She drew on Pa’s old, tall stable-boots. Her little feet were lost in them, but they would keep out the snow. She fastened Pa’s jumper snug at her throat and belted it around her waist. She tied her hood and put on her mittens.
“May I go with you, Ma?” Laura asked.
“No,” said Ma. “Now listen to me. Be careful of fire. Nobody but Mary is to touch the stove, no matter how long I am gone. Nobody is to go outdoors, or even open a door, till I come back.”
She hung the milk-pail on her arm, and reached through the whirling snow till she got hold of the clothes-line. She shut the back door behind her.
Laura ran to the darkened window, but she could not see Ma. She could see nothing but the whirling whiteness swishing against the glass. The wind screamed and howled and gibbered. There seemed to be voices in it. Ma would go step by step, holding tight to the clothes-line. She would come to the post and go on, blind in the hard snow whirling and scratching her cheeks. Laura tried to think slowly, one step at a time, till now, surely, Ma bumped against the stable door.
Ma opened the door and blew in with the snow. She turned and pushed the door shut quickly, and dropped the latch into its notch. The stable would be warm from the heat of the animals, and steamy with their breath. It was quiet there; the storm was outside, and the sod walls were thick. Now Sam and David turned their heads and whickered to Ma. The cow coaxed, “Moo-oo,” and the big calf cried, “Baw!” The pullets were scratching here and there, and one of the hens was saying to herself, “Crai-ai-kree-eek.”
Ma would clean all the stalls with the pitchfork. Forkful by forkful she threw the old bedding on the manure-pile. Then she took the hay they had left in their mangers, and spread it to make them clean beds.
From the hay-pile she pitched fresh hay into manger after manger, till all four mangers were full. Sam and David and Spot and her calf munched the rustling good hay. They were not very thirsty, because Pa had watered them all before he went to town.
With the old knife that Pa kept by the turnip-pile Ma cut up turnips. She put some in each feed-box, and now the horses and cattle crunched the crisp turnips. Ma looked at the hens’ water-dish to make sure they had water. She scattered a little corn for them, and gave them a turnip to peck.
Now she must be milking Spot.
Laura waited until she was sure that Ma was hanging up the milking-stool. Carefully fastening the stable door behind her, Ma came back toward the house, holding tight to the rope.
But she did not come. Laura waited a long time. She made up her mind to wait longer, and she did. The wind was shaking the house now. Snow as fine and grainy as sugar covered the window sill and sifted off to the floor and did not melt.
Laura shivered in her shawl. She kept on staring at the blank window-panes, hearing the swishing snow and the howling, jeering winds. She was thinking of the children whose Pa and Ma never came. They burned all the furniture and froze stark stiff.
Then Laura could be still no longer. The fire was burning well, but only that end of the room was really warm. Laura pulled the rocking-chair near the open oven and set Carrie in it and straightened her dress. Carrie rocked the chair gaily, while Laura and Mary went on waiting.
At last the back door burst open. Laura flew to Ma. Mary took the milk-pail while Laura untied Ma’s hood. Ma was too cold and breathless to speak. They helped her out of the jumper.
The first thing she said was, “Is there any milk left?”
There was a little milk in the bottom of the pail, and some was frozen to the pail’s inside. “The wind is terrible,” Ma said. She warmed her hands, and then she lighted the lamp and set it on the window sill.
“Why are you doing that, Ma?” Mary asked her, and Ma said, “Don’t you think the lamplight’s pretty, shining against the snow outside?”
When she was rested, they ate their supper of bread and milk. Then they all sat still by the stove and listened. They heard the voices howling and shrieking in the wind, and the house creaking, and the snow swishing.
“This will never do!” said Ma. “Let’s play bean-porridge hot! Mary, you and Laura play it together, and, Carrie, you hold up your hands. We’ll do it faster than Mary and Laura can!
So they all played bean-porridge hot, faster and faster until they could not say the rhymes, for laughing. Then Mary and Laura washed the supper cups, while Ma settled down to her knitting.
Carrie wanted more bean-porridge hot, so Mary and Laura took turns playing it with her. Every time they stopped she shouted, “More! More!”
The voices in the storm howled and giggled and shrieked, and the house trembled. Laura was patting on Carrie’s hands,
“Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days—”
The stovepipe sharply rattled. Laura looked up and screamed, “Ma! The house is on fire!”
A ball of fire was rolling down the stovepipe. It was bigger than Ma’s big ball of yarn. It rolled across the stove and dropped to the floor as Ma sprang up. She snatched up her skirts and stamped on it. But it seemed to jump through her foot, and it rolled to the knitting she had dropped.
Ma tried to brush it into the ashpan. It ran in front of her knitting needles, but it followed the needles back. Another ball of fire had rolled down the stovepipe, and another. They rolled across the floor after the knitting needles and did not burn the floor.
“My goodness!” Ma said.
While they watched those balls of fire rolling, suddenly there were only two. Then there were none. No one had seen where they went.
“That is the strangest thing I ever saw,” said Ma. She was afraid.
All the hair on Jack’s back was standing up. He walked to the door, lifted up his nose, and howled.
Mary cowered in her chair and Ma put her hands over her ears. “For pity’s sake, Jack, hush,” she begged him.
Laura ran to Jack, but he did not want to be hugged. He went back to his corner and lay with his nose on his paws, his hair bristling and his eyes shining in the shadow.
Ma held Carrie, and Laura and Mary crowded into the rocking-chair, too. They heard the wild voices of the storm and felt Jack’s eyes shining, till Ma said:
“Better run along to bed, girls. The sooner you’re asleep, the sooner it will be morning.” She kissed them good-night, and Mary climbed the attic ladder. But Laura stopped halfway up. Ma was warming Carrie’s nightgown by the oven. Laura asked her, low, “Pa did stay in town, didn’t he?”
Ma did not look up. She said cheerfully, “Why, surely, Laura. No doubt he and Mr. Fitch are sitting by the stove now, telling stories and cracking jokes.”
Laura went to bed. Deep in the night she woke and saw lamplight shining up through the ladder-hole. She crept out of bed into the cold, and kneeling on the floor she looked down.
Ma sat alone in her chair. Her head was bowed and she was very still, but her eyes were open, looking at her hands clasped in her lap. The lamp was shining in the window.
For a long time Laura looked down. Ma did not move. The lamp went on shining. The storm howled and hooted after things that fled shrieking through the enormous dark around the frightened house. At last Laura crept silently back to bed and lay shivering.
Chapter 38
The Day of Games
It was late next morning when Ma called Laura to breakfast. The storm was fiercer and wilder. Furry-white frost covered the windows, and inside that good tight house the sugary snow was over the floor and the bedcovers. Upstairs was so cold that Laura snatched up her clothes and hurried down to dress by the stove.
Mary was already dressed and buttoning Carrie up. Hot cornmeal mush, and milk, with the new white bread and butter, were on the table. The daylight was dim white. Frost was thick on every window pane.
Ma shivered over the stove. “Well,” she said, “the stock must be fed.”
She put on Pa’s boots and jumper, and wrapped herself in the big shawl. She told Mary and Laura that she would be gone longe
r this time, because she must water the horses and the cattle.
When she was gone, Mary was scared and still. But Laura could not bear to be still. “Come on,” she told Mary. “We’ve got the work to do.”
They washed and wiped the dishes. They shook the snow off their bedcovers and made their bed. They warmed again by the stove, then they polished it, and Mary cleaned the woodbox while Laura swept the floors.
Ma had not come back. So Laura took the dust-cloth and wiped the window sills and the benches and every curve of Ma’s willow rocking-chair. She climbed on a bench and very carefully wiped the clock-shelf and the clock, and the little brown-spotted dog and her own jewel-box with the gold teapot and cup-and-saucer on top. But she did not touch the pretty china shepherdess standing on the bracket that Pa had carved for Ma. Ma allowed no one else to touch the shepherdess.
While Laura was dusting, Mary combed Carrie’s hair and put the red-checked cloth on the table, and got out the school-books and the slate.
At last the wind howled into the lean-to with a cloud of snow and Ma.
Her skirt and her shawl were frozen stiff with ice. She had had to draw water from the well for the horses and Spot and the calf. The wind had flung the water on her and the cold had frozen her soaked clothes. She had not been able to get to the barn with enough water. But under the icy shawl she had saved almost all the milk.
She rested a little, and said she must bring in wood. Mary and Laura begged her to let them bring it, but Ma said:
“No. You girls are not big enough and you’d be lost. You do not know what this storm is like. I’ll get the wood. You open the door for me.
She piled wood high on the woodbox and around it, while they opened and shut the door for her. Then she rested, and they mopped up the puddles of snow melting from the wood.
“You are good girls,” Ma said. She looked around at the house, and praised them for doing the work so nicely while she was gone. “Now,” she said, “you may study your lessons.”
Laura and Mary sat down to their books. Laura looked steadily at the page, but she could not study. She heard the storm howling and she heard things in the air moaning and shrieking. Snow swish-swished against the windows. She tried not to think of Pa. Suddenly the words on the page smeared together and a drop of water splashed on them.
She was ashamed. It would be shameful even for Carrie to cry, and Laura was eight years old. She looked sidewise to make sure that Mary had not seen that tear fall. Mary’s eyes were shut so tight that her whole face was crinkled, and Mary’s mouth was wabbling.
“I don’t believe we want lessons, girls!” Ma said. “Suppose we don’t do anything today but play. Think what we’ll play first. Pussy-in-the-corner! Would you like that?”
“Oh yes!” they said.
Laura stood in one corner, Mary in another, and Carrie in the third. There were only three corners, because the stove was in one. Ma stood in the middle of the floor and cried, “Poor pussy wants a corner!”
Then all at once they ran out of their corners and each tried to get into another corner. Jack was excited. Ma dodged into Mary’s corner, and that left Mary out to be poor pussy. Then Laura fell over Jack, and that left Laura out. Carrie ran laughing into the wrong corners at first, but she soon learned.
They all ran until they were gasping from running and shouting and laughing. They had to rest, and Ma said, “Bring me the slate and I’ll tell you a story.”
“Why do you need a slate to tell a story?” Laura asked as she laid the slate in Ma’s lap.
“You’ll see,” said Ma, and she told this story:
Far in the woods there was a pond, like this:
The pond was full of fishes, like this:
Down below the pond lived two homesteaders, each in a little tent, because they had not built their houses yet:
They went often to the pond to fish, and they made crooked paths:
A little way from the pond lived an old man and an old woman in a little house with a window:
One day the old woman went to the pond to get a pail of water: And she saw the fishes all flying out of the pond, like this:
The old woman ran back as fast as she could go, to tell the old man, “All the fishes are flying out of the pond!”
The old man stuck his long nose out of the house to have a good look:
And he said: “Pshaw! It’s nothing but tadpoles!”
“It’s a bird!” Carrie yelled, and she clapped her hands and laughed till she rolled off the footstool. Laura and Mary laughed too and coaxed, “Tell us another, Ma! Please!”
“Well, if I must,” said Ma, and she began, “This is the house that Jack built for two pieces of money.”
She covered both sides of the slate with the pictures of that story. Ma let Mary and Laura read it and look at the pictures as long as they liked. Then she asked, “Mary, can you tell that story?”
“Yes!” Mary answered.
Ma wiped the slate clean and gave it to Mary “Write it on the slate, then,” she said. “And Laura and Carrie, I have new playthings for you.”
She gave her thimble to Laura, and Mary’s thimble to Carrie, and she showed them that pressing the thimbles into the frost on the windows made perfect circles. They could make pictures on the windows.
With thimble-circles Laura made a Christmas tree. She made birds flying. She made a log house with smoke coming out of the chimney. She even made a roly-poly man and a roly-poly woman. Carrie made just circles.
When Laura finished her window and Mary looked up from the slate, the room was dusky. Ma smiled at them.
“We have been so busy we forgot all about dinner,” she said. “Come eat your suppers now.”
“Don’t you have to do the chores first?” Laura asked.
“Not tonight,” said Ma. “It was so late when I fed the stock this morning that I gave them enough to last till tomorrow. Maybe the storm will not be so bad then.”
All at once Laura felt miserable. So did Mary. And Carrie whimpered, “I want Pa!”
“Hush, Carrie!” Ma said, and Carrie hushed.
“We must not worry about Pa,” Ma said, firmly. She lighted the lamp, but she did not set it in the window. “Come eat your suppers now,” she said again, “and then we’ll all go to bed.”
Chapter 39
The Third Day
All night the house shook and jarred in the wind. Next day the storm was worse than ever. The noises of the wind were more terrible and snow struck the windows with an icy rattle.
Ma made ready to go to the stable. “Eat your breakfast, girls, and be careful with the fire,” she said. Then she was gone into the storm.
After a long time she came back and another day began.
It was a dark, long day. They huddled close to the stove and the cold pressed against their backs. Carrie was fretful, and Ma’s smile was tired. Laura and Mary studied hard, but they turns looking out at the snow blowing in waves over the ground. The sky looked like ice. Even the air looked cold above that fast-blowing flood of snow, and the sunshine that came through the peep-hole was no warmer than a shadow.
Sidewise from the peep-hole, Laura glimpsed something dark. A furry big animal was wading deep in the blowing snow. A bear, she thought. It shambled behind the corner of the house and darkened the front window.
“Ma!” she cried. The door opened, the snowy, furry animal came in. Pa’s eyes looked out of its face. Pa’s voice said, “Have you been good girls while I was gone?”
Ma ran to him. Laura and Mary and Carrie ran, crying and laughing. Ma helped him out of his coat. The fur was full of snow that showered on the floor. Pa let the coat drop, too.
“Charles! You’re frozen!” Ma said.
“Just about,” said Pa. “And I’m hungry as a wolf. Let me sit down by the fire, Caroline, and feed me.”
His face was thin and his eyes large. He sat shivering, close to the oven, and said he was only cold, not frost-bitten. Ma quickly warmed some of the bean broth and
gave it to him.
“That’s good,” he said. “That warms a fellow.”
Ma pulled off his boots and he put his feet up to the heat from the oven.
“Charles,” Ma asked, “did you—Were you—” She stood smiling with her mouth trembling.
“Now, Caroline, don’t you ever worry about me,” said Pa. “I’m bound to come home to take care of you and the girls.” He lifted Carrie to his knee, and put an arm around Laura, and the other around Mary. “What did you think, Mary?”
“I thought you would come,” Mary answered.
“That’s the girl! And you, Laura?”
“I didn’t think you were with Mr. Fitch telling stories,” said Laura. “I—I kept wishing hard.”
“There you are, Caroline! How could a fellow fail to get home?” Pa asked Ma. “Give me some more of that broth, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
They waited while he rested, and ate bean broth with bread, and drank hot tea. His hair and his beard were wet with snow melting in them. Ma dried them with a towel. He took her hand and drew her down beside him and asked:
“Caroline, do you know what this weather means? It means we’ll have a bumper crop of wheat next year!”
“Does it, Charles?” said Ma.
“We won’t have any grasshoppers next summer. They say in town that grasshoppers come only when the summers are hot and dry and the winters are mild. We are getting so much snow now that we’re bound to have fine crops next year.”
“That’s good, Charles,” Ma said, quietly.
“Well, they were talking about all this in the store, but I knew I ought to start home. Just as I was leaving, Fitch showed me the buffalo coat. He got it cheap from a man who went east on the last train running, and had to have money to buy his ticket. Fitch said I could have the coat for ten dollars. Ten dollars is a lot of money, but—”
“I’m glad you got the coat, Charles,” said Ma.