The Jumping-Off Place

by Marian Hurd McNeely

  He turned on his heel and went into the house. Becky was setting the table in the sitting-room to get away from the oven-like air of the kitchen. Her face looked worn and her eyes stare-y.

  “I saw you digging the early potatoes,” she said.

  Dick made no response.

  “Well?” inquired Becky.

  “Not a potato on them.”

  “You sure?”

  “Dead sure.”

  Becky went on laying the knives and forks at each place. “Would a rain save anything in the garden?”

  “Not unless it came tonight. The melons are burnt up, and the tomatoes almost gone. Some of them are burned off at the roots. I did hope we were going to have some potatoes, but I’m afraid they’re doomed. Rain might save the cabbage plants, and give the turnips a start, but there’s no hope of rain. Look at that sky!”

  Becky did not look at the sky; she did not look at her brother. Her eyes faced despair. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  Dick did not answer. Becky went on: “Uncle Jim figured that we could get through the winter if we had fodder and potatoes. If we don’t have them how can we make it? With the Glovers behind in their rent there’ll be no money for even groceries.”

  Her brother leaned his head on the beam that ran alongside the window, and looked out into the blinding sunshine. He stood still, without a reply, as Becky went back and forth from hot sitting-room to hotter kitchen.

  The children came in languidly at her summons to the meal, and Becky turned out the oil stove and followed them. She had tried to vary the monotonous menu by a little baking, and with her face flushed with the heat, she set a plate of smoking cornbread on the table. Nobody touched it. Dick drank his milk, Phil indifferently accepted a hard-boiled egg, Joan took an empty plate. Becky’s face hardened as she looked round the table. .

  “I’d like to know what’s the use of baking myself over that stove if nobody’s going to eat!” she exclaimed angrily.

  The children looked up amazed. Was this from serene Becky, this overwrought, petulant voice and angry inflection?

  “You needn’t be so sore,” said Dick. “I can’t eat that cornbread without butter, and I don’t like butter when it swims in the dish.”

  “Well, I didn’t melt it!” snapped Becky.

  “Gee, but you’re cranky,” commented Phil. “Scolding us for not being hungry. And I don’t see as you’re taking anything, yourself.”

  “Things look so awful uneatish out here,” complained Joan. “Just think what we’d be having in Platteville now—black raspberries, and big red tomatoes sliced on lettuce, and crispy little radishes—”

  “And ice-cold watermelons,” put in Phil.

  “And cherries and big, red plums—”

  “And green apple sauce and frozen custard and new potatoes—”

  “Be still!” said Dick savagely.

  They finished the meal in silence. The children wiped the dishes, and Dick put a saddle on Job.

  “Where you going?” asked Phil.

  “Winner,” answered Dick. “I’ll be back for supper.” Becky heard him go to the pocket-book in the bureau drawer. “Do you want anything?”

  “A lot of things there’s no money for.” She watched him take out one of the bills. “We can’t spare a cent of that,” she said sharply.

  “Whose money is it?” inquired Dick with spirit. He went out with the money, and the screen door slammed behind him.

  The grasshoppers flew up in swarms as Job trotted slowly over the trail to Winner. At the Wubber gate his driver stopped to speak to the tow-headed family that flowed over the chicken-wire gate to meet him. The Wubber cornstalks, yellow and dry, rustled in the hot wind.

  “How are things?” called Dick.

  Mr. Wubber shook his head. “Bad.”

  “How’s your corn?”

  “Dry enough to pop, if it had any ears on it. Ain’t goin’ to git a thing out of the year’s work. The Missus says she’s fed up with homesteading.”

  Dick’s eyes followed the indicating thumb. There, in the open door of the hen house, sat the rocking-chair with Mrs. Wubber inside of it. Under that low-roofed shack the heat must have been terrific, but she was reading a torn paperbacked novel, and fanning herself with a newspaper as she rocked.

  “Been out there most of the day,” explained Mr. Wubber. “When the wind’s from this way it rattles the corgerated iron roof on the house till it makes her crazy. She says she can’t stand the banging. That’s why she sets out there.”

  “Maybe it’ll blow up a storm,” said Dick.

  “No hope for that,” replied Mr. Wubber. “No weather-breeder about that breeze—it’s straight prairie wind. Myself, I don’t mind it, but it gits the women folks.”

  Dick thought over the speech as he urged Job along the prairie trail. Was that what was the matter with Becky, that made her so jerky and irritable? She hadn’t looked right lately, and she jumped if anyone dropped a cup or the door banged. Did the wind “git” her, or was it the worry? Poor Beck! They were all having a hard enough time, but she was getting the toughest end of it. He wished he had not slammed the screen door. Well, he knew what he must do—

  FROM noon to three o’clock was the hottest part of the day. Becky ironed in the sitting-room, with her board placed between the doors to catch the breeze that stirred, but did not cool, the air. Birds sat motionless on the barbed wire fence, in the tiny shade cast by the posts, and the air seemed to dance as she looked out over the dry prairie. Perspiration drenched the blue gingham apron, and her head felt dizzy and too large for her body, but the basket of ironing was almost emptied. “No use in leaving it for another day; no hope of tomorrow’s being any cooler.” She was on Dick’s last blue shirt when the children burst in at the door, both crying.

  “It’s wrecked. It’s all broken up!” Becky made out between sobs.

  “What’s broken, children?”

  “Oh, our homestead. Our little claim! The buildings are all smashed—”

  “And the windmill—”

  “It’s all torn up.”

  She followed them down to the bank of the dry creek. It looked as though a tornado had struck the site of the little homestead. The farm buildings were split in pieces, the wheels were wrenched off the carts, the fragments of the windmill lay in the creek bottom. Nothing had been spared. The plaything was a wreck.

  “It was those Welp boys! I know it was those Welp boys!” exclaimed Phil, his voice shrill with fury and excitement. “I saw Bill and Pete ridin’ along the creek this noon. They must have seen my little farm and smashed it while we were all in the house. Oh, Becky, my farm!”

  Becky tried to comfort the little fellow. “I’ll help you build another,” she said, with her arms around him.

  “I can’t build another; that was the last of the boxes.”

  “I’d just like to catch those ole sneaks,” scolded Joan. “They waited around here till they knew Bronx and Dick were gone. I’d like to tie wasps’ nests to ’em.”

  “Can’t we do something to them, Becky? Have them arrested or something? I’m afraid they’ll kill us if they get the chance.”

  Becky laughed at the fear, but it was not a genuine laugh. The same thought had threatened her when the two little boys were found strung up on the hillside, and had never left her since. Broken windows, loosened stock, torn-up flowers and smashed toys could be endured, but would the Welp family stop at depredations? Becky hugged her little brother tightly. How long would the children be safe?

  She comforted them with the promise of more box lumber and her help in building.

  “Why don’t you pull two washtubs up in front of the shack and fill them with water?” she suggested. “It’ll begin to be shady there before long. Put on your worst clothes and you can have a good time splashing around. It will cool you off, anyway.”

  Phil and Joan forgot their grief in their delight at the idea, as they ran in for overalls and out again for tubs. Becky looked at
the thermometer which hung at the door. “Hundred and three in the shade,” she said; “if there is any shade to be in.” She put away the ironing board and the smooth stack of linen, and took Uncle Jim’s old sweater from her pile of mending. “Dick will be wanting this some day,” she thought; “If it ever gets cool enough to wear a sweater!”

  But she did not sew. She sat with the needle in her hand, and looked out at the dry world that lay beyond. The prairie seemed to be rolling in on them instead of away from them; it was like a threatening enemy, not a welcoming friend. Only a month ago it had invited them, holding out its green lap of plenty; now it had turned a traitorous face. They could never hope to make friends with it.

  The hot wind sucked in at the south door and out at the north. It flapped the awning; it pounded the screen door. The strips of black cloth tacked on to the outside to keep away the flies snapped in the breeze till the edges were frayed. The gusts of hot air rose and fell like waves of the sea, with a noise that waxed and waned, but never stopped. Becky remembered Mrs. Kenniker on the wind: “It nags at you and nags at you and nags at you till it finally gets you.” … Was that what was the matter with her? Was it the worry over the drought and fear of the Welp family that was making her nervous, or was it the prairie wind? She had not been sleeping well since the hot weather set in, and she was not hungry either; nothing tasted good out of cans.

  Perhaps what Phil had said about her at noon was true: Yes, she had been cranky lately; she could recall more than one irritable speech. But that wasn’t her fault; she was not naturally a cross person: it must be the wind; if it would only stop its eternal nagging she could stand all the rest of the discomforts… But how she hated the heat and the flies! How she despised the dirt! How she missed the sink, and dreaded the carrying and emptying water. How she rebelled at the traces of the barnyard that seemed ever-present, and how she longed for the old bathroom at home! She could get along without companionship; she could give up school; she didn’t mind the hard work or the loneliness. But it was the daintiness she missed, and it was impossible to be dainty on the Dakota prairie when it was a hundred and three by the thermometer.

  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

  $12.25 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

  g arpe

  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.”