Song of years, p.9
Song of Years, page 9
“And you can remember to tell your grandchildren what they told me in Dubuque,” he added. “You’re riding along to-day with the first bell that was ever brought west of the Mississippi into the State of Iowa to be hung in a tower.”
But foolishly, as young girls do, both Celia and Suzanne developed the giggles concerning the reference to the grandchildren they might have, rather than thinking with awe upon any potential historical data.
They laughed long and hilariously, swinging their legs off the wagon, lying down on the merchandise to look up into the prairie sky in which puffy clouds sailed low, jumping off to pick wild ragged-robins or shaggy pink bouncing-Bets, running to catch a ride again behind the plodding oxen.
“Look, Celia . . . the clouds are big fat white geese with their wings flapping and their necks stretching out. What do they look like to you?”
“Oh, I don’t know—just clouds, I guess. You and me having grandchildren!” Celia rolled, laughing, in the limited space between a molasses barrel and a plowshare.
“Imagine that time ever coming,” Suzanne echoed her.
Time was such a slow old thing. The years were as slow as . . . as oxen. She half closed her eyes and looked up at the clouds again. Now they were puffy white roses quilted on a huge blue tester to cover a bed for the world; the low gray clouds against the horizon made the valance.
She felt very close to Celia to-day, and friendly. This was one of her real days. The Red Cedar Valley was the interesting world, not that imaginary country in which only beautiful people lived. In the outdoor oven Ma was baking loaves of bread from wheat cracklings Pa had had ground at the Overman mill. Indoors Emily was baking cookies with caraway seeds on top. Phoebe Lou was looking over and washing a bushel of wild plums. Pa and Phineas were getting pounds and pounds of wild honey from a hollow locust tree. Sabina, Jeanie, and Melinda had gone in to Sturgis Falls to take some of Ma’s butter and see the lot Tom Bostwick was buying near the court-house square for sixty dollars. Sabina and Jeanie had planned to go together but when they went out to the buckboard they had found Melinda all fixed up in her other dress, sitting in it waiting to go, too, and saying that Ma had told her she could.
She, herself, and Celia had new bead rings. Aunt Harriet from her nice home in Chicago had sent The Box. So many pleasant happenings! Suzanne knew she didn’t care one bit to-day that her own folks were all plain and familiar-looking and unromantic. The magic world where only strange lovely people lived seemed very far away, and a little silly.
* * *
The Box sat in the middle of the lean-to table. To Suzanne it looked like a human being crouched there, biding its time until all should gather around. Last year it had been upright and fat and square. This one was low and long like an old man lying asleep just before he would waken and bestow gifts on a waiting world.
It was an interminable time before every one was ready. Sabina, Jeanie, and Melinda must put up the horses first and bring in the brown sugar, salt, and tea which Ma’s butter had bought. Phoebe Lou had to finish putting the plums in their stone jars and covering them with spring water which would form a scum and preserve them for pies away into the winter. Emily and Ma, their faces red and sweaty from the baking, wanted to wash up a bit before presenting themselves at the shrine of The Box. Henry, man fashion, had driven on over to town, but even though Pa and Phineas pretended only a casual interest, they came in after the honey-gathering to attend the ceremony, with Pa taking charge of the opening in order to keep the nails in good shape for future use and the boards for shelves.
At the tearing, ripping sound of the wood, Suzanne wondered whether in all the world there was a noise so pleasant. It made her shiver with delicious chills of anticipation.
Over the top and crushed around the sides were newspapers which Pa lifted out carefully, smoothing them tenderly, so anxious was he to see what the Chicago paper had to say about that new political convention in Jackson, Michigan, called for all those who were getting dissatisfied with the Whigs.
All right! Here come The Things now. Oh, my goodness, how could life hold anything anywhere more exciting. Suddenly Suzanne felt sorry for Evangeline Burrill who had no cousins in Chicago, sorry for every one who was not standing here in the lean-to this very moment to see no-telling-what.
Pa’s contribution to the ceremony finished, there was some delay because of an unaccustomed politeness as to which one might have the honor of lifting out The Things, with “You, Ma,” and “No . . . let Sabina . . . she won’t be here next year when it comes.”
So Sabina, who was to trade this great annual excitement for matrimony, took out the things carefully amid rapt attention and contributory remarks from the side-lines. A gray-blue dress and a blue plaid cape to match, with Pa saying it was as big around as that traveling showman’s tent down to Prairie Rapids. A great hank of red yarn, crinkled from having been raveled out of something, but pounced upon by Ma with satisfaction. New red flannel. Another voluminous dress, dark green, with a little soiled linen lace still at the neckline, and a dark red one with enough rows of black silk galloon braid around its wide skirt to trim several dresses under Emily’s efficient planning. A pair of hoops! And every one was calling out, “They’ve got down to you, now, Phoebe Lou. These are yours.”
There was a bolt of new unbleached muslin which by common consent was laid in Sabina’s willing arms, and which she held lovingly like a baby, and a bolt of gray calico which Ma took charge of, saying she would parcel it out as needed.
And then, you could not believe your eyes. Suzanne’s face turned pink in embarrassment as though some mental activity of her own had brought the thing to life—a parasol of dark green silk, small as a toadstool, on a long slim handle and with only a few little splits in the silk where a rib or two stuck through. It sounded almost wicked for Ma to be asking what in time would they send that out here for, and Phineas to be saying it would be good to fasten over old Star or Baldy in the heat instead of a wet sack when he was plowing.
When the box was emptied, Suzanne experienced a let-down feeling of there being nothing now to live for. Several times before supper she went into Ma’s bedroom to pull out the trundle-bed and look at the lovely green parasol lying there, trying to bring back some of that delicious excitement she had known.
As though this day were like all others they were soon sitting down to supper with the usual confusion. Phineas and Celia had arrived simultaneously at the last unoccupied wooden chair, and Phineas, by virtue of his masculine strength was lifting Celia away from the coveted seat with much teasing laughter on his part and indignant shrieking on hers, so that it was not until Sarah had told them to hush and Jeremiah with bowed head had said mumblingly into his beard, “I’ll-thump-you-both-bless-this-food-to-Thy-Glory,” that there was enough silence to hear the queer foreign sound.
“Hark!” Phoebe Lou and Jeanie said together. “What’s that?”
Others had heard it, too, so that several jumped up and ran outdoors, leaving the dishes of corn-meal mush steaming at each plate like so many miniature camp-fires sending up a white smoke.
The sound was so faint and from so far away, that almost was it not heard at all. But because the wind was coming from the Sturgis Falls direction, it brought that distant eerie tinkle.
“Hush up your noise,” Sarah said crossly to a rooster taking that particular moment to crow near her, so anxious was she to hear this unusual thing.
Every ear was strained to catch it, the sound of the new school-bell ringing from the tower of the little frame building over at the settlement among the trees and stumps.
“All listen to the first tower bell of the Mississippi,” Jeremiah said. He held up his hand and spoke solemnly as though he were pronouncing a benediction. “Eddication has come to Ioway.”
They all went back into the house where the flies had gathered near the corn-meal mush during their absence, so that Suzanne and Celia had to get the long-handled brushes again and whack awhile before they could clear them out.
Jeremiah talked about the bell all through the supper hour until every one grew a little tired of it. “It’s a sort of symbol. You’ll see . . .” He bragged as though he were going to be personally responsible, “Ioway’ll maybe stand at the very head of the Union some day in schools. Like Massachusetts . . . and Connecticut . . . and the others. I want to live to see it . . . free schools, too, common schools . . . no tuition . . . for rich and poor alike . . . all over the state. School funds ought to have better management . . .”
They all laughed at that. “Well, Pa, you’re school director here for our new district. What you been buying for yourself with the school funds?”
Well, he meant all over the Valley and other newly settled parts of the state. If all were run as honest as this one there wouldn’t be need of much complaint. He hoped this Ambrose Willshire who’d walked clear up from Iowa City to see about getting the school would be all right. Here now they had this good log school-house right on the corner of their own land, and even if it was small and not many scholars to attend, it ought to be just as good as a bigger one back east. That was the right way. A chain wasn’t any stronger than its weakest link, and the Iowa school system couldn’t ever expect to be what it should be unless every little log school-house did its share.
They grew impatient over the continuation of the same subject so that they tried to get Pa off on other topics but every little while he would return to it like a puppy shaking an old rag. For with very little schooling himself, Jeremiah Martin was still wanting education for those who would come after him.
Wayne Lockwood had heard the faint far-away sound, too, from his cabin across the prairie and now came riding Blackbird over to the Martins’ to find out whether he was sane or had a ringing in his head.
The Akins heard it, and the Burrills and the Mansons, and all felt an unexplainable elation over the sound, knowing that something pleasant and substantial had happened to the new country. In truth, outside of every cabin within hearing distance of that ringing stood a group of people, bareheaded, silent, as though they had stopped work to worship at the sound of the Angelus.
All night the bell rang jubilantly. When one citizen grew tired pulling the rope, another took his place. It was as though they could not stop the celebration, as though now for the first time Iowa had something of Pennsylvania and Ohio, York State and New England—something which made it seem like “back home.”
CHAPTER 10
The fall term of school began now for Suzanne in that little log building on a corner of the land which her father had donated to the newly formed school district. Like his house, it sat at the edge of the timber which swept up from the south so that trees formed a background to its dark logs and the prairie fell away from its door. There was a tangle of underbrush at its windows—hazelnut and scrub oak and the wild sumac that appeared to be setting fire to the black logs, its scarlet branches licking at the little building like tongues of flame.
Inside, there were hand-hewn benches over which the children climbed to be seated with their backs to the center of the room, the boys with swaggering straddle, the girls carefully, with a clutching at wide skirts to keep the showing of pantalets at a minimum. The desks were fastened to the wall on two sides of the room, each one a long sloping box with a lidded compartment for every two children.
A water-pail with long-handled dipper stood on a built-in shelf so that this particular corner was always in a state of dripping moisture on warm days and of icicle formation in winter. That tin dipper constituted the sum total of the improvement of this year’s equipment over last (which had been the school’s first year of existence) inasmuch as all those gallons of drinks of the yesteryear had been consumed by way of a gourd dipper which was discarded now because of the jagged appearance of its rim caused by the sharp teeth of the consumers.
Melinda, Celia, and Suzanne were the only Martins to be in school this fall. Sabina and Emily had called their education finished before they came to Iowa. Jeanie and Phoebe Lou had both gone part of last winter at Pa’s insistence but when Jeanie found she could spell, parse, and read better than the little old man who taught them, she had made a big fuss about it and stopped, too. And now Phoebe Lou would go no more for she was away helping Mrs. Manson who was expecting a baby.
A week before, Mrs. Manson’s unmarried brother, Ed Armitage, had arrived in a two-wheeled cart, dashing madly up to the lean-to door as though finishing a race, to see if one of the girls could come over to help his sister. Jeremiah, fond of his little joke, had said: “Well, now, Ed, I can’t let any of my girls go for to be hired girls, but if you want to marry one, take your choice—you got seven to pick from.”
“Only six, Pa.” Phineas had winked, teasingly. “You forget Sabina’s spoken for.”
“That’s right, Ed . . . Sabina’s the only one we can get off our hands.”
Ed Armitage had turned red clear down into his buckskin coat collar, and the girls had all made an excuse of going into Ma’s bedroom where they stifled their laughter at Ed’s discomfiture in the feather-beds whose acoustic properties were negligible.
But Phoebe Lou had gone to help, riding away bouncingly in the two-wheeled cart with the perturbed Ed, and throwing a languishing look over her shoulder at the assembled family as she clasped her hands imploringly behind his broad back, so that the girls had run into the house and laughed themselves sick.
Neither Celia nor Suzanne liked the new Ambrose Willshire for a teacher, and Melinda frankly said she could cheerfully mop the floor with him, although no one could put her finger on just what was wrong. He was polite to a point of saturation, correct and stiff in his manner, but so mean about little things, holding up the oldest Akin boy to ridicule when the lad merely meant to be informative, making Celia write “I think I am pretty” fifty times for twisting a curl over her ear during class, so that Melinda and Suzanne who had often and unhesitatingly confronted her with the same accusation now escorted her home between them in deep clannish sympathy and high dudgeon.
As an embarrassing aftermath, that turned out to be the very night Ambrose Willshire moved in at home, bag and baggage, for he was boarding around and there was not going to be room for him and the stork both in the one-roomed cabin of the Mansons. The family had all talked noisily and naturally (which were synonymous terms) at that first meal, excepting the three school-girls who were still in a state of revolt.
Indeed, Ambrose Willshire’s pedantic presence cast a shadow on them all through the sunny days of October—there was such an air of condemnation about him at their chatter and laughter. Sometimes he corrected them in their speech and often he spoke about attaining perfect goals in life.
But his four weeks were up and he had gone on to the Horace Akins’ this Saturday. Every one felt relieved.
Jeanie said she was going to let out and sing at the top of her voice all day for she had been just like a bird fascinated by a snake when she was alone with him and he looked so long at her. Even Jeremiah said it was nice to have a good eddication but there wasn’t no call to be long-faced about it, and he guessed having some schooling didn’t need to prohibit you from cracking a joke once in a while.
This October Saturday, with the timber in the Valley burning red under the fire of bright maples and burnished oak leaves, with the smoke of the Indian camp-fires near the river drifting lazily into the fall sky, Henry and Phineas were breaking the last of their new prairie sod for the next spring’s planting. Emily was baking. Jeanie and her mother were making soft soap in an outdoor kettle, for which task they had leached their own lye from wood ashes. Melinda was bringing out the pieced comforts to hang on a line stretched between two trees which had been topped to form clothes-line posts but which had broken out into foliage this year, as though the mere duty to which Sarah assigned them was too commonplace.
Sabina was drying the last of the sweet corn with Celia to help her. The sheets for her new home were bleaching on the coarse grass of the yard, the color of the muslin having already changed from a mulatto tan to a pale saffron under the warm prairie sun.
Suzanne’s job was one which called for much locomotion, for she not only had to whack her fly brush of paper streamers over the drying sweet corn and the soap grease which were on opposite sides of the cabin, but ever and anon she had to dart hastily toward the sheets as she saw an inquisitive chicken ambling in that direction, and toward the clothes-line as a bird gave evidence of alighting.
Jeremiah was on his way up to Wayne Lockwood’s on Jupiter this afternoon with weighty things on his mind and fire in his eye, deeply concerned about a serious political problem. Indeed, the whole newly organized county was excited.
There had been a real bounded county only since June. The court records over which Sarah had waxed sarcastic were in Sturgis Falls safely ensconced in the loft over Mr. Mullarky’s combination house and store, a room twenty feet square and seven feet high for which the county office was paying eight dollars per month, the rental including a table and two stout wooden chairs. Thus Sturgis Falls, by virtue of being the older and larger of the two settlements and platted now for two years, was the county seat.
More rumors had been coming out of Prairie Rapids via the mouth-to-mouth route that the little upstart settlement had its eye on the county-seat, claiming it should be the chosen site because centrally located.
All of Jeremiah’s indignation was fomenting as he rode to where Wayne, with Ed Armitage to help him, was breaking sod.
For a long time the two stood by their plow while Jeremiah “talked turkey” to them, explaining, gesticulating, going into countless reasons why Sturgis Falls should retain the county-seat.
