Читать книгу Song of Years - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 11

The fall term of school began now for Suzanne in that little log building on a corner of the land which her father had donated to the newly formed school district. Like his house, it sat at the edge of the timber which swept up from the south so that trees formed a background to its dark logs and the prairie fell away from its door. There was a tangle of underbrush at its windows—hazelnut and scrub oak and the wild sumac that appeared to be setting fire to the black logs, its scarlet branches licking at the little building like tongues of flame.

Inside, there were hand-hewn benches over which the children climbed to be seated with their backs to the center of the room, the boys with swaggering straddle, the girls carefully, with a clutching at wide skirts to keep the showing of pantalets at a minimum. The desks were fastened to the wall on two sides of the room, each one a long sloping box with a lidded compartment for every two children.

A water-pail with long-handled dipper stood on a built-in shelf so that this particular corner was always in a state of dripping moisture on warm days and of icicle formation in winter. That tin dipper constituted the sum total of the improvement of this year’s equipment over last (which had been the school’s first year of existence) inasmuch as all those gallons of drinks of the yesteryear had been consumed by way of a gourd dipper which was discarded now because of the jagged appearance of its rim caused by the sharp teeth of the consumers.

Melinda, Celia, and Suzanne were the only Martins to be in school this fall. Sabina and Emily had called their education finished before they came to Iowa. Jeanie and Phoebe Lou had both gone part of last winter at Pa’s insistence but when Jeanie found she could spell, parse, and read better than the little old man who taught them, she had made a big fuss about it and stopped, too. And now Phoebe Lou would go no more for she was away helping Mrs. Manson who was expecting a baby.

A week before, Mrs. Manson’s unmarried brother, Ed Armitage, had arrived in a two-wheeled cart, dashing madly up to the lean-to door as though finishing a race, to see if one of the girls could come over to help his sister. Jeremiah, fond of his little joke, had said: “Well, now, Ed, I can’t let any of my girls go for to be hired girls, but if you want to marry one, take your choice—you got seven to pick from.”

“Only six, Pa.” Phineas had winked, teasingly. “You forget Sabina’s spoken for.”

“That’s right, Ed . . . Sabina’s the only one we can get off our hands.”

Ed Armitage had turned red clear down into his buckskin coat collar, and the girls had all made an excuse of going into Ma’s bedroom where they stifled their laughter at Ed’s discomfiture in the feather-beds whose acoustic properties were negligible.

But Phoebe Lou had gone to help, riding away bouncingly in the two-wheeled cart with the perturbed Ed, and throwing a languishing look over her shoulder at the assembled family as she clasped her hands imploringly behind his broad back, so that the girls had run into the house and laughed themselves sick.

Neither Celia nor Suzanne liked the new Ambrose Willshire for a teacher, and Melinda frankly said she could cheerfully mop the floor with him, although no one could put her finger on just what was wrong. He was polite to a point of saturation, correct and stiff in his manner, but so mean about little things, holding up the oldest Akin boy to ridicule when the lad merely meant to be informative, making Celia write “I think I am pretty” fifty times for twisting a curl over her ear during class, so that Melinda and Suzanne who had often and unhesitatingly confronted her with the same accusation now escorted her home between them in deep clannish sympathy and high dudgeon.

As an embarrassing aftermath, that turned out to be the very night Ambrose Willshire moved in at home, bag and baggage, for he was boarding around and there was not going to be room for him and the stork both in the one-roomed cabin of the Mansons. The family had all talked noisily and naturally (which were synonymous terms) at that first meal, excepting the three school-girls who were still in a state of revolt.

Indeed, Ambrose Willshire’s pedantic presence cast a shadow on them all through the sunny days of October—there was such an air of condemnation about him at their chatter and laughter. Sometimes he corrected them in their speech and often he spoke about attaining perfect goals in life.

But his four weeks were up and he had gone on to the Horace Akins’ this Saturday. Every one felt relieved.

Jeanie said she was going to let out and sing at the top of her voice all day for she had been just like a bird fascinated by a snake when she was alone with him and he looked so long at her. Even Jeremiah said it was nice to have a good eddication but there wasn’t no call to be long-faced about it, and he guessed having some schooling didn’t need to prohibit you from cracking a joke once in a while.

This October Saturday, with the timber in the Valley burning red under the fire of bright maples and burnished oak leaves, with the smoke of the Indian camp-fires near the river drifting lazily into the fall sky, Henry and Phineas were breaking the last of their new prairie sod for the next spring’s planting. Emily was baking. Jeanie and her mother were making soft soap in an outdoor kettle, for which task they had leached their own lye from wood ashes. Melinda was bringing out the pieced comforts to hang on a line stretched between two trees which had been topped to form clothes-line posts but which had broken out into foliage this year, as though the mere duty to which Sarah assigned them was too commonplace.

Sabina was drying the last of the sweet corn with Celia to help her. The sheets for her new home were bleaching on the coarse grass of the yard, the color of the muslin having already changed from a mulatto tan to a pale saffron under the warm prairie sun.

Suzanne’s job was one which called for much locomotion, for she not only had to whack her fly brush of paper streamers over the drying sweet corn and the soap grease which were on opposite sides of the cabin, but ever and anon she had to dart hastily toward the sheets as she saw an inquisitive chicken ambling in that direction, and toward the clothes-line as a bird gave evidence of alighting.

Jeremiah was on his way up to Wayne Lockwood’s on Jupiter this afternoon with weighty things on his mind and fire in his eye, deeply concerned about a serious political problem. Indeed, the whole newly organized county was excited.

There had been a real bounded county only since June. The court records over which Sarah had waxed sarcastic were in Sturgis Falls safely ensconced in the loft over Mr. Mullarky’s combination house and store, a room twenty feet square and seven feet high for which the county office was paying eight dollars per month, the rental including a table and two stout wooden chairs. Thus Sturgis Falls, by virtue of being the older and larger of the two settlements and platted now for two years, was the county seat.

More rumors had been coming out of Prairie Rapids via the mouth-to-mouth route that the little upstart settlement had its eye on the county-seat, claiming it should be the chosen site because centrally located.

All of Jeremiah’s indignation was fomenting as he rode to where Wayne, with Ed Armitage to help him, was breaking sod.

For a long time the two stood by their plow while Jeremiah “talked turkey” to them, explaining, gesticulating, going into countless reasons why Sturgis Falls should retain the county-seat.

Wayne was neither agitated over the question nor conclusive in his choice of the two towns, as was Jeremiah, and he said so. “I can’t think but maybe Prairie Rapids is the one to have a court-house. After all they’re right in bringing up the fact that they’re more central.”

Jeremiah’s black beard bristled like the hair of old Major over some wiggling thing in the grass. “Ain’t you nearer to Sturgis Falls both in miles and your feelings for it?”

“A little in actual distance,” Wayne admitted, “but not any closer in feelings, as you say.”

He was sorry to rile his neighbor. Jeremiah Martin had been more than good to him, but after all he was his own boss and entitled to his own opinion.

It was fully an hour later that Jeremiah rode away with a parting: “Well, you sleep over this and you’ll come to see it rightly. I’ll warrant, come daylight, you’ll see the light and throw in your weight with the Sturgis Falls folks and help hang onto the court records there.”

He had been gone across the prairie only long enough to be a toy man on a toy horse when Wayne saw a pair of bays and a shining buggy coming across the open spaces.

Only a few times had he seen Cady Bedson and now here the fellow was, but for what purpose?

“Looks like we better get ready to serve afternoon tea . . . so many callers, Ed,” Wayne said, as the two saw the team making for them.

Right after Jeremiah Martin’s agitated visit, it was not taking Wayne five minutes to see the reason for this other call.

“Watch the sparks fly, Ed. I just don’t have any extra liking for this lad.”

“How are you, Lockwood?” Cady Bedson was affable enough.

“I can’t complain.”

“Nice farm you’ll have some day.”

“That’s what I thought the day I picked it out,” he answered dryly.

Cady laughed. Evidently he was in no mood to quarrel.

“Land settling up in fine shape through here. Some of these days all the land will be taken in the whole new county.”

“I agree. But I doubt if I’m going to agree to do what you’re out here to get me to promise.”

“Why, what’s that?”

“I guess you’re here to get me to pull for a change in the county-seat all right.”

“I hadn’t mentioned that, had I?”

Wayne grinned. “No . . . and now you won’t even need to.”

Why did he dislike him so—his slick looks and his dapper little mustache and his oily affability? Just one of those things you could not understand. “I Just don’t like him and I’m of no mind to try,” he said to Ed, after Cady was gone.

Ed Armitage laughed at Wayne and his complete about-face on the subject of the court-house site so that Wayne laughed too.

“Yes, I guess I’m committed to a decision now.” Queer that the dislike of a personality was what had convinced him. That was what you would call being prejudiced for a certainty. How Jeremiah Martin and the girls would laugh when he told them what had decided him to stand by Sturgis Falls.

He would have a chance to tell them the next day, too, for there was to be preaching in the log school-house and Emily had asked him to dinner between sessions. Some Brother Osgood, an itinerant preacher, was to arrive at the Martins’ and hold service both morning and afternoon.

Sunday turned out to be a rare jewel of a day set in the necklace which October was wearing. The little log schoolhouse was crowded. Saddle horses and those hitched to lumber wagons, buckboards and two-wheeled carts, were tied to trees at the rear, so that during the long sermon Jeremiah figuratively cut and set two dozen hitching-posts in front of the school grounds already worn bare in spots by hi-spy and ante-over games.

Brother Osgood, a shriveled brown gnome of a man, preached in droning flat tones from an Old Testament text, but also covered decisively, if sketchily, the subjects of baptism, conversion, punishment, redemption, prayer, and predestination, while mothers slipped sprigs of caraway to their offspring to smell in order to keep them awake, and surreptitiously took a whiff themselves betimes.

It was a most auspicious occasion for Suzanne to dream, lulled as she was by the monotonous tones of Brother Osgood. For time unending the voice mumbled through her consciousness like the bumbling of a far-off bee.

Jeremiah was nodding into his black beard, jerking up and looking about him indignantly. Sarah’s thin sharp face under its black bonnet was upturned to the speaker, her heavy red hair sagging down from its pins, and her lips pursed as though she was trying to keep herself from a snapping retort to the little man’s orthodoxy. Henry and Phineas were outside the door, half glad that their late arrival was keeping them there.

Sabina and Tom Bostwick were holding hands surreptitiously under the edge of Sabina’s gray shawl. Emily was pleating her black mitts in nervous fingers, planning the dresses from Aunt Harriet’s box. Jeanie rolled her dark eyes under her green bonnet from Sam Phillips to George Wormsby and even toward the pedantic Ambrose Willshire in impartial and regular sequence.

Phoebe Lou, sitting with the Mansons, looked a little self-conscious over the proximity of Ed Armitage. Melinda, gazing out of the window whose open wooden shutters revealed the vast stretches of prairie, was far afield on one of those journeys she was always sighing to take. Celia’s head under her white straw bonnet was bent decorously low. To the casual observer Celia was in a state of pious worshiping, her pretty face carrying an expression which was dutifully reverential. But the casual observer could not have known that Miss Celia had a broken piece of mirror in her white cotton mitt and was gazing therein quite as fascinated by what she saw as Narcissus at the pool.

It is not to be wondered at that Suzanne, in her half-dreaming state, seeing all these familiar figures as through a veil, for one brief moment lost consciousness of where she was, so that when a late fall fly lighted on her hand, trained as she was to be fly-conscious, she started up suddenly from her bench, thinking to get the long-handled brush, only to drop back onto the seat in deepest mortification when she realized that this was “meeting,” that every one was glaring at her, and that Wayne Lockwood from across the room was grinning at her discomfiture.

And now almost to every one’s surprise, as though they were not quite sure it could ever end, the morning session was over. There remained only an announcement, a song, and the benediction. The announcement was that there would be a sermon again at two-thirty which would contain something of the lives of the major prophets at the close of which a collection would be the order of the day. The song was sung, pushed along by Sabina’s and Wayne’s strong voices and held back by a dozen unmusical ones. The benediction, which Mr. Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language said was a short prayer with which public worship was closed, proved to be all that Mr. Webster had said of it excepting that it was not short. It was very long, indeed, so that it was going to hurry the women folks to get dinner and the dishes done in time to get back to the afternoon preaching.

Because of the lateness of the hour there was not the usual loitering to visit as on most occasions when the settlers got together. This time it was the women who tugged at men’s sleeves, instead of the usual, “Come, come, you women never know when to stop talking.” For most of the men wanted to talk to the old trapper, Rab Dorwit, who in regular frontier clothes and coonskin cap with tail down the back, had returned to the Valley to see what it looked like under modern conditions.

The man had roamed through this section fifteen years before, trapping and fishing, living with the Indians at first, later in a hastily constructed log hut by the river. He was not at all the Jeremiah Martin type of settler coming into Iowa to make a permanent home, belonging instead, to that other period, the era of the transient—an old man now who had been one with the beavers and the pike and the antelope, free as the prairie winds or any wild thing of the river or forest, finding these modern modes of living too settled.

Already Jeremiah was asking the old trapper to come over to dinner, so that Melinda said to her mother: “For goodness sakes, let’s get Pa home before he asks the whole congregation.”

Sarah had sent Celia and Suzanne ahead to get the table set and now added: “Melinda, get the fire going up under the chicken. I’ll be along as fast as I can come. Now scoot!”

There was no need to give orders to Emily. Already Ma’s stand-by was half-way to the house, scurrying along alone, with her skirts held as high as she dared to avoid the dusty October weeds. Phoebe Lou, working for the Mansons, was excused temporarily from orders. Sabina, strolling along slowly toward the house with Tom Bostwick, existing in a state of romanticism, also carried a certain insurance protection against her mother’s curt orders.

Jeanie, although unbetrothed as yet because of a coquettish desire not to admit which scalp she desired to retain permanently, was walking home between two able protectors, Sam Phillips and George Wormsby, but when half-way there, overtaken by Ambrose Willshire, she thought it a good joke to leave the body-guard in the lurch and step back with Ambrose.

Celia and Suzanne arrived breathlessly at the cabin, for Ma would brook no fooling to-day, and tied aprons around their waists, beginning at once to piece out the table with wooden sawhorses and boards, for in addition to Brother Osgood, Tom Bostwick, and Wayne Lockwood, Pa was bringing the old trapper and as like as not a half-dozen other folks.

Happily, the usual fly-brushing task was over for the season as only a few stragglers remained. That first killing frost had done more than get rid of the black pests. It had wrinkled the great pumpkin vines, left the morning-glories a soft black mass of pulp clinging limply to the side of the cabin, and turned the timber into such ruddy colors that it appeared to have caught and held some particularly vivid prairie sunset in its tree-tops.

And now the girls could hear their father’s voice shouting: “No necessity of your goin’ ’way home to try to get back at half-past two,” hospitality oozing from its every inflection.

“Yes, but he don’t have to try and squeeze them around this table,” Celia growled.

“Or be the one to wait if there’s too many.” Suzanne was laying the knives and forks the length of the pieced-out table, covered now with both long white cloths her mother had bought in York State years before, when either one had seemed of infinite capacity for any potential family.

She was wishing she knew where Wayne Lockwood was going to sit. Just what difference the knowledge would make was difficult to see, as the same black bone-handled knives and forks, the same heavy white plates with their English stamps on the back served for all. But she laid each one down with loving touch so that she might not miss the favored place.

The men sat around outside in the nice October weather waiting for dinner to be called, avoiding discussion of the courthouse feud to-day out of deference to Brother Osgood and his supposedly peaceful inclinations, dwelling rather on the differences between the old days when the trapper was monarch of all he surveyed and the way the lands of the Valley were now being gradually patented and settled.

When Suzanne saw that her mother and Emily were beginning to take up the huge platters of prairie-chicken and dumplings and the corn-bread which Sarah had hurriedly “whacked out” when she saw the crowd would “eat her out of house and home,” she ran outdoors to see if there was something left with which to decorate the center of the table.

All the flowers were gone—even the hardy goldenrod was black and soft—but she could get a few short branches of shining oak leaves, copper-colored in the warm sun, and of maples as red as the blood of the Lamb. She could see Celia in the east door of the lean-to, one arm high on the casing, her yellow head bent in such fashion that Suzanne knew she was trying to stand elegantly for the benefit of the onlookers in the yard; she heard Melinda calling out, to take her off her high horse: “Celia, if you’re trying to look like the Grecian Exile I can tell you it’s not a very good imitation with a smudge of dirt across your nose!”

But Suzanne forgot Celia, Melinda’s teasing, and the dinner, in the joy of looking into the red and yellow and bronze of the trees so soon to be weighted down with the snows of winter.

“Don’t it seem sad,” she called back to the two girls, her voice husky with emotion, “that these leaves will all be gone . . . and never again will we see the same crab-apple blossoms or wild sweet-williams or shaggy bouncing-Bets?”

“There’ll be more next year, silly,” Celia retorted.

And Melinda yelled cheerfully: “Ma will bouncing-Bet you if you don’t get in here to help with the benches.”

They gathered close on the chairs and long boards—eighteen people, with the Mansons’ new baby asleep in a deep ravine of the mountain that was Sarah’s high feather-bed.

Old Rab Dorwit in his coonskin cap with the tail at the back had sat down when he suddenly remembered he was to eat in the presence of others than birds and squirrels, removed his head-gear politely and, with accurate aim, shied it neatly across the room into the woodbox.

Jeremiah nodded to Brother Osgood who bowed his head and addressed the Deity promptly, fluently and, to the waiting diners, unendingly. “Oh, Lord, bless this Thy food for Thy servants. Bless this Thy friendly gathering. Bless these Thy people. Bless their neighbors. Bless this Thy community. Bless Thy church. Bless the head of this home and all the inmates herein. Bless the new state carved here out of the wilderness. Bless Governor Hempstead and all his acts. Bless President Pierce and give him wisdom to guide the nation. Bless the Congress . . . and all the cabinet members. Bless . . .”

Wayne Lockwood, wedged between Phoebe Lou and Jeanie, sensed rather than felt the first faint tremor of a girl’s body on either side. He bit his lip and glowered at the “Made in England” stamp on the back of his plate. If a single girl so much as made a faint beginning of that dangerous Martin chuckle, he knew they were done for, and so was he. Never could he have the self-control to stand up against the concerted action of the Martin risibilities.

Although there were moments when it seemed that life never would be anything again but the sound of a droning ministerial voice and the consciousness of a painful effort to keep that uncontrollable Martin laughter from spreading, the prayer eventually came to an ecstatic Amen. As though released from some brush dam too slight to hold the flood waters longer, low laughter rippled up and down the long boards. So that there must be an excuse for it at once, Jeanie was saying: “My goodness, Suzanne! Bringing in old oak leaves for flowers! It makes me laugh.”

The laughter exploded then into a noisy whirlpool of sound as the plates were turned over.

“It makes me laugh, too.”

“Me, too.”

“I never saw anything so funny.”

With united cause they took it up as an excuse for the sudden gay outburst, so that Suzanne was embarrassed, and Wayne, looking across the table at her red face and the distress in her gray-blue eyes, was sorry for her. Poor girl, he thought, they ought not take it out on her.

He leaned across the red and bronze of the leaves with “I think they’re pretty, Suzanne,” noted how the brightness came back into her eyes as though candles had been lighted there. It was not an unpleasant sensation to have lighted those candles.

At half-past two, the eighteen, all the other river road people and a few from the north prairies were back at the schoolhouse. It was so crowded that a group of men stood outside the door, and each of the four windows open to the Indian summer weather contained the heads and shoulders of others, so that from the inside they looked like nothing so much as pieces of rustic statuary set along on the wooden sills.

By four o’clock Brother Osgood had left the major prophets behind and was about to bring forth the foibles of the minor ones, when the old trapper, who was squeezed in between Jeremiah and Ed Armitage, must have decided suddenly and conclusively that he had heard enough, for rising abruptly and stomping up to the desk, his coonskin cap pushed back off a perspiring forehead, he reached a hairy hand into his pocket, drew out a small coin and slapped it down on the printed account of the prophets, both major and minor, with a gruff “That’s my share,” and stalked majestically out of the school-house into the great open spaces.

For the second time that day Wayne Lockwood sensed the laughter of the Martin girls being held in check with superhuman efforts, its dangerous compression manifested by reddening faces and shaking shoulders. This time there was no outlet for it as there had been at noontime over poor Suzanne, and he was wondering how they would get through the ordeal without disgracing themselves, when the preacher asked Sabina to start a closing hymn.

Rosy-cheeked Sabina, whether by accident or design, he could not know, immediately pitched and started: “Come on, my partners in distress,” so that the unmusical shouting of it by the congregation served its purpose in covering the mirth which was strangling them all.

So many things as there had been going on all day! Suzanne thought at night when it was all over that probably no one anywhere—the Chicago cousins or people in York State or New England—had had such a full day or so much excitement as she had just known. And when Pa wound the big weights of the clock with the iron key and said: “There now . . . another day’s over. Start fresh to-morrow,” it made her sad to see it go.