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Early next morning my father set out to sell the wood in town. The man worked with a will while he was gone. He was gone all day. At night he had not come. The strange man went down the hill, my mother lighted the lamp, turned low to save the kerosene. Still it was some time before we heard the wagon jolting. My mother lighted the lantern, then said I’d better take it to him.
I rushed out with it. The wagon box was empty and I almost shouted, “You sold it!”
“Finally I did,” my father said in triumph.
“How much did you get for it?” I asked. He was beginning to unharness the horses. He bragged, “Fifty cents.”
I set down the lantern and ran into the house to tell my mother, “Fifty cents! He sold it all for fifty cents!” Her whole face trembled and seemed to melt into softness, she sighed a long sigh. “Aren’t you glad?” I exulted.
“Glad? Of course I’m glad!” she snapped at me and to herself, “Oh, thanks be!”
I ran out again, I pranced out, to tell my father how glad she was. And he said, with a sound of crying in his voice, “Oh, why did you tell her? I wanted to surprise her.”
You do such things, little things, horrible, cruel, without thinking, not meaning-to. You have done it; nothing can undo it. This is a thing you can never forget.
How long that man worked with my father I don’t remember. I cannot remember his name nor anything at all about his family camping down by the creek. Surely I knew those children; they must have been there for weeks. I remember that he and my father were roofing the little log barn, the day I chased the rabbit.
The leaves had fallen from all the trees but the oaks then, and the oaks wore their winter red that day. There was light snow or frost underfoot, so cold that it burned my bare feet, and my breath puffed white in the air. I chased that rabbit over the hills, up and down and back again until, exhausted, it hid in a hollow log; I stopped up the log’s ends with rocks and fetched both men from their work on the roof to chop out the rabbit and kill it.
The day was Saturday; I was going to school then. For Sunday dinner we had rabbit stew, with gravy on mashed potatoes and on our cornbread. And on Monday I found in my lunch-pail at school one of that rabbit’s legs; my mother had saved it and packed it with the cornbread in the little tin pail, to surprise me.
The man and his family must have gone on west or south, early that winter. He must have earned provisions for the trip. I remember walking to school through the snowy woods in my shoes and stockings, hearing the thuds of my father’s ax sounding fainter as I went; and coming home with the sunset red behind me to hear the whirr-whirr of the crosscut saw growing sharper in the frosty air. The ax was too heavy for my mother; my father would not trust her with its sharpness, but she could safely handle one end of the crosscut saw.
Winter evenings were cosy in the cabin. The horses were warm in the little barn, the hens in the new wooden coop. Snow banked against the log walls and long icicles hung from the eaves. A good fire of hickory logs burned in the fireplace. In its heat, over a newspaper spread on the hearth, my father worked oil into the harness-straps between his oily-black hands. I sat on the floor, carefully building a house of corncobs, and my mother sat by the table, knitting needles flashing while she knitted warm woolen socks for my father and read to us from a book propped under the kerosene lamp. She read us Tennyson’s poems and Scott’s poems; those books were ours. And she read us Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and Conquest of Peru, and The Green Mountain Boys, and John Halifax, Gentleman. She read us The Leatherstocking Tales, and another true book, the biggest of all: Ancient, Medieval and Modern History. I borrowed those from the shelf of lending-books in the Fourth Reader room at school. The teachers let me borrow them, though I wasn’t in Fourth Reader yet.
I remember the Sunday afternoon when my father and mother planned the new house. We had got the cow that spring; I must have been ten years old, going on eleven. On Sunday afternoons in warm weather, when company wasn’t spending
the day with us or we were not spending it in town with the Gooleys, my father and mother in their Sunday clothes went walking sedately over the land while I, in mine, minded the cabin. They had cleared twenty acres and set out all the little apple trees, and we had the cow, that Sunday afternoon when they decided where to build the house.
From my swing in the oak tree by the cabin, Fido and I saw them standing and talking under the huge old white-oak tree not far away. They talked a long while. Then my father went to lead the cow to water and change her picket-peg, and my mother called me to see the spot where our house would be.
It would be under the great old white-oak at the edge of the hill where we stood. Here the ground sloped more gently down into the ravine and rose steeply up the wooded mountain to the south. You could see the brook running from the widening mouth of the ravine and curving to the north and east around the base of the rounded hill. You could hear the water rippling over the limestone ledges. It was springtime; the hickory trees on the hill were in young green leaves, the oak leaves were pink, and all the flinty ground beneath them was covered with one blue-purple mat of dog’s-tooth violets. Along the brook the sarvice trees were blooming misty white. The ancient white-oak was lively with dozens of young squirrels whisking into and out of their nests in the hollow branches.
My mother stood under it in her brown-sprigged white lawn dress, her long braid hanging down her back. Below the curled bangs her eyes were as purple-blue as the violets. It would be a white house, she said, all built from our farm. Everything we needed to build it was on the land: good oak beams and boards, stones for the foundation and the fireplace. The house would have large windows looking west across the brook, over the gentle little valley and up the wooded hills that hid the town, to the sunset colors in the sky. There would be a nice big porch to the north, cool on hot summer afternoons. The kitchen would be big enough to hold a wood stove for winter and one of the new kerosene stoves that wouldn’t heat up the place worse in summer. Every window would be screened with mosquito netting. There would be a well, with a pump, just outside the kitchen door; no more lugging water from the spring. And in the parlor there would be a bookcase, no, two bookcases, big bookcases full of books, and a hanging lamp to read them by, on winter evenings by the fireplace.
When the mortgage is paid, in only a few more years, she said, and when the orchard is in bearing, if prices are good then, we will fence the whole place with wire and build the barn bigger; we will have more stock by then. And after that, we can begin to build the house.
She woke from the dream with a start and a Goodness! it’s chore-time! I’d better take the milk pail to my father, she said, and feed the hens before they went to roost; don’t forget to fill their water-pans, and bring in the eggs; be careful not to break one. Oh, now that we had the cow, we’d have a treat for Sunday supper, French toast with that wild honey, to surprise my father. How wonderful it was to have a cow again.
While I scattered corn for the hens, fetched water from the spring to fill their pans, and hunted for eggs that the broody hens hid in the haymow, in the straw stack, and even in the wild grasses, I heard her whistling in the cabin, getting supper.
? On the Way Home ?
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Laura and Almanzo shortly after their marriage in De Smet, Dakota Territory.
I was 2 years 4 months old when this picture was taken in April 1889. I remember the picture-taking well, was impressed by the photographer’s stupid pretense that there was a little bird in the camera. The photographer also kept putting my right hand on top of the left, and I kept changing them back because I wanted my carnelian ring to show. And in the end I won out. R.W.L.
Rose (4th from left) in her church’s ‘children’s exercises’ just before leaving De Smet in 1894.
Laura (top) and Almanzo (bottom) at the time of These Happy Golden Years.
Laura (top) and Almanzo (bottom) at the time of their trip to Mansfield, Missouri.
A sewing box made of cigar boxes by Almanzo for a first anniversary gift to Laura. It came with us in the hack to Mansfield. R.W.L.
Pa and Ma Ingalls’ house in De Smet. This picture was sent to us in Mansfield some years after we left Dakota. R.W.L.
