The Prairie Wife Part 13

Three long weeks since those last words were written. And what shall I say, or how shall I begin?

In the first place, everything seemed gray. The bed was gray, my own arms were gray, the walls looked gray, the window-gla.s.s was gray, and even d.i.n.ky-Dunk's face was gray. I didn't want to move, for a long time.

Then I got the strength to tell Mrs. Watson that I wanted to speak to my husband. She was wrapping something up in soft flannel and purring over it quite proudly and calling it a blessed little lamb. When poor pale-faced d.i.n.ky-Dunk bent over the bed I asked him if it had a receding chin, or if it had a nose like Olie's. And he said it had neither, that it was a king of a boy and could holler like a good one.

Then I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk what had been in my secret soul, for so many months. Uncle Carlton had a receding chin, a boneless, dew-lappy sort of chin I'd always hated, and I'd been afraid it might kind of skip-and-carry one and fasten itself on my innocent offspring. Then, later on, I'd been afraid of Olie's frozen nose, with the split down the center. And all the while I kept remembering what the Morleys' old colored nurse had said to me when I was a schoolgirl, a girl of only seventeen, spending that first vacation of mine in Virginia: "Lawdy, chile, yuh ain't no bigger'n a minit! Don't yuh nebber hab no baby, chile!"

Isn't it funny how those foolish old things stick in a woman's memory?

For I've had my baby and I'm still alive, and although I sometimes wanted a girl, d.i.n.ky-Dunk is so ridiculously proud and happy seeing it's a boy that I don't much care. But I'm going to get well and strong in a few more days, and here against my breast I'm holding the G.o.d-love-itest little lump of pulsing manhood, the darlingest, solemnest, placidest, pinkest hope of the white race that ever made life full and perfect for a foolish mother.

The doctor who finally got here--when both Olga and Mrs. Dixon agreed that he couldn't possibly do a bit of good--announced that I had come through it all like the true Prairie Woman that I was. Then he somewhat pompously and redundantly explained that I was a highly organized individual, "a bit high-strung," as Mrs. Dixon put it. I smiled into the pillow when he turned to my anxious-eyed d.i.n.ky-Dunk and condoningly enlarged on the fact that there was nothing abnormal about a woman like me being--well, rather abnormal as to temper and nerves during the last few months. But d.i.n.ky-Dunk cut him short.

"On the contrary, sir; she's been wonderful, simply wonderful!"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk stoutly declared. Then he reached for my hand under the coverlet. "She's been an angel!"

I squeezed the hand that held mine. Then I looked at the doctor, who had turned away to give some orders to Olga.

"Doctor," I quite as stoutly declared, "I've been a perfect devil, and this dear old liar knows it!" But our doctor was too busy to pay much attention to what I was saying. He merely murmured that it was all normal, quite normal, under the circ.u.mstances. So, after all, I'm just an ordinary, everyday woman! But the man of medicine has ordered me to stay in bed for twelve days--which Olga regards as unspeakably preposterous, since one day, she proudly announced, was all her mother ever asked for. Which shows the disadvantages of being too civilized!

_Sunday the Ninth_

I'm day by day getting stronger, though I'm a lady of luxury and lie in bed until ten every morning. To-day when I was sitting up to eat breakfast, with my hair braided in two tails and a pink and white hug-me-tight over my nightie, d.i.n.ky-Dunk came in and sat by the bed. He tried to soft-soap me by saying he'd be mighty glad when I was running things again so he could get something fit to eat. Olga, he admitted, was all right, but she hadn't the touch of his Gee-Gee. He confessed that for nearly a month now the house had been a d.a.m.ned gynocracy and he was getting tired of being bossed around by a couple of women. _Mio piccino_ no longer looks like a littered whelp of the animal world, as he did at first. His wrinkled little face and his close-shut eyes used to make me think of a little old man, with all the wisdom of the ages shut up in his tiny body. And it is such a knowing little body, with all its stored-up instincts and guardian appet.i.tes! My little _tenor robusto_, how he can sing when he's hungry! Last night I sat up in bed, listening for my son's--d.i.n.ky-d.i.n.k's--breathing. At first I thought he might be dead, he was so quiet. Then I heard his lips move in the rhapsodic deglut.i.tion of babyland dreams. "d.i.n.ky-Dunk," I demanded, "what would we do if Babe should die?" And I shook him to make him answer. He stared up at me with a sleepy eye. "That whale?" he commented as he blinked contentedly down at his offspring and then turned over and went to sleep. But I slipped a hand in under little d.i.n.ky-d.i.n.k's body, and found it as warm as a nesting bird.

_Monday the Tenth_

I noticed that d.i.n.ky-Dunk had not been smoking lately, so I asked him what had become of the rest of his cigars. He admitted that he had given them to Olie. "When?" I asked. And d.i.n.ky-Dunk colored up as he answered, rather casually, "Oh, the day Buddy Boy was born!" How men merge down into the conventional in their more epochal moments!

The second day after my baby's birth Olga rather took my breath away by carrying in as neat a little wooden cradle as any prince of the royal blood would care to lie in. _Olie had made it_. He had worked on it during his spare hours in the evening, and even d.i.n.ky-Dunk hadn't known.

I made Olga hold it up at the foot of the bed so I could see it better.

It had been scroll-sawed and sand-papered and polished like any factory-made baby-bed, and my faithful old Olie had even attempted some hand-carving along the rockers and the head-board. But as I looked at it I realized that it must have taken weeks and weeks to make. And that gave me an odd little earthquaky feeling in the neighborhood of the midriff, for I knew then that my secret had been no secret at all.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, by the way, has just announced that we're to have a touring-car. He says I've earned it!

_Tuesday the Eleventh_

Yesterday was so warm that I sat out in the sun and took an ozone-bath.

I sat there, staring down at my boy, realizing that I was a mother. My boy--bone of my bone and flesh of my fles.h.!.+ It's so hard to believe! And now I am one of the mystic chain, and no longer the idle link. I am a mother. And I'd give an arm if you and c.h.i.n.kie and Scheming-Jack could see my boy, at this moment. He's like a rose-leaf and he's got six dimples, not counting his hands and feet--for I've found and kissed 'em all--on different parts of his blessed little body. d.i.n.ky-Dunk came back from Buckhorn yesterday with a lot of the foolishest things you ever clapped eyes on--a big cloth elephant that grunts when you pull its tail, a musical spinning-top, a high-chair, and a projecting lantern.

They're for d.i.n.ky-d.i.n.k, of course. But it will be a week or two before he can manipulate the lantern!

_Wednesday the Thirteenth_

d.i.n.ky-Dunk has taken Mrs. Dixon home and come back with a brand-new "hand," which, of course, is prairie-land synecdoche for a new hired man. His name is Terry Dillon, and as the name might lead you to imagine, he's about as Irish as Paddy's pig. He is blessed with a potato-lip, a b.u.t.termilk brogue, and a nose which, if he follows it faithfully, will some day lead him straight to Heaven. But Terry, d.i.n.ky-Dunk tells me, is a steady worker and a good man with horses, and that of course rounds him out as a paragon in the eyes of my slave-driving lord and master. I asked where Terry came from.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with rather a grim smile, acknowledged that he'd been working for Percy.

Terry, it seems, has no particular love for an Englishman. And Percy had affronted his haughty Irish spirit with certain ideas of caste which can't be imported into the Canadian West, where the hired man is every whit as good as his master--as that master will tragically soon find out if he tries to make his help eat at second table! At any rate, Percy and potato-lipped Terry developed friction which ended up in every promise of a fight, only d.i.n.ky-Dunk arrived in the nick of time and took Terry off his hara.s.sed neighbor's hands. I told him he had rather the habit of catching people on the bounce. But I am reserving my opinion of Terry Dillon. We are a happy family here, and I want no trouble-makers in my neighborhood.

I have been studying some of the New York magazines, going rather hungrily through their advertis.e.m.e.nts where such lovely layettes are described. My poor little d.i.n.ky-d.i.n.k's things are so plain and rough and meager. I envy those city mothers with all those beautiful linens and laces. But my little Spartan man-child has never known a single day's sickness. And some day he'll show 'em!

_Thursday the Fourteenth_

When Olie came in after dinner yesterday I asked him where my husband was. Olie, after some hesitation, admitted that he was out in the stable. I asked just what d.i.n.ky-Dunk was doing there, for I'd noticed that after each meal he slipped silently away. Again Olie hesitated.

Then he finally admitted that he thought maybe my lord was out there smoking. So I went out, and there I found my poor old d.i.n.ky-Dunk sitting on a grain-box puffing gloomily away at his old pipe. For a minute or two he didn't see me, so I went right over to him. "What does this mean?" I demanded.

"Why?" he rather guiltily equivocated.

"Why are you smoking out here?"

"I--er--I rather thought you might think it wouldn't be good for the Boy!" He looked pathetic as he said that, I don't know why, though I loved him for it. He made me think of a king who'd been dethroned, an outsider, a man without a home. It brought a lump into my throat.

I wormed my way up close to him on the grain-box, so that he had to hold me to keep from falling off the end. "Listen to me," I commanded. "You are my True Love and my Kaikobad and my Man-G.o.d and my Soul-Mate! And no baby is ever going to come between me and you!"

"You shouldn't say those awful things," he declared, but he did it only half-heartedly.

"But I want you to sit and smoke with me, beloved, the same as you always did," I told him. "We can leave the windows open a little and it won't hurt d.i.n.ky-d.i.n.k, for that boy gets more ozone than any city child that was ever wheeled out in the Mall! It can't possibly hurt him. What hurts me is being away from you so much. And now give me a hug, a tight one, and tell me that you still love your Lady Bird!" He gave me two, and then two more, until Tumble-Weed turned round in his stall and whinnied for us to behave.

_Friday the Fifteenth_

I've been keeping Terry under my eye, and I don't believe he's a trouble-maker. His first move was to lift Babe out of the cradle, hold him up and publicly announce that he was a darlin'. Then he pointed out to me what a wonderful head the child had, feeling his frontal bone and declaring he was sure to make a great scholar in his time. d.i.n.ky-Dunk, grinning at the sober way in which I was swallowing this, pointedly inquired of Terry whether it was Milton or Archimedes that Babe most resembled as to skull formation. But it isn't Terry's blarney that has made me capitulate; it's the fact that he has proved so companionable and has slipped so quietly into his place in our little lonely circle of lives on this ragged edge of nowhere.

And he's as clean as a cat, shaving every blessed morning with a little old broken-handled razor which he strops on a strip of oiled bootleg.

He declares that razor to be the finest bit of steel in all the Americas, and showed off before Olie and Olga yesterday morning by shaving without a looking-gla.s.s, which trick he said he learned in the army. He also gave Olie a hair-cut, which was badly needed, and on Sunday has promised to rig up a soldering-iron and mend all my pans for me. He looks little over twenty, but is really thirty and more, and has been in India and Mexico and Alaska.

I caught him neatly darning his own woolen socks. Instead of betraying shame at being detected in that effeminate pastime he proudly explained that he'd learned to do a bit of st.i.tching in the army. He hasn't many possessions, but he's very neat in his arrangement of them. A good soldier, he solemnly told me, always had to be a bit of an old maid.

"And you were a grand soldier, Terry, I know," I frankly told him. "I've done a bit av killing in me time!" he proudly acknowledged. But as he sat there darning his sock-heel he looked as though he couldn't kill a field mouse. And in his idle hours he reads _Nick Carter_, a series of paper-bound detective stories, almost worn to tatters, which he is going through for the second or third time. These adventures, I find, he later recounts to Olie, who is slowly but surely succ.u.mbing to the poison of the penny-dreadful and the virus of the s.h.i.+lling-shocker! I even caught d.i.n.ky-Dunk sitting up over one of these blood-curdling romances the other night, though he laughed a little as I dragged him off to bed, at the absurdity of the situations. Terry's eyes lighted up when he saw my books and magazines. When I told him he could take anything he wanted, he beamed and said it would sure be a glorious winter he'd be having, with all that book-reading when the long nights came. But before those long nights are over I'm going to try to pilot Terry into the channels of respectable literature.