Thank goodness, Dad was still confident. He had unlocked the back door with the key Sam Parsons had given him, and was flinging it wide.
Sayre stepped into the opened doorway. Trembling a little, she lifted one arm to brace her hand against the door jamb and let her glance sweep in half-fearful appraisal over that interior. Larger than she had expected from the outside. Partly filled with untidy furniture, covered thick with dust. Dad was cautiously lifting one home-made window shade. Late sunlight fluttered in. It revealed long diagonal lines of shimmering dust motes across unoccupied space; a greasy cookstove; cobwebs, everywhere; old papers in corners, mouse-nibbled.
Dad kept on moving briskly about, opening the whole place up to air and fading daylight. Just three rooms. A bedroom partitioned off at each end from the one main big room, which after all was really two. One half of it was meant for living-room; that was plain. The other half was kitchen. When cleaned up, what a cosy kitchen it would be! Its compact arrangement of shelves and table and benches and stove made of it a sort of country kitchenette, much nicer than any city one, because into it sweet air could flow and sunshine flood. “It’s like a great big country dollhouse,” Sayre thought happily. She turned and called Hitty to come and see.
All her misgivings were gone now. With everything scrubbed up, and Dad’s easy chair in it, and the books, and Mother’s picture, and the curtains, freshly laundered, she no longer had any doubt of being able to make a home out of this place.
The Parsons family had left enough in the house for them to get along with temporarily until their own things should come, things Aunt Mehitable’s money had paid to bring, just as it had paid to get the family there. As always, thinking of Aunt Mehitable’s money made Sayre feel ashamed. She went back to the ‘Shake and set to work helping Charley unload.
Sayre slept that night with a profundity born of the enfolding silence. She awakened, wonderfully refreshed, to stand at her bedroom window and watch the dawn. No one, not even the most favored of Chicago’s millions, ever saw a sunrise like that. Instinctively the girl sank to her knees on the floor. Elbows propped on the sill, chin cupped in her hands, she watched the scene with reverence and bated breath.
Behind her on the bed, Hitty stirred in her sleep, fair hair spread wide on the pillow, one thin arm outflung. The sound brought to Sayre the swift crystallizing of a resolve so deeply felt that it became a vow.
“The Morgans are through with moving. We’re going to stay here. We’re going to make a home here. Hitty’s little yet. She’s going to have a home and live in it, and be one of a family that really belongs somewhere. And that somewhere’s going to be right here on this federal irrigation project in Wyoming!”
All her life Sayre herself had longed for a real home—above all, a home in the country. She had never expected actually to have it. But she had liked to escape into the dream of it when realities were hard. When she drew books to read out of the public library, she always sought out farm stories, or else tales of the days before all this great western United States was settled. Then the Government had given away new land in the West to people who would live on it, improve it, and make farm homes out of it—what they called homestead it. Sayre had devoured eagerly every story about this sort of thing she could lay hands on, filled with regret that the time of these stories was always in the past. If only, she had often thought, there were such opportunities now!
Then this summer Sam Parsons had told the Morgans there still was new land in the West on which people could homestead. He had explained to them everything about it. It was land overgrown with sagebrush and dwarf cactus, which nobody had thought worth anything in the old days except for sheep grazing. But all it had really needed to make it produce was water. And now the Government had brought water upon it by means of its big dams and irrigation systems. Mr. Parsons had shown them maps and diagrams that told all about such systems. And, at last, thanks to Sam Parsons himself, who had really brought about their coming, here they actually were, the four Morgans, arrived on eighty acres of this new, reclaimed, irrigated land. Could anything so good be really true?
Gratitude surged through the girl’s heart toward fussy Mr. Parsons. She felt very guilty these days that she had never used to like him. He was a floorwalker in Reeves & Beebe’s department store basement in Chicago where Dad had clerked for a while in the hardware department.
Mr. Parsons and his wife had started to homestead these eighty acres two years ago but had never proved up on them; that is, lived on them and improved them enough to get full legal ownership of them. Mr. Parsons’ wife had hated the loneliness of the life, and Sam himself had found he was never meant for a farmer. So they had come back to Chicago and turned over to Dad, on long, very easy terms, their chance on these eighty acres of homestead land, already partly cropped, and fenced, and provided with temporary house and sheds. Sayre was still lost in the wonder of it. Thankfulness sang in her this morning softly like a prayer.
Suddenly she shivered at her open window. The morning air was chill in this high altitude. She rose and began to dress. She was a sturdy, dark-haired cricket of a girl; every movement was quick and true. She had need to hurry. There was lots to do today. Was she not the Morgan housekeeper? She had been ever since her mother’s death three years before.
It was afternoon before she went with Dad to town. He had to see about having the right to homestead these eighty acres transferred from Sam Parsons’ name to his own—to “file on the claim,” as the phrase was, for himself.
Sayre gave Dad’s hand a quick squeeze as they entered the land office of the Pawaukee Irrigation Project. Dad did not seem to fit into the place. It was such a new, shiny room, and Dad, in spite of his cheerfulness, looked old and worn—just like that threadbare suit of his which would sag to shapelessness in spite of all that her iron could do.
The land agent was not the only person in the office. In a back corner three men occupied tilted chairs in a semicircle of friendly intercourse. Undertones from their conversation reached Sayre as she sat and listened to Dad telling the agent how the Morgans’ move had come about. And now, hearing the story as it was told to a stranger, Sayre found sweeping over her a deeply dismaying realization of what they had really done. She hadn’t thought about it in this way before. What had they actually known, back there in Chicago, about the situation here? Nothing but what Sam Parsons had told them. They hadn’t asked, hadn’t looked up facts, had just accepted his word for the conditions that they would find, and come out in blind confidence that everything would be all right. Why did Dad have to be making all that so clear to this man? He even told the agent that the money for the move had come from Aunt Mehitable, “the principal of a big New York City public school.” Why tell that? What business was it of the land agent’s? Dad was so simple and straightforward and honest that sometimes he was too frank.
“You can see, sir,” he wound up, “what this venture means to me. I’m a man with a dependent family, sir, a widower. I’ve been unfortunate in the past. So a chance like this, to secure a comfortable home for my family and an assured future—it is nothing less than a godsend.”
The land agent looked grave; he began to ask questions. Sayre shrank from her father’s answers. Long before that questioning was over, she wanted to cry to the questioner, “Oh, please don’t try to be so kind. Just tell him right out!” For there was that in the agent’s manner, sympathetic though it was, which made Sayre feel humiliated. She wanted to rise up and shield her father. Instead she only sat very quiet, consternation mounting in her heart, her intent blue eyes watching the cheerfulness of her father’s face fade into that gray dejection which, even as a little girl, she had learned to dread with an astuteness beyond her years. It so often followed a new move. Why? Why, anyway, all her life long, had their family had to move and move and move?
Aunt Mehitable said it was because Dad was visionary. Sayre had come of late years to understand what her aunt meant. Dad was always seeing somewhere at a dis
tance ideal conditions of living which made what the family had unendurable. Yet when his restlessness had found a way to grasp at this distant vision, it was never what it had promised to be; often it was worse than what they had left behind. Then Dad would grow restless again, and begin to reach out toward another dream.
Dad exasperated Aunt Mehitable. Yet she really loved him, Sayre knew. The girl could remember hearing her aunt sigh and say that Dad had never been meant for the practical world, that if only his eyes had not failed so badly during his theological seminary course, life might have been very different for him and for his family.
As it was, the family had lived in so many places that it was hard for Sayre to remember their exact order. The Ohio town where Dad had had a shoe store. The Michigan mining town where Aunt Mehitable had bought Dad a little hardware business—which she had had to sell again because Dad would trust people he never should have trusted. New York City for quite a while after that, with Dad a partner in a second-hand bookstore which had failed, leaving Dad stranded again and hating New York’s turmoil. The family had drifted south then, to towns in West Virginia and Florida, then back to a Pennsylvania coal town where Dad had sold insurance and real estate for a man, and the man had absconded.
There had followed that slow sort of gypsy trip back to the Middle West, with Dad selling a line of household mops and brushes to small-town merchants. In this capacity he had at last reached Chicago, having looked forward to it as a big center of opportunity, but finding himself unable to cope there with the competition he met. From then on he had been a grasping at any opportunity to earn some sort of living, Dad always calling what he was doing “temporary,” and looking for something better. Clerking in Reeves & Beebe’s basement had been the last.
Of all the places they had been Sayre shrank most in memory from the shabby southern Indiana town where, on their way Chicagoward, Mother had died suddenly of pneumonia.
Dad had been discouraged much more often since then. He blamed himself deeply, Sayre knew, for having made their mother’s life too hard. Sayre’s heart ached for him; yet she knew he was right to blame himself. He had made life too hard for all of them; it had not been good for them. Charley was growing up restless and fickle, and Hitty, frail.
Thus had been planted in Sayre, before she was old enough to be conscious of it, that longing for a permanent home which had grown deep-rooted with the years. Because of it, no member of the Morgan family had welcomed this Wyoming move more eagerly than she.
And now!
The agent kept talking on and on about a lot of complicated things: alkali; new soil conditions; drainage; settlers’ failures to meet Government construction charges; losses of money; abandoned claims; new rulings; a Government investigation into the situation. Through all this Sayre’s clear, candid mind slashed straight to the awful truth.
Dad could not file a homestead claim to the Parsons’ eighty!
Worse than that, he could not file a homestead claim to new land anywhere!
Why? Unflinchingly Sayre’s mind sifted away all but the hard kernels of the facts.
Dad could not file on Parsons’ eighty because farming on some of the federal irrigation or reclamation projects, including this part of the Pawaukee, had proved so disastrous that the Government was not letting settlers file any more until it had studied out the causes of all the trouble. He could not file on new land anywhere because he had no money, no equipment, no supplies. He had never farmed before; he did not know how to farm. He had never, really, been a success at anything. The Government did not want—would not have—men like that as homesteaders. And Sam Parsons must have known all these things when he had let them come.
Sayre sat trying to grasp this, and found she couldn’t. She felt stunned, all her joyous hopefulness of the morning submerged in terrible disappointment. Would that agent never stop talking?
“You’re welcome, Mr. Morgan, under the circumstances to stay on the Parsons place as long as you find it convenient, but I can give you no legal hold nor prospect of possession. Not all the land out that way is a failure, either. A few farmers, mostly foreigners, are making things go. And that Parsons’ eighty has twenty mighty good acres of alfalfa—if it’s free.”
Only much later was Sayre conscious of having noted that last phrase. Now it seemed there was not a feeling in her. Yet her pride was quick to detect that Dad was meeting the situation with his usual self-effacing dignity. Fiercely she loved him for it.
The two men rose, and Sayre realized that the agent had said something about their need to look in at another office down the street. Her father asked “May my daughter stay here while we are gone? It would be more comfortable for her than out in front in that burning sunshine.” She hardly noticed the two going out, so numbed was she. Yet through her numbness there was already rising something stubborn and defiant. What was Dad up to now? Going out to see if he could pick up some kind of temporary job to tide things over? That was what he was always doing. Giving up. Yielding to discouragement. Why couldn’t he ever fight harder against circumstances? Against situations like this? Why couldn’t he for once be more like Aunt Mehitable? Aunt Mehitable never gave up. She always managed somehow to accomplish the thing she had set out to do.
Sayre leaned against the wall, and shut her eyes tight to squeeze back the threatening tears. Her body was rigid; her will-power centering in one vast determination.
It was Aunt Mehitable whom she, Sayre Morgan, was going to be like. Not for all the land agents in the country, not for all the rules the Government could make about homesteading new land, was she going to give up this beautiful dream of hers which had seemed so near accomplishment, a farm home for the Morgans which one day would be all their own!
Wild schemes raced through her head. If times were so hard on these farms around here as that agent made out, there must be some people who had lived on their land long enough to prove up on it—that is, get full legal ownership of it—who would be willing to sell out for a song. Well, what difference did that make? She almost laughed. Perhaps she was a bit hysterical. The Morgans had not even a song. All they had was a rattletrap Ford, some shabby furniture, a few worn-out clothes, and a ten-dollar bill. And that ten-dollar bill was Aunt Mehitable’s.
Suddenly she sat erect, jacking up her thoughts in self-contempt. Here she was, letting her mind run on it the way Dad talked in one of his despondent moods, when she had just decided that she was going to be like Aunt Mehitable! Why, they had a good roof over their heads, a place they could stay on indefinitely even if they could not own it, the right to use the land. They had health and strength. Not by any means did she have to give up her dream. Part of it seemed gone. She would have to find a way to bring that back; she would do it, too. But even now for the present there was a part of that dream to which she could cling. They could all learn to farm. Perhaps Dad and Charley could get work on one of those nice places out the other side of Upham where they would learn a lot, and earn. Then, later on, the day would come.
She opened her hands. She had not realized she had been sitting with them clenched. Body and mind began to relax. Into her consciousness floated scraps of talk from the men at the back of the room. She caught the word “Hoskins.” Why, that was the name of the man of whom they had asked directions yesterday. She listened a little.
Evidently this Mr. Hoskins was president of the local school-board. One of these men at the back of the room, too, the big man with the foreign speech, seemed to be on the board. There had been some kind of trouble. Mr. Hoskins had been trying to keep some high-school teacher from being rehired and the big foreigner had kept Mr. Hoskins from getting what he wanted. The teacher in question was a Mr. Kitchell, who was high-school athletic coach and who also—Sayre caught the words distinctly—taught agriculture.
Taught agriculture! Sayre clutched at the phrase. It was more than the proverbial straw to the drowning man; it was a floating spar. She began to listen with all her might.
“What
’s Hoskins got against Kitchell anyhow, Hansen? Is that big lump of a Frank Hoskins so swelled in the head about his football playing he can’t get along with his teachers? Kitchell’s always struck me as about as fine a young chap as we’ve ever had on our teaching force.”
“Nuttin’ personal. Nuttin’ personal at all.” Into the monotonous voice with the foreign accent crept a good-humored sarcasm that evoked ripples of amusement from its hearers. “Meester Kitchell is a most esteemable young man.” (The words were plainly a quotation.) “But he can’t coach so good as—”
“Oh, come on, Hansen. We all know Hoskins’ blind talk as well as you do. What’s he really got against the teacher?”
“Dat’s easy. He hates de teacher for vat he teach about alfalfa, dat ve must not sell it so much, dat ve must plow it into de soil. Hoskins is, I t’ank, afraid a leetle. Ain’t he de big hay-buyer of all dis part of de Pawaukee Irrigation Project?”
“De teacher says vy ve farmers is all so hard up is because all de time most of us raise alfalfa hay to sell. He says dat ve must plow under all our alfalfa ve do not need for our own use, and plant udder crops vere de alfalfa vas. Ve must get livestock and feed ’em our hay and our udder crops. Den ve vill not haf such hard times. De Ag teacher, he teach dis all de time to his boys, and Hoskins, he don’t like it.
“De teacher says, too, his big yob ain’t football. His big yob is to make real farmers out of dis part of de Pawaukee’s farm boys. I t’ank, maybe—” and the monotonous voice broke into a sudden chuckle; then added with an expressionless distinctness startling in emphatic effect, “Hoskins ain’t ready yet for too many good farmers on dis part of de Pawaukee Project!”
Silence, expressive of understanding, was broken by, “All the other board members vote with you, Hansen?”
“Ven Hoskins, de big man, kick so plenty? Not on your life! Ve have only von more vote dan half, and vat got him vas de teacher’s idea for anudder agriculture course, vat he calls a part-time class.”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 102