Читать книгу A White Bird Flying - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Grandmother Deal's old home behind the cedars was dismantled, with every one hot and hurried and uncertain what to do with things. Margaret Deal Baker, wife of Dr. Frederick Baker of Lincoln, and Isabelle Deal Rhodes, the singer from Chicago, were there. Grace Deal, the University teacher, was there. Eloise, Laura and Millard went out to the house in the morning. Mackenzie Deal, the Omaha banker, and Emma, his wife, drove down in the late afternoon. John Deal, Laura's father, came when he had closed his law office. Katherine Deal Buchanan, Mack's and Emma's daughter, a bride of two weeks, drove over in her sport roadster, although there was practically nothing she wanted, the old things giving no promise of fitting in the smart new English cottage with any degree of artistry.

In the beginning, the daughters and daughters-in-law were a bit red-eyed and tearful. At the first sight of her mother's clothes in the old walnut wardrobe, Margaret Baker thought she could not go on with her sorrowful task. Isabelle Rhodes had a bad moment or two as she took down the recipe books and saw her mother's cramped handwriting. The rather austere Grace broke down when she took the glasses off the old Bible in the bedroom and put them in the case. It was almost as hard for Emma and Eloise, the daughters-in-law. Mother Deal had been good to them. Mack and John tramped around out doors, taking down tools that had been their father's and, uncertain what to do, with masculine helplessness, put them all back again. Katherine sat on the kitchen table with the declivity in one corner in which old Doc Matthews had rolled pills in Civil War times, swung her chic-looking feet and, to keep the tears back, made snappy remarks about the dismantling. Millard ran in and out, with Eloise calling: "Millard Deal, do stay in or out."

It was all very confusing, and very strange, with the familiar things in a queer rearrangement, clustered together in piles on the floor. Laura went in and out of the rooms with something tearing a little at her heart every time an article was taken from its old place. Once she took the red pincushion from a pile and placed it back on the sewing-machine, and once she surreptitiously slipped the turkey-feather fan into a blue flowered vase. She could think of nothing but that Grandma was looking on and saying: "You'd better let Annie Johnson have the cape. She could make it over for Dottie." Or, "Tell Mrs. Curtis she can have the geraniums." Yes, that was just what Grandma would have said. It seemed queer to think she could almost hear her. How could it be? Because all the Deals were there together, it seemed that Grandma was there, too. How could some one who was dead live on and move among them just as she had always done?

Everything seemed as natural as though nothing had happened. After the first few attempts to stop the tears and keep from breaking down, the whole clan grew brisk and talkative. In the stress of sorting and making disposition of things the conversation became practical and cheerful. After awhile they even began the old joking way of the Deals. Katherine laughed gayly and made extravagant statements about the old-fashioned clothes which her mother was unearthing in bundles from a closet shelf. Aunt Margaret and Aunt Isabelle even staged a well-bred but intensive argument over which one could have the old tallow lamp with the wick hanging over the side like a dog's tongue hanging out of his mouth. Life always closes over the vacancy and goes on.

Christine Reinmueller, Grandma's neighbor and friend for sixty years, came over, her blue calico dress gathered on full at the place where her waistline should have been, her colorless hair braided in moist flat strands and wound from ear to ear, like a miniature braided rug that had been pinned on the back of her head.

"Ach . . . solch ein aufbrechen . . . such a splitting . . . breaking up . . ." She wrung her hard old hands.

They gave her countless things,--clothes and dishes and garden seeds tied up in rags, and fruit jars. And although she still owned three eighties of land after giving away eight other quarter sections to her children, she was glad to get the things; said they would help her out through the hard winter. Old Christine always thought she was poverty-stricken, on the verge of entering the county home.

While every one was sorting, warm and hurried, old Oscar Lutz came tap-tapping with his cane around to the door. The remarks on the side concerning his arrival were more frank than polite: "Good-night! . . . old Uncle Oscar."

"Of all days!"

"He would."

Old Oscar Lutz came tap-tapping smilingly into the confusion of the dismantling. He had string beans in an old pail with a rope for the handle. He had brought them as a gift for any one who wanted them, but no one seemed overjoyed at the donation.

Old Oscar Lutz was Cedartown's oldest inhabitant. In every town and village west of Iowa there is still some old man who has seen the beginning and the growth of the community, who has watched little saplings grow to ancient trees, and the boys of three generations slip into manhood. Even east of the Missouri River they are gone. But west of the Missouri you will still find them, a few old men who have seen everything from the beginning, who once climbed down from covered wagons into the waving prairie grass, to turn the first furrows in the virgin soil. Some of them are still active. Some mill around like restless old buffaloes. And some sit on their porches watching the stream of life go by.

There are old men of the sea and old men of the mountains,--but here in the midwest live the old men of the prairie. The old salt tells of the mightiness and fascination of the sea, the hillman of the majesty and the lure of the mountains, but the old man of the prairie lives over his days on the plains. One recalls strong ships scuttled on far shores, one the rockribbed fastness of the hills, but the other remembers the wave of the grass on the prairie. To one there is no memory so lovely as the moonlight on the sea, to one the dawn breaking over the mountains, but to the old man of the prairie it is the sudden hush of the winds at twilight.

Old Oscar Lutz was Cedartown's last old man of the prairie. Tall, gaunt, as gnarled as the cottonwoods he had planted, he looked akin to the elements with which he had once wrestled. Furrows in the virgin soil, and furrows in the red-brown face! Eyes the color of the gray-blue ice on Stove Creek. Hair and beard like tangled wheat stalks under the snow. Hands hard and calloused as old buffalo hide. He wore two buttons in the lapel of his shiny old coat,--a G.A.R. token, and a little button with the number "68," the year he had settled in the state. He was as proud of one as the other; a war record on one, and the record of an equally harsh war on the other,--the tussle with nature to make a home on the prairie.

Old Oscar Lutz spent his winters in California, but about the time that countless tiny maltese kittens scrambled over the branches of the willows down by Stove Creek, old Oscar would arrive from the Far West. These were the things in Cedartown's calendar of events which proved that spring had come: a robin or two suddenly swooping down onto some one's leaf-covered lawn, an intermingled odor of bonfires and subsoil from over the meadows, pussy-willows at the creek bend, and old Oscar Lutz's cane tap-tapping on the sidewalk.

There was scarcely any one but old Christine Reinmueller left now in the community who had been his friend of the early days. But he came back to his old haunts every spring, spent a day each with the Mackenzie Deals of Omaha, the John Deals of Cedartown, the Bakers of Lincoln, and a day with a son or two of some old companion of his plainsman's days, regaling them with accounts of their ancestors' uprisings and downswings and his own first early experiences; tap-tapping through the town with his cane ("yes, sir, whittled from a young elm branch down by the creek") to his own old closed and musty dwelling. Sturdy as an old hickory limb, he would go through the house, open up doors and windows, beat some of the ancient rugs and hang his dead Marthy's quilts out on the line. There they would swing all day in the fresh spring wind and the sunshine,--the Rose of Sharon and the Dutch Puzzle, the Log Cabin and the Rising Sun. His rather superficial house-cleaning done, he was ready for the garden. The bursting of the first wild plum blossoms, and the bumbling of the first honey-bee always found him in his garden behind the fussy old house.

There were those he bored with his constant talk of the early days. Because time hung heavily on his hands, his greatest delight was to have a listener. The ratio of his happiness in declaiming his experiences rose in proportion to his audience. One person was a pleasure, two a greater satisfaction, three or more standing about listening to his tales, taking in attentively all he had to say, lifted him to a heaven of rare delight.

And now he was here to-day, tap-tapping up the cement walk to the side door. And the Deals in unison groaned.

"Well, well," he tapped in smilingly, unaware of his lack of welcome, "and so you're getting the old household things divided up?"

"Hello, Uncle Oscar." He was Mrs. Mackenzie Deal's uncle (she had been Henry Lutz's daughter), but he was "Uncle" to the others in name only. Emma pushed forward a chair. He lowered his gaunt frame into it heavily.

"Well--well--the time goes by and one by one we all pass on. . . ."

"And out," Katherine whispered to Laura. Kathie's recent honeymoon had in no way mellowed her flippancy.

"Well--well--it seems like only yesterday. I mind as how--"

"Old-Mind-As-How is all wound up ready to go," Katherine muttered.

". . . we all come across the prairie from Plattsmouth,--Marthy and me and the three little tads . . . my brother Henry and Sarah, his bride, and Will and Abbie Deal, your folks, . . . and you and Gus, Christine. I mind as how, Christine, you and Gus had a boat for a wagon-box, the stern next to the oxen's hind quarters."

"Nein . . . no." Christine spoke up. "De bow . . . he vas next."

"No, I think it was the stern, Christine."

Christine was adamant. "Nein . . . de bow he vas next."

"My money is on Christine," Katherine whispered. "She'll never give up. She'll die saying 'De bow he vas next' if old Mind-As-How doesn't give in."

Old Oscar went on unperturbed. "We met at the Weeping Water and traveled all day against the sun. We could see a faint fringe of trees outlinin' the horizon and we knew it was Stove Creek. We camped by the creek bed . . . made a campfire . . . the stars come out . . . and the Injuns come . . ."

Every one went on about his work. Margaret sorted clothes, Grace packed dishes, Isabelle, books. They all went in and out unheeding the old man's tale.

It made Laura feel sorry for him. People were always that way with old Oscar. Something about the disinterest they seemed to show brought out her sympathy. She wondered how it would feel to be old and to bore people. Of course, he didn't realize he bored them,--that was one good thing.

"I mind as how when Henry and I first come we got a house nigh about where Plattsmouth stands . . ." He was going on and on with no one giving him any special heed. "Stayed all night with some folks by the name of . . . wait a minute . . . name slips . . . tell you in a minute . . . A B C D E F G . . . Gunwall . . . always run down the alphabet if you can't locate a name . . . works every time . . . stayed with a family by the name of . . . what's I say a minute ago?" he asked Laura. "Gunwall . . . that's it. Slept on the floor, had a latch . . . a wooden latch you run a leather thong through to hook the door . . . like this. . . ." With his cane and fingers he showed definitely the form of the latch. "Toward daylight . . . come clear daylight, mebbe, I should say . . . saw the leather thong on the latch keep moving . . . somebody workin' away on the latch . . . pretty soon the leather pulled outwards, and the door opened 'n' in come four o' the biggest Injuns y' ever saw . . . feathers 'n' moccasins 'n' tommyhawks 'n' all. For two cents I'd crawled out 'n' drowned myself in the Platte. Come to think . . . don't know's I could a drowned . . . water was lower 'n' git out. This man . . . what'd I say? . . . A B C D E F G . . . Gunwall . . . this man Gunwall met 'em 'n' talked to 'em. They grunted 'n' stepped around over the beds on the floor . . . made known they wanted something to eat . . . ate a handout . . . laughed a bit. You always think of Injuns serious I bet, don't you? T'ain't so . . . full of jokes . . . if you don't mind the kind they sometimes perpetrated."

He stopped and fell into an absent-minded mood as though he were actually seeing the scenes of which he talked so fluently. The Deals moved all around him, back and forth, sorting, packing. Soon he came to the present with "Goin' to take a flower down to lay on Gunwall's grave some of these days; think I can locate it . . . it'll be som'ers on the north side of a bunch of cottonwoods at the old Prairie Home cemetery."

Out in the kitchen Isabelle Rhodes was saying: "I could scream to have to listen to him. He doesn't live in the present . . . just inhabits another world."

Eloise said stiffly: "He's like house-cleaning and taxes and being fooled the first of April,--you just have to have them all whether you want to or not."

"If he starts visiting me," Katherine, the bride, made her definite pronouncement, "I'll simply disappear when he arrives. Great-uncle or not, life is too short to be bored by the old pest."

It made Laura feel sorry for the old man. "I kind of like him," she admitted. "He sort of fascinates me, now that Grandma's gone. When he's gone, too . . . did you ever stop to think, Katherine, that when your old Uncle Oscar Lutz and old Christine Reinmueller are gone, there won't be any one . . . not a soul left that came here in wagons, and started the community. Just think, we'll lose connection forever with the pioneer days."

"You can sever the connection any time, Lolly, as far as I'm concerned," was Katherine's rejoinder. "Nothing bores me to a state of coma quicker than a rehash of this native-sons-and-daughters, heroic-lives, corn-bread-in-a-sod-house stuff."

It was getting late and the Deal clan stopped work for the day. Old Christine took her things and waddled down the lane toward home, her blue calico dress switching the tall grass at the roadside. When the Deals all left, the old man was still mulling over his recollections, and no one had taken the string beans.

There were a half-dozen cars in the lane road. Every one offered to take him home.

"No," he said, "I'll walk. Don't stop walking and you'll never get rusty in the joints."

When the John Deal car turned out of the lane road, Laura looked back. The old man was leaning on his cane and looking across the fields and meadows to the sun slipping low in the west. A sudden mist came to her eyes. She wished the others liked him better. Poor old man. When she got home she would write about him:

Poor old man, looking toward the sun,

What do you remember, now that life's done?