A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

The winter seemed nothing but snow and cold, trouble and misery. Only the children were happy. Too young to sense the desperate straits of the family, they played joyfully through the winter and worked cheerfully at the little tasks assigned them.

  It was cold and rainy through March and part of April. And then spring came. Spring on the prairie, with the teal flying out of the coarse grass, with the willow and the cottonwood and the elders over by Stove Creek bursting into green joyousness, with sweet-William and blue phlox, mousetail and wild indigo nosing up through the sod, with the odor of loam and sub-soil coming over the low rolling hills on the wings of every breeze, with the white clouds scudding low with the wind, and with hope, which springs eternal.

  To Abbie the winter had seemed one nightmare of trouble and one endless toot on an old cornet. Out of the hoarse and heterogeneous collection of sounds, Mack had evolved the faint semblance of two tunes. But the noisy affair had its advantage, for when he began herding hogs on the prairie, its guttural sounds assured her that he was all right.

  It was hard for Abbie to put in the garden. Nature did not mean to have a woman bend to severe tasks at such a time. Mack and Margaret did a great deal of it under her supervision. Mack, with his eight years, could hoe the rows, and Margaret, with her six, could drop and cover the seeds. Even little John, who was nearly three, wanted to “d’op ’em in,” but as he had a wild and superior disregard for keeping various seeds separate, he was persuaded to make mud pies at the edge of the patch.

  The Lutz store distributed government seeds and Will went hopefully to his spring planting. But first he tried hard to get rid of the young grasshoppers on his wheat acreage by laying long rows of straw across the fields into which the infant grasshoppers crawled for warmth. He then set fire to the straw and destroyed a portion in that way. With the other men of the neighborhood, he disposed of a countless number of the pests to the government for two dollars a bushel. Never was money more thankfully received.

  The small grain came up with much promise. More grasshoppers hatched, small as little gray-green flies, and promptly ate it up.

  In spite of the desperately hard times, Henry Lutz seemed able to buy another eighty. He paid one thousand dollars for the eighth-section, a nice acreage lying south of the young Cedartown. Incidentally, his heirs sold it many years later for twenty thousand dollars.

  All the neighbors now joined the Grange, a union of farmers, which some fondly thought would better conditions. It met in the schoolhouse, where there was a great deal of talk without much result, and where the women formed an auxiliary. Because of her condition, Abbie did not join, but she helped Sarah Lutz sew the regalia,—red calico robes, a cross between a cardinal’s vestments and a Mother-Hubbard, which were to be tied with white sashes. Sarah told Abbie confidentially that she was Pomona, and young Mrs. Oliver Johnson was Minerva and that Christine had been Scylla, but when they assigned her the name she thought, they said “Silly,” and had straightway announced that even if she couldn’t understand English very well, she knew when she was called names, and departed in high dudgeon.

  In May, two young men stopped at the house just before dusk. They were driving six hundred sheep from the Ozark Mountains through to Cozad, which lay beyond the hundredth meridian on the edge of the country known as the Great American desert.

  They were fine, upstanding fellows in their early twenties, the nephew of the editor of the Boston Transcript, and a chum. The uncle had just died the previous December and left the nephew five hundred dollars. With an equal amount of money the friend had joined him and formed a partnership. Besides the sheep, their chattels seemed to consist of a wagon, three small horses, a coffee-pot and a skillet.

  They made camp for the night a little to the north and east of the Deal place, taking from the wagon a collapsible corral consisting of yards and yards of muslin, one end of which they tied to the wagon wheel and then used stakes driven into the ground for temporary fence-posts around which to wrap the muslin.

  After the children were in bed, the young fellows came to the house and talked with Will, but Abbie stayed in the bedroom. The next morning they went on to add their fine young courage and energy to the building of the state.

  Only a few mornings later, Abbie sent Margaret out with the old dog to call Will in from the field, and told Mack to take John up to Reinmuellers. When Will came hurriedly in, he unhitched, threw a saddle on old Bird and rode over after Dr. Hornby. Sarah Lutz came riding out with the doctor in his cart and Christine came down, too. The baby was born in the afternoon.

  Abbie, relaxing, was filled with that age-old gratitude that her ordeal was over. Peace enveloped her,—peace and relative ease. Her fourth child! How queer! Well, she would love it and care for it tenderly. Looking out in the other room she could see Will and the doctor, Christine and Sarah all close together. They were whispering. It seemed silent out there,—too silent,—a whispering silence. A great fright seized her, so that she raised herself up and called sharply, “Will!”

  Will turned and came quickly into the bedroom.

  “What’s the matter, Will? I can tell there’s something the matter.”

  Will took Abbie’s hand. “It was a little son, Abbie.”

  “ ‘Was,’ Will? Not . . . not . . .?”

  “He didn’t live, Abbie-girl.”

  “Oh . . . no . . . no!” She broke into wild sobbing. “Oh, God, not that. He’s all right, Will. Go see if he isn’t all right. My babies are always all right.”

  But when Will did not go and only tried to quiet her, she had to believe it. She was inconsolable. “Will, it was because I didn’t want him at first.”

  And when he tried to reason with her, she would not listen. “I know better than any one. I’m punished. I didn’t tell anybody. But I was bitter. And now I’ve lost my baby.” In her whole life Abbie Deal never cried so wildly.

  Sarah Lutz dressed him,—Sarah, with her black beady eyes softened with tears. And then she brought him in,—a beautifully formed child with a face like a tiny white rose. Abbie wanted him beside her, wanted to hold him.

  “My baby . . . he’s so cold, Will. I never had a cold baby. I want him to be warm.” She did not talk rationally. “I hate death and I’m afraid of it. But I did want him, Will. After a while I wanted him. It was just at first.” Rachel, who lives again in every grieving mother, was crying for her child and would not be comforted. And when she had worn out her hysteria and quieted, she said she wanted him to have a name. “Basil, Will,—after my father.” Sarah came in and smoothed her hair, talked to her gently, and said they were going to take him over and put him by Dannie and Grandpa Lutz.

  “Ach!” Christine came in and clucked her sympathy. “A boy, too! With the land he should help.”

  Abbie turned her face to the wall. Christine had no finer feelings. She lay and thought of her sister Janet and her dead baby. She could hear the faint pound, pound, of a hammer out at the barn. Every hammer stroke hit her heart. They were going to take the baby over to the Lutz burial knoll. There was no one there but Dannie and Grandpa Lutz. Dannie . . . Grandpa Lutz . . . and now little Basil Deal . . . three to make a cemetery. In a new country you had to make homes and roads and wells and schools . . . and you had to make a cemetery. You couldn’t get around it . . . you had to make a cemetery, too.

  She lay there and thought of the knoll and the prairie grass and the low picket fence against which the tumbleweeds piled . . . where the blackbirds wheeled and the sun beat down and the wind blew. She hated the barrenness of it. If she could put him in a shady place it wouldn’t be quite so hard. But to put him in the sun and the coarse grass and the wind! She and Sarah would go over and plant some trees some day. She heard the rattle of the lumber-wagon and raised herself up to look through the little half-window set in the sod. She could see Will and Sarah in the wagon. Will was driving, and Sarah had a little wooden box across her lap. When the big lumber-wagon rattled away from the house, Abbie lay back on her pillow. For a lon
g time she could hear the sound of the lumber-wagon rattling over the prairie.

  CHAPTER XVI

  It was several weeks before Abbie could get around again to do all her work. Christine or Sarah came over and helped a little each day. Service finds its greatest opportunity and its least begrudged hours of labor among neighbors in a new community through which lines have not been drawn and into which class has not yet come.

  Abbie could not get over the loss of her little son. Always she saw him in shadowy outline among the others. All her life she was to say, “Now he would be seven,” “To-day he would be twelve,” “He could have voted to-day for the first time.” Yes, Abbie Deal was a born mother,—one of those women who love the touch of baby flesh, who cuddle little children to them, who, when their own babies have grown, catch up some other woman’s child to fondle.

  On the day in June in which Abbie did her first full day’s work, the grasshoppers lifted their wings and flew to other fields,—as complete and unified a departure as their coming had been.

  There was no small grain that summer, but a half-hearted corn crop seemed on the way. Settlers by the score were returning east. Scarcely a day passed which did not see some forlorn group go by the house. Many of the covered wagons carried statements painted on their wagons, which would have been humorous if they had not been so tragic. “Going back to Pa and Ma,” was one. Another held a huge caricature of a grasshopper strangling a man with its forelegs and antennæ, and the laconic words, “He wins.”

  Abbie, standing at the door and watching one of these bedraggled-looking outfits pass, said bitterly to Will, “When do you think our time is coming? Look at the clouds, Will. Even the clouds seem always going east.”

  Will did not answer. He turned on his heel and went down to the straw-covered dug-out which served as a barn. Watching him go, in his faded blue shirt and overalls with their many patchings, and his dingy old hat, Abbie called to her mind the fine figure he had made in his wedding suit,—fine enough to draw the attention of any exacting young woman. Ten years ago! And the minister at home had said you could do anything with your life. But that was not so. Life did things to you. Ten years! Small wonder that love would break under circumstances like these. Standing there in the soddie door, she seemed two personalities. One argued bitterly that it was impossible for love to keep going when there was no hope for the future, suggested that there was no use trying to keep it going. The other said sternly that marriage was not the fulfillment of a passion,—marriage was the fulfillment of love. And love was sometimes pleasure and sometimes duty.

  “You traitor,” she said suddenly to herself, “You Judas! As though hard luck could kill my love for Will! Will’s not to blame. It’s a fine love that a little bad luck can smother! It can’t touch it . . . it can’t. Love is the light that you see by. It’s all in the world we’ve got to light our way, and it takes both of us to keep it bright. And I’m not doing my share . . . I’m not. I’m glum and sad and discouraged. And I’m not going to be any more. There are only two things that can help us,—and that’s our courage and our love. From this very minute on I’m going to try to cheer Will up more. I’m through being down-hearted.”

  She turned to the children. They were all around the table looking at a little picture Margaret had drawn. Margaret was always drawing. Abbie ran to them, closed warm maternal arms around all three, and bumped them together in a return of girlish spirits, so that they laughed at her unusual playfulness, their faces sparkling because Mother was full of fun. How readily they responded to all her moods. And how careful she must be with those childish impressions.

  “You shall wear them, Margaret,” she kissed her little daughter, “you shall wear them yet.”

  “Wear what, Mother?”

  “The pearls.”

  “What are pearls, Mother?”

  “Wait . . . I’ll show you.”

  She got it from under the bed,—the old calf-skin box, and the children gathered close with excited anticipation. She took the pearls out and ran them through her fingers.

  “Oh, Mother . . . the pretty beads!” Margaret’s gray eyes glowed.

  “Shucks, I’d rather have a watch,” from the masculine Mack. Little John was not even interested.

  Abbie laughed and held them up, their creamy luster inappropriate against her work-worn hand. She put them around Margaret’s little sunburned neck, and they hung down over the dingy gray calico dress with incongruous comparison.

  “You shall wear them, darling. Some day you shall. We’re going to make it come true. We’ve got to make it come true.” She caught Margaret to her. “It takes faith and courage and love and prayer and work and a little singing to keep up your spirits, but we’re going to do it.”

  In September, Mack and Margaret started to school to a little new one-roomed frame building which some one already had christened the Woodpecker School. Little Emma Lutz started, too, and two more of the Reinmueller boys,—Christine’s idea being that it would be a good thing for them to know how to write their names, at least, and figure up bushels. On good days the children trudged the long grassy way, and on bad days, Will stopped his work long enough to take them in the wagon. Abbie shed copious tears the first morning they started, and then laughed at her own inconsistency.

  “I wanted them to have a school closer than Sodom to go to, and then I cry when they do have,” she said to Will. But Will said he knew how she felt. Will was always so understanding, Abbie thought gratefully.

  That winter of ’76 and ’77 was another one of great hardship, but like many things in life, it had its pleasant side. A reading circle was formed and met at Woodpecker School every Friday night. Its members wore ribbon badges upon which Sarah Lutz and Abbie had printed the mysterious letters “S.C.L.R.C.,” which, when the mystery was eliminated, were discovered to stand for the title of Stove Creek Precinct Literary Reading Circle. The membership was divided, like all Gaul, into three parts, and if there were not Belgians, Helvetians and Germans who fought and bled, at least, the “Reds,” the “Blues,” and the “Yellows” met in forensic frays. On one Friday night the “Reds” performed, the next two Fridays the “Blues” and “Yellows” respectively, and on the fourth Friday night a big contest was staged, in which the star members of the various colors mingled in one grand rainbow spectrum, with people imported from outside the precinct sitting in judgment upon the efforts. That winter the schooner Hesperus was wrecked, little Paul Dombey died, Hamlet met his father’s ghost and the Raven quothed more times than there were meetings,—new “pieces” being at a premium, as they were.

  Whole families came, ensconced on straw in the bottom of wagon-boxes which had been put upon bob-sleds. Every one brought heated soap-stones or hot flat-irons, as more than one load came from twenty miles away. The Henry Lutzes brought their reed-organ in the sleigh each time, so there was always music. Abbie was put on for a group of songs whenever the “Blues” performed, and always led the chorus singing. “Three Blind Mice” and “Scotland’s Burning” were the favorite rounds. As for the favorite choruses, while great partiality was shown toward “Juanita,” “Annie Laurie” and “Revive Us Again,” for sheer volume there was nothing like “Pull For the Shore” to open the throttle. Young blades who could not carry a tune were filled with an irresistible impulse to sing whenever the life-line was brought out, and when the sailors began to make more rapid progress toward the lighthouse, they would grab oars, as it were, open their mouths and bellow like young steers.

  In September of 1877, Abbie gave birth to a girl. The high bleating cries of the child were music to the mother who could never erase from her mind the misery of that whispering silence of two years before. They named the little girl Isabelle. “Maybe she’ll be the lovely lady,” Abbie thought as she ran her fingers through the tiny moist ringlets of reddish-brown hair.

  The first Sunday Abbie could get out, Will hitched up the horses to the lumber-wagon, and they drove to the dedication of the new frame churc
h near the Lutz store. Henry Lutz had donated the land, and a dollar collected here and another one there, had bought the lumber which was hauled from Nebraska City. All the men of the community for miles around had given their time for the labor, and now a little unpainted church stood at the four corners.

  It had been nine years now since the Deal and Lutz and Reinmueller wagons had first crawled across the prairie. A few fences had appeared, and the old buffalo trail had begun to take upon itself the semblance of a roadway. Tracks were plainly visible, worn by the feet of a thousand oxen and horses and the wide iron rims of the dingy prairie schooners. Between the trails the grass still flaunted, and the graceful goldenrod nodded its plumed head, as a queen bows when her subjects pass by. Sweet William and blue phlox, mouse-tail and wild indigo crowded the grass of the roadway, and when the tiny primrose was gone, yellow and white mustard elbowed their way in to take the place.

  The cottonwoods had shot up with unbelievable growth. The leaves, with their peculiar double motion, seemed always twinkling, always dancing. The silhouettes of the grayish-green clumps against the prairie sky were Abbie’s poetry and her paintings, her sermons and her songs.

  Cedartown now had its church and its school, its store and blacksmith shop, and six houses assembled in the same vicinity. And it had its cemetery, for Henry Lutz had given the community the knoll where Dannie lay. There were seven mounds inside the picket fence where herding stock could not trample. Yes, in a new country you have to make a cemetery.

  Crops were no better. They were put in each year with hope, and they came up with promise. But the dry, fluffy clouds scudded high across the blue sky without moisture, or the hot winds blew, and the settlers would harvest a scant half-crop. In some way, Will and Abbie held body and soul together. In some way, the children seemed to get enough to eat and to thrive and grow.

  In the fall of ’79 a man with a violin case stopped at the house and asked if he could have supper. He had been drinking, and Will, contrary to his usual hospitable manner, talked with him for some time before he decided to invite him to stay.