Part 6
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Tommy, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging.
Sally paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls and Tommy received their first real information about the other neighbors around Elmhurst.
Buzzy was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Sally at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, poring over a seed catalogue.
“I’d love some zinnias and snapdragons and blue delphiniums in big beds along the terraces,” she said. “Think of the splashes of blue up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies’ place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.”
“You’ll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better,” Sally declared merrily. “We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what’s left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you’ve got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don’t need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl.”
The girls were silent, remembering what Rebecca had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Tommy’s curiosity got the better of his caution and he coaxed Sally away to hunt for the lilies of the valley hidden away under the hazel bushes.
It was Sally, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Sally, who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.
“She’s perfectly wonderful,” Kit declared that day at lunch. “She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trillium and bloodroot, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn’t let us pick many either, only a few. She says it’s just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds’ nests.”
Here Doris chimed in.
“And she’s going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Mom. We’re going to take some of that monk’s cloth and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin.”
“Sally seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities,” said Mrs. Craig amusedly.
“She is just exactly that,” Kit answered earnestly. “I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they’re as poor as churchmice. Sally told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Elmhurst without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it.”
“Sally’s going to peddle our rhubarb for us,” Kit went on. “I think that rhubarb is a most wonderful plant. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Sally told me it was rhubarb, and we’re going to market it. She says there’s a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we’re going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mom, from the window over the kitchen sink, and heaven help anybody who takes our cranberries!”
“I wouldn’t start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won’t be along until frost,” laughed Mrs. Craig.
Tommy, with Buzzy’s help, was devoting himself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Tommy had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the “coming offs,” as Buzzy put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Rebecca’s incubator, and over these Tommy fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.
One of “Ma” Parmelee’s pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.
Jean named her “Hamlet” in fun, because she said she was always looking for “rats in the arras.” But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn’t have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn’t even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at mealtime and eat her share.
“There’ll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays,” Kit prophesied darkly, but Tommy begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Tommy always begged off any of his flock from execution, and Buzzy had to go to one of the neighboring farms and buy one.
“It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you’re well-acquainted with,” Tommy explained. “And another thing, Mom, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it’s in the fall. I had Buzzy paint me some signs on shingles and I’m going to put them all over the place.”
“What do they say, dear?”
“They say just this.” Tommy’s tone was full of firmness and decision. “_Any traps set on this property will be sprung by_ ME.”
“Do they state who ‘Me’ is?”
“I signed it with Dad’s name, and put underneath ‘Per T.’”
The screen door slammed and Kit walked into the living room from the porch. “Good night, everybody,” she said. “The night is yet young, but I’ve promised Buzzy—or rather, Buzzy and I have a bet that I can’t get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my tennis racket against five of Buzzy’s records. Don’t anyone call me, because it’s got to be fair.”
Doris and Tommy decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living room. Presently Mrs. Craig glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean’s lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old fireplace.
“What is it, dear?” she asked. “Tired?”
Jean shook her head, and smiled. “No, country life doesn’t tire me. I love it even though I am lonesome for my old friends. I think I’ll go over to Sally’s tomorrow and see if she’ll take me to meet some of the young people.” Jean dangled her legs over the arm of the chair and studied her scuffed saddle shoes. “If they are all as nice as Buzzy and Sally they must be swell.”
12. The Craigs Plan a Barbecue
Breakfast at Woodhow was supposed to be seven-thirty, but the girls and Tommy got up at about six and spent the hour before out in the garden. It was so fascinating, Doris said, to be out-of-doors in the early morning. Sometimes when the air was warmer than the ground there would be a morning mist out of which rose clumps of tree tops like little islands.
The following day, at five-thirty exactly, Jean wakened drowsily to find Kit standing by her bed, already dressed in blue jeans and a sweater.
“I want you to look at this clock and be a witness that I’m up on time,” she said briskly, holding up an alarm clock. “It’s perfectly gorgeous outside, Jean. I don’t see how you can lie and sleep with all nature calling.”
“Nature didn’t call you before, did she, Kathleen? Go away and let me sleep.”
“Well, I get the records anyway.” She seated herself blithely on the foot of the bed. Jean sat up and hurled her pillow at her, but Kit dodged and ran, laughing, down the hall.
After breakfast though, when the dew was gone from the meadow grass, Jean had Buzzy saddle Princess, the mare, and declared she was going to ride over and get Sally to take her visiting. Kit and Tommy were busy out in the kitchen garden, and Doris was helping with the dusting. For some reason Jean wanted to go without them on this first reconnoitering expedition.
She rode down the hill toward Elmhurst, bowed with a little rising flush of color to the group in the front of the feed store, and stopped before the brown and white house where the Hancocks lived.
“Hello, Jean,” called Sally buoyantly, beating some oval-braided rugs out on the clothesline. “Can you stop in?”
Jean leaned forward, the reins held loosely in her hand. “I wanted to see if you couldn’t go riding with me. Just so I can meet some of the girls. We want to give a barbecue or some sort of a party to get acquainted with our neighbors.”
“Why, the idea,” Sally exclaimed, dropping her stick and pushing back her hair. “I think that’s awfully nice. Wait till I ask Mother if I can go.”
Jean waited and presently Mrs. Hancock stepped out on the side porch and down the steps. She was rather like Buzzy and Sally, curly-haired and young-looking, with deep dimples and eyes that still held an abiding happiness in their blue depths. Her face was careworn and there were lines around her mouth that told of repressed pain, but it was the look in the eyes that held you. Luella Trowbridge may have gone through trouble, but she had married the man she loved and had been happy with him. She stretched out both hands to Jean.
“Buzzy’s told us so much about all of you up there that it seems as if I know every single one of you,” she said pleasantly. “You’re Jean, aren’t you? Of course Sally can go along if she wants to. Don’t forget the new girl over at the old Parmelee place.”
Jean never forgot that morning. They rode miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the material upon which she had to work.
At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.
“Ingeborg belonged to a basketball team,” Astrid said. “I can swim and play tennis best.”
The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Rebecca’s. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother’s skirts at the stranger on horseback and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.
“They like very much to come, you see?” she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. “Tony, I have shame for you, _ma petite_. Why don’t you come out and say hello? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, quick!”
Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to give to Jean and Sally. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must ride around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.
Last of all came the Icelandic farm, and here Jean found only the hired men, two grave-faced, light-haired transplanted vikings, who eyed her curiously and silently. Hedda, the daughter, and her mother had driven over to sell two young pigs at the Finnish place.
“Oh, golly,” laughed Jean, “let’s go home. I feel as if I had been riding like Peer Gynt, all over the world, just touching at countries here and there. Let’s go right straight home, so I can talk to Mother and get a perspective on it all.”
“Better ask the Mill girls over while you’re about it,” Sally suggested, so they made one last stop at the red sawmill in the valley below Woodhow. “They’re Americans. My friend lives here, Lucy Peckham. She’s got five sisters and three brothers, but Lucy’s the whole family herself.”
The three brothers worked in the sawmill after school, and Jean didn’t see them, but Lucy sufficed. She came running out of the kitchen with a brown and white checked apron covering her up, and her red hair streaming behind her. She was short and freckled and not one bit pretty, unless good health and happiness and smiles made up for beauty. But the instant you met Lucy you recognized executive ability concentrated in human form.
“Billy, keep out of those lettuce beds,” she called to a younger brother, strayed somehow from the mill. “How do you do, Miss Craig—”
“Oh, call me Jean,” Jean said quickly. “We’re close neighbors. If we didn’t hear your whistle we’d never know what time it is.”
“Well, we’ve been intending to get up the valley to see you, but Mother hasn’t been well, and all the girls are younger than I, so I help around the house. We’ve got twins in our family, did Sally tell you? Sally and I named them. We thought of everything under the sun, Martha Washington and Betsey Ross, and Ruth and Naomi, and Mercy and Faith, and then we got it all at once. We’ve had twins in our family before, Josephine and Imogene, that’s Mother and Aunt Jo, but we didn’t want to repeat. Somehow, it didn’t show any imagination.” She laughed and so did Jean. “So we called ours Elva and Sylvia. We say Elvy and Sylvy for short. Anne and Charlotte are twelve and nine and the twins are only five. They’re too cute for anything. Wish you’d all come down and see us Sunday afternoon.”
“Lucy’d ask the whole world to supper Sunday afternoon,” Sally said as they finally turned up the home road. “She’s just a dear, and she has to work all the time. She never has a single day to herself, and she doesn’t mind it a bit. She does manage to get away to sing in the choir Sunday mornings, but that’s all. And even if she isn’t pretty, she’s got a voice that makes gooseflesh come out all over you, and you shut your eyes and just tingle when it rises and falls. I think she’s wonderful. Isn’t her hair red?”
“It’s coppery and it’s beautiful,” Jean answered decidedly. “I think she’s swell. Why can’t Anne and Charlotte buckle down and help, so that Lucy can get away once in a while?”
“Her mother says she can’t do without her.”
Jean pondered over that and finally decided it was too deep for her to settle. It had been a very profitable afternoon, and after she had taken Sally home, she rode into the home drive, feeling as if she really had a line on Elmhurst girls. Tommy came running down to meet her as she jumped off, while Buzzy came to take care of Princess. Tommy’s eyes were shining with excitement.
“Jeannie, what do you suppose has happened?”
“Something’s sprouted,” Jean guessed laughingly. Tommy spent most of his time watching to see if any of the seeds had started to sprout.
“No. It isn’t that. Gypsy’s got little chickens. She marched into the barnyard with ten of them, as proud as anything. And nobody knows where she hatched them at all.”
Jean had to go immediately to see the new brood. Gypsy had cuddled them around her in the barn on a pile of hay and steadfastly refused to be removed. If ever a hen looked nonchalant she did, quite as if she would have said, “I can do it just as well as any of these ridiculous nesters that you’re so proud of, and my chicks are twice as perfect as theirs.”
“They’re wonderful babies, Gypsy,” Jean told her. “Be careful of them now. Mothers have to behave themselves, you know. No more gallivanting off to the woods.”
“She probably will. I’m going to put them into a little coop tomorrow and her too.”
It only proved, as Kit remarked, what children would do for a flighty and light-minded person.
Jean changed into a dress and ran down into the kitchen to help get lunch and tell her experiences of the day, which proved so entertaining and comical that Mrs. Craig finally came out and asked if they were ever to have anything to eat.
“Dad’s tray is all ready, Mom,” Jean replied, sitting up on the kitchen stool beside the stove, “I’m just waiting for the biscuits to bake, and Kit’s fixing a beautiful jelly omelette. Mother, you never saw anything so funny as these precious inhabitants, but they’re all gold, just the same, and I like them. And we’re going to have a barbecue.”
13. Swing Your Partner
“We’ve forgotten to write Mr. McRae and tell him how much we like the house,” Doris said a few days later.
“He doesn’t know anything about the house, or care either,” protested Kit, struggling with some raspberry bushes that needed disentangling and tying back against the woodshed boards. “He’s never even seen it. Do you suppose he has the least bit of sentiment for it the way we have or Sally has? I wouldn’t bother to write to him.”
“Oh, I would,” Doris answered serenely. She was down on her knees hunting for four-leaf clovers. “It isn’t his fault that he’s never seen the place. Maybe we could coax him back.”
“We don’t want to coax him back. It must be our one endeavor to keep him right out there in Saskatoon forever. We must tell him the cellar’s damp and the roof leaks and the whole place has gone to rack and ruin. If we don’t he may come East and take it away from us, and we want to save up and buy it and give it back to Sally and her Mother and Buzzy.”
“What’s Buzzy’s real name?” asked Tommy irrelevantly. “I never thought to ask him.”
“He wants to study electrical engineering or else be a rancher,” Kit said. “I never asked him what his real name is. You’re awfully inquisitive, Tommy.”
“What do all boys see in ranches, I wonder,” put in Doris. “Back at the Cove, Dave Phelps always wanted to be a cowboy and he’s got to be a lawyer, his father says.”
“Maybe he’ll escape West some day and be whatever he likes. I think one of the very worst things in life is to have to be something you don’t want to be.” Kit surveyed her work. “Of course, in the ups and downs and uncertainties, as Becky would remark, we must be prepared for all things, but if you can decide what you’re best fitted for, then you ought to aim everything at that mark. If Buzzy wants to be an electrical engineer, he ought to get books now, and study them hard, and if he wants to be a rancher, he ought to go West—”
A voice came from midair apparently, overhead on the woodshed roof which Buzzy was patching with waterproof paint and tar. It was a mild and cheerful voice and showed plainly that Buzzy was personally interested in the conversation.
“I can’t go West just now, Mom needs me. But I’m going as soon as I can.”
The three stared up at him with laughing faces. “Buzzy Hancock,” exclaimed Tommy, “why didn’t you sing out to us before?”
“Wanted to hear what you had to say,” said Buzzy simply. “Thought maybe I’d get some good advice. And my first name’s Seth. Seth Guilford Trowbridge Hancock. I’m named for my grandfather. Sally called me Buzzy when I was a little kid, so I suppose that I’ll be that all my life.”
“Sally and Buzzy,” repeated Doris musingly, “when you’re really Sarah and Seth. Nicknames are queer, aren’t they? I think that babies should be called pet names till they’re old enough to choose their own. Still Seth’s a good name. It’s a name to grow up to, Buzzy. You ought to be stout and dignified, like Mr. Pickwick.”
“Guess I don’t know him, do I?” asked Buzzy. “Sally wants to be something too, but girls can’t do that. She wants to be a builder and look after land. She wants to go to the State Agricultural College too, and take the forestry course. Do you know what she does? She read some place that the chestnut trees were dying out, so she takes a pocketful of sound chestnuts with her whenever she goes out for a walk in the woods, and every once in a while she sticks her finger in the ground and plants a chestnut. What do you think of that?”
Kit drew in a deep breath.
“I think she’s wonderful. I don’t see why she can’t go to the State College if she likes, or why she can’t take the forestry course. It isn’t whether you’re a boy or a girl that matters in such things. It’s just whether you can do the work that counts.”
“She can shut her eyes and walk through the woods and tell the name of every tree just by feeling its leaves.”
Jean appeared on the back porch and called down to them to come up and wash for dinner. She stood there in the doorway for a minute after the rest had gone in, looking out at the fields highlighted by the sun. As she stood there Buzzy came up, looking as if there was something on his mind.
After a moment he said, “Jean, there’s going to be a barn dance up at the Grange Saturday night. I wondered if you’d like to go?”
“What? A barn dance? I’ve never been to one. I’d love to. What are they like?” said Jean all in one breath.
“Oh, they’re a lot of fun. Everybody goes to them. They do square dancing and sometimes they do regular dancing besides. They have a caller, a man who plays the fiddle and directs the dancing so you know what steps to use. It’s not hard to learn.”
“It sounds like a good time,” said Jean.
“OK, then, I’ll pick you up about eight. That be all right?”
“Swell, Buzzy. Gee, I’d better go! Something’s burning.” With that Jean turned and ran back into the kitchen, feeling happier than she had since the family had moved to Woodhow. When she told her mother about it later, Mrs. Craig agreed that Buzzy was very nice indeed to have offered to show her some of the fun of living in the country.
Saturday night promptly at eight o’clock, Buzzy appeared at the front door with his hair slicked down, his shoes polished, and looking quite different from the boy who worked in the fields all day in overalls. Jean opened the door for him, wearing a pretty light blue cotton dress that set off her dark hair.
“Hi, Buzzy. Come on in. I’m all ready.” She picked up her bag, called good night to her family and they went out.
It was a lovely spring evening, the smell of cherry blossoms hung in the air and the moon was beginning to come up over the hills. Buzzy opened the door of his battered jalopy and Jean got in. Walking around to the other side of the car, Buzzy broke off a sprig of cherry blossoms and tossed them into Jean’s lap. She turned and smiled at him as she fastened the flowers in her hair.
“Gee, you look nice tonight, Jeannie,” he said, and abruptly started the car.
Judging by the number of cars parked when they arrived at the Grange, there were already a number of people there before them. Inside they found quite a crowd. A square dance had already begun, so Jean and Buzzy stood watching the twirling mass of people dance by them.
“Gosh, they dance so fast. I’ll never be able to do it,” exclaimed Jean. “Does just that one fiddler play all evening?”
“Not always,” he explained. “Sometimes somebody plays the piano, too, or Jed Perkins brings his bass fiddle, but usually just Nate plays. That’s his name, Nate White. Come on, let’s try it. They’re starting again. Just follow me and you’ll be all right.”
Buzzy led her out onto the floor and they began to dance. Much to her surprise, Jean found the steps quite easy after she tried them a few times. It was far more strenuous than it looked, however, and after a couple of dances she was forced to sit down and catch her breath.
“I’ve never danced so fast in all my life,” she gasped while they were resting. “I’m terribly thirsty. Do you suppose they have anything cold to drink?”
“Sure,” said Buzzy. “I’ll be back in a minute with some of the best-tasting lemonade you ever drank.”
While he was gone, Sally appeared from out of the crowd and came over to where Jean was sitting. “Hi,” she said. “How do you like night life, country style?”