The Long Winter (8 page)

Foster and Teacher. Then other shadows pressed close around her.

No one tried to say anything. The y crowded together and they were all there—Mary Power and Minnie, each with a little Beardsley girl, and Arthur Johnson and Ben Woodworth with the small Wilmarth boys. Only Cap Garland was missing.

The y followed along the side of that building till they came to the front of it, and it was Mead's Hotel, at the very north end of Main Street.

Beyond it was nothing but the railroad track covered with snow, the lonely depot and the wide, open prairie. If Laura had been only a few steps nearer the others, they would all have been lost on the endless prairie north of town.

For a moment they stood by the hotel's lamplit windows. Warmth and rest were inside the hotel, but the blizzard was growing worse and they must all reach home.

Main Street would guide all of them except Ben Woodworth. No other buildings stood between the hotel and the depot where he lived. So Ben went into the hotel to stay till the blizzard was over. He could afford to do that because his father had a regular job.

Minnie and Arthur Johnson, taking the little Wilmarth boys, had only to cross Main Street to Wilmarth's grocery store and their home was beside it.

The others went on down Main Street, keeping close to the buildings. The y passed the saloon, they passed Royal Wilder's feed store, and then they passed Barker's grocery. The Beardsley Hotel was next and there the little Beardsley girls went in.

The journey was almost ended now. The y passed Couse's Hardware store and they crossed Second Street to Fuller's Hardware. Mary Power had only to pass the drugstore now. Her father's tailor shop stood next to it.

Laura and Carrie and Teacher and Mr. Foster had to cross Main Street now. It was a wide street. But if they missed Pa's house, the haystacks and the stable were still between them and the open prairie.

The y did not miss the house. One of its lighted windows made a glow that Mr. Foster saw before he ran into it. He went on around the house corner with Teacher to go by the clothesline, the haystacks, and the stable to the Garland house.

Laura and Carrie were safe at their own front door.

Laura's hands fumbled at the doorknob, too stiff to turn it. Pa opened the door and helped them in.

He was wearing overcoat and cap and muffler. He had set down the lighted lantern and dropped a coil of rope. “I was just starting out after you,” he said.

In the still house Laura and Carrie stood taking deep breaths. It was so quiet there where the winds did not push and pull at them. The y were still blinded, but the whirling icy snow had stopped hurt-ing their eyes.

Laura felt Ma's hands breaking away the icy muffler, and she said, “Is Carrie all right?”

“Yes, Carrie's all right,” said Pa.

Ma took off Laura's hood and unbuttoned her coat and helped her pull out of its sleeves. “The s e wraps are driven full of ice,” Ma said. The y crackled when she shook them and little drifts of whiteness sifted to the floor.

“Well,” Ma said, “'All's well that ends well.' You're not frostbitten. You can go to the fire and get warm.”

Laura could hardly move but she stooped and with her fingers dug out the caked snow that the wind had driven in between her woolen stockings and the tops of her shoes. Then she staggered toward the stove.

“Take my place,” Mary said, getting up from her rocking chair. “It's the warmest.”

Laura sat stiffly down. She felt numb and stupid.

She rubbed her eyes and saw a pink smear on her hand. Her eyelids were bleeding where the snow had scratched them. The sides of the coal heater glowed red-hot and she could feel the heat on her skin, but she was cold inside. The heat from the fire couldn't reach that cold.

Pa sat close to the stove holding Carrie on his knee.

He had taken off her shoes to make sure that her feet were not frozen and he held her wrapped in a shawl.

The shawl shivered with Carrie's shivering. “I can't get warm, Pa,” she said.

“You girls are chilled through. I'll have you a hot drink in a minute,” said Ma, hurrying into the kitchen.

She brought them each a steaming cup of ginger tea.

“My, that smells good!” said Mary, and Grace leaned on Laura's knee looking longingly at the cup till Laura gave her a sip and Pa said, “I don't know why there's not enough of that to go around.”

“Maybe there is,” said Ma, going into the kitchen again.

It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little bit like Heaven, where the weary are at rest. She could not imagine that Heaven was better than being where she was, slowly growing warm and comfortable, sipping the hot, sweet, ginger tea, seeing Ma, and Grace, and Pa and Carrie, and Mary all enjoying their own cups of it and hearing the storm that could not touch them here.

“I ' m glad you didn't have to come for us, Pa,”

Laura said drowsily. “I was hoping you were safe.”

“So was I,” Carrie told Pa, snuggling against him.

“I remembered that Christmas, on Plum Creek, when you didn't get home.”

“I did, too,” Pa said grimly. “When Cap Garland came into Fuller's and said you were all heading out to the open prairie, you can bet I made tracks for a rope and lantern.”

“I ' m glad we got in all right,” Laura woke up to say.

“Yes, we'd have had a posse out looking for you, though we'd have been hunting for a needle in a haystack,” said Pa.

“Best forget about it,” said Ma.

“Well, he did the best he could,” Pa went on. “Cap Garland's a smart boy.”

“And now, Laura and Carrie, you're going to bed and get some rest,” said Ma. “A good long sleep is what you need.”

When Laura's eyes opened in the morning

she saw that every clinched nail in the roof overhead was furry-white with frost. Thick frost covered every windowpane to its very top. The daylight was still and dim inside the stout walls that kept out the howling blizzard.

Carrie was awake too. She peeked anxiously at Laura from under the quilts on the bed by the stovepipe where she and Grace slept. She blew out a breath to see how cold it was. Even close to the stovepipe her breath froze white in the air. But that house was so well-built that not one bit of snow had been driven through the walls or the roof.

Laura was stiff and sore and so was Carrie. But morning had come and they must get up. Sliding out of bed into the cold that took her breath away, Laura snatched up her dress and shoes and hurried to the top of the stairs. “Ma, can we dress down there?” she called, thankful for the warm, long, red flannels under her flannel nightgown.

“Yes, Pa's at the stable,” Ma answered.

The cookstove was warming the kitchen and the lamplight made it seem even warmer. Laura put on her petticoats and dress and shoes. Then she brought down her sisters' clothes and warmed them and carried Grace downstairs wrapped in quilts. The y were all dressed and washed when Pa came in with the milk half frozen in the pail.

After he had got his breath and melted the frost and snow from his mustaches, he said, “Well, the hard winter's begun.”

“Why, Charles,” Ma said. “It isn't like you to worry about winter weather.”

“I ' m not worrying,” Pa replied. “But it's going to be a hard winter.”

“Well, if it is,” said Ma, “here we are in town where we can get what we need from the stores even in a storm.”

There would be no more school till the blizzard was over. So, after the housework was done, Laura and Carrie and Mary studied their lessons and then settled down to sew while Ma read to them.

Once she looked up and listened and said, “It sounds like a regular three days' blizzard.”

“Then there won't be any more school this week,”

said Laura. She wondered what Mary and Minnie were doing. The front room was so warm that the frost on the windows had melted a little and turned to ice.

When she breathed on it to clear a peephole she could see against the glass the blank white swirling snow.

She could not even see Fuller's Hardware store, across the street, where Pa had gone to sit by the stove and talk with the other men.

Up the street, past Couse's Hardware store and the Beardsley Hotel and Barker's grocery, Royal Wilder's feed store was dark and cold. No one would come to buy feed in that storm, so Royal did not keep up the fire in the heater. But the back room, where he and Almanzo were baching, was warm and cosy and Almanzo was frying pancakes.

Royal had to agree that not even Mother could beat Almanzo at making pancakes. Back in New York state when they were boys and later on Father's big farm in Minnesota they had never thought of cooking; that was woman's work. But since they had come west to take up homestead claims they had to cook or starve; and Almanzo had to do the cooking because he was handy at almost anything and also because he was younger than Royal who still thought that he was the boss.

When he came west, Almanzo was nineteen years old. But that was a secret because he had taken a homestead claim, and according to law a man must be twenty-one years old to do that. Almanzo did not consider that he was breaking the law and he knew he was not cheating the government. Still, anyone who knew that he was nineteen years old could take his claim away from him.

Almanzo looked at it this way: the Government wanted this land settled; Uncle Sam would give a farm to any man who had the nerve and muscle to come out here and break the sod and stick to the job till it was done. But the politicians far away in Wash-ington could not know the settlers so they must make rules to regulate them and one rule was that a homesteader must be twenty-one years old.

None of the rules worked as they were intended to.

Almanzo knew that men were making good wages by filing claims that fitted all the legal rules and then handing over the land to the rich men who paid their wages. Everywhere, men were stealing the land and doing it according to all the rules. But of all the homestead laws Almanzo thought that the most foolish was the law about a settler's age.

Anybody knew that no two men were alike. You could measure cloth with a yardstick, or distance by miles, but you could not lump men together and measure them by any rule. Brains and character did not depend on anything but the man himself. Some men did not have the sense at sixty that some had at sixteen. And Almanzo considered that he was as good, any day, as any man twenty-one years old.

Almanzo's father thought so too. A man had the right to keep his sons at work for him until they were twenty-one years old. But Almanzo's father had put his boys to work early and trained them well.

Almanzo had learned to save money before he was ten and he had been doing a man's work on the farm since he was nine. When he was seventeen, his father had judged that he was a man and had given him his own free time. Almanzo had worked for fifty cents a day and saved money to buy seed and tools. He had raised wheat on shares in western Minnesota and made a good crop.

He considered that he was as good a settler as the government could want and that his age had nothing to do with it. So he had said to the land agent, “You can put me down as twenty-one,” and the agent had winked at him and done it. Almanzo had his own homestead claim now and the seed wheat for next year that he had brought from Minnesota, and if he could stick it out on these prairies and raise crops for four years more he would have his own farm.

He was making pancakes, not because Royal could boss him any more but because Royal could not make good pancakes and Almanzo loved light, fluffy, buck-wheat pancakes with plenty of molasses.

“Whew! listen to that!” Royal said. The y had never heard anything like that blizzard.

“That old Indian knew what he was talking about,”

said Almanzo. “If we're in for seven months of this...”

The three pancakes on the griddle were holding their bubbles in tiny holes near their crisping edges. He flipped them over neatly and watched their brown-patterned sides rise in the middle.

The good smell of them mixed with the good smells of fried salt pork and boiling coffee. The room was warm and the lamp with its tin reflector, hung on a nail, lighted it strongly. Saddles and bits of harness hung on the rough board walls. The bed was in one corner, and the table was drawn up to the stove hearth so that Almanzo could put the pancakes on the white ironstone plates without moving one step.

“This can't last seven months. That's ridiculous,”

said Royal. “We're bound to have some spells of good weather.”

Almanzo replied airily, “Anything can happen and most usually does.” He slid his knife under the edges of the pancakes. The y were done and he flipped them onto Royal's plate and greased the griddle again with the pork rind.

Royal poured molasses over the cakes. “One thing can't happen,” he said. “We can't stick it out here till spring unless they keep the trains running.”

Almanzo poured three more rounds of batter from the batter pitcher onto the sizzling griddle. He lounged against the warm partition, by the stovepipe, waiting for the cakes to rise.

“We figured on hauling in more hay,” he said.

“We've got plenty of dry feed for the team.”

“Oh, they'll get the trains through,” Royal said, eating. “But if they didn't we'd be up against it. How about coal and kerosene and flour and sugar? For that matter, how long would my stock of feed last, if the whole town came piling in here to buy it?”

Almanzo straightened up. “Say!” he exclaimed.

“Nobody's going to get my seed wheat! No matter what happens.”

“Nothing's going to happen,” Royal said. “Who-ever heard of storms lasting seven months? They'll get the trains running again.”

“They better,” said Almanzo, turning the pancakes. He thought of the old Indian, and he looked at his sacks of seed wheat. The y were stacked along the end of the room and some were under the bed. The seed wheat did not belong to Royal; it belonged to him. He had raised it in Minnesota. He had plowed and harrowed the ground and sowed the grain. He had cut it and bound it, threshed and sacked it, and hauled it a hundred miles in his wagon.