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“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.”
