by Ruth Glover
“Oh yes, I’ve heard of you. Chickens, right?”
“Right. Just took a batch of eggs to town. This here,” he indicated Tierney, “is our new help—Tierney Caulder, from Scotland. Back there is my son, Buster.”
“How do you do, ma’am,” the hat came off, and the man, though seated, actually managed a bow. “Dilbert Short here. These creatures in the back”—three pairs of eyes in three blond heads were peering with interest over the side of the wagon—“are the D, E, and F of our family—Damon, Ellery, and Florence. The A, B, C’s are home working under the supervision of the wife. These’uns need to have some shoes or they’ll be using their feet as snowshoes come winter. Too bad kids couldn’t have feet like rabbits! I’m taking a calf to pay for ’em.”
Sure enough, tied to the back of the rig was a brown-and-white yearling, dusty and weary, but game. Even as they watched, it dipped its muzzle into the growth at its feet and tore up and began chewing a mouthful of grass.
Buster, standing on a box in order to peer over their own wagon, was saying nothing but was holding aloft, in one hand, a thrashing frog. The eyes of the three in the Short wagon grew as large as saucers.
“Got ’im at the coulee,” Buster managed, shyly but proudly.
“Can we stop there, Dad; can we?” D, E, and F chorused.
“Plan to,” the father said, without turning around. Then, addressing Will, he remarked, “Say, I’d like to come over sometime when work is scarce—ha ha—and see your operation.”
“Glad to have you. I think you are south of Fielding? Come on through Fielding, about ten miles to the north . . . anyone in town can tell you.”
Reluctant farewells were said on both sides; duty called, and there was no time in the middle of the day for the finer facets of life, earnestly though they beckoned the lonely in heart.
“Short,” Will Ketchum said, as they lumbered on. “Dilbert Short. Good man, I’ve heard. Too bad there isn’t time for socializing. It’s one of the hardest prices we pay.”
And so saying, leaving a nostalgic trace in the air as they went, they proceeded homeward. Buster went to sleep on the floor of the wagon, the loosed frogs hopping around him until they too became sluggish from the afternoon heat. Tierney’s head drooped, and she dozed fitfully on the wagon seat, waking once to find her head resting on the shoulder of the uncomplaining man at her side. Apologies seemed unnecessary; explanations were not needed.
If truth were told, Will himself might have dozed off without any problem. Unless, of course, there came a branching of the dim trail they followed, and the beasts took it, leading off into unknown and frightening emptiness. As it was, the team trudged on doggedly, and the reins lay slack in Will’s hand, and he too found his head nodding from time to time.
There was something about creatures that honed in on the familiar; lost in a blizzard, horses had, at times, taken a snow-blinded driver home as straight as an arrow.
Even Tierney recognized the increased measure to the horses’ gait; even she could see their pricked ears. She looked inquiringly at Will.
“Home,” Will said briefly. “Just over the rise. And the horses know it.”
I wonder, thought Tierney, if his heart and breath quicken as the horses’ do? Certainly the man straightened his shoulders, ran a weary hand over his face, and seemed to be more alert than he had been.
“Almost home, Buster,” he said, and the child roused himself, to rise and cling to the edge of the wagon box, anticipating home and Mother and the end of the trip.
The supper hour was over and the shadows of the day were growing long when, over the horizon, Tierney could see the tip of the windmill. Next, not far from it, came the outline of a tall, narrow building—the house Will and his wife had erected, allowing them to move out of the soddy at last. Around and behind it were grouped what seemed to be several small buildings, granaries, perhaps, or storage sheds, and a barn that was, in spite of all improvements, made of sod. Finally she located the long, shedlike building that she presumed housed the “thousands” of chickens.
As they pulled into the yard, a low cacophony of sound could be heard, unrelenting, unchanging, that she figured out was the sound of a thousand and more chickens conversing with one another or perhaps lifting their complaints to the sky. That it was muted, she was to understand later, was due to the lateness of the day and the fact that common sense—if chickens had such—and more likely Mother Nature herself, alerted them to the futility of their loquaciousness.
With a bang that carried to them as they turned in at the gate, the screen door closed behind the form of Lavinia Ketchum. She stepped to the edge of the stoop at the back door of the house and shaded her eyes against the sun’s final rays.
In spite of the smile that lit her face and the small, tentative wave with which she welcomed them, Will, in an undertone, almost as if he was speaking to himself, muttered, “Something’s wrong.”
The Lord certainly knew what He was doing when He substituted Pearly for Anne at the Schmidt farm. And not entirely for Anne’s sake, who so dreaded being placed where there was an unknown, suspicious-appearing man. The elderly Franz she was prepared—grudgingly, it’s true—to accept, but the sturdy, manly form of his grandson—never!
How auspicious then, that the very person Anne looked on with apprehension, Pearly found so satisfactory.
Jolting across the prairie, a sapling at the side of the massive trunk that was Frank Schmidt, Pearly’s overflowing heart poured out, the entire trip, in paeans of joy. Everything, it seemed, pleased her.
“Oh, look!” she exclaimed when a hawk soared overhead, when a patch of prairie flowers appeared, when the wind blew the grasses in a magical display of syncopation and synchronization, back and forth, silently, as though swept by a Master’s hand. She sang it when a covey of prairie chickens flew up, almost from under the team’s hooves. She warbled it when the sun, sinking at last, wrapped itself in folds of pink and silver and rested there on the horizon a while.
“Oh, listen!” she exclaimed when a lark sang, when, at a coulee at lunchtime, a frog croaked unmusically and bees hummed over a bed of blue-eyed grass flourishing daintily at the stream’s edge. She trilled it when, not far from the road, a ground squirrel chattered shrilly, accompanied by a sharp jerk of its tail, and slipped into its burrow.
The stolid, stoic Frank was bemused by her life and liveliness. She was the perfect match for his matter-of-fact, ponderous mind and body. Frank thought slow . . . he moved slow.
Pearly, in turn, was captured by that very deliberateness. While she had a lifetime of uncertainties behind her, he seemed to typify reliability, good substantial values—and, best of all!—staunch Christian virtues.
Hardly able to believe it, at one point she rejoiced, apropos of nothing except perhaps that a four-legged creature—“gopher,” Frank said—scuttled across the road in front of the rig: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; praise Him, all creatures here below!”
Immediately Frank responded with, “Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!”
It was truly a litany of praise, lifting out over the silence of the prairie as sweetly as though a mighty choir had sung the ancient doxology.
Pearly’s heart within her filled with an exultation over and above that of worship of her Lord. There was an acknowledging of the kindred spirit sitting next to her and a swelling of joy at the revelation. So certain was she, that she never doubted for one minute but what Frank recognized it, as she did.
At the realization of what was unfolding itself between them—as a flower, unresisting to the tug of the sun, uncurls itself fully to scatter its fragrance abroad—so the hearts of Frank Schmidt and Pearly Chapel opened at that moment.
Pearly’s great pansy-purple eyes swung in wonder toward the light-hued but earnest gaze of the young man, now looking at her with astonishment mingled with awareness. Unlearned in the ways of love as they were, simple as they were in all things, and inn
ocent, it never occurred to either of them that anything might be improper, or that it was too soon, or that anyone—man on earth or God above—wouldn’t approve.
Never a word was spoken. But Frank’s hamlike hand reached spontaneously toward Pearly, and her small hand, not yet free of calluses, slipped happily into it.
And so they jounced and bounced over the prairie, homeward, as certain of their future as though it had been spelled out in frothy clouds in the vast blue sky above them. And, who knows, perhaps it had. Certainly heaven seemed to smile on them, the earth around them reflected only bounty and blessing, and the very breeze was pungent with promise.
And when, toward the end of the afternoon, the rig pulled into the grandparents’ yard and Franz and Gussie came out to greet the newcomer, they saw a wisp of a girl, all hair and eyes, step down and turn toward them with a smile that superceded the written contract. In that moment the barrier of hired and hirer was erased.
“T’ank Gott!” Gussie whispered, all her fears laid to rest, all her hesitations settled over having a stranger in the house, an unmarried female around the bachelor grandson who was the apple of her eye and heir to the spreading Franz homestead.
There was no hesitation: Gussie took the London waif in her arms. “Velcome—you iss so velcome, mein liebchen,” she said.
Pearly had come home.
She stepped into a simple house, as solid and substantial as its inhabitants. Here the delicious odors of fresh strudel made the ever-hungry Pearly heady with its unspoken welcome—it was so homey. Her hand touched the few family treasures scattered around the room, and it was a touch of loving possession. She pulled back the handmade lace curtains and looked out on a yard where trees had been set out and watered faithfully and a garden flourished under the prairie sun and rain, and felt the satisfaction of a home-owner.
And when she was escorted to the room that would be hers, and hers alone—a first for Pearly Gates Chapel—she burst into tears. But they were tears of pure joy. Frank, behind her and carrying her shabby bag, set the load down and, without a word, took Pearly into the shelter of his arms, patting her until her sobs abated. They were the happiest tears he had ever seen; they were the happiest sobs.
“Gott,” the little mimic said through her tears, never realizing she was already adapting Schmidt ways and the Schmidt accent into her love- and family-hungry self, “iss so good.”
Anne’s tears were of another nature entirely.
She had come back to the hostel, after seven solid hours of work—she had started three hours late—to fold herself onto the bed and realize she was alone, tired, and afraid.
But she wasn’t hungry. There was food, and in abundance, for the kitchen help at the Madeleine. And, to be fair, hard and steadily though she had worked, there had come a time when Mrs. Corcoran had put her hand on Anne’s shoulder, turned her from the dry sink where she was still bent over what seemed to be an unending supply of vegetables, and said, “Come now, stop a while, dearie. It’s time we all put our feet up and had a bite to eat.”
Whether Mr. Whidby approved, or even knew, the kitchen crew ate exactly what the paying guests ate. “The workman is worthy of his hire,” Mrs. Corcoran declared, and who among them, even Mr. Whidby, dared argue. Mrs. Corcoran did such a superb job, had so many admiring and satisfied customers, that no one interfered with her performance.
“Stick with me, dearie,” she said to Anne, “an’ you’ll learn how to become a A-one cook one of these days.”
Thereafter Anne had watched in fascination as Mrs. Corcoran had prepared, for certain customers, venison, elk, and even a bear steak. Pies, pies, and more pies were forthcoming—apple pies, gooseberry pies, lemon pies, even something called Saskatoon pies.
“Named for the town, or the town named for them?” Anne asked, wishing to sink her teeth into a decent scone or oatcake.
“It’s like the chicken or the egg—nobody knows which came first,” Mrs. Corcoran said comfortably, holding aloft a generous pie with one hand and turning it, and slicing off the extra dough with the other.
“Now I take this extra dough,” she continued, setting the pie aside, “and roll it out, sprinkle it with sugar,” and she suited action to words, “then roll it up, slice it into little rolls, and bake them. They are tasty snacks for the cook—the workman is worthy, remember—also, you can tell, from these little samples, before ever you serve the pie, if the dough is going to be good and flaky, or heavy and tough.”
Mrs. Corcoran’s pies were never tough. Neither were her buns, which were the result of pinching off portions of a rich dough, shaping them into tiny “loaves,” and baking them, supplying individual, separate servings, crusty and tasty, to the diner rather than sliced bread. These farmers, Anne discovered, downed more bread than she would have thought possible. Some sopped up their gravy with it, many ate it with jam or syrup smeared generously all over it, some ate it with pudding, others even ate it with pie! Children, she was told, if hungry aside from meal times, sat down to a bowl of bread and milk sprinkled with a little sugar—if they were fortunate enough to have sugar—and perhaps a little cinnamon. What’s more, they were happy with it.
No wonder, Anne thought with astonishment, they grew so much wheat! As for oats, the grain of her country, aside from the ubiquitous porridge for breakfast, it didn’t seem to be much in evidence.
After a hearty supper of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and carrots (those she had spent most of the day peeling), something called cabbage slaw, some of Mrs. Corcoran’s fluffy buns, and a piece of her delectable lemon pie, Anne was dismissed for the day.
“You’ve done enough for the first day,” Mrs. Corcoran said kindly. “And enough for me to tell you’ll work out just fine. Now scoot on home, wherever that is—the hostel, you say?—and take care of getting settled for the duration, for we’ll be countin’ on you. Be here at ten tomorrow and plan on working twelve hours—that’s a normal day. You’ll skip the breakfast hour and work through the supper hour. Sometimes it will be the other way ’round. Got it?”
Anne, weary, her back breaking, “got it” and was only half-satisfied. Would working on the Schmidt farm have been better, after all? Then she remembered again the ever-so-masculine form of Mr. Frank Schmidt and her aversion to men in general, and she felt she had made the only choice possible.
How was Pearly, poor chick, faring? Somehow Anne had the idea Pearly had been happy, even eager, to make the switch, riding off into the unknown expanse of the prairie with that . . . that male. As for Tierney, Anne hadn’t seen her all day, and wondered what was happening with her.
She soon found out. Arriving at the hostel, she was stopped by the clerk and handed a note. Mystified, Anne went to her room—which was ominously empty—shut and locked the door, took off her shoes, lay back on the bed, propped herself up on a pillow, and opened the note, which was, she realized, in Tierney’s handwriting.
Perhaps Tierney, too, had found a job and was at work. Then the emptiness of the room struck her. Not only were Pearly’s things gone but Tierney’s also. Heart thumping, Anne read what was, after all, but a brief scrawl:
Annie, I’m writing because Mr. Ketchum showed up (and his little son with him, so don’t worry none) right after you left, and I’m going to my placement. Write me at Fielding, but remember that mail is not picked up very often, for I will be ten miles from town. I pray [Tierney had scratched out the “pray” and added “hope”] you’ll be all right.
Lovingly, Tierney
Weary, homesick, lonely, it was then Anne pulled a quilt over herself, curled into a ball, and cried herself to sleep.
What is it?” Will Ketchum asked, even before he embraced his wife. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“It could have been worse—”
“What is it, Lavinia!”
“The chickens—”
“What about the chickens?” Her husband was too impatient, perhaps, but it was their livelihood.
“Give me a chance,
Will. Lemuel . . . well, Lemuel left the doors to one of the pens open, and some of the chickens got out.”
Will Ketchum smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “That lackwit! I was afraid he would do something dumb when I hired him. But it’s not easy finding one lone man, willing to work for little or nothing, and do it away out here. Where is he?”
“Well, that’s the rest of it. He was scared, I guess. He quit and took off.”
“Leaving me with no help whatsoever. What am I going to do? If I’d only known when I was in town!”
The eyes of husband and wife, after one brief pause, swung to Tierney. Still on the wagon seat, she was aware her mouth had dropped open and closed it quickly.
“I’ll help,” she said weakly, picturing herself thrashing through the grasses in search of escaping chickens.
“How long ago was this?” Will asked as he turned to help his son out of the wagon, then reached a hand toward Tierney.
Stepping out backward onto the wheel, reaching a foot for the hub, then jumping to the ground, Tierney sighed to note her dingy “outfit”—the serge skirt dust-covered, the white waist soiled—and was certain her face showed the same wear and tear. What a way to greet Mrs. Ketchum, who stood, neat as a pin in her calico dress and bib apron, on the kitchen stoop.
Several years older than Tierney, Lavinia Ketchum was as unremarkable, in a feminine way, as her husband. But she conveyed, somehow, the same strength of spirit that Tierney had discerned about her husband. Here was a pair who were, she was certain, the salt of the earth, though never considered diamonds, especially not diamonds in the rough.
Therefore she was not surprised when Lavinia said calmly to Will, “Come on in, wash, and have your supper, and you’ll handle things better.” Then she turned her attention to Tierney.
“Welcome, Miss Caulder. I’m sorry to have introduced you to our farm in the way that I did, but Will, here, understands me well, and had guessed that something had gone awry. Perhaps he expected it. Did you, Will?”
