“I used to go with you,” her grandfather said. He put down his spoon, looking troubled.
“You’ll be going day after tomorrow.”
“I certainly will!” He smiled radiantly. “The Mayor came out to see me today.”
“He did?”
“He wants me to ride in the parade—in an auto. I told him I’d rather walk, the way we did going to Gettysburg. But there aren’t more than a dozen of us old fellows left. He says he wants to take good care of us. Let the Spanish-American fellows do the walking, he said. Maybe there’s something in it?” The old eyes twinkled under his bushy brows with the same humor Emily’s eyes had.
“There’s a lot in it,” said Emily. “You’re eighty-one years old. I don’t want you walking very far.”
“Oh, I’ll only walk up Front Street. Just to show them I can. That’s what Judge Hodges and I have decided. The Judge came over a while today, too.”
He usually did. Tall, gaunt, bearded, he was a veteran of the Fifth Minnesota and the two old men loved to argue about the exploits of their respective regiments.
“I don’t want you to get so tired you can’t come to Commencement,” Emily said.
“Commencement?”
“My graduation.”
“When is it?”
“Friday night.”
“I’ll be there,” he answered. “Do they make much fuss about it?”
“I told you I’m having flowers—and a new white dress. I tried it on today.”
“That’s right. I’m glad you got yourself a nice white dress.” He put down his spoon again. “Your mother was married in a nice white dress.”
She was buried in it, too, thought Emily, remembering the story her grandfather had often told her. The old man’s thoughts didn’t go on to that sad aftermath. “Yes siree,” he said, “the Mayor wants us to ride. But we’re going to walk a ways at least. Show ’em we can.”
“You’d better get to bed,” said Emily. “I’ll press your uniform.”
The old man went into his little bedroom off the kitchen. He always went to bed before the sunset color was quite out of the sky. Emily washed their bowls and spoons. Then she built up the fire in the range and put the irons to heat and brought out her ironing board.
It was astonishing that she had forgotten about Decoration Day. She hadn’t missed a parade in her life. But the dress fitting, the party, Don Walker had put it out of her mind.
“You’re going to have good weather for it, Grandpa,” she called, testing her iron with a moistened finger.
“What’s that? What did you say?”
“You’re going to have good weather for Thursday. Nice and cool.”
He put his head, in a nightcap now, around the bedroom door.
“It was mighty hot when we marched to Gettysburg,” he chuckled. “But we got there just the same.”
3
Class Day
BY SIX O’CLOCK THE following morning Emily was on her way to the cemetery.
She had set her alarm clock for five, for she had to practise her oration in the Opera House at one; she must have a final fitting of her graduation dress, and in the evening came the Class Day program. It was a day on which to get a head start.
She walked briskly, dressed for action in an old middy blouse and skirt. Over one arm hung a pail containing a small rake, a trowel, garden shears, and three empty quart jars. The other arm held big bouquets of snowballs and lilacs, tulips and painted daisies, their stems wrapped in newspapers which had been soaked in water.
She had picked them in her own yard while the birds trilled a welcome to their early morning world, and had breakfasted softly, leaving her grandfather’s coffee on the stove. Beyond the slough most of the houses were still sleeping, but at Annette’s house a curl of smoke suggested that Minnie might be getting breakfast.
A milkman’s wagon was rattling from door to door.
“Hel-lo,” the milkman called in a muted voice. He, too, seemed to feel the camaraderie of the hour and nodded at her flowers. “The missus and I are going up there this afternoon,” he said.
It was too bad, Emily reflected, turning east to Broad Street, that she had to go so early, for the cemetery on the afternoon before Decoration Day was a very social place. It was full of people putting their family graves in spic and span order. At the Episcopal Church, she took the curving road up Cemetery Hill and passed through the tall arched gate.
This town of marble and granite monuments was even quieter than the one she had left below. Silvery cobwebs lay unbroken on the grass. Only a callous bob-o-link disturbed the stillness, and Emily made her way with a hushed tread past modest crosses, stately obelisks, and the snowy statue of an angel, to the Webster plot which had a square granite monument with headstones marking the places where her grandmother, father and mother lay. At the foot of the graves her grandfather had placed a small white iron bench.
Ivy covered the headstones, and a moss-rose bush, which her grandmother had planted, stood between the graves of Emily’s father and mother. Lilies of the valley on her grandmother’s grave had spread untidily.
“I’ll have to clear them out,” thought Emily. She looked down at the headstone on which a pair of clasped hands was chiseled. The lettering read: “Emily Clarke Webster. Born 1835, died 1904. She hath done what she could.”
Emily remembered her well…a cheerful, big-bosomed old lady. She was something of a personage in Deep Valley, for she had been its first school teacher. Far back in the fifties, when the town was less than a year old and she was a girl, fresh from New Hampshire, Emily Clarke had opened a little school in her father’s parlor. There had been fourteen pupils.
In the last decade of a busy, useful life she had taken her granddaughter to raise.
“You always did do what you could,” Emily said affectionately. “Well! I’d better get to work.”
Putting down her pail, she thinned out the too lavish lilies of the valley. She raked the dead leaves, clipped the long grass, and dug a hole on each mound, into which she sank an empty jar. Taking her pail, she went to a nearby pump for water. She filled the jars and inserted the still dewy bouquets.
As she worked she continued to think about her grandparents. Cyrus Webster had come out to Minnesota from Ohio, lured by the newly ceded Indian lands. A seminary graduate, he had been attracted to the enterprising young teacher. They were married and staked out a claim over a valuable limestone formation which, after the Civil War, he had quarried with great profit. But his only son had been killed in an accident there.
Emily glanced at her father’s dates. “Fred Webster, 1868-1896,” said his headstone under a chiseled open book, presumably the Bible.
For all her grandfather’s loyal evasiveness, Emily gathered that her father had not been too successful in the quarry—or any place else. Fred Webster had been a changeable, too optimistic young man. He had looked, she understood, like Uncle Chester, who was floridly handsome. But Uncle Chester had had the business ability his cousin lacked. He had taken Fred’s place in the quarry and had risen from foreman to be superintendent and then partner. He ran it alone now.
Emily’s slow gaze passed to her mother’s headstone. There was a chiseled cherub above “Charlotte Benton Webster, 1873-1894”; 1894 was the year of Emily’s birth.
Lottie Benton had been a teacher, too. She had come all the way from Binghamton, New York, to teach in Deep Valley.
“No wonder I want to go to college!” Emily thought. “Two teachers in the family!”
Lottie had married Fred Webster in his parents’ home. Her own parents were dead, and she had left no relatives in Binghamton.
“Lottie was a dear, pretty girl,” her grandfather always said.
“She was just the one for him. He’d have settled down if she had lived,” her grandmother had told her.
“Your father didn’t deserve her,” Uncle Chester had said bluntly.
But somehow nothing that anyone said ever made her mother real
to Emily. The photograph on her bureau of Lottie Benton wearing the frizzed bang, tight basque and looped polonaise of the eighties had never come to life.
Emily sat down on the bench to rest. Her exertions had loosened her hair which broke into curly tendrils around her broad brow and quiet eyes. She sat with her head bent and studied her mother’s headstone.
How different her life would have been if her parents had lived! It was strange to think that she might have had brothers and sisters, and girl friends coming for supper or to study and stay all night! She had heard the other girls mention doing this, but she had never done it in her life.
Boys and girls would have come to play the piano or phonograph as they did at Annette’s. Boys would have called for her to go to parties, and her mother would have looked her over before she started! Emily had once gone to a party with Annette and she had never forgotten how Aunt Sophie had asked Annette to turn around, watching critically for a hint of petticoat or a hair out of place.
Emily bent down impulsively and touched her mother’s grave.
“I wish you could be here to see me graduate. Father, too,” she said.
She remembered the tickets she had received for Commencement. Each member of the class had been given six. Emily had use for only one, and she had felt queer when the other girls were discussing how they would manage with so few. She had wanted to offer her extra ones, and she would, of course, before the day came. It occurred to her now with an unexpected stab that if her parents had lived she might have needed every single ticket.
“I’m glad I have Grandpa,” she thought, and loving thankfulness swept over her. “I’m glad, even if I can’t go to college.”
She jumped up. Everything looked fresh and tidy. The graves would be a credit to her and her grandfather when the crowd came up to the cemetery tomorrow.
Going down the hill, her empty pail over her arm, she met Hunter Sibley and his two younger brothers, coming up.
“Doesn’t your family come in the afternoon?” she asked.
“Sure,” answered Hunter. “But we kids want to decorate Uncle Aaron’s grave ourselves.”
“What a lovely idea!” Emily warmed with pleasure. The Sibleys’ Uncle Aaron had been in the First Minnesota along with her own grandfather. This was a tribute to him, too.
“It was Jerry’s idea,” said Hunter, and nodded, smiling, at the middle brother, a short boy who still wore knickerbockers although he was a junior in high school. Emily knew him well for he, too, was a debater.
Jerry held up his bouquet. “Look what I found!”
“Lady slippers!” cried Emily. “They’re beauties.”
“I’m going to put on flags,” said Bobby, a ten-year-old with unruly hair, mischievous eyes and big front teeth. “Flags!” he shouted. “And when I put on flags, I put on flags.”
Both his hands were full of flags of all sizes. Waving them violently, he started to run up the hill.
Emily laughed with the warm enjoyment she always found in children and proceeded on to Front Street and over the slough. Her grandfather was waiting for her at the gate, his round face, beneath the skull cap, sober.
“How did the graves look?”
“Just fine, Grandpa! I took out nice bouquets.”
“What did you put on your grandmother’s grave?”
“Lilacs.”
“She always liked them,” the old man said with satisfaction.
“And what do you think the Sibley boys were doing?” She described their pilgrimage and a flush came into his old cheeks.
“When Colonel Colville told us to charge,” he said, “nobody ran out on that field any faster than Aaron Sibley.”
“You ran fast enough to get a bullet through your arm.”
“Only winged, only winged,” he answered impatiently. “It might have been death for any one of us.”
It was for a good many of them, Emily remembered. She had heard her grandfather say many times that only forty-seven had come back out of two hundred and sixty-two who had made the gallant charge.
After pumping a pail of fresh water, she went in to get dinner. She put potatoes to boil, fried pork chops and opened a jar of tomatoes she had canned the summer before. She laid a cloth on the dining room table and put on jelly, bread and butter, a pot of tea. They sat down and her grandfather said grace.
Through the bow window in which his easy chair stood, they could see small crooked willows and the slough, still wet from the spring rains. Some Syrian boys had a homemade boat in the pond.
“They killed a snake out there this morning,” her grandfather remarked. Presently he asked, “Emmy, did you press my uniform?”
“Yes, Grandpa. I pressed it last night.”
“That’s fine! That’s fine! Judge Hodges was here this morning. He and I don’t want to ride in autos, the way the Mayor asks. We want to walk, show ’em we can.”
“Well, don’t walk too far,” Emily answered absently. She was used to hearing him tell the same story, and herself making the same responses, over and over.
“I’m glad those Sibley boys appreciate their uncle, Emmy.”
“They’re nice boys. Hunter is the president of our class, you know. Grandpa, I have to go to the Opera House this afternoon. I have to practise my oration.”
He looked puzzled. “You told me what that was about, but I’ve forgotten.”
“It’s about Jane Addams and Hull House.”
“Oh, yes! You said it for me. It was fine.”
Gettysburg, Emily Clarke Webster, Fred and Lottie slipped into the past. While she washed the dishes, and her grandfather napped in his chair, Emily recited her oration.
“A woman has awakened the social conscience of this generation…”
She enjoyed reciting it, for she liked the story of Jane Addams who had grown up in nearby Illinois, had been graduated from Rockford Seminary there, had traveled abroad and had been so touched by the miseries of the poor that she had decided to devote her life to helping them.
She had done it in such a strange, interesting way, by going to live among them, taking a big house in a poor, crowded foreign section of Chicago and then just being a good neighbor. Hull House had resulted—a “settlement house,” it was called—a hospitable center of fun and useful activity for young and old.
“What a wonderful thing to do!” Emily thought, running upstairs to change her clothes. “If I could go to college, I’d train for work like that. I’d love to go to some big city and start another Hull House.”
Miss Fowler, the little dark-eyed English teacher, was waiting on the stage of the Opera House. The big front curtain was rolled halfway up to show rows of empty seats.
“I’m going to sit down in the parquet and listen first, and then I’ll go up in the balcony,” Miss Fowler said. She came from Boston and spoke with an eastern accent. “I’ll take your paper although I know it isn’t necessary. You won’t need prompting.”
“I don’t think I will,” said Emily. She liked to address an audience and was used to it, from debating. Miss Fowler applauded from the gallery, and when she returned to the stage she put her hand on Emily’s arm.
“Your oration is very good,” she said. “It sounds as though it had sprung from your own thoughts about Jane Addams.”
“It did,” Emily answered. “Of course, I’ve done a lot of reading, too.”
“But she really interests you.”
“Yes, she does. I think I would like social work.”
“Emily,” said Miss Fowler, looking at her thoughtfully, “I wish you could go to college. You can afford it, I know. It’s a matter of leaving your grandfather, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t a housekeeper…”
“No. He’s eighty-one. I’ve lived with him all my life.”
“The German College has classes in English.”
“But he’s been waiting for me to get through high school. He doesn’t realize…” she stopped.
“Oh,
well,” said Miss Fowler. “It isn’t necessary. College would help you to get where you’re going but you’ll get there just the same.”
Emily didn’t answer. She ached when she thought about college. So many of the girls in her class were going—to Carleton, or St. Catherine’s, or the State University. Mabel Scott, another honor student, was going east to Vassar where Carney Sibley, Hunter’s older sister, went.
“No girl in the class would get as much out of college as I would,” thought Emily, walking up Front Street. She swallowed hard. “But I mustn’t even think about it.”
She turned in at the butcher shop and bought a chicken for Decoration Day. She stopped at the shop of Windmiller, the florist, to order flowers for herself for Friday. The other girls would be receiving them from their parents. But her grandfather wouldn’t know how to go about buying flowers. He wouldn’t mind her buying them, though.
“We have plenty, Emily,” he had told her when she was fourteen, and illness had forced him to retire from the quarry. Each month he gave her the money for their modest living, and if she needed more, she had only to ask. She seldom asked, however, for she had been trained in thrift.
She approached Mrs. Windmiller with friendly dignity. “Will you send me a dozen pink roses Friday afternoon? They’re for my graduation. I’ll pay for them now.”
At Annette’s, the two dresses were finished, pressed and laid out on the bed. Grandma LaDou came to see Annette in her ruffled organdy and stayed on with kindly interest to admire Emily, too.
“We’ll call for you and your grandfather tomorrow night,” Aunt Sophie said.
“Oh, thank you!” Emily cried. She had been wondering how they would get to the Opera House.
“Emily,” Aunt Sophie added, looking a trifle embarrassed, “are you using all your tickets?”
“My tickets?”
“Yes. For Commencement. I know you each got six. Could you spare us three? We need them desperately.”
“Of course. They’re in my pocket book.”
Aunt Sophie accepted them with fervent gratitude, and after Emily had packed her dress in a box, they went down to the back parlor to see Annette’s presents which were spread out on the center table, each one in its bed of tissue paper.