Bess Streeter Aldrich - Song of Years

“Look,” she called from her perch on the topmost rail, and pointed to the bright north star, “somebody else is holding up a light for you to see by.”

The glamour of the friendly evening and the musical outpouring still hung over Wayne when he rode Blackbird home across the prairie, Belle trotting along by his side, and somebody holding up the bright north star to guide him.

All the way his voice rolled out in mellow cadence through the silence of the summer night.

“. . . That my vows were false and my old love cold.

That my truant heart held another dear

Forgetting the vows that were whispered here . . .”

He cared for the horses, took off his boots, crawled into the wagon, and pulled the robe over him. The warmth of the Martin friendliness enveloped him like the warmth of the buffalo blanket.

What a raft of girls! He wondered if he could ever get them all straightened in his mind. This would be a good time to try. He slipped his hands under his head as he lay with his face turned to the stars in the dark prairie sky.

Remember them now as they stood in a row and see if you can name them.

Sabina. The black-haired rosy-cheeked one with the snapping dark eyes who stood at the head of the line, so she’s the oldest. Mr. Tom Bostwick is in love with her.

Emily. The carrot red-haired one, freckled, blue-eyed, taller and slimmer than Sabina. Sang lustily off-key. Helped her mother most with the dinner. Made lots of droll remarks.

Jeanie. Honey-colored hair with dark eyes that made an attractive contrast. Her nose turned up a bit. Made her look sort of saucy. One of the jolliest.

Phoebe Lou. Molasses-colored hair with greenish-blue eyes. A kind of a dimple by her mouth when she laughs. Something of a tease.

Melinda. Jet-black hair like Sabina, but taller and thinner. A wide red mouth. Kind of a tomboy.

Celia. The yellow-haired one with the fairest complexion and finest features. Maybe the prettiest.

Suzanne. The youngest, with reddish-brown hair and big gray-blue eyes that shone . . .

There, I did better than I expected . . . I’m dropping off to sleep . . . under the stars . . . on the lonely prairie . . . where was I? Oh, yes, I remember . . .

Suzanne, with gray-blue eyes that shone . . . like the stars . . . on the lonely prairie. . . .

The Martins were up at daybreak. There was much work to be done before Jeremiah and the boys could leave to assist the new Wayne Lockwood with his cabin. Phineas had ridden Queen to the neighbors’ on the river road the afternoon before—to the Burrills’, the two Akin families’ and the Mansons’—to tell them about helping Wayne. This early summer morning Sarah was giving her orders with all the snap and brevity of an army general. Some of the girls were helping with the outdoor chores and some with the housework. Later one was to take lunch to the men up on the north prairie.

“Celia will get to, you see.” Melinda was darkly foreboding in her prediction to Suzanne.

“I can ride lots better than she can and carry the things at the same time,” Suzanne admitted modestly.

“Melinda always works it some way to get off the place,” Celia in turn confided to Suzanne—those two, Celia and Melinda, counting that day lost whose low descending sun found either one of them had failed to “get ahead” of the other.

Breakfast was the inevitable noisy meal. Hot corn cakes and side pork dipped in egg batter and dropped into deep fat constituted the bill of fare. Sarah, the mother, fried the pork and Emily constantly and deftly flopped the cakes on their great iron griddle that extended the width of the stove.

“Why don’t you let one of the girls do that meat, Ma?” Jeremiah was in one of his rare moods of polite solicitude over his wife’s welfare as she stood, red-faced and perspiring, over the hot stove.

But Sarah enjoyed her martyrdom. “It takes watching. You can’t be gabbing and then get a good do on it.”

There was, indeed, plenty of “gabbing.” Because Wayne Lockwood had been there the night before, he was the general topic of conversation this morning.

Phineas began it as, a late arrival, he straddled one of the sawed-off hickory logs. Traces of his recent washing at the tin basin outside the kitchen door lingered on his sandy hair and side-whiskers. “Well, which one of you is going to set your cap for him?”

“Yes, girls.” Their father was not averse to teasing his comely daughters, either—“plaguing them,” they called it. “Sabina might’s well count herself out of the general contest, with Mr. Tom Bostwick comin’ out from the Falls every excuse he gets.”

Sabina tossed her crow-wing head. “Mr. Tom Bostwick! Why, I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man in the county.” This speech was not unexpected, girls being all of a pattern in that particular. Neither Sabina Martin out here in the newly settled Red Cedar Valley nor her cousins back in that growing city of thirty thousand souls, Chicago, would admit she could so much as tolerate the sight of a man until her wedding invitations were practically on their way to potential guests.

“Emily, you better cabbage onto him quick. You’re second in line after Sabina and it looks like she’s taken.”

“Pooh! I’m older’n him,” Emily emitted from the region of the hot griddle.

“That don’t hurt. Mrs. Burrill is older than Mr. Burrill.”

There were ceaseless remarks on all sides, containing no noticeable lack of frankness.

“Jeanie will want to add his scalp to her belt alongside of George Wormsby and Sam Phillips.”

“Celia’s begun eyes at him a’ready. I could see her shake her hair and look up admiring at him.” Melinda’s day for getting ahead of Celia was well on the way.

“Hush that!” from Sarah, the mother. “Celia’s too young for that.”

“But with big-lady notions.”

Celia tossed her yellow head. “I’d rather have big lady notions than tomboy ones.”

“If you’d mind your own business . . .”

“Come now . . . I’ll thump you girls,” Jeremiah threatened.

“Phoebe Lou and Jeanie will probably catch him together and then draw straws for him.”

Talk! Talk! Talk! It flew back and forth over countless corn cakes and fried side pork, like that sound of the grackles outside in the trees at the edge of the timber, as unchecked and as pointless.

In an unusual cessation of this flow of light words bandied back and forth, Suzanne raised her gray-blue eyes from their serious attention to her plate.

“I saw him first,” she said quietly.

They all shouted with typical Martin hilarity, for long moments could not get over the joke of it—that Suzanne had said this funny thing. All the rest of the meal, one had only to look at Suzanne or to say in mimicking tone, “I saw him first,” to start the whole table off into gales of laughter, with Jeremiah threatening to thump them even while he roared with them.

Sarah was provoked, hushed them and scolded about teasing such a young girl, but the laughter swept up and around her like prairie wind which there was no stopping. Life was real and life was earnest to Sarah Martin; most decidedly fun was not its goal, and all the years of her living she could never account for that gay foolish laughter of her offspring.

Breakfast was over and the long day of work under way. After all, it was Suzanne who was sent up on the prairie. It never occurred to any one to question Ma’s decision when she said Suzanne was to go and carry the big basket in front of her and mind her business when she rode along or there’d be pork sausage and corn-bread a-plenty a-feedin’ of the gophers.

So Suzanne in her gray print dress that ballooned out, sometimes showing her calico pantalets, mounted Jupiter, took the covered basket gingerly in front of her, and galloped away up north on the prairie where there was a faint trail marked in the grass by broken blossoms of blue lupine or wild mustard from her father’s wide-rimmed wagon wheels and the hoof prints of Wayne Lockwood’s horses.