A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  “What memories do you have, Grandma?”

  “I have many . . . my little girlhood days when Chicago was a village . . . the three weeks’ journey from Illinois into Iowa . . . the fun in the Big Woods behind my sister Janet’s house. I can shut my eyes and smell the dampness and the Mayflowers there. The old log school and then the new white one with green shutters . . . my wedding . . . the trip from Iowa into Nebraska. . . . There are many memories. But I’ll tell you the one I like to think of best of all. It’s just a homely everyday thing, but to me it is the happiest of them all. It is evening time here in the old house and the supper is cooking and the table is set for the whole family. It hurts a mother, Laura, when the plates begin to be taken away one by one. First there are seven and then six and then five . . . and on down to a single plate. So I like to think of the table set for the whole family at supper time. The robins are singing in the cottonwoods and the late afternoon sun is shining across the floor. Will, your grandfather, is coming in to supper . . . and the children are all playing out in the yard. I can hear their voices and happy laughter. There isn’t much to that memory is there? Out of a lifetime of experiences you would hardly expect that to be the one I would choose as the happiest, would you? But it is. The supper cooking . . . the table set for the whole family . . . the afternoon sun across the floor . . . the robins singing in the cottonwoods . . . the children’s merry voices . . . Will coming in . . . eventide.”

  “I think it’s a nice memory, Grandma, but something about the way you say it makes me sad.”

  “But it’s not sad, Laura. My memories are not sad. They’re pleasant. I’m happy when I’m living them over. You’ll find out when you get old, Laura, that some of the realities seem dreams . . . but the dreams, Laura, . . . the dreams are all real.”

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  That summer,—the one in which Abbie Deal was eighty,—was the summer of the Great Harvest.

  Nebraska was favored of the gods. Ceres’ throne was in Nebraska. It was as though she chose the state from all others upon which to lavish her goods,—as though the bulk of her fortune had been given to a favorite child. From the old Missouri to the foot of the sand-hills,—from the Kansas border to the land of the Dakotas, the wheat fields, like the sun’s reflection, lay ripe under the July sky. In every direction one saw a thrasher belching out its yellow breath of wheat straw.

  The fields were springs from which never-ending brooklets of yellow wheat, pouring into the thrashers, rolled forth in golden streams to form a mighty river of grain.

  The barley, rye and oats yield was also heavy. The beet sugar output was to be of gigantic proportions. A bumper corn crop loomed in promise for the fall,—three hundred million bushels were being predicted. Those who juggled with figures said that it would bring four hundred million dollars. The combined sum of all the grain figures was almost beyond comprehension. Poor conditions in many of the neighboring states, and a shortage in production in the east and south, added to the fancy that Nebraska seemed to hold the gifts of the gods in her lap that summer.

  The crop moved to market in an unprecedented volume. The various transportation systems had prepared for their part in this great procession of the grains. Tens of thousands of workers had bent their backs to the task. Tens of thousands of freight cars had been assembled at various points, awaiting the signal to move. And the grain came in,—and the cars moved. To the east and to the west they moved for weeks, carrying new life blood to the nation.

  It filled old Abbie Deal with an overwhelming pride. “Do you know, John,” she said to her attorney son, “it makes me happy . . . proud and happy. When I think of all those early lean years . . . the droughts . . . the grasshoppers . . . the crop failures . . . and then this! ‘Poor Nebraska’ people said. They looked down on us . . . as though we were a lot of destitute relations. They sent us old clothes and seeds and dried apples. And to think we’re sending grain in great trainloads.”

  “Mother,” John chuckled, “to hear you, anybody would think you owned the state.”

  “I do, John. She’s mine in spirit. I feel as though she had been on trial before a world court and the trial dragged out over many years. We, who loved her, had faith to believe she would come through unscathed. And in these later years she’s acquitted . . . and vindicated. And to think she’s one of the wealthiest states in the union . . . the only one, I guess, with no bonded indebtedness! I wish your father might have lived to see it. He was so loyal . . . and so faithful . . . and so hopeful. He didn’t live to see all his hopes fulfilled . . . but he did his part in making them materialize. They were prophets, John . . . prophets in a strange country . . . those hardy young men who ferried across the Missouri and forded the Platte and the Weeping Water and the other streams. What a legacy they’ve left you all,—farms and cities . . . cattle on a thousand hills, . . . manufactories, . . . great educational institutions . . .”

  “Mother, that sounds quite oratorical. You can put all that into a speech up at Lincoln on the twenty-ninth. That’s what I came over to see you about. They told me in Lincoln to-day that they wanted you to come up and speak at the unveiling of the Donovan Marker. That’s the sixtieth anniversary, you know, of choosing the site of Lincoln for the capital. They want those present who were here then.”

  “Oh, but I wasn’t here, John. That was almost a whole year before we came. I’ve only been here fifty-nine years.”

  “Fifty-nine years is quite a while, Mother, and you’re getting to be one of the few left, who came that long ago. They want you to make a little talk.”

  “But what can you say in a few words, John, that will cover fifty-nine years? I guess ‘Behold what God hath wrought,’ is the most condensed statement I can think of.”

  And then it turned out that there were to be two big events for Abbie Deal in July. Katherine’s wedding, which was to have been in the fall, was suddenly set for the twentieth. John was sending Jimmie Buchanan east on business, and in spite of the off-season time of year, the wedding was to take place so that Katherine could go with him. Already Katherine was being dined and fêted and showered by the friends who were still in town. Sarah Lutz was in California and was not coming back. “So you must be careful and not get sick, Granny,” Katherine told her, “or we wouldn’t have either of you at the big doings.” She and her mother had driven down one afternoon to see Abbie. They brought her a lavender silk dress and a real lace cape-collar which Emma had bought in Vienna.

  “You must be all dolled up, Granny,” Katherine told her. “You must be massaged and manicured and you ought to have a permanent. I believe you would take a lovely one.” She bent low over her grandmother’s head and examined a strand of snow-white hair. “It looks as though it might have had a bit of natural curl in it once.”

  Oh, why couldn’t they know? Why did an old woman seem always to have been old? Abbie was back on the knoll near the Big Woods, singing . . . her head thrown back . . . her thick hair curling and rippling over her creamy white shoulders. Why couldn’t they understand that once she had kept tryst with Youth? Why didn’t they realize that some day, they, too, must hold rendezvous with Age?

  “Yes,” said old Abbie Deal, simply, “it used to be quite curly.”

  It was just before they left, that Abbie said, “I have two presents for you, Kathie.”

  “Two, Granny? How lovely! Why two?”

  “Well, one I am making myself so that you will always have something of Grandma’s hand work. The other . . . the other, Kathie, is an heirloom, a string of little pearls. I want you not to plan for anything else for your neck. They’re beautiful. Even you, with all your nice things, will be proud to own them.”

  “Fine . . . Granny! Fine!” Even so, it was said half carelessly. Things had come so easily to Kathie.

  In the next two weeks, Abbie worked hard to finish the pink and white quilt with its rose-shaped blocks rambling up the borders. On the nineteenth, Grace came from summer school where she was teaching, and left
immediately for Omaha in her roadster, as she had some shopping to do before the wedding. Early on the morning of the twentieth, Christine Reinmueller came over to receive her instructions from Abbie for caring for the place. The chickens were to be fed. Abbie gave minute directions for the ceremony,—the laying hens in the chicken-yard, whole corn out of one box,—the fries so-and-so out of a certain can. If it looked like rain, Christine was to turn the water-spout into the cistern. But if it rained too long, it ought to be turned out before it started to run over. And Christine was to pick the sweet-peas and nasturtiums.

  John and Eloise Deal, with Wentworth and Laura and Millard, came for Abbie in the big sedan. Abbie had on her black silk with white collar and cuffs, and a new hat with a noble-appearing pom-pon on one side, which the milliner had told her looked “chic.” Above Abbie’s old wrinkled face it looked as chic as a painted one would have looked atop the portrait of Whistler’s mother.

  She had the quilt done up in a big flat package, and she put her feet on it in the car, as though it might, from sheer naturalness of the roses, ramble out of the sedan window. The pearls in the little box she held tightly in the bag in her hands.

  The big car shot out over the graveled roads. Wentworth was at the wheel. Abbie wished John would do the driving. As a matter of fact Wentworth, born to the wheel, with all the younger generation, was the more alert driver, but Abbie could not think so.

  “You know, Wentworth, I wish you wouldn’t go so fast. Can’t we go a little slower and see the country better?”

  “You’re sort of cracked about the country, aren’t you, Grandma?”

  “Yes, I guess I am, Wentworth. But if you’d gone over these same roads in a covered wagon, when there wasn’t even a trail in the grass, you’d be, too.”

  At the top of a hill, John said something to his son, and the big car slowed down and stopped. “Take a drink, Mother,” John waved his hand to the panorama before them, “but don’t get intoxicated.”

  In the distance the Platte sprawled out lazily in the morning sun, the thick foliage of its tree-borders green against the sky’s summer blue. There were acres of yellow wheat stubble where once the buffalo had wallowed, fields of young corn where once the prairie grass had grown, great comfortable homes and barns where once the soddies had stood. There were orchards and pastures and cattle, and a town nestling under the sheltering shade of huge trees. And soft white languorous clouds slipped into the east.

  As they looked, there was a humming sound, and like one of the dragon-flies from the old creek bed, an aeroplane came out of the southwest. As direct and as fast as the southwest winds, it shot toward Omaha, back over the road that the Deals’ and Lutzes’ and the Reinmuellers’ plodding oxen had come. From the hilltop near the Platte, Abbie Deal watched the mail plane go back over the road that the plodding oxen had come.

  They slipped into Omaha at ten o’clock,—the Omaha that had been the raw frontier town, but was now a city of nearly a quarter million.

  Mack, at home from the bank, came out to meet them when they turned into the driveway. The Mackenzie Deal place, a huge brick structure, with its clipped lawn and its sunken garden and its lily pools, was lovely in the morning sunlight. And it belonged to a man who had lived in a soddie until his thirteenth year, and to a woman whose first home on the prairie was hung with burlap to keep out the cold.

  “Let me take your bag, Mother.”

  “Take the package, Mack, but I want to carry this myself.” And they all laughed that Mother would trust no one with the pearls. She got slowly out of the car, her limbs a little numb. For a few moments she could not walk steadily, so that Mack put his arm around her and helped her up the wide steps.

  In the house, Abbie asked at once for Katherine. The moment had come. It had been sixty-two years coming and now it was here. The winds had blown it by . . . the winds she could not stop. The clock hands had ticked it off . . . the time she could not stay.

  Old Abbie Deal, with her snow-white hair, and her eighty years beginning to sit heavily upon her, climbed the mahogany-railed stairway with its imported carpet. A ladder with sapling cross-pieces . . . bare pine steps . . . a mahogany-railed stairway with thick imported carpet.

  Katherine was in her room. Abbie knocked and went in, the little bag tightly clutched in her hand.

  “Well . . . Granny?” Katherine did not seem flippant to-day. She was gentle, a little tender. She kissed her grandmother with genuine affection and sat down beside her.

  “Here they are, dear.” Abbie laid the pearls in Katherine’s lap, her blue-veined hands trembling.

  It was as though they had brought everything to Katherine,—had heaped their all into her lap,—the fruits of their labor, the results of their pioneering. The price of the prairie had been paid. The debt was canceled. For Katherine they had fought the prairie fires, split open the prairie furrows, and planted the corn. For Katherine they had set out the trees and made the roads and built the bridges.

  Katherine took the pearls out of the little velvet box.

  “Thanks, Granny, dear. They’re darling.”

  There was no great surprise. She had spoken in a matter-of-fact way. “Thanks, Granny, dear. They’re darling.”

  Well, she could not sense it. She was young and had never wanted for a thing in her life. She could not realize all the hardships which had been undergone since Abbie Deal’s wedding night,—all the privations which had been endured while the pearls lay in the box for sixty-two years waiting for the time to come when a Mackenzie bride could wear them.

  “I want to tell you about them. Could you . . . for just a few minutes, Kathie? I don’t want to take your time . . .”

  “Sure . . . Granny . . . tell me about them.”

  “They were Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie’s, Kathie. After her death they became my mother’s and then she gave them to me in the old log-cabin on my wedding night. They always seemed to me a sort of symbol . . . standing for everything that was fine and artistic and lovely. You probably don’t understand, but the work on the land in our early days was so hard that it took all of our time and strength to keep body and soul together. There was neither time nor opportunity for the things that many of us wanted, with all our hearts, to do. But we kept our eyes on a sort of gleam ahead, a hope that our boys and girls could have all the things we could not have. And so the pearls became a symbol to me of those things. I said Margaret could wear them at her wedding, thinking we would have everything to go with them. But you can’t always do with life as you wish. Sometimes life does things to you. And so we didn’t have much to do with, and Margaret was married without them. Isabelle was married suddenly on the eve of war, and Grace never married . . . and now they’re yours, the first granddaughter to marry. They’ve gone in a sort of circle, from wealth, through hard times, back to prosperity.”

  “I’ll love them, Granny.” Katherine kissed her grandmother again. Then she rose and slipped her arm through Abbie’s. “Now, Granny, I want you to come in and see the spoils of war.”

  Out in the upper hall, with Persian rugs hanging over the mahogany-railed balcony, most of the relatives seemed gathering. Margaret and Dr. Baker had just driven in. Isabelle and Harrison Rhodes had arrived the previous evening. Stanley’s and young Dr. Fred’s wives were both there with their children. One room had been converted into a receiving room for the gifts, and it was into this one that the whole clan gathered. Dainty gifts from exclusive shops were there. Many countries had contributed their loveliest to Katherine Deal. Abbie, wandering among the tables, made little clucking noises of delight. “My, my, Kathie, whatever can you do with them all? How beautiful! And to think that I was happy to get some quilts and plain dishes and an old rooster and six hens!”

  Mack came in and wandered aimlessly about. Every one was there in the room, now,—Mack and Emma, Isabelle and Harrison, Margaret and Doctor Baker, Grace, John and Eloise, Laura, Wentworth, Stanley’s and Fred Jr.’s wives, Katherine and Jimmie Buchanan——Suddenly i
t seemed to Abbie that there was some concerted plan that they should all gather. Two or three were whispering mysteriously.

  “Are you ready, Daddy?” It was Katherine. “There’s something else we want to show you, Granny. We’re too anxious for you to see.”

  Abbie turned toward Katherine who was holding the cord of a silken drape in her hand. Katherine’s head was thrown back. Her eyes were merry. She was excited about something. “All set. Eyes front and guide right, Granny.”

  She pulled the silken cord and the drape parted. Behind the soft folds there hung a huge painting in a wide dull gold frame,—the painting of a lovely lady in velvet draperies, her reddish-brown hair curling over her shoulder, and a string of pearls at her neck. A hat with a sweeping plume was in one hand,—held by long slender fingers that tapered at the ends.

  Katherine waved an airy hand. “Here she is, Granny. Allow me to introduce to you Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, painted with my pearls on her . . . the little wretch.”

  Abbie Deal stared. The faint coloring of excitement under her old cheeks slipped away. One hand went up to her wrinkled throat and the other above her pounding heart. She turned to Mack. “You don’t . . . not really, Mack? It isn’t . . .?”

  “Yes, it is, Mother . . . your grandmother . . . my great-grandmother . . . Kathie’s great-great-grandmother. It’s the original and it cost like the old Harry, but Katherine has been after me ever since she heard you tell about it. I had the deuce of a time getting it, too. The agent traced it from Aberdeen to London and then to Edinburgh and back to London.”

  Abbie turned to the picture again.

  “Can you beat it, Granny?” Katherine was laughing and calling to her. “All in one fell swoop I get six tons of china, nine carloads of silver, a darling new house, a homely new husband, and a snobocratic ancestor and her pearls.”

  Abbie Deal stood in front of the picture with Katherine’s flippant words rippling past her. Old Abbie Deal, with her snow-white hair in its neat little knot at the back of her head, with her dumpy pudding-bag figure and her long, gnarled fingers that tapered at the ends, stood and stared at the picture. And standing there, looking up at the lovely lady, old Abbie Deal began to cry. They are the most painful tears in the world . . . the tears of the aged . . . for they come from dried beds where the emotions have long burned low.