The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  It was one of those interested teachers who unknowingly changed the order of worship at Wully’s that season. One morning, when breakfast was over at dawn, John’s first week there, as Wully reached for The Book, he said in a voice which seemed, as usual, a little impatient, somewhat too eager;

  “Let me do the reading, Wully, and you do the praying!”

  Wully was rather surprised by such devotion on John’s part.

  “All right,” he said, handing him the book.

  John began abruptly at the first of Isaiah, which was not the place according to the custom of their fathers, and he read stumblingly, with pauses, so that his brother, turning toward him, saw that he was looking at the text only for occasional phrases, trying to read from memory. And when they sat around the table again, in the evening, almost stupid from weariness, John went over the same chapter, but with scarcely any hesitation. Wully asked him, after prayers, why he had repeated it. John had just picked up the lamp to go up to bed—he had the one lamp, because he studied—and he turned at the bottom of the stairs to answer, the light flickering across his neck, where his hickory shirt collar was open. He was six feet, even then, and he had huge broad shoulders strangely awkward. His head was long and narrow, and though he was blistered red just then from the sun, his untanned forehead was a clear yellow, unlike any other complexion in the family. He had the long upper lip that spoiled the symmetry of so many McLaughlin faces, and a long determined chin, and from his deep-set blue eyes he stood gazing at his brother with that speculating keenness with which he examined even the most familiar things.

  “Professor Jamison advised me to learn Isaiah this summer. He said it would be a good thing to get the swing of the sentences. We might as well get some good out of worship, I suppose.”

  “Commit Isaiah to memory!” gasped Wully.

  “Well, why not? We know most of it now, don’t we? We’ve heard it all our lives. I told him we knew the Psalms. We’ll read a chapter twice a day, and we’ll know it.”

  “I won’t,” said Wully.

  “You’ll know enough of it,” said John, starting up to his reading.

  Wully gave Chirstie a significant look.

  “Did ever you hear the equal of that?” he asked her. “I wouldn’t know that chapter if I read it every day for a month.” He considered John. It would not have been his father’s way to use the few minutes of the day set apart for the worship of the Most High God, to learn the swing of sentences, whatever that might be. It certainly would not have been Wully’s own way. But it was John’s way, and doubtless a good way, and since John was living with them, he might as well have his way. Chirstie didn’t mind. She only wanted John to be happy.

  They were happy as the summer wore on, the three of them working from the first streak of dawn to the frog-croaking darkness. The stars in their courses and the clouds in their flights seemed to be working with them that season. Week after week, just as the ground grew ready for it, they watched the desired clouds roll up in great hills against the sky, and pour down long, slow, soaking rains. They watched the sun grow more and more stimulatingly warm, and then, just when their corn needed it, grow fiercely hot in its coaxing. They worked like slaves, of course. But then, they had always worked like slaves. Wully was at the height of his strength that year, apparently, and he tried to save John, who was, after all, still a growing boy. But John sharply refused to be considered less than any man. Chirstie was cruelly tired every night, with far too much fever. She had her new house to keep as clean as her mother’s linen-hung cabin had been. She had more than a hundred little chickens to feed and water, and to guard from the slow-rising storms, and the low-hovering hawks. She had an orphan lamb to feed. She had washing to do, and ironing, and scrubbing and sewing and cooking, bread making and butter making, with pans and pails and churns to be scalded and kept sweet; she had yarn making, and knitting, vegetable drying and wild fruit canning. She had wee Johnnie to care for, and whenever she sat down to nurse him, she fell asleep worn out. More than one pie got itself scorched that way that summer.

  And with it all, they were so happy that sometimes she had to say to Wully, although he didn’t want her to mention it, “Oh, think of last summer, and of this!” And he would answer, “I certainly had a time without you, Chirstie!” Everything seemed to swell the sum of their well-being. Every noon, if the dinner was not entirely ready when Wully was washed for it, he seized his spade and transplanted two or three little trees from their seed-bed to their place in the windbreak. Every evening, tired to death, with the baby in his arms, he went with his wife to see if by chance any seedlings had halted, and needed water. Every leaf on the little trees called for comment. There they would stand, looking over their domain, brushing mosquitoes from their faces. Wheat and corn had surely never grown better than theirs did that year. To John, now, a field of wheat was a field of wheat, capable of being sold for so many dollars. To Wully, as to his father, there was first always, to be sure, the promise of money in growing grain, and he needed money. But besides that, there was more in it than perhaps anyone can say—certainly more than he ever said—all that keeps farm-minded men farming. It was the perfect symbol of rewarded, lavished labor, of requited love and care, of creating power, of wifely faithfulness, of the flower and fruit of life, its beauty, its ecstasy. Wully was too essentially a farmer ever to try to express his deep satisfaction in words. But when he saw his own wheat strong and green, swaying in the breezes, flushed with just the first signs of ripening, the sight made him begin whistling. And when, working to exhaustion, he saw row after row of corn, hoed by his own hands, standing forth unchoked by weeds, free to eat and grow like happy children, even though he was too tired to walk erectly, something within him—maybe his heart—danced with joy. Therefore he was then, as almost always, to be reckoned among the fortunate of the earth, one of those who know ungrudged contented exhaustion.

  CHAPTER XIV

  JOHN came out for a three months’ vacation the next year and worked again for Wully. They had acres of sod corn that summer, and wheat to make a miser chuckle. Both men, and whatever neighborly passer-by they might be able to hire, worked day after day till they staggered. To have stopped while yet there was sufficient daylight to distinguish another hill of corn would have been shirking; to go to supper while yet one could straighten up without a sharp pain in his back would have been laziness. Yet John was never too tired to choose an idiom as far removed as possible from the one he heard about him. Now that he had been in Chicago he had a growing contempt, which never failed to amuse Wully, for the speech of his own people. What was it they spoke, he demanded scornfully, swinging a violent hoe among the weeds. It was Scotch no longer. It wasn’t English. It wasn’t American, certainly. It was just a kind of—he tried all summer to describe it satisfactorily in a word. Once he called it “the gruntings of the inarticulate forthright.” Mrs. Alex McNair was the only one that spoke pure anything, he declared. John seemed to like that woman, strange to say. Wully suspected he listened to her because her pronunciation fascinated him, but at Wully’s he was intolerant of any tendency towards Scotticisms. Wully’s and Chirstie’s articulation he supervised continually, their grammar and their diction. They were not allowed to say before John, “She won’t can some,” or “I used to could.” A less happy man than Wully might have resented correction from a younger brother. Wully took it gratefully, feeling he was getting not a poor substitute for the schooling he had been forced to miss. And when he saw his mother, he would repeat John’s innovations to her with gusto. “Indeed!” she exclaimed upon one such occasion. “The gruntings of the inar—what, Wully? Lawsie me! You did well to remember that!” “Yes,” cried Wully. “But John didn’t remember them, mother. He makes them up!” Chirstie would have been annoyed sometimes by John’s attitude, if her son had not been so devoted to his uncle. Wee Johnnie refused to go to sleep in the evening till he had had his daily romp with John on the doorstep. And even if he did treat her like an unimp
ortant younger sister, she had to like her baby’s playmate.

  The child was by this time the joyous little husky heart of the family. John had noticed him dutifully at first because he was Wully’s, but he came speedily to love him for his own diverting charms. There had been an evening nearly two years ago, when he came into the little room where he and his sister cooked their meals, and had found her stretched out on the bed crying. He read the letter she gave him in explanation. His mother had written about the impending disgraceful baby. John hadn’t forgotten his sensation of amazement, or the sharp wound that his disdainful sense of superiority sustained, but now he seldom recalled either. It outraged his sense of the fitness of things that he so well understood that scrape; that he had to wonder at times that passion was ever less rampant, less controlled, than in the case he had to consider. The information encouraged a budding cynicism within him. If it had been anyone but Wully—even Allen—he would have understood it better. He had read the letter, and stood looking at it. Then without a word he went out, and walked about the streets through the dusk. And never a mention of it passed between the brother and sister. And then when he came home, and saw Wully—when that brotherly, honest geniality shone out simply towards him—he couldn’t think of that story. Wully’s presence denied it, obliterated it. That was all. And wee Johnnie justified himself.

  John was, of course, keen about having his nephew speak English undefiled, and between their little games he begged him patiently to say “Uncle John.” But, after hours of slipping gleefully away from effort, the baby came no nearer the desired sounds than “Diddle!” He had lovely, twinkling ways of making light of instruction. He would duck his curly head, and hold it reflectingly to one side, and purse up his little lips enough to have spoken volumes. Yet when he saw his uncle coming towards the house, he would sing out that absurd “Diddle,” delightedly, waiting an award for such perfect enunciation. When his grandmother got him into her arms, she would beg him to say “Grannie.” And he would say it, in a way that satisfied him entirely. Only he called the word “Pooh!” And in that absurdity, too, he persisted. “Mama” he said, and “Papa” and “chickie” and “Diddle” and “Pooh.” And that was all. No coaxing could elicit more from him. Chirstie grew vexed at times hearing other women tell how early and plainly their children had talked. She longed to have Johnnie shine vocally. Sometimes she almost wondered if he wasn’t “simple.” But her mother-in-law consoled her by telling about her John. He had spoken hardly a word till he was three, and she was really getting alarmed about it, when suddenly he seemed to join the family conversation, so rapidly he learned words and sentences.

  So with that foolish “Ayn?” which was his question, and with the “Ayn” which was his consent, Bonnie Wee Johnnie went on ruling his domain. The men never started to the fields with a team without letting the baby ride a few steps on the back of the old mare. No one plowed into a bird’s nest without saving an egg to show the baby. No one ran across a long gaudy pheasant’s feather without saving it for Johnnie’s soft fingers to feel. At noon John carried him out to pat the colt’s nose, or to see the little pigs nosing their way among one another to their mother’s milk. The baby had just naturally become Wully’s child. Wully could never bear the thought of Peter Keith. He kept it resolutely out of his mind. He had to. He shrank from it as he had never shrunk from the face of an enemy. Making the baby his own helped the forgetting. Barbara McNair said to Isobel McLaughlin that she had never seen a man with such a way with a baby as Wully had with that child. And Isobel McLaughlin answered that it was small wonder Wully had a way with babies, since he had carried one in his arms ever since he was three years old. Month by month Wully became in the eyes of that prairie-bound world a more exemplary and unsuspected father to Chirstie’s son.

  June came and went. The corn began hiding the black soil at its roots entirely from sight. It was “knee-high by the Fourth of July” according to the Scriptures. There was to be a great celebration that year in Woolsey’s woods, and Wully had, of course, planned to take his family to the picnic. All his army comrades would be there, and neighbors for thirty miles round, talking crops and prices, and the president’s troubles in Washington. It was to have been a grateful change from hoeing.

  However, when the day came, it was out of the question to take Chirstie, who had been having fever, and the baby, who was unhappily teething, for a twenty-five mile ride through the heat, even with the new spring seat which Wully had bought for the wagon—extravagantly, according to Alex McNair. John, therefore, rode away on horse-back before dawn. Not that John would have condescended to care to go if it had been only what he would have called in our day a gathering of “neighborhood fatheads.” But there was to be a speaker there who helped to make laws and thwart the president in Washington, and John wanted to hear what he had to say, and how he managed to say it.

  Wully and Chirstie accordingly began their holiday by a most unusually long sleep in the morning, the baby for some reason allowing it. They had a late and lazy breakfast. If Chirstie cared to, they would drive down to the creek and look for some blackberries, Wully said. He dallied about, playing with the baby, who was better than they had expected him to be. They sauntered out to their garden of little trees, after Wully had wiped the breakfast dishes, and spent some time there, weeding it, and cultivating it, playing together. Were not the two of them quite content to spend their holiday at home together now? It was not as if they were young, unmated things, running about experimentally, investigatingly. When it grew warm, and they sought the shade of the house to rest in, a Sabbath peace brooded over them. Wully stretched out on the grass, and the baby sat contentedly on his chest.

  Chirstie looked at the morning-glories blooming on the fence of the little vegetable garden. There were but few of them. The hens had got into the garden earlier and scratched them almost all out. She hated to kill the hens she had had the trouble of raising, just because they spoiled her morning-glories. Her stepmother, she reflected, had no such hesitations. If a rash hen flew into Barbara McNair’s garden, she caught it and cut its wing feathers. If it repeated the offense, into the boiling kettle it went. She had scarcely a hen left. That famous wee white fowl-house was really little more than an ornament. Yet when Chirstie sighed over her morning-glories, Wully said at once that he would get a better fence around a bigger garden by the next spring. He, too, was thinking of the McNair place. Everyone thought of that place that summer, and planned to make his own less desolate-looking. That McNairs’ was now the very show place of the country. One driving up to it, unless he had heard reports, could scarcely believe his eyes. No sty now! No bony cows trampling knee-deep in mud One saw a trim white house, inside a smart white fence, upon a jaunty rise of ground, with a gay white fowl-house in the rear, and in the front yard—what sights for pioneer eyes! Crimson hollyhocks, just beginning to open, almost as high as the lean-to, screening the porch. A grapevine halfway across the main part of the building. Morning-glories on cunning arrangements of hidden wires. Scarlet poppies and magenta petunias romping all along the front walk, laughing to the confederate heavens, flaunting their uselessness flippantly before the eyes of those who lived slavishly, blossoms with the Scriptures behind them to justify their toiling not, their spinning not, their being arrayed beyond kings’ glory—not economically. The garden scouted the very principles of the hard-working, of those who would “get ahead.” It hooted aloud at frugality. Barbara McNair kept a lamb, to be sure, but for no utilitarian purpose. She kept it to mow her lawn. And when its hunger had shaved its environments, she moved the stake which held it, to another spot. She kept hens languidly, perhaps only to justify artistically that supernumerary luxury, the white fowl-house. But let those chickens beware how they turned their eyes towards her garden spaces, lest they discover fatally her feelings towards them and their like. No useless and ungardening orphan calf would she mother. No bereaved young pigs owed their life to her. She did only what she elected to do. Though th
ere was at that time scarcely a servant girl west of the Mississippi, Barbara McNair was almost never without some neighbor girl to do her work for her, while in return she taught her sewing, or made some pretty garment for her. Just now Wully’s sister Mary, who was to marry a Yankee minister that fall, was working at the McNairs’, while Barbara, in spite of Isobel McLaughlin’s protests, was making her a famous blue silk dress, equaled in grandeur only by that red wool one of Chirstie’s. Always some girl or other eating that helpless McNair’s good bread, while his wife knit tidies, and watered her trifling wee flowers—from a pump all painted and handy just outside the kitchen door—and lived like a lady, envied by all the women in the neighborhood, and distrusted by nearly all the men.

  Wully lay playing with the baby, who liked tickling his face with a long spear of grass, and thinking just how he would make that fence, and grinning, at times, to himself. The Sabbath before he had taken Chirstie home for dinner, and when she had seen how the flowers were blooming there, she had explained in vexation about her morning-glories. Wully had been walking with his father-in-law and the women among the trifling flowers, when Chirstie had spoken of the accident, in answer to Barbara McNair’s question. And Alex had turned to Wully, and remonstrated with him for not having a better fence for Chirstie! A man ought to see that the women had such things, McNair had assured him solemnly. That was one of the best things he had had to tell his mother for a long time! Alex McNair telling him, Wully McLaughlin, how to treat a wife! McNair strutted about, taking all the credit for that garden, extremely proud of having the best-looking place for miles around. As if he had been able to help himself! Wully had said nothing about the incident to Chirstie. He couldn’t seem always to be laughing at her father. Just then she went on to tell him about the new dress Barbara had made for little Jeannie. Whatever the neighbors might say enviously about Barbara McNair, they must in justice agree that she was an excellent stepmother to her husband’s children. The way she loved Jeannie and Dod, and was loved in return, was a source of deep satisfaction to Chirstie. And so she gossiped contentedly and harmlessly on about the neighbors, and the baby kicked the protesting Wully gleefully in the ribs. They felt cosily shut in to themselves by the sense of the countryside emptied of its patriotic and picnicking dwellers. Wully lounged about till almost eleven. There was a little hay cut which he wanted to turn. He would be back by dinner time, he said.