The First Four Years (5 page)

A newcomer would buy Kate and Bill for more than Manly had paid for them. Manly would not need them, for he had found a renter for the tree claim on shares; Manly would
furnish the seed.

Skip and Barnum, with Trixy and Fly to do the driving, could do the work on the one place.

If someone else worked the tree claim, Manly could raise more crops on the homestead and
have more profit from the farms than if he tried to work both claims all by himself.

An addition would have to be built on the homestead claim shanty before they moved but
they could do with one new room and a cellar underneath through using the original shanty
for a storeroom.

So it was decided. Manly hurried to stack the oats, which the hail had threshed to the
ground, but the oat straw made good animal feed to take the place of hay and that would
leave more hay to sell.

When the oats were hauled to the homestead and stacked, Manly dug the hole in the ground
for the cellar, and over it built the one-room addition to the claim shanty. Then he
built the frame of a barn, cut slough hay, and when it was dry stacked it around the frame to make a hay barn.

Everything was ready now for the moving. Manly and Laura moved to the homestead the next
day after the barn was finished.

It was the twenty-fifth of August. And the winter and summer were the first year.

I
t was a beautiful day, the twenty-fifth of August, 1886, when Manly and Laura moved to
the homestead.

"A fine day, as fine as our wedding day just a year ago, and it's a new start just as that
was. And a new home, if it is some smaller.

“We'll be all right now. You'll see! 'Everything evens up in the end. The rich man”'

His voice trailed silent but Laura couldn't help finishing the Irishman's saying to
herself: “The rich man has his ice in the summer and the poor man gets his in the winter.”
Well, they had got theirs in that hailstorm and in the summer too.

But she mustn't think about that now. The thing to do was to get things arranged in the
new home and make it cheerful for Manly. Poor Manly, he was having a hard time and doing
his very best. The house wasn't so bad. The one new room was narrow (twelve feet by
sixteen) and not very long, facing the south with a door and a window on a narrow porch,
closed at the west end by the old claim shanty. There was a window in the east end of the room. The looking glass was hung beside it in the south corner and the parlor table stood
under it. T h e head of the bed came close to the window on the other side and extended
along the north wall.

The kitchen stove was in the northwest corner of the room and a kitchen cupboard stood
beside it. T h e kitchen-dining table stood against the west wall close to the south end.

The carpet from the old bedroom was across the east end of the room, and the armchair and
Laura's little rocking chair stood on it, close to each other between the windows. The sun
came in through the east window in the mornings and shone across the room. It was all very snug and pleasant.

The room that had been the claim shanty was convenient as a storage room, and the stock
were comfortable in their new barn. Sheltered from the north and west by the low hill and
facing south, it would be warm in winter.

The whole place was new and fresh. The wind waved the tall grass in the slough that
stretched from the foot of the hill by the barn to the south and to the east line of the
farm. The house was at the top of the low hill and there would always be grassland in
front of it. The plowland lay to the north of the hill out of sight from the house. Laura was glad of that. She loved the sweep
of unbroken prairie with the wild grasses waving in the winds. To be sure
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the whole place was grassland now, except for a small field. Ten acres of cultivated
land were required by law before proving up on a homestead. But the grass to the north
of the house was upland, blue stem, and not the tall slough grass that grew so rankly in low places. It was haying time, and every day
counted in the amount of hay that could be put up before winter.

Because of the hailstorm, hay would be the only crop this year. So as soon as breakfast
was over on the day after the moving, Manly hitched Skip and Barnum to the mowing machine
and began cutting hay.

Laura left her morning's work undone and went with him to see the work started, and then
because the air was so fresh and the new-cut hay so clean and sweet, she wandered over the
field, picking the wild sunflowers and Indian paintbrush. Presently she went slowly back
to the house and her unfinished tasks.

She didn't want to stay in the house. There would be so much of that after the baby came.
And she felt much better out in the fresh air. So after that she did as little as possible
in the house, and instead stayed out in the hayfield with Manly.

When he loaded the hay in the big hayrack to haul to the barn, Laura, already in the
wagon, stepped up on each forkful as it was pitched in and so gradually rose with the load
until she was on the top, ready to ride to the barn. At the barn she slid down the hay
into Manly's arms and was safely on the ground.

Manly made the stacks in the field with a bull rake. The bull rake was a long wide plank
with long wooden teeth set in it at intervals for the whole length. A horse was hitched at
each end,

and, walking one on each side of a long windrow of hay, they pulled the plank sideways.
The long teeth slipped under the hay and it piled up in front of the plank and was pushed
along the ground.

When there was enough of a load and it was where the stack was to be, Manly tipped the
plank. It went over the top of the hay which was left in a pile. Several of these piles
started the stack. Then as the horses came to it, one went on each side of the stack, the
rake went on up, Manly followed it and spilled the hay on top of the stack and then went
down the other end after another load.

Barnum was good and always walked along with his end of the plank on his side of the
stack. But Skip stopped when he had no driver, so Laura drove Skip the length of the stack
and then sat against the sweet hay on the sunny side while Manly would bring up another load with the rake.

When the stack was high enough, Manly raked down the sides with his pitchfork and gath
ered up all the scattered hay around and against it, making it all neat and even. Then he
topped the stack with a load of hay from the wagon.

So the nice fall weather passed. Nights grew cooler, frost came. The haying was finished.

Manly had mortgaged the homestead for eight hundred dollars, so now he could buy the coal
for winter, and it was stored in the storeroom.

T h e taxes of sixty dollars (there were no taxes on the tree claim because they had no
title yet) were paid. Interest, on the notes given for machinery, was paid. There was
money for seed in the spring and to live on, they hoped, until next harvest.

T h e hay had helped. Manly had sold thirty tons at four dollars a ton, and the $120 was a
year's income from crops.

Wild geese were late coming from the north, and when they did, seemed in no hurry to go on
south. Instead they fed in the sloughs and flew from one lake to the other, where the
water was nearly covered with them as they swam about.

The sky was filled with their V-shaped flocks and the air rang to their calls. Manly
hurried into the house for his gun one day.

“A flock of geese is coming over so low, I believe I can get one,” he told Laura.

Quickly he went out the door, and forgetting that the old gun kicked, he held it up before
his face, sighted, and pulled the trigger.

Laura followed him just in time to see him whirl around with his hand to his face.

“Oh, did you hit a goose?” she asked.

“Yes, but I didn't quite kill it,” he answered, as he wiped the blood from his nose.

The flock of geese went on unharmed to join their kindred at the lake.

It was going to be an open winter; the geese knew there was no hurry to go south.

The small field was soon plowed and the hurry of work was over.

In November, the snow came and covered the ground, making good sleighing. Manly and Laura,
well bundled up and covered with robes, went often for sleigh rides on sunny afternoons.
Because Laura felt so much better outdoors, Manly made a handsled and a breast-collar-harness for Old Shep. On pleasant days Laura hitched Shep to
the handsled and let him pull her on it down the hill to the road. Then together they
would climb the hill, Shep pulling the sled and Laura walking beside him to take another
ride down until she was tired from the walking and the fun. Shep never got tired of it,
and at times when the sled tipped against a drift and Laura rolled into the snow he seemed actually to laugh. And so November passed and December came. The sun was shining on the morning of the fifth of December, but it looked stormy in the north.

“Better play outdoors all you can today, for it may be too stormy tomorrow,” Manly said.

So, soon after breakfast Laura hitched Shep to the sled and took the day's first ride down
the hill. But she stayed out only a little while.

“I don't feel like playing,” she told Manly when he came up from the barn. “I would rather
curl up by the stove.” And again after the dinner work was done she sat idly by the stove
in her little rocking chair, which worried Manly. Along in the afternoon Manly went to the barn and came back with the horses hitched to the sleigh.

“I'm going for your Ma,” he said. “Keep as quiet as you can until we come.” It was snowing
hard now as from the window Laura watched him drive down the road with the team trotting
their best. She thought that the pace would have won them the prize at the Fourth of July
races.

Then she walked the floor or sat by the stove until Manly came back with her Ma.

“My goodness,” Ma exclaimed, as she warmed herself by the fire. “You should not be up.
I'll get you to bed right away.”

And Laura answered, “I'll have a long time to stay in bed. I am going to stay up now as
long as I can.”

But soon she made no objections and only vaguely knew when Manly drove away again to fetch
a friend of her Ma's from town.

Mrs. Power was a friendly, jolly Irish woman. The first Laura knew of her being there was
hearing her say, “Sure she'll be all right, for it's young she is. Nineteen you say; the very age of my Mary. But we'd better have the doctor out
now, I'm thinking.” When Laura could again see and know what went on around her, Ma and
Mrs. Power were standing one on each side of her bed. And was that Manly at the foot? No!
Manly had gone for the doctor. Then were there two Mas and two Mrs. Powers? They seemed to
be all around her.

What was that old hymn Pa used to sing?

... angel bank Gome and around me stand, Oh, bear me away on your snowy wings To She was being borne away on a wave of pain. A gust of cold, fresh air brought her back and
she saw a tall man drop his snowy overcoat by the door and come toward her in the
lamplight.

She vaguely felt a cloth touch her face and smelled a keen odor. Then she drifted away
into a blessed darkness where there was no pain.

When Laura opened her eyes, the lamp was still shining brightly over the room, and Ma was bending over her with the doctor standing beside her. And in the bed by her side was a
little warm bundle.

“See your little daughter, Laura! A beautiful baby, and she weighs just eight pounds,” Ma
said. “It's a fine girl you are yourself,” Mrs. Power said from where she was sitting by
the fire. "A fine, brave girl, and baby'll be good because of it.

You'll be all right now." So Manly took the doctor and Mrs. Power home, but Ma stayed, and Laura went to sleep at once with her hand resting gently on
little Rose.

Rose was such a good baby, so strong and healthy that Ma stayed only a few days. T h e n
Hattie Johnson came. “To wash baby this time, instead of windows,” she said.

But soon Hattie went and the three, Manly, Laura, and Rose, were left by themselves in the
little house atop the low hill with the sweep of the empty prairie all around it.

There was not a house near enough for neighbors, but a mile away across the slough a few
buildings on the edge of town were in sight.

A hundred precious dollars had gone for doctor bills and medicine and help through the summer and winter so far; but after all, a Rose in
December was much rarer than a rose in June, and must be paid for accordingly.

Christmas was at hand and Rose was a grand present. Then the day before Christmas Manly
hauled a load of hay to town and brought back the most beautiful clock. It stood nearly
two feet high from its solid walnut base to the carved leaf at its very top. The glass
door that covered the face was wreathed with a gilt vine on which four gilt birds fluttered, and the pendulum that swung
to and fro behind them was the color of gold too.

The clock had such a pleasant, cheerful voice as it said tick, tock, and when it struck
the hours its tone was clear and sweet. Laura loved it at once.

The old round, nickel alarm clock could not be depended on to tell the right time, but
still it would have answered the need, and Laura said doubtfully, “But ought you” Then
Manly told her he had traded the load of hay for it, and it would be a Christmas present
for all three of them. The hay he had kept for feed was holding out so well that there would be more than enough to take the stock through the rest of the
winter, and he couldn't have sold the load of hay for money because they were not shipping
anymore.

Christmas was a happy time even though it was a stormy day, and they stayed quietly at
home.

After the Christmas storm the weather was clear and sunny but coldtwenty-five and thirty
below zero on some days.

But one day seemed unusually warm and Laura had been at home so long, she wanted to go for
a sleigh ride to see Ma and Pa. Could they take the baby out safely?

They were sure they could. Some blankets were put to warming by the stove. Manly drove the
cutter close to the door and made a little warm nest of them in the shelter of the
dashboard. Rose was wrapped in her own warm blankets and little red cloak and hood, with a thin blue silk handkerchief lightly covering her face, and
tucked tightly in among the blankets in the cutter.

Then away they went, the horses stepping quickly and the sleigh bells singing merrily Several times Laura put her hand in among the
blankets and touched Rose's face to be sure that she was warm and that there was air
beneath the veil. It seemed only a few minutes until they drove up to the old homeplace and went quickly into the house, where Ma and Pa both scolded them
well.

“You're crazy!” Pa said. “Out with that baby when it is fifteen below.” And so it was by
the thermometer. “She might have smothered,” Ma added.

“But I watched. She couldn't have,” Laura answered.

And Rose waggled her fingers and cooed. She was warm and happy and had had a good nap.

Laura had never thought it might be dangerous to take the baby out, and she was anxious
on the way home and glad when they were safely there. It seemed there was a good deal to
taking care of babies.

There were no more sleigh rides for some time, and then one day that was really warm they drove the four miles to see their good friends, the Boasts.