A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  “Kathie!”

  “And all the time I had this keen ancestor. Now, say it again, and very slowly . . . ‘Katherine, your great-great-grandmother was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, a beautiful, aristocratic snob. She was an awful snob, wasn’t she, Granny?”

  “Kathie!”

  “Think how my marriage could read: ‘The marriage of Miss Katherine Elaine Deal to Mr. James Worden Buchanan . . .’ I haven’t said anything about this yet to Jimmie, but as the Chinaman says, ‘Can happen,’ and there’s nothing like taking time by the fetlock. Picture this in bold bad type in the Sunday edition: ‘Miss Deal is a direct descendant of the Anders-Mackenzies of Aberdeen, Scotland, Knights of the Garters’ . . .”

  Abbie Deal’s old eyes twinkled. “But don’t forget the other side of the house, too, Kathie. There were knights of the suspenders, too. Don’t forget old Grandmother Bridget O’Conner, Kathie. She was an Irish peasant woman and she lived in a shack at the side of a hill on the edge of the moors. The chickens and the pigs ran in and out of the thatch-covered hut. She couldn’t read a word and she couldn’t write her name, and she smoked a black pipe. But if it wasn’t for the sturdy plebeian blood of her daughter, Maggie (my mother, Kathie) you wouldn’t be here.”

  Katherine waved it aside. “We’ll pass lightly over the O’Conners. It’s the Mackenzies that intrigue me. What more do you know about them?”

  Abbie Deal told all that she could remember hearing from her sister Belle,—the story of the lovely lady,—of her reddish-brown hair and tapering fingers, and of the picture that hung on the landing of the stairway in the great hall.

  “That settles it,” Katherine arose. “I’m going right up to Jimmie and bring matters to a climax, by revealing to him just who I am. Right into the office I go and say, ‘Jimmie, here comes the Lady Katherine Elaine Anders-Mackenzie Deal, great-great-granddaughter of Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, who had flowing white fingers and a long reddish-brown nose that tapered at the end.”

  When the door had closed behind her, Abbie sighed and said, “Whatever are you going to do with her, Emma?”

  “Oh, she’s all right, Mother.” Emma was always like Sarah, her mother, good-natured, easy-going. “She’s just breezy. She tells me everything.” Mrs. Mackenzie Deal temporarily disregarded the recollection of some of the things Katherine had told her.

  When they had all gone, Abbie took a great deal of comfort with her new radio. The dull-finished, beautifully-polished cabinet put a new interest in life for her. At first in the wonderment of the thing, she rubbed the Aladdin lamp all day long. Sermons, jazz bands, market reports, monologues, she listened to them all with equal interest and amazement. A sermon from Denver, a talk on fruit tree culture from Lincoln, a dance orchestra from Omaha, interested her with equal intensity. Preaching and pruning and prancing, they were all the same to her. And when “The Ring of the Piper’s Tune” came in, she shut her eyes and saw her Irish mother lift her skirts and do the Kerry dance as lightly as a thistledown.

  “My, I wish you could hear the music, Will.”

  I’ve heard wondrous music, Abbie.

  “There’s nothing more now, Will, that can be invented.”

  There are things undreamed of, Abbie-girl.

  And then Abbie had a letter from Isabelle. She was to sing from a Chicago station on February third.

  “Find the station beforehand, Mother,” Isabelle wrote, “so you’ll not have any trouble that night or lose time trying to locate it while the program is on.”

  On the night of the third, Abbie sat up later than was her custom, so that she could hear Isabelle. Even then she experienced a little trouble in getting the station. “I suppose nothing’s just perfect,” she thought. “We always have to have some little grief to make us . . .” Suddenly she had them. But the program had begun. Isabelle’s voice came forth in an aria as plainly as though she were in the room. When she had finished, the announcer spoke. “Mrs. Rhodes will sing her second number especially for her mother, listening in at Cedartown, Nebraska.”

  The piano, with violin accompaniment, played a few notes and then Isabelle’s voice came again, full and clear:

  “Oh, the Lady of the Lea

  Fair and young and gay was she

  Beautiful exceedingly

  The Lady of the Lea.”

  And then it came to Abbie Deal. That was it,—the little half-memory! That was the old strain that had haunted her and which she could not quite remember.

  “Many a wooer sought her hand

  For she had gold and she had land . . .”

  That was the forgotten melody,—the song of her youth.

  “Everything at her command

  The Lady of the Lea.”

  She was young again, singing on a grassy knoll, with the future all before her, with the years of her life still unlived.

  “Oh, the Lady of the Lea

  Fair and young and gay was she . . .”

  Where had they gone, those years? Blown away by the winds you could not stop,—ticked off by the clock hands you could not stay.

  “Dreaming visions longingly

  The Lady of the Lea.”

  Isabelle finished the last verse of the song. Abbie turned off the radio, performed all the little nightly duties about the house, and undressed for bed. When she had turned out the lights, she stood for a few minutes at the bedroom window looking out at the night. It was moonlight and cloudless and very still. The trees stood etched in black against the white of the snow, their shadows as real as their substance. For some time Abbie looked out at the cedars standing silently there in the snow and the moonlight, like old women listening for something,—perhaps the strains of a song of their youth, and the dreams of desire.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  In the spring, Katherine’s affair with Jimmie Buchanan culminated in an engagement, duly announced on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie Deal, by way of an elaborate luncheon and the Sunday papers,—the wedding to take place in the early fall. The immediate effect upon Abbie was to have her begin a quilt for the bride-to-be, on Monday morning, as soon as the chickens were fed and the dishes washed. For some time she pondered whether to do “The Basket of Flowers” pattern, “The Rising Sun,” or “The Rose of Sharon,” eventually deciding on the rose pattern, done in pink and white. Grace came home to find her in a puddle of pink and white blocks, her blue-veined fingers trembling a little over the stitches.

  Grace scolded. “Mother, whatever are you doing that for? You can walk into any department store now and buy these very same old-fashioned patterns.”

  “They cost an awful lot.”

  “Maybe they are expensive. All nice hand work is. But think of the labor! Please, Mother . . . I’ll be glad to get it for you . . . any pattern you say . . . if you’ll just put the thought about doing it yourself out of your mind.”

  “No . . . it’s more like a real gift if you do it yourself.”

  “But, Mother, Katherine wouldn’t care. And there’ll be thousands of stitches in it.”

  “And a thousand thoughts of love caught in the stitches, Grace.”

  No, you could not do much with old Abbie Deal when she had made up her mind.

  Sometimes when she had sewed all afternoon she would walk over to Christine’s “to get the cricks out of her back.” On a cool April evening she found Christine sitting up close to her cook-stove cutting up potatoes for the morrow’s planting. She wore the inevitable faded blue calico dress gathered full at her portly waist line. Her little greasy braids, neither white nor gray, nor yet any particular color, were wound flat from ear to ear.

  “Oh . . . So it’s you. Come in. Shall I make a light?” Christine wanted to know. And then added, with characteristic frugality, “If we sit up close the stove by, we not have to make it. Ya?”

  Abbie looked around for Anna, Christine’s granddaughter, who had been living with her for several years. “Where’s Anna, Christine?”

  “Huh!” Christine was evidently disgruntled
about something. “Anna, she’s gone to Omaha up.”

  “Omaha?”

  “Ya. To vork . . . until she some money earn.” She was excited. Her broken words came tumbling over each other. “I give Anna land all the same to her . . . eighty acres. Eighty acres to every child I give, I tell you. I give Anna the land from her dead mother. What keep I? Three eighties. Ya! Out of all that eleven eighties, for myself three I keep. Maybe I starve. Maybe I go the county house by. How they like their old mother go the poorhouse by? Anna care nothing. She come by me and say, ‘Grandmudder . . . I haf it . . . the land . . . but I haf taxes to pay. Can I haf money the taxes to pay?’ How you like? Huh? The land I gif her . . . do you hear. . . Abbie Deal? Eighty acres I gif her and she come already yet and say, ‘For taxes no money I haf.’ I say, ‘Better you get and money earn for taxes then. Nein?’ ”

  “Oh, and she’s gone?”

  “Ya, she’s vent.”

  “But, Christine, Omaha is such a city. Don’t you know about her . . . where she first went?”

  “Oh, I guess herself she take care. She svill pigs and corn shuck. You learn ’em svill and shuck, and demselves they take care.”

  “Christine, why don’t you sell some of your land and use the money for yourself? The three eighties you kept for yourself are worth a lot of money now. Sell one of the eighties and have more comforts and conveniences.”

  “Ya . . . and go the poorhouse by. How long I know I live? Only eighty-two I am. A man I know a hundred-and-four was when he die. Maybe like dat I live. Maybe twenty year I live yet already. I guess dey not all my land get. Ya . . . when I die, over it quick dey fight. Not while here I stay.”

  Abbie Deal sighed. Well, she thought, one gets out of life largely what one puts in. Christine had put all her time and thought on the land and for reward she had . . . land.

  As soon as the Cedartown school was out that summer, Laura came over to spend a few days with her grandmother. Abbie still found pleasant companionship in this particular grandchild, an understanding and sympathy deeper than the usual twelve-year-old girl possessed. The two seemed, to hold a oneness of thought, a kinship of mind as well as of body. With none of Katherine’s sophistication, the child yet seemed mature.

  On this visit she would help her grandmother with the morning’s work and then fly to the pencil and tablet which she kept hidden under the bench by the long double row of cedars. It was on a late June morning that the two were seated there under the big trees which, toy-size, the Deals had planted a half-century before. Laura took out her portfolio from the box under the bench, with, “Listen, Grandma . . . listen to this that I wrote this morning. It’s about you and Grandfather Deal:

  “I know not if ’twas beating rain,

   That lightly tapped the window pane,

   Or if the dying embers flare

   Shone softly on my old arm chair.

  “But in the scent of dusky gloom,

   That stole within my chamber room,

   It seemed that from the shadowy wall

   I dreamed I heard you softly call.

  “Maybe it was only the book I’d read,

   But I heard your voice,—you, who are dead.

   You called me by a name most dear

   And then I knew that you were near.”

  There were tears in Abbie Deal’s eyes. “Why, Laura,—you didn’t do that yourself?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But how could you . . . a little girl like you . . . how could you have the feeling?”

  “Well, I don’t know . . . I can’t quite tell you. But I get to thinking about a thing and it almost hurts me . . . kind-of in my throat or somewhere . . . and then when I work away and get it all written down, I feel sort of happy afterward. I don’t suppose you’d understand it.”

  “Oh, yes, I would,” said old Abbie Deal. “I’d understand.”

  “I like to read my things to you, Grandma.”

  “And I like to have you, Laura. They seem splendid to me. I suppose they are not what critics call technically correct, but that can come with the years. It’s the feeling you show.”

  For a long time they sat there in the morning sunshine under the cedars that had grown old. The flyer went through town, it’s thick black smoke writing spiral-shaped figures across the blue slate of the sky. To the east, the wide rolling prairie held on it’s breast the young corn and wheat and the grass of the pastures. The Reinmueller boys, grandsons of Christine, were plowing corn, with a new type cultivator. To the south and west, Cedartown with its comfortable homes and its paved streets overhung with elms and maples, sat astride the great highway that was once a buffalo trail. To the north, behind the curving arch of a wide graveled driveway lay the silent city of the dead,—on a knoll in the center, the monuments of the Deal and Lutz families.

  “What are you thinking about, Grandma?”

  “That your life is like a field-glass, Laura. When you look into the one end, the landscape is dwarfed and far away,—when you look into the other, it looms large as though it were near at hand. Things that happened seventy years ago seem like yesterday. But, when I was a girl, eighty years seemed too remote to contemplate. And now, it has passed. The story is written.”

  “You sound as though you were sorry about something, Grandma.”

  “I didn’t mean to, but I was thinking that when I was a little girl, my sister Belle used to tell me about our grandmother . . . that would be your great-great-grandmother. Her name was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie. She was wealthy and beautiful and accomplished for her time. I used to think I would grow up to look just like her. I pictured her as an ideal and I would say to her in my mind, ‘You’ll be proud some day of the things I am going to accomplish.’ All my girlhood I always planned to do something big . . . something constructive. It’s queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura . . . now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung.”

  “But you’ve done lots of things, Grandma. You’ve baked bread . . . and pieced quilts . . . and taken care of your children.”

  Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl’s hand. “Well . . . well . . . out of the mouths of babes. That’s just it, Laura, I’ve only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don’t they? . . . But I’ve dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children . . . and the children are carrying them out . . . doing all the things I wanted to and couldn’t. Margaret has painted for me and Isabelle has sung for me. Grace has taught for me . . . and you, Laura . . . you’ll write my book for me I think. You’ll have a fine education and you will probably travel. But I don’t believe you can write a story because you have a fine education and have traveled. I think you must first have a seeing eye and an understanding heart and the knack of expressing what you see and feel. And you have them. So I think you, too, are going to do one of the things I wanted to do and never did.”

  Abbie Deal thoroughly enjoyed talking to this grandchild. Any of the rest of the family would have been a little impatient with an old woman’s musings. The others were always so alert, so active, so poised for flight. Of them all, only little Laura Deal wanted to sit and talk and dream. She told her that now.

  “You are a great comfort to me, Laura. You are something like me . . . a part of me. We think alike . . . you and I. Between you and me, I think my reminiscences bore the others. Well, well . . . old people used to bore me when I was young.”

  “They don’t bore me, Grandma. They interest me.”

  Abbie smiled across at her. No longer could she look down upon Laura. The twelve-year-old girl was larger than her little grandmother.

  “And we old pioneers dreamed other things, too, Laura. We dreamed dreams into the cou
ntry. We dreamed the towns and the cities, the homes and the factories, the churches and the schools. We dreamed the huge new capitol. When you walk under its wonderful tower, you say to yourself, ‘My Grandfather and Grandmother Deal dreamed all this . . . they, and a thousand other young couples dreamed it all in the early days . . . and the architect had the imagination to catch the dream and materialize it. It is their vision solidified. They were like the foundation stones under the capitol . . . not decorative, but strong. They were not well-educated. They were not sophisticated. They were not cultured. But they had innate refinement and courage. And they could see visions and dream dreams.”

  “How does it feel to be old, Grandma?”

  Abbie laughed. “Laura, it doesn’t feel at all. People don’t understand about old age. I am an old woman . . . but I haven’t changed. I’m still Abbie Deal. They think we’re different . . . we old ones. The real Abbie Deal still has many of the old visions and longings. I’m fairly contented here in the old home. . . . There was a time when I thought I never could be . . . but . . . some way . . . we get adjusted. I’ve never grown tired of life as some old people do. I’m only tired of the aches and the pains and the inability to make my body do what I want it to do. I would like to live a long time yet . . . to see what can still be invented . . . to read the new things that will be written . . . to hear the new songs that will be sung . . . to see heavy foliage on all the new shrubbery . . . to see all the babies grow into men and women. But there comes an end . . .”

  “Don’t talk that way, Grandma. It makes me feel like crying.”

  “Why, it ought not, Laura . . . not when Grandma has happy memories to live over.”