Little Town On The Prairie (3 page)

That was a happy time, for the garden was growing well, the corn and oats were thriving, the calf was weaned so that now there was skim-milk for cottage cheese and there was cream to make butter and butter-milk, and best of all, Pa was earning so much money.

Often while Laura worked in the garden, she thought of Mary's going to college. It was nearly two years since they had heard there was a college for the blind in Iowa. Every day they had thought of that, and every night they prayed that Mary might go. The sor-est grief in Mary's blindness was that it hindered her studying. She liked so much to read and learn, and she had always wanted to be a schoolteacher. Now she could never teach school. Laura did not want to, but now she must; she had to be able to teach school as soon as she grew old enough, to earn money for Mary's college education.

“Never mind,” she thought, while she hoed, “I can see.”

She saw the hoe, and the colors of the earth, and all the leafy little lights and shadows of the pea vines.

She had only to glance up, and she saw miles of blowing grasses, the far blue skyline, the birds flying, Ellen and the calves on the green slope, and the different blues of the sky, the snowy piles of huge summer clouds. She had so much, and Mary saw only darkness.

She hoped, though she hardly dared to, that perhaps Mary might go to college that fall. Pa was making so much money. If Mary could only go now, Laura would study with all her might, she would work so hard that surely she could teach school as soon as she was sixteen years old, and then her earnings would keep Mary in college.

They all needed dresses and they all needed shoes, and Pa always had to buy flour and sugar and tea and salt meat. There was the lumber bill for the new half of the house, and coal must be bought for winter, and there were taxes. But this year there was the garden, and the corn and oats. By year after next, almost all they ate could be raised from the land.

If they had hens and a pig, they would even have meat. This was settled country now, hardly any game was left, and they must buy meat or raise it. Perhaps next year Pa could buy hens and a pig. Some settlers were bringing them in.

One evening Pa came home beaming.

“Guess what, Caroline and girls!” he sang out. "I saw Boast in town today, and he sent word from Mrs.

Boast. She's setting a hen for us!"

“Oh, Charles!” Ma said.

“As soon as the chicks are big enough to scratch for themselves, he's going to bring us the whole batch,”

said Pa.

"Oh, Charles, this is good news. It's just like Mrs.

Boast to do it, too,“ Ma said thankfully. ”How is she, did he say?"

“Said they're getting along fine. She's so busy, she hasn't been able to get to town this spring, but she's certainly keeping you in mind.”

“A whole setting of chicks,” said Ma. “There's not many that would do it.”

“ The y don't forget how you took them in when they came out here, just married, and got lost in a snowstorm, and we were the only settlers in forty miles,” Pa reminded her. “Boast often speaks of it.”

“Pshaw,” said Ma. “That was nothing. But a whole setting of eggs— It saves us a year in starting a flock.”

If they could raise the chicks, if hawks or weasels or foxes did not get them, some would be pullets that summer. Next year the pullets would begin laying, then there would be eggs to set. Year after next, there would be cockerels to fry, and more pullets to increase the flock. The n there would be eggs to eat, and when the hens grew too old to lay eggs, Ma could make them into chicken pie.

“And if next spring Pa can buy a young pig,” said Mary, “then in a couple of years we'll have fried ham and eggs. And lard and sausages and spareribs and head-cheese!”

“And Grace can roast the pig's tail!” Carrie chimed in.

“Why?” Grace wanted to know. “What is a pig's tail?”

Carrie could remember butchering time, but Grace had never held a pig's skinned tail in front of the cookstove grate and watched it sizzling brown. She had never seen Ma take from the oven the dripping pan full of brown, crackling, juicy spareribs. She had never seen the blue platter heaped with fragrant sausage-cakes, nor spooned their red-brown gravy onto pancakes. She remembered only Dakota Territory, and the meat she knew was the salt, white, fat pork that Pa bought sometimes.

But someday they would have all the good things to eat again, for better times were coming. With so much work to do now, and everything to look forward to, the days were flying by. The y were all so busy that they hardly missed Pa during the day. The n every night there was his coming home, when he brought news of the town, and they always had so much to tell him.

All day they had been saving a most exciting thing to tell him. The y could hardly expect him to believe it, for this was what had happened: While Ma was making the beds and Laura and Carrie were washing the breakfast dishes, they all heard the kitten cry out piteously. Kitty's eyes were open now and she could scamper across the floor, chasing a scrap of paper that Grace drew on a string.

“Grace, be careful!” Mary exclaimed. “Don't hurt the kitty.”

“I'm not hurting the kitty,” Grace answered earnestly.

Before Mary could speak, the kitten squalled again.

“Don't, Grace!” Ma said from the bedroom. “Did you step on it?”

“No, Ma,” Grace answered. The kitten cried desperately, and Laura turned around from the dishpan.

“Stop it, Grace! What are you doing to the kitty?”

“I'm not doing anything to the kitty!” Grace wailed.

“I can't find it!”

The kitten was nowhere to be seen. Carrie looked under the stove and behind the woodbox. Grace crawled under the tablecloth to see beneath the table.

Ma looked under the whatnot's bottom shelf and Laura hunted through both bedrooms.

The n the kitten squalled again, and Ma found it behind the opened door. There, between the door and the wall, the tiny kitten was holding fast to a mouse.

The mouse was full grown and strong, nearly as big as the wobbling little kitten, and it was fighting. It squirmed and bit. The kitten cried when the mouse bit her, but she would not let go. She braced her little legs and kept her teeth set in a mouthful of the mouse's loose skin. Her baby legs were so weak that she almost fell over. The mouse bit her again and again.

Ma quickly got the broom. “Pick up the kitten, Laura, I'll deal with the mouse.”

Laura was obeying, of course, but she couldn't help saying, “Oh, I hate to, Ma! She's hanging on. It's her fight.”

Right under Laura's grasping hand the tiny kitten made one great effort. She leaped onto the mouse.

She held it down under both her front legs and screamed again as its teeth bit into her. The n her own little teeth snapped hard, into the mouse's neck. The mouse squeaked shrilly and went limp. All by herself, the kitten had killed it; her first mouse.

“I declare,” Ma said. “Whoever heard of a cat-and-mouse fight!”

The baby kitten should have had its mother to lick its wounds and purr proudly over it. Ma carefully washed the bites and fed her warmed milk, Carrie and Grace stroked her wee nose and fuzzy soft head, and under Mary's warm hand she cuddled to sleep. Grace carried the dead mouse out by the tail and threw it far away. And all the rest of that day they often said, What a tale they had to tell Pa when he came home!

They waited until he had washed, and combed his hair, and sat down to supper. Laura answered his question about the chores; she had watered the horses and Ellen and the calves, and moved their picket pins. The nights were so pleasant now that she need not put them in the stable. The y slept under the stars, and woke and grazed whenever they liked.

Then came the time to tell Pa what the kitten had done.

He said he had never heard anything like it. He looked at the little blue and white kitty, walking carefully across the floor with her thin tail standing straight up, and he said, “That kitten will be the best hunter in the county.”

The day was ending in perfect satisfaction. They were all there together. All the work, except the supper dishes, was done until tomorrow. The y were all enjoying good bread and butter, fried potatoes, cottage cheese, and lettuce leaves sprinkled with vinegar and sugar.

Beyond the open door and window the prairie was dusky but the sky was still pale, with the first stars beginning to quiver in it. The wind went by, and in the house the air stirred, pleasantly warmed by the cookstove and scented with prairie freshness and food and tea and a cleanness of soap and a faint lingering smell of the new boards that made the new bedrooms.

In all that satisfaction, perhaps the best part was knowing that tomorrow would be like today, the same and yet a little different from all other days, as this one had been. But Laura did not know this, until Pa asked her, “How would you like to work in town?”

No one could imagine what work there could be for a girl in town, if it wasn't working as a hired girl in the hotel.

“It's a new idea of Clancy's,” Pa said. Mr. Clancy was one of the new merchants. Pa was working on his store building. “We've got the store pretty near finished, and he's moving in his dry goods. His wife's mother's come West with them, and she's going to make shirts.”

“Make shirts?” said Ma.

"Yes. So many men are baching on their claims around here that Clancy figures he'll get most of the trade in yard goods, with somebody there in the store making them up into shirts, for men that haven't got any womenfolks to do their sewing."

“That is a good idea,” Ma had to admit.

“You bet! There's no flies on Clancy,” said Pa,

“He's got a machine to sew the shirts.”

Ma was interested. “A sewing machine. Is it like that picture we saw in the Inter-Ocean? How does it work?”

“About like I figured out it would,” Pa answered.

"You work the pedal with your feet, and that turns the wheel and works the needle up and down. There's a little contraption underneath the needle that's wound full of thread, too. Clancy was showing some of us. It goes like greased lightning, and makes as neat a seam as you'd want to see.

“I wonder how much it costs,” said Ma.

“'Way too much for ordinary folks,” said Pa. “But Clancy looks on it as an investment; he'll get his money back in profits.”

“Yes, of course,” Ma said. Laura knew she was thinking how much work such a machine would save, but even if they could afford it, it would be foolish to buy one only for family sewing. “Does he expect Laura to learn how to run it?”

Laura was alarmed. She could not be responsible for some accident to such a costly machine.

“Oh, no, Mrs. White's going to run it,” Pa replied.

“She wants a good handy girl to help with the hand sewing.”

He said to Laura: “She was asking me if I knew such a girl. I told her you're a good sewer, and she wants you to come in and help her. Clancy's got more orders for shirts than she can handle by herself. She says she'll pay a good willing worker twenty-five cents a day and dinner.”

Quickly Laura multiplied in her head. That was a dollar and a half a week, a little more than six dollars a month. If she worked hard and pleased Mrs. White, maybe she could work all summer. She might earn fifteen dollars, maybe even twenty, to help send Mary to college.

She did not want to work in town, among strangers.

But she couldn't refuse a chance to earn maybe fifteen dollars, or ten, or five. She swallowed, and asked,

“May I go, Ma?”

Ma sighed. “I don't like it much, but it isn't as if you had to go alone. Your Pa will be there in town. Yes, if you want to, you may.”

“I—don't want to leave you all the work to do,”

Laura faltered.

Carrie eagerly offered to help. She could make beds, and sweep, and do the dishes by herself, and weed in the garden. Ma said that Mary was a great help in the house, too, and now that the stock was picketed out, the evening's chores were not so much to do. She said, “We'll miss you, Laura, but we can manage.”

There was no time to waste next morning. Laura brought the water and milked Ellen, she hurried to wash and to brush and braid her hair and pin it up.

She put on her newest calico dress, and stockings and shoes. She rolled up her thimble in a freshly ironed apron.

The little breakfast that she had time to swallow had no taste. She tied on her sunbonnet and hurried away with Pa. The y must be at work in town by seven o'clock.

Morning freshness was in the air. Meadow larks were singing, and up from Big Slough rose the thunder-pumps with long legs dangling and long necks outstretched, giving their short, booming cry. It was a beautiful, lively morning, but Pa and Laura were too hurried. The y were running a race with the sun.

Up rose the sun with no effort at all, while they kept walking as fast as they could, north on the prairie road toward the south end of Main Street.

The town was so changed that it seemed like a new place. Two whole blocks on the west side of Main Street were solidly filled with new, yellow-pine buildings. A new board sidewalk was in front of them. Pa and Laura did not have time to cross the street to it.

The y hurried, Indian file, along the narrow dusty path on the other side of the street.

On this side, the prairie still covered all the vacant lots, right up to Pa's stable and his office-building at the corner of Main and Second Streets. But beyond them, on the other side of Second Street, the studding of a new building stood on the corner lot. Beyond it, the path hurried past vacant lots again till it came to Clancy's new store.

The inside of the store was all new, and still smelled of pine shavings. It had, too, the faint starchy smell of bolts of new cloth. Behind two long counters, all along both walls ran long shelves, stacked to the ceiling with bolts of muslin and calicoes and lawns, challis and cashmeres and flannels and even silks.

There were no groceries, and no hardware, no shoes or tools. In the whole store there was nothing but dry goods. Laura had never before seen a store where nothing was sold but dry goods.

At her right hand was a short counter-top of glass, and inside it were cards of all kinds of buttons, and papers of needles and pins. On the counter beside it, a rack was full of spools of thread of every color. Those colored threads were beautiful in the light from the windows.