Fruitlands (7 page)

Mother was happier in the woods today than she has been for a long time. She has to work so hard to cook and clean and sew for all of us. She seldom complains, but today on the way home from picking berries she sighed and said she wished she could make a blackberry pie. You cannot make a pie without lard, and lard comes from pigs. So no pie.

I am too old to play with dolls myself, but I helped Lizzie make new clothes for her dolls. She begged me to play at a tea party for the dolls, which I did. We made dandelion tea. I don't see why we have to be just one age all the time. It would be nice if we could be older sometimes and do just as we liked and then younger and still play with dolls.

 

S
EPTEMBER
3, 1843

William and my sisters and I shucked corn all morning until we were covered head to toe with the sticky corn silk. Afterward we had a game of hide-and-seek among
the cornstalks. We were hot from the running and sat on a log with our feet dangling in the river. William told us about England. We asked him if he missed living there. He said in England he had no family but his father. Now, at Fruitlands, we are all his family. I said he could be our brother forever.

In the afternoon we dried herbs: peppermint, rosemary, tansy, parsley, savory, and lavender. My hands smelled so lovely I didn't wash them for supper.

 

S
EPTEMBER
3, 1843

I was good almost all of today. It is easier to be good if you are busy.

Tonight Father told us how when he was a young man, unable to find work as a teacher, he became a peddler. He sold buttons and thimbles, shaving brushes, combs, scissors, and sewing threads. For five years he traveled all over the South, sleeping in slave quarters and nearly drowning in the Dismal Swamp of Virginia. He entered thousands of homes. Sometimes he was given a cold glass of water. Sometimes the dogs were set upon him. As Father told his story, I thought what a
hard life he has had. Still, he is always in good spirits and full of hope. I try to be hopeful as well, but we seem to want for everything. When once a friend asked Mother if our poverty was not difficult for her, she said Father's tatters were the rags of righteousness. I thought that very beautiful. I mean to work harder and be more cheerful.

 

S
EPTEMBER
6, 1843

Yesterday all the men left the farm, Mr. Palmer and Mr. Bower to Boston and Father and Mr. Lane to New York. Father and Mr. Lane had no money for their travel, but they said they would board the boat in Boston and offer to give a lecture to the passengers in exchange for their passage. Mother had hoped they would change into their suits, but they said it was well that the rest of the world should see them in their linen tunics and trousers, the better to understand their purpose. William went with them.

Just at dark we had a very bad thunderstorm. Before the storm Mother and my sisters and I got in the barley harvest.

 

S
EPTEMBER
6, 1843

Yesterday, before everyone left, Mother asked Father, “Bronson, shouldn't the barley be brought into the barn before you go?”

“The barley can wait until we return, my dear. What is of foremost importance now is to bring new people into our little experiment. We must spread the happy word. The barley is all cut, and we will only be gone a few days.”

“But if it should rain?” Mother asked.

Mr. Lane looked up into the sky and said, “There will be no rain.” I do think Mr. Lane believes he can make the rain come or go as he pleases.

Father said, “We must do our duty and trust to Providence.”

The sun shone all day yesterday, and Mother said after we weeded the carrots and cabbage we might have a holiday. I made up a play about an enchanted island like Shakespeare's
The Tempest.
We made a boat out of an old wooden box and shipwrecked it on the bank of the river. Anna was Prospero and the Prince, Lizzie was Miranda, and I was Caliban and looked as ugly and frightening as I could. Abby May, with her fairy looks, made a fine Ariel and took
great delight in pinching me and making me fetch and carry.

In the evening we all took our dinner outside and had a picnic.

This morning the sun disappeared, and all across the sky gray clouds were bumping into one another. The sun shone behind the clouds and lit their edges, so at first they were very pretty. In the afternoon the clouds turned black. Swords of lightning were thrust out of the sky followed by rumbling thunder. Mother ran in and out of the house, looking first at the sky and then at the barley lying upon the ground.

“If the rain falls on the barley it will rot, and we've no other crop to depend upon for food this winter,” she said. She turned to us. “Girls, bring every basket in the house here. And quickly.”

Lizzie, Anna, and I ran from room to room tumbling papers and firewood and sewing out of baskets, snatching them up and running with them to Mother. Even Abby May dragged a basket to the porch.

Handing the baskets out, Mother led us into the field. “We must be as quick as we can, girls. The barley is all that lies between us and starvation this winter.” We flew up and down the rows gathering the sheaves of barley, piling them into our baskets, and running with them to the granary. Back
and forth we ran, unmindful of the flashing and roaring over our heads. We bumped into one another, we tripped, we fell, the sheaves scratched our hands, and the barley got in our hair and down the necks of our dresses and itched. By the time the first drops of rain fell, we had saved a good part of the crop.

Mother hugged us all and told us our efforts had saved us from starving. I am not very fond of barley, but I am even less fond of starving, so I took satisfaction in our afternoon's work. I said, “Father told us Providence would provide.”

Mother smiled at us. “Luckily, He had five helpers.”

 

S
EPTEMBER
14, 1843

We have had three days of rain, so I have been reading. There is nothing I like so well as to curl up in the attic with a book while the rain dances upon the roof and slides down the window. I will put down some of my favorite books. The first is
The Pilgrim's Progress
. I think the burden I carry of selfishness and thinking only of myself is very like the burden Christian carries on his journey past the Hill of Difficulty and the Valley of
Humiliation to the Celestial City. The next is
The Vicar of Wakefield
. Everyone in the book has faults as I have, but in spite of the fact that Dr. Primrose loses all of his money and is thrown into prison, it has a happy ending. Maybe I will, too.

 

S
EPTEMBER
14, 1843

Father says that we must read to find characters whom we wish to imitate. Though Christian and Dr. Primrose are such characters, I must confess that I like villains just as well. It really makes you want to turn the pages when you are hoping that something bad will finally happen to evil people.

Today on my paper scrap I wrote, “If sharing all we have with one another is so important, shouldn't Anna be made to let me have her room to myself sometimes?”

Father said I should be thinking of what I could share with others and not what I wished others to share with me. I let Anna wear my best blue ribbon around her hair.

 

S
EPTEMBER
28, 1843

Now that our berries and most of our vegetables are gone, we were happy to receive several barrels of apples. Mother wishes to get more maple sugar so that she can begin to make applesauce again, but Mr. Lane says that self-denial is the road to a spiritual life. He insists we eat our applesauce unsweetened. Mother said there must be more to life than doing without everything that might give one a little pleasure. A compromise was agreed upon. Mother is to use just a very little maple sugar.

 

S
EPTEMBER
28, 1843

Everyone was cross tonight because of the applesauce discussion. Even Mother was cross. She says we are too much in one another's pockets. We see the same faces at all our meals and hear the same complaints. Mother must keep house for everyone, yet she has little say in decisions. I saw today that she meant for once to have her way. Since she is the one to measure the maple sugar, we can be sure the applesauce will be sweet.

When I was outside this morning, I noticed how still it was. There is no birdsong in the trees. Just like our five departed friends, the birds have all flown away from Fruitlands. The wild asters are gone, and the bracken turned brown overnight with the first frost. A shriveled blackberry dangles like a single earring. A few red leaves show on the maple trees, and the sun goes down early. We all gather around Mother's lamp in the evening now to read our books. It is cozy with a fire in the fireplace to keep us warm, but we can't take the warmth of the fire to the attic with us. The window rattles, and the wind blows through the cracks in the walls and the roof. What will it be like in the winter?

 

O
CTOBER
10, 1843

From our hillside we look out to see the trees all around us catch fire with autumn colors. Lizzie and I walked in the woods seeking the prettiest leaf. We could not choose, for one leaf was brighter than the last. We pressed some of the showiest leaves in books, but in a few days their colors will have faded. Though we work hard to make our little family a perfect one,
all our months of sacrifice and work are not so fine as the maple tree beside the back porch. And we had nothing to do with that.

Mother sent us to gather butternuts. She said the Indians boiled them to obtain a kind of oil. She means to try to boil some herself. Now that the leaves are beginning to drop, it is easier to discover the butternut trees. We gathered the nuts until our hands were stained brown so that we stopped picking for a while and played at being Indians. There were once thousands and thousands of Algonkian Indians here. They lived much as we do, dwelling along a river and eating corn, beans, berries, and nuts. Though they are gone, Indian names remain: Mt. Wachusett and Mt. Monadnock and our own state's name, Massachusetts. A hundred years from now, when we are gone, maybe someone will play at Fruitlands as we play at Indians.

 

O
CTOBER
10, 1843

We had one of our evenings of self-criticism. We do not shoot arrows as the Indians did, but we almost kill one another with
words. I don't like having to criticize myself in front of everyone. It is like telling tales on yourself.

Here are this evening's self-criticisms. The interesting thing about them is that there is as much criticism of others as of oneself.

Father: I have not put pen to paper as often as I would wish. This is a great sorrow to me. If some of the others might take on more of my work, I would have time to bestow upon the world more of my valuable thoughts.

Mr. Lane: I regret that I have allowed myself to agree to the use of maple sugar. Mrs. Alcott has made the applesauce so sweet, it is impossible to savor the natural flavor of the apples.

Lizzie: I was so busy dressing my dolls I forgot to set the table tonight, and no one thought to remind me.

Mr. Bower: I regret that I have betrayed my principles by agreeing to the wearing of clothes, which confine the spirit as they confine the body. I do not see why others are so set in their prejudices as to require the constriction of shirts, trousers, and hats.

Anna: I was vain about the dirt from digging potatoes and wasted nearly a half hour in soaking my hands in soapy water and rubbing them with Mother's butternut oil. It does
seem to me that the digging of potatoes ought to be done by the men, who need not care so much for their hands.

William: I did something wrong when I fed bread to a stray dog. It was only that the dog looked very hungry. It does seem that when Father chased the dog away, and scolded me for wasting food by giving it to an animal, he was forgetting that we must all be kind to animals.

Mother: I was too hard on everyone this morning, demanding that the house be weatherproofed. However, if I don't think of these things, no one else seems to. The girls are already complaining of the cold in the attic, and there are barely enough quilts and blankets to go around.

Me: We should have given over all of our time to the picking of the butternuts as we were told to do. Instead I tempted my sisters and William to lay our pails aside and play at Indians. We wasted an hour of time and caused the tear in my pantaloons and Lizzie's skinned knee. Also while we were playing, the squirrels got into our pails and we lost many of the nuts. William was very eager for the game.

Mr. Palmer: I should have finished cutting wood for the stove long since. I didn't stick to it and winter is close. My only excuse is that Bronson prefers the pen to the saw and the ax, leaving me to do his work for him. It is all very well to
write down a lot of ideas that look better on paper than they do in life, but if Bronson doesn't do his share, we are all bound to freeze.

Mr. Palmer's words were very terrible. With his long beard and frown, I thought he looked like an Old Testament prophet. When he had finished there was a terrible silence. Father's face went white and then red. He dislikes being criticized. I think if he believed very strongly in himself, it wouldn't bother him so much. I hate to be criticized for something I already know is wrong. After a moment Father stamped out of the room leaving all of us (except for Mr. Palmer) feeling miserable. Mother went after Father to pacify him. If we keep shooting arrows at one another, no one will be left.