The Able McLaughlins/Chapter 12

by Margaret Wilson

CHAPTER XII

SOON after the garments of Barbara McNair dawned upon the congregation, her husband bought three hundred acres of land at three dollars an acre. There are those who say a man owning eight hundred and forty acres of land should be happy. Alex McNair was not. There was in his flesh one great thorn—that Glasgow wife.

She had lived through the autumn and the terrible winter, waiting for spring. And now that spring was here, what was it? Only an oozy wet waste, with patches of green in the lower places, and winds shrieking always across flat desolations. Near the sty, a sagging haystack of a barn, and a couple of bony cows trampling dead grasses deeper into the mire of the dooryard. If only there had been even a little white house, and a fence, and a few flowers sending up their endearing shoots! But this! And her from Glasgow!

Words failed her.

Had she not set forth day by day and hour by hour conscientiously, the necessity of a new house? Yet in the face of her demands, her man had gone to town to buy more wilderness. If she had known that spring that Dod was to sell part of that land for six hundred dollars an acre, her contempt for her husband's folly would scarcely have been less hot. There he was, driving into the yard now! She went to the door and greeted him.

"You didn't buy it?" she asked.

"Did I not say I would buy it?" he answered doggedly.

Not a change of expression passed over her face. She stood watching him unhitch his team. She had never before been so much interested in that process, having always avoided the barn.

The next day, when he was in the field, and Dod was hitching up, she went out and watched him. Would he show her how he did that? she asked. She thought she ought to know, she said. Which were the gentlest horses? And which harness did they take? She learned where it all hung in the barn. Dod liked teaching an old person. It wasn't any trick to hitch a horse to the wagon, he said. You put this under the belly, so. And the lines through here, taking them from here, thus. She practiced. She grew proficient. She waited.

One day in early May her husband rode away horseback to the Keiths', to pay back one of the many days of labor he owed that family. He left home at daylight, and Dod went to school. Then Barbara began.

When McNair came home that evening, Dod asked, lonesomely,

"Where's mother?"

"Is she not here?"

"She is not."

"She'll be gone to Chirstie's. Or McCreaths'. Who came for her?"

"She took the team and went herself."

"You're daft! Her take a team!"

But the team was gone. The barn was as empty as the house. Dod made a fire in the fireplace, and put the kettle on. Then the father made a discovery that the son had made some time ago. The cupboard was bare. Not a bite in it. Not a crumb of cake.

McNair didn't like that. She might have told them where she was going. She ought to have come back in time to have the supper ready. He hated a cold house. He went to his tobacco box. At least that was always ready for a hungry man. He opened it, and found a strange white paper in it. A note from his wife. A fine note! "I can't live in a sty," it said. "I have gone back to Scotland. Jeannie is with Chirstie. Barbara Ferguson."

Back to Scotland!

A woman alone!

Starting away with his team! She was daft! He rushed into the bedroom, as soon as he began to realize her meaning. Were her hat and cloak there? They were not! What was this? The kists not one on top of the other, as usual! Spreading all over the room! And empty! Nothing left in them! He rushed to the kitchen. The kist that set there was empty, too, more empty if possible than the others! He sat down.

He was outraged. He was speechless. That woman hadn't been able to lift those boxes alone into the wagon, so she had taken all their contents and left them. Such cunning! Such deceit! And had he not paid all her passage from Scotland! She had left him! Left him, Alex McNair! Without saying a word! Her so quiet, and all! The whole clan would know all about it! They would all have seen her passing! A woman alone! Had anyone ever before heard of such a thing? Certainly not in those parts! Everybody wondering where his wife was off to! Oh, Jeannie would never have played him so base a trick!

Dod came into the room. McNair stuffed the note hastily into the box.

"Your mother has gone to town," he murmured, meekly.

Dod heard that with surprise. Presently he volunteered that he saw now why she had wanted to learn how to hitch up the horses. Had she indeed learned all that from him? his father gasped. Oh, the depth of deceit in her! And he had paid her way from Glasgow! Dod made disconsolate cornmeal for their supper, forgetting to put salt in it. To think of that woman ridding the cupboard of its last crumb! McNair went to the barn and pretended to work, after the meal, being too excited to sit still. Back to Scotland! Had ever anyone heard the like! Everyone would be laughing at him. A rich wife, indeed! Oh, he understood now why the canny widowers of Scotland had meekly let him take this jewel of a woman away to America. They must have known her!

There was but one thing to be done. He would rise early, long before dawn, and pursue her, getting out of the neighborhood before anyone would be awake to see him pass. Her with his good horses in the town, not knowing enough, maybe, to give them a drink at the end of the journey! If she ever imagined he would give her a cent to get back with, how greatly mistaken she was. He would surely show her who was master here.

He found her the next afternoon, in the hall of one of those long, shanty-like hotels which comprised the town, found her in the very act of making a bargain with a man to make her new boxes to take the place of those she had so extravagantly abandoned. They faced each other in her room, he, tall, gaunt, black-eyed, ragged, she, small, dainty, red-haired, bedecked. Her placidness, as usual, disarmed him. He began;

"You can't go back to Scotland! Are you daft?"

"I canna' live in a sty."

They were off, then. He urged decency, morality, economy, honesty, pride, race, the waning reputation of Glasgow. After each argument she simply said, like one born foolish;

"I canna' live in a sty."

It was a deadlock, till he demanded angrily where she expected to get money for the journey. At her answer he surrendered. It fairly took the life out of him. She certainly had not expected to get it from him, thank you! She knew him too well. She had money enough with her to take her comfortably to her home in Glasgow. Did he suppose that she was one to come to the wilds without knowing how she might get back? She had kept it all—all that gold, mind you!—in the lining of her muff.

That woman had come thinking she might not stay! He, Alex McNair, had been, as it were, married on probation. And him a Presbyterian!

He asked hopelessly what kind of a house she wanted.

She replied promptly that she wanted three good big rooms downstairs, and two upstairs, a wee porch, all painted white, except the green shutters, with closets and windows like Chirstie's and besides a wee white house for the fowls. All this was to be bought to-day, at once.

The Lord preserve us! Why, there wasn't a painted fowl house in the state!

The train left for Glasgow at seven the night.

He couldn't buy all that in a day, could he? He had no money!

He could sell the last great plot he had bought. Was she daft? Did she suppose he could sell it in a day?

Why could he not sell it in one day? Hadn't he bought it in one? She would call to the man to bring in those boxes.

He would buy the lumber as soon as he got around to it. Couldn't she trust him to do it?

He hadn't told her in the first place that he lived in a sty, had he? She felt the inside of her muff carefully.

The next day in the dusk they drove into Wully's together, having a wagon whose strange shape would have excited the curiosity of the most philosophical, with that same long, uneven thing all covered with blankets and tucked in, such a load as no man ever hauled, and plainly the same thing that she had taken with her the day before. McNair was apparently in a bad humor. How could the two who came out to welcome them in, know that the nearer he had got to his home, the more he dreaded the explanation he would have to give of his wife's desertion. But he had not yet learned all the depth of that lintie! Was she embarrassed? Not she! She began immediately telling the news, in that hesitating, ingratiating way of hers. They were to have a new house! The lumber was to be hauled at once. She was that glad she hadn't been able to wait for Alex, but had gone in ahead, to see about it. It was all settled. Just about like Wully's, it was to be. But a little larger. With a white fence. And a wee white fowl house. They had bought even the paint. And, having had some time on her hands, she had found this wee pair of shoes for the baby. No, they couldn't come in. Let Wully just hold wee Johnnie up till she would see if they were the right size. Out of that confounded muff came the shoes. They fitted. Well, the McNairs would just take their wee Jeannie and be going on. She had so wanted them to hear her good news. She hoped Jeannie hadn't troubled Chirstie much. And wasn't Johnnie just growing bonnier day by day!

What could a man do in the face of that? Where in the name of the shorter catechism had the woman got those shoes, and when—after all the money she had wasted that day on houses? McNair simply gave up. Like the Queen of Sheba before Solomon, he had no spirit left in him. But he had acquired an uncomfortable amount of fear of women.

Chirstie and Wully took it for granted that the rich wife had paid for the house, until the next Sabbath. Therefore, when Wully heard as he came out of church that his revered father-in-law had sold part of his newly bought land to Geordie Sproul, in a panic so to speak, in a hurry, without much bargaining, to get the required funds for the lumber, he grinned to himself, and waited to hear his mother's comment on the tale. He took his family as usual home to his mother's, after the service, and when dinner was over, he had a chance to speak with her alone. She heard his pleasant suspicions. Doubtless the new wife had made him sell that land. And she chuckled with deep, deep mirth.

"Yon's a fine woman, Wully!" she exclaimed, relishing her thoughts. "She's a grand wee captain!" She heaved sighs of contentment from time to time all the afternoon, whose import was not lost on her son. Surely, late as it was, Jeannie was being avenged.

Quite unconscious of the envious comment and the snickers of admiration which her house was causing among her neighbors, Barbara McNair went again with her husband to town, a month later, after the bluebells had faded in the creek woods, just when the wild roses were beginning to bloom, when the prairie was blue with spider lilies. She rode along arrayed like the lilies—not to say like the twenty-eight colors of wild phlox which a Dartsmouth botanist records he found there that year. When at length she came within sight of the town which stirred Isobel McLaughlin so greatly to speculation, she speculated upon it not at all. There was nothing significant to her in a town of eleven real estate offices and nineteen hotels, wherein every other inhabitant was a land speculator. She left the main street without paying it the compliment of a thought, and turned toward the first street of dwellings, a muddy lane not worthy to be called a street. The further down it she went, the more homesick she grew, so bare and naked it was, shack after shack uncared-for—wherever she turned, no gardens, no flowers, no trees, even in the year's height of leaf and blossom. On she went, down one path after another. Then, away at the end of one— Oh, there she found a little, unpainted vine-covered shanty, with color, with fragrance, iris blooming, borders of clove pinks, pansies, a yellow rosebush, a red one, grapevines in blossom, a honeysuckle, budding peonies!

It came over her with such delight that it never occurred to her to hesitate. She pushed open the gate, and followed the path of clove pinks around the house. There in the shade a woman was bending over her washtub, a large, fat uncorseted woman, who raised a red face from her steaming work.

Barbara said to her positively and politely, moved to her broadest accent,

"I have come to see your flowers!"

The woman wiped her well-soaked hands on a limp apron, and replied in perfect Pennsylvania Dutch;

"I don't understand you." But she smiled a smile of extraordinary width.

They faced each other, Scotland and Germany, curiously for one moment. Then Barbara pointed dramatically at the pansies. There was that look on her face that was understood by frontiers-women of many tongues. The German began babbling sympathetically about her display, pointing out one beauty after another, breaking off little sprays to hold near her visitor's longing nose. So much there was that Barbara wanted to ask, and her hostess wanted to explain, and they understood each other after so many repetitions and efforts! Barbara examined each plant, and felt the soil it grew in. She bowed her face down to them again and again, hungrily. Not one did she omit to sigh over enviously. Presently the German led her into the shanty, and set before her in a red-carpeted, closely-guarded parlor, coffee and coffee-cake, which Barbara esteemed but lightly, surprised out of politeness by the fact that on the kitchen table a pair of pigeons sat cooing. Then, the refreshments being finished, the woman took her by the hand, and led her out of the house, down a barren street, just as she was, in her wet dress, unhatted, red-faced. Barbara surmised she was being taken to a place where plants were sold.

They came to a large square house, built on a high foundation, in a yard planted with trees which were not just small sticks, approached by a walk which had wide blossoming borders which Barbara would fain have examined. But her guide waddled up determinedly and knocked on the door. A lady opened it, a lady perhaps fifty, whose gray calico was fastened at the throat most primly by an oval brooch. She was sad-faced, and gray-haired, and as the German woman babbled to her, she turned and smiled upon Barbara gravely and kindly, and asked them to come in. But the German was not for sitting in a house on such a morning. The lady put on a wide hat, and gloves, and came out to the border. In her foreign language, which was merely New England English, she discussed her loves, pointing out one blossom and another. Her pansies never equaled the German's. But look at the number of buds on her peonies! She could hardly wait till they opened. And Mrs. McNair followed her about with the great question on her tongue, namely, where does one get these things in this country?

She was standing by a yellow rosebush when she asked that, first, and its owner, bending down, said;

"Here's a good little new one now. You may have that. Have you a place for it? Where do you live?"

"Twenty-five miles west."

The lady sighed.

"We have come for wood to build our house to-day," Barbara informed her.

"Have you been here long?"

"Long enough," said Barbara, simply. "I came in November."

The lady sighed again, and went to get her spade. She asked again if Barbara had a place for the rose. Barbara was offended at the suggestion she might not cherish that plant until death. Where can you buy them here? she asked again.

That rose, the lady explained, she had brought with her from Davenport, in a little box with grape cuttings and the peony, which she had carried in her lap in a covered wagon long before there were railroads to the town. She had brought it to Davenport coming down the Ohio and up the Mississippi soon after she was married. A woman had given it to her when she left Ohio for the West. The peony her mother had brought from eastern to western Ohio many years ago, and when she had died, her daughter had chosen the peony for her share of the estate. Her mother had got it from her mother, who came a bride to Ohio from western New York, clasping it against her noisy heart, out of the way of the high waters her husband had led her horse through, across unbridged streams, cherishing it more resolutely than the household stuffs which had to be abandoned in pathless woods. Her great-grandfather had brought it west in New York in his saddle bag, soon after Washington's inauguration as he returned from New York City. She supposed before that the Dutch had maybe brought it from Holland to Long Island. There had been tulips, too, but the pigs had eaten them in Ohio. She had wondered sometimes if it was the fate of the peony to be carried clear to the Pacific by lonely women. At least, if she gave a bit of it to Mrs. McNair, it would be that much farther west on its way to its destination, which she, for one, hoped it might soon reach, so that there would be some rest for women. Let Mrs. McNair remember to come for a root of it in the fall, when her fence would be finished. Without fences it is useless to try to protect flowers. Her mother in Ohio had had a sort of high stockade made of thorny brush around a little garden, so that one had to come near, and look down over the top to get a glimpse of the blossoms. But the pigs had been very hungry in those days. Their destruction of that garden and the rescue of the peony she had heard her mother tell about with tears in her eyes twenty years afterwards. It was one of the sorrows of her life.

When Mrs. McNair went home that day, she had with her the roots of all transplantable things, lilacs, white and purple, roses pink and red and yellow, pinks and young hollyhocks, grape cuttings and snowballs. She had a pile of old "Horticultural Advisers" from the lady's library, full of advice about planting windbreaks, and letters from frontier gardeners who had morning-glories growing over their young pines, and walls of hollyhocks twelve feet high. She had been urged to stay at the lady's for dinner, and the German had made her promise always to come back to her for coffee when she came to town. The road was full of ruts and swamps, and her bones ached long before the springless wagon got home. But her plants had felt no joltings, for she had held them carefully in her lap. That was the first day she sang in the United States of America. It was her "Americanization." Her husband never even noticed her song, however. He was suffering acutely from the price of glass windows.