A Lantern in Her Hand

by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  A Lantern in Her Hand

  by Bess Streeter Aldrich

  First published in 1928

  This edition published by Reading Essentials

  Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

  For.ullstein@gmail.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  A LANTERN

  IN HER HAND

  BESS STREETER ALDRICH

  * * *

  Because the road was steep and long,

  And through a dark and lonely land,

  God set upon my lips a song

  And put a lantern in my hand.

  Joyce Kilmer

  * * *

  A Lantern in Her Hand

  INTRODUCTION

  Cedartown sits beside a great highway which was once a buffalo trail. If you start in one direction on the highway—and travel far enough—you will come to the effete east. If you start in the opposite direction—and travel a few hundred miles farther—you will come to the distinctive west. Cedartown is neither effete nor distinctive, nor is it even particularly pleasing to the passing tourist. It is beautiful only in the eyes of those who live here and in the memories of the Nebraska-born whose dwelling in far places has given them moments of homesickness for the low rolling hills, the swell and dip of the ripening wheat, the fields of sinuously waving corn and the elusively fragrant odor of alfalfa.

  There are weeks when drifting snow and sullen sleet hold the Cedartown community in their bitter grasp. There are times when hot winds come out of the southwest and parch it with their feverish breath. There are periods of monotonous drouth and periods of dreary rain; but between these onslaughts there are days so perfect, so filled with clover odors and the rich, pungent smell of newly turned loam, so sumac-laden and apple-burdened, that to the prairie-born there are no others as lovely by mountain or lake or sea.

  The paved streets of Cedartown lie primly parallel over the obliterated tracks of the buffalo. The substantial buildings of Cedartown stand smartly over the dead ashes of Indian campfires. There are very few people left now in the community who have seen the transition,—who have witnessed the westward trek of the last buffalo, the flicker of the last burnt-out ember.

  Old Abbie Deal was one of these.

  Just outside the corporate limits of Cedartown stands the old Deal home. It was once a farm-house, but the acreage around it has been sold, and Cedartown has grown out to meet it, so that a newcomer could not know where the town ceased and the country began.

  The house stands well back from the road in a big yard with a long double row of cedars connecting the formal parlor entrance and the small front gate. However, in the days when the Deals lived there, scarcely any one used the little gate, or walked up the grassy path between the cedars. All comers chose to enter by the wide carriage-gate standing hospitably open and beckoning a welcome to the lane road which runs past a row of Lombardy poplars to the sitting-room porch.

  The house itself is without distinction. There were no architects in the community when the first of its rooms were built. “We’ll have the living-room there and the kitchen here,” one told old Asy Drumm. And old Asy, with few comments and much tobacco-chewing, placed the living-room there and the kitchen here. The result was weatherproof, sturdy and artless. When the country was new, homes, like dresses, were constructed more for wearing qualities than beauty.

  Twice, onto the first wing-and-ell, old Asy, a little more glum and tobacco-stained, added a room, until the house had attained its present form. That form, now, is not unlike an aeroplane which has settled down between the cedars at the front and the cottonwood wind-break in the rear. The parlor, protruding toward the road, might contain the engine. The sitting-room to the left and a bedroom to the right seem the wings, while the dining-room, kitchen, and a summer kitchen beyond, trail out like the long tail of the thing. If one’s imagination is keen he can even fancy that the fan-shaped colored-glass window in the parlor may some day begin to whirl, propeller-like, and the whole house rise up over the cedars.

  The interior of the house, during Abbie Deal’s lifetime, was a combination of old-fashioned things which she had accumulated through the years, and modern new ones which the grown children had given her. A dull-finished, beautifully-proportioned radio cabinet stood opposite a homemade, rudely painted what-not. A kitchen table, with a little declivity in one corner, in which old Doc Matthews had rolled pills in Civil War times, stood near a white enameled case which was the last word in refrigeration. A little crude oil-painting of a prairie sunset, which Abbie Deal had done in the ’seventies, hung across the room from a really exquisite study of the same subject, which a daughter, Mrs. Frederick Hamilton Baker, had done forty years later.

  Abbie Deal kept everything that had ever come into the house. Every nail, every button, every string, was carefully hoarded. “This would make a strong bottom for one of the kitchen chairs some day,” old Abbie Deal would say, when in truth the bottom of the chair was as strong as its legs. Or, “Save those stubs of candles from the Christmas tree. I can melt them and run them into one big one.” The characteristic was a hang-over from the lean and frugal days when the country was new, when every tiny thing had its use. As a consequence, there was in the house the flotsam of all the years.

  One of the daughters, Mrs. Harrison Scannell Rhodes, on her annual visit out from Chicago, protested once: “Mother, if the house only represented some one period! But it’s such a jumbled combination of things. They’re not antique. They’re just old.”

  “And why should it?” Old lady Deal flared up a little. “I’m no one period. I’ve lived with spinning-wheels and telephones . . . with tallow-dips and electric lights. I’m not antique. I’m just old. It represents me, doesn’t it?”

  You will infer from the retort that old Abbie Deal was a strong personality. And you will be quite right. The fact that she lived there in the old home until her eightieth year, over the protests of children and grandchildren, attested to that. At the time she was seventy, they began trying to pry her away from “The Cedars.” They talked over various plans for her—that she should go to Omaha to live with Mack,—to Lincoln to live with Margaret,—that she should have rooms at John’s right there in Cedartown,—that Grace should give up her teaching in Wesleyan University temporarily and stay at home. When they had quite definitely decided on the Lincoln home with Margaret, old Abbie Deal spoke. “I will do nothing of the kind,” she said with finality. “I am going to stay right here. And kindly let me alone. Because a woman is old, has she no rights?”

  After that they did not press the matter. They “let her alone,” but they drove in frequently, for only the Chicago daughter lived far away. Sometimes, on Sundays, the lane road contained a half dozen high-powered cars parked there through the dinner hour and the afternoon. But not one son or daughter could ever become reconciled to the idea of driving away and leaving her there.

  “When I think of fire . . .” one of them would say.

  “Or of her getting sick in the night . . .”

  “Or falling . . . and no one to help her . . .”

  “Or any one of a dozen things . . .”

  “Yes . . . something will happen to Mother some day.”

  And they were quite right. Something happened to Mother. Last July on a late afternoon, while suppers cooked and children of the north end of town played “Run, Sheep, Run,” in her yard, old lady Deal died. A neighbor woman found her lying across the
foot of the bed, fully dressed, while the slice of meat which she had been cooking, burned to a crisp.

  Of the five middle-aged children, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, not one was with her. They all came hastily in response to the messages. Within two hours’ time, a shining limousine, two big sedans, and a roadster all stood in the lane road. For the first time, when the cars turned into the driveway by the Lombardy poplars, no little old white-haired woman with bright brown eyes, had come hurrying out to give cheery greeting. That queer, solemn hush of death hung over the whole place. It was in the quivering droop of the cottonwoods,—in the deepening of the prairie twilight,—in the silence of the star-filled summer sky.

  They all gathered in the parlor with its modern radio and its old-fashioned what-not, its elaborate new floor-lamp and its crude oil-painting. All of the children and several of the grandchildren were there. Mackenzie Deal, the Omaha banker, was there. John Deal, the Cedartown attorney and state legislator, was there. Mrs. Harrison Scannell Rhodes of Chicago, who had been visiting in Omaha, was there. Mrs. Frederick Hamilton Baker, of Lincoln, and Miss Grace Deal, of Wesleyan University, were there. They were people of poise, men and women not given to hysterical demonstration, but at the first gathering they all broke down. For a brief quarter of an hour there in the old parlor with its familiar objects, they let their grief have sway. For a little while there in the farm-home of their youth, they were but children whose mother had left them lonely when night was coming on.

  When they had pulled themselves together, their greatest grief seemed to be that she died alone. In deepest remorse they blamed themselves. Standing there together in common sorrow, they said the same thing over and over to each other:

  “Didn’t she seem as well as ever to you last week?”

  “I’ll never forgive myself that I played bridge all afternoon.”

  “Do you suppose she suffered much?”

  “Or called for us?”

  “Isn’t it dreadful? Poor Mother! So many of us . . . and not one of us here just when she needed us . . . and after all she’s done for us.”

  Only one,—Laura Deal,—a twelve-year-old granddaughter, turned away from the window where she had been looking down the long double row of cedars, and said in a clear, steady voice: “I don’t think it was so dreadful. I think it was kind of nice. Maybe she didn’t miss you.” She looked slowly around the circle of her elders. “When you stop to think about it, maybe she didn’t miss you at all. One time Grandma told me she was the very happiest when she was living over all her memories. Maybe . . .” She hesitated, a little shy at expressing the thought in her heart, “Maybe she was doing that . . . then.”

  * * *

  This is the story of the old lady who died while the meat burned and the children played “Run, Sheep, Run,” across her yard.

  CHAPTER I

  Abbie Mackenzie was old Abbie Deal’s maiden name. And because the first eight years of her life were interesting only to her family, we shall skip over them as lightly as Abbie herself used to skip a hoop on the high, crack-filled sidewalks in the little village of Chicago, which stood at the side of a lake where the bulrushes grew.

  We find her then, at eight, in the year 1854, camping at night on the edge of some timberland just off the beaten trail between Dubuque and the new home in Blackhawk County, Iowa, to which the little family was bound.

  Abbie and a big sister of fifteen, Isabelle, were curled up together under two old patchwork quilts in one of the wagons. Another sister, Mary, and a little brother, Basil, were in the other wagon with their mother. Sixteen-year-old James and eleven-year-old Dennie, the men of the party, were sleeping near the oxen, so that the warmth of the animals’ bodies would keep them warm.

  Because she had propped up a small section of the wagon’s canvas cover, Abbie could see out into the night. The darkness was a heavy, animate thing. It hung thickly about the wagon, vaguely weird, remotely fearsome. It seemed to see and hear and feel. It looked at Abbie with its stirs, heard her whispered words with its tree-leaves, felt of her warm little body with its cool breeze fingers. Something about the queer closeness of it almost frightened her. Something about the hushed silence of it made her think of her father who had died two years before. She summoned a picture of him into her mind, now,—recalling the paleness of his long, thin face, the neatness of his neckcloth, the gentle courtesy of his manner. Thinking of him so, she punched Isabelle with an active elbow. “Belle, tell me about Father and Mother.”

  The big girl was a little impatient. “I’ve told you everything I remember.”

  “Tell it again.”

  “I should think you’d get tired of hearing the same thing.”

  “Oh, I never do.”

  “Well . . . Father were what they call an aristocrat. He lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, and his folks, the Mackenzies, had a town house and two country houses. He belonged to the landed gentry.”

  “What’s landed gentry?”

  “It means he were a gentleman and didn’t have to work.”

  “Will James and Dennie be gentlemen?”

  “Of course not. We lost all our money.”

  “Tell how we lost it.” Abbie settled herself with complacence. There was an element of satisfaction in having had such a foreign substance at one time, even if it was long before her birth.

  “Well . . . Father were a young man and never had to do nothing but enjoy hisself, and he were out one day following the hare and hounds . . .”

  “Tell about that.”

  “That’s hunting . . . a pack of hounds after a rabbit . . . and he got away from the rest of them and were lost.”

  “The rabbit?”

  “No, dunce-cap, . . . you know I mean father. And he come to a peasant’s cottage.”

  “What’s peasant?”

  “Awful poor people that have to work. But don’t stop me every minute. I always forget where I were. Well . . . and he wanted a drink. And a sixteen-year-old peasant girl come out of the house. They were Irish, but I guess they were working for some folks in Scotland. Anyway it were Mother and she got a drink for him . . . were pulling up the rope and he took the rope and pulled it up hisself. Just think! A gentleman . . . and Mother were sixteen . . . just one year older than me. Abbie, do you suppose there’ll be an aristocratic landed gentleman out in Blackhawk County where we’re going?”

  “No . . . I don’t think so. Go on.”

  “Well, Mother were pretty . . . Irish girls about always are . . . and there were a rosebush and Father asked her for a rose and she pulled one for him. Abbie, don’t you tell anybody, but I’ve got a little rosebush done up in a wet rag in the wagon and I’m going to plant it out in Blackhawk County.”

  “Ho! Ho! It takes years and years for a rosebush to grow big enough to have flowers to pull off for a-ris . . . for a-rist . . . for gentlemen. Go on.”

  “Anyway, Father took his rose and went away and the next day he come back.”

  “Were he lost again?”

  “No, dunce-cap! He come back to see Mother a-purpose. And he come other days, even after that, and they would walk over the heather hills together.”

  “What’s feather hills?”

  “Not feather! Heather! . . . a little kind of weedy grass. And all the neighbors shook their heads and said they’d seen that thing happen before from the gentry . . . and . . .” Isabelle whispered solemnly, “no good ever come of it.”

  “What did they say that for?”

  “I can’t tell you now. You wouldn’t understand. When you’re as old as me, you will. But just the same, Father did marry her and took her to Aberdeen to the big Mackenzie house. Mother wore her best dress and her best head-shawl, but even then, all fixed up that nice way, the Mackenzies didn’t like her. Father’s mother were Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie and she were awful proud and I hate her for not liking Mother. I hate her so bad that I’m sorry I’m named for her. If Mother would let me, I’d change it to Rosamond. I read about a
Rosamond and she . . .”

  “Go on about her . . . not you.”

  “Well . . . she were ashamed of Mother, but she had to take her in because she were Father’s wife, and she dressed her up grand and tried to make her different. But when Mother would go back to see her folks, she’d put on her peasant dress and wear her shawl on her head and slip away. And Sundays when the Mackenzies would go to the kirk . . .”

  “What’s kirk?”

  “Church. Where were I? Oh . . . the aristocrats set down below and the peasants all set up in the loft . . .”

  “Like a hay loft?”

  “No. Stop interrupting, or I won’t tell you one thing more. And Mother wouldn’t leave her folks, the O’Conners, so Father went and set with them and the Mackenzies were just sick with shame. Then Grandfather Mackenzie died, and a long time afterward . . . after Janet and James and Mary and Dennie and I were all born, Grandmother Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie . . .”

  “I just admire to hear that name . . .”

  “There you go again. Now I’m through telling it.”

  “Please . . . I won’t stop you again.”

  “Well . . . Grandmother died, too. Then Father come to America on a sailing vessel, just for a pleasure trip, and he were gone so long and folks thought he weren’t coming back at all . . . and Mother cried something terrible . . . and Father had signed a note for a man . . .”

  “What’s signed a . . .? Oh, . . . go on.”

  “And it made him lose all his money. Men come and put cards up on the house and stables while he were gone and the signs said there were going to be a roup there.”

  “What’s . . .? Go on.”

  “A roup’s an auction sale. There were fifteen saddle-horses in the stables, but after the roup cards went up Mother were not allowed to touch one on account of the law, and so her and James and Janet walked twenty-seven miles to have her father and mother come and bid in some of her things. She’s got ’em yet in that little wooden chest with calf-skin all over it. It’s in the other wagon and I know just what’s in it because I saw ’em. There’s a white silk shawl with big solid roses in the corners . . . all four corners . . . and a jeweled fan . . . and a breast-pin with lavender sets and a string of pearls. There are just as many things as there are girls in our family and Mother says each girl are to have one for a keepsake. I know which one I want . . . the silk shawl. I tried it on once when Mother were gone and I looked a lot like the painting of Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie that hung up on the landing of the stairway in the great hall. Course, you understand, Abbie, I never said I hated her looks . . .”