Kitabı oku: «Winning the Wilderness», sayfa 8
“Tell the men to send a committee up here with their needs listed,” Jacobs said hastily, “or better, I’ll go out there myself the day after tomorrow. I want to see what kind of a claim Carey has preempted. Good-by, now, good-by.”
He hurried Virginia to her horse and watched her ride away.
Down at the ford of Wolf Creek the willow brush fringed the main trail thinly for a little distance and half hid the creek trail, winding up a long canyon-like hollow, until a low place in the bank and a steep climb brought it up to the open prairie. It was the same trail that Dr. Carey had spoken of as belonging to an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf, the trail he had wanted to avoid on the day he had heard Virginia singing when she was lost on the prairie one cold day.
Virginia paused in this semblance of shade to let Juno drink. She pushed back her sunbonnet and sat waiting. Her brown face grew radiant as she thought of the good news she was bearing to the waiting home-makers of the Grass River Valley. A song came to her lips, and as she sang a soft little measure she remembered how somewhere down a tributary to this very creek she had sung for help in pleading tones one cold hopeless day three years before. So intent was she on the triumph of the hour she did not even look up the willow-shadowed creek trail.
Dr. Horace Carey, coming in from a distant claim, had dropped into this trail for the bits of shade here and there and was letting his pony take its way leisurely along the side of the creek bed. There were only a few shallow pools now where the fall rains would soon put a running stream, and as the doctor’s way lay along the moist places the pony’s feet fell noiselessly on the soft ground. As he rounded a bend in the stream he caught sight of Virginia, her face outlined against the background of willow sprays, making a picture worth a journey to see, it was such a hopeful, happy face at that moment. Dr. Carey involuntarily checked his pony at the sight. His own countenance was too pale for a Kansas plainsman, and he sat so still that the low strain of Virginia’s song reached his ears.
Presently Juno lifted her head and Virginia rode away out on the Sunflower Trail, bordered now only by dead pest-ridden stalks. Suddenly lifting her eyes she saw far across a stretch of burned prairie a landscape of exquisite beauty. In a foreground lay a little lake surrounded by grassy banks and behind it, on a slight elevation, stood a mansion house of the old Colonial style with white pillared portico, and green vines and forest trees casting cool shade. Beyond it, wrapped in mist, rose a mountain height with a road winding picturesquely in and out along its side. Virginia caught her breath as a great sob rose in her throat. This was all so like the old Thaine mansion house of her childhood years.
“It’s only the mirage,” she said aloud. “But it was so like – what?” She held Juno back as she looked afar at the receding painting of the plains. “It’s like the house we’ll have some day on that slope beyond the Sunflower Inn. The mountains are misty. They are only the mountains of memory. But the home and the woods and the water – all may be real.”
Then she thought of Asher and of the dull prairie everywhere.
“I wonder if he would want to go back if he could see this as I see it,” she questioned. “But I know he has seen it daily. I can tell by that look in his gray eyes.”
It was long after moonrise when Asher Aydelot, watching by the corral, heard the sound of hoof-beats and saw the faint outline of a horse and rider swinging in from the northward as once before he had watched the same horse and rider swinging over the same trail before the cool north wind that beat back the September prairie fire.
“I have supper all ready. See what grew just for you!” Asher said as he and his wife entered the house.
A bunch of forlorn little sunflowers in a brown pitcher graced the table. They could scarcely be called flowers, but to Virginia, who had hardly seen a blossom through the days of drouth, the joy they brought was keener than the joy that the roses and orchids gave in the days of a later prosperity.
“I found them in the draw where the wild plums grow,” Asher said. “How they ever escaped the hoppers is a miracle.”
“We will christen our claim ’The Sunflower Ranch’ tonight, and these are our decorations for the ceremony. It is all we have now. But it is ours,” Virginia declared.
And then she told the story of the bank failure at Cloverdale.
“The last bridge is burned surely,” Asher commented as he looked across the table at Virginia. “This is the only property we have except youth and health and hope – and – each other.”
“And the old Aydelot heritage to stand for principle, and your mother’s belief in the West and in you, and the Thaine stubbornness about giving up what they want to keep,” Virginia declared.
“As our days so shall our strength be,” Asher added, as he saw his wife’s face bright with hope and determination, and remembered the sweet face of his mother as it had looked that night on the veranda of the old farmhouse by the National pike road.
For a long time down by the willows thinly shadowing Wolf Creek a white-faced man sat looking out toward the west, where a horse and rider had vanished into the mellow tones of distance.
CHAPTER VIII
Anchored Hearthstones
Dear Mother of Christ, who motherhood blessed,
All life in thy Son is complete.
The length of a day, the century’s tale
Of years do His purpose repeat.
As wide as the world a sympathy comes
To him who has kissed his own son,
A tenderness deep as the depths of the sea,
To motherhood mourning is won.
No life is for naught. It was heaven’s own way
That the baby who came should stay only a day.
Living by faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, is good for the spirit but reducing to the flesh. Yet it was much by faith that the frontier settlers lived through the winter after the grasshopper raid. Jim Shirley often declared in that time between crops that he could make three meals a day on Pryor Gaines’ smile. And Todd Stewart asserted that when the meat was all gone from their larder his family lived one whole week on John Jacobs’ belief in the future of their settlement. For the hardship of that winter was heavy. All the more heavy because the settlers were not stupid pauper-bred folk but young men and women of intelligence and culture, whose early lives had known luxuries as well as comforts. But the saving sense of humor, the saving power of belief in themselves, and the saving grace of brotherly love carried them through.
The winter was mercifully mild and the short grass of the prairies was nourishing to the stock that must otherwise have perished. Late in February a rainfall began that lasted for days and Grass River, rising to its opportunity, drowned all the fords, so that the neighbors on widely separated claims were cut off from each other. No telephones relieved the loneliness of the country dwellers in those days, and each household had to rely on its own resources for all its needs. March came raging in like a lion. All the rain turned to snow and the wind to a polar blast as the one furious blizzard of that season fell upon the plains and for many hours threshed the snow-covered land.
On the night before the coming of the blizzard the light did not go out in the Aydelot cabin. And while the wind and rain without raved at door and window, a faint little cry within told that a new life had come to the world, a baby girl born in the midst of the storm. Morning brought no check to the furious elements. And Asher, who had fought in the front line at Antietam, had forced his way through a storm of Indian arrows out of a death-trap in the foothills of the Rockies, had ministered to men on the plains dying of the Asiatic plague, and had bound up the wounds of men who returned to the battle again, found a new form of heroism that morning in his own little cabin – the heroism of motherhood.
“You must go for help, Asher,” Virginia said, smiling bravely. “Leave the baby beside me here. We’ll wait till you come back. Little Sweetheart, you are welcome, if you did come with the storm, a little before you were expected.” The young mother looked fondly at the tiny face beside her.
“I can’t leave you alone, Virgie,” Asher insisted.
“But you must.” Virginia’s voice was full of courage. “You can go as far as Pryor Gaines’ and send him on for you. Little daughter and I will be all right till you come back.”
So Asher left her.
Pryor Gaines was waterbound across Grass River. Of the three women living east of the stream one was sick abed, one was kept at home with a sick husband, and the third had gone with her husband to Wykerton for supplies and was stormstaid somewhere along the Sunflower Trail.
“I must go for Jim. Any neighborhood is blessed that has a few good-hearted unmarried folks in it,” Asher thought as he braced himself against the driving rain and hurried away.
When he reached home again the fire was low, the house was very quiet, and Virginia’s face was white against her pillow.
“Our little daughter is asleep,” she said, and turning away she seemed not to hear her husband’s voice assuring her that Jim would bring the doctor as soon as possible.
The blizzard was just beginning in the early evening when Jim Shirley fairly blew down the trail from the north. He slipped into the kitchen and passed quietly to the next room. Asher was bending over his wife, who lay in a delirium.
Jim Shirley had one of those sympathetic natures that read the joys and sorrows of their friends without words. One look at Asher told him what had been.
“The doctor was away up Wolf Creek, but I left word with his colored man for him to come at once, and he’ll do it,” Jim assured Asher as he stood for a moment beside the bed. “I didn’t wait because you need me.”
Asher lifted his head and looked at Jim. As man to man they knew as never before the strength of their lifetime friendship.
“I need you. She needs the doctor. The baby – ”
“Doesn’t need any of us,” Jim said softly. “I’ll do what I can.”
It is no strange, unreal story of the wilderness day, this fluttering in and out of a little life, where no rosewood grew for coffins nor florists made broken columns of white lilies and immortelles.
But no mother’s hands could have been more gentle than the gentle hands of Jim Shirley as he prepared the little form for burial.
Meantime the wind was at its wildest, and the plains blizzard swirled in blinding bitterness along the prairie. The hours of the night dragged by slowly to the two men hoping for the doctor’s coming, yet fearing that hope was impossible in the face of such a night.
“Carey has the keenest sense of direction I ever knew in a human being,” Jim assured Asher. “I know he will not fail us.”
Yet the morning came and the doctor came not. The day differed from the night only in the visible fierceness of the storm. The wind swept howling in long angry shrieks from the northwest. The snow seemed one dizzy, maddening whirlpool of white flakes hanging forever above the earth.
Inside the cabin Virginia’s delirium was turning to a frenzy. And Asher and Jim forgot that somewhere in the world that day there was warmth and sunlight, health and happiness, flowers, and the song of birds, and babies cooing on their mothers’ knees. And the hours of the day dragged on to evening.
Meanwhile, Dr. Carey had come into Wykerton belated by the rains.
“The wind is changing. There’ll be a snowstorm before morning, Bo Peep,” he said wearily as the young colored man assisted him into warm, dry clothes. “It’s glorious to sit by a fire on a night like this. I didn’t know how tired I was till now.”
“Yes, suh, I’se glad you all is home for the night, suh. I sho’ is. I got mighty little use for this yuh country. I’se sorry now I eveh done taken my leave of ol’ Virginny.” Bo Peep’s white teeth glistened as he laughed.
“Any calls while I was gone?” Dr. Carey asked.
Bo Peep pretended not to hear as he busied himself over his employer’s wraps, until Carey repeated the question.
“No, suh! no, suh! none that kaint wait till mawhnin’, suh,” Bo Peep assured him, adding to himself, “Tiahd as he is, he’s not gwine way out to Grass Riveh this blessed night, not if I loses my job of bein’ custodian of this huh ’stablishment. Not long’s my name’s Bone-ah-gees Peepehville, no, suh!”
Dr. Carey settled down for the evening with some inexplicable misgiving he could not overcome.
“I didn’t sleep well last night, Bo Peep,” he said when he rose late the next morning. “I reckon we doctors get so used to being called out on especially bad nights we can’t rest decently in our beds.”
“I didn’t sleep well, nutheh,” Bo Peep replied. “I kep thinkin’ bout that man come heah foh you yestedy. I jes wa’n’t gwine to le’ yuh go out again las’ night.”
“What did he want?” the doctor asked, secretly appreciative of Bo Peep’s goodness of heart as he saw the street full of whirling snow.
“He done said hit wah a maturity case.”
Bo Peep tried to speak carelessly. In truth, his conscience had not left him in peace a moment.
“What do you mean? Who was it?” Horace Carey demanded.
“Don’t be mad, Doctah, please don’t. Hit wah cuz you all wah done woah out las’ night. Hit wah Misteh Shulley from Grass Riveh, suh. He said hit wah Misteh Asheh Aydelot’s wife – ”
“For the love of God!” Horace Carey cried hoarsely, springing up. “Do you know who Mrs. Aydelot is, Bo Peep?”
“No, suh; neveh see huh.”
“She was Virginia Thaine of the old Thaine family back at home.”
Bo Peep did not sit down. He fell in a heap at Dr. Carey’s feet, moaning grievously.
“Fo’ Gawd, I neveh thought o’ harm. I jus’ thought o’ you all, deed I did. Oh! Oh!”
“Help to get me off then,” Carey commanded, and Bo Peep flew to his tasks.
When the doctor was ready to start he found two horses waiting outside in the storm and Bo Peep, wrapped to the eyes, beside them.
“Why two?” he asked kindly, for Bo Peep’s face was so full of sorrow he could not help pitying the boy.
“Please, kaint I go with you all? I can cook betteh’n Miss Virginia eveh could, an’ I can be lots of help an’ you all’ll need help.”
“But it’s a stinger of a storm, Bo Peep,” the doctor insisted, anxious to be off.
“Neveh mind! Neveh mind! Lemme go. I won’t complain of no stom.” And the doctor let him go.
It was already dark at the Sunflower Ranch when the two, after hours of battling with wind and snow and bitter cold, reached the cabin door. Bo Peep, instead of giving up early or hanging a dead weight on Dr. Carey’s hands, as he had feared the boy might do, had been the more hopeful of the two in all the journey. The hardship was Bo Peep’s penance, and right merrily, after the nature of a merry-hearted race, he took his punishment.
Jim Shirley, putting wood on the kitchen fire, bent low as he heard the piteous moanings from the sick room.
“Oh, Lord, if you can work miracles work one now,” he pleaded below his breath. “Bring help out of this storm or give us sense to do the best for her. We need her so, dear Lord. We need her so.”
He lifted his eyes to see Horace Carey between himself and the bedroom door, slipping out of his snowy coat. And beside him stood Bo Peep, helping him to get ready for the sick room.
“I know Miss Virginia back in the Souf, suh. I done come to take keer of this kitchen depahtment. I know jus’ what she lak mos’ suh,” Bo Peep said to Jim, who had not moved nor spoken. “I’se Misteh Bone-ah-gees Peepehville, an’ I done live with Doctah Carey’s family all mah life, suh, ’cept a short time I spent in the Jacobs House at Carey’s Crossing. I’se his custodian now, suh, and I know a few things about the cookin’ depahtment, suh.”
He looked the part, and Jim accepted him gladly.
It is given to some men to know the power of the healing spirit. Dr. Carey was such a man. His presence controlled the atmosphere of the place. There was balm in his voice and in the touch of his hand as much as in his medicines. To him his own calling was divine. Who shall say that the hope and belief with which his few drugs were ministered carried not equal power with them toward health and wholeness?
When Virginia Aydelot had fallen asleep at last the doctor came into the kitchen and sat down with the two haggard men to whom his coming had brought unspeakable solace.
“You can take comfort, Mr. Aydelot,” he said assuringly. “Your wife has been well cared for. Hardly one man in a thousand could do as well as you have done. I wonder you never studied medicine.”
“You seem confident of results, Doctor,” Asher said gratefully.
“I have known the Thaine family all my life,” Horace Carey said quietly. And Asher, whose mind was surged with anxiety, did not even think to be surprised.
“We did not recognize each other when I found her on the way to Carey’s Crossing three or four years ago, and – I did not know she was married then.”
He sat a while in silence, looking at the window against which the wind outside was whirling the snow. When he spoke again his tone was hopeful.
“Mrs. Aydelot has had a nervous shock. But she is young. She has a heritage of will power and good blood. She will climb up rapidly with the coming on of spring.”
How strange it was to Asher Aydelot to listen to such words! He had not slept for fifty hours. It had seemed to him that the dreadful storm outside and sickness and the presence of death within were to be unending, and that in all the world Jim Shirley would henceforth be his only friend.
“You both need sleep,” Carey was saying in a matter-of-fact way. “Bo Peep will take care of things here, and I will look after Mrs. Aydelot. You will attend to the burial at the earliest possible time in order to save her any signs of grieving. And you will not grieve either until you have more time. And remember, Aydelot,” he put his hand comfortingly on Asher’s shoulders. “Remember in this affliction that your ambition may stake out claims and set up houses, but it takes a baby’s hand to really anchor the hearthstones. And sometimes it takes even more. It needs a little grave as well. I understood from Shirley that some financial loss last fall prevented you from going back to Ohio. You wouldn’t leave Grass River now if you could.”
Dr. Carey’s face was magnetic in its earnestness, and even in the sorrow of the moment Asher remembered that he had known Virginia all her life and he wondered subconsciously why the two had not fallen in love with each other.
And so it was that as the Sunflower Inn had received the first bride and groom to set up the first home in the Grass River Valley, so the first baby born in the valley opened its eyes to the light of day in the same Sunflower Inn. And out of this sod cabin came the first form to its burial. And it was the Sunflower Ranch that gave ground for God’s Acre there for all the years that followed. It happened, too, that as Jim Shirley had been the friendly helper at that bridal supper and happy house-warming more than three years ago, so now it was Jim Shirley who in the hour of sorrow was the helper still.
The winter season passed with the passing of the blizzard. The warm spring air was delicious and all the prairies were presently abloom with a wild luxuriance of flowers.
Asher carried Virginia to the sunshine at the west window from which she could see the beautiful outdoor world.
“We wouldn’t leave here now if we could,” she declared as she beheld all the glory of the springtime rolling away before her eyes.
“Bank accounts bring comforts, but they do not make all of life nor consecrate death. We have given our first-born back to the prairie. It is sacred soil now,” Asher replied.
And then they talked of many things, but mostly of Dr. Carey.
“I have known him from childhood,” Virginia said. “He was my very first sweetheart, as very first sweethearts go. He went into the war when he was young. I didn’t know much that happened after that. He was at home, I think, when you were in that hospital where I first saw you, and – oh, yes, Asher, dear, he was at home when your blessed letter came, the one with the old greasy deuce of hearts and the sunflower. It was this same Bo Peep, Carey’s boy, who brought it to me up in the glen behind the big house. Horace left Virginia just after that.” Virginia closed her eyes and lived in the past again.
“I wonder you never cared for Dr. Carey, Virgie. He is a prince among men,” Asher said, as he leaned over her chair.
“Oh, I might, if my king had not sent me that sunflower just then. It made a new world for me.”
“But I am only a common farmer, Virgie, just a king of a Kansas claim, just a home-builder on the prairie,” Asher insisted.
“Asher, if you had your choice this minute of all the things you might be, what would you choose to be?” Virginia asked.
“Just a common farmer, just a king of a Kansas claim,” Asher replied. Then looking out toward the swell of ground beside the Grass River schoolhouse where the one little mound of green earth marked his first-born’s grave, he added, “Just a home-builder on the prairies.”
The second generation of grasshoppers tarried but briefly, then all together took wing and flew away, no man knew, nor cared, whither. And the Grass River settlers who had weathered the hurricane of adversity, poor, but patient and persistent still, planted, sometimes in tears to reap in joy, sometimes in hope to reap only in heartsick hope deferred, but failed not to keep on planting. Other settlers came rapidly and the neighborhood thickened and broadened. And so, amid hardships still, and lack of opportunity and absence of many elements of culture, a sturdy, independent, God-fearing people struggled with the soil, while they lifted up faces full of hope and determination to the skies above them. What of the prairies they could subdue they bent to their service. What they could not overcome they defied the right to overcome them. There were no lines of social caste. They were needy or full together. They shared their pleasures; together they laughed at calamities; and they comforted one another in every sorrow.
A new town was platted on the claim that Dr. Carey had preempted where the upper fork of Grass River crossed the old Sunflower trail. The town founders ruled Hans Wyker out of a membership among them. Moreover, they declared their intentions of forever beating back all efforts at saloon building within the corporation’s limits, making Wykerton their sworn enemy for all time. In the new town, which was a ten-by-ten shack of vertical boards, a sod stable, and two dugout homes, the very first sale of lots, for cash, too, was made to Darley Champers & Co., dealers in real estate, mortgages, loans, etc.
One summer Sabbath afternoon, three years after the grasshopper raid of dreadful memory, Asher came again to the little grave in the Grass River graveyard where other graves were consecrating the valley in other hearts. This time he bore in his arms a dimpled, brown-eyed baby boy who cooed and smiled as only babies can and flung his little square fists aimlessly about in baby joy of living.
“We’ll wait here, Thaine, till your mother comes from Bennington’s to tell us about the little baby that just came to our settlement only two days ago and staked out a claim in a lot of hearts.”
Little Thaine had found that his fist and his mouth belonged together, so he offered no comment. Asher sat down on the warm sod with the baby on his knees.
“This is your little sister’s grave, Thaine. She staid with us less than a day, but we loved her then and we love her still. Her name was to have been Mercy Pennington Aydelot, after the sweet Quaker girl your two great-great-grandfathers both loved. Such a big name for such a tiny girl! She isn’t here, Thaine. This is just the little sod house she holds as her claim. She is in a beautiful mansion now. But she binds us always to the Grass River Valley because she has a claim here. We couldn’t bear to go away and leave her little holding. And now you’ve come and all the big piece of prairie soil that is your papa’s and mamma’s now will be yours some day. I hope you’ll want to stay here.”
A stab of pain thrust him deeply as he remembered his own father and understood for the first time what Francis Aydelot must have felt for him. And then he remembered his mother’s sacrifice and breadth of view.
“Oh, Thaine, will you want to leave us some day?” he said softly, gazing down into the baby’s big dark eyes. “Heaven give me breadth and courage and memory, too,” he added, “when that time comes not to be unkind; but to be brave to let you go. Only, Thaine, there’s no bigger place to go than to a big, fine Kansas farm. Oh! we fathers are all alike. What Clover Creek was to Francis Aydelot, Grass River is to me. Will it be given to you to see bigger things?”
Thaine Aydelot crowed and stretched his little legs and threw out his hands.
“Thaine, there are no bigger things than the gifts of the soil. I may only win it, but you can find its hundredfold of increase. See, yonder comes your mother. Not the pretty, dainty Virginia girl I brought here as my bride. But I tell you truly, baby boy, she will always be handsome, because – you wouldn’t understand if I told you, but you will some day.”
“Oh, Asher, the new baby is splendid, and Mrs. Bennington is ever so well,” Virginia said, coming up to where he sat waiting for her. “They call her Josephine after Mr. Bennington’s mother. Thaine will never be lonely here, as we have been. After all, it is not the little graves alone that anchor us anywhere, for we can take memory with us wherever we go; it is the children living, as well, that hold our hearthstones fast and build a real community, even in a wilderness. We are just ready to begin now. The real story of the prairie is the story of the second generation. The real romance out here will be Thaine Aydelot’s romance, for he was born here.”
