A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  It had been thirteen years since Abbie and Will had followed the trail behind old Red and Baldy, and Abbie had not been back home.

  “You can come back to visit whenever you want to, I promise you that, Abbie,” Will had said. And she had not gone back once. But she did not blame Will. He had been helpless to keep that promise. And now this summer he said that she must go. All the plans were made, with a new brown cashmere dress in the process of construction. Abbie sang at her work, that after all these years she was to go back home and see her mother and Belle, Janet and Mary and the boys.

  And then, Mack did not feel well. Dr. Hornby came and after some time decided it was to be a run of fever,—typhoid. Abbie put away the unfinished dress and hung over Mack’s bed for weeks. He pulled through, but by the time he was strong enough to be up, the fall had come and the rains, so that the roads to Lincoln and Nebraska City were impassable, and Abbie’s plan for a trip back home had gone into nothing.

  It was only a few weeks later that Will came in from putting up the team after a trip to Weeping Water and said: “Abbie, you can get out your old paints. There’s a woman in Weeping Water just come from some place back east and they say she’s a real artist. They say she’ll take some pupils and I told ’em my wife was always wanting to try her hand . . .”

  Abbie was already on her way to the calf-skin box under the bed, with Margaret close behind her. When she had come out with the chest and opened it, Margaret was still at her elbow, her gray eyes wide with anticipation.

  “Oh, Mother,—I didn’t know you had any paints now. You just said you used to . . . Oh, Mother, why did you never tell me?”

  “Why did you want to know?”

  The young girl’s eyes were bright gray lights. “Oh, Mother . . . I want to use them . . . I want to go and see that woman . . . Oh, Mother . . . something in me . . .”

  Will was cross. “That’ll do, Margaret. You don’t understand. Before you were born, when your mother came out here, she wanted to . . .”

  “Will,” said Abbie sternly, “hush! Of course you may try them, Margaret. And we’ll take you over to Weeping Water some time to see the artist.”

  When Abbie left the room, Margaret did not even look up. She was sorting the tubes in the little box, touching them lovingly as one would touch jewels.

  When Mack was seventeen, he went to Omaha with his father and came back changed. He was through with farm life and he didn’t care who knew it. Will said he’d better settle down and get to work and Mack said no, he wanted to get a job in Omaha. Will said it was a boy’s fool notion and Mack said it was nothing of the kind, that he was almost eighteen and he knew what he wanted. Never did Abbie feel so helpless to handle a situation, so uncertain what to say or do.

  “He doesn’t want to sweat,” Will told her with sarcasm. “He wants to wear a white collar.”

  “What do you want to do up there?” Abbie was trying to keep the conversation peaceful.

  “Oh, I don’t know just what. Get in somewhere and work up.”

  “Get in somewhere . . . but where . . . and what?” Will had no patience with the wild scheme.

  “Anything that’s where there’s business and a big town . . . anything but the farm.”

  And Will had said that the Deals had always been for the land.

  Abbie stood between them for days. “Oh, Will, don’t you see? The farm is distasteful to Mack.”

  “A farm has been good enough for smarter men than Mack.”

  “We don’t all want to do the same thing, and Will, you said you couldn’t do anything just working for your father. You’ve always been so understanding. Then try to understand Mack.”

  Abbie talked and prayed. “Oh, God, it’s such little things we need help in,—such every day affairs.” She saw Will’s disappointment and she saw Mack’s ambitions. Torn between the two, she could only smooth matters over for both.

  “Let him go, then,” Will said suddenly, as one who could no longer hold to his point. “But I wish to God, Margaret and Isabelle had been boys. Maybe we could get something done around here then.” He slammed the kitchen door and went down to the barn. Abbie, fighting back the tears, told herself that he didn’t mean it. Will loved his girls,—and he didn’t mean it.

  By fall Mack had a job in an Omaha bank. Henry Lutz knew one of the officers well, and it was through him that Mack landed the work which consisted in part of sweeping and dusting, but which “beat plowing corn all to pieces,” according to the wielder of the broom and duster.

  Abbie had thought she could not stand it to see Mack leave home. All day long she had sewed shirts and mended socks for him,—and all night she had stared into the dark with the worry of her boy going to the city. But with the arrival of his letters, some of her anxiety vanished. When at Christmas time he came home to spend the day, he was full of “bank talk.” One would have gathered from his conversation that he was at least on the board of directors.

  In the spring of ’85, the day which had been set aside by the various governors for planting trees was legalized as a holiday,—and J. Sterling Morton had given Arbor Day to Nebraska, which, in turn, was eventually to give it to the other states. That summer Abbie again planned the delayed trip back home. Before she was ready word was noised about that an academy was to open in Weeping Water in the fall. It was to have a full three-year academic course preparing students for college, with special attention to the languages.

  “For what anybody two vays vant to talk . . .?” Christine asked.

  “I felt like telling her no one could object if she would stick to one way,” Abbie told Will. Christine’s language was no better than when she had first arrived in the prairie schooner. Quite often she used both the German and the English words in the same sentence.

  Emma Lutz, Margaret’s chum, and a year younger, was going to the academy. Henry and Sarah drove over to Weeping Water in their high-topped buggy with the natural-colored maple wheels and a red tassel on the whip, to get a place for Emma to board.

  Abbie could think of nothing else when she heard it. An academy! Margaret ought to go,—Margaret, at sixteen, with her braids of soft dark hair, her big gray eyes, her gentle manner, and her love of painting. She ought to have more schooling, to meet more young people. Several times that summer Emil Reinmueller had come over to take her to neighborhood socials. It worried Abbie a little. Emil was nineteen, a blond young giant, stolid, crude, virile. What if . . .? “Thou art mated to a clown and the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down,” Abbie had read from Tennyson’s Locksley Hall. Emil was no mate for Margaret with her love of the niceties of life. What could a mother do? What had her mother done? Nothing. “I married the man I wanted,” Abbie thought. What if Margaret, with her high ideals and her painting talent—what if she should suddenly turn and say, “Mother, I’m going to marry Emil.” What could one do? The worry of it was constantly with Abbie.

  She began trying to plan how she could send Margaret to the academy with little expense. The money for the trip back home would pay the first tuition. Will did not like the idea. “You’ve planned this trip for years. You ought not to give it up for her. And she’s just where she can really help you, now, at home.” He argued, “You’ve got yourself to think about.”

  “Oh, no, I haven’t,” Abbie said quickly, “I’ve got the children to think about.”

  He gave in, a little grudgingly. If Abbie thought she could manage—And Abbie knew she must manage.

  She took the team and drove the ten miles to Weeping Water. When she came back, she had a place in the minister’s family for Margaret to work for her board, and a dress pattern of red and gray plaid for best. It was all they could afford now, but on the way home Abbie mentally made over Margaret’s old dress and one of her own, trimmed a hat, and relined a winter coat.

  In the last half of the summer they tied two quilts, as Margaret had to furnish her own bedding. They made over the clothes in accordance with Abbie’s previous brain
convolutions, mended cotton stockings, ironed out hair ribbons, made a work-apron out of flour-sacking, and packed and repacked the small trunk. Abbie could not think how the home would be without Margaret. Quiet, gentle, fun-loving, ready to help, Margaret had always been at her right hand.

  Will was to take Margaret and Emma in the lumber-wagon, so the trunks could go with them. Emma had several new dresses and a dolman,—the latest thing in wraps. It was made of black watered silk, waist length in the back and to the bottom of the skirt in front, with cape-like appendages for sleeves, and rows of braid, cord, beads and buttons rambling nonchalantly all over the whole structure. Added to this grandeur was a new gold watch on a long chain which went twice around her neck and eventually came to rest in a pocket sewed on her bosom, the pocket constructed of lace so that the gold of the watch would shine through. Henry Lutz was very proud of his purchase. “There’s a whole horse around Emma’s neck,” he would announce with complacence. It sounded rather startling at first hearing, until one realized he meant no acrobatic feat, but that the price of a horse had gone into the chain.

  Will went over to town after Emma and her trunk first, and then the two came back to the farm for Margaret, who had been ready for an hour.

  “You’re sure you’ll get along, Mother?”

  “Why, of course I’ll get along.” Abbie was outwardly calm and confident, while all the time there was that queer sensation of a wind rushing by,—a wind she could not stop,—Time going by which she could not stay. Oh, stop the clock hands! Stop Time for a minute until she could think whether it was right for Margaret to go away and leave her.

  “Good-by, dear!” Oh, stop the clock hands!

  Will was calling. “Trunk’s in. All ready in there?” Stop Time for a while,—until she could think—!

  “Oh, Mother, do you think I ought to go?”

  “Of course you ought to go.” Head up, Abbie was smiling.

  “Good-by, then . . .!”

  They were down the lane road now, past the Lombardy poplars. Now they had turned east onto the main road. Margaret was dividing her handkerchief between her eyes and waving. Abbie waved and smiled,—waved and smiled,—as long as they were in sight. Then she turned and ran blindly into her bedroom and shut the door. And, whether she has driven away in a lumber-wagon or a limousine, the mother whose daughter has left her for the first time, will understand why Abbie Deal ran blindly into her bedroom and shut the door.

  CHAPTER XIX

  That fall, Dr. Hornby, Henry Lutz and Will Deal went up to Omaha to interview the powers that were, in regard to the railroad coming through Cedartown instead of farther to the north as the plans seemed to be. Later the Superintendent came down and was driven through the farming section by Henry Lutz. In consequence, Cedartown drew the branch line, and with many an expression of high glee, figuratively made faces at the Weeping Water delegation which had worked against the southern route.

  Margaret’s school year was a wonderful experience. There were thirty tuition pupils, about half from the town of Weeping Water and half from farm homes. The minister, in whose family Margaret stayed, had a nephew who was studying to be a doctor, and who had come to visit his uncle. “His name is Fred Baker and I wish you could know him, Mother,” Margaret reported. “You never in your life saw such a fine young man.”

  Abbie wondered.

  In July of ’86, the railroad was finished through to Lincoln. And now, Cedartown would no longer sit out on the prairie by herself. No longer would twenty-three miles of snow drifts or deep ruts of mud lie between her and the capital city. Cedartown residents held their heads a little higher, spoke largely of “train-time” and “making connections for Omaha.” Already the stones were in place for the foundation of the station. A train each way every day, mail in a sack being thrown carelessly out of a baggage-car instead of from a pony’s back, a telegraph machine clicking noisily in a three-roomed station. What more metropolitan atmosphere could one desire?

  The day that the first train came through was a gala one. Word had been wafted about by some occult means that any one who wanted to do so could ride to the end of the line free of charge. The entire Cedartown population, including two puppies and a cat, was on hand to pile hilariously into the box-cars and ride to the end of the road. Old Asy Drumm took his hammer and his saw and his tobacco, and drove over to the track with the Deals, as he had just finished building another room to the rear of the house. Upon their return from the free railroad trip, Abbie and Margaret began painting the pine woodwork in the new kitchen. Margaret, since her year in the academy, was a little fussy about the way things looked.

  Abbie’s plans for going back home that summer had gone into nothing on account of the new kitchen and the fact that she realized more and more that, because Isabelle was the musical one of the family, she must have an organ.

  The Lutzes were getting Emma a fine new piano, so Will bought their second-hand reed-organ. On Isabelle’s ninth birthday he brought it home in the lumber-wagon. Isabelle was beside herself with excitement. Her little legs pumped furiously up and down to get air into the creature’s cloth lungs and her little, slender, tapering fingers ran nimbly over the keys.

  Abbie, herself, sat down and tried to pick out a few chords of an old song, but her fingers were stiff and clumsy.

  “By George, you’re the one that ought to take lessons,” Will said suddenly, “the way you always wanted . . .”

  “No . . .” Abbie got up from the whirling carpet-covered stool. “No.” Her lips trembled a little so that she did not look up. “At forty it’s too late.”

  In the spring of ’87 the community was presented with the first issue of the Cedartown Headlight, a small sheet with growing pains. It contained a great many items pertaining to “the growth of our fair city.” It said that Mr. William Deal arrived in front of the editorial office in a fine new green lumber-wagon with red wheels, that on April fools’ day a cow of Mr. Oscar Lutz’s presented him with twin calves, that a box social was held in the G. A. R. hall, at which a good time was had by all. One gathered from an editorial that subscriptions could be paid with cobs, butchered beef and money, but that the greatest of these was money.

  Crops continued to be good. Abbie thought that this coming summer of ’87 would prove to be the one in which she could go back home. And then, before she was ready, she knew she was to be a mother. With Isabelle, her youngest child, nearly ten, Abbie thought she could not face motherhood again,—not at forty-one.

  “That means I wont go back to the academy, Mother,” Margaret told her. But Abbie said she would manage, that she had to manage somehow, for Margaret must finish.

  In the fall, with Will protesting a little, Margaret and John both went to Weeping Water to school. And in November, Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie died, without having seen Abbie in twenty years. Bitterness came over Abbie with her grief. Why should life on the prairie have demanded so much of her? Why should twenty years have been so hard, so barren? By her condition, both her grief and her bitterness were accentuated.

  At Christmas time, which was cold with deep snow, Margaret and John came home,—Margaret with her gray eyes luminous, her cheeks flushed with prairie-rose tints. She could not wait to tell her mother shyly that the young Fred Baker, who was a nephew of the minister, had been there again. He had only two more years in medical school and then he would be Doctor Fred Baker. He wanted her to write to him. And she liked him,—oh, how she liked him.

  And Abbie wondered.

  John, serious, quiet, “liked his work all right.” Of all the children, John was the hardest to understand. One almost had to read his mind to get anything out of him. Mack, too, was home for the day. He had graduated from the broom-and-dust-cloth and was on the books all the time. His round face, from which the freckles had miraculously disappeared, had taken on a more alert look, his round china-blue eyes a keener expression.

  Isabelle played and sang for them, “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” and “Bonny C
harlie’s Now Awa’,” her childish voice soaring forth lustily, her slim little legs pumping vigorously.

  Abbie was thankful the children were all doing so well.

  Christmas over, Mack left for Omaha, and after New Year, Margaret and John went back to the academy. Elsa Reinmueller came over three mornings in the week to help.

  On the afternoon of the twelfth of January, Abbie put her shawl over her shoulders and walked down the road to Reinmuellers’. The day was like a spring one,—a soft, mild, spring day.

  “It’s probably the last time I can go to any of the neighbor’s,” she had said to Will, “and it will do Christine good to think I made the effort to come over once more to see her.”

  The sun was warm. There was moisture on the sides of the cedars and cottonwoods. Hens scratched in the damp, steaming ground on the south side of the straw stacks, their liege lords crowing ecstatically over their activities.

  Abbie walked cumbersomely, heavy with child. It was hard for her at forty-one to get about. The old buffalo trail of twenty years before, with its faintly outlined tracks, was a well-defined road now, running on to the big town of Lincoln, as straight as the crow, except for one short deviation, where it formed a letter S over the new Missouri Pacific railroad.

  As she neared the Reinmueller house, Gus drove out of the yard with two of the younger boys on their way to town.

  Abbie drew her shawl closer around her and called pleasantly, “Spring is here.”

  “Ya,” shouted Gus. “She’s come, all right. Weather-breeder, that’s what she is. Ya . . . look at that.” Pigeons had settled down before his horses’ hoofs, to rise with a whirr of wings and settle again. What did Gus mean? Was it a bad sign? Grandma Deal would have said it was.