The Prairie Mother Part 9

That sent the color ebbing from his face again, and he looked at me as I'd never seen him look at me before. We'd both been mauled by the paw of Destiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and oversensitized spirits, facing each other as irritable as teased rattlers, ready to thump rocks with our head. More than once I'd heard d.i.n.ky-Dunk proclaim that the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled.

And I remembered Theobald Gustav's pet aphorism to the effect that _Ha.s.sen machts nichts_. But life had its limits. And I wasn't one of those pink-eared s.h.i.+very little white mice who could be intimidated into tears by a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And married life, after all, is only a sort of _guerre d'usure_.

"And you think you're doing the right thing?" I demanded of my husband, not without derision, confronting him with a challenge on my face and a bawling Pee-Wee on my hip.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk sniffed.

"That child seems to have its mother's disposition," he murmured, ignoring my question.

"The prospects of its acquiring anything better from its father seem rather remote," I retorted, striking blindly. For that over-deft adding of insult to injury had awakened every last one of my seven sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold and calculated cruelty. And by this time little waves of liquid fire were running through my tingling body.

"Then I can't be of much service to this family," announced d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with his maddening note of mockery.

"I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a flabby-minded idler and the head of this household at one and the same time," I said out of the seething crater-fogs of my indignation.

"She's never impressed me as being flabby," he ventured, with a quietness which only a person who knew him would or could recognize as dangerous.

"Well, I don't share your admiration for her," I retorted, letting the tide of vitriol carry me along in its sweep.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk's face hardened.

"Then what do you intend doing about it?" he demanded.

That was a poser, all right. That was a poser which, I suppose, many a woman at some time in her life has been called on to face. What did I intend doing about it? I didn't care much. But I at least intended to save the bruised and broken hulk of my pride from utter annihilation.

"I intend," I cried out with a quaver in my voice, "since you're not able to fill the bill, to be head of this household myself."

"That sounds like an ultimatum," said d.i.n.ky-Dunk very slowly, his face the sickly color of a meerschaum-pipe bowl.

"You can take it any way you want to," I pa.s.sionately proclaimed, compelled to raise my voice to the end that it might surmount Pee-Wee's swelling cries. "And while you're being lackey for Lady Alicia Newland I'll run this ranch. I'll run it in my own way, and I'll run it without hanging on to a woman's skirt!"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk stared at me as though he were looking at me through a leper-squint. But he had been brutal, was being brutal. And it was a case of fighting fire with fire.

"Then you're welcome to the job," I heard him proclaiming out of his blind white heat of rage. "After _that_, I'm through!"

"It won't be much of a loss," I shot back at him, feeling that he'd soured a bright and sunny life into eternal blight.

"I'll remember that," he said with his jaw squared and his head down.

I saw him push his chair aside and wheel about and stride away from the Yorks.h.i.+re pudding with the caved-in roof, and the roast-beef that was as cold as my own heart, and the indignantly protesting Pee-Wee who in some vague way kept reminding me that I wasn't quite as free-handed as I had been so airily imagining myself. For I mistily remembered that the Twins, before the day was over, were going to find it a very flatulent world. But I wasn't crushed. For there are times when even wives and worms will turn. And this was one of them.

_Thursday the Thirtieth_

It's a busy three days I've been having, and if I'm a bit tuckered out in body I'm still invincible in spirit. For I've already triumphed over a tangle or two and now I'm going to see this thing through. I'm going to see Alabama Ranch make good.

I teamed in to Buckhorn, with d.i.n.kie and the Twins and Ikkie bedded down in the wagon-box on fresh wheat-straw, and had a talk with Syd Woodward, the dealer there. It took me just about ten minutes to get down to hard-pan with him, once he was convinced that I meant business. He's going to take over my one heavy team, Tumble-Weed and Cloud-Maker, though it still gives my heart a wrench to think of parting with those faithful animals. I'm also going to sell off fifteen or eighteen of the heaviest steers and turn back the tin Lizzie, which can be done without for a few months at least.

But, on the other hand, I'm going to have an 8-16 tractor that'll turn over an acre of land in little more than an hour's time, and turn it over a trifle better than the hired hand's usual "cut and cover"

method, and at a cost of less than fifty cents an acre. Later on, I can use my tractor for hauling, or turn it to practically any other form of farm-power there may be a call for. I'm also getting a special grade of seed-wheat. There was a time when I thought that wheat was just merely wheat. It rather opened my eyes to be told that in one season the s.h.i.+ppers' Clearance a.s.sociation definitely specified and duly handled exactly four hundred and twenty-eight grades of this particular grain. Even straight Northern wheat, without the taint of weed-seed, may be cla.s.sified in any of the different numbers up to six, and also a.s.sorted into "tough," "wet," "damp," "musty,"

"binburnt" and half a dozen other grades and conditions, according to the season. But since I'm to be a wheat-grower, it's my duty to find out all I can about the subject.

I am also the possessor of three barrels of gasoline, and a new disk-drill, together with the needed repairs for the old drill which worked so badly last season. I've got Whinstane Sandy patching up the heavy sets of harness, and at daybreak to-morrow I'm going to have him out on the land, and also Francois, who has promised to stay with us another two weeks. It may be that I'll put Ikkie in overalls and get her out there too, for there's not a day, not an hour, to be lost. I want my crop in. I want my seed planted, and the sooner the better.

Whinstane Sandy, on account of his lame foot, can't follow a plow. But there's no reason he shouldn't run a tractor. If it wasn't for my bairns, of course, I'd take that tractor in hand myself. But my two little hostages to fortune cut off that chance. I've decided, however, to have Whinnie build a canopy-top over the old buckboard, and fit two strong frames, just behind the dashboard, that will hold a couple of willow-baskets, end to end. Then I can nest Poppsy and Pee-Wee in these two baskets, right under my nose, with little d.i.n.kie beside me in the seat, and drive from one end of the ranch to the other and see that the work is being done, and done right. The Lord knows how I'll get back to the shack in time to rustle the grub--but we'll manage, in some way.

The Twins have been doing better, the last week or two. And I rather dread the idea of weaning them. If I had somebody to look after them I could, I suppose, get a breast-pump and leave their mid-morning and mid-afternoon luncheons in cold-storage for them, and so ride my tractor without interruption. I remember a New York woman who did that, left the drawn milk of her breast on ice, so that she might gad and shop for a half-day at a time. But the more I think it over the more unnatural and inhuman it seems. Yet to hunt for help, in this busy land, is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack. Already, in the clear morning air, one can hear the stutter and skip and cough of the tractors along the opalescent sky-line, accosting the morning sun with their rattle and tattle of harvests to be. And I intend to be in on the game.

_Sunday the Second_

I'm too busy to puddle in spilt milk or worry over things that are past. I can't even take time to rhapsodize over the kitchen-cabinet to which Whinnie put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to-day at noon, though I know it will save me many a step. Poor old Whinnie, I'm afraid, is more a putterer than a plowman. He's had a good deal of trouble with the tractor, and his lame foot seems to bother him, on account of the long hours, but he proclaims he'll see me through.

Tractor-plowing, I'm beginning to discover, isn't the simple operation it sounds, for your land, in the first place, has to be staked off and marked with guidons, since you must know your measurements and have your headlands uniform and your furrows straight or there'll be a woeful mix-up before you come to the end of your job. The great trouble is that a tractor can't turn in its own length, as a team of horses can. Hence this deploying s.p.a.ce must be wasted, or plowed later with horses, and your headlands themselves must be wide enough for the turning radius of your tractor. Some of the ranchers out here, I understand, even do their tractor-plowing in the form of a series of elongated figure-eights, beginning at one corner of their tract, claiming this reduces the time spent with plows out of the ground. But that looked too complex for me to tackle.

Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with man: they occasionally get out of kilter at the very time you expect most from them. So this morning I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath by working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie's overalls--for I _have_ succeeded in coercing Ikkie into a jumper and the riding-seat of the old gang-plow--and went out and studied that tractor. I was determined to understand just what was giving the trouble.

It was two hours before I located the same, which was caused by the timer. But I've conquered the doggoned thing, and got her to spark right, and I went a couple of rounds, Sunday and all, just to make sure she was in working order. And neither my actions nor my language, I know, are those of a perfect lady. But any one who'd lamped me in that get-up, covered with oil and dust and dirt, would know that never again could I be a perfect lady. I'm a wiper, a greaser, a clodhopper, and, according to the sullen and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a slave-driver. And the odd part of it all is that I'm wringing a perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excitement and the novelty of the thing. I'm being something more than a mere mollusk. I'm making my power felt, and producing results. And self-expression, I find, is the breath of life to my soul. But I've scarcely time to do my hair, and my complexion is gone, and I've got cracks in my cheek-skin. I'm getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever again love me. Even my own babies gape at me kind of round-eyed when I take them in my arms.

But I'm wrong there, and I know I'm wrong. My little d.i.n.kie will always love me. I know that by the way his little brown arms cling about my wind-roughened neck, by the way he burrows in against my breast and hangs on to me and hollers for his Mummsy when she's out of sight. He's not a model youngster, I know. I'm afraid I love him too much to demand perfection from him. It's the hard and selfish women, after all, who make the ideal mothers--at least from the standpoint of the disciplinarian. For the selfish woman refuses to be blinded by love, just as she refuses to be imposed upon and declines to be troubled by the thought of inflicting pain on those perverse little toddlers who grow so slowly into the knowledge of what is right and wrong. It hurts me like Sam-Hill, sometimes, to have to hurt my little man-child. When the inevitable and slow-acc.u.mulating spanking _does_ come, I try to be cool-headed and strictly just about it--for one look out of a child's eyes has the trick of bringing you suddenly to the judgment-bar. d.i.n.kie, young as he is, can already appraise and arraign me and flash back his recognition of injustice. More than once he's made me think of those lines of Frances Lyman's:

"Just a look of swift surprise From the depths of childish eyes, Yet my soul to judgment came, Cowering, as before a flame.

Not a word, a lisp of blame: Just a look of swift surprise In the quietly lifted eyes!"

_Sat.u.r.day the Twenty-second_

I've got my seed in, glory be! The deed is done; the mad scramble is over. And Mother Earth, as tired as a child of being mauled, lies sleeping in the sun.

If, as some one has said, to plow is to pray, we've been doing a heap of mouth-wors.h.i.+p on Alabama Ranch this last few weeks. But the final acre has been turned over, the final long sea of furrows disked and plank-dragged and seeded down, and after the heavy rains of Thursday night there's just the faintest tinge of green, here and there, along my billiard-table of a granary-to-be.

But the mud is back, and to save my kitchen floor, last night, I trimmed down a worn-out broom, cut off most of the handle, and fastened it upside down in a hole I'd bored at one end of the lower door-step.

All this talk of mine about wheat sounds as though I were what they call out here a Soil Robber, or a Land Miner, a get-rich-quick squatter who doesn't bother about mixed farming or the rotation of crops, with no true love for the land which he impoverishes and leaves behind him when he's made his pile. I want to make my pile, it's true, but we'll soon have other things to think about. There's my home garden to be made ready, and the cattle and pigs to be looked after, and a run to be built for my chickens. The latter, for all their neglect, have been laying like mad and I've three full crates of eggs in the cellar, all dipped in water-gla.s.s and ready for barter at Buckhorn. If the output keeps up I'll store away five or six crates of the treated eggs for Christmas-season sale, for in midwinter they easily bring eighty cents a dozen.

And speaking of barter reminds me that both d.i.n.kie and the Twins are growing out of their duds, and heaven knows when I'll find time to make more for them. They'll probably have to promenade around like Ikkie's ancestors. I've even run out of safety-pins. And since the enduring necessity for the safety-pin is evidenced by the fact that it's even found on the baby-mummies of ancient Egypt, and must be a good four thousand years old, I've had Whinnie supply me with some home-made ones, manufactured out of hair-pins.... My little d.i.n.kie, I notice, is going to love animals. He seems especially fond of horses, and is fearless when beside them, or on them, or even under them--for he walked calmly in under the belly of Jail-Bird, who could have brained him with one pound of his wicked big hoof. But the beast seemed to know that it was a friend in that forbidden quarter, and never so much as moved until d.i.n.kie had been rescued. It won't be long now before d.i.n.kie has a pinto of his own and will go bobbing off across the prairie-floor, I suppose, like a monkey on a circus-horse. Even now he likes nothing better than coming with his mother while she gathers her "clutch" of eggs. He can scramble into a manger--where my unruly hens persist in making an occasional nest--like a marmoset. The delight on his face at the discovery of even two or three "cackle-berries," as Whinnie calls them, is worth the occasional breakage and yolk-stained rompers. For I share in that delight myself, since egg-gathering always gives me the feeling that I'm partaking of the bounty of Nature, that I'm getting something for next-to-nothing. It's the same impulse, really, which drives city women to the bargain-counter and the auction-room, the sublimated pa.s.sion to adorn the home teepee-pole with the fruits of their cunning!

_Tuesday the Twenty-fifth_