A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  “There’s your pianny,” Grandma said tartly. “Gold . . . all of ’em . . . and minted in the ’fifties. I’m saving ten of ’em to bury me. You tell your Ma. Tell her when I die . . . I want her to take the money out o’ this bag and buy herself a railroad ticket and go along home with me. I ain’t goin’ to have no mistake made. Like’s not if she wa’n’t along they’d send me on to Chillicothe or Kalamazoo.”

  “Oh, Grandma . . .” Isabelle could not yet comprehend the gift of gold that had come from the Aladdin lamp of the little black bag. “How can I thank . . . oh, Grandma . . . I never can thank . . .”

  Quite suddenly, Grandma broke into a dry old sobbing. “Don’t thank me . . .” Her voice cracked weirdly. “Thank your dead father. Twas his draft money. I’d never touch it.” Her quavering old voice was torn into hoarse shreds, “Thirty years I kep’ it . . . come in the house ’n’ put it in my lap . . . said, ‘Mother, there’s your money’ . . . blood money . . . I alwa’s said ’twas. . . .”

  Isabelle was frightened and ran out for her mother.

  When Fritz Reinmueller and John, Oscar and Henry Lutz unloaded the wonderful shining affair at the parlor door, Isabelle would not have exchanged places with the first lady of the land. Grandma greeted the purchase with “What’d you get that color for? Why didn’t you get a plush stool? What’re you settin’ it in that corner for?”

  On a morning in July, Grandma’s restless spirit took its grumbling flight, sputtering a little at the Lord for the time spent upon her demise. Abbie took a piece of Will’s gold draft money, and with Grace, accompanied all that was mortal of Grandma back to the old home. “Poor Grandma,” thought Abbie on the train, “I wonder if she’s finding fault with the way the angels’ wings are put on and the direction the River of Life flows.”

  It had been twenty-eight years since Abbie had traveled the miles toward the setting sun behind old Red and Baldy. After the services for Grandma, she stayed a week, finding a thousand changes. But the greatest change of all she found in herself. She did not like the old places as well as she had always dreamed. Houses were too thick. Trees were too close and shady. The air was too humid. She felt hemmed in. “I would want to see out more,” she thought to herself, “. . . to far horizons. I belong to the prairie. That’s home now.”

  She visited her mother’s grave and Grandpa Deal’s and the tiny one of Janet’s baby with the wild honeysuckle tangled over it. Her mother lay under a tall pine on which the dried cones rustled all the afternoon in the summer breezes. Abbie sat and thought about her,—the little peasant girl whose life had changed because a young hunter rode by. She thought of the trail of graves across the country. Her father was buried in New York State, a little brother in Illinois, her mother in Iowa, her husband in Nebraska. A trail of graves marked the westward trek of her family.

  When she got back to town they asked her to guess whoever she supposed could be there. “Dr. Ed Matthews’ wife from New York City,” they told her.

  Abbie could not think that it would be so hard to meet any one. Surely, at forty-seven one did not care about things like that.

  The woman was slender, wasp-waisted, beautifully dressed, her huge leg-o’-mutton sleeves the height of style. She had on a whole garnet set, a pin, earbobs and bracelet.

  “They tell me you are one of Doctor’s old sweethearts.” She smiled at Abbie with her graying hair and her sunburned skin and her work-worn hands. Abbie’s heart was pounding ridiculously. Certainly at forty-seven one ought to have more poise than that. She leaned over Grace and fixed her sash. When she raised her face it was composed. She smiled back, “Oh, he used to come past the schoolhouse sometimes where I taught . . . and stop to talk.”

  When Abbie came back, she stopped in Lincoln a day to visit Margaret. Fred, Jr. was two years old now, and sitting up to the table on Gus’s and Christine’s wedding gift of Twenty Lessons in Etiquette, but as far as Abbie could see, the association was a lost cause, for Fred, Jr.’s, table activities were of such an adventurous type that an onlooker might gather he was sitting on The Life and Voyages of Columbus.

  Abbie arrived at the farm to face the utter ruin of her corn crop. During that week of July in which she had been back to the old home, the hot winds had blown out of the southwest with their scorching, blighting breath, and the young, shoulder-high stalks were so many blistered pieces of pulp.

  She had been home two days when Henry Lutz drove out to tell her that Sarah was not well enough to go to Omaha to be with Emma during confinement and to ask her to go in Sarah’s place. The hot winds had wearied Sarah, Henry said,—just tired her out.

  For a few brief moments Abbie felt a fierce resentment that Sarah was always so well taken care of. Wasn’t it hot for her too? Just back from burying Grandma, after caring for her two years, with the chickens and the house and everything to see to,—wasn’t she weary, too? Oh, why could she never live any life of her own? For a few minutes resentful thoughts tumbled about in her mind, and then she said cheerfully, “Why, yes, tell Sarah I’ll go.”

  Mack and Emma had a sturdy little son, now, too,—Stanley, they called him.

  “Another grandson, Will,” Abbie said at home again.

  We’re both pleased, Abbie.

  That fall Abbie put in her first small sowing of winter wheat, the new experiment about which some of the farmers were talking. In November, with a light dash of snow on it, the small rectangle of vivid green stood out on the landscape like a bit of spring which had lost its reckoning of time. The crop in its experimental stage did well enough so that she added to her list a small sowing of the other new one, alfalfa, the tiny bluish-purple flowers later sending out a haunting fragrance that vied with the sweet fresh odor of the red clover.

  But in general, it was a hard row that Abbie was having to hoe. Under the best of circumstances, with plenty of man-power on the farm, the owners were having a series of hard years. For a woman to face the problems seemed next to impossible. She rented parts of the eighty to Oscar Lutz and Gus Reinmueller for a share in the grain. But one year of drought followed another, so that a share in a poor crop was sometimes next to nothing. Pete and Heinie Reinmueller worked for her at times on shares. If they butchered they took their pay in meat, if they cut down trees they took it in wood. The chickens, the horses and the two cows she cared for herself, and except at farrowing time, the pigs. She made butter and sold it to town customers, and she traded eggs and chickens for staples at the Lutz store. Aside from a cloak which Mack gave her one Christmas and a dress from Margaret, Abbie Deal had nothing new in the way of clothes for years. Every stitch, every penny, every thought was for the schooling of the children. “If you can help any one, help John and Isabelle get through school,” she would say to Mack and Margaret. And those who think she was not cheerful through it all, do not know the Abbie Deals of the old pioneer stock.

  She made light of her hard times. “I’ve worn the same black hat for so many years,” she would say, “it’s like an old friend. The jet ornament on it has gone the whole rounds. It’s been sewed on the front and on both sides and on the back. And now next year, I’m going to try it sort of northeast between the front and side.”

  The Lutz families and the Reinmuellers had gone away beyond their original ownership of land. Henry and Oscar Lutz had bought several eighties from families who had given up and returned East. Gus Reinmueller owned six eighties now, instead of the two of the earlier days. He and Christine seemed to have a perfect obsession for adding acres to their possession. Everything went into more land,—nothing into the house or for the children. The Henry Lutz family was now the “best fixed” one in Cedartown. Henry had done well in the store, had bought and sold land by that sharp businesslike bargaining which brought him always the better of the trade. Unlike the Reinmuellers, the Lutz family was the first to get new things and conveniences. Sarah Lutz, with her little black beady eyes and her still rosy cheeks, was always well dressed, always merry, always hospitable in the new hous
e with the fancy wooden rosettes and the stylish cupola.

  The year that John finished his law course found an opportunity presenting itself to locate in Iowa with a friend. He took the Iowa bar examination and was in the firm by mid-summer. It seemed queer to Abbie that John should go back to her old state to live.

  That same June, Isabelle finished the Academy, the star pupil in piano and voice. Abbie in her turned and made-over dress, sitting in the audience of the church where the exercises were held, cried a little behind her program, and there are those who will understand the nature of her tears.

  That was the same summer too, that Mack and Emma turned into the lane on a tandem bicycle one afternoon. Abbie could not believe her eyes,—that Emma, the mother of a year-old boy, would pedal from Omaha on one of the mannish-looking things. Emma was gay and unconcerned about little Stanley. She had left him with “the girl.” He was as “fine as a fiddle” and the girl knew “just what to do with him.” Yes, Emma was going to be as carefree and irresponsible a person as Sarah, her mother. Dressy, too, like her mother. She had on a dark green wool skirt, tight-fitting over the hips and bell-shaped at the bottom. Her white waist had sleeves the size of smoked hams. She wore a green necktie, and on top of her huge head of black hair was perched a little creased felt hat with a green quill at one side,—an “Alpine hat,” she told Abbie. How could a young mother take her duties so lightly, thought Abbie.

  In the fall, Isabelle, dreamy-eyed with musical plans, went up to Lincoln to live with Margaret and attend the University. Abbie sometimes opened the sliding double doors and went into the parlor where the piano stood, silent now, and ran her long slender fingers, stiff and knotted with outdoor work, over the keyboard. Sometimes she sighed a little for a lost dream, but more often she thought only of her pride in Isabelle.

  Grace, at eight was in the Cedartown school, quick, keen-eyed,—“smart as a whip,” people said. For two years, Abbie had hitched up on bad days and taken her in to school, but now a second building had gone up in the north end of town, and Grace was no farther away from it than many of the town children. It lightened Abbie’s work materially when Grace could skip off to school by herself down the lane road under the poplars.

  It was not until early winter again, with its half-crop of husking out of the way, that Abbie turned to that old desire of hers, that girlish ambition to write some of the things she had heard and seen and lived.

  In that saving, frugal way, born of necessity, she ironed out dark brown wrapping paper, which she had saved for years, and cut it into sheets. At forty-nine Abbie was finding her first opportunity to take time from duties which had always confronted her, to carry out this old ambition. For several afternoons she wrote of the things she had been wanting forever to get down on paper. The things she had wanted to say did not come as readily as she had always anticipated. The task was a little more labored than she had thought. When she had finished several of the brown papers, she put them away carefully in her bureau drawer.

  Duties descended upon her again before she had a chance to read over what she had written—those urgent duties which seemed always to confront her. Isabelle came home for vacation, burning incense before Euterpe’s shrine. Even as a freshman, she had been chosen one of the new members in a musical organization, and what was of more practical benefit, had been asked to sing in one of the church choirs. Isabelle’s fresh mellow voice was the open sesame to meeting many new friends and experiences.

  Christmas came and went with every one, but John, home. On one of the short January days with the snow thick on the Lombardy poplars, Abbie, with almost a girlish enthusiasm, took out of the drawer the story she had written in the fall. She read it through and then, amazed and chagrined, she read it a second time. It was flat, insipid. None of the things which she had been thinking as she wrote, was there. The statements were dull and lifeless. Grace, at nine, might almost have written them. What was the matter? She, who had so loved life, and so deeply lived it, could she not of all people get down on paper that which she had lived and loved? Apparently not.

  How did they do it, she wondered? How did those writers you loved make you live in their stories? How did their people move across the pages like flesh and blood friends? How could they bring tears to your eyes and laughter to your lips? How could the winds sweep through their books so that you heard its endless rushing? How could the prairie grass blow for them so that you saw it wave and ripple? How could the Mayflowers and the honey-locusts drip their fragrance for them, so that you smelled it across the years? She did not know.

  For some time she sat in stunned disappointment and looked at the snow thick on the cedars, and the gray bowl of a sky turned over the world. All her life she had dreamed of constructing something. She had told herself that if only she could find time, she would write of life as it was. And she had found time. But she could not write of life as it was. She had tried to tell of the journey over the uncharted sea of grass, of the nights under the star-filled sky, and the winds that were never still. But the words she had set down had not told it. Only the memory of it remained in her heart, like a song that would never be sung. She thought of her younger days,—the gleam which seemed always ahead,—of the vague allure which accomplishing something in the arts had always held for her. And now she was nearly fifty and she was not to know the fruition of any of those hopes.

  “Oh, Will, I am so disappointed,” she said to that invisible comrade who was only spirit and memory. “I can only feel those things,—not do them.”

  Isn’t motherhood, itself, an accomplishment?

  She knew that she made her own answer, and yet it gave her a sense of satisfaction and peace. Will might have said it. It sounded like him.

  “But I’ve made so many mistakes. . . . Will. . . . even in that.”

  You are a good mother, Abbie-girl.

  Yes, it gave her a sense of peace and comfort.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  It seemed to Abbie that the years began to move more quickly now. The leaves of the almanac over the wooden kitchen sink were turned with almost unbelievable rapidity. Abbie never tore them out and never destroyed one of these outlived chronicles of time.

  “Don’t you ever burn up any of the old things that have accumulated?” Isabelle asked when she was home from the University.

  “Oh, no,” Abbie said hastily.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know. Some one might need them sometime. I’ve always found a use for everything.” And so every button, every string, every paper sack was carefully hoarded.

  Isabelle was in the second semester of her sophomore year. She had only two dresses,—her brown school dress and her tan Sunday one, but she had a knack of wearing them well. It was the Era of Throttled Throats. Isabelle would pin a long ribbon at the front of her neck, wrap it tightly several times around that maltreated part of her anatomy and tie it in a huge bow under her ear.

  “It’s a wonder it doesn’t shut off your epiglottis or whatever it is you sing with,” Abbie said in disgust.

  Isabelle was attractive with her reddish-brown hair and eyes and her mellow voice,—attractive apparently to Harrison Rhodes, a young man who sang in the same choir with her. When he had been out to the farm and sung “Whispering Hope,” with Isabelle, looking down at her while she played the accompaniment, Abbie thought that all who ran could read, and the language of the message was in that Esperanto, the universal language of romance.

  “But then I’m sort of romantic, Will, and maybe I just imagine it.”

  I thought so, too, Abbie.

  In June of that year a national political convention named a Nebraska man for its presidential candidate. He was defeated in November, but Abbie said, “At least they know now there are some states west of the Mississippi.”

  Letters came from John regularly and Abbie thought to herself, with no small amount of glee, that John was far more communicative through the medium of pen and paper than when he was with her. Hi
s firm was “getting along pretty well,” although he himself was not doing much more than the collections and looking up references. He would be glad when he had a real case. Later he had joined the local unit of National Guards. They met and drilled right along. Rather foolish, maybe, when there was no likelihood of war, but it was good for them, as they were mostly fellows in offices. His foot bothered him yet sometimes,—a little stiff after he had drilled.

  Peace had been over the land for thirty years,—and then suddenly there was no peace. Spanish-American controversies, which had been piling up like so many logs on a pyre, were touched off by a match of news which flashed across the land. The Maine had been sunk in Havana’s harbor. And in the wing-and-ell farmhouse behind the cedars, Abbie Deal was reading a letter from John:

  “And so we arrived here in camp Des Moines, Tuesday. It was the most impressive and magnificent sight I ever saw yesterday morning when we left. The G.A.R. and band and drum corps escorted us to the depot, and thousands of people on every side waved flags and cheered and cried as we marched along. At the station friends were bidding good-bys, and mothers, sisters and sweethearts were weeping and saying their farewells. . . . We arrived in Des Moines and our regiment was quartered in the speed stables. . . . We have ten box stalls to each company. . . . I didn’t come home first for I didn’t want to say good-by to you. I know how you will feel, Mother. But if you saw a bully licking a little youngster, you would think I was cowardly, if I didn’t jump in and . . .”

  Yes, yes, how the words came back! A boy she knew long ago had said that same thing.

  War! War again! How terrible! O God, stop war!

  “Our John’s going to war, Will!” Abbie’s stiff lips could hardly frame the words.

  I would have wanted him to do his duty.

  And then Abbie could think of almost nothing but her boy; could do almost nothing but fix things to send him,—cookies, a cake, a needle-book, a Testament. Always the Abbie Deals must be doing something for their children.