The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  Wully rode up to the house unperceived, though not one tree, not one kindly bush protected it against the immensity of the solitude around it. He tied his horse, and was at the door before Jeannie saw him. Then she exclaimed:

  “If it is’na Isobel’s Wully!” She shook his hand, and patted him on his shoulder, and reached up and kissed him. He didn’t mind that. She was practically an aunt, so intimate were the families. In her silent excitement she brought him into her wretched little cabin.

  And there stood another woman. By the window—a young woman—turning towards him with sunshine on her white arms—and on the dough she was kneading—sunshine on her white throat—and on the little waves of brown hair about her face—sunshine making her fingertips transparent pink—a woman like a strong angel—beautiful in light!

  Wully just stared.

  “It’s only Chirstie.” Jeannie was surprised at his surprise.

  Only Chirstie!

  “She was just a wee’un when I saw her,” he stammered. “I did’na ken she was so bonny!” Fool that he was! Idiot! Yammering away in bits of a forsaken dialect! What would the girl think of him!

  “It’s more than four years you’ve been away,” Jeannie reminded him kindly. She began plying him with questions. He answered them realizing that the girl was covering her bread with a white cloth freshly shaken from its folds—that she was washing her hands, and pulling down her sleeves—and seating herself near him composedly enough. His mother was well, he said. They were all well. It was twelve days now since he had come home. Yes, he was tired of the war. The more he saw of the girl, the tireder he got. The other boys from the neighborhood were all alive and well as far as he knew. He looked at that girl as much as he dared. He could think of nothing to say—that is, of nothing he dared yet to say. He was most stupidly embarrassed, trying not to appear foolish. He stammered out that his mother had sent over some things, some squashes—he would go and bring them in. He went out to get them. Oh, it wasn’t squashes! It was ducks! The girl giggled deliciously. Her mother smiled. Wully was more at his ease. Now where should they put the ducks? They were all standing together now in the dooryard, the three ducks, the three humans. There was no place ready for the gifts. Well, Wully would make a coop for them. Just give him a few sticks. But there were no sticks. Then Chirstie thought of some bits of wood behind the barn. They went and got them. She stood, shy because of the ardor of his eyes, by her mother, watching his skill in making duck shelters. He could have gone on making them forever. But the work was done. He grew embarrassed again.

  He must be going. Not before he had had tea! He didn’t really care for tea. He would have—just a drink of water. No sooner had he said that word than he regretted it painfully. There was no fresh water. But Chirstie would go get some. He knew that one of the things that annoyed his mother most about the McNair place was that Alex had never even dug a second well. The water was all still carried a quarter of a mile from the old well in the slough. Chirstie was ready to start for his drink at once. Was he not a soldier, and a fine looking one, her eyes inquired demurely, whom she would be honored to serve? No, he would get it himself.

  “Go along, the two of you!” said Jeannie. And as they started, she stood in the door looking after them, and on her face there grew a sore and tender smile.

  He took the pail. She reached for the big stick. That was to kill rattlesnakes. He took that, too, shocked by the thought of death near her feet. They walked silently together, in a path just wide enough for one. Their hands touched at times. He grew bold to turn and study her beauty. Their eyes met, but she said never a word. On they went, silently. He could hear his heart beating presently. He forgot that his feet had ever been sore. He could have walked on that way with her to Ayrshire. They came to the well. His hand trembled as he let the pail down into it. That may have been the ague. He filled the cup, and gave it to her to drink, looking straight at her. She put it to her lovely lips and drank, looking across the prairie. She handed it back to him, and he took it, and her hand. The grass about the well was very high. Some way—he put out his arms, and she was in them.

  “Chirstie!” he whispered. “I didn’t know that you were here! I didn’t know that you were the lassie for me!” He kissed her fearfully. He kissed her without fear, many times. She said only “Oh!” He held her close.

  After a time—how long a time it must have been to have worked so mightily!—she sighed and said:

  “We must go back.”

  Hand in hand they went back, until they came to the edge of the tall grass. They couldn’t miss the last of that opportunity. Out in the short grass she pulled her hand away. No one must see yet, she said. Of course not. Not yet.

  No, he said to Jeannie, he couldn’t stay for tea. He had had his drink. He had indeed drunk deep.

  He rode out into the loveliness of the distances, unconscious of everything but that girl in the sunlight. He was shaken through with the excitement of her lips. Her name sang itself riotously through his brain. Perhaps in a thousand miles there was not a man so surprised as that one. But he was not thinking of his emotions. He was thinking of what he had found. He was looking through vistas opened suddenly into the meaning of life. He was seeing glimpses of its space and graciousness. He laughed aloud abruptly remembering the site his father had chosen for his house. And yesterday a house had meant nothing to him! He was getting too near home. He had come to the creek. He stopped his horse, and sat still, going over again and again that supreme moment. He had never kissed a girl before in his life. Allen had kissed them whenever he had gotten a good chance—or any chance at all. Now, to-day, with Chirstie, it had been just simply the only thing to do. She was already by the significance of that caress a part of him. Oh, no wonder Stowe had come home four times! And now his holiday was all but over. He vowed rashly he would not go back! Never! If only he had come and found her the first of his twelve days! He wondered why he had left her. He might have stayed for supper. But no, not with her mother there! He was glad he had come away. To think of him, who had marched through states and territories, finding a girl like that, the very queen of beauty, right there on the prairie! He could scarcely remember how she had looked when he had seen her last. Just some kind of a little girl—no stunning queen like this. The song of her name rose and fell in his mind rhythmically. The sun grew low while he sat exulting. A chill came into the air. He couldn’t endure to take his excitement home to the light. He would wait till they would all be at supper. How glad his mother would be when sometime she heard of his love! He knew it was the very thing she would have chosen for him.

  When he came into the kitchen she said, with relief:

  “You’re a long time away, Wully!”

  He replied without a waver:

  “I stopped for a swim in the creek.”

  She sat looking at him, wondering why he was pale again, and silent. He was far from well, she was thinking. And before the meal was over, he was wondering why the children’s chatter was so strangely tiresome. Wouldn’t they ever get away to bed, and leave him to his memories? Even with that babbling about, he could feel her face against his. . . .

  His Uncle Peter’s Davie came in with the mail after supper, bringing a paper with a notice for the scattered men of his regiment, and paroled prisoners. They were to have reported yesterday to headquarters. He tried to appear eager to go. His mother lifted the Psalm, when the visitors were gone, and left the children to quaver through it. And when he was lying in his bed, vowing desperately he would not go back, she came to him.

  “I canna’ thole your going, Wully!” she cried to him, and her cry braced him. He remembered with shame how she had made him go back after Allen’s death, how she had signaled fiercely to him to keep the mention of anything else from the children. As if he, her son, could not do whatever he must do, and do it well! She had been ashamed of him before the children, then. He remembered that, and grew brave now. “ He hated to remember what a baby he had been. As if, however
terrible the war might be, it hadn’t to be fought out, some way, by men! As if he must escape from the hell other men must endurel He was glad now he had occasion to strengthen the strengthener.

  “It’s almost over now, mother!” he kept saying. Almost over, indeed, and a bullet the death of a second! What was the use of saying that when an hour could kill thousands? She sat stroking his hair, her face turned away from him, so that he suspected tears. She felt like an old broken woman, worn out not by years and childbearing, but by this war. All that night she lay sleepless, praying for her son. He lay sleepless in the room next to her, never giving her a thought. He gave all his thoughts, he gave all he had, to the girl of the slough well.

  The dream of the night wore away, and the nightmare of the morning was upon him. His father was calling him long before daybreak. He was starting away, in the darkness, in the cold, away from Chirstie, towards his duty. His feet ached. His back ached. His head ached. His heart ached. He was one new great pain. It didn’t seem possible that life could be so hard. But on his father drove, through the first shivering glimpses of dawn, towards the train.

  CHAPTER III

  AFTER more than three months spent in hospitals, Wully came home the next March, honorably discharged from the army. His father met him at the end of the railroad, and before dawn they started westward over the all but impassable paths called roads. Rain began falling when the sun should have begun shining. Hour after slow hour of the morning their horses strained and plunged and splashed through deep, black mud. At every slough the men alighted to pull and tug at the sunken wagon, and returned bemired to their wet blankets. From noon till dusk they rode on, pulling grain sacks helmetwise down over their caps to protect the back of their necks from trickles of water, rearranging their soaked garments, hearing, when their voices fell silent, only the splashing of the horses’ feet down into the thawed mud, and the sucking of the water around hoofs reluctantly lifted to take the next step. Darkness set in early, but they made the ford while there was still a soggy twilight. More soaked, more dripping, they went on, peering into the wall of blackness which settled down in front of them. They were hungry. They were tired. They were chilled to the bone. Wully’s teeth chattered in spite of all he could do to prevent them. And they were both immeasurably, happy. On they went, caressing the fine joy in their hearts. The father had his son home safe from battles. The son, each shivering step, was nearing the queen of the afternoon light.

  At half-past eight they drew near the welcoming lighted window towards which they had strained their eyes so eagerly. If the boy had had a lesser mother, if he had been well, he would have gone on through the four miles of pouring darkness to Chirstie. But here was shelter and rest for his feebleness, a fire, food, light, a mother, and the children, caresses sprung from the warmest places in human hearts—all things, in short, that a man needs, except one. It seemed that the very kitchen breathed in great, deep sighs of thankfulness and content, this great night of its life, the night Wully got home from the army. The younger children sat watching him till they sank down from their chairs asleep, for no one thought to send them away to bed.

  He had so many things to tell them that he forgot how weary he was. Now that his danger was over, he had no need of minimizing for his mother’s sake the discomforts he had been suffering. He said feelingly what he thought of a government that couldn’t get letters from a soldier’s home in Iowa to a military hospital in New Orleans. He shouldn’t have minded the fever so much if he could have heard from home, and if he had been stronger he would likely have been more sensible about not getting letters. It seemed to him he had been confined in a madhouse devised for his torture. He would have preferred a battle months long to those endless, helpless, sick-minded days. And now he never wanted to speak of that time or hear of it again as long as he lived.

  Young Peter had torn his coat half off his back at play that day, and it must be mended before school time next morning. It was a piece of patching not long or difficult, but his mother laid it down to look at her Wully—she laid it down and took it again a dozen times before it was done. She couldn’t deny her eyes the sight of his white, thin, beautiful face. He ought to go to bed. She could see that. She urged him to again and again, as they sat around the stove. But he had always one more thing to tell as he started to go. He had never written in full about getting back to his regiment after his last visit home, had he? Well, when he got back, there was not an officer left whom he had known. And the one to whom he had to tell his tale of escaping from his guard—oh, he was a new man, most hated by the boys—he had put Wully and two others in prison in the loft of a barn, on bread and water. And every night the guard, who knew them, used to hand up on the end of bayonets all the food they could desire. And the officer heard of it, and was more angry. He was a man who raged. And he changed the guard, and yet the men who hated his being there, in place of the colonel they had liked, Wully’s friends, managed some way to feed the prisoners, so that really in the loft they had nothing to do but to sleep well-fed, and rest. And presently the new colonel waxed more raging and swearing, and sent the three away to another place to be disciplined, sent them—guess where, of all places—to Colonel Ingersoll for punishment!

  “What? Not that infidel!”

  Yes, exactly, and that was just how Wully had felt about it! The prisoners made Wully their spokesman in the first hearing. Colonel Ingersoll listened to them kindly till he had finished speaking. He had a boil on the back of his neck and was not able to turn his head, and he sat there, just looking at Wully, a long time, too long, Wully began to fear. And then he said:

  “I wouldn’t punish you if you were my man, McLaughlin. And I don’t see why I should because you aren’t.” And he called an orderly and told him to take the men to a mess.

  “Ingersoll did that? That infidel?”

  “Yes.”

  His mother was leaning forward, Peter’s coat forgotten.

  “Yon’s a grand man,” she cried with conviction.

  “He’s an infidel,” her husband reminded her.

  “He’s a grand man for a’ that!” she asserted.

  “But he’s an infidel!”

  “He’s a grand man, I’m telling you, for a’ that!” After that, every time she sang the antichrist’s praise to her neighbors she had the last word of characterization. (After all, her family had not been Covenanters.) Presently she laid the coat down again—the children were in bed now, and Wully, too, with only his father and mother beside him in the kitchen.

  “Your father told you about Jeannie’s death, Wully?” His father had told him briefly about it on the way home. He didn’t say to his mother that the news had thrilled him with the certainty that now his plans could have no opposition, since Chirstie was left quite unprotected, and must be needing him. He was ashamed of the hope he had had from it, when he saw his mother’s face harden with grief and resentment as she went on to relate the details of her friend’s death, a death grim enough to be in keeping with Jeannie’s life. For her part, she hoped to live till Alex McNair got home, till she could get one good chance to tell him what she thought of him Oh, it had been altogether a terrible winter, almost as bad as that worst early one, just one fierce-driven blizzard after another. Jeannie had known in that darkening afternoon that it was no common illness coming over her. Chirstie, terrified by her isolation, had begged to be allowed at once to go for her aunt. But even then so thick was the storm raging that from the window she could not see the barn, and to venture out into the storm could mean only death. As the night had hurled itself upon the poor little shelter, almost hidden under drifts, and the maniac wind unchecked by a tree, unhindered by a considerable hill for a thousand miles, tore on in its deadly course, inside the cabin where the candle flickered gustily out, Jeannie had whispered to her children that she was dying. One thing they must promise her so that she might die in peace. They must not venture out for help, even in the morning, unless the storm was over. She lay then moa
ning inarticulately, which was frightful for the children, but not so frightful as the silence that followed, when they could in no way make her answer their cries of agony. All that night Chirstie sat watching beside her, relighting the candle, while the other children slept. In the quieted morning she had helped her brother dig an entrance to the stable, and together they had got the horse out. She had wrapped him as securely as possible, and sent him across the blinding snow to his uncle’s, John Keith’s. And when Aunt Libby finally got there, she found the baby playing on the floor, the dinner cooking on the stove, and Chirstie on her mother’s bed unconscious.