Chapter Nineteen
The House Arrives
As the morning had worn on, the heat had become more intense and the air more oppressive. Manda found it difficult to stay with her sewing, and she made frequent trips to the door of the soddy to study the sky. The younger children played listlessly beside the creek, and Polly muttered under her breath as she pounded the bread dough. Manda wished that Chad hadn’t chosen this day to go to town. Even if he were working out of sight in the field, she would have felt better.
When Simon came running across the yard, shouting for her to come and see, Manda rushed to the door.
“Look! Look what’s coming!” He pointed toward the north.
There in the distance was a large object moving across the prairie so slowly that Manda wasn’t certain it was moving at all. She knew at once what it was.
“It’s that wretched house,” she said to Polly, who had come to stand beside her. “That must have been what Luke felt was coming.”
Polly wiped her hands on her apron. “Ain’t natural, movin’ houses across the country like that. A house is s’posed to stand where you build it, not go chasin’ from one place to another. How long you reckon it’ll take to get here?”
When Luke and Ethan came in for the noon meal, the object appeared to be no nearer than it had been when Simon spotted it.
“It’ll take several days,” Luke said. “They have to rest the oxen and change teams pretty often. That’s a heavy load to drag without wheels under it.”
In the town of Winner, the storm passed as quickly as it had come. By the time Chad, Henry, and Frances had finished eating, they were able to start for home.
“The rain is headed west,” Henry remarked. “We’re followin’ right along behind it.”
“We can use it,” Chad said. “It certainly has settled the dust on this road.”
Frances blew out a breath. “It didn’t make it any cooler. I feel like I’m steaming.”
“It will start to cool soon,” Chad assured her. “We’ll be home before dark, the Lord willing.”
By the middle of the afternoon, the house wasn’t the only thing coming across the prairie. In the northeast sky, black clouds rolled toward them. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled and growled in the distance. Polly herded the children into the soddy, and they huddled in the doorway, watching the approaching storm. The chickens and ducks scattered, and Ethan led the cows to the barn. Suddenly the sky opened up, and hailstones of enormous size began to beat the ground.
“Big snow!” Will shouted and had to be restrained from running out to grab some of hailstones.
“You stay here,” Polly commanded. “Them things would knock you senseless. How in the world ice can drop from the sky on a day as hot as this, I’ll never know.”
When the storm moved on, the ground was covered with a blanket of white, much to the joy of the children.
Luke, however, gazed out over the flattened fields, where corn and wheat had been standing proudly that morning. His shoulders drooped, and his usually cheerful face was glum. “Seems like if the Lord told you to pick up and move to this forsaken plain, He’d at least see to it that your crops didn’t get beat to the ground the first summer you was here.”
Manda was silent, for she felt much the same way herself. They had suffered a great deal for a lot of nothing.
Ethan stood beside them with his fists stuffed into his overall pockets. “What will Pa do when he sees it?”
“I can tell you what he’ll do,” Polly said in a no-nonsense voice. “He’ll save what he can, plow the rest under, and plant again. Maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but the Bible says that the Lord sends rain on the just and the unjust. Same thing for ice balls, I guess. The unjust’ll complain about it, and the just’ll make the best of it. Seems to me like I read too that ‘the just shall live by faith,’ so we got to buck up and believe we’ll be taken care of. Now I’m gonna get supper and be thankful for what we got.”
If Chad was discouraged by the apparent futility of his hard work, he didn’t reveal it to the family. As Polly had predicted, he continued to labor in the fields and do what he could to restore the crops.
“We’ll have late wheat and corn,” he said, “and there will be wild hay for the livestock.” He looked at Manda. “You were right to bring all our winter food. We’ll not go hungry, and we will have adequate shelter. We must thank the Lord for keeping us well and providing for our needs.”
The “adequate shelter” was approaching its intended spot, however slowly. It was now possible to determine the outlines of the house. By the end of the week, the children were counting the windows on the sides visible to them.
“There are two windows in every bedroom,” Frances announced. “I hope mine looks out over the creek.”
“I won’t fuss about my bedroom so long as my kitchen looks east,” Polly said. “What will they do if they’re haulin’ that thing up here backwards?”
“Judging by the size of it, we’ll just have to live in it backwards,” Manda said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Chad replied when she asked him about it. “Comancho knows how we want it. As a matter of fact, that’s the way it sat on the original lot.”
“How convenient. I don’t suppose the cupboards are in place and the floors scrubbed?”
“No, but if we had started building from the ground up, we’d be spending the winter in the soddy. I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable in the house, even if it isn’t exactly what you had planned.”
“Yes, I know I will,” Manda admitted. “I have no cause to complain. The Lord has been good to us. When I see the size of the rooms, I’ll order wallpaper, and we’ll begin sewing the curtains.”
The day the house was lowered to the foundation was an exciting one for everybody. Aside from the feeding and milking, the farmwork was suspended. There was much shouting of directions as Comancho and his helpers scurried about.
Even Polly left her housework to watch this unusual event. She was alarmed by the sight of men crawling underneath the house before the logs were removed.
“I hope they don’t let that down on nobody. What if the house don’t fit on that piece of cement?”
“They’re puttin’ big blocks of brick between the cement slab and the house. And it’ll fit. You wait and see,” Henry told her.
Polly didn’t argue, but she was skeptical.
However, by the middle of the afternoon, the logs were pulled out, and the house settled solidly on its foundation.
“Can we move in now?” Simon shouted.
“Not yet,” Frances told him. “It needs a new roof and fixing up inside. It’ll take a while to do all that.”
As Ethan walked from the barn with Henry later that evening, he looked at the big house and the surrounding fields. “I guess we really belong here now, don’t we?”
Henry put his arm around the boy. “I reckon you do, Ethan. We couldn’t get along without any of you young ’uns. Come on. Let’s see what Polly’s fixed for supper. And afterward I’ll beat you in a game of checkers.”
