The First Four Years (4 page)

Laura had become quite a good cook and an expert in the making of light bread.

With work and play, in sunshine and storm, the winter passed. There was very little
visiting or having company, for neighbors were rather far away (except for the Larsens
across the road) and the days were short. Still, Laura was never lonely. She loved her
little house and the housework. There were always Shep and the cat, and a visit to the
horses and cows at the barn was, she thought, as good as visiting people any day.

When Trixy lipped her hand or rested her soft nose on her shoulder, or Skip, the scamp,
searched her pocket for a lump of sugar, she felt that they were very satisfactory friends.

The wild geese were coming back from the southland. They flew overhead from one lake to
the other, where they rested on the water and fed along the shores.

The ground was bare of snow, and although the nights were cold and the wind often chilly,
the sunshine was warm and the spring had come. Manly was getting his plows and harrows in
order for working the land to be ready for the sowing of wheat and oats. He must get an early start at the work for there were a hundred acres to
sow in wheat and a fifty-acre oatfield on the homestead. At the shanty on the homestead
Laura held the grain sacks while he shoveled the wheat into them. He was hauling them to
the home barn to be handy for the sowing. The shanty was cold. The grain sacks were coarse
and rough to the touch and the wheat was dusty.

Watching the plump wheat kernels slide into the open mouth of the sack made Laura dizzy.
If she took her eyes from them, they were drawn irresistibly to the newspapers pasted on
the shanty walls and she read the words over and over. She was unreasonably annoyed
because some of them were bottom side up but she must read them anyway. She couldn't
take her eyes from them. Words! Words! The world was full of words and sliding wheat
kernels!

And then she heard Manly saying, “Sit down a minute! You're tired.”

So she sat down, but she was not tired. She was sick. The next morning she felt much worse
and Manly got his own breakfast.

For days she fainted whenever she left her bed. T h e doctor told her to lie quietly. He
assured her she would feel much better before long and that in a few months, nine to be
exact, she would be quite all right. Laura was going to have a baby.

So that was it! Well, she mustn't shirk. She must get around and do the work in the house
so that Manly could get the crops in. So much depended on this year's crops, and there
was no money to hire help.

Soon Laura was creeping around the house, doing what must be done, and whenever possible
relieving her dizzy head by lying down for a few minutes. T h e little house grew to look
rather dingy for she couldn't give it the care it had always had. As she went so
miserably about her work she would smile wryly now and then as she remembered a saying of
her mother's:

“They that dance must pay the fiddler.” Well, she was paying, but she would do the work.
She
would
help that much in spite of everything.

The trees were not growing very well. The dry weather of the summer had been hard on them,
and they must be given extra care, for years from now there must be the ten acres with the
right numbers of growing trees in order to prove up on the tree claim and get a title to
the land.

So Manly plowed around the little trees and then mulched them with manure from the barn
yard.

Laura missed the drives over the greening prairie in the freshness of early spring. She
missed the wild violets that scented the air with their fragrance, but when wild rose
time came in June she was able to ride behind Skip and Barnum along the country roads
where the prairie roses on their low bushes made glowing masses of color from pale pink to
deepest red and the air was full of their sweetness. On one such drive she asked abruptly out of a silence, “What shall we name the child?”

“We can't name it now,” Manly replied, “for we don't know if it will be a boy or a girl.”

And after another silence Laura said, “It will be a girl and we will call her Rose.”

It rained often that spring. It rained through the summer and the little trees took
courage and waved their little green leaves in the wind while they stretched taller every
day. T h e wild blue stem grass grew on the high prairie, and the slough grass grew rank
in the sloughs where water stood in the lowest places.

And, oh, how the wheat and oats did grow! For it rained!

The days went by and by and the wheat headed tall and strong and green and beautiful. Then
the grain was in the milk and in just a few days more the crop would be safe. Even if it
turned dry now there would be a good crop, for the stalks would ripen the wheat.

At last one day Manly came in from the field. He had been looking it over and decided it
was ready to cut.

The wheat, he said, was perfect. It would go all of forty bushels to the acre and be Number One hard. T h e price would start at seventyfive cents a bushel delivered at the
elevator in town.

“Didn't I tell you,” he said, “that everything evens up? The rich have their ice in the
summer, but the poor get theirs in the winter.” He laughed and Laura laughed with him. It
was wonderful.

In the morning Manly had to go to town and buy a new binder to harvest the wheat. He had
waited until he was sure there would be a good crop before buying it, for it was
expensive: two hundred dollars. But he would pay half after the grain was threshed and the
other half in a second payment after the threshing next year. He would only have to pay
eight percent interest on the deferred payment, and could give a chattel mortgage on the
machine and cows to secure the debt. Manly went early to town; he wanted to be back in
time to begin cutting the grain.

Laura was proud when Manly drove into the yard with the new machine. She went out and
watched while he hitched on the four horses and started for the oatfield. The oats were
ripest and he would cut them first. As Laura went back into the house she did a little mental arithmeticone hundred acres at forty bushels an acre would be four thousand
bushels of wheat. Four thousand bushels of wheat at seventy-five cents a bushel would be
Oh, how much would it be? She'd get her pencil. Four thousand bushels at seventy-five
cents a bushel would be three thousand dollars. It couldn't be! Yes, that was right! Why,
they would be rich! She'd say the poor
did
get their ice!

They could pay for the mowing machine and the hayrake Manly bought a year ago and could
not pay for because the crop had been so poor. The notes of seventy-five dollars and forty
dollars and the chattel mortgage on Skip and Barnum would be due after threshing.
Laura did not mind the notes so much, but she hated the chattel mortgage on the horses.
She'd almost as soon have had a mortgage on Manly. Well, it would soon be paid now,
and
the note for the sulky plow with its chattel mortgage on the cows. She thought there were
some store accounts but was not sure. T h e y couldn't be much anyway. Perhaps she could have someone to do the work
until the baby came. Then she could rest; she needed rest, for, not being able to retain
her food for more than a few minutes, she had not much to live on and was very emaciated.
It would be nice to let someone else do the cooking. The smell of cooking always made her
feel so nauseated now.

Manly cut the fifty acres of oats with the new McCormick binder that day. He was jubilant
at night. It was a wonderful crop of oats and early tomorrow he would begin on the wheat.

But, the next morning, when Manly had cut twice around the wheatfield, he unhitched and
came back to the barn with the team. The wheat would be better for standing a couple of
days longer. When he came to cut into it, it was not quite so ripe as he had thought, and
he would take no chance of shrunken kernels by its being cut a little green, Manly said.
But it was even heavier than he had figured, and if it didn't go above forty bushels to
the acre, he was mistaken. Laura felt impatient. She was in a hurry for the wheat to be cut and safely stacked. From the window she could see the shining new binder
standing at the edge of the grain and it looked impatient too, she thought.

After noon that day the DeVoes came by. Cora stopped to spend some time while her hus
band Walter went on to town. The DeVoes were about the same age as Laura and Manly and had
been married about as long. Laura and Cora were very good friends and it was a pleasant
afternoon except for being rather uncomfortable from the heat.

As the afternoon passed it grew hotter and there was no wind, which was unusual. It left
one gasping for breath and feeling smothered.

About three o'clock Manly came in from the barn and said it was going to rain for sure. He
was glad he had not been cutting the wheat to have it lie in a rainstorm before he could
get it shocked. The sunshine darkened, and the wind sighed and then fell again as it grew
darker yet. Then the wind rose a little, and it grew lighter, but the light was a greenish
color. Then the storm came. It rained only a little; then hailstones began to fall,

at first scattering slowly, then falling thicker and faster while the stones were larger,
some of them as large as hens' eggs.

Manly and Cora watched from the windows. They could not see far into the rain and hail,
but they saw Ole Larsen, across the road, come to his door and step out. Then they saw him
fall, and someone reached out the door, took hold of his feet and dragged him in. Then the
door shut.

“The fool,” Manly said, “he got a hailstone on the head.”

In just twenty minutes the storm was over, and when they could see as far as the field,
the binder was still there but the wheat was lying flat. “It's got the wheat, I guess,”
Manly said. But Laura could not speak.

Then Manly went across the road to find out what had happened to Mr. Larsen. When he came
back, in a few minutes, he said that Mr. Larsen had stepped out to pick up a hailstone so
large that he wished to measure it. Just as he stooped to pick it up, another one hit him
on the head. He was unconscious for several minutes after he was dragged in by the heels,
but was all right now except for a sore head. “And now let's make some ice cream,” Manly said. “You stir it up, Laura, and I'll gather up the hailstones to freeze it.”

Laura turned to Cora where she stood speechless, looking out of the window. “Do you feel
like celebrating, Cora?” she asked.

And Cora answered, “No! I want to get home and see what has happened there. Ice cream
would choke me!”

The storm had lasted only twenty minutes but it left a desolate, rain-drenched and
hail-battered world. Unscreened windows were broken. Where there were screens they were
broken and bent. The ground was covered with hailstones so thickly, it looked covered with
a sheet of ice, and they even lay in drifts here and there. Leaves and branches were
stripped off the young trees and the sun shone with a feeble, watery light over the wreck.
The wreck, thought Laura, of a year's work, of hopes and plans of ease and pleasure. Well, there would be no threshers to cook for. Laura
had dreaded the threshing. As Ma used to say, “There is no great loss without some small
gain.” That she should think of so small a gain bothered Laura.

She and Cora sat white and silent until Walter drove up to the door, helped Cora into the
wagon, and drove away almost forgetting to say good-by in their anxiety to get home and
learn how bad the storm had been there.

Manly went out to look at the wheatfield and came in sober enough. “There is no wheat to
cut,” he said. “It is all threshed and pounded into the ground. Three thousand dollars'
worth of wheat planted, and it's the wrong time of the year.”

Laura was muttering to herself, “The poor man gets his”

“What's that?” Manly asked.

“I was only saying,” Laura answered, “that the poor man got his ice in the summer this
time.”

At two o'clock the next day hailstones were still lying in drifts in low places.

Though plans are wrecked, the pieces must be gathered up and put together again in some
shape. Winter was coming. Coal must be bought to last through. That would cost between sixty and one hundred dollars. Seed grain would
have to be bought for next spring's sowing. There were notes on the machinery coming due.

There was the binder that had been used to cut only fifty acres of oats; there was the
sulky plow and the mower and rake, the seeder that had sown the grain in the spring, and
the new wagon. There was too the five hundred dollars still due on the building of the
house. “Five hundred dollars' debt on the house!” Laura exclaimed. “Oh, I didn't know
that!”

“No,” Manly said. “I didn't think there was any need to bother you about that.”

But something must be done about all this, and he would go to town tomorrow and see what
could be done. Perhaps he could raise money with a mortgage on the homestead. That was
proved up on, thank goodness. He couldn't give a mortgage on the tree claim. That
belonged to Uncle Sam until Manly had raised those trees. And Laura thought she could hear
her father singing,

“Our Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm!” Sometimes Laura was afraid her head was a little flighty, but that extra five hundred dollars' debt had been something of a
shock. Five hundred and two hundred was seven hundred, and the wagon and the mower . . .
She must stop counting it or she would have her head queer.

Manly found he could renew all his machinery notes for a year by paying the interest. He
could even make the first payment on the binder after the next harvest, postponing the
second payment to the year after. He could sell all the wild hay he had for four dollars a
ton delivered at the railroad in town. Buyers wanted it to ship to Chicago.

But he could not raise money with a mortgage on the homestead unless they were living on
it. He must have money to pay the interest due, for living expenses, and for seed. There
was no way to get the money except by moving to the homestead. If they were living on the
homestead he could mortgage it for eight hundred dollars.