She laid her hot face down on the table beside Uncle Jim’s sweater. It brought back Uncle Jim so vividly, with its smell of tobacco and that tear in the pocket—the pocket that he had caught on the kitchen cabinet the last time he wiped dishes for her. Oh, if Uncle Jim were only there, to advise, to plan, and to comfort! If he were with them they wouldn’t fail in homesteading; he would find a way out. She picked up the needle and took the sweater off the table. Out of the pocket a little shower dropped into her lap: Uncle Jim’s knife was there, a black button from his vest, three matches, one of the little, smooth, shiny stones that he was always picking up. And besides this tiny hoard of treasures was a small blank book, with a four-leafed clover pressed between its pages. There were figures on most of its sheets, and memoranda of various kinds in his neat handwriting. And on the fourth page she found this:
Enter on check book
$ 6.80 flour
$ 15.00 potatoes
$ 25.00 church
$ 12.20 school books
Call up Gronau
See about winter’s coal
Cout’s Life of Napoleon
Taxes
Joan’s muff
The road to a mountain top is always a zig-zag one. Sit tight.
The tears rushed to her eyes. Uncle Jim came back with the words. The prairie shack melted away into space, and she was back in the Platteville living-room. And he was near her, standing with his hands in the pockets of that old gray sweater, looking down at her with the smile wrinkles about his eyes. No matter whether those words were a quotation, or his own, no matter why he had written them in the book, they were his message to her. She could hear him saying them; she could see him saying them. He was there with her. Oh, Uncle Jim…
And then the Platteville living-room was gone. She was back in the hot shack, the gray sweater was empty, and the prairie wind was banging the screen door. But the wind was no longer an excuse for irritation and discouragement. She saw how she had been sheltering herself behind it for the past weeks; how she had been trying to fool herself with the idea that it alone was responsible for her ill-humor. “You big baby!” said Becky to herself. “Pitying yourself!” No doubt that things were hard and times were discouraging, but you couldn’t go down under them. And if you did go down it was your own fault, and not the wind’s… “Sit tight,” Uncle Jim had said. Well, she would.
She stooped down to pick up a piece of paper that had fallen where Joan had changed her dress. On it was written in Joan’s unmistakable spelling:
Lime
garpe
orange croosh
cheery bloosom
ginger ail
hiry’s rote Beir.
“Poor little kid! She’s been longing for something cool, too,” thought Becky. She jumped up from the chair, and laid the gray sweater back in the mending basket. That could wait. She heated water and bathed, and put on one of the clean dresses she had just ironed. She made cocoa and set it to cool; she mixed a near-salad, of gelatine and tomato juice, opened a bottle of olives and made floating island. She hung everything down the well to chill them. She spread sandwiches of thin bread and butter, and then she called the children and made them clean for the meal. Somehow the heat didn’t seem so unbearable after clothes were changed. She and the children milked the cow, watered the horse, and fed the chickens, and the chores were done and the meal ready when Dick came slowly back over the trail from Winner. He was whistling as he drove up to the door.
“Any supper for a hard-working man?” he called. “Got something for you.” And he laid down in front of Becky a letter from Aunt Jule.
“What you got in that bundle?” demanded the children, as the older lad deposited a bulging paper sack on the kitchen table.
“Never you mind. Business before pleasure; let’s have the letter: It’s a peach. I read it.”
Dear Children:
I fell in front of Sander’s gate, on his broken sidewalk which should have been mended months ago, and sprained my wrist three weeks ago so haven’t been able to write. I have my arm out of the sling now, and it is still very painful, but I feel that I ought to make the effort to write you even if you children don’t feel obligated to write me. I have never heard one word from you except Becky’s two letters and Joan’s postcard.
We are having very warm weather here, and the crops need rain. I see by the papers that this is a bad season in Tripp County, and that you are due for a complete failure. I never had the faith in that country that Jim had. I hope you are not going to lose everything, but if you children did the planting I don’t suppose you had much to lose.
Your house looks pretty run down. The Glovers seem to be dirty, easy-going tenants, and don’t keep things up the way they should. They have cut down the hard maple that Jim planted, and I notice that two of the windows are broken. I don’t suppose they will keep the place long. I hope they will stay, for you’ll need the money before the year is out. I worry about you often, and wonder how you are getting along. I suppose you are all out at the elbows.
The M. E. church cleared $18.90 on their chicken dinner last week. They expected more—Mrs. Hunter is down with rheumatism, and Grandpa Patterson has had a stroke and is unconscious.
Did you take your walnut book shelves with you? If they are stored here in Platteville I could use them, and save you the price of storage. Let me hear from you at once.
Your affectionate aunt,
Juliet McGrudy
Becky laughed her first real laugh for weeks.
“Cheery, isn’t it?” said Dick, seating himself at the table. “Gee, this has been a hot day! This cold cocoa tastes great, Beck. Well, I have two pieces of good news for you: The first is that I dropped Aunt Jule a postcard saying she might use the bookcase. It’s too wide to get through any door in her house, as she’ll find after she’s paid the drayman to bring it up.”
“Dick!”
“Why not? Your cry was always not to argue with her. Nothing else I could write her would ever convince her that the shelves were too big for her house.”
Becky looked amused, but worried. “I don’t like to make trouble for Aunt Jule—” she began.
“I do,” said Joan, eating her floating island with relish. “What’s the other good news, Dick?”
“Well, I went into Mr. Cleaver’s office, and asked him if he knew where I could get a job in the fall. I told him that things looked bad out here, and that we’d have a slim chance of scraping through the winter if I couldn’t earn something to help. He told me that he didn’t see what I could do—that there were a dozen homesteaders to every job in Tripp county. But he suggested something for you, Beck.”
“Me? What could I do?”
“He says he thinks you could get a school if you went after it. Seems that the people who settled this district first are crazy for a teacher for their kids. They tried to get one last year, and couldn’t find a soul. He asked me how much schooling you had had, and when I told him that you were all ready for normal school he said that he felt sure that you could get a job somewhere. He knows the School Commissioner well, and said he’d ask for the place in this district if you wanted it.”
Becky looked overjoyed, then dubious. “But I never taught school a day in my life!”
“That’s what I told him. But he said there were many teachers out in this part of the country with just half your preparation. The people want schools so much that they’ll take girls of sixteen without any training at all.”
“But who’d do our cooking if you were teaching?” inquired Joan.
“We’d all have to hop to and help,” said Dick. “If Becky’s going to support us we’ve got to board her.”
“Where could I hold school? Here in the house?”
“No, he says there’s a school building two miles and a half west of here, in Crane Hollow. It was built last year, but never used because they couldn’t find a teacher.”
“It’s too good to be true. I can’t believe that I’d ev
er get it.”
“He said you were to let him know, right away, if you wanted it, and he’d go after the place for you. Said you could probably make forty-five dollars a month.”
“But Dick, arithmetic!”
“Well, I mentioned that you always counted dots on your paper when you were adding, and he said to tell you to stop doing it in front of people. Said you were the smartest girl he’d seen among the homesteaders—he evidently doesn’t know many of them!—and that if he had children he’d be tickled to have you teaching them.”
Becky’s eyes shone.
“He said not to mention our plans, because old man Welp would probably do all he could to keep you from getting the school.”
“Did you tell him about the lassoing?”
“I did, and he was as hot as I was. Said that the worst thing about it was that we were so helpless with a man like Welp; if we had him bound over to keep the peace he’d probably burn the shack down at night, or do something equally lawless. The only thing to do was to keep away from them; not even let the children go where they’d be likely to have a run-in with them. If the Welps got too lawless, he said, the homesteaders themselves would step in and force them out of the county, which of course would be the best thing in the world for us. He advised us to mind our own business, never to speak to them, and if they threatened us again to let him know. Mr. Cleaver’s a peach, Beck.”
“It’s wonderful to have him to go to for advice.”
“I told him that, and he laughed and said it was wonderful to find anybody who wanted advice these days; that it was far more blessed to give than to receive.”
“I hope he doesn’t feel that the Linvilles are hanging on him too much.”
“He didn’t act as though he did. He kept me in his office a long time, and asked all about the corn and the potatoes and what improvements we had made, and if we were lonesome, and how you were standing it—”
“What did you tell him about that?”
Dick looked mischievous. “I told him that I thought the wind was making you a bit edgy; that your practically perfect disposition seemed frazzled lately. And he said, ‘When she feels that way pack her up and bring her in to Dallas to my wife; she’ll sympathize with her. When I first brought Mrs. Cleaver out here from Ohio she said the wind used to blow her spirits out just like electric fuses.’”
“I’m not afraid of the wind now. Oh, Dick, everything will be smooth sailing if I get that school!”
“Look what I brought home!” said Dick. He opened the paper bag that the children had been eyeing, and thrust it under the three noses in succession.
“Oranges!” exclaimed Joan and Phil.
“Lemons!” said Becky.
“Let’s lie in the lap of luxury,” proposed Dick. “Beck, you squeeze the lemons; Phil, you get the big pitcher; Joan, you bring the sugar. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t manage to scurry around and dip out the water! We’ll drink to Becky’s school in real lemonade.”
CHAPTER VIII
PRAIRIE BONDS
“’S your turn to feed the chickens,” said Joan to Phil.
“’Tis not. It’s yours.”
“Phil Linville, don’t you remember that I took the scraps out early this morning, an’ that ole rooster snipped me in the arm?”
“That was yestiddy.”
“It was not. Look at the mark! Does that look like a yestiddy scar?”
“Gee, you’re always trying to get out of work,” said Phil. “I did all the chores this morning—with Dick.”
“Quit your scrapping,” called Dick from the barn. “Trouble with you kids is that you haven’t enough work. You ought to be made to do all the chores except milking. Then you wouldn’t have so much time to fight.”
“Why don’t you children carry out the chicken feed together?” advised Becky. “Then you could get to playing sooner. I thought you were going to have a circus this morning.”
“We were going to have one,” said Phil gloomily. “We had two gophers for it. But one gnawed his way out of the box last night, an’ we always have a fight because Joan insists on being the trainer. There’s only one that can be that, and she won’t be the audience. That’s the reason I don’t like Dakota; there’s never any folks for audiences.”
The rain had come at last, but too delayed to do much good. The late potatoes could be helped, the parsnips and turnips would be started, but the corn would amount to nothing, and the gardens had gone beyond saving. There were no crops anywhere, except in the land along the Keya Paha River, where the homesteaders had had more rain. Becky had resigned herself to the absence of green vegetables, and was doing her best to satisfy the children’s craving for fruit by preserving the few things that grew in that orchard-less country. The drought had affected the wild plums, and their fruit was small and hard, but Becky made them into a jam which the children welcomed as a change from their monotonous fare. She bought thriftily of lemons to flavor the tasteless ground cherries. And as she dug around the roots of the sickly currant bushes she dreamed of the jelly she would have next summer. Surely Dakota wouldn’t suffer a drought, next year
Uncle Jim’s note-book had given her new courage. She replanted the vines that had been torn down at the door, and watered the few flowers that the drought had spared. Castor and Pollux looked like feather dusters, with their long, naked stems, but their heads were putting out fresh green leaves, and making two tiny spots of shade on the dry yard. And it was easier to be hopeful when the thermometer dropped a little, and the prairie cooled instead of baked.
Becky thought of Phil’s words as she bent over the only two tomato plants left of the dozens that they had started, and tied their limpy stalks to a stake. That was the hard part of homesteading—that you never had an audience. Trouble and disappointment you could stand if you could only talk them over with someone; she could have laughed at hardships if she had had Mary Dennison, or some of the other dear Platteville girls to laugh with her. If Mr. Cleaver lived near enough to see occasionally it wouldn’t be so bad. But there was not only no audience in Tripp County, but no companionship. How could you be intimate with people who weren’t like you, who hadn’t a thought in common with you? It was hard to be even neighborly with most of them. There didn’t seem to be much friendliness on the prairies.
Bronx, who had been lying in the soft dirt beside her, wrinkled his alert nose, gave a bark, and bounded wildly over the trail.
“Someone’s coming,” called Joan.
“Maybe it’s the Welps,” said Phil with fear in his eyes.
But Bronx came back down the trail with Mrs. Kenniker, her ugly red calico dress swinging against a horse. “The Oleson baby’s dead,” she announced.
“That curly-headed little thing that lived on the claim near the Lone Tree?”
“That’s the one.”
“Had she been sick long?”
“Took this morning. Bit by a snake. She was only ailing a few minutes; then she took a spell and died. Wasn’t nobody there but her pa and ma. She’s all they got, except a big boy.”
The children gathered around the gray horse with wonder and sympathy in their faces. They felt a sudden bond with the Oleson family—the sullen-looking man and the sad-faced woman to whom they had nodded when they passed in their wagon.
“He come over fer me,” continued Mrs. Kenniker. “He had to drive in to town to get a coffin, and she didn’t want to lay out the baby alone. Ole, the boy, is working down on the Keha Paha, and she’s all alone. I promised Oleson I’d go over and help, but I don’t like to go alone. I got a dread on me about dead people. I thought I’d drive this way, and get you to mosey along.”
Becky began at once to take off her apron. “Dick, will you harness Job for me?” she asked. “Good thing I was up early this morning. The house is clean and the dinner all ready to cook. Dick will finish that, and you two children can wash the dishes afterward. Please don’t slop the water all over the clean floor, and don’t fight while I’m
away!”
Mrs. Kenniker smiled a grim smile. “That’s one trouble I ain’t got,” she said. “Marietta ain’t got anyone to fight with, and if she had she ain’t much on the scrap. The Mister and me does all the rowing at our house.”
Becky picked up the reins, added a few last words of instruction, and swung herself into the saddle. The two horses set off over the dusty trail to the Oleson house.
“How you getting along with the Welpses?” asked her companion as they passed in sight of the enemy’s rusty stovepipe. “They leaving you be?”
“We haven’t found anything wrong for several weeks.”
“Then they ain’t been around your way, be sure of that. They always leave a piece of cussedness in their trail. I’ve known a lot of mean folks in my time—I was born of ’em and married with ’em, but I ain’t never seen a meaner man than Peter Welp, unless it was his two sons.”
“Do they make trouble for you, too?”
“They don’t dare do any real damage, ’cause they’re scart of Mister. They’d rather try their devilment on a family of children. But those miserable big boys make life terrible for Marietta.”
“How?”
“Oh, mocking her, and hunching up a shoulder at her, and calling to know who she’s got her back up at. She hates even to go to church fer fear they’ll yell after her. I could kill ’em fer that. Marietta’s on to her looks without anybody reminding her.”
“I think she’s a lovely-looking girl. Her eyes are so clear you can almost look through them.”
“Yes, she’s got nice eyes, but folks are too busy spotting her crooked back to look at her face. She was born straight enough, but her pa knocked her over one day, when he was drunk. He didn’t aim to do it, but he stumbled and fell agin her—she was just starting to walk—and knocked her down. When she could walk again she was crooked that way.”
“Couldn’t she ever be helped?”
Mrs. Kenniker’s horse dropped back a few paces, so her face was out of Becky’s sight. “I tried it. The day I first noticed that her back was wrong I took her to a doctor. That was out in Gregory County. He was a good doctor—one of those cancer removers—but he couldn’t help her. We paid him in potatoes, and it took our whole crop that year. Finally I seen his treatments weren’t doing no good, and then he said she’d have to go to Sioux City fer an operation, and it would cost a hundred and fifty dollars. I began to save fer it that very night. I laid eighteen cents in a tea-box in my pantry as soon as I got home, and whenever I got a little egg money I’d put a few cents to it. But every-time I got a little scraped together Marietta’d be sick, and I’d have to spend it. She was such a pindling baby that she caught everything that came along. I had ninety dollars saved the time she had typhoid, and it all went. After she was well I began to save again. It took me three years to get a hundred dollars. Then the Mister hitched up and we drove into Sioux City with her. She was at the hospital two weeks.”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 69
