ROSE'S grief was a surprise to herself; there was no blinking the fact
that her life was going to be far more disrupted by Martin's death than
it had been by Bill's. There were other differences. Where that loss
had struck her numb, this quickened every sensibility, drove her into
action; more than that, as she realized how much less there was to
regret in the boy's life than in his father's, how much more he had got
out of his few short years, the edge of the older, more precious sorrow,
dulled. During quite long periods she would be so absorbed in her
thoughts of Martin that Bill would not enter her mind. Was it possible,
that this husband who with his own lips had confessed he had never
loved her, had been a more integral part of herself than the son who had
adored her? What was this bond that had roots deeper than love? Was it
merely because they had grown so used to each other that she felt as
if half of her had been torn away and buried, leaving her crippled and
helpless? Probably it would have been different if Bill had been living.
Was it because when he had died, she still had had Martin, demanding,
vital, to goad her on and give the semblance of a point to her life,
and now she was left alone, adrift? She pondered over these questions,
broodingly.
“I suppose you'll want to sell out, Rose,” Nellie's husband, Bert Mall,
big and cordial as Peter had been before him, suggested a day or two
after the funeral. “I'll try to get you a buyer, or would you rather
rent?”
“I haven't any plans yet, Bert,” Mrs. Wade had evaded adroitly, “it's
all happened so quickly. I have plenty of time and there are lots
of things to be seen to.” There had been that in her voice which had
forbidden discussion, and it was a tone to which she was forced to have
recourse more than once during the following days when it seemed to her
that all her friends were in a conspiracy to persuade her to a hasty,
ill-advised upheaval.
Nothing, she resolved, should push her from this farm or into final
decisions until a year had passed. She must have something to which she
could cling if it were nothing more than a familiar routine. Without
that to sustain and support her, she felt she could never meet the
responsibilities which had suddenly descended, with such a terrific
impact, upon her shoulders.
In an inexplicable way, these new burdens, her black dress--the first
silk one since the winter before Billy came--and the softening folds of
her veil, all invested her with a new and touching majesty that seemed
to set her a little apart from her neighbors.
Nellie had been frankly scandalized at the idea of mourning. “Nobody
does that out here--exceptin' during the services,” she had said sharply
to her daughter-in-law when Rose had told her of the hasty trip she and
her aunt had made to the largest town in the county. “Folks'll think
it's funny and kind o' silly. You oughtn't to have encouraged it.”
“Oh, Mother Mall, I didn't especially,” the younger woman had protested.
“She just said in that quiet, settled way she has, that she was going
to--she thought it would be easier for her. And I believe it will, too,”
she added, feeling how pathetic it was that Aunt Rose had never looked
half so well during Uncle Martin's life as she had since his death.
“Oh, well,” Mall commented, “Rose always was sort of sentimental, but
there's not many like her. She's right to take her time, too. It'll be
six or eight months, anyway, before she can get things lined up. She's
got a longer head than a body'd think for. Look at the way she run that
newspaper office when old Conroy died.”
“That was nearly thirty years ago,” commented his wife crisply, “and
Rose's got so used to being bossed around by Martin that she'll find it
ain't so easy to go ahead on her own.”
With her usual shrewdness, Nellie had surmised the chief difficulty,
but it dwindled in real importance because of the fact that Rose so
frequently had the feeling that Martin merely had gone on a journey
and would come home some day, expecting an exact accounting of her
stewardship. His instructions were to her living instructions which must
be carried out to the letter.
She had attended with conscientious promptness to checking the trouble
that had brought about his death. “I promised Mr. Wade it should be the
first thing,” she had explained to Dr. Hurton. “'You'll let it be the
first thing, won't you?' Those were his very words. He depended on us,
Doctor.”
When the time came to plan definitely for the disposal of the purebred
herd, she went herself to Topeka to arrange details with Baker. She was
constantly thinking: “Now, what would Martin say to this?” or “Would he
approve of that?” And her conclusions were reached accordingly. The
sale itself was an event that was discussed in Fallon County for years
afterwards. The hotel was crowded with out-of-town buyers. Enthused by
the music from two bands, even the local people bid high, and through
it all, Rose, vigilant, remembered everything Martin would have wanted
remembered. She felt that even he would have been satisfied with
the manner in which the whole transaction was handled, and with the
financial results.
She began to take a new pleasure in everything, the nervous pleasure one
takes when going through an experience for what may be the last time.
The threshing--how often she had toiled and sweated over those three
days of dinners and suppers for twenty-two men. Now she recalled,
with an aching tightness about her heart, how delicious had been her
relaxation, when, the dinner dishes washed, the table reset and the
kitchen in scrupulous order with the last fly vanquished, she and Nellie
had luxuriated in that exquisite sense of leisure that only women know
who have passed triumphantly through a heavy morning's work and have
everything ready for the evening. Later there had been the stroll down
to the field in the shade of the waning afternoon, to find out what time
the men would be in for supper; and the sheer delight of breathing
in the pungent smell of the straw as it came flying from the funnel,
looking, with the sinking sun shining through it, like a million bees
swarming from a hive, while the red-brown grain gushed, a lush stream,
into the waiting wagon.
“It always makes me think of a ship sailing into port, Nellie,” Rose
had once exclaimed, “the crop coming in. It gives me a queer kind of
giddiness, makes me feel like laughing and crying all at once,” to which
her sister-in-law had returned with more than her usual responsiveness:
“Yes, it's the most excitin' time of the year, unless it's Christmas.”
More nebulous were the memories of those early mornings when she had
paused in the midst of getting breakfast to sniff in the clover-laden
air and think how wonderful it would be if only she needn't stay in the
hot, stuffy kitchen but could be free to call Bill and go picnicking or
loaf deliciously under one of the big elms. Most precious of all--the
evenings she and her boy had sat in the yard, with the cool south breeze
blowing up from the pasture, the cows looking on placidly, the frogs
fluting rhythmically in the pond, the birds chirping their good-night
calls, and the dip and swell of the farm land pulling at them like
a haunting tune, almost too lovely to be endured. Oh, there had been
moments all the sweeter and more poignant because they had been so
fleeting.
As she passed successfully through one whole round of planting,
harvesting and garnering of grain, she began to realize her own ability
and to be tempted more and more seriously to remain on the farm. She
understood it, and Martin would have liked her to run it. If it had not
been for the problem of keeping dependable hired hands and the sight
of the mine-tipple, which, towering on the adjoining farm, reminded her
more and more constantly of Bill, she would not even have considered the
offer of Gordon Hamilton, one of Fallon's leading business men, to buy
her whole section.
“There's a bunch going into this deal, together, Rose,” Bert Mall
explained. “They want to run a new branch of their street car line
straight through here and they're going to plat this quarter into
streets and lots. The rest they'll split up into several farms and rent
for the present. It's a speculation, of course, but the way the mines
are moving north and west it's likely this'll be a thickly settled camp
in another two or three years.”
“But they only offer seventy-five an acre,” Rose expostulated, “and it's
worth more than that as farm land. There's none around here as fertile
as Martin made this--and then, all the improvements!”
“They'll have to dispose of them second-hand. It's a pity they're in
exactly the wrong spot. Well, of course, I'm not advising you, Rose,” he
added, “but forty-five thousand ain't to be sneezed at, is it, when it
comes in a lump and you own only the surface? You may wait a long while
before you get another such bid. Seems to me you've worked hard enough.
I'd think you'd want a rest.”
In the end, Mrs. Wade capitulated to what, as Martin had foreseen so
clearly, was sooner or later inevitable. She was a little stunned by
the vast amount of available money now in her possession and at her
disposal. “But it's all dust in my hands,” she thought sadly. “What do
I want of so much? It's going to be a terrible worry. I don't even know
who to leave it to,” and she sighed deeply, pressing her hands, with her
old, characteristic gesture, to her heart. Everybody would approve,
she supposed, if she left it to Rose and Frank--her niece and Martin's
nephew--but she couldn't quite bring herself to welcome that idea--not
yet. And anyway it might be better to divide it among more people, so
that it would bring more happiness.
Her own needs were simple. The modest five-room house which she
purchased was set on a pleasant paved street in Fallon and was obviously
ample for her. She hoped that during part of each year she could rent
the extra bed-room to some one, preferably a boy, like Bill, who was
attending high school. There was a barn for her horse and the one cow
she would keep, a neat little chicken-house for the twenty-five hens
that would more than supply her with eggs and summer fries, and a small
garage for Martin's car. It would seem very strange, she thought, to
have so few things to care for and she wondered how she would fill her
time, she whose one problem always had been how to achieve snatches of
leisure. She saw herself jogging on and on, gradually getting to be less
able on her feet, a little more helpless, until she was one of those
feeble old ladies who seem at the very antipodes of the busy mothers
they have been in their prime. How could it be that she who had always
been in such demand, so needed, so driven by real duties, should have
become suddenly such a supernumerary, so footloose, and unattached?
But when it came to that, wasn't Fallon full of others in the same
circumstances? It was not an uncommon lot. There was Mrs. McMurray. Rose
remembered over what a jolly household she had reigned before she, too,
had lost her husband and three children instead of just one, like Billy.
Two of them had been grown and married. Now she was living in a little
cottage, all alone, doing sewing and nursing, yet always so brave and
cheerful; not only that, but interested, really interested in living.
And Mrs. Nelson. Her children were living and married and happy, but
she had given up her home, sold it--the pretty place with the hospitable
yard that used to seem to be fairly spilling over with wholesome,
boisterous boys and chatty, beribboned little girls. She was rooming
with a family, taking her meals at a restaurant, keeping up her zest
in tomorrow by running a shop. She thought of how her friend, Mrs.
Robinson, gracious, democratic woman of wide sympathies that she was,
had lived alone after David Robinson's death, taking his place as
president of the bank, during the years her only daughter, Janet, had
been off at college and later travelling around the country “on the
stage”--of all things for a daughter of Fallon. When hadn't the town
been full of these widowed, elderly women made childless alike by life
and by death? What others had met successfully, she could also, she
told herself sternly, and still the old Rose, still struggling toward
happiness, she tried to think with a little enthusiasm of her new life,
of the things she would do for others. One recreation she would be able
to enjoy to her heart's content when she moved into town--the movies.
They would tide her over, she felt gratefully. When she was too
lonely, she would go to them and shed her own troubles and problems by
absorption in those of others. She who had been married for years
and had borne two children without ever having had the joy of one
overwhelming kiss, would find romance at last, for an hour, as she
identified herself with the charming heroines of the films.
She was to surrender the farm and the crops as they stood in June,
but as there was to be no new immediate tenant in her old house it
was easily arranged that she could continue in it until the cottage in
Fallon would be empty in September.
Meanwhile, preparations were begun for the new car line which would pass
where the big dairy barn was standing. As the latter went down, board
by board, it seemed to Mrs. Wade that this structure which, in the
building, had been the sign and symbol of her surrender and heartbreak,
now in its destruction, typified Martin's life. It was as if Martin,
himself, were being torn limb from limb. All that he had built would
soon be dust. The sound of the cement breaking under the heavy sledges,
was almost more than she could bear. It was a relief to have the smaller
buildings dragged bodily to other parts of the farm.
Only once before in her memory had there been such a summer and such a
drought. The corn leaves burned to a crisp brown, the ground cracked and
broke into cakes and dust piled high in thick, velvety folds on weeds
and grass. It seemed too strange for words to see others harvest the
wheat and to know that the usual crop could not be put in.
Rose was thankful when her last evening came. Most of her furniture had
been moved in the morning, her boxes had left in the afternoon, and
the last little accessories were now piled in the car. As, hand on
the wheel, she paused a moment before starting, she was conscious of a
choking sensation. It was over, finished--she, the last of Martin, was
leaving it, for good. Before her rolled the quarter section, except for
the little box-house, as bare of fences and buildings as when the Wades
had first camped on it in their prairie schooner. With what strange
prophetic vision had Martin foreseen so clearly that all the
construction of his life would crumble. Would Jacob and Sarah Wade have
had the courage to make all their sacrifices, she wondered, if they had
known that she and she alone, daughter of a Patrick and Norah Conroy,
whom they had never seen, would some day stand there profiting by it
all? She thought of the mortgages in the bank and the bonds, of the
easier life she seemed to be entering. How strange that she whom
Grandfather and Grandmother Wade had not even known, she whom Martin
had never loved, should be the one to reap the real benefits from their
planning, and that the farm itself, for which her husband had been
willing to sacrifice Billy and herself, should be utterly destroyed. A
sudden breeze caught up some of the dust and whirling it around let
it fall. “Martin's life,” thought Rose, “it was like a handful of dust
thrown into God's face and blown back again by the wind to the ground.”