O Pioneers!

by Willa Cather

  II

  On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log housein which John Bergson was dying. The Bergson homestead was easierto find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, ashallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stoodstill, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sidesovergrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creekgave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of allthe bewildering things about a new country, the absence of humanlandmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. Thehouses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked awayin low places; you did not see them until you came directly uponthem. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were onlythe unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but fainttracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. Therecord of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches onstone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may,after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record ofhuman strivings.

  In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impressionupon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thingthat had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely tocome, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendlyto man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out ofthe window, after the doctor had left him, on the day followingAlexandra's trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the sameland, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge and drawand gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowedfields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, thepond,--and then the grass.

  Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back.One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summerone of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and hadto be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, anda valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and againhis crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that camebetween Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness anddeath. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he wasgoing to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course,counted upon more time.

  Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting intodebt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgagesand had ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He ownedexactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside hisdoor; his own original homestead and timber claim, making threehundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, thehomestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, goneback to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himselfin a Swedish athletic club. So far John had not attempted tocultivate the second half-section, but used it for pasture land,and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather.

  John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, isdesirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse thatno one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicksthings to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how tofarm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Theirneighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did.Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up theirhomesteads. They had been HANDWERKERS at home; tailors, locksmiths,joiners, cigar-makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in ashipyard.

  For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking about these things. Hisbed stood in the sitting-room, next to the kitchen. Through theday, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, thefather lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself hadhewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattleover and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weighteach of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often calledhis daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra wastwelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grewolder he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulnessand good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but whenhe talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandrawho read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned bythe mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could alwaystell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who couldguess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer thanJohn Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he couldnever teach them to use their heads about their work.

  Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like hergrandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.John Bergson's father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerableforce and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time,a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he,who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder'spart, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly ofa powerful man who cannot bear to grow old. In a few years hisunprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated,lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaringmen, and died disgraced, leaving his children nothing. But when allwas said, he had come up from the sea himself, had built up a proudlittle business with no capital but his own skill and foresight, andhad proved himself a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recognizedthe strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking thingsout, that had characterized his father in his better days. Hewould much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one ofhis sons, but it was not a question of choice. As he lay thereday after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to bethankful that there was one among his children to whom he couldentrust the future of his family and the possibilities of hishard-won land.

  The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strikea match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered throughthe cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away.He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, withall the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt.He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing togo deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not findhim. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave thetangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.

  "DOTTER," he called feebly, "DOTTER!" He heard her quick step andsaw her tall figure appear in the doorway, with the light of thelamp behind her. He felt her youth and strength, how easily shemoved and stooped and lifted. But he would not have had it againif he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to beginagain. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.

  His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows. She calledhim by an old Swedish name that she used to call him when she waslittle and took his dinner to him in the shipyard.

  "Tell the boys to come here, daughter. I want to speak to them."

  "They are feeding the horses, father. They have just come backfrom the Blue. Shall I call them?"

  He sighed. "No, no. Wait until they come in. Alexandra, you willhave to do the best you can for your brothers. Everything willcome on you."

  "I will do all I can, father."

  "Don't let them get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto. I wantthem to keep the land."

  "We will, father. We will never lose the land."

  There was a sound of heavy feet in the kitchen. Alexandra wentto the door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys ofseventeen and nineteen. They came in and stood at the foot of thebed. Their father looked at them searchingly, though it was toodark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he toldhimself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head andheavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy wasquicker, but vacillating.

  "Boys," said the father wearily, "I want you to keep the landtogether and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to hersince I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want noquarrels among my children, and so long as there is one house theremust be one head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes.She will do the best she can. If she makes mistakes, she will notmake so many as I hav
e made. When you marry, and want a house ofyour own, the land will be divided fairly, according to the courts.But for the next few years you will have it hard, and you must allkeep together. Alexandra will manage the best she can."

  Oscar, who was usually the last to speak, replied because hewas the older, "Yes, father. It would be so anyway, without yourspeaking. We will all work the place together."

  "And you will be guided by your sister, boys, and be good brothersto her, and good sons to your mother? That is good. And Alexandramust not work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now.Hire a man when you need help. She can make much more with hereggs and butter than the wages of a man. It was one of my mistakesthat I did not find that out sooner. Try to break a little moreland every year; sod corn is good for fodder. Keep turning theland, and always put up more hay than you need. Don't grudge yourmother a little time for plowing her garden and setting out fruittrees, even if it comes in a busy season. She has been a goodmother to you, and she has always missed the old country."

  When they went back to the kitchen the boys sat down silently atthe table. Throughout the meal they looked down at their platesand did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, althoughthey had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbitstewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies.

  John Bergson had married beneath him, but he had married a goodhousewife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavyand placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortableabout her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven yearsshe had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of householdorder amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habitwas very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts torepeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had donea great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally andgetting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, forinstance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summershe sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, tofish for channel cat. When the children were little she used toload them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishingherself.

  Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desertisland, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden,and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania withMrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks ofNorway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wildcreature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipidground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemonpeel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. Shehad experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she couldnot see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head andmurmuring, "What a pity!" When there was nothing more to preserve,she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processeswas sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources. She wasa good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enoughnot to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgivenJohn Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, nowthat she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct herold life in so far as that was possible. She could still take somecomfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars onthe shelves, and sheets in the press. She disapproved of all herneighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the womenthought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way toNorway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid inthe haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her barefoot."