A Son of the Middle Border Part 39

It was not a pleasant time for my good friend, but, as it turned out, there was a special providence in his being there, for a few days later, while Jessie and I were seated in the little sitting-room busily discussing plans for her schooling we heard a short, piercing cry, followed by low sobbing.

Hurrying out into the yard, I saw my mother standing a few yards from the door, her sweet face distorted, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

"What is it, mother?" I called out.

"I can't lift my feet," she stammered, putting her arms about my neck.

"I can't move!" and in her voice was such terror and despair that my blood chilled.

It was true! She was helpless. From the waist downward all power of locomotion had departed. Her feet were like lead, drawn to the earth by some terrible magnetic power.

In a frenzy of alarm, Jessie and I carried her into the house and laid her on her bed. My heart burned with bitter indignation. "This is the end," I said. "Here is the result of long years of ceaseless toil. She has gone as her mother went, in the midst of the battle."

At the moment I cursed the laws of man, I cursed myself. I accused my father. Each moment my remorse and horror deepened, and yet I could do nothing, nothing but kneel beside the bed and hold her hand while Jessie ran to call the doctor. She returned soon to say she could not find him.

Slowly the stricken one grew calmer and at last, hearing a wagon drive into the yard, I hurried out to tell my father what had happened. He read in my face something wrong. "What's the matter?" he asked as I drew near.

"Mother is stricken," I said. "She cannot walk."

He stared at me in silence, his gray eyes expanding like those of an eagle, then calmly, mechanically he got down and began to unhitch the team. He performed each habitual act with most minute care, till I, impatient of his silence, his seeming indifference, repeated, "Don't you understand? Mother has had a stroke! She is absolutely helpless."

Then he asked, "Where is your friend Dr. Cross?"

"I don't know, I thought he was with you."

Even as I was calling for him, Dr. Cross came into the cabin, his arms laden with roses. He had been strolling about on the prairie.

With his coming hope returned. Calmly yet skillfully he went to the aid of the sufferer, while father, Jessie and I sat in agonized suspense awaiting his report.

At last he came back to us with gentle rea.s.suring smile.

"There is no immediate danger," he said, and the tone in which he spoke was even more comforting than his words. "As soon as she recovers from her terror she will not suffer"--then he added gravely, "A minute blood vessel has ruptured in her brain, and a small clot has formed there. If this is absorbed, as I think it will be, she will recover. Nothing can be done for her. No medicine can reach her. It is just a question of rest and quiet." Then to me he added something which stung like a poisoned dart. "She should have been relieved from severe household labor years ago."

My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward my father who had kept my mother always on the border, working like a slave long after the time when she should have been taking her ease.

Above all, I resented my own failure, my own inability to help in the case. Here was I, established in a distant city, with success just opening her doors to me, and yet still so much the struggler that my will to aid was futile for lack of means.

Sleep was difficult that night, and for days thereafter my mind was rent with a continual and ineffectual attempt to reach a solution of my problem, which was indeed typical of ambitious young America everywhere.

"Shall I give up my career at this point? How can I best serve my mother?" These were my questions and I could not answer either of them.

At the end of a week the sufferer was able to sit up, and soon recovered a large part of her native cheerfulness although it was evident to me that she would never again be the woman of the ready hand. Her days of labor were over.

Her magnificent voice was now weak and uncertain. Her speech painfully hesitant. She who had been so strong, so brave, was now both easily frightened and readily confused. She who had once walked with the grace and power of an athlete was now in terror of an up-rolled rug upon the floor. Every time I looked at her my throat ached with remorseful pain.

Every plan I made included a vow to make her happy if I could. My success now meant only service to her. In no other way could I justify my career.

Dr. Cross though naturally eager to return to the comfort of his own home stayed on until his patient had regained her poise. "The clot seems in process of being taken up," he said to me, one morning, "and I think it safe to leave her. But you had better stay on for a few weeks."

"I shall stay until September, at least," I replied. "I will not go back at all if I am needed here."

"Don't fail to return," he earnestly advised. "The field is just opening for you in Boston, and your earning capacity is greater there than it is here. Success is almost won. Your mother knows this and tells me that she will insist on your going on with your work."

Heroic soul! She was always ready to sacrifice herself for others.

The Doctor's parting words comforted me as I returned to the shadeless farmstead to share in the work of harvesting the grain which was already calling for the reaper, and could not wait either upon sickness or age.

Again I filled the place of stacker while my father drove the four-horse header, and when at noon, covered with sweat and dust, I looked at myself, I had very little sense of being a "rising literary man."

I got back once again to the solid realities of farm life, and the majesty of the colorful sunsets which ended many of our days could not conceal from me the starved lives and lonely days of my little sister and my aging mother.

"Think of it!" I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation, father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to 'reign like kings'? Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and McClintocks seem a madness?"

Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. I told her of Aunt Loretta's peaceful life, of the green hills and trees.

"Oh, I wish we had never left Green's Coulee!" she said.

But this was as far as her complaint ever went, for father was still resolute and undismayed. "We'll try again," he declared. "Next year will surely bring a crop."

In a couple of weeks our patient, though unable to lift her feet, was able to shuffle across the floor into the kitchen, and thereafter insisted on helping Jessie at her tasks. From a seat in a convenient corner she picked over berries, stirred cake dough, ground coffee and wiped dishes, almost as cheerfully as ever, but to me it was a pitiful picture of bravery, and I burned ceaselessly with desire to do something to repay her for this almost hopeless disaster.

The worst of the whole situation lay in the fact that my earnings both as teacher and as story writer were as yet hardly more than enough to pay my own carefully estimated expenses, and I saw no way of immediately increasing my income. On the face of it, my plain duty was to remain on the farm, and yet I could not bring myself to sacrifice my Boston life.

In spite of my pitiful gains thus far, I held a vital hope of soon,--very soon--being in condition to bring my mother and my sister east. I argued, selfishly of course, "It must be that Dr. Cross is right. My only chance of success lies in the east."

Mother did her best to comfort me. "Don't worry about us," she said. "Go back to your work. I am gaining. I'll be all right in a little while."

Her brave heart was still unsubdued.

While I was still debating my problem, a letter came which greatly influenced me, absurdly influenced all of us. It contained an invitation from the Secretary of the Cedar Valley Agriculture Society to be "the Speaker of the Day" at the County Fair on the twenty-fifth of September.

This honor not only flattered me, it greatly pleased my mother. It was the kind of honor she could fully understand. In imagination she saw her son standing up before a throng of old-time friends and neighbors introduced by Judge Daly and applauded by all the bankers and merchants of the town. "You must do it," she said, and her voice was decisive.

Father, though less open in his expression, was equally delighted. "You can go round that way just as well as not," he said. "I'd like to visit the old town myself."

This letter relieved the situation in the most unexpected way. We all became cheerful. I began to say, "Of course you are going to get well,"

and I turned again to my plan of taking my sister back to the seminary.

"We'll hire a woman to stay with you," I said, "and Jessie can run up during vacation, or you and father can go down and spend Christmas with old friends."

Yes, I confess it, I was not only planning to leave my mother again--I was intriguing to take her only child away from her. There is no excuse for this, none whatever except the fact that I had her co-operation in the plan. She wanted her daughter to be educated quite as strongly as I could wish, and was willing to put up with a little more loneliness and toil if only her children were on the road to somewhere.

Jessie was the obstructionist. She was both scared and resentful. She had no desire to go to school in Osage. She wanted to stay where she was. Mother needed her,--and besides she didn't have any decent clothes to wear.

Ultimately I overcame all her scruples, and by promising her a visit to the great city of Minneapolis (with the privilege of returning if she didn't like the school) I finally got her to start with me. Poor, little scared sister, I only half realized the agony of mind through which you pa.s.sed as we rode away into the Minnesota prairies!

The farther she got from home the shabbier her gown seemed and the more impossible her coat and hat. At last, as we were leaving Minneapolis on our way to Osage she leaned her tired head against me and sobbed out a wild wish to go home.

Her grief almost wrecked my own self-control but I soothed her as best I could by telling her that she would soon be among old friends and that she couldn't turn back now. "Go on and make a little visit anyway," I added. "It's only a few hours from Ordway and you can go home at any time."

She grew more cheerful as we entered familiar scenes, and one of the girls she had known when a child took charge of her, leaving me free to play the part of distinguished citizen.

The last day of the races was in action when I, with a certain amount of justifiable pride, rode through the gate (the old familiar sagging gate) seated beside the President of the a.s.sociation. I wish I could believe that as "Speaker of the Day," I filled the sons of my neighbors with some small part of the awe with which the speakers of other days filled me, and if I a.s.sumed something of the polite condescension with which all public personages carry off such an entrance, I trust it will be forgiven me.

The event, even to me, was more inspiring in antic.i.p.ation than in fulfillment, for when I rose to speak in the band-stand the wind was blowing hard, and other and less intellectual attractions were in full tide. My audience remained distressingly small--and calm. I have a dim recollection of howling into the face of the equatorical current certain disconnected sentences concerning my reform theory, and of seeing on the familiar faces of David Babc.o.c.k, John Gammons and others of my bronzed and bent old neighbors a mild wonder as to what I was talking about.

On the whole I considered it a defeat. In the evening I spoke in the Opera House appearing on the same platform whence, eight years before, I had delivered my impa.s.sioned graduating oration on "Going West." True, I had gone east but then, advice is for others, not for oneself. Lee Moss, one of my cla.s.smates, and in those Seminary days a rival orator, was in my audience, and so was Burton, wordless as ever, and a little sad, for his attempt at preaching had not been successful--his ineradicable shyness had been against him. Hattie was there looking thin and old, and Ella and Matilda with others of the girls I had known eight years before. Some were accompanied by their children.