The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

When she woke the younger children were playing about on the floor in their night-clothes, and little Pet was sitting in a square of sunshine intent on one of his shoes. He was too young to know how poor and squalid his surroundings were, the patch of sunshine flung on the floor glorified it all. He (little animal) was happy.

The poor of the western prairies lie almost as unhealthily close together as do the poor of the city tenements. In the small hut of the peasant there is as little chance to escape close and tainting contact as in the coops and dens of the North End of proud Boston. In the midst of oceans of land, floods of sunshine and gulfs of verdure, the farmer lives in two or three small rooms. Poverty’s eternal cordon is ever round the poor.

“Ma, why didn’t you sleep with pap last night?” asked Bob, the seven-year old, when he saw she was awake at last. She flushed a dull red.

“Sh! Because—I—it was too warm—and there was a storm comin’. You never mind askin’ such questions. Is he gone out?”

“Yup. I heerd him callin’ the pigs. It’s Sunday, aint it, ma?”

“Why, yes, so it is! Wal! Now Sadie, you jump up an’ dress quick’s y’ can, an’ Bob an’ Sile, you run down an’ bring s’m water,” she commanded, in nervous haste beginning to dress. In the middle of the room there was scarce space to stand beneath the rafters.

When Sim came in for his breakfast he found it on the table but his wife was absent.

“Where’s y’r ma?” he asked with a little less of the growl in his voice.

“She’s upstairs with Pet.”

The man ate his breakfast in dead silence, till at last Bob ventured to say,

“What makes ma ac’ so?”

“Shut up!” was the brutal reply. The children began to take sides with the mother—all but the oldest girl who was ten years old. To her the father turned now for certain things to be done, treating her in his rough fashion as a housekeeper, and the girl felt flattered and docile accordingly.

They were pitiably clad; like most farm-children, indeed, they could hardly be said to be clad at all. Sadie had on but two garments, a sort of undershirt of cotton and a faded calico dress, out of which her bare, yellow little legs protruded, lamentably dirty and covered with scratches.

The boys also had two garments, a hickory shirt and a pair of pants like their father’s, made out of brown denims by the mother’s never-resting hands,—hands that in sleep still sewed, and skimmed, and baked, and churned. The boys had gone to bed without washing their feet, which now looked like toads, calloused, brown, and chapped.

Part of this the mother saw with her dull eyes as she came down, after seeing the departure of Sim up the road with the cows. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and the woman might have sung like a bird if men were only as kind to her as Nature. But she looked dully on the seas of ripe grasses, tangled and flashing with dew, out of which the bobolinks and larks sprang. The glorious winds brought her no melody, no perfume, no respite from toil and care.

She thought of the children she saw in the town. Children of the merchant and banker, clean as little dolls, the boys in knickerbocker suits, the girls in dainty white dresses, and a bitterness sprang into her heart. She soon put the dishes away, but felt too tired and listless to do more.

“Taw-bay-wies! Pet want ta-aw-bay-wies!” cried the little one, tugging at her dress.

Listlessly, mechanically she took him in her arms, and went out into the garden which was fragrant and sweet with dew and sun. After picking some berries for him, she sat down on the grass under the row of cotton-woods, and sank into a kind of lethargy. A kingbird chattered and shrieked overhead, the grasshoppers buzzed in the grasses, strange insects with ventriloquistic voices sang all about her,—she could not tell where.

“Ma, can’t I put on my clean dress?” insisted Sadie.

“I don’t care,” said the brooding woman darkly. “Leave me alone.”

Oh, if she could only lie here forever, escaping all pain and weariness! The wind sang in her ears, the great clouds, beautiful as heavenly ships, floated far above in the vast dazzling deeps of blue sky, the birds rustled and chirped around her, leaping-insects buzzed and clattered in the grass and in the vines and bushes. The goodness and glory of God was in the very air, the bitterness and oppression of man in every line of her face.

But her quiet was broken by Sadie who came leaping like a fawn down through the grass.

“O ma, Aunt Maria and Uncle William are coming. They’ve jest turned in.”

“I don’t care if they be!” she answered in the same dully-irritated way. “What’re they comin’ here to-day for, I wan’ to know.” She stayed there immovably, till Mrs. Council came down to see her, piloted by two or three of the children. Mrs. Council, a jolly, large-framed woman, smiled brightly, and greeted her in a loud, jovial voice. She made the mistake of taking the whole matter lightly; her tone amounted to ridicule.

“Sim says you’ve been having a tantrum, Creeshy. Don’t know what for, he says.”

“He don’t,” said the wife with a sullen flash in the eyes. “He don’t know why! Well, then, you just tell him what I say. I’ve lived in hell long enough. I’m done. I’ve slaved here day in and day out f’r twelve years without pay—not even a decent word. I’ve worked like no nigger ever worked ‘r could work and live. I’ve given him all I had, ‘r ever expect to have. I’m wore out. My strength is gone, my patience is gone. I’m done with it—that’s a part of what’s the matter.”

“My sakes, Lucreeshy! You mustn’t talk that way.”

“But I will,” said the woman, as she supported herself on one palm and raised the other. “I’ve got to talk that way.” She was ripe for an explosion like this. She seized upon it with eagerness. “They aint no use o’ livin’ this way, anyway. I’d take poison if it want f’r the young ones.”

“Lucreeshy Burns!”

“Oh, I mean it.”

“Land sakes alive, I b’leeve you’re goin’ crazy!”

“I shouldn’t wonder if I was. I’ve had enough t’ drive an Indian crazy. Now you jest go off an’ leave me ‘lone. I aint in mind to visit—they aint no way out of it, an’ I’m tired o’ tryin’ to find a way. Go off an’ let me be.”

Her tone was so bitterly hopeless that the great jolly face of Mrs. Council stiffened into a look of horror such as she had not worn for years. The children, in two separate groups, could be heard rioting. Bees were humming around the clover in the grass, and the kingbird chattered ceaselessly from the Lombardy poplar-tip. Both women felt all this peace and beauty of the morning, dimly, and it disturbed Mrs. Council because the other was so impassive under it all. At last, after a long and thoughtful pause, Mrs. Council asked a question whose answer she knew would decide it all,—asked it very kindly and softly,—

“Creeshy, are you comin’ in?”

“No,” was the short and sullenly decisive answer. Mrs. Council knew that was the end, and so rose with a sigh and went away.

“Wal, good by,” she said simply.

Looking back she saw Lucretia lying at length with closed eyes and hollow cheeks. She seemed to be sleeping, half-buried in the grass. She did not look up nor reply to her sister-in-law. Her life also was one of toil and trouble, but not so hard and hapless as Lucretia’s. By contrast with most of her neighbors she seemed comfortable.

“Sim Burns, what you ben doin’ to that woman?” she burst out as she waddled up to where the two men were sitting under a cotton-wood tree, talking and whittling after the manner of farmers.

“Nawthin’ ‘s fur ‘s I know,” answered Burns, not quite honestly, and looking uneasy.

“You needn’t try t’ git out of it like that, Sim Burns,” replied his sister. “That woman never got into that fit f’r nawthin’.”

“Wal, if you know more about it than I do, whadgy ask me fur,” he replied angrily.

“Tut, tut!” put in Council, always a peacemaker, “hold y’r horses! Don’t git on y’r ear, childern! Keep cool, and don’t spile y’r shirts. Most likely yer all t’ blame. Keep cool an’ swear less.”

“Wal, I’ll bet Sim’s more to blame than she is. Why they aint a harder-workin’ woman in the hull State of Ioway than she is—”

“Except Marm Council.”

“Except nobody. Look at her, jest skin and bones.”

Council chuckled in his vast way. “That’s so, mother, measured in that way she leads over you. You git fat on it.”

She smiled a little, her indignation oozing away; she never “could stay mad,” her children were accustomed to tell her. Burns refused to talk any more about the matter, and the visitors gave it up, and got out their team and started for home, Mrs. Council firing this parting shot:—

“The best thing you can do to-day is t’ let her alone. Mebbe the childern ‘ll bring her round again. If she does come round, you see ‘t you treat her a little more ‘s y’ did when you was a-courtin’ her.”

“This way,” roared Council, putting his arm around his wife’s waist. She boxed his ears while he guffawed and clucked at his team.

Burns took a measure of salt and went out into the pasture to salt the cows. On the sunlit slope of the field, where the cattle came running and bawling to meet him, he threw down the salt in handfuls, and then lay down to watch them as they eagerly licked it up, even gnawing a bare spot in the sod in their eagerness to get it all.