John’s letters came again in the late spring, in them an echo of the breeze that blows over the Kotzebue Sound. “For Christmas dinner we had fish balls and egg sauce, baked white-fish, ptarmigan pot-roast, mashed potatoes, baked dressing, ice cream from condensed milk, and coffee. After the white people ate, the Eskimos took turn and made a thorough clean-up. When one of them found something that struck his palate, he proceeded to devour the entire contents of the dish. Eighty white people ate and twenty-five Eskimos. The miners came dressed in their parkas and mukluks. . . .
“Thermometer has been down to 38 degrees all day, 46 below in the night. This morning about eleven the ice began moving on the Keewalik and kept coming all day. There is an ice jam at the bluffs below town, and a number of cabins are in danger of being carried away. . . .
“Strike on Kugruh has been confirmed,—the whole river and benches have been staked.”
Abbie, with the letters in her lap, would look out over the familiar fields, green in their spring wheat and their parallel rows of young corn, and wonder how a child of the prairie could have gone so far away.
And now Nature began to seem less parsimonious with her rains. No longer was the sky a dry blue bowl turned over the dry brown earth. Heavy with moisture, the clouds gathered and fell in a blessing of light showers or heavy, soaking rains. Out of Nature’s benediction grew fine crops, better times, high land prices.
A union of farmers to market their own crops was being formed in many localities. Abbie took two shares of stock in the Cedartown Elevator. “It’s the beginning of something pretty big, I believe,” she told Mack.
In the fall, Henry Lutz died. And over in the house with the cupola and the wooden rosettes and the fancy grill-work, Sarah Lutz clung to Abbie constantly, so there was one more duty at hand for her. After her father’s death, Emma came into the possession of a large amount of land. Selling here, buying there with good business judgment, and aided by the upward swing of prices, Mack, who was now assistant cashier of the bank, placed the Mackenzie Deal family on the best of financial footing.
One more year went by with John proving his ownership of the title “Judge Deal” in the land of the dog-team, and then he came back. In that characteristic way of suddenly doing something with no preliminary talk, he opened a law office in Cedartown. To Abbie, it seemed unbelievable and far too good to be true, that the wanderer of the family should settle down closer to her than any of the others.
Margaret was painting many canvases every year now. Pencil and drawing-book with her, she often came out home to wander for hours in the vicinity, sketching the cottonwoods or the maples or a rolling bit of pasture land. “When the day comes, Mother,” she would say, “that I can get the light that lies over the prairie at evening, to suit me, I believe I’ll be satisfied.”
Isabelle, in Chicago for three years, was forging ahead in her career, singing at some of the select musical affairs. Abbie’s natural garment of modesty showed large perforations in it, when it came to anything concerning her children’s accomplishments. More than once she hitched up the old white mare and drove into the Headlight office to proffer some item about one of her offspring’s achievements.
“The Deals all seem to do things,” Abbie heard a visitor to the community say to Oscar Lutz once. The two men were sitting on a bench under her kitchen window, before one of the many neighborhood suppers. Abbie, paring potatoes, could hear every word of Oscar’s reply.
“The children do. Will, himself, was a good man but not much of a manager. Was always planning some wild scheme for the whole community. You can’t get anywhere if you spread your plans all out over the whole country. At all the school meetings he talked about the day when the country school would be graded like the town. Talked about the day when the roads would be fixed. Had some fool plan about hauling little stones from the quarry at Louisville . . . loads of little stones and gravel and running a roller over ’em. Heard him say once right after a long drought that Nebraska was the best state in the Union . . . had the best soil . . . that the day would come that the climate conditions would change and it would be the most productive of them all. Talked about trees . . . trees . . . trees. Was as loony as old J. Sterling Morton himself about setting out timber. Would go after saplings and cuttings and help haul ’em in for the careless ones if they’d set ’em out. No, he wasn’t lazy . . . lord, no. . . . Just plannin’ fer the whole kit ’n’ bilin’ of ’em instead of himself. Carried the whole precinct on his shoulders. Didn’t leave Abbie anything very much besides this one half-section, but the five children and the good name o’ Deal.”
Abbie, bending over the potatoes, with the neighbor women bustling around her, said softly to one they could not see, “Will, I’m glad,—glad that you left me the children and the good name of Deal.”
John was not much more than settled in his new Cedartown office when his thirtieth birthday arrived, via the 1902 calendar. Thirty having been the meridian between youth and old bachelorhood in Abbie’s young day, she concluded quite definitely that he was never going to marry. And as has happened since the time Naomi’s sons appeared before her with Ruth and Orpha, Abbie was suddenly astounded by John writing her, while on a business trip, that he was bringing home a bride. She was Eloise Wentworth, a teacher he had met in Iowa, and they would arrive on the four o’clock, Saturday.
Abbie sat with the letter in her lap, the world tumbling grotesquely about her. This bolt from the blue, so characteristic of John, was hard to realize. A peculiar form of jealousy tore at her. “I’ll bet she did the courting herself,” Abbie said grimly, and was too wrought up to laugh at herself. Why hadn’t he picked out some one she knew? Emma Lutz, Dr. Fred Baker, Harrison Rhodes,—she had met and known them all before they came into the family. Why had he done this, anyway? Did he know the girl well? What was she like? Of all the children, John was the one who had to be handled with gloves. Would she know how to get along with him? Why hadn’t he married one of the home girls? Why hadn’t he ever mentioned the girl? All at once Abbie began to laugh aloud, almost hysterically. “I’m talking for all the world like Grandma,” she said. “Oh, I mustn’t let myself get like Grandma Deal.”
She never dreaded anything so much in her life as the prospects of that meeting on Saturday. It took all of her will-power to get herself in hand to welcome them. She was glad that Grace was home with her. Grace was fourteen now and in the Cedartown High School. No longer did children of the community have to go from home and board at the old Weeping Water Academy, for the Cedartown High School was now accredited to the University. Grace was a nice girl and a good student,—efficient, neat, a little prim. Looking at her sometimes, critically, Abbie wondered why a keen sense of humor had been omitted from Grace’s makeup. She laughed at a joke when it was in a column duly labeled as one, and warranted to tickle the risibilities. But humor, that vague, elusive thing which had pulled Abbie through many a monotonous day and over many a harsh experience, seemed a missing ingredient.
The two, Abbie and Grace, met the newly-married couple with the surrey. Abbie was fifty-five now, her once glorious reddish-brown hair colorless where it was not gray, her shoulders drooping, her body rather shapeless.
Eloise was pleasant,—a nice looking young woman with firm lips. She had on an Alice-blue skirt made the new way with all the gathers in the back, and dragging a little on the station platform. A tight silk waist of the same shade with a cream-colored lace fichu, and a blue hat fitting firmly to her coils of light hair in the back but protruding fashionably to the front far over the large roll of a high pompadour, completed her most up-to-date costume. She met Abbie half-way with cordiality. She fitted herself into the family, firmly, as though she had arrived with the preconceived idea that she was going to make the most of John’s mother. Grace took a liking to her immediately. The two discussed school affairs earnestly, with Grace hanging on her new sister’s every firm word. Abbie, cleaning up the table and listening to them, said to herself, “For all the world, I believe she and Grace are two of a kind.”
“Mother,” Eloise said firmly, after supper when John had gone over to the office, “I’m going to call you ‘Mother’ right on the start and then it won’t be hard.”
“I hope,” said Abbie gently, “it won’t be hard to call me ‘Mother.’ ”
“Oh, no,” Eloise said firmly. “I’m not going to let it be hard. That’s why I’m beginning at once. Mother, John’s and my marriage is to be different from other marriages.”
“How, Eloise?”
“Because I’m going at it in a businesslike, systematic way.”
“Yes,” said Abbie, “that’s a good way.”
“I’m going to make our home a well-organized place of rest and peace for John.”
“That will be nice.”
“You see mistakes on all sides and I’m not going to make any.”
“No,” said Abbie, “of course you won’t.”
“I’ve been reading everything on the subject and I know that I’m well prepared.”
“Yes,” said Abbie meekly, “I think you are.”
“She has everything, Will,” Abbie said to the spirit who was comrade and confidante, “education, looks, high ideals, efficiency,—everything but a sense of humor. And oh, Will, how John will miss it.”
He admires her, Abbie.
“And loves her, Will, and love covers many things.”
The next year Abbie sold the rest of the acreage to Gus Reinmueller, retaining the five acres which contained the house and out-buildings, the orchard and one pasture. Gus paid twelve thousand dollars for it, giving four thousand in cash and an interest-bearing note. “Now we can plan for Grace to go to the University,” Abbie said. “Grace wants to be a teacher and now I can help her.”
Now that the land was sold, Abbie did not have to think of the responsibility of the crops, but her hands were still busy with chickens, and pigs and the cow. She drove a sorrel mare now back and forth, attending everything that went on in Cedartown, which she felt would benefit her mentally, and she did not miss a church service or Ladies’ Aid. One of the attractions that summer, which she and Grace patronized, was an entertainment in the opera house, purporting to be a sort of magic-lantern show in which the people in the picture would move about as they were thrown on the sheet.
“It may be true,” Abbie admitted, but added with frank suspicion that there was probably a catch in it somewhere.
The program opened with a piece by the Cedartown orchestra. Probably the Boston Symphony could have done as well, but old Charlie Beadle, who was leader and drummer, would not have admitted it. A male quartet next sang, “Out on the Deep When the Sun Is Low.” One gathered the rather disquieting impression from their forlorn and hopeless tones that there was small prospect of ever seeing the center of the solar system again. Miss Happy Joy Hansen then spoke “The Raggedy Man, He Works for Paw,” with so much childish lisping and so much coy twisting of an imaginary apron, that one never in the world could have guessed her age, unless he had known, as all Cedartown did, that, neither happily nor joyously, would she ever, ever again see thirty-two.
And then, the picture. The male quartet, having apparently recovered from the sad effects of the setting sun, launched forth into a spirited presentation of: “When Kate and I Were Coming Through the Rye.” A field of grain was plainly visible on the cloth, and, incredulous as it seemed, it waved and jerked and twitched. Kate came into sight, and, unbelievable as it was, Kate also waved and jerked and twitched. A young man close behind her, with every indication of St. Vitus’ Dance, also waved and jerked and twitched. But they moved. The advertisement had not lied. Across the sheet the people moved. “Dear, dear,” Abbie said on the way home. “What next can they do? There’s just nothing now left to be invented, Grace.”
Late that fall, Abbie helped organize a Woman’s Club. “I don’t know that we will do a great deal of good, but we won’t do any harm, and much of life is an experiment, anyway.”
Christine was disgusted when Abbie told her. “A club! Ach! for what? To hit mit?”
On the very day in which Abbie drove home with the office of second vice president of the Cedartown Woman’s Club upon her shoulders, a touch of the old raw prairie days presented itself like a bit of the past. She met Oscar Lutz with a wild deer which he had shot and killed in the timber a mile east of Stove Creek,—a young buck that, quivering and at bay, seemed the last survivor of his comrades that had once roamed the east-Nebraska country.
Grace graduated from High School when Abbie was fifty-eight. She gave the valedictory for her class, an earnest if youthful dissertation on “Heaven Is Not Reached by a Single Bound.”
The Sunday after the exercises, all of the children, but Isabelle, were home for dinner. At the table Mack said: “Mother, you ought to offer the place for sale right away to get a buyer by fall. It will make some farmer who wants to retire, a mighty good place,—a nice little five-acre tract with the orchard and a pasture and all.”
“I would have before this,” Abbie admitted, “but I haven’t been real sure in my mind that I’d leave at all.”
They all voiced the same sentiment, “Oh, yes, Mother, you ought to move to Lincoln with Grace.”
“There’s no real use for your staying.”
“With Grace gone, just think how lonesome you’ll be.”
Dr. Baker and Margaret were willing to have Grace and her mother live with them just as Isabelle had done for those two years. The Bakers had been married fifteen years now. Dr. Baker’s firm was a leading one, Dr. Baker himself prominent in his profession. They had a nice comfortable home. Lincoln was a city.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to do that,” Abbie said. “Not both of us. That would be one too many, anyway. If I go, Grace and I will have a little place of our own.”
That set them off on another tangent. There were nice cottages going up everywhere, several attractive ones of the new type called bungalows.
Before they left, they went over all the arguments for selling. “The place is too big for you, Mother. What do you need of a yard this size? Or a house with this many rooms? Or a barn?” Their talk was sensible. All the arguments seemed on their side. “And above all the reasons, is the one that it’s going to be lonesome for you here.” They were unanimous in that opinion of their mother’s coming loneliness.
Abbie thought about it a great deal that summer before it was time for Grace to go. At times she decided that she was foolish to stay in the old place. The children were right. It was only old-fashioned, narrow people who never made a change. She believed she would go up to Lincoln and look at cottages. In the city there would be a larger life for her, new contacts, opportunities to see and hear better things. Just as she had half reconciled herself to the plan, she would walk down the path between the cedars, which she and Will had set out, look at her hollyhocks and delphinium, blood-red and sea-blue against the White pickets, stand for a time and gaze over toward the heavy fringe of willows and oaks and elms along Stove Creek. Everything looked familiar,—friendly. There would never be another real home for her. Home was something besides so much lumber and plaster. You built your thoughts into the frame work. You planted a little of your heart with the trees and the shrubbery.
It was the only old home the children had ever known. There ought to be a home for children to come to,—and their children,—a central place, to which they could always bring their joys and sorrows,—an old familiar place for them to return to on Sundays and Christmases. An old home ought always to stand like a mother with open arms. It ought to be here waiting for the children to come to it,—like homing pigeons.
On the next Sunday Abbie was ready with her decision. “No, I’ve decided. I’m going to stay here. This is my home.”
They went over all the arguments again. “The place is too big for you, Mother. What do you need of a house this size? Or a barn? And above all, with Grace gone, it will be too lonely for you here. . . .”
Abbie looked beyond the poplars, stared for a moment beyond the Lombardy poplars into the deepening prairie twilight.
“No,” she said quietly, “you wouldn’t understand. It won’t be lonely here.”