Читать книгу Song of Years (Bess Streeter Aldrich) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 8

The Martin cabin was something of an architectural triad. Not only was it built in three parts, but each part represented one of the summers in which the newly settled Valley had known the family.

The large room into which one entered through the thick battened door was the original cabin of 1852. To the left, but at right angles to it and so forming the clumsy T, stood that portion which had been erected in 1853. Back of the original cabin, in this year of 1854, had been erected a large one-story lean-to, also of timber cut from the near-by woods but made into lumber at the Overman sawmill in Sturgis Falls. So the Martin establishment, with two large cabin rooms topped by sleeping lofts, and the new lean-to, in comparison with most of the settlers’ cabins, was a castle of a house there in the Red Cedar Valley.

At the right of the main room a huge open fireplace, through which stars were visible in the daytime, held a four-foot backlog and a wide swinging crane with iron pot. Iron shovel and tongs leaned against the wall. Wild-turkey wings, tallow candles, and snuffers were on a mantelshelf topped by crossed firearms, while another gun hung above the lintel of the lean-to door.

In the middle of the shelf stood the clock, a big Seth Thomas timepiece, on whose glass door the great American eagle encircled by thirteen stars spread his wings, held pointed darts in his claws and an E Pluribus Unum banner in his beak. Iron weights on heavy cord descended to the clock’s depths throughout the night and day, only to be wound back into place each evening by an iron key held in Jeremiah’s steady hand, at the end of which ceremony he invariably remarked: “There, now. Day’s over. Everybody gets a fresh start tomorrow.”

A walnut cupboard with plump knobs and wooden buttons for fastening its four doors was against one wall, a walnut bureau flanked another. Built-in shelves with calico curtains across them were in two of the corners, a walnut what-not filled a third, and large braided rag rugs lay on the puncheon floor.

Several chairs stood about, made from sturdy flour barrels out of which part of the staves had been sawed, the round heads inserted for seats and the whole covered with red calico. A large arm-chair held a place of honor near the fireplace while a small calico-covered rocker sat opposite it—the specific property of Jeremiah and Sarah, no one else ever sitting in them if the parents were present. A barrel-stand was near the front door, this, too, covered with bright calico, and with a removable top which formed a receptacle to hold the current pieces of sewing, while on it reposed the Bible, representing the religious life of the family, and a spy-glass, representing the earthly or non-spiritual side of existence as exemplified by the girls in trying to “make out what the neighbors were up to.” There were a few books in a corner shelf, among them an atlas, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, a volume of poems called Footprints, a New York Agricultural Report, The Indian Lover, the 1847 Parlor Annual, and The Mother’s Recompense.

On the clay-plastered whitewashed wall hung a walnut-framed steel engraving of a tomb beneath a willow, with a drooping figure in black weeping copiously with the willow but evidently sustained by the verse:

Wherefore weep o’er those who sleep?

Their precious dust the Lord will keep

Till he appear in glory here,

The harvest of the world to reap.

There were other pictures—two of former Presidents Taylor and Fillmore, good Whigs, and a third of General Winfield Scott, recently defeated Whig candidate, this political art gallery showing a fine disregard for the present democratic President Pierce. There were colored pictures of two infants, sex undetermined, one with daisies around its head labeled Day and the other with poppies titled Night, both the sleeper and its less lethargic mate surrounded by pine-cones glued to a home-made frame. Waxed autumn leaves were fastened to the walls, and several crude if colorful paintings of sprays of wild flowers were framed in shells gathered along the Red Cedar’s bank.

The room to the left contained in one end a walnut bedstead with calico valance around it and a tester of the same flowered material. In the other a dark calico curtain concealed artfully the bed that any chance company might wish to use, while another calico curtain formed a clothes-closet. In truth, calico was a prominent furnishing, almost human in its predominance of the scene.

A walnut chest of drawers stood at the east wall, a reed-basket on top held balls of carpet rags in various sizes, and in the center of the room was an unfinished rug whose connection with the colored balls was apparent.

Back in York State and later in Illinois there had been a trundle-bed in use, and although it had been years since even Suzanne’s youthful legs could curl up in the wooden boxlike affair, Sarah had insisted on bringing it out to the new home where it now reposed under the walnut bedstead (upon which she and Jeremiah nightly slept), waiting for company’s children or a potential grandchild. Unlike some of the settlers who had moved to the Valley in a single wagon, the Martins had formed a cavalcade—three big linch-pin wagons and a buckboard, drawn by three teams of horses and two yoke of oxen. It was the only way in which Sarah Martin could be budged from her obstinacy against the move, by allowing her to bring some of her cherished belongings.

Strong ladders made from hickory saplings mounted upward like open stairs into lofts above both of these log rooms. Henry and Phineas slept over the main room, sharing it with any male overnight guest. Ordinarily Celia and Suzanne slept in the bed behind the calico curtain in their parents’ room, but when company came, which was often, for never would Jeremiah Martin’s hospitality turn any one away, the two youngest of the girls climbed the ladder of saplings also and disappeared somewhere into the region above with the other five sisters. Up in these lofts the snows sometimes sifted through the log chinks onto the comforts, or little streams of water trickled in. Sometimes the night grew so cold that a few of the girls shiveringly descended the ladder, stirred the logs in the fireplace, and rolled themselves in their quilts in front of it. Sometimes the night stayed so hot under the low roof, with mosquitoes buzzing and moths flying through the open windows, that they brought their pillows down to the doorway of the main room or lean-to where it was less stifling if no less buggy.

The large lean-to, made of real sawed lumber, was the general eating and cooking part of the house now. No longer were Sarah and her daughters compelled to cook over the fireplace of the main room or in an outdoor oven. There was a four-legged stove with an elevated oven and a short hearth which protruded like a black lip forever pouting at some unknown insult. Sarah’s planning and industry had been the means of purchasing it. After the men folks had tapped the maples this year she and the girls had boiled down enough sap to make and send two tubs of maple sugar to Dubuque for it. A few things they admitted could still be cooked well over the old open flame—the big black kettle on the crane continued to hold prairie-chicken stew and dumplings or a slowly roasting venison rump.

The solidly packed clay hearth was always brushed neatly, a constant cause for work, as the swallows habitually flew about the chimney and sent fluttering feathery contributions into the room. Indeed, life to Sarah Martin was one long warfare with dirt, dust, sand, manure, grime, mud, and fly-specks. She hated flies with an inborn deadly hate. From across the room she could see a moth flit behind a calico curtain. She kept her milk pans and butter jars scalded and shining. She pounced upon a bit of mud as a bird on a worm, slipped slyly up on a fleck of dust like a creeping Indian. From early dawn until night fell she waved an energetic but futile war against dirt, teaching her daughters to fight it with her, and if she accompanied her quick energetic movements with much nagging, vehement complaints, and pessimistic prophecies as to the good it was all doing, the family looked upon her sputtering as it looked upon the wind in the maples, a sound to be heard afar off, but unheeded.

Besides the new stove in the lean-to, iron utensils hung on the walls and more braided rugs were on the floor. There were built-in shelves, flour barrels, the long table, a wooden waterpail and dipper, pegs for hanging wraps and a huge woodbox, above which hung a bootjack and the usual harness always in a state of being oiled. Eight straight-backed heavy wooden chairs surrounded the table, and three sawed-off tree-trunks, so that part of the tri-daily commotion in getting to the table consisted in seeing which three members of the family were left out and had to use the backless seats. Except for the understood ruling that the parents had good chairs, the effect of a general call of “Dinner’s ready” took upon itself the semblance of a game of “going to Jerusalem.”

Fly-roosts hung from the ceiling, long streamers of paper with spots of molasses on them upon which one hoped optimistically the flies would stick, but which they had a happy faculty of evading. Before every meal in summer the room was darkened by pinning aprons over the small windows and driving the pests out through the open door into the sunlight.

As it was always Celia’s and Suzanne’s duty to brush out those insensitive ones that returned unwelcome to the feast, each girl, with her sawed-off stick upon which strips of stiff paper had been bound, would rustle her long-handled brush over the big table so vigorously that, if one could have counted them, probably not fifty flies remained in the room.

To-night, in the excitement of the new young man’s arrival, Celia and Suzanne had forgotten their warlike duties and were now being hustled in ahead of the others by their mother’s, “I declare, you’re as bad as the flies themselves. Let up on you a minute and you’ve settled down. Shoo!”

So the two were vigorously swaying brushes when Wayne Lockwood arrived in the lean-to, ushered there by a half dozen hospitable and talkative Martins.

The long table had been set with a nice white cloth, one of the good ones which Sarah Martin had owned back in York State. Against it the sand-polished steel knives and forks with their black handles looked very fine. In the center of the table was a mass of wild bouncing-Bets in an old tureen, their shaggy pale-pink blossoms lovely against the delft blue of the bowl.

“Oh, that Suzanne! She always drags flowers into the house,” one of the girls was saying, so that Suzanne whacked her brush vigorously to hide her red face, and her father said, “Any of you make sport of Suzanne and her flowers I’ll thump you.”

They shouted with laughter and Sabina explained to Wayne: “Ever since I was a little girl he’s said that . . . ‘I’ll thump you’ . . . and he’s never touched one of us yet.”

“But Ma has,” Jeanie said, and they all laughed again.

“Don’t you go to makin’ sport of Ma, either, or . . .”

“ ‘I’ll thump you,’ ” they mimicked in chorus.

The most unusual family he had ever known, Wayne thought, saying bold, mean-sounding things to each other, but seemingly having bonds of affection underneath.

When Henry had brought out a barrel-chair from the main room to complete the seating accommodations, the lean-to was quite filled, with twelve people in it milling around to their place but taking pains to-night to see that the company had a chair and suppressing their usual scramble to avoid the sawed-off tree-trunks. Phineas even went so far as to take one voluntarily. Black iron kettles on the stove were steaming. The two shepherd-dogs sat on their haunches just outside the south door looking wistfully into the room, as though afraid of Sarah’s sharp tongue, and licked their jaws hungrily at the smell and sight of the eatables.

Emily and her mother were taking up food.

“Melinda,” the mother was saying, “put water in this kettle to soak, and watch out, it’s hot.”

“What’ll I do if it sizzles?” Melinda called.

“You just sizzle right back,” Sarah retorted, and the whole family laughed.

“You can’t get ahead of Ma,” Phoebe Lou was telling Wayne. “She’s quick with her tongue.”

Jeremiah, the father, sat at one end of the table and Sarah, the mother, at the other. On one side were Henry, Phoebe Lou, Wayne Lockwood, Melinda, and Emily; on the other, Phineas, Sabina, Celia, Jeanie, and Suzanne. At both ends of the table were platters of steaming stewed prairie-chicken. Several large bowls held white-flour saleratus biscuits in prairie-chicken gravy. Wayne knew just how those shepherd-dogs felt licking their chops outside the door. He felt like doing it himself after eating so much corn-meal and smoked ham these last weeks. There was a pyramid of the dry biscuits also, and a glass container with wild-grape jelly.

“Save room for crab-apple dumplings with maple sugar and cream,” Celia was saying to Phineas even before they were quite seated.

And now Jeremiah’s head was bowed and there was a slow trickling off of that constant feminine chatter as though it were as hard to stop as vinegar dripping from a barrel’s bung-hole.

“Thank Thee for this food and bless it,” Jeremiah’s voice rumbled into his big black beard. He did not call the Lord by name, merely addressed himself humbly to some great Unseen Power who was the woods, the prairies, the moon, the sun, the winds, the rains. “And bless the stranger within our gates as he now becomes our friend. Amen.”

Chatter broke forth immediately like the cider that must flow again from the barrel after being held back a moment by a wooden plug. The plates which had been upside down were turned over with an artillery-like sound of clattering crockery. The great platters and bowls went around.

Constantly Wayne was on the alert to get this family straight in his mind. It was going to be something of a task, but whenever any one of that raft of girls was addressed by another he darted his eyes toward her to place the face and name together.

The talk flew about from one thing to another like the sound of wild grackles in the maples—chatter, chatter, chatter. Here was no group of femininity, uncertain and bashful, too shy to take part in masculine affairs, too genteel to dip into rough subjects. They were noisily fun-loving, opinionated, argumentative, could not be backed down when taking sides. He had not known any one just like them, could see plainly that although he might admire them as friends and neighbors, there was not the slightest chance of ever feeling anything else toward any one of them. There was no lovely creature floating in a white veil of cloud here among these healthy and hearty girls. It gave him a pleasant feeling of security that he could treat them friendly and on equal ground with their brothers, Henry and Phineas.

He was learning much about this new locality that he had not yet known. Sometimes he wished he might get the facts straight from some one of them without all the others chipping in to tell the same thing. Of them all, Henry and the young Suzanne said the least. Apparently Henry lived in his own thoughts more than the others for he ate methodically without taking much part in the talk. On those rare occasions when he ventured an opinion it had the effect of a stone dropping into a well, so that genuine attention was given him. Suzanne was quiet, too. But when she raised her big gray-blue eyes from her plate, Wayne could see how her emotions were mirrored in their depths, embarrassment, pleasure, distress, wonderment. It rather fascinated him to see how the light came and went in them like candles burning or blown out.

From the tumult of volunteered information in answer to his questions, he evolved some semblance of knowledge.

There had never been a white man stepped foot in the Valley until seventeen years before. He had been Gervais Paul Somaneux, a Frenchman, who had built a cabin on the bank of the Red Cedar. He had hunted and fished a few months and gone on. Then a white trapper by the name of Dorwit had lived around the streams for a time. For eight years afterward this part of the Valley had not seen any one but red men. But nine years ago a white settler by the name of Sturgis had come in from Michigan and built a cabin on the Red Cedar; a few months later a relative by the name of Adams built one near the springs over on Dry Run. Three other families named Hanna, Mullen, and Virden had located down the river. The Hanna family had been the nucleus around which the little Prairie Rapids settlement was beginning. The Sturgis and Adams families had moved on now, but before they left, seven years ago, the Overmans had come and bought the Sturgis claim and water-power, built a sawmill and a grist-mill. They were the big people over at the Sturgis Falls settlement, having started a ferry, platted a town last year, and given a block of it for a court-house to be built some day.

At Wayne’s question concerning which of the two settlements the Martins looked upon as their own for trading, Sturgis Falls or Prairie Rapids, Jeremiah said at once: “Sturgis Falls. We’re closer for one thing. It’s older and bigger. It’s a platted town now which Prairie Rapids ain’t. It had the first post office . . . mail brought on horseback. . . .”

Sarah, his wife, sniffed. “Demsey Overman carried the letters in his stovepipe hat. Never went out of his way none. When he happened to meet anybody who had a letter, he’d take off his hat and pull it out.”

“Now, Ma”—Jeremiah spoke in conciliating fashion—“I’d just as soon get a letter out of Demsey Overman’s hat as out of a big post-office building.”

Wayne decided that Jeremiah Martin liked to promote good feeling, enlarge a little upon events, make them seem progressive and panning out well, that Sarah, his wife, enjoyed pricking the bubbles of his enthusiasm by minimizing events and their good effects. Probably she had not wanted to come out here to the new state with its few settlers, still carried the grievance with her.

“And another thing,” Jeremiah went on, “Sturgis Falls is the county-seat . . . has all the court records . . .”

Sarah gave her preliminary sniff. “ ‘All the court records,’ ” she mimicked. “A little black book bought at Dubuque. Has two items in it, they say—and one of them’s the seventy cents they paid for the book. Court-house is a little two-by-four room in the loft over Mullarky’s store where you couldn’t stand up straight if you tried . . .”

“Now, Ma,” Jeremiah said dryly, “some of ’em that comes to do business couldn’t stand up straight if they had all the room in the world,” which had the effect of setting every one off into laughter again.

Wayne liked them, warmed to their gay merriment over nothing, their simultaneous chatter as though one never listened to another. Such trivialities set them off, such inconsequential happenings gave them pleasure. Here were girls who seemed unconscious of their femininity, who would never cry over a man with their hearts on their sleeves.

Jeremiah was inclined to sit on when the meal was over, telling Wayne tales of the Valley: of Mrs. Hanna, the first settler down near Prairie Rapids, saying when she saw the sparkling river and green grass, “I never knew there was such a place this side of Heaven. Boys, here’s where we’ll have a town”; of the Indians, the Musquakies, camped above the bluffs beyond Sturgis Falls, getting maple sap from a grove claimed by a white settler and how the settler took an ax and destroyed all their butternut troughs, so that only the diplomatic intervention of Mr. Virden prevented a massacre; how the Overman girls baked corn-meal pancakes one morning for an Injun who went away and told all the others and they kept coming until the girls had fed the whole tribe.

But Sarah said to come now, the dishes wouldn’t do themselves, and started every one to her work.

It amused Wayne to see the diminutive, wiry woman order all these grown girls about. “Phoebe Lou, you and Suzanne red up the table and take care of the dogs and the vittles. Sabina, you wash. Melinda, wipe. Jeanie, put away. Emily, set buck-wheat for breakfast. Celia, tend to the candle-lightin’ and take the chairs in the other room.”

There was some dissension from Melinda. “Candle-lighting, Ma. That’s too easy for Celia with me wiping all these dishes.”

“That’ll do for you,” little bustling Sarah said. “Scoot, now.”

And Melinda scooted.

By the time the last girl was through with her appointed task, a good-looking man with black side-whiskers arrived on horseback and was introduced as Mr. Tom Bostwick. He was dressed in a nice suit with fashionable stock, so that Wayne wished for the first time he had dressed likewise, thinking of his own best suit and stock up there in the brass-bound chest on the prairie.

Tom Bostwick was from Sturgis Falls where he had recently located to buy and sell grain and to dip into various enterprises in the little settlement. He was an interesting talker, having been to California in ’49, relating to Wayne how he had gone from Dubuque down the Mississippi to Point Isabel, across the Gulf of Mexico and the Mexican Republic to Masatland, up the coast to San Francisco, all in three months, stayed there a year and then, coming back by way of Panama and New Orleans, had located in Sturgis Falls which he thought now was to be his permanent home.

He had come visiting at the Martins’ on account of one of the girls, Wayne was quite sure, but which one? It was like a conundrum that must soon reveal its answer. He found himself looking them all over again, wondering which would be his choice, if he were Tom Bostwick: Sabina? Emily? Jeanie? Phoebe Lou? Melinda? Celia? No, Melinda, Celia, and Suzanne were too young for Mr. Bostwick. Before he had decided which of the other four it could be, Jeremiah got a jew’s-harp off the fireplace mantel and settling it against his full-lipped mouth, after much pushing aside of heavy beard and mustache, twanged out a lively air. Then Phineas took a gray calico bag from the side of the cupboard and removed a fiddle which he told Wayne had been left to him by a German hired man back in York State.

And now the evening’s “sing” began. Hymns—folk-songs—romance. All the voices rolled out lustily, with Phineas turning out a lively if uncertain accompaniment.

Wayne was enjoying himself, letting his voice out to its full volume in order to hold his own with this energetic tidal wave of feminine voices. One, he noticed, was rasping and off-key and he located it soon as Emily’s. The others knew it, too, and made no bones about joking her.

“I hear it inside me all right,” the unabashed Emily explained, “but when it comes out it’s not just the way I meant it to be.” And laughed at herself with the others.

Tom Bostwick was singing, too, peculiarly, in a thin high voice which should have come from a small person, and sounded somewhat ludicrous emanating from his large frame.

The answer to the riddle was apparent. It was Sabina, there was no mistaking.

“. . . one cold winter’s night

And the wind blew across the wild moor . . .”

Tom Bostwick’s eyes were on the crow-wing hair, the rosy cheeks, and the snapping dark eyes of Sabina, his high thin voice almost cracking in its fervor:

“When Mary came wandering home with her babe

Till she came to her own father’s door . . .”

That was to be the last song, for it was late and all were to get up early to help Wayne. The voices rose in a perfect orgy of volume and emotion:

“The villagers point out the spot

Where the willows droop over the door

Saying ‘There Mary died once a gay village bride

By the winds that bled ’cross the wild m-o-o-o-r.’”

With Emily holding onto the last note longest, loudest and off-key, so that the song broke up with laughter.

The evening was over, but Tom Bostwick lingered protectingly in the corner a moment with the object of his regard as though the winds blowing over the wild moor might have had their effect on the rosy cheeks and crow-wing hair of Sabina.

Jeremiah told Wayne he might as well stay all night—plenty of room up there in the loft with Phineas and Henry. But Wayne said he would go back to his wagon-box, be there to get a good early start in the morning.

“Any time you see a storm comin’ up, though, get right over here to be under shelter. Now, you mind.” This from Sarah, the mother, who was evidently not altogether the exasperated nagger she appeared to be.

When he left they all trooped out to see him off. Suzanne ran ahead to the small gate in the stake-and-rider fence with a lighted candle, cupping her hand over the little flame to protect it.

“Look,” she called from her perch on the topmost rail, and pointed to the bright north star, “somebody else is holding up a light for you to see by.”

The glamour of the friendly evening and the musical outpouring still hung over Wayne when he rode Blackbird home across the prairie, Belle trotting along by his side, and somebody holding up the bright north star to guide him.

All the way his voice rolled out in mellow cadence through the silence of the summer night.

“. . . That my vows were false and my old love cold.

That my truant heart held another dear

Forgetting the vows that were whispered here . . .”

He cared for the horses, took off his boots, crawled into the wagon, and pulled the robe over him. The warmth of the Martin friendliness enveloped him like the warmth of the buffalo blanket.

What a raft of girls! He wondered if he could ever get them all straightened in his mind. This would be a good time to try. He slipped his hands under his head as he lay with his face turned to the stars in the dark prairie sky.

Remember them now as they stood in a row and see if you can name them.

Sabina. The black-haired rosy-cheeked one with the snapping dark eyes who stood at the head of the line, so she’s the oldest. Mr. Tom Bostwick is in love with her.

Emily. The carrot red-haired one, freckled, blue-eyed, taller and slimmer than Sabina. Sang lustily off-key. Helped her mother most with the dinner. Made lots of droll remarks.

Jeanie. Honey-colored hair with dark eyes that made an attractive contrast. Her nose turned up a bit. Made her look sort of saucy. One of the jolliest.

Phoebe Lou. Molasses-colored hair with greenish-blue eyes. A kind of a dimple by her mouth when she laughs. Something of a tease.

Melinda. Jet-black hair like Sabina, but taller and thinner. A wide red mouth. Kind of a tomboy.

Celia. The yellow-haired one with the fairest complexion and finest features. Maybe the prettiest.

Suzanne. The youngest, with reddish-brown hair and big gray-blue eyes that shone . . .

There, I did better than I expected . . . I’m dropping off to sleep . . . under the stars . . . on the lonely prairie . . . where was I? Oh, yes, I remember . . .

Suzanne, with gray-blue eyes that shone . . . like the stars . . . on the lonely prairie. . . .