Song of Years, page 25
Not a day passed that Phoebe Lou or Suzanne, Emily, Melinda, or Celia, depending on which ones were at home, did not climb the ladder to the loft and train the spy-glass over on the activities down there in the timber at the west end of the slough. It became their favorite indoor sport to see if they could detect anything new from day to day.
* * *
In the last of April the Republican county convention went into session at the new brick Prairie Rapids court-house. Jeremiah, making ready to go in clean shirt and freshly greased boots, was twitted considerably by Sarah who reminded him that time was when he wouldn’t have set foot in Prairie Rapids itself, let alone the court-house. But Jeremiah was above such small feuds these days. His horizon was enlarged. He felt magnanimous about the decision, large-hearted and forgiving toward Prairie Rapids. Such battles as he carried on now were in a wider sphere, their sole object the complete political annihilation of the dumb and dastardly Democrats.
Those who attended the convention composed almost a roll-call of the settlers who had first broken sod in the Valley. When he came back Jeremiah said quite casually that he had been chosen to go to the state convention in Iowa City. Yes, life for Pa was just one long journeying to far distant points, his days just one unending succession of meetings.
“You might be one sent to the national convention, Pa.” Suzanne felt there was no limit to Pa’s potential activities.
But Jeremiah retained at least a semblance of self-depreciation. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
When he got back from Iowa City via the evening stage, having walked part way out home until overtaken by a neighbor, he had to report that he was not a delegate to Chicago.
“Now you can settle down and get some farm work done, I hope,” Sarah said.
Jeremiah agreed cheerfully that he could do so and, as soon as he changed his clothes, went out to the stable to fuss around there, not wanting Sarah or the girls to know how chagrined he was in being overlooked. Every one must have some disappointments, he told himself, in old Queen’s stall. He’d sailed along a little too fast maybe. ’Twasn’t good for you to have things come your way too much.
All that month of May in the fields, with the smell of the mellow loam in his nostrils and the prairie larks singing from the rail fence, he held himself to his farm work even while his thoughts were on the country and its problems, on the coming convention and the crucial moment of its choosing the candidate.
By the middle of May the Scotts’ house emerged into a skeleton of pine uprights shining white against the green timber. And then on a gray day Mr. Scott reappeared to supervise the finishing. This time a young man, presumably his son, and two Negro men were with him, all driving through from Dubuque in a fine carriage pulled by spanking bays.
And now gossip flew about that the ladies of the family were in Dubuque awaiting word of the house being finished before arriving. The information was followed by the astounding news that they were bringing a woman slave and her children.
“But you can’t bring slaves into Iowa.”
“Who said you couldn’t?”
“The Missouri Compromise bill said you couldn’t.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it had anything to do with us.”
“What can be done to stop ’em?”
“I’d like to see anybody flaunt a slave under our very noses.”
Oh, my goodness—was there any place else in the Union where life was so exciting?
Even Wayne Lockwood, generally oblivious to gossip, attending to his own business with his usual characteristic steadiness, was drawn into much conversation over it with others in the community.
Speculation was rife, guesswork rampant. Some said the Scotts came because they were not in sympathy with this secession talk. Some had heard the niggers they were bringing were free.
“Well, they’d better be.”
Not all niggers were slaves. Look at old Bunk over in town at the Overmans’. Free as air! Just lived there and did chores. Some said they came because of this growing talk of war, that they did not want the son to have to fight in case the worst happened.
“That’s a pretty excuse,” Jeremiah said, “and I don’t believe it. If there’s to be war, he’s got to fight on some side. They wouldn’t move here now if they was in sympathy with this secession talk. Those ain’t slaves, mark my word. He wouldn’t try that on Ioway.”
“Oh, Pa, not everybody would have to fight!” The girls were saying it almost simultaneously, each thinking of a different person as she spoke, unless, perchance, Emily’s and Suzanne’s thoughts turned to the same one.
“I’d hate to be the one that didn’t shoulder arms.”
“Maybe these Scotts don’t believe in slaves and just want to live where other people think that way, too.”
“I can’t reconcile the fact the niggers are with them, though.”
Around in a circle, all the talk came back to, “Maybe the niggers wanted to come along.”
The whole community was a living question-mark.
On that morning in May, Jeremiah felt that he could scarcely stand the slowness of passing time of this day and the ones to follow until he could hear what was being done in the Chicago national convention. At breakfast when the family gathered about the table where dishes of fried potatoes, sausage, and great platters of fried corn-meal mush waited to be consumed in little ponds of maple syrup, all were surprised and almost embarrassed to hear their father add to that familiar prayer of “Bless this food to Thy glory,” a mumbled “and be in the Republican convention to-day.”
Immediately thereafter, as though he must justify himself before them for having reminded the Lord to attend the convention he gave them a rambling and long-winded peroration about the vital issues that would be discussed on the floor.
All through the day in the field where he held himself strictly to the first cultivating as though to do penance humbly for expecting too much honor, he ached with the wish to be in the convention in the thick of the fight with the smoke and the stale air and the arguments. What was going on now? Why couldn’t there be some way to hear it? There was an instrument called the telegraph. Why in tunkit couldn’t there be such an invention as hearing the speeches and the bitter words of the battle? But he put the foolish thought out of his mind, visualizing the leaders walking about the caucus rooms, haggard, sleepless, working hard for their candidates. Who was being nominated? Chase? . . . Seward? . . . Lincoln?
He was for Lincoln, lock, stock, and barrel. Tom Bostwick wasn’t. He and Tom had come through many an argument, Tom often saying, “Can you think of him meeting with some of those eastern men . . . breaking out into one of those back-woodsy stories of his . . . with his feet on a desk?”
Well, if meeting eastern men was all there was to it. . . ! They heard results in record-breaking time, the very night following the day of nominations. The papers containing the results came on through Dubuque to Jesup by train and were hurried out by stage, so that night had barely fallen when the news came. Jeremiah, standing with the crowd around the stage-driver at Sturgis Falls, heard it from him before any one had a chance to see a paper. It was Abraham Lincoln.
Tom Bostwick, half angered, half relieved, admitted: “All right . . . I give up. Maybe he’ll make up in judgment what he lacks in polish.”
“You can put polish on everything from hair to shoes,” Jeremiah told him, heatedly, “but you can’t give a man horse sense, level-headedness and gumption like Abe Lincoln’s been born with.”
There was yelling, back-slapping, hand-shaking. Several of the Republicans slipped over to the saloon to celebrate and to drink to the hope of Lincoln’s election. Several Democrats slipped along to drink to the doom of it.
Jeremiah did not yell nor back-slap nor drink. He walked quietly over to Queen, mounted her, and rode home over the river road through the deepening prairie twilight. The clammy odor of fresh herbage came from the fields across the stake-and-rider fences. A white mist settled down in the hollows at the roadside. Frogs croaked. There was the feel of green groping things.
Abraham Lincoln! That gangling, honest, smart, tarnation-homely old rail-splitter!
Abe Lincoln, who saw eye to eye with him in everything, whose speeches were just what he would have said if he could talk easy!
Abe Lincoln, who was his kind, whose very blood seemed to flow in his own veins!
Abe Lincoln, who had been a settler, had plowed and planted and husked, split rails and joked and cussed, who had experienced cold and hunger, faced storms and an irate woman!
Abe Lincoln, who would never forget the feel of mellow loam . . . the sound of the cracking black-snake whip . . . the smell of upturned prairie sod. . . !
He pulled his gray shawl around him and spoke sharply to Queen. He must get home to tell Ma and the girls.
CHAPTER 23
So many changes in the Valley as there had been during the six years since the youthful Wayne Lockwood walked into it across the prairies from Dubuque that sunlit afternoon!
The railroad creeping within twenty-four miles of town and met by the stage was one change. Another Concord stage up the Valley rolled into Sturgis Falls behind four horses in a whirlwind of dust or lumbered through splashing mud, having made connections with the new train there in the growing Cedar Rapids. Eight, ten, a dozen passengers sometimes alighted—new-comers, drummers, visiting politicians, an occasional returned resident who had been visiting “back home.”
If there were big changes in the Valley, there were changes, too, in Wayne. He was no longer the inexperienced youth of eighteen who, lonely and homesick, had written his mother about the loneliness but never the homesickness. He was twenty-four, a man, his own boss, a respected settler. He had raised as good crops as any one, owned a nice flock of sheep for which he had built a shelter bigger than his cabin, so that people joked him about treating his stock better than himself. A hard worker, yet he was ready at all times to dress up and take part in sociables, mass-meetings, singing school, festivities, church services.
His cabin was neat even though there were no softening touches to the harsh furnishings excepting that Emily had made curtains for it and covered his big chair. More than one young woman in the Valley would have been glad to add that touch. More than one cast demurely pensive or warmly longing eyes toward the young giant whose blond head was set so well on his fine shoulders.
But to all these Wayne was impervious. When the glances were coy he laughed to himself that any girl would let her eyes tell tales out of school until a man had sought her out. When the glances were bold he drew a coat of armor about himself. Sometimes in self-analysis he pondered why this should be. If he had no mind to court one of the modest maidens who yet wore her heart on her sleeve, why not meet one of the audacious-eyed ones on her own terms? But to this he felt a strange repugnance.
Working in the soil and with animals he was a part of Nature herself. He knew the urge of groping, growing things, the force that drove the mating, the mellow feel of Nature at the seeding and the satisfaction of the harvest. But something held him back, some sensitive instinct given him in the blood of restrained New England forebears made him hold himself aloof and wait. For what?
That he did not know, excepting as some predilection to those things which were fine and subtle bade him do, excepting as he sensed that a mating for him would satisfy to the fullest only when he desired a girl too deeply to live without her.
To any masculine friend—to Ed Armitage or Tom Bostwick or Phineas Martin—asking why he did not bring a girl to that cabin up the lane road, he made some slight answer, turning it off jestingly with: “Who’d want to have a flock of sheep for a rival?” or, “Snide is all the company I’ve needed so far.”
For how could he say that marriage meant more to him than that the work in his cabin should be done and a woman lie by his side? How could he tell them that always he carried within himself the thought of a girl whose face was the face of a girl in a cloud? They would have laughed at him and told him no angel was going to drop out of a cloud into a cabin up the lane road, that no unusual girl would seek him out there in the Red Cedar Valley in the year 1860.
And for that he knew they would have been right. But even so, he kept his fancy to himself, attended to his work faithfully both indoors and out, did not shun femininity nor run after it, but bode his time, feeling completely comfortable only with the Martin girls who were always themselves, always jolly—not “girls” at all, just “people.”
And sometimes in the evening after the day’s work was done, when he went down the lane road, he let his voice out to its fullest, putting into a melody all this that he carried in his heart but would never tell.
Her eyes soft and tender,
The violets outvying,
And a fairer form was never seen,
With her brown silken tresses
And cheeks like the roses,
There was none like my darling Daisy Dean.
Or perhaps another favorite:
Forever shall thy gentle image
In my memory dwell,
And my tears thy lovely grave shall moisten;
Nellie, dear, farewell.
He could not know that his voice, carrying across the north prairie its unconscious longing as the bittern calls for its mate, unaccountably stirred the pulses and brought an unwanted mist of tears to the eyes of a young girl who answered neither to the name of Daisy nor Nellie. For whenever Suzanne heard that voice singing up the lane road she would slip away from the others—to the loft bedroom or into the edge of the grove—drinking in the song alone for fear some one would notice that which she must conceal.
Jeremiah rode home from town on one of those first days in June, tied Queen to a ring in the stable, and hurried to the house.
“Ma . . . Emily . . . Suzanne . . . Phoebe Lou . . . where be you all? Here it is. Listen to this.”
“What is it now?” Sarah’s sharp brown eyes peered from under their short sandy lashes.
“His acceptance speech. Listen.” He cleared his throat, reading slowly with emphasis on every syllable. “I accept the nomination tendered me. . . . Imploring the assistance of Divine Providence and with due regard to the views and feelings of all who were represented in the Convention; to the rights of all the states and territories and peoples of the nation; . . . perpetual union, harmony, and prosperity of all . . . am most happy to coöperate for the practical success of the principles declared by the Convention.’ ” Without change of expression or monotonous meter he finished: “ ‘Your-obliging-friend-and-fellow-citizen-Abraham-Lincoln’-Ma-where’s-the-shears?”
“What you want of shears?”
“Want to cut this out . . . and keep it. Want to keep it in my hide trunk for my grandchildren to read.” Prophetic words, that it was to be found seventy-eight years later.
The Fourth of July celebration was the most elaborate yet attempted by Sturgis Falls. All morning teams came in from the country-side bringing their loads, lumber wagons with three or four boards across for seats, or chairs arranged along the side, single buggies, double-seated carriages, the horses’ heads decorated with flags, red, white, and the blue rosettes, or field flowers wilting under the hot sun. Every girl was gowned in her best from the light calico dresses of the north prairie Emerson sisters to the silk dress and drooping white plume worn by an Overman daughter, young Mrs. Joseph Chase, a bride of three months.
There was a parade with girls in white to represent every state, and only brooding Kansas in black because she had been refused admission as a free state.
The Declaration of Independence, new songs and old, a sense of the seriousness of the coming election, and the ascension of a flag-decorated balloon, all stirred together in one long day, brewed a concoction of patriotic fervor that rendered all more or less drunk with the emotion, so that when it was over there was a distinct reaction of fatigue and low spirits.
It was a summer of good crops. Wheat headed out into a golden tapestry ready for the cradles. The green corn stood slim and tall in the fields like so many green-blanketed Indian chiefs with yellow feathers in their hair. There was never ceasing labor to break up more new land so that the green and the gold would spill itself out over more acres another year. More wheat! More corn! More stock! The new Iowa was coming into her own.
Wayne broke up the last of his acreage, hiring Ed Armitage to hold the plow as he drove; at the end of every furrow stopping to file anew the dulling plowshare.
When the new Scott house, there at the edge of the timber, began to be clothed in garments of snowy white paint and green blinds, every feminine heart between Sturgis Falls and Prairie Rapids fairly ached with envy.
To Sarah Martin, remembering her own substantial if plain stone farm-house in York State, scrubbing away on bare planking, running slivers into her hands on occasion, whitewashing walls every spring, trying in vain to hide the blackened, weather-beaten logs of the big cabin with morning-glories, the new house flaunted itself with the same result which a red flannel would have had for old Sandy, Pa’s bull, in the south pasture. She scolded about it at the slightest provocation.
“We could have a frame or brick house if Pa would ’tend to his business and get ahead. But no . . . there’s the school district to see to and the county to be looked after and the state. Now lately here’s the whole nation! He’s got to manage that for a change. ’Twouldn’t do to let anybody else look after the union and keep the south petted up.”
