“It’s too good to be true. I can’t believe that I’d ever 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
PRIVATE 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 d
on’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.”
Mrs. Kenniker stopped talking. Becky glanced at her. The tight skin seemed to be stretched tighter than ever across the bones of the thin face.
“And then what?”
“It was too late,” said Mrs. Kenniker dully. “They said if she’d come three years sooner she could’a’been fixed. Git up, Jerry.”
The two horses jogged on, side by side, over the dusty prairie.
“That’s why I’m so anxious to get her learned. She’s an awful smart child; ketches on to book-reading and writing right away. She won’t never be able to do much hard work, and I’d like to get her learned so she can be a teacher, herself, some day. But we couldn’t get a school out here last year. We got the building put up in Crane Hollow, and then the teacher didn’t show up. We couldn’t get another, and it stood empty all winter. Now we’re after the school commissioner hard, and he’s promised us one this year.”
“Do you know who it’s going to be?”
“No, I don’t. But I heard yesterday that he had one chose.”
Becky’s heart sank. That meant that the position she had hoped for was gone.
“There’s the Oleson place,” said Mrs. Kenniker, pointing ahead of her.
“Place” was the name for it. It wasn’t a home; it wasn’t even a shack. It was a sod shanty set down in a tiny clearing. Behind it shivered some yellow cornstalks; a gaunt cow and a rusty plow made two spots of shade on the landscape, and some ragged chickens pecked the bare ground. The two visitors picked their way through a dooryard littered with boards and empty barrels. The door casing stood empty, and through the opening they saw an untidy woman sitting on an unmade bed.
She looked up as they entered, but did not leave her seat. She pointed, without a word, to a stretcher on the side of the room—a stretcher made by laying the outside door across two wooden chairs. And on this lay the pitiful little figure they had come to help. Nothing had been done since her death except to lift her from bed to pine door. She lay as she had been carried in, with yellow curls uncombed, and baby fingers stained with soil. She still wore her ugly little brown calico dress. There was no sign of death or disease about her except the one swollen leg that showed where the venom had entered.
Becky looked about her, uncertain where to begin. The sod house was divided into two rooms. One held nothing but a wall bunk, a stool, and an oil stove, with several lard buckets hanging on nails above it. In the other room there was a bed, two wooden chairs, and a baby buggy. A home-made table was pushed against the earth wall, and clothes were hung along the side of the room. There were no carpets, no curtains, no plaster, no floors. The sunlight blazed in through open window and door, chickens pecked the earth floor, and flies buzzed everywhere. Mrs. Kenniker drove the chickens out of the house and barred their entrance with boards, while Becky heated water in the lard pails that seemed to be the only kitchen utensils. Then they washed the little child, and brushed her fair hair. Of linen there was nothing in the house; no sheets, no towels, no clean cloths, even. When they asked for underwear the woman brought out a pair of dark calico bloomers.
“Ain’t you got any white cloth in the house?” asked Mrs. Kenniker.
Mrs. Oleson went to a pine box in the room, and produced two flour sacks, with traces of the flour inside. They washed them in a lard pail, and dried them in the hot sunshine. From the two pieces of coarse cloth Mrs. Kenniker fashioned a white slip, which they put on the baby.
“I cut it so she wouldn’t have ‘Rooster Flour’ running acrost her,” she whispered.
Becky looked at the dull calico dress, the clumsy bloomers, the dark tan stockings which the mother had laid out. “Don’t put them on, yet,” she whispered to Mrs. Kenniker. “I’ll go over home and pick up a few clothes. I’m sure I can find something better for the little thing.”
BECKY LAID A CLEAN WHITE CLOTH OVER THE PILLOWS
“I can’t bear to put that caliker dress on that baby.”
“Neither can I.”
“Marietta’s got a white dress. It’s the apple of her eye, but I think she’d give it up. In a case of need, like this now—”
“Don’t ask her for it till I see what I have. Do you suppose Mrs. Oleson would be offended if I brought back some clothes?”
“No, I don’t,” said Mrs. Kenniker, with a glance at the woman who sat gazing straight ahead of her, only looking up when they spoke to her. “She ain’t got a thing in the house. Bare cupboards is a good cure for pride.”
Together they pulled up the coarse blankets on the bed and plumped up the turkey-red pillows. Then Becky rode back over the trail to get the things that were most sorely needed. She found the house quiet and in order, so she did not disturb the children, whose voices sounded from the thicket, as she packed her basket to carry to the sod house. She put in a loaf of bread and a jar of jam, a clean white sheet, two white curtains, a strip of new mosquito bar, some towels, a pair of Joan’s white stockings, some white bloomers. And last of all, she went to her bureau dra
wer, and pulled out a flat box. In it lay a new nightgown, embroidered and lace-trimmed, with little knots and roses of palest pink ribbon. It had been Mary Dennison’s parting gift, passed through the car window the day she left Platteville.
“When can I use such elegance on the prairie?” Becky had called back through the window.
And Mary, trying to make the parting a little less funereal, had answered gayly, “At your first week-end visit.”
And now here was the prairie, the nightgown, and the week-end visit.
Becky hesitated. She wished she had not remembered the gown. Its daintiness would be utterly wasted in that dirty cabin, among the chickens and the flies. That sullen, slovenly woman, who had left a two year old baby exposed to snake bite, certainly deserved no such consideration. Besides, Becky wanted that nightgown herself. From the moment she had seen its sheer folds, its laciness, it had been the apple of her eye… That was what Mrs. Ken-niker had called Marietta’s white dress… And yet Marietta would have given up her one and only white gown… And Mrs. Kenniker, who had but one Marietta and no money to buy her another gown, would have been willing… “In a case of need like this now—”
Becky hesitated no longer. She laid the box on top of the basket and set out on her third trip across the trail. It seemed to her as she entered the open doorway that she had never known what real poverty was until then.
Mrs. Oleson still sat at the table looking into nothingness. Mrs. Kenniker was clearing away the untasted meal.
“No use in coaxing her,” she murmured to Becky. “We just got to wait until her crying time comes. Then she’ll eat.”
Her eyes opened at the sight of the soft white gown. “You ain’t intending to cut that up!” she whispered.
Becky nodded.
“It’s a shame to spoil a lovely thing like that. I’ll ride home and get Marietta’s dress. That’s got the new wore off of it.”
“No, you start at this. If you cut it out I can help with the sewing.”
The Jumping-Off Place Page 11