"Thank you. I believe I'll set outside for a little while, Mother."
"All right."
Barbara opened the door and closed it quietly behind her. Emma knew that
she was going only to look at the stars, and that was good because all
young people should have trysts with stars. They might never pull one
out of the sky and have it for their own, but they could always try.
Emma fell into a mood of sober reflection.
The years had brought her a fair measure of wisdom, and at thirty-two
she knew a great deal which she had not known when, at sixteen, she
became Joe's wife. Among other things, she knew now that her father had
been a martinet. He knew, he thought, the only true way, and all about
him must follow or risk his wrath. If Emma regretted any years of her
married life, it was the first five when she had insisted that she must
not leave her father. But she had honestly known of nothing else that
she might do.
Since babyhood she had been under her father's influence, and in his
opinion women must always take a secondary place. One by one, as her six
older brothers attained their majority, they had quarreled with their
father and left home. Then the old man had suffered a series of spasms,
and now Emma wondered if they were not simulated spasms designed to keep
his last remaining child at his side. But she had loved him and pitied
him and remained under his influence. She had brought upon her husband
five painful and unproductive years. But those five years had taught
Emma the true measure of Joe's worth. In spite of old Caleb's abuse, Joe
had given him the fullest help of which a man is capable. He had been in
the fields from the first light of morning until the last lingering glow
of twilight. And he had waited without a word of complaint until Emma
herself was willing to leave. With a fresh surge of love and gratitude
she thought about his patient waiting, more difficult for him than for
many another. Because he had waited until she was fully ready, she had
felt obliged to conceal from him the real anguish she felt when, looking
back from the wagon that was carrying them away, she saw Caleb, a
strangely shrunken, isolated figure, standing in the doorway of his
empty home.
But it was not only pity for Caleb that tore at her. It was that her own
roots ran deep, that Caleb's home had been her home for all of her life,
that now she and Joe and Barbara had no home at all other than the
quarters that would be given to them on the farm where Joe would be
working. To be without her own home was a personal agony that she had
shared with no one, but it was an agony that had enabled her to save and
scrimp and put aside every penny until she could hold out her hands to
Joe with enough money in them to buy a place of their own.
Now she held the spare copper lamp base in her hands, and with a soft
piece of cloth she rubbed it and rubbed it until she could see mirrored
in it the smiling, contented outlines of her own face. For a few
precious minutes she dared to hope that, in spite of the troublesome
debt, their most difficult years were behind them.
Barbara came in, stifling a yawn with her hand. "I think I'll go to bed
too, Mother."
"Are you tired, darling?"
"Lazy, I suppose."
Barbara stooped to pick up a toy wagon--another of Joe's products--that
Alfred and Carlyle had left on the floor. She put it in its proper place
on a shelf, dipped a pan of water, and bathed herself. Night-dressed,
she kissed her mother good night. Emma sat alone.
For eight years she had gone with Joe from farm to farm, where he worked
for a house, food, and small wages. But he had always fed and clothed
his family, and where other men had given up in despair, taken to
drink, or even abandoned their families, Joe had still plodded on.
Still, he was more than a plodder. Plodding was his way of making a good
from what otherwise would have been a bad situation.
Just as she herself had wanted a home, Joe had wanted his own land, and
to be his own master. Together they had worked and saved and sacrificed,
until the day came when they were able to realize their ambition. For
her it was the end of the journey. She had come home. The foundation of
their life was laid. From here on all the work they did would be toward
making their home and their land completely their own, forever. Yet she
had seen as the year passed that Joe was somehow not content, and
thinking about him now, a familiar fear began to tug at her again. She
knew the wild fires that flared beneath Joe's placid exterior, and she
was at a loss to explain them. The debt against which he fretted so
angrily was to her bothersome but surely not intolerable. Bit by bit
they would pay it off, and meanwhile they could live comfortably, each
year expanding their little home to meet their expanding needs.
She started when she thought she heard his footstep, then sank back in
her chair. Five minutes later the door opened quietly and Joe tiptoed
in. Emma looked at his flushed cheeks and excited eyes, and for a moment
she was startled. Men looked like that when they drank too much, but Joe
didn't drink. However, he had surely partaken of some heady draught.
Emma asked,
"Are you all right, Joe?"
"Oh sure. I'm all right. I was down at the store. Bibbers Townley's
there. He just came back from the west."
He sat beside her, his eyes glowing, and Emma looked wonderingly at him.
She had never seen him just this way before.
"Tell me, Joe," she urged.