The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  Squire McLaughlin, of course, was just brazen enough to enjoy such a ceremony. He may have had some secret sympathy for Wully’s predicament, for he came over to inspect the child only a few days after it was born. The Squire was the playboy of the community. None of them ever took him seriously, and none failed to welcome him heartily in for a “crack.” It appears that even his absurd pretensions endeared him to his friends. He fancied himself a great lord, before an acre of his “estate” was subdued, and sang a silly song about gravel walks and peacocks. He never hauled a load of gravel to fill the mudhole before his cabin door. But he did the easier thing. He managed to have some gullible soul send him a pair of peacocks. They died promptly upon arrival. He said, laughing with the neighbors at himself, that it was the shock of seeing their laird barefooted that killed them. He was a farmer who rode forth to preside at theorizing agricultural meetings, while the forests of weeds on his land grew unchecked up to the heavens. (Even two years ago, the wild sunflowers near a culvert on that farm reached the telephone wires.) He was later on one of the first men west of the Mississippi to have purebred bulls, and east or west, no man confused pedigrees more convivially. From the first he considered it his duty to see that no Scottish folly was forgotten in the new world, or even hogmanay allowed to pass unobserved. He was the man who all but popularized curling in the west. Three times he had been left an undaunted widower with a family of small, half-clothed children, his esteemed heirs and heiresses of only his gay fancies. Just now he was looking for a fourth helper to relieve him of the responsibilities of his family, and such a man he was that, in spite of his follies, all wished him success in the venture. He consulted Isobel about various possibilities and she gave him her opinion, with the frank statement that she pitied any woman who married him. However, he still liked her. He had always liked her since that time in Ayrshire, soon after she had married his older brother, when she had saved him from a long and well-earned term in prison for poaching. His successful pursuers were almost upon him when they turned suddenly in the wrong direction, from which they had just heard firing. She had seen his plight, and fired cunningly into the air, and when the men had rushed into her cottage they found only a young woman demurely sewing on baby clothes. Now since, of course, it was impossible to poach in a land where not even God preserved game, he was a reformed man, and an eminent huntsman. But sometimes he still said jovially that he might as well have gone to prison as to have to listen to all she said to him on that occasion. Even yet he was not averse to giving her occasions of finding fault with him.

  So when she lifted the baby up for his inspection, he rose, and squinted down thoughtfully upon the little bundle. He turned his head appraisingly from one side to the other. Then, knowing very well what she thought, he said recklessly;

  “He’s a perfect little McNair, Isobel. He’s like Alex. That nose of his——”

  She enlightened him stoutly. He persisted in his error, and only asked:

  “What’s he called?”

  Now what to name the child was a question not altogether easy for Wully, who had been standing near his mother, looking with proper paternal pride upon the child. Each McLaughlin named his first-born son, not boastingly, for himself, but gratefully, for his father; so that Johns and Williams came alternatingly down through the generations. That was the rub. Perhaps John McLaughlin might not relish having this irregular child bear his name. So Wully was too proud to seem to desire it.

  “He’s such a husky little fighter for what he wants, we thought we’d call him Grant. There’s no better name than that, is there?”

  His father was sitting by the stove, smoking, seeming as usual absorbed in a dream and only half-conscious of what was going on about him. At this he took his pipe from his mouth and said, without a sign of emotion;

  “I wonder at you, Wully. The laddie’s name is John.”

  Wully was greatly relieved.

  “Oh, well,” he said lightly. “Maybe that would be better. There won’t be more than fourteen or fifteen John McLaughlins about in twenty years. Grant’ll keep. We’ll save it for the next one.”

  Wully had rejoiced beyond measure at the child’s birth, not for the reason some supposed, but solely because Chirstie was safely through her ordeal. So gay he had become, so light-hearted, after that burden of anxiety for her had been taken from him, that he seemed quite like a rejoicing young father. It had been terrible for him to see her time unescapably approaching. Those days seemed to him now like a nightmare. He had planned what he would say to his wife when he adopted her baby for his own. He would go blithely in, and cry to her gayly, “Where’s my son, Chirstie?” And the child would be his. He had planned that. But it had been different. That one irrepressible moan he had heard from her before his mother had sent him for the doctor had driven him through the night cursing. Cursing that man, whose very name he hated to recall, cursing any man who lightly forced such hours upon any woman—to say nothing of a dear woman like Chirstie. He wanted to kill such men, to pound them to bits. And yet, lightly or not lightly, what would his love of her bring her to, eventually, if not to such hours as these! It was a hellish night. Afterwards he had gone in to see her, not blithely, but otherwise. He had found her lying there, hollow-eyed, exhausted, all her strength taken from her, and her roundness, leaving her reduced, it seemed, to her essential womanhood. And then suddenly he had not been able to see her for the tears that burned his eyes. He had knelt down beside her, to put his face near hers, so unseeing that she had cried sharply, “Don’t! Be careful!” He had hurt her! But her hand was seeking for his. When she had shown him the child—well he remembered that she had never asked him for pity for herself. But now her eyes were praying, “My baby! Love my baby, Wully!” With her lying there, even her familiar hands looking frail, her hair lying wearily against her pillow, if she had asked him to love a puppy, would he not have bent down to kiss it! Later he had marveled to see her with the child. A farmer, a man judging his very female animals by the sureness of their instincts for their young, he wouldn’t have wanted a wife not greatly maternal, he told himself. It came to be soon that in loving the child he was playing no role; he liked all his wife’s adornments.

  So the terrible days passed away. His wife became altogether his. And wee Johnnie slept and thrived, his tiny hands doubled against his little red face, in the cradle that had served the five younger McLaughlins. When he opened his bonnie blue eyes, he saw only adoration bending over him. He felt only delighted and reverent hands lifting him. His grandmother, who “just couldn’t abide a house without a baby in it,” would sometimes allow one of her children, sitting carefully in just a certain chair, to hold him a little while as a mark of her favor. If Johnnie was a shame to the household, he was certainly an entertaining and a well-fed shame; if he was a disgrace, he was surely an amusing and a hungry one.

  It was wonderful how completely Chirstie was sheltered from reproach. Though her humiliation was gossiped about by the hour, after all, the gossipers had to remember her mother, and, sighing, grant the daughter some little toleration. And then, however proud that Isobel McLaughlin might be, there was hardly a family in the community which had not, upon arriving from the old country, made “Uncle John McLaughlin’s” their convenient home till another could be built. Moreover, Wully had always been particularly indulgent to those who were his aunts and uncles. Greatest of all, he was a soldier. Not so far down the creek, a Quaker soldier had come home from war without a leg, and his congregation had said if only he would say, even privately, that he was sorry he had fought, he would again be received into their communion. But he refused to say he was sorry. And they refused to take him again to their approval. That didn’t seem to trouble the soldier very much. But it had troubled the Scotch, where he had come to work, extremely. They loved to belittle the Quakers for what they considered a meanness to a man who had fought. So it behooved them to treat their own veterans with more consideration. On the whole, there might have been much
more gloating than there was was. There might have been battles. Great, quiet, simple men like Wully, however, people seem instinctively to avoid exciting to fury.

  So Chirstie had scarcely had occasion to feel the awkwardness of her position till the afternoon early in April when her stepmother came over with the finished dress to try on her. Chirstie had donned the beautiful, rich, wine-colored thing, to be sure it hung right, and set right, and standing forth so that Isobel McLaughlin might view the effect, she turned round and round while Barbara McNair smoothed out even imaginary wrinkles. It was pronounced perfect. Mrs. McNair admired it as if it were not her skill but the girl’s beauty that made the gown remarkable. Then, beaming, as much as her little pale weak face could beam, she unwrapped a hat—a hat all wine-colored and black, and set it jauntily on Chirstie’s head, so that the long feather swept down over the brown coil of hair low on her neck. Chirstie was radiant. She had never seen so lovely a hat in her life, she said. And she stood looking at herself in the little glass, in surprise, a very happy surprise, to see how she looked in such soft, rich things. Then, with a command, Barbara McNair took all the joy out of her face.

  She simply demanded that Chirstie wear that conspicuously beautiful outfit the second Sabbath to come, when the winter’s crop of babies was to be formally dedicated to the Lord. Chirstie went suddenly crimson, standing there, blankly, fingering the feather on her neck.

  Mrs. McNair insisted on an answer.

  “Oh!” cried Chirstie meekly, her eyes appealing to her mother-in-law. “Our baby—” she began to say it wasn’t to be baptized, but she had to turn away. She started for her room, to take the dress off.

  The girl was so sensitive, Isobel started to say—But Barbara called after her to come back, breaking forth into the broadest Glasgow accent. They weren’t to suppose she didn’t understand! She had known it all the time. That innocent laddie had told her, unconsciously. (More innocent then than now, she might have added, if she had known.) And she thought, indeed, that Chirstie had great reason for shame, and not of her bonnie wee Johnnie, either, but of her own heathen ingratitude. Chirstie lifted her face upon hearing that, from the towel upon which she was wiping it, and Mrs. McNair demanded that moment if she expected the Lord to sit studying the almanac all the year for her convenience. She was sure that if she had been in Chirstie’s place, and the Lord had given her a son, she wouldn’t have gone sulking, no matter what the month might have been. Was it not better to have one any time than none at all? she demanded, with such a passion of regret for her own childlessness that Chirstie was left speechless. She had never imagined anyone speaking in such a strain. She looked at her mother-in-law, who seemed mildly amused. The idea that she had been deriding the Lord’s chronological calculations was in itself sobering to one of so tender a conscience. The giver of all her good clothes went scolding away at her, till she promised at least to wear the new things the week after the baptisms.

  Chirstie kept thinking of the scolding as she drove in the wagon of that harassed man, Alex McNair, with her stepmother and her mother-in-law, to see the new house that was getting about ready for her occupancy. Wully had to lay a plank for a walk hurriedly from the wagon to the house, for the new Mrs. McNair still wore such boots that one step in the thawing black mire would have ruined them. It was always that way. That little insignificant-looking person refused to adjust herself to the new country. She just sat tight, and let the great significant country adjust itself to her as best it might. The house towards which she neatly walked was not perhaps, to disinterested eyes, a very inviting place. But to Wully and Chirstie it was their very palace of love. It stood a story and a half high on a slight rise of ground, a decent way back from the path that has since become one of the nation’s highways, built of shining new lumber, the tall grass around it trampled into the black ground littered with bits of boards and yellow curling shavings. From the front door, just hung that day, the women looked down over fifteen miles of prairie, an occasional plowed square humanizing the distances, which sloped with so gentle an incline that one standing on any one of the acres could scarcely have told it was not level. From the windows of the parlor the women saw the plot that Wully’s father had insisted on breaking the year before, along one side of which the maple seeds he had planted were presently to appear as slight as spears of sprouting grass. From the kitchen window they saw a row of elms as thick as broomsticks, which Wully had brought the fall before from the creek. In a long furrow there, the walnut trees that were to make gunstalks for the World War were still waiting in their shells for a warmer sun to bring them forth, and to the north the trench was ready for the red and white pines that are nowadays a pride to the family. Chirstie pointed to the piece of ground that was to be fenced for a garden. Whereupon Mrs. McNair asked anxiously if the fence was to be painted white.

  Wully heard his father-in-law move impatiently behind him, and, though he hadn’t before thought of such a thing, he answered that it would be painted white as soon as he had the money for the paint. The stepmother-in-law sighed with relief, and began inspecting the kitchen closet. Wully pointed out with malicious glee the finish of the cupboards, making light of the expense and difficulty of building, while his father-in-law poked about glooming, refusing to admire the conveniences which the little woman coveted with so gentle a simplicity. He still had a grudge against that man, and aired it whenever he could without Chirstie seeing him. He knew McNair disapproved of the size of the windows. But what business of that man’s was it what his windows cost?

  The Sabbath of the Communion Wully unabashed, and shame-filled Chirstie wearing the appealing old coat of her mother, and the bedecked wee Johnnie went to church for the first time since the baby’s birth. But let no one suppose that they attracted much attention. What chance for consideration could even the most unholy child have had that morning, sitting in front of the Glasgow fashions in the person, or on the person, of his stepgrandmother? Wasn’t she wearing a most stunning little hat with a dark green feather curling down over a chignon of red hair, sitting there in the pew just behind Mrs. McLaughlin, who wore with grace and satisfaction the bonnet a lamenting friend in Ayrshire had made for her in fifty-four, and just in front of Mrs. Whannel, whose headpiece was conceived in the spring of fifty-eight, and across from Mrs. McTaggert, who had bought somewhat more expensively than was necessary in sixty-one, but who, considering the well-preserved condition of her purchase, had really nothing to regret. One skilled in millinery might have reckoned from the mother’s bonnets more or less accurately, the year of each family’s immigration, although the array of such young girls as were not away at school would have slightly vitiated his calculations. And now, this Sabbath morning, there sits down in this world, so remote from others, a Metternich jacket, a cape-like affair trimmed with fur, and a skirt spreading gracefully, but without hoops, a floating veil, and gloves embroidered in faint gray! If wee Johnnie had been baseborn twins, he could never have attracted more than a stray thought to himselves on that occasion.

  CHAPTER XII

  SOON after the garments of Barbara McNair dawned upon the congregation, her husband bought three hundred acres of land at three dollars an acre. There are those who say a man owning eight hundred and forty acres of land should be happy. Alex McNair was not. There was in his flesh one great thorn—that Glasgow wife.

  She had lived through the autumn and the terrible winter, waiting for spring. And now that spring was here, what was it? Only an oozy wet waste, with patches of green in the lower places, and winds shrieking always across flat desolations. Near the sty, a sagging haystack of a barn, and a couple of bony cows trampling dead grasses deeper into the mire of the dooryard. If only there had been even a little white house, and a fence, and a few flowers sending up their endearing shoots! But this! And her from Glasgow!

  Words failed her.

  Had she not set forth day by day and hour by hour conscientiously, the necessity of a new house? Yet in the face of her demands, her
man had gone to town to buy more wilderness. If she had known that spring that Dod was to sell part of that land for six hundred dollars an acre, her contempt for her husband’s folly would scarcely have been less hot. There he was, driving into the yard now! She went to the door and greeted him.

  “You didn’t buy it?” she asked.

  “Did I not say I would buy it?” he answered doggedly.

  Not a change of expression passed over her face. She stood witching him unhitch his team. She had never before been so much interested in that process, having always avoided the barn.

  The next day, when he was in the field, and Dod was hitching up, she went out and watched him. Would he show her how he did that? she asked. She thought she ought to know, she said. Which were the gentlest horses? And which harness did they take? She learned where it all hung in the barn. Dod liked teaching an old person. It wasn’t any trick to hitch a horse to the wagon, he said. You put this under the belly, so. And the lines through here, taking them from here, thus. She practiced. She grew proficient. She waited.

  One day in early May her husband rode away horseback to the Keiths’, to pay back one of the many days of labor he owed that family. He left home at daylight, and Dod went to school. Then Barbara began.

  When McNair came home that evening, Dod asked, lonesomely,

  “Where’s mother?”

  “Is she not here?”

  “She is not.”

  “She’ll be gone to Chirstie’s. Or McCreaths’, Who came for her?”

  “She took the team and went herself.”

  “You’re daft! Her take a team!”

  But the team was gone. The barn was as empty as the house. Dod made a fire in the fireplace, and put the kettle on. Then the father made a discovery that the son had made some time ago. The cupboard was bare. Not a bite in it. Not a crumb of cake.