On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip From South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, Page 5

  NO! I felt scalded. She asked, Was I sure? I hadn’t just opened the desk sometime, for fun? My throat swelled shut; I shook my head, no. “Don’t cry,” she said automatically. I wouldn’t cry, I never cried, I was angry, insulted, miserable, I was not a baby who’d play with money or open that desk for fun, I was going on eight years old. I was little, alone, and scared. My father and mother sat there, still. In the long stillness I sank slowly into nothing but terror, pure terror without cause or object, a nightmare terror.

  Finally my mother said, “Well.” She meant, No use crying over spilled milk. What can’t be cured must be endured. My father told her not to blame herself, it wasn’t her fault. Carefully she peeled off her thin kid gloves. She turned them right-side-out finger by finger, smoothed them. She said that he’d better go explain to the banker.

  Somehow the worst was over when he tried to put it off, saying something might turn up, and she flared out that he knew as well as she did, “nothing turns up that we don’t turn up ourselves.” Then she told me to run away and play, and I remembered the unwashed dishes. She had forgotten them.

  For days, I don’t remember how many days, everything was the same as ever and not at all the same. I said nothing about the disaster; I didn’t want to. My mother told Mrs. Cooley that they thought best to take time to make up their minds. My father looked for work in town. My mother knew nobody there. Mr. Cooley sold one of his teams and one wagon; and Paul and George were going to move into the hotel and help run it. I knew we could sell the horses, but what then? Covered wagons were going by every day, going both ways as usual, some camping overnight nearby. Often I tried to think what would happen when we had nothing to eat; I couldn’t.

  Blackberries were fewer now and smaller. I was deep in the briary patch, hunting them, when my mother called, and called again before I could get out without tearing my dress on the clutching thorns and run over the sharp stones to the camp. My father was hitching up, my mother was putting last things into the wagon. They had bought the farm. She had found the hundred dollar bill. In the writing desk. The jolting had slipped it into a crack in the desk and I was to stop asking questions and get into the wagon. Just as she was, my mother had found my father and gone to sign the papers, and just as I was, without even washing my feet, I was to obey her and get up onto that wagon seat, now, and no more words about it.

  The town began with two small houses on a side road in the woods. Then there were two big houses in large yards with trees, and a cunning little low house right at the edge of the gravel sidewalk. On the other side of the road, opposite the little house, stairs went up the side of the hotel where Paul and George would live. In front of the hotel was the Square, with trees in it and lines of hitching posts around it, except on the far side where the railroad track was. We were driving along Main Street, and it was on one side of us and in front of us and behind us, too; it went around three sides of the Square. It was three solid rows of stores behind three high board sidewalks. This was The Gem City of the Ozarks.

  We passed a big Reynolds General Store, with two large windows full of things, the door between them. Men were loafing, whittling, talking and spitting along the high board walk. There were small stores, The Bank of Mansfield, a Boston Racket Store with ‘Opera House’ painted on the windows upstairs, Hoover’s Livery Stable and horses in a feed lot, then another big house inside a wire fence. Past a blacksmith shop the dusty road went downhill to cross a little bridge. The long hillside was orchard and pasture, but houses began where the road went up again beyond the bridge. In all there must have been a dozen houses, in fenced yards with gates, behind paths through the weeds on both sides of the road.

  All the houses had front porches; all were painted and trimmed with different colors and wooden lace. Behind them were vegetable gardens and clotheslines, barns and chicken houses; some had pigpens. Two had an upstairs; one of these had a bay window and a cupola. Behind the houses on our right was the railroad enbankment; behind those on the left, two more houses and a high grassy hill against the sky.

  At the top of the road’s long climb stood the schoolhouse where I would go to school. It stood square, two stories high, with windows all around, and its bell tower up above the double doors. All beyond it was woods; it was in the edge of the woods but not a single stump remained on the ground trodden bare and hard about it. There was a well beside it; behind it a woodshed and two privies: Boys and Girls.

  I looked as long as I could, but the road turned away from the schoolhouse to follow the railroad track. The wheel tracks went beside the iron rails with the row of poles holding a telegraph wire on glass knobs above them. There were two houses in the woods; then the road turned into the woods and left the railroad behind us.

  Now there was nothing but woods on either side, and the two wheel tracks went straight and slowly downward. Between them were stumps and big rocks. The wagon jolted and lurched over rocks in the dust and the horses’ iron shoes clattered on them.

  From the talk over my head I learned how lucky it was that the last cent had been just enough to pay for the salt pork and cornmeal. We could make out all right now, selling wood, and do well when the apple trees were in bearing. Paying off the mortgage would be easy then. Three hundred dollars at twelve percent, pounded every three months. (Why would they be pounded? I wondered.) My mother could do the arithmetic in her head. They ought to be able to carry it if they kept their health.

  Either then or later I learned from such talk that some very foolish man had bought all those little apple trees from a smart salesman though he had no cleared land. When they came in their bundles, he had no clearing to set them out in; but he had signed papers, so he had to mortgage the land to pay for them. Then he just gave up. Between two days, he left the land and the cabin, the little apple trees root-buried in a trench, and the mortgage. So my father and mother got them from the banker.

  The road went up again, it seemed to go almost vertically up a long, long hill but my father turned the horses away from it, onto a fainter track in a valley. Beside us now a stream of water as clear as glass ran over flat ledges and through shadow pools. In a little while the wagon tracks turned to ford a pool. The horses stopped to drink and my mother said, “Here we are!” She asked me what I thought of it, but I saw nothing to think about. The creek came from our own spring, she told me. Across the creek the woods went up a low hill in the yellow light of the sinking sun; the wheel tracks went on down the curve of the creek and trees hid them.

  My father drove up the hill through the woods. The horses climbed clumsily, the flat rocks slipping under their feet. At the top of the hill we came into a tiny clearing at the edge of a deep ravine, and there stood a little log house.

  Quick as a squirrel, I was down over the wheel and around the corner of logs’ ends. A rough, thick door stood open; I was in the house, I was in a narrow little room, its floor of earth and dead leaves, but beyond a doorway was a larger room that had a wooden floor. This room was bare and clean, it smelled like the woods, dead leaves were blown into its corners. There was a big fireplace and sure enough, as that woman had said, no windows. There was a square hole in the wall of peeled logs; an empty hole, but it had a rough wooden door hanging open, like the house door.

  Nothing more was to be seen there. But I hadn’t noticed that in the narrow room the logs of the wall around the door were papered with newspapers. Large black letters in curleycues stopped me; I stood and read: “Carter’s Little Liver Pills,” and a philosophical question which I kept trying and failing to answer for so long afterward that I have never forgotten it: What is life without a liver?

  That problem was too much for me; for the moment, I postponed the struggle with it. Outside, some chunks of bark had fallen from the house wall, and between all the logs was yellow clay, dry and hard and cracked to bits. Not far away the path from the door went down, steeper than stairs, into the ravine. As usual, my mother called to me to be careful.

  The ravine was sh
adowy, darker in its narrow bottom. It ended in one huge rock as big as a big house. Behind the rock was a hollow sound of running water, and water ran from beneath it into a little pool as round as a wash-tub and half as deep. Ferns hung over the darling pool, and from a bough above it dangled a hollowed-out gourd for dipping up the water.

  I drank a delicious cold gourdful, looking up and up the mountainside above the spring. It was all dark woods, only the very tips of the highest trees in sudden yellow light. All down the dark ravine the water chuckled eerily. Something moved stealthily in the leaves under the bushes. I clambered up the path as fast as I could.

  The horses were unhitched and picketed, the hens in their coop on the ground. My father and mother were taking out things over the wagon’s opened endgate. We would eat supper outdoors and sleep one more night in the wagon. My mother meant to scrub that cabin floor from top to bottom before we moved into it. We could still see well enough in the shadowy daylight but inside the wagon it was too dark to find things. My father rummaged for the lantern.

  He pressed the spring that lifted its thick glass globe, he touched the match-flame to the wick and carefully lowered the globe into its place, and suddenly the lantern was shining in darkness. He held it up, looking for a place to hang it, and there in the edge of its light stood a strange man.

  The man’s feet were bare, his pants were patched over patches and torn. He was tall, thin, bony, and his eyes glittered from a bush of hair and whiskers. He came a step nearer and quick as a snake my mother’s hand slid into the pocket where her revolver was. She waited, ready. Slowly my father said, “Hello there.”

  The man said he wanted work, he was looking for a chance to work for something to eat. My father answered that we were just moving in, as he could see; we didn’t have work to give anybody. Too bad, but maybe better luck in town, just over the next hill, not much more than a mile to the west.

  “You got a good place here,” the man said. He was bony, but big. After a minute my father said it would be a good place someday, he guessed. Then we all stood silent as if we couldn’t move.

  The man began to talk quietly, slowly, almost dreamily. They had to get something to eat, he said. His wife and five children were down in the wagon by the creek. They had been traveling all summer looking for work. They could not go on any longer. This was the third day they’d had nothing to eat. He had to get work so he came up the wagon tracks – They couldn’t go on without something to eat.

  He stopped, there was nothing more to say. Nothing to do. Now I knew what happened when you had nothing to eat. What happens is, nothing.

  Suddenly, my father was talking and moving quickly, not deliberate at all. He said he needed help making wood, provided the man would come help him tomorrow, he’d divide what little – He was reaching into the wagon. At sight of the slab of salted fat pork my mother cried out, “Manly, no! We’ve got Rose” He paid no attention. The butcher knife in his hand cut through the white meat. He opened a corner of the sack and poured cornmeal into the little tin pail. He was asking, did the man have a good ax? He said they’d start early, at sun-up, put in a good day’s work and if the wood sold he’d treat the man right. Bring an ax if he had one. Be sure to bring back the pail. That’s all right, don’t mention it, see you tomorrow.

  The man was gone into the darkness. He had not said a word. Afterward my mother always said that she expected never to see that vagabond again, nor her tin pail, either. At the time she said nothing. My father made the fire under the camp stove and she cooked supper. We had fried salt pork and corn-dodgers, and slept in the wagon.

  The man woke us in the false dawn, bringing the tin pail and his ax. He was a better woodsman than my father. All that day while my mother and I cleaned the house and lugged things from the wagon to put on the dry, scrubbed floor, they worked in the woods. They worked as long as they could see. Then my mother held the lantern and they took the top and curtains off the wagon, and stacked up high in it all the stove wood that it would hold.

  Early next morning my father set out to sell the wood in town. The man worked with a will while he was gone. He was gone all day. At night he had not come. The strange man went down the hill, my mother lighted the lamp, turned low to save the kerosene. Still it was some time before we heard the wagon jolting. My mother lighted the lantern, then said I’d better take it to him.

  I rushed out with it. The wagon box was empty and I almost shouted, “You sold it!”

  “Finally I did,” my father said in triumph.

  “How much did you get for it?” I asked. He was beginning to unharness the horses. He bragged, “Fifty cents.”

  I set down the lantern and ran into the house to tell my mother, “Fifty cents! He sold it all for fifty cents!” Her whole face trembled and seemed to melt into softness, she sighed a long sigh. “Aren’t you glad?” I exulted.

  “Glad? Of course I’m glad!” she snapped at me and to herself, “Oh, thanks be!”

  I ran out again, I pranced out, to tell my father how glad she was. And he said, with a sound of crying in his voice, “Oh, why did you tell her? I wanted to surprise her.”

  You do such things, little things, horrible, cruel, without thinking, not meaning-to. You have done it; nothing can undo it. This is a thing you can never forget.

  How long that man worked with my father I don’t remember. I cannot remember his name nor anything at all about his family camping down by the creek. Surely I knew those children; they must have been there for weeks. I remember that he and my father were roofing the little log barn, the day I chased the rabbit.

  The leaves had fallen from all the trees but the oaks then, and the oaks wore their winter red that day. There was light snow or frost underfoot, so cold that it burned my bare feet, and my breath puffed white in the air. I chased that rabbit over the hills, up and down and back again until, exhausted, it hid in a hollow log; I stopped up the log’s ends with rocks and fetched both men from their work on the roof to chop out the rabbit and kill it.

  The day was Saturday; I was going to school then. For Sunday dinner we had rabbit stew, with gravy on mashed potatoes and on our cornbread. And on Monday I found in my lunch-pail at school one of that rabbit’s legs; my mother had saved it and packed it with the cornbread in the little tin pail, to surprise me.

  The man and his family must have gone on west or south, early that winter. He must have earned provisions for the trip. I remember walking to school through the snowy woods in my shoes and stockings, hearing the thuds of my father’s ax sounding fainter as I went; and coming home with the sunset red behind me to hear the whirr-whirr of the crosscut saw growing sharper in the frosty air. The ax was too heavy for my mother; my father would not trust her with its sharpness, but she could safely handle one end of the crosscut saw.

  Winter evenings were cosy in the cabin. The horses were warm in the little barn, the hens in the new wooden coop. Snow banked against the log walls and long icicles hung from the eaves. A good fire of hickory logs burned in the fireplace. In its heat, over a newspaper spread on the hearth, my father worked oil into the harness-straps between his oily-black hands. I sat on the floor, carefully building a house of corncobs, and my mother sat by the table, knitting needles flashing while she knitted warm woolen socks for my father and read to us from a book propped under the kerosene lamp. She read us Tennyson’s poems and Scott’s poems; those books were ours. And she read us Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and Conquest of Peru, and The Green Mountain Boys, and John Halifax, Gentleman. She read us The Leatherstocking Tales, and another true book, the biggest of all: Ancient, Medieval and Modern History. I borrowed those from the shelf of lending-books in the Fourth Reader room at school. The teachers let me borrow them, though I wasn’t in Fourth Reader yet.

  I remember the Sunday afternoon when my father and mother planned the new house. We had got the cow that spring; I must have been ten years old, going on eleven. On Sunday afternoons in warm weather, when company wasn’t spending
the day with us or we were not spending it in town with the Gooleys, my father and mother in their Sunday clothes went walking sedately over the land while I, in mine, minded the cabin. They had cleared twenty acres and set out all the little apple trees, and we had the cow, that Sunday afternoon when they decided where to build the house.

  From my swing in the oak tree by the cabin, Fido and I saw them standing and talking under the huge old white-oak tree not far away. They talked a long while. Then my father went to lead the cow to water and change her picket-peg, and my mother called me to see the spot where our house would be.

  It would be under the great old white-oak at the edge of the hill where we stood. Here the ground sloped more gently down into the ravine and rose steeply up the wooded mountain to the south. You could see the brook running from the widening mouth of the ravine and curving to the north and east around the base of the rounded hill. You could hear the water rippling over the limestone ledges. It was springtime; the hickory trees on the hill were in young green leaves, the oak leaves were pink, and all the flinty ground beneath them was covered with one blue-purple mat of dog’s-tooth violets. Along the brook the sarvice trees were blooming misty white. The ancient white-oak was lively with dozens of young squirrels whisking into and out of their nests in the hollow branches.

  My mother stood under it in her brown-sprigged white lawn dress, her long braid hanging down her back. Below the curled bangs her eyes were as purple-blue as the violets. It would be a white house, she said, all built from our farm. Everything we needed to build it was on the land: good oak beams and boards, stones for the foundation and the fireplace. The house would have large windows looking west across the brook, over the gentle little valley and up the wooded hills that hid the town, to the sunset colors in the sky. There would be a nice big porch to the north, cool on hot summer afternoons. The kitchen would be big enough to hold a wood stove for winter and one of the new kerosene stoves that wouldn’t heat up the place worse in summer. Every window would be screened with mosquito netting. There would be a well, with a pump, just outside the kitchen door; no more lugging water from the spring. And in the parlor there would be a bookcase, no, two bookcases, big bookcases full of books, and a hanging lamp to read them by, on winter evenings by the fireplace.