Little Town on the Prairie Read online

  “That’s an easy one,” said Pa.

  “One for the blackbird,

  One for the crow,

  And that will leave

  Just two to grow.”

  The garden was growing now. In tiny rows of different greens, the radishes, lettuce, onions, were up. The first crumpled leaves of peas were pushing upward. The young tomatoes stood on thin stems, spreading out their first lacy foliage.

  “I’ve been looking at the garden, it needs hoeing,” Ma said, while Laura set the violets in water to perfume the supper table. “And I do believe the beans will be up any day now, it’s turned so warm.”

  All one hot morning, the beans were popping out of the ground. Grace discovered them and came shrieking with excitement to tell Ma. All that morning she could not be coaxed away from watching them. Up from the bare earth, bean after bean was popping, its stem uncoiling like a steel spring, and up in the sunshine the halves of the split bean still clutched two pale twinleaves. Every time a bean popped up, Grace squealed again.

  Now that the corn was planted, Pa built the missing half of the claim shanty. One morning he laid the floor joists. Then he made the frame, and Laura helped him raise it and hold it straight to the plumb line while he nailed it. He put in the studding, and the frames for two windows. Then he laid the rafters, to make the other slant of the roof that had not been there before.

  Laura helped him all the time, Carrie and Grace watched, and picked up every nail that Pa dropped by mistake. Even Ma often spent minutes in idleness, looking on. It was exciting to see the shanty being made into a house.

  When it was done, they had three rooms. The new part was two tiny bedrooms, each with a window. Now the beds would not be in the front room any more.

  “Here’s where we kill two birds with one stone,” said Ma. “We’ll combine spring housecleaning and moving.”

  They washed the window curtains and all the quilts and hung them out to dry. Then they washed the new windows till they shone, and hung on them new curtains made of old sheets and beautifully hemmed with Mary’s tiny stitches. Ma and Laura set up the bedsteads in the new rooms all made of fresh, clean-smelling boards. Laura and Carrie filled the straw ticks with the brightest hay from the middle of a haystack, and they made up the beds with sheets still warm from Ma’s ironing and with the clean quilts smelling of the prairie air.

  Then Ma and Laura scrubbed and scoured every inch of the old shanty, that was now the front room. It was spacious now, with no beds in it, only the cookstove and cupboards and table and chairs and the whatnot. When it was perfectly clean, and everything in place, they all stood and admired it.

  “You needn’t see it for me, Laura,” Mary said. “I can feel how large and fresh and pretty it is.”

  The fresh, starched white curtains moved softly in the wind at the open window. The scrubbed board walls and the floor were a soft yellow-gray. A bouquet of grass flowers and windflowers that Carrie had picked and put in the blue bowl on the table, seemed to bring springtime in. In the corner the varnished brown whatnot stood stylish and handsome.

  The afternoon light made plain the gilded titles of the books on the whatnot’s lower shelf, and glittered in the three glass boxes on the shelf above, each with tiny flowers painted on it. Above them, on the next shelf, the gilt flowers shone on the glass face of the clock and its brass pendulum glinted, swinging to and fro. Higher still, on the very top shelf, was Laura’s white china jewel box with the wee gold cup and saucer on its lid, and beside it, watching over it, sat Carrie’s brown and white china dog.

  On the wall between the doors of the new bedrooms, Ma hung the wooden bracket that Pa had carved for her Christmas present, long ago in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Every little flower and leaf, the small vine on the edge of the little shelf, and the larger vines climbing to the large star at the top, were still as perfect as when he had carved them with his jackknife. Older still, older than Laura could remember, Ma’s china shepherdess stood pink and white and smiling on the shelf.

  It was a beautiful room.

  Chapter 3

  The Necessary Cat

  Now the first yellow-green spears of corn were dotted like fluttering ribbon-ends along the furrows of broken sod. One evening Pa walked across the field to look at them. He came back tired and exasperated.

  “I’ve got to replant more than half the cornfield,” he said.

  “Oh, Pa. Why?” Laura asked.

  “Gophers,” said Pa. “Well, this is what a man gets for putting in the first corn in a new country.”

  Grace was hugging his legs. He picked her up and tickled her cheek with his beard to make her laugh. She remembered the planting rhyme, and sitting on his knee she chanted it proudly

  “One for the blackbird,

  One for the crow,

  And that will leave

  Just two to grow.”

  “The man that made that up was an Easterner,” Pa told her. “Out here in the Territory we’ll have to make our own rhyme, Grace. How’s this for a try?

  “One for a gopher,

  Two for a gopher,

  Three for a gopher,

  Four don’t go fur.”

  “Oh, Charles,” Ma protested, laughing. She did not think puns were funny, but she could not help laughing at the naughty look Pa gave her when he made one.

  He had no sooner planted the seed corn than the striped gophers found it. All over the field they had been scampering, and stopping to dig into the little spots of fine soil with their tiny paws. It was a wonder that they knew exactly where the kernels were buried.

  It was amazing that those little gophers, scampering, digging, sitting up straight and nibbling, each one, at one kernel of corn held in its paws, had eaten more than half of that whole field of corn.

  “They are pests!” said Pa. “I wish we had a cat like old Black Susan used to be. She’d have thinned ’em out.”

  “I need a cat in the house, too,” Ma agreed. “I declare the mice are getting so thick I can’t leave food uncovered in the cupboard. Is there a cat to be had, Charles?”

  “There’s not a cat in this whole country, that I know of,” Pa answered. “The storekeepers in town are complaining, too. Wilmarth’s talking of getting a cat shipped out from the East.”

  That very night, Laura was startled out of a sound sleep. Through the partition between the bedrooms she heard a gasp, a grunt and a sudden thud of something small and squashing. She heard Ma say, “Charles! What is it?”

  “I dreamed it,” Pa said, low. “I dreamed a barber was cutting my hair.”

  Ma spoke low, too, because this was the middle of the night and the house was asleep. “It was only a dream. Lie down again and let me have some of the covers back.”

  “I heard the barber’s shears go snip, snip,” said Pa.

  “Well, lie down and go to sleep,” Ma yawned.

  “My hair was being cut,” said Pa.

  “I never knew you to be upset by a dream before.” Ma yawned again. “Lie down and turn over and you won’t go on dreaming it.”

  “Caroline, my hair was being cut,” Pa repeated.

  “What do you mean?” Ma asked, more awake now.

  “I am telling you,” Pa said. “In my sleep I put up my hand and— Here. Feel my head.”

  “Charles! Your hair’s been cut!” Ma exclaimed. Laura heard her sit up in bed. “I can feel it, there’s a place on your head—”

  “Yes, that’s the spot,” said Pa. “I put up my hand—”

  Ma interrupted. “A place as big as my hand, shorn clean off.”

  “I put up my hand,” said Pa, “and I took hold of— something—”

  “What? What was it?” Ma asked.

  “I think,” said Pa, “I think it was a mouse.”

  “Where is it?” Ma cried out.

  “I don’t know. I threw it away, as hard as I could,” said Pa.

  “My goodness!” Ma said weakly. “It must have been a mouse. Cutting off your hair to make its
elf a nest.”

  After a minute Pa said, “Caroline, I swear—”

  “No, Charles,” Ma murmured.

  “Well, I would swear, if I did, that I can’t lie awake nights to keep mice out of my hair.”

  “I do wish we had a cat,” Ma wished hopelessly.

  Sure enough, in the morning a mouse lay dead by the bedroom wall where Pa had thrown it. And Pa appeared at breakfast with an almost bare spot on the back of his head, where the mouse had shorn his hair away.

  He would not have minded so much, but there was not time for the hair to grow before he must go to a meeting of county commissioners. The country was settling so rapidly that already a county was being organized, and Pa must help. As the oldest settler, he could not shirk his duty.

  The meeting was to be held at Whiting’s homestead claim, four miles northeast of town. No doubt Mrs. Whiting would be there, and Pa could hot keep his hat on.

  “Never mind,” Ma consoled him. “Just tell them how it happened. Likely they have mice.”

  “There’ll be more important things to talk about,” said Pa. “No, better just let them think this is the way my wife cuts my hair.”

  “Charles, you wouldn’t!” Ma exclaimed, before she saw that he was teasing her.

  When he drove away in the wagon that morning, he told Ma not to expect him for dinner. He had a ten-mile drive to make, on top of the time spent at the meeting.

  It was supper time when he came driving to the stable. He unhitched and came hurrying to the house so quickly that he met Carrie and Grace running out.

  “Girls! Caroline!” he called. “Guess what I’ve brought you!” His hand was in his pocket and his eyes were twinkling.

  “Candy!” Carrie and Grace answered together.

  “Better than that!” said Pa.

  “A letter?” Ma asked.

  “A paper,” Mary guessed. “Maybe The Advance.”

  Laura was watching Pa’s pocket. She was certain that something, not Pa’s hand, was moving inside it.

  “Let Mary see it first,” Pa warned the others. He took his hand from his pocket. There on his palm lay a tiny blue and white kitten.

  He laid it carefully in Mary’s hand. She stroked its soft fur with a finger tip. Gently she touched its tiny ears and its nose and its wee paws.

  “A kitten,” she said wonderingly. “Such a very little kitten.”

  “Its eyes aren’t open yet,” Laura told her. “Its baby fur is as blue as tobacco smoke, and its face and its breast and its paws and the very tip of its tail are white. Its claws are the tiniest wee white things.”

  “It’s too small to take from its mother,” Pa said. “But I had to take it while I had the chance, before somebody else did. Whiting had the cat sent out to them from the East. She had five kittens, and they sold four of them today for fifty cents apiece.”

  “You didn’t pay fifty cents for this kitten, Pa?”

  Laura asked him, wide-eyed.

  “Yes, I did,” said Pa.

  Quickly Ma said, “I don’t blame you, Charles. A cat in this house will be well worth it.”

  “Can we raise such a little kitten?” Mary asked anxiously.

  “Oh, yes,” Ma assured them. “We will have to feed it often, wash its eyes carefully, and keep it warm. Laura, find a small box and pick out the softest, warmest scraps from the scrap bag.”

  Laura made a snug, soft nest for the kitten in a pasteboard box, while Ma warmed some milk. They all watched while Ma took the kitten in her hand and fed it, a drop of milk at a time, from a teaspoon. The kitten’s wee paws clutched at the spoon and its pink mouth tried to suck, and drop by drop it sucked in the warm milk, though some ran down its chin. Then they put it in its nest, and under Mary’s warm hand it snuggled down to sleep.

  “It has nine lives like any cat, and it will live all right,” said Ma. “You’ll see.”

  Chapter 4

  The Happy Days

  Pa said that the new town was growing fast. New settlers were crowding in, hurrying to put up buildings to shelter them. One evening Pa and Ma walked to town to help organize a church, and soon a foundation was laid for a church building. There were not carpenters enough to do all the building that was wanted, so Pa got carpenter work to do.

  Every morning he did the chores and walked to town, taking a lunch in a tin pail. He began working promptly at seven o’clock, and by taking only a short nooning he was through work at half past six, and home again for a late supper. And every week he was earning fifteen dollars.

  That was a happy time, for the garden was growing well, the corn and oats were thriving, the calf was weaned so that now there was skim-milk for cottage cheese and there was cream to make butter and buttermilk, and best of all, Pa was earning so much money.

  Often while Laura worked in the garden, she thought of Mary’s going to college. It was nearly two years since they had heard there was a college for the blind in Iowa. Every day they had thought of that, and every night they prayed that Mary might go. The sorest grief in Mary’s blindness was that it hindered her studying. She liked so much to read and learn, and she had always wanted to be a schoolteacher. Now she could never teach school. Laura did not want to, but now she must; she had to be able to teach school as soon as she grew old enough, to earn money for Mary’s college education.

  “Never mind,” she thought, while she hoed, “I can see.”

  She saw the hoe, and the colors of the earth, and all the leafy little lights and shadows of the pea vines. She had only to glance up, and she saw miles of blowing grasses, the far blue skyline, the birds flying, Ellen and the calves on the green slope, and the different blues of the sky, the snowy piles of huge summer clouds. She had so much, and Mary saw only darkness.

  She hoped, though she hardly dared to, that perhaps Mary might go to college that fall. Pa was making so much money. If Mary could only go now, Laura would study with all her might, she would work so hard that surely she could teach school as soon as she was sixteen years old, and then her earnings would keep Mary in college.

  They all needed dresses and they all needed shoes, and Pa always had to buy flour and sugar and tea and salt meat. There was the lumber bill for the new half of the house, and coal must be bought for winter, and there were taxes. But this year there was the garden, and the corn and oats. By year after next, almost all they ate could be raised from the land.

  If they had hens and a pig, they would even have meat. This was settled country now, hardly any game was left, and they must buy meat or raise it. Perhaps next year Pa could buy hens and a pig. Some settlers were bringing them in.

  One evening Pa came home beaming.

  “Guess what, Caroline and girls!” he sang out. “I saw Boast in town today, and he sent word from Mrs. Boast. She’s setting a hen for us!”

  “Oh, Charles!” Ma said.

  “As soon as the chicks are big enough to scratch for themselves, he’s going to bring us the whole batch,” said Pa.

  “Oh, Charles, this is good news. It’s just like Mrs. Boast to do it, too,” Ma said thankfully. “How is she, did he say?”

  “Said they’re getting along fine. She’s so busy, she hasn’t been able to get to town this spring, but she’s certainly keeping you in mind.”

  “A whole setting of chicks,” said Ma. “There’s not many that would do it.”

  “They don’t forget how you took them in when they came out here, just married, and got lost in a snowstorm, and we were the only settlers in forty miles,” Pa reminded her. “Boast often speaks of it.”

  “Pshaw,” said Ma. “That was nothing. But a whole setting of eggs— It saves us a year in starting a flock.”

  If they could raise the chicks, if hawks or weasels or foxes did not get them, some would be pullets that summer. Next year the pullets would begin laying, then there would be eggs to set. Year after next, there would be cockerels to fry, and more pullets to increase the flock. Then there would be eggs to eat, and when the hens grew too o
ld to lay eggs, Ma could make them into chicken pie.

  “And if next spring Pa can buy a young pig,” said Mary, “then in a couple of years we’ll have fried ham and eggs. And lard and sausages and spareribs and head-cheese!”

  “And Grace can roast the pig’s tail!” Carrie chimed in.

  “Why?” Grace wanted to know. “What is a pig’s tail?”

  Carrie could remember butchering time, but Grace had never held a pig’s skinned tail in front of the cookstove grate and watched it sizzling brown. She had never seen Ma take from the oven the dripping pan full of brown, crackling, juicy spareribs. She had never seen the blue platter heaped with fragrant sausage-cakes, nor spooned their red-brown gravy onto pancakes. She remembered only Dakota Territory, and the meat she knew was the salt, white, fat pork that Pa bought sometimes.

  But someday they would have all the good things to eat again, for better times were coming. With so much work to do now, and everything to look forward to, the days were flying by. They were all so busy that they hardly missed Pa during the day. Then every night there was his coming home, when he brought news of the town, and they always had so much to tell him.

  All day they had been saving a most exciting thing to tell him. They could hardly expect him to believe it, for this was what had happened:

  While Ma was making the beds and Laura and Carrie were washing the breakfast dishes, they all heard the kitten cry out piteously. Kitty’s eyes were open now and she could scamper across the floor, chasing a scrap of paper that Grace drew on a string.

  “Grace, be careful!” Mary exclaimed. “Don’t hurt the kitty.”

  “I’m not hurting the kitty,” Grace answered earnestly.

  Before Mary could speak, the kitten squalled again.

  “Don’t, Grace!” Ma said from the bedroom. “Did you step on it?”

  “No, Ma,” Grace answered. The kitten cried desperately, and Laura turned around from the dishpan.