A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  And then it was time to go downstairs. Margaret and young Doctor Fred Baker came down the enclosed pine stairway and across the parlor, Margaret’s silk dress dragging stylishly over the red and green spirals of the sale carpet. Isabelle pedaled and played the wedding march, lustily, the sound of the wind pumping into the reeds rather prominent above the melody.

  A solemn hush fell on the friends gathered from all the farms and the little village. Abbie stood by Will, who was holding Grace in his arms. John was at her other side. Mack sauntered over and stood by Emma Lutz. Isabelle stopped playing and the voice of the preacher came hurtling against the silence:

  “Inasmuch as we are gathered together—”

  Abbie thought she could not stand it. She must call out in one great scream that she could not let her little girl go away from her.

  “For better or for worse.” Oh, God, don’t let Margaret have to go through all the hardships I did.

  “Until death do you part.” There, they were speaking of death again. Why did they always talk about death when there was only life before them?

  “Do you take this man. . . .”

  And now Abbie was going to break down and cry. She threw up her head. No, not a tear, not a single tear! If she started, she would turn into a Niobe to weep herself to death.

  And then, quite suddenly, Margaret Deal was Mrs. Fred Baker.

  After that, with Isabelle pumping away faithfully, if windily, on the “Blue Danube Waltz,” and “By the Blue Alsatian Mountains,” some of the young folks danced on the new sale carpet, with the straw underneath working itself up into little hummocks.

  There were biscuits and pressed chickens, cakes and lemonade out on the side porch. Christine Reinmueller and Sarah Lutz took turns in shaking the fly-brush with its long paper streamers over the tables, so that no unusual number of flies would light on the food. Every one had a grand and glorious time. There was only one queer thing about the whole affair,—a new dish among the refreshments which no one in the community had served before. Men folks going home, asked their wives why in Sam Hill the potatoes were all cold, and their wives said to hush and not show their ignorance, that it was something new called “potato salad” and it was supposed to be cold. At which, most of the men laughed long and raucously and said by golly, for their part, they’d take theirs hot-fried or baked in the skins.

  And back on the porch of the farmhouse behind the cedars, Abbie Deal stood and watched her married daughter drive away under the starlit summer sky. Then she turned and went into the kitchen and wound the old Seth Thomas clock with the little brown church painted on the glass.

  CHAPTER XXI

  After Margaret’s marriage, life seemed to move along in a monotonous regularity that summer. Letters came from her twice a week and they were full of enthusiasm and plans. It was nice to have her so happily married, Abbie thought. Mack did not write so often. When he did, the letter was brief and businesslike. He had received a raise in wages. The president, himself, commended him about something. Omaha was growing. You would be surprised to see how large it was getting. One gathered the impression from Mack that he was joint-owner in all the enterprises. Well, it was a good trait, Abbie thought. Loyalty! It was nice for a boy to feel so much a part of a town.

  John was helping his father with the farm work,—a silent boy. Abbie, looking at him curiously at times, wondered if she would ever understand him. Isabelle, at twelve, was practicing several hours a day, with no coaxing, “General Grant’s Grand March” and “Dance of the Flowers.” Sometimes, in her interest over it, she would forget time altogether, and Abbie would scold, “Come, Isabelle, too much of that at once isn’t good for you.” Little Grace at eighteen months was toddling everywhere and into everything. It seemed to Abbie that she pulled her out of one thing, only to turn and see her getting into something else. She loved her deeply. “Whatever would we have done without her?” she would say to Will.

  There had been days of ordinary happenings in the summer of ’89 until the heat of August hung over the land like a blanket.

  Abbie had learned to know the prairie in all its moods,—and the mood of August was a lazy, somnolent one. There was a noticeable decrease in the songs of birds, for molting time had begun, although one could hear the cardinal’s “what cheer” and the pee-wee calling his own name with plaintive patience all through the day and even after sunset and twilight. Elderberry bushes massed along Stove Creek, had exchanged their lacy headgear for black bonnets of ripe fruit. Along the grassy roadway, one’s skirts touched Queen Anne’s lace, field mustard and yarrow. Wild morning-glories tangled through the grass, and metallic beetles of iridescent red and green climbed the sticky stems of milkweeds. The yellow of sunflowers, the white of boneset and the azure blue of chicory stood in friendly groups on all sides, and everywhere there were plumes of goldenrod, like plumes from the hats of lovely ladies. Spiders, the highwaymen of all the insects, spread their webs in the pastures to hold up their victims. A covey of baby quail, nearly full-grown, could be flushed almost any time a horse and rider crossed a field, and down by the creek bed the mink and muskrat families had begun breaking home ties, with the brown sons and daughters hunting for themselves.

  On one of these August afternoons, with the sun hot, and the hollyhocks blood-red against Abbie’s white pickets, with the sound of crooning hens outside the windows and a settled air of languor over the whole farm, Abbie heard a sound of snorting horses, and looked out of the east kitchen window to see John’s team charging down the field, the knives of the mower close upon their heels, and John not in sight.

  With a horrible sensation of fright, so nightmarish that she seemed not able to pull her wooden limbs along, she ran out. John was lying against the barbed wire of the fence, white as the pickets of the garden gate, a sickening stream of scarlet trickling from his foot. Ill at the sight, Abbie ran to a small new plum tree and broke off its top. She pulled up the lower barbed wire of the fence and crawled through, snatching off her apron, and binding it above the ankle, with the plum stick knotted in between, John’s eyes opened, and clung in fright to his mother.

  “Mother, do something for me,” he moaned in the old, little-boy way.

  Abbie heard some one, who seemed not herself, saying, in a steady cool voice, “Yes, John, trust Mother.”

  The horses, frothing, now, at the bits and flanks, were standing against the fence at the far side of the field, trying to reach green corn-ears over the wire. Across the hay-stubble Abbie ran to them. On the way she kept saying, “Oh, God . . . one more thing . . . help me through this one more thing.” With frantic movements, she unhitched and led the team back into the yard and hitched them to the lumber-wagon. She seemed to have acquired Amazonian strength. Isabelle, who had run out, was crying in silent fright. “Bring pillows from the beds,” Abbie called. Back into the field she drove in the wagon. Fearful to leave the horses, which had not yet settled down to their usual docility, she tied them to the fence post.

  “Mother . . . do something.”

  “Yes, John,—trust Mother.”

  Together, Abbie and Isabelle, pulling and lifting, got the suffering boy into the wagon with his head on a pillow. Already the apron was scarlet. Abbie jerked off the wagon-seat, piling the other pillows on it, and propped up the mangled foot. She jumped out, untied the team, and climbed back over the wheel into the wagon-box.

  “Look after the baby,” she called to Isabelle, and started the horses out of the field on a gallop. Against the dashboard she stood and clung to the lines which almost cut her as they sawed through her hands. The wagon bounced and careened and rocked. The pins came from Abbie’s hair, and the red-brown mass, faded now, and with a few graying streaks, fell over her shoulders.

  In Cedartown, people ran out of their houses and looked after her. As she reached Dr. Hornby’s, she had to use all her strength to get the team stopped. Men, running out from the little stores, came to help, catching the horses by the bits and tying them to one of
the long row of hitching posts. Dr. Hornby and Henry Lutz and Asy Drumm carried the boy into the one-story office.

  “Stay by me, Mother.”

  “Yes, John, I won’t leave you.”

  Abbie held the boy’s hand, her thick hair still tumbled over her shoulders while Dr. Hornby cut and cleansed and tied. When the last neat bandage was fastened, Abbie Deal slipped to the floor in a crumpled heap.

  John’s life was saved only by a few moments,—only by the time gained through Abbie’s wild drive into town. For weeks, his foot propped in its one position, he suffered all the agonies of a cut and tortured tendon of Achilles. And always he was to carry a horny scar.

  It was the nearest that death had come to the family since Abbie’s long illness. Will and Abbie, sitting on the side porch, on a warm August evening, talked of it in low tones.

  “Death . . . Will,” Abbie said. “How the fear of it always hangs over me. If John had died . . .”

  “Death,” Will repeated it. “Death . . .” He looked beyond the Lombardy poplars, stared for a moment up into the deepening prairie twilight. “I wonder why we fear it?” He spoke as though to himself. “The naturalness of it! Wild geese flying over . . . cattle coming home . . . birds to their nests . . . leaves to the winter mold . . . the last sleep. How natural they all are, and yet of them all, we fear only the sleep. When my time comes I wish my family and friends could think of it that way . . . without tears.”

  “Oh, Will, don’t talk so. If you should be taken away from me, I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Oh, yes, you could, Abbie-girl. You could stand it. It’s the people who have loved and then lost their love . . . who have failed each other in some way, who couldn’t stand it. With you and me . . . all we’ve been through together and all we’ve meant to each other . . . with us, it couldn’t be so terrible. Nothing could take away the past from us. You are so much a part of me, that if you were taken away, I think it would seem that you just went on with me. And I’m sure if I were the one taken I would go on with you, remembering all you had been to me.”

  So seldom did Will speak that which was in his heart. And now he had spoken. Abbie sat and looked out into the star-filled sky. There were the summer night odors,—clover hay and ripening apples and sweet alyssum. There were the summer night sounds,—cicada and frogs and a crooning bird. There were the summer night movements,—the trembling of the leaves on the poplars, a night hawk dipping low, a bit of lacy cloud slipping across the moon. For a moment, Abbie Deal seemed greater than herself, larger than humanity. For a brief time, a sense of deep wisdom was within her, a flood of infinite strength and peace enveloped her.

  I would go on with you . . . remembering . . .

  All fall and early winter John, suffering, blue, discouraged, was kept in with his bad foot. It had been a terrible cut, but it was healing; and he was not going to be crippled, thanks to the ministrations of a country doctor with few instruments and meager equipment, but with a sound surgical knowledge. Young Dr. Frederick Baker commended the older doctor’s care of the case with the cheerful condescension of the recent graduate.

  By studying at home and taking his tests, John was able to graduate with his class at the academy. Still favoring his foot a little, he went into the field with his father.

  That summer of ’90 was the summer of the great drought. Day after day, Will came into the kitchen with the pails of morning milk to say, “Another scorcher. Not a cloud in the sky.”

  The hot belching winds blew in from the southwest. The grass in the pastures knotted and scorched on its roots. The brittle leaves of weeds rattled, like so many tiny castanets, whenever the chickens walked through them. Blackberries hardened on the bushes and fell to the ground. Raspberries were purple warts. Peaches dried in the forming.

  The small grain amounted to very little. The corn began to curl and brown and bake on its roots. Crops were stillborn in the womb of Nature.

  Reports from other parts of the country were the same. The state seemed to have slipped backward into its beginnings, to be going through the same hard period experienced in the ’seventies. Rumor came from the northern border that the Indians were dancing the ghost dance. Abbie commenced to wish the family had not been so extravagant,—buying the organ and the carpet, and building on the room. That joke of hers about the fall of Rome was beginning to seem ill-timed.

  But the bad summer seemed not to bother the children. Grace was two and a half now, “a smart little tike,” every one said. Margaret came home sometimes, but her young doctor husband was too fearful of missing a case in the growing town of Lincoln to leave often. Margaret was as happy as Abbie had ever wished her to be. She was busy, too, with her painting, reveling in the time and opportunity to work with it. She brought sketches out to show Abbie and the two spent long moments talking them over.

  Mack had good reports to make. Whenever he came for an occasional Sunday in his friendly, breezy way, Abbie always felt a renewal of pride in his virile young manhood, a feeling of elation over his unceasing energy.

  “People like Mack,” she would say to Will, “but what’s better, they have confidence in him.”

  John was Will’s standby in the farm work. Quiet, serious, seldom speaking his mind, he seemed to Abbie more and more like Will.

  Isabelle was talking and thinking “music” all day. She was taking lessons now from a woman in Cedartown. Abbie always drove with her over to town on Saturday afternoons. While Isabelle took her lesson, Abbie traded out the butter and eggs she had brought to the Lutz store.

  On one late Saturday afternoon in October, as Abbie was taking Isabelle over to town for her music lesson, she met Dr. Fred and Margaret riding out home with Oscar Lutz. They had come on the late afternoon train to surprise the home folks.

  A warm feeling of happiness was with Abbie when she drove the old white mare back toward the lane road by the Lombardy poplars. Mack was coming the next day, too. Never did life seem so complete as when the children were all at home. Home was the hub of the wheel. Always she and Will would live there, and always, no matter where the children’s activities led them, they would come home to father and mother in the white farmhouse behind the cedars. She was thinking this in a general way, and that she would have chicken and hot biscuits for Sunday dinner, when she turned into the lane road by the poplars.

  Every one was out by the windmill,—John, Margaret, Dr. Fred Baker, Grace, Oscar Lutz, Gus Reinmueller. They were standing in a group,—a quiet, silent group,—only standing and doing nothing. Something smote Abbie like a chilling hand, clutching at her heart and throat. There was complete silence in the crowd,—a whispering silence,—the same hushed silence of the time when the baby was born dead. They all turned when she came up the lane road,—turned toward her, but did not move,—looked at her,—and were silent. Abbie got out of the buggy with wooden movements and went over to the group. Dr. Fred Baker was kneeling on the grass. By his side Will lay at the foot of the windmill, staring beyond the Lombardy poplars.

  Abbie knelt down by him, too. But he did not look at her. He only lay and looked beyond the Lombardy poplars,—stared up into the deepening prairie twilight.

  Oscar Lutz’s voice, hoarse and far away, said: “Is he . . . ?”

  Dr. Fred’s, low and far away, also, said: “Yes . . . gone.” He turned his head away and slipped a hand gently over Will’s eyelids.

  Gus Reinmueller gave a sob. Oscar Lutz said. “There was a man . . .” The children,—John, Margaret, Isabelle, little Grace,—all began to cry wildly.

  Abbie Deal dragged her eyes away from Will and looked across the prairie as toward Golgotha. No one moved. There was no sound but the children crying.

  The cows were coming up to the pasture gate. The leaves of the Lombardys floated onto the lane road. A bird flew into the cedars. A long wedge-shaped line of wild geese flew low. Will lay sleeping.

  Suddenly, Abbie Deal seemed greater than herself, larger than humanity. A sense of deep wisdom was within h
er, a flood of infinite strength enveloped her. She rose and threw up her head. “Hush!” she said quietly to the children. Almost sternly she said it: “Hush! Not a child of Will Deal’s is to shed a tear.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  It is the prerogative of the dramatist to lower the curtain upon a scene and raise it upon a later one,—of the story-teller to close one chapter and begin another when time has passed. Real life is not so. There is no kind interval of time as the settings of the various experiences shift,—no heart-easing period of days between the chapters of life.

  Life is Time’s galley-slave, forever shackled to its relentless master. If its hardest blow be dealt at three o’clock, then four o’clock must be met and five and six,—the first dark, agonizing night and the first pale, torturing dawn.

  And so it is unreal, even cowardly, to leave Abbie Deal wrestling with her deepest emotions,—living two lives; one within herself, wracked and tortured,—the other, an outward one which met all the old duties and trivial obligations with composure,—leave her in the garden of her Gethsemane, to meet her many months later. Only the children had kept her going. Only her motherhood, whose first characteristic was love and whose second was duty, had kept her hands busy and her head unbowed. These,—and one other thing which she could not explain: the unseen presence of Will himself. She told no one,—made no attempt to discuss the experience with any other. But much of the time Will did not seem to be away. Whether the phenomenon were of the spirit world with the metaphysical involved, a touch of the supernatural which no man understands, or only a comforting memory, she did not know. She accepted the solace in blind faith and with soul-filled gratitude.

  Through what agency came the consolation she could not say, but she felt able to keep in touch with him. There was nothing of the weird about it,—no foolish incantations to the dead. He just seemed with her. It grew in time to give her a slight sense of peace. It took from the separation the raw, tearing hurt. They had been so close, so companionable, that she seemed always to know what he would have said or done under any conditions. She grew to imagine she was talking to him,—telling him the small inconsequential affairs of the household, just as she had always done. And he seemed to answer.