On the Banks of Plum Creek Read online

  “Now dress quickly,” Ma said, “or you’ll catch your death of cold.”

  But Laura was glowing warm. She had never felt so fine and frisky. Mary said, “I’m surprised at you, Laura. I wouldn’t go out in the rain and get all wet like that.”

  “Oh, Mary, you just ought to see the creek!” Laura cried, and she asked, “Ma, may I go out and see it again after breakfast?”

  “You may not,” said Ma. “Not while it is raining.”

  But while they were eating breakfast the rain stopped. The sun was shining, and Pa said that Laura and Mary might go with him to look at the creek.

  The air was fresh and clean and damp. It smelled like spring. The sky was blue, with large clouds sailing in it. All the snow was gone from the soaking-wet earth. Up on the high bank, Laura could still hear the creek roaring.

  “This weather beats me,” said Pa. “I never saw anything like it.”

  “Is it still grasshopper weather?” Laura asked him, but Pa did not know.

  They went along the high bank, looking at the strange sights. The roaring, foaming creek changed everything. The plum thickets were only foamy brushwood in the water. The tableland was a round island. All around it the water flowed smoothly, coming out of a wide, humping river and running back into it. Where the swimming-pool had been, the tall willows were short willows standing in a lake.

  Beyond them, the land that Pa had plowed lay black and wet. Pa looked at it and said, “It won’t be long now till I can get the wheat planted.”

  Chapter 15

  The Footbridge

  Next day Laura was sure that Ma would not let her go to play in the creek. It was still roaring, but more softly. In the dugout she could hear it calling her. So Laura quietly slipped outdoors without saying anything to Ma.

  The water was not so high now. It had gone down from the steps and Laura could see it foaming against the footbridge. Part of the plank was above the water.

  All winter the creek had been covered with ice; it had been motionless and still, never making a sound. Now it was running swiftly and making a joyful noise. Where it struck the edge of the plank it foamed up in white bubbles and laughed to itself.

  Laura took off her shoes and stockings and put them safely on the bottom step. Then she walked out on the plank and stood watching the noisy water.

  Drops splashed her bare feet and thin little waves ran around them. She dabbled one foot in the swirling foam. Then down she sat on the plank and plumped both legs into the water. The creek ran strong against them and she kicked against it. That was fun!

  Now she was wet almost all over, but her whole skin wanted to be in the water. She lay on her stomach and thrust her arms down on each side of the plank, deep into the fast current. But that was not enough. She wanted to be really in the roaring, joyous creek. She clasped her hands together under the plank and rolled off it.

  In that very instant, she knew the creek was not playing. It was strong and terrible. It seized her whole body and pulled it under the plank. Only her head was out, and one arm desperately across the narrow plank.

  The water was pulling her and it was pushing, too. It was trying to drag her head under the plank. Her chin held on to the edge and her arm clutched, while the water pulled hard at all the rest of her. It was not laughing now.

  No one knew where she was. No one could hear her if she screamed for help. The water roared loud and tugged at her, stronger and stronger. Laura kicked, but the water was stronger than her legs. She got both arms across the plank and pulled, but the water pulled harder. It pulled the back of her head down and it jerked as if it would jerk her in two. It was cold. The coldness soaked into her.

  This was not like wolves or cattle. The creek was not alive. It was only strong and terrible and never stopping. It would pull her down and whirl her away, rolling and tossing her like a willow branch. It would not care.

  Her legs were tired, and her arms hardly felt the plank any more.

  “I must get out. I must!” she thought. The creek’s roaring was in her head. She kicked hard with both her feet and pulled hard with her arms, and then she was lying on the plank again.

  The plank was solid under her stomach and under her face. She lay on it and breathed and was glad it was solid.

  When she moved, her head whirled. She crawled off the plank. She took her shoes and her stockings and she climbed slowly up the muddy steps. At the door of the dugout she stopped. She did not know what to say to Ma.

  After a while she went in. Just inside the door she stood still and water dripped off her. Ma was sewing.

  “Where have you been, Laura?” Ma asked, looking up. Then she came quickly, saying: “My goodness! Turn around, quick!” She began unbuttoning Laura down the back. “What happened? Did you fall in the creek?”

  “No, ma’am,” Laura said. “I—I went in.”

  Ma listened and went on undressing Laura and rubbing her hard all over with a towel. She did not say a word even when Laura had told her everything. Laura’s teeth chattered, and Ma wrapped a quilt around her and sat her close to the stove.

  At last Ma said: “Well, Laura, you have been very naughty and I think you knew it all the time. But I can’t punish you. I can’t even scold you. You came near being drowned.”

  Laura did not say anything.

  “You won’t go near the creek again till Pa or I say you may, and that won’t be till the water goes down,” said Ma.

  “No’m,” Laura said.

  The creek would go down. It would be a gentle, pleasant place to play in again. But nobody could make it do that. Nobody could make it do anything. Laura knew now that there were things stronger than anybody. But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.

  Chapter 16

  The Wonderful House

  The creek went down. All at once the days were warm, and early every morning Pa went to work the wheatfield with Sam and David, the Christmas horses.

  “I declare, Ma said, “you’re working that ground to death and killing yourself.”

  But Pa said the ground was dry because there had not been enough snow. He must plow deep and harrow well, and get the wheat sowed quickly. Every day he was working before the sun came up and he worked till dark.

  Laura waited in the dark till she heard Sam and David splashing into the ford. Then she ran into the dugout for the lantern and she hurried to the stable to hold it so that Pa could see to do the chores.

  He was too tired to laugh or talk. He ate supper and went to bed.

  At last the wheat was sowed. Then he sowed oats, and he made the potato patch and the garden. Ma and Mary and Laura helped plant the potatoes and sprinkle little seeds in the garden-rows, and they let Carrie think she was helping.

  The whole world was green with grass now; the yellow-green willow leaves were uncurling. Violets and buttercups were thick in the prairie hollows, and the sorrel’s clover-like leaves and lavender blossoms were sour and good to eat. Only the wheat-field was bare and brown.

  One evening Pa showed Laura a faint green mist on that brown field. The wheat was up! Each tiny sprout was so thin you could hardly see it, but so many of them all together made that misty green. Everyone was happy that night because the wheat was a good stand.

  The next day Pa drove to town. Sam and David could go to town and come back in one afternoon. There was hardly time to miss Pa, and they were not even watching for him when he came home. Laura heard the wagon first, and she was the first one up the path.

  Pa was sitting on the wagon seat. His face was one big shining of joy, and lumber was piled high in the wagon box behind him. He sang out, “Here’s your new house, Caroline!”

  “But Charles!” Ma gasped. Laura ran and climbed up over the wheel, up onto that pile of boards. She had never seen such smooth, straight, beautiful boards. They had been sawed by machinery.

  “But the wheat’s hardly up yet!” Ma said.

  “That’s all right,” Pa told he
r. “They let me have the lumber, and we’ll pay for it when we sell the wheat.”

  Laura asked him, “Are we going to have a house made of boards?”

  “Yes, flutterbudget,” said Pa. “We’re going to have a whole house built of sawed lumber. And it’s going to have glass windows!”

  It was really true. Next morning Mr. Nelson came to help Pa, and they began digging the cellar for that house. They were going to have that wonderful house, just because the wheat was growing.

  Laura and Mary could hardly stay in the dugout long enough to do their work. But Ma made them do it.

  “And I won’t have you giving your work a lick and a promise,” said Ma. So they washed every breakfast dish and put them all away. They made their bed neatly. They brushed the floor with the willow-twig broom and set the broom in its place. Then they could go.

  They ran down the steps and over the footbridge, and under the willows, up to the prairie. They went through the prairie grasses and up to the top of a green knoll, where Pa and Mr. Nelson were building the new house.

  It was fun to watch them set up the skeleton house. The timbers stood up slender and golden-new, and the sky was very blue between them. The hammers made a gay sound. The planes cut long curly shavings from the sweet-smelling boards.

  Laura and Mary hung little shavings over their ears for earrings. They put them around their necks for necklaces. Laura tucked long ones in her hair and they hung down in golden curls, just the color she had always wanted her hair to be.

  Up on the skeleton roof Pa and Mr. Nelson hammered and sawed. Little blocks of wood fell down, and Laura and Mary gathered them in piles and built houses of their own. They had never had such a good time.

  Pa and Mr. Nelson covered the skeleton walls with slanting boards nailed on. They shingled the roof with boughten shingles. Boughten shingles were thin and all the same size; they were far finer shingles than even Pa could hew with an ax. They made an even, tight roof, with not one crack in it.

  Then Pa laid the floor of silky-smooth boards that were grooved along the edges and fitted together perfectly. Overhead he laid another floor for the upstairs, and that made the ceiling of the downstairs.

  Across the downstairs, Pa put up a partition. That house was going to have two rooms! One was the bedroom, and the other was only to live in. He put two shining-clear glass windows in that room; one looking toward the sunrise and the other beside the doorway to the south. In the bedroom walls he set two more windows, and they were glass windows, too.

  Laura had never seen such wonderful windows. They were in halves. There were six panes of glass in each half, and the bottom half would push up, and stay up when a stick was set under it.

  Opposite the front door Pa put a back door, and outside it he built a tiny room. That was a lean-to, because it leaned against the house. It would keep out the north winds in the wintertime, and it was a place where Ma could keep her broom and mop and washtub.

  Now Mr. Nelson was not there and Laura asked questions all the time. Pa said the bedroom was for Ma and Carrie and him. He said the attic was for Mary and Laura, to sleep in and to play in. Laura wanted so much to see it that he stopped work on the lean-to and nailed strips of board up the wall, to make the attic ladder.

  Laura skipped quickly up that ladder till her head came up through the hole in the attic floor. The attic was as big as both rooms downstairs. Its floor was smooth boards. Its slanting roof was the underside of the fresh, yellow shingles. There was a little window at each end of that attic, and those windows were glass windows!

  At first Mary was scared to swing off the ladder to the attic floor. Then she was scared to step down through the floor-hole onto the ladder. Laura felt scared, too, but she pretended she didn’t. And they soon got used to getting on and off the ladder.

  Now they thought the house was done. But Pa nailed black tar-paper all over the outside of the house walls. Then he nailed more boards over that paper. They were long, smooth boards, one lapping over the other all up the sides of the house. Then around the windows and the doorways Pa nailed flat frames.

  “This house is tight as a drum!” he said. There was not one single crack in the roof or the walls or the floor of that house, to let in rain or cold winds.

  Then Pa put in the doors, and they were boughten doors. They were smooth, and far thinner than slab doors hewed with an ax, and even thinner panes were set into them above and below their middles. Their hinges were boughten hinges, and it was marvelous to see them open and shut. They did not rattle like wooden hinges or let the door drag like leather hinges.

  Into those doors Pa set boughten locks, with keys that went into small, shaped holes, and turned and clicked. These locks had white china door knobs.

  Then one day Pa said, “Laura and Mary, can you keep a secret?”

  “Oh yes, Pa!” they said.

  “Promise you won’t tell Ma?” he asked, and they promised.

  He opened the lean-to door. And there stood a shiny-black cookstove. Pa had brought it from town and hidden it there, to surprise Ma.

  On top, that cookstove had four round holes and four round lids fitted them. Each lid had a grooved hole in it, and there was an iron handle that fitted into the holes, to lift the lid by. In front, there was a long, low door. There were slits in this door, and a piece of iron would slide back and forth, to close these slits or open them. That was the draught. Under it, a shelf like an oblong pan stuck out. That was to catch ashes and keep them from dropping on the floor. A lid swung flat over this hollowed-out shelf. And on the lid were raised iron letters in rows.

  Mary put her finger on the bottom row and spelled, out, “P A T. One seven seven ought.” She asked Pa, “What’s that spell, Pa?”

  “It spells Pat,” Pa said.

  Laura opened a big door on the side of the stove, and looked into a big square place with a shelf across it. “Oh Pa, what’s this for?” she asked him.

  “It’s the oven,” Pa told her.

  He lifted that marvelous stove and set it in the living-room, and put up the stovepipe. Piece by piece, the stovepipe went up through the ceiling and the attic and through a hole he sawed in the roof. Then Pa climbed onto the roof and he set a larger tin pipe over the stovepipe. The tin pipe had a spread-out, flat bottom that covered the hole in the roof. Not a drop of rain could run down the stovepipe into the new house.

  That was a prairie chimney.

  “Well, it’s done,” Pa said. “Even to a prairie chimney.”

  There was nothing more that a house could possibly have. The glass windows made the inside of that house so light that you would hardly know you were in a house. It smelled clean and piny, from the yellow-new board walls and floor. The cookstove stood lordly in the corner by the lean-to door. A touch on the white-china door knob swung the boughten door on its boughten hinges, and the door knob’s little iron tongue clicked and held the door shut.

  “We’ll move in, tomorrow morning,” Pa said. “This is the last night we’ll sleep in a dugout.”

  Laura and Mary took his hands and they went down the knoll. The wheat-field was a silky, shimmery green rippling over a curve of the prairie. Its sides were straight and its corners square, and all around it the wild prairie grasses looked coarser and darker green. Laura looked back at the wonderful house. In the sunshine on the knoll, its sawed-lumber walls and roof were as golden as a straw-stack.

  Chapter 17

  Moving In

  In the sunny morning Ma and Laura helped carry everything from the dugout up to the top of the bank and load it in the wagon. Laura hardly dared look at Pa; they were bursting with the secret surprise for Ma.

  Ma did not suspect anything. She took the hot ashes out of the little old stove so that Pa could handle it. She asked Pa, “Did you remember to get more stovepipe?”

  “Yes, Caroline,” Pa said. Laura did not laugh, but she choked.

  “Goodness, Laura,” Ma said, “have you got a frog in your throat?”

  D
avid and Sam hauled the wagon away, across the ford and back over the prairie, up to the new house. Ma and Mary and Laura, with armfuls of things, and Carrie toddling ahead, went over the footbridge and up the grassy path. The sawed-lumber house with its boughten-shingle roof was all golden on the knoll, and Pa jumped off the wagon and waited to be with Ma when she saw the cookstove.

  She walked into the house and stopped short. Her mouth opened and shut. Then she said, weakly, “My land!”

  Laura and Mary whooped and danced, and so did Carrie, though she did not know why.

  “It’s yours, Ma! It’s your new cookstove!” they shouted. “It’s got an oven! And four lids, and a little handle!” Mary said. “It’s got letters on it and I can read them! PAT, Pat!”

  “Oh, Charles, you shouldn’t!” Ma said.

  Pa hugged her. “Don’t you worry, Caroline!” he told her.

  “I never have worried, Charles,” Ma answered. “But building such a house, and glass windows, and buying a stove—it’s too much.”

  “Nothing’s too much for you,” said Pa. “And don’t worry about the expense. Just look through that glass at that wheat-field!”

  But Laura and Mary pulled her to the cookstove. She lifted the lids as Laura showed her, she watched while Mary worked the draught, she looked at the oven.

  “My!” she said. “I don’t know if I dare try to get dinner on such a big, beautiful stove!”

  But she did get dinner on that wonderful stove and Mary and Laura set the table in the bright, airy room. The glass windows were open, air and light came in from every side, and sunshine was streaming in through the doorway and the shining window beside it.

  It was such fun to eat in that big, airy, light house that after dinner they sat at the table, just enjoying being there.

  “Now this is something like!” Pa said.

  Then they put up the curtains. Glass windows must have curtains, and Ma had made them of pieces of worn-out sheets, starched crisp and white as snow. She had edged them with narrow strips of pretty calico. The curtains in the big room were edged with pink strips from Carrie’s little dress that had been torn when the oxen ran away. The bedroom curtains were edged with strips from Mary’s old blue dress. That was the pink calico and the blue calico that Pa brought home from town, long ago in the Big Woods.