by Willa Cather
At this the little boy in kilts (the fashion of the times, though he was four years old) caught his sister’s skirt in his two hands and jerked it to get her attention. “No, no!” he said mournfully, “you don’t love anybody but us!”
His mother laughed, and Lesley stooped and gave him the tight hug he wanted.
The family supper was over. Mrs Ferguesson put on her apron. “Sit right down, Lesley, and talk to the children. No, I won’t let you help me. You’ll help me most by keeping them out of my way. I’ll scramble you an egg and fry you some ham, so sit right down in your own place. I have some stewed plums for your dessert, and a beautiful angel cake I bought at the Methodist bake sale. Your father’s gone to some political meeting, so we had supper early. You’ll be a nice surprise for him when he gets home. He hadn’t been gone half an hour when Miss Knightly drove up. Sit still, dear, it only bothers me if anybody tries to help me. I’ll let you wash the dishes afterward, like we always do.”
Lesley sat down at the half-cleared table; an oval-shaped table which could be extended by the insertion of “leaves” when Mrs. Ferguesson had company. The room was already dusky (twilights are short in a flat country), and one of the boys switched on the light which hung by a cord high above the table. A shallow china shade over the bulb threw a glaring white light down on the sister and the boys who stood about her chair. Lesley wrinkled up her brow, but it didn’t occur to her that the light was too strong. She gave herself up to the feeling of being at home. It went all through her, that feeling, like getting into a warm bath when one is tired. She was safe from everything, was where she wanted to be, where she ought to be. A plant that has been washed out by a rain storm feels like that, when a kind gardener puts it gently back into its own earth with its own group.
The two older boys, Homer and Vincent, kept interrupting each other, trying to tell her things, but she didn’t really listen to what they said. The little fellow stood close beside her chair, holding on to her skirt, fingering the glass buttons on her jacket. He was named Bryan, for his father’s hero, but he didn’t fit the name very well. He was a rather wistful and timid child.
Mrs. Ferguesson brought the ham and eggs and the warmed-up coffee. Then she sat down opposite her daughter to watch her enjoy her supper. “Now don’t talk to her, boys. Let her eat in peace.”
Vincent spoke up. “Can’t I just tell her what happend to my lame pigeon?”
Mrs Ferguesson merely shook her head. She had control in that household, sure enough!
Before Lesley had quite finished her supper she heard the front door open and shut. The boys started up, but the mother raised a warning finger. They understood; a surprise. They were still as mice, and listened: A pause in the hall … he was hanging up his cap. Then he came in—the flower of the family.
For a moment he stood speechless in the doorway, the “incandescent” glaring full on his curly yellow hair and his amazed blue eyes. He was surprised indeed!
“Lesley!” he breathed, as if he were talking in his sleep.
She couldn’t sit still. Without knowing that she got up and took a step, she had her arms around her brother. “It’s me, Hector! Ain’t I lucky? Miss Knightly brought me in.”
“What time did you get here! You might have telephoned me, Mother.”
“Dear, she ain’t been here much more than half an hour.”
“And Miss Knightly brought you in with old Molly, did she?” Oh, the lovely voice he had, that Hector—warm, deliberate … it made the most commonplace remark full of meaning. He had to say merely that—and it told his appreciation of Miss Knightly’s kindness, even a playful gratitude to Molly, her clumsy, fat, road-pounding old mare. He was tall for his age, was Hector, and he had the fair pink-cheeked complexion which Lesley should have had and didn’t.
Mrs. Ferguesson rose. “Now let’s all go into the parlour and talk. We’ll come back and clear up afterward.” With this she opened the folding doors, and they followed her and found comfortable chairs—there was even a home-made hassock for Bryan. There were real books in the sectional bookcases (old Ferg’s fault), and there was a real Brussels carpet in soft colours on the floor. That was Lesley’s fault. Most of her savings from her first year’s teaching had gone into that carpet. She had chosen it herself from the samples which Marshall Field’s travelling man brought to MacAlpin. There were comfortable old-fashioned pictures on the walls—“Venice by Moonlight” and such. Lesley and Hector thought it a beautiful room.
Of course the room was pleasant because of the feeling the children had for one another, and because in Mrs. Ferguesson there was authority and organization. Here the family sat and talked until Father came home. He was always treated a little like company. His wife and his children had a deep respect for him and for experimental farming, and profound veneration for William Jennings Bryan. Even little Bryan knew he was named for a great man, and must some day stop being afraid of the dark.
James Grahame Ferguesson was a farmer. He spent most of his time on what he called an “experimental farm.” (The neighbours had other names for it—some of them amusing.) He was a loosely built man; had drooping shoulders carried with a forward thrust. He was a ready speaker, and usually made the Fourth of July speech in MacAlpin—spoke from a platform in the Court House grove, and even the farmers who joked about Ferguesson came to hear him. Alf Delaney declared: “I like to see anything done well—even talking. If old Ferg could shuck corn as fast as he can rustle the dictionary, I’d hire him, even if he is a Pop.”
Old Ferg was not at all old—just turned forty—but he was fussy about the spelling of his name. He wrote it James Ferguesson. The merchants, even the local newspaper, simply would not spell it that way. They left letters out, or they put letters in. He complained about this repeatedly, and the result was that he was simply called “Ferg” to his face, and “old Ferg” to his back. His neighbours, both in town and in the country where he farmed, liked him because he gave them so much to talk about. He couldn’t keep a hired man long at any wages. His habits were too unconventional. He rose early, saw to the chores like any other man, and went into the field for the morning. His lunch was a cold spread from his wife’s kitchen, reinforced by hot tea. (The hired man was expected to bring his own lunch—outrageous!) After lunch Mr. Ferguesson took off his boots and lay down on the blue gingham sheets of a wide bed, and remained there until what he called “the cool of the afternoon.” When that refreshing season arrived, he fed and watered his work horses, put the young gelding to his buckboard, and drove four miles to MacAlpin for his wife’s hot supper. Mrs. Ferguesson, though not at all a meek woman or a stupid one, unquestioningly believed him when he told her that he did his best thinking in the afternoon. He hinted to her that he was working out in his head something that would benefit the farmers of the county more than all the corn and wheat they could raise even in a good year.
Sometimes Ferguesson did things she regretted—not because they were wrong, but because other people had mean tongues. When a fashion came in for giving names to farms which had hitherto been designated by figures (range, section, quarter, etc.), and his neighbours came out with “Lone Tree Farm,” “Cold Spring Farm,” etc., Ferguesson tacked on a cottonwood tree by his gate a neatly painted board inscribed: WIDE AWAKE FARM.
His neighbours, who could never get used to his afternoon siesta, were not long in converting this prophetic christening into “Hush-a-bye Farm.” Mrs. Ferguesson overheard some of this joking on a Saturday night (she was marketing late after a lodge meeting on top of a busy day), and she didn’t like it. On Sunday morning when he was dressing for church, she asked her husband why he ever gave the farm such a foolish name. He explained to her that the important crop on that farm was an idea. His farm was like an observatory where one watched the signs of the times and saw the great change that was coming for the benefit of all mankind. He even quoted Tennyson about looking into the future “far as human eye could see.” It had been a long time since he had quot
ed any poetry to her. She sighed and dropped the matter.
On the whole, Ferg did himself a good turn when he put up that piece of nomenclature. People drove out of their way for miles to see it. They felt more kindly toward old Ferg because he wrote himself down such an ass. In a hard-working farming community a good joke is worth something. Ferguesson himself felt a gradual warming toward him among his neighbours. He ascribed it to the power of his oratory. It was really because he had made himself so absurd, but this he never guessed. Idealists are seldom afraid of ridicule—if they recognize it.
The Ferguesson children believed that their father was misunderstood by people of inferior intelligence, and that conviction gave them a “cause” which bound them together. They must do better than other children; better in school, and better on the playground. They must turn in a quarter of a dollar to help their mother out whenever they could. Experimental farming wasn’t immediately remunerative.
Fortunately there was never any rent to pay. They owned their house down by the depot. When Mrs. Ferguesson’s father died down in Missouri, she bought that place with what he left her. She knew that was the safe thing to do, her husband being a thinker. Her children were bound to her, and to that house, by the deepest, the most solemn loyalty. They never spoke of that covenant to each other, never even formulated it in their own minds—never. It was a consciousness they shared, and it gave them a family complexion.
On this Saturday of Lesley’s surprise visit home, Father was with the family for breakfast. That was always a pleasant way to begin the day—especially on Saturday, when no one was in a hurry. He had grave good manners toward his wife and children. He talked to them as if they were grown-up, reasonable beings—talked a trifle as if from a rostrum, perhaps,—and he never indulged in small-town gossip. He was much more likely to tell them what he had read in the Omaha World-Herald yesterday; news of the State capital and the national capital. Sometimes he told them what a grasping, selfish country England was. Very often he explained to them how the gold standard had kept the poor man down. The family seldom bothered him about petty matters—such as that Homer needed new shoes, or that the iceman’s bill for the whole summer had come in for the third time. Mother would take care of that.
On this particular Saturday morning Ferguesson gave especial attention to Lesley. He asked her about her school, and had her name her pupils. “I think you are fortunate to have the Wild Rose school, Lesley,” he said as he rose from the table. “The farmers up there are open-minded and prosperous. I have sometimes wished that I had settled up there, though there are certain advantages in living at the county seat. The educational opportunities are better. Your friendship with Miss Knightly has been a broadening influence.”
He went out to hitch up the buckboard to drive to the farm, while his wife put up the lunch he was to take along with him, and Lesley went upstairs to make the beds.
“Upstairs” was a story in itself, a secret romance. No caller or neighbour had ever been allowed to go up there. All the children loved it—it was their very own world where there were no older people poking about to spoil things. And it was unique—not at all like other people’s upstairs chambers. In her stuffy little bedroom out in the country Lesley had more than once cried for it.
Lesley and the boys liked space, not tight cubbyholes. Their upstairs was a long attic which ran the whole length of the house, from the front door downstairs to the kitchen at the back. Its great charm was that it was unlined. No plaster, no beaver-board lining; just the roof shingles, supported by long, unplaned, splintery rafters that sloped from the sharp roof-peak down to the floor of the attic. Bracing these long roof rafters were cross rafters on which one could hang things—a little personal washing, a curtain for tableaux, a rope swing for Bryan.
In this spacious, undivided loft were two brick chimneys, going up in neat little stair-steps from the plank floor to the shingle roof—and out of it to the stars! The chimneys were of red, unglazed brick, with lines of white mortar to hold them together.
Last year, after Lesley first got her school, Mrs. Ferguesson exerted her authority and partitioned off a little room over the kitchen end of the “upstairs” for her daughter. Before that, all the children slept in this delightful attic. The three older boys occupied two wide beds, their sister her little single bed. Bryan, subject to croup, still slumbered downstairs near his mother, but he looked forward to his ascension as to a state of pure beatitude.
There was certainly room enough up there for widely scattered quarters, but the three beds stood in a row, as in a hospital ward. The children liked to be close enough together to share experiences.
Experiences were many. Perhaps the most exciting was when the driving, sleety snowstorms came on winter nights. The roof shingles were old and had curled under hot summer suns. In a driving snowstorm the frozen flakes sifted in through all those little cracks, sprinkled the beds and the children, melted on their faces, in their hair! That was delightful. The rest of you was snug and warm under blankets and comforters, with a hot brick at one’s feet. The wind howled outside; sometimes the white light from the snow and the half-strangled moon came in through the single end window. Each child had his own dream-adventure. They did not exchange confidences; every “fellow” had a right to his own. They never told their love.
If they turned in early, they had a good while to enjoy the outside weather; they never went to sleep until after ten o’clock, for then came the sweetest morsel of the night. At that hour Number Seventeen, the westbound passenger, whistled in. The station and the engine house were perhaps an eighth of a mile down the hill, and from far away across the meadows the children could hear that whistle. Then came the heavy pants of the locomotive in the frosty air. Then a hissing—then silence: she was taking water.
On Saturdays the children were allowed to go down to the depot to see Seventeen come in. It was a fine sight on winter nights. Sometimes the great locomotive used to sweep in armoured in ice and snow, breathing fire like a dragon, its great red eye shooting a blinding beam along the white roadbed and shining wet rails. When it stopped, it panted like a great beast. After it was watered by the big hose from the overhead tank, it seemed to draw long deep breaths, ready to charge afresh over the great Western land.
Yes, they were grand old warriors, those towering locomotives of other days. They seemed to mean power, conquest, triumph—Jim Hill’s dream. They set children’s hearts beating from Chicago to Los Angeles. They were the awakener of many a dream.
As she made the boy’s beds that Saturday morning and put on clean sheets, Lesley was thinking she would give a great deal to sleep out here as she used to. But when she got her school last year, her mother had said she must have a room of her own. So a carpenter brought sheathing and “lined” the end of the long loft—the end over the kitchen; and Mrs. Ferguesson bought a little yellow washstand and a bowl and pitcher, and said with satisfaction: “Now you see, Lesley, if you were sick, we would have some place to take the doctor.” To be sure, the doctor would have to be admitted through the kitchen, and then come up a dark winding stairway with two turns. (Mr. Ferguesson termed it “the turnpike.” His old Scotch grandmother, he said, had always thus called a winding stairway.) And Lesley’s room, when you got there, was very like a snug wooden box. It was possible, of course, to leave her door open into the long loft, where the wood was brown and the chimneys red and the weather always so close to one. Out there things were still wild and rough—it wasn’t a bedroom or a chamber—it was a hall, in the old baronial sense, and it reminded her of the lines in their Grimm’s Fairy Tales book:
Return, return, thou youthful bride,
This is a robbers’ hall inside.
IV
When her daughter had put the attic to rights, Mrs. Ferguesson went uptown to do her Saturday marketing. Lesley slipped out through the kitchen door and sat down on the back porch. The front porch was kept neat and fit to receive callers, but the back porch was given over to th
e boys. It was a messy-looking place, to be sure. From the wooden ceiling hung two trapezes. At one corner four boxing gloves were piled in a broken chair. In the trampled, grassless back yard, two-by-fours, planted upright, supported a length of lead pipe on which Homer practised bar exercises. Lesley sat down on the porch floor, her feet on the ground, and sank into idleness and safety and perfect love.
The boys were much the dearest things in the world to her. To love them so much was just … happiness. To think about them was the most perfect form of happiness. Had they been actually present, swinging on the two trapezes, turning on the bar, she would have been too much excited, too actively happy to be perfectly happy. But sitting in the warm sun, with her feet on the good ground, even her mother away, she almost ceased to exist. The feeling of being at home was complete, absolute: it made her sleepy. And that feeling was not so much the sense of being protected by her father and mother as of being with, and being one with, her brothers. It was the clan feeling, which meant life or death for the blood, not for the individual. For some reason, or for no reason, back in the beginning, creatures wanted the blood to continue.
* *
After the noonday dinner Mrs. Ferguesson thoughtfully confided to her daughter while they were washing the dishes:
“Lesley, I’m divided in my mind. I would so appreciate a quiet afternoon with you, but I’ve a sort of engagement with the P.E.O. A lady from Canada is to be there to talk to us, and I’ve promised to introduce her. And just when I want to have a quiet time with you.”
Lesley gave a sigh of relief and thought how fortunate it is that circumstances do sometimes make up our mind for us. In that battered canvas bag upstairs there was a roll of arithmetic papers and “essays” which hung over her like a threat. Now she would have a still hour in their beautiful parlour to correct them; the shades drawn down, just enough light to read by, her father’s unabridged at hand, and the boys playing bat and pitch in the back yard.