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THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS
[Illustration]
THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS
by
MARGARET WILSON
[Illustration]
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS
Copyright, 1923
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS
The ABLE McLAUGHLINS
CHAPTER I
The prairie lay that afternoon as it had lain for centuries of
September afternoons, vast as an ocean; motionless as an ocean coaxed
into very little ripples by languid breezes; silent as an ocean where
only very little waves slip back into their element. One might have
walked for hours without hearing anything louder than high white
clouds casting shadows over the distances, or the tall slough grass
bending lazily into waves. One might have gone on startled only by
the falling of scarlet swamp-lily seeds, by sudden goldfinches, or
the scratching of young prairie chickens in the shorter grasses.
For years now not even a baby buffalo had called to its mother in
those stretches, or an old squaw broken ripening wild grapes from
the creek thicket. Fifteen years ago one might have gone west for
months without hearing a human voice. Even that day a traveler might
easily have missed the house where little David and the fatter little
Sarah sat playing, for it was less in the vastnesses about it than
one short bubble in a wave’s crest. Ten years ago the children’s
father had halted his ox team there, finishing his journey from
Ayrshire, and his eight boys and girls alighting upon the summer’s
crop of wild strawberries, had harvested it with shrieks of delight
which broke forever the immediate part of the centuries’ silence. A
solitary man would have left the last source of human noise sixty
miles behind him, where the railroad ended. But this farsighted
pioneer had brought with him a strong defense against the hush that
maddens. He had a real house now. The log cabin in which he and his
nine, his brother and his ten, his two sisters and their sixteen had
all lived that first summer, was now but a mere woodshed adjoining
the kitchen. The house was a fine affair, built from lumber hauled
but forty miles--so steadily the railroad crept westward--and
finished, the one half in wild cherry cut from the creek, and the
other half in walnut from the same one source of wood. Since the day
of the first McLaughlin alighting there had arrived, altogether, to
settle more or less near him, on land bought from the government,
his three brothers and four sisters, his wife’s two brothers and one
sister, bringing with them the promising sum of sixty-nine children,
all valiant enemies of quietness and the fleeing rattlesnakes. Some
of the little homes they had built for themselves could be seen that
afternoon, like distant specks on the ocean. But Sarah and David had
no eyes just then for distant specks.
They had grown tired of watching the red calf sleep, and Davie was
trying to make it get up. Finally in self-defense, it rose, and
having found itself refreshed, began gamboling about, trying its
length of rope, its tail satisfactorily erect. The two had to retreat
suddenly to the doorstep where Hughie sat, so impetuous it grew.
Hughie was not, like the others, at home because he was too small to
go to school. Indeed, no! Hughie was ten, and at home to-day because
he had been chilling, the day before, with the fever that rose from
the newly-broken prairie. The three of them sat quiet only a moment.
“Why does he frisk his tail so?” Davie asked.
“He’s praising the Lord,” replied Hughie, wise and wan.
“Is he now!” exclaimed Davie, impressed. “Does God like it?”
“Fine,” said Hughie. That was an easy one. “It’s in the Psalm.
Creeping things and all ye cattle.”
Davie sat for some time sharing his Maker’s pleasure in the antics
of happy calves. Then bored--perhaps like his Maker--he turned to
other things. He rose, and went down the path towards the road, and
stood looking down it, in the direction from which the older children
must come, surely soon now, from school. Only here and there along
that path where they would appear was the grass not higher than
the children’s heads; in some places it was higher than a man on
horseback. There seemed no children in sight.
But wasn’t that someone coming down there on the other road?
“I see somebody coming on the road, Hughie!” he called.
“You _do_ not!” answered Hughie. It wasn’t at all likely anybody was
coming. Yet in case anything so unusual was happening, he would just
have a look. Sarah waddled after him.
Ship ahoy!
Was that really something moving down there in the further slough?
The three stood still, peering across the prairie, hands sheltering
eyes, barefooted, the boys in the most primitive of homemade
overalls, Sarah in an apron unadorned, the golden autumn sunshine
blowing around them. They stood looking....
Then the home-coming children emerged from the tall grass into which
the younger ones were strongly forbidden to go, because children
sometimes got fatally lost in it, and at this signal the three ran
to meet them, crying out the news. Gaining the little rise of ground
again, upon which the house stood, they all paused together to look
at whatever it was that drew near, Mary, the oldest of them, the
teacher, Jessie and Flora, James and Peter.
Yes! There was no doubt about it now!
“’Tis a team!” cried Peter.
“’Tis a pair of grays!” he added in a moment. They were all perfectly
motionless from curiosity now. Who had grays in that neighborhood?
“There’s two men in it,” Mary affirms.
Then Peter yells,
“One is wearing blue!” They can scarcely breathe now.
Blue! Can it be blue! This is too much for Mary.
“Run, Peter!” she cries. “Tell mother! Get father! It has the looks
of a soldier!” It is three weeks now since the last battle, since
word has come from Wully. The little girls are jumping about in
excitement.
The children’s shouts had not at all disturbed the mother in
the kitchen, where she sat sewing, until--could she believe her
ears?--they were shouting, “’Tis Wully, mother! ’Tis Wully!” She ran
out of the house, down the path.
“It never is!” she says, unsteadily. But she can see someone in blue,
someone standing up, waving a cap now. She can see his white face.
The children bolt down the road. She can see him, her black-bearded
first-born. The driver is whipping up the horses. Home from battles,
pale to the lips, he is in her arms. But she is paler.
“Run for your father!” she cries, to whoever will heed her. The
children are pulling at him boisterously. The strange driver is
patting his horses, his back to the family reunited. Hugged, and
kissed, and patted and loved, the bearded Wully turns to the stranger.
“This is Mr. Knight, of Tyler, mother. He brought me all the way.”
“’Tis a kind thing you have done!” she exclaims, shaking his hand
devoutly.
“Oh, he was a soldier. And he didn’t look able to walk so far.”
“You’re not sick!” she cries to Wully, scanning his face. Certainly
he was not sick, now. He could have walked it, but he was glad he
didn’t have to, he adds, smiling engagingly at the stranger. They
stand together awkwardly, joy-smitten, looking at one another,
excited beyond words. Then the mother leads the way to the unpainted
house, the children hanging to Wully, dancing about.
The fifteen-year-old Andrew was working in the farther part of the
field just below the house that afternoon, when he saw, from a
distance, his father, called by Peter, suddenly leave his plow, and
run towards the house surely faster than an old man ever runs. His
own team was fly-bitten and restless, and he left it just long enough
to see that in front of the house there was a team and a light wagon.
He unhitched his half-broken young steers, urged them impatiently to
the nearest tying place, and hurried to the house.
What he saw there made so great an impression on him, that
fifty-seven years later, when that stranger’s grandson was one of the
disheartened veterans of the World War who came to his office looking
for work, the whole scene rose before him in such poignancy that he
had to turn his head away abruptly, remembering....
There in the kitchen, in his mother’s chair sat the stranger in the
fine clothes, with a drink of whisky in his hand which his father
had just poured out. There on the bed sat his great gaunt brother
in blue, one trouser leg rolled up to his hairy knee. There on a
strip of carpet in front of the bed knelt his mother with a strange
white face, soaking bloody rags away from evil-looking sores on that
precious foot. There by the cupboard stood Mary, tearing something
white into bandages, with the children huddled around her, awed by
the sight of their mother.
Andy saw all that the moment that Wully, taking up one of the
children’s old jokes, cried out to him, in a voice that belied his
foot, a greeting that the young ones had loved deriding.
“Lang may your lum reek, Andy!” There wasn’t really anything wrong
with Wully, it seemed. That wasn’t a wound, he affirmed. It was only
a scratch. He really couldn’t say just how it had happened. It wasn’t
anything! It might not be anything to a soldier, but to his mother
it was the mark of imminent death for her dearest son. She began
rubbing it gently with lambs’ fat. Wully, bethinking himself, pulled
from a pocket a paper-wrapped bundle of sweeties for the children,
who saw such things but seldom. They were intent upon the contents
of that, and the stranger was talking to his father, when Andy,
still standing awkwardly in the door, saw a thing happen which was a
landmark in his understanding. He saw his mother, who had made fast
the last bandage, and was carefully pulling down the trouser leg,
suddenly bend over and _kiss_ that leg! Such passion he saw in that
gesture that he realized vaguely then some great fierce hidden thing
in life, escaping secrecy only at times, a terrible thing called love
... which breaks forth upon occasions ... even in old women like
his mother. He turned his face away suddenly as from some forbidden
nakedness, and fixed his eyes upon Wully.
That hero, quite unabashed, was pulling his mother, who had risen,
down to a seat beside him on the bed. She sat there, unconscious of
the roomful, just looking at him, looking ... as if she could never
see his face enough. She watched him devouringly when presently, with
the attention of them all, he began light-heartedly telling about his
escape. Half of his regiment had been made prisoners, including his
major. They had been marched away towards a train, to be sent south,
and he had marched among them until he dropped. He told his captors
that they could shoot him if they would, but he couldn’t go a step
further. They had left him lying helpless there by the roadside, a
guard standing over him. And before the wagon came along, which was
to pick them up, the guard had slept, and Wully, stronger to run to
freedom than to march to prison, had made his escape. Starved and
hiding, he had crept night by night towards the Mississippi, and
there he had seen a boat which was bringing Northern wounded men
home, tie up at the river bank to bury its dead. Its captain had
taken pity on him, chilling and nauseated, and had brought him to
Davenport. Then when he had got by train to the nearest Iowa town,
this stranger had shown him this kindness.... Oh, his mother needn’t
worry about his being shot for a deserter. They knew him too well
in his company, if there was any of them left. And hadn’t his chum,
Harvey Stow, been home four times to visit, without permission
from anyone, and had he ever been punished for it? As soon as he
had something to eat, and he could find where to report, he would
be going back--yes, certainly--going back, however much his mother
caught her breath at the mention of it.
It was so interesting to hear him talk that the men could scarcely
leave for their duties. But there were the horses to feed, and
the cows to milk, and the kind strange team to reward. Mr. Knight
followed the boys to the barn and watched with amusement how
reverently they rubbed down and bedded and fed the guests of the
stable. And when they came in again, there sat the scrubbed soldier,
in a fresh hickory shirt and clean jeans, in his mother’s chair, his
swathed foot on a stool--the stool was Hughie’s thought--and the New
York _Tribune_ in his hand--the paper was Flora’s contribution. He
was talking grinningly to his mother. A white cloth was spread on
the table, and the mother, shining, uplifted with joy, was wiping
pink-banded cups which Wully remembered to have seen taken from the
sacred shelf only when her Scot cousin, who had come to this country
to enlighten the darkness of the Yankees by taking the presidency of
one of their colleges, had come west to visit this family. Not since
then had the Scottish sheets been out of the chest, and now they
were airing on the line. ’Twas an occasion magnificent to consider!
When they sat down at the table for supper--and they had not long
to wait, for the mother was that woman of whom tradition says she
could make a pair of jean pants in twenty minutes--they had fried
prairie chicken, and potatoes and scons and egg-butter, and stewed
wild plums, sweetened with sugar at forty cents a pound. The father
instituted the feast by a long prayer. “Of course!” thought the
stranger. “They’re Scotch!” He counted the children. There were ten.
“You’ve a fine family,” he commented.
“Not so bad when they’re all here,” returned the mother complacently.
“There’s a boy and a girl away at school.” She paused abruptly.
“Our boy younger than Wully was killed at Fort Donaldson,” explained
the father.
“Ah! My son was wounded there. Lost a hand.” There was a moment’s
silence. Then Wully said, wanting the subject changed,
“It’s over now, mother. Grant’ll get them now.”
They proceeded to talk of the coming election. Five families of
Covenanting Scotch in the neighborhood were deserting the principles
of their forefathers and taking out naturalization papers, hoping to
vote for Lincoln. The visitor wondered vaguely what kind of Scotch
that might be. He had no chance to ask. The mother seemed to have
read every word of the last _Tribune_. He had hardly time for that
himself. She seemed a woman of wide information. Apparently she knew
the position of every unit of the army.
Supper was over. Flora handed her father The Book, and moved the
candle near him. He found the place, and said,
“The twenty-third Psalm.”
To the man’s surprise, the mother began the song in a clear, sure
voice, and the children all joined, without hesitation, as if this
was a part of a familiar routine. The boys and girls were obviously
thinking of the guests of honor. The mother’s face was turned to
her son. But the father was looking away in a dream to something
he seemed to see through the wall before him. When the singing was
over, he began reading from The Book words that clearly had some
exalted meaning to him, though what it might be the stranger could
not imagine. “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up,
ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is
this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty
in battle.” It sounded impressive, read with a subdued ring in
the voice. Then he shut the book, in a high silence, and they all
moved their chairs back, and knelt down. The stranger knelt, too,
somewhat tardily. Not that he objected to prayers, of course. He
was a religious man himself in a way. His wife often went to church.
He could see the rapt face of the father praying in great, sonorous
phrases which sounded vaguely familiar. Of all the children he could
see, not one had an eye open. They were thanking the Lord for the
boy’s return. “Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within
me, bless His holy name.” They proceeded to pray for everyone in
the United States, the President and his cabinet, the generals and
the colonels and the captains, all the privates, all the sick and
homesick, for those destroyed by war, for the mourning and all small
children, for slaves in their freedom, and masters in their poverty,
and then for the stranger, that he might hear the Judge say unto
him, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared
for you from the beginning of the world. For I was sick, and ye
ministered unto me”; “that the beauty of the Lord, as now, might be
upon him forever.” The stranger had scarcely got over that when they
all began saying the Lord’s Prayer together. “Nothing lacking but
the collection,” he thought, somewhat resentfully. Not having heard
a sermon for some time, he had forgotten that. When they rose from
their knees, Sarah and David were found asleep. Andy picked them up
and carried them away to bed. And even while Mr. Knight was wondering
how many of the children he would have to sleep with, the mother took
the sheets from beside the stove, and as she started for the fine
parlor, whose bed was to be got ready for the guest, she said,
“Wully is to have the kitchen bed by himself. You all just go
upstairs and leave him alone.”
The stranger had the decency to go soon to his bed. It wasn’t a
half-bad bed, either. And he was tired. It had been a sudden impulse,
this driving the soldier home, with a new team, over no road at all.
But he was glad he had come. He had wanted to see this country. The
new horses had jogged along very well. Moreover, he had made friends
among the Scotch, and he was a politician. He thought of his son with
Sherman’s army. He thought of the soldier’s impressive mother. He
smiled over the number of children. He slept.
But long after the house was quiet, Wully lay talking to his father
and mother, who sat on his kitchen bed. He told them of marches and
battles and fevers and skirmishes, none of which had endangered him
at all, of course, of the comradeship among the boys from the Yankee
settlement down the creek, and of the hope everywhere, now, that
the end was near. Then gradually there fell a silence over them,
an understanding silence, wherein each knew the other’s thoughts.
They were all thinking of that first terrible home-coming of his, of
the things that led up to it. He remembered how “the boys” had been
eating breakfast in camp, when the orders came that meant their first
battle. He had been in an agony of fear lest he might be afraid. The
one good thing about it was that Allen, his brother, had been sent
away on a detail not an hour before. He would go into battle without
having his brother to worry about. That trembling, as he advanced,
had not been fear, but only ague so severe he might have stayed
behind if he had chosen. But he had advanced with the rest of them,
and in the darkness when he tried to sleep after it was over, he knew
he need not fear cowardice again. They had won the day, and they
exulted as fiercely as they had fought. Had not their regiment been
one of three which, not getting their orders to retreat, had stood
firmly till fresh troops came to save the day! But the next morning’s
task had mocked terrifyingly their victory. He could have pleaded
fever to escape from that.... Some on the snow-covered hillside were
digging great trenches, some were throwing body after body into
them, some were shoveling earth in upon them. He had bent down to
tug at a stiff thing half hidden by snow, he had turned it over, a
head grotesquely twisted backward, a neck mud-plastered, horrible,
bloody. Then he had cried out, and fallen down. That thing, with the
lower face shot away, was Allen! His comrades, hunting about, found
the bodies of the others of the little squad that had been hurriedly
recalled.
That night Wully had planned to desert. He had announced his
intention to his lieutenant who came to sit beside him. They might
drum him out of camp as a deserter if they would. He was telling
them plainly what he intended doing. He would never fight again. But
before he was able to walk, his comrades had got him a furlough.
They understood only too well his fever and his delirium, and
they remembered how he had gone through the battle, vomiting and
ague-shaken, firing with a hand too weak to aim, and vomiting again,
and shaking and firing. All the way home he had planned how to break
the news to his mother. But when he had seen her, his grief which
before had had no outlet, suddenly burst forth, so that even as she
asked him, he was sobbing it all out to her. He had never told her,
of course, how Allen’s sweet singing mouth had been destroyed. For
Allen had been a gay lad, playing the fiddle, and singing many songs,
sometimes little lovable ones he made as he sang, about pumpkins,
or the old red rooster, or anything that might please the little
children.
For Wully, no home-coming could ever again be so terrible as that
one. But his father and mother who sat beside him there were trying
not to know that just such news might come at any time of this one,
who must go back to death’s place. Wully lay telling them little
things he could recall of those last days. Had he told them of the
time that the captain had stood, unbeknown to Allen, behind a bush,
listening to him imitate all the company’s officers? There had never
been a day that Allen had not been called upon to make fun for his
comrades. Laughter had bubbled up within him and gushed out even
in stark times. There was no detail of his nonsense not precious to
the two who listened. It was late before they left him, and he soon
slept. Towards morning, his mother slept.
Soon after daylight the stranger came into the kitchen. The mother
was standing half hidden by the steam that rose from the milk pails
that she was scalding out. The oldest sister at a table where
candlelight and dawn struggled together, was packing a school lunch
into a basket. A small girl was buttoning fat Sarah into her dress.
Two small boys were struggling with their shoes on the floor. Wully
presently hobbled in from out of doors, declaring himself recovered,
a giant refreshed. The stranger noticed that when they found their
places at the table, there was a larger child beside each smaller
one, to look after him. There was one little fellow who looked like
the soldier, and a half-grown sister with beautiful regular features
like his. But the others were all alike, with deeply set dark blue
eyes, long upper lips, and lower faces heavy, keen, determined. He
could have appreciated what the mother said sometimes simply, to
the neighbors, when they remarked how good her children were: “Yes,
they’re never any care when they’re well. If we had one or two, we
might let them have tantrums. But who could live in a house with
thirteen ill bairns?” Since by that she meant, of course, naughty
children, her question seemed indeed unanswerable.
Now they sat eating lustily their cornmeal, and she talked with
leisure and understanding. When the meal was finished, Flora handed
her father The Book again.
“By Golly!” said the stranger to himself, “they’re going to do it
again!” And they did. The mother lifted the Psalm from memory, and
then they repeated some part of the Bible. The stranger was the more
ill at ease because young Hughie’s eyes were fixed accusingly upon
him. Again the father prayed for all the inhabitants of the world, by
name or class.
When the boys brought the guest’s wonderful team to the door, all the
family gathered to bid him good-by.
“I wish you well, sir, for your kindness,” the father said, and the
mother, at a loss to know how to thank him sufficiently, added,
“We’ll never forget this, neither us nor our children!” It was that
trembling choked back in her voice that gave the stranger’s grandson
his work with the firm of Andrew McLaughlin, in the fall of 1920.
The beautiful grays started impatiently away, the men went to their
work, and the children to their school. In the kitchen his mother
bandaged Wully’s feet, and put the wee’uns out of door to play while
he had a sleep. At half past eleven he woke. His mother was sitting
in the doorway, shelling beans. How was he to guess that she was late
with her dinner preparations because again and again she had to stop,
and look at this child of hers grown a strange man in the midst of
horrors unimaginable? He lay very still looking at her. The kettle
was singing on the stove. Through the door, he saw the red calf
sleeping in the sunshine. A wave of joy, of ecstasy complete passed
over him. Oh, the heaven of home, the peace of it, of a good bed, of
a mother calmly getting dinner!
“I’m starved, mother!” he sang out suddenly to her. She hurried to
the cellar, and brought him cool milk and two cookies. The children,
hearing him, came in to watch him. He sat down in the doorway, and
began throwing beans up, and catching them skillfully, to win the
friendship of the doubtful little Sarah. David watched him eagerly.
Presently Hughie said:
“Mother, why did yon strange man not say the Psalm?”
“You mus’na stare so at visitors, Hughie!”
“But why, mother? Why did he not say it?”
“Maybe he did’na ken it.”
“Did’na ken what?”
“The Psalm.”
“Did’na ken the fifteenth Psalm, and him a man grown!” Hughie had
never seen anyone before who couldn’t say the fifteenth Psalm.
“Aw, mother!” he exclaimed remonstratingly. “Even Davie knows that!”
Wully chuckled. He knew the world. He had seen cities. He had marched
across states. He had eaten ice cream.