby, she made, and dressed them in corn-husk clothes. Will built a small bedstead for them. Out of one of the coats in the barrel she made Mack a new suit and concocted a bonnet for Margaret out of the old one Regina had sent, trimming it with a little wisp of the pink tips. With her paints, she marked off a checkerboard for Mack, and Will whittled checkers from the circumference of some small cottonwood branches. She cut a pattern and made a calico dog for little John, stuffing it with corn-husks, and covering it with knotted ends of carpet rags to give it a woolly appearance. She ironed out brown wrapping paper, tied the pieces with yarn and drew waggish-looking cows and horses on it for him, too.

  Margaret laboriously hemmed a handkerchief for her father and Mack made him a box for his newspapers. There was a State Journal now, and as scarce as money was, Will had subscribed. “We can’t drop out of touch with other parts of the country,” he had said. “And we must know what the rest of the settlers are doing.”

  The children could talk of nothing but the approach of the wonderful day. The word “he” had only one meaning in their vocabulary,—a portly gentleman with a white beard and a sack on his back.

  “Are you sure he’ll come this year, Mother? Heinie Reinmueller said he wouldn’t. He said his mother said so.”

  “Of course he’ll come,” Abbie assured the three. “Because Father and I are making things, too, to help him when he comes.”

  With Scotch-Irish cleverness, she could think of a dozen things to do with her meager supplies to add to the festivities. She ran tallow in tiny molds for the candles. She made a little batch of molasses candy and baked cookies in star and diamond shapes. She boiled eggs and painted faces on them and made little calico bonnets for them.

  Christine was contemptuous toward the unnecessary festivities.

  “For dot . . . no time I haf. You learn ’em vork . . . cows milk ’n’ pigs svill . . . ’n’ dey for foolishness no time haf.”

  “Oh, don’t let us ever get like Reinmuellers,” Abbie said. “We’re poor. If we were any poorer we might as well lie down and give up. But we can fight to keep civilized . . . can fight to keep something before us besides the work.”

  On the day before Christmas the snow lay deep on the prairie and the children’s greatest anxiety was whether “he” would find the little house which was half buried. Margaret, with the characteristic ingenuity of the female of the species, suggested tying a piece of bright cloth where “he” would notice it. And Mack, with the characteristic daring of the less deadly of the same, got on top of the low house via a crusty snow bank and tied one of little John’s red flannel shirts to the stove-pipe.

  At lamp-lighting, they all hung up their stockings, even Will and Abbie. The children were beside themselves with excitement. By their parents’ stocking they put the little presents they had made for them. They danced and skipped and sang. They cupped their eyes with their hands, pressing their faces to the little half-window and looking out into the night. The gleam of the stars was reflected in the snow, and the silence of the sky was the silence of the prairie.

  “I see the Star.”

  “So do I. Right up there.”

  “It looks like it was over a stable.”

  “Yes, sir. It looks like it was over a manger-stable.”

  “Now it looks like it’s stopping over us.”

  “Yes, sir, it looks like it’s stopping right over our house.”

  Wide-eyed, they went to bed. The three faces in a row on the pillows, with the patchwork quilts tucked under the chins, were flushed with anticipation.

  “Always keep the Christmas spirit going,” Abbie told them. “Promise me, that when you get big and have homes of your own, you’ll keep the Christmas spirit in your homes.”

  “We will,” they promised in glib and solemn accord.

  When at last they slept, Will brought in the little cedar tree. The morning found it trimmed with popcorn and tallow candles. And a marvelous flock of butterflies had settled upon it. Their bodies were of dried apples dipped in sugar and their antennæ were pink and feathery, looking surprisingly as though they had once adorned Regina Deal’s bonnet. Will had made and painted Abbie a corner what-not with four shelves, secreting it in the stable behind some straw bedding. And he had constructed a monstrous hobby-horse for the children, the body and head of cottonwood chunks, real horse’s hair for mane and tail, reins and a bit in the steed’s cut-out mouth. The wooden horse of Troy never looked so huge. And then the old brass horn was unwrapped.

  “I’m so excited,” Mack said, in solemn ecstasy. “I’m so excited . . . my legs itch.”

  Historians say, “The winter of ’seventy-four to ’seventy-five was a time of deep depression.” But historians do not take little children into consideration. Deep depression? To three children on the prairie it was a time of glamour. There was not much to eat in the cupboard. There was little or no money in the father’s flat old pocketbook. The presents were pitifully homely and meager. And all in a tiny house,—a mere shell of a house, on a new raw acreage of the wild, bleak prairie. How could a little rude cabin hold so much white magic? How could a little sod house know such enchantment? And how could a little hut like that eventually give to the midwest so many influential men and women? How, indeed? Unless, . . . unless, perchance, the star did stop over the house?

  CHAPTER XV

  There was a great deal of suffering among the settlers. It was extremely cold. The government issued flour and beans and some army clothes left over from war days. A supply came to the Lutz store and Will took advantage of the offer of the flour, but only after some protest of pride.

  “I don’t want to, Abbie,—like beggars.”

  “Will Deal,—from your government, after you fought to keep it going!”

  In the Lutz store, one day later, Abbie met Mrs. Tomlinson from Poor Man’s Hollow. She had on one of the blue army coats
and a pair of men’s coarse army shoes.

  Word came from back home that Grandpa Deal was very sick,—the disease which had caused his arm’s amputation, had broken out again.

  A few weeks later in the winter, Grandpa Lutz, Henry’s and Oscar’s old father, died. Homesick for the neat Michigan farm and a sight of lake water, uncomplaining, gently, he died. And once more the settlers stood around an irregular hole in the ground on the Lutz knoll of land where little Dan lay.

  With scarcely a fortnight’s passing, a letter came from Louise Deal telling of Grandpa Deal’s death, too. In a winter of intense cold, little to eat, a dubious outlook for the future, and the worry of Abbie’s pregnancy, the news of kind Grandpa Deal’s death seemed too much to bear.

  “I sat by his bed and Ma was mending stockings over by the window where the light was,” Louise wrote. Yes, Grandma Deal would not want to be wasting any of the daylight, thought Abbie, as she read with tear-dimmed eyes. “He said, ‘Sis!’ . . . you know he sometimes called me that . . . ‘Sis, how do you reckon it’ll be, all gold and wings and harps and pearly gates? No meadows and lane roads and maple sap running and honey-locusts and young corn growing . . . and no jokes?’ I told him I didn’t know, and then in a little while he nodded his head over to where Ma was sitting and said, ‘Sis, it’ll be mighty lonesome sittin’ around waitin’ for her.’ And when I looked at him again he was dead.”

  Abbie could not see the rest of the letter for the tears. She had loved Will’s old father.