Bess Streeter Aldrich - Song of Years

They filled the three downstairs rooms, men, women, children, and their belongings. Those who had come straight from their own houses brought freshly baked loaves of bread, their best shawls, sacks of herbs, hens, feather-beds, Bibles, scrap-books, dishes of jam, wall pictures, knives and forks, bags of dried corn, precious keepsakes from “back home.” Almost all had live stock tied to the ends of the wagons. Children clutched treasured corn-cob dolls or spool carts. A few men said they had buried some of their possessions; one had hurriedly dug a trench for his grindstone.

There was a strange quietness about so large a crowd gathered in such close quarters. The men talked together in knots, planning what would be best to do under given circumstances, keeping their voices low as they discussed plans, not to put too much fear into the minds of the women folks. They looked over the guns and hurriedly made wooden bolts for the lean-to doors which had never possessed any.

All this time, Jeremiah and the others of steady nature belittled the danger, scoffed at any Injuns around there having the guts to harm them. “Any I’ve ever met up with hadn’t no aim to molest.” He and Henry and Phineas, Wayne Lockwood, Mr. Burrill, the Akin men, and Ed Armitage stayed out around the log stables for a time and in angles of the stake-and-rider fence, listening to the prairie sounds, watching for any potential sign of trouble. Among other emergency plans, they adopted a password so that any man riding off the premises and coming back in the dark might make himself known to the others.

About one o’clock Ed Armitage, excitable and impulsive, hearing a noise near the timber, shakingly challenged the marauder, and when he thought the answer was the guttural grunting of an Indian, blazed away at him. He reported it excitedly to the other men who looked over the ground cautiously but saw nothing more suspicious.

Sarah made Mrs. Horace Akin lie down with her babies on Celia’s and Suzanne’s bed behind the calico curtain. A few other women with their small children lay down on the floor of the main room on various makeshift pallets. By two o’clock Sarah told Celia and Suzanne to go on up the ladder to a bed there, but at their protest that they would be more afraid up in the loft than down here where folks were, she told them to get into her own bed then, but with their clothes on. Suzanne on the outside lay there tense with fright, knowing she could never shut an eye, but turning to whisper to Celia she found her sound asleep with her regular nightly layer of sweet cream on her face as though not even an Injun could come between her and her good complexion.

Suzanne kept thinking. I’ll never go away from the house again as long as I live. No one can ever get me to go down near the slough. When I think of the times I’ve been off down there by the prairie-chicken circle, I don’t see how I ever went. I never will again.

It was queer to be here in her mother’s bed, bigger and softer than her own. She hadn’t been in it since the last time she had the ague. There was a joke about that. People were always saying, “Trust the Martin girls to see the funny side of it.” Well, this had a funny side, too. Both times she had slept in her mother’s big tester bed she had been shaking, once with the ague, and this time with fright about the Injuns.

The calico tester was drawn tight and people were stirring around right outside. Somebody was so close to her she could have touched him through the curtains.

The voices were low, almost whispering—and in a moment she knew they belonged to Sabina and Mr. Tom Bostwick. She could hear a murmured questioning sound and then Sabina must have parted the tester cautiously and looked in. She only sensed it for she had shut her eyes and was breathing heavily, so that immediately she heard Sabina say, “Yes, they’re asleep.” And Tom Bostwick’s voice said: “And so to-night has made me know I couldn’t bear to have you away from me. When I think if I was over at the Falls and you out here . . . not knowing if there’s anything to this scare or not. . . . You have my whole affection, Sabina . . . my whole heart. If we both get through this night all right . . . will you . . . will you do me the honor to be my wife?”

Suzanne was trembling now with more than fright. Emotion and the fear of moving were added to her discomfiture. Her eyes stared into the darkness of the calico curtains and she felt little prickles go up and down her back. The Indians were coming and she was hearing a real love proposal, not an imagined one, right by her ear. The combination of the two exciting things made her feel dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. And now Sabina was saying, “Oh, Mr. Bostwick . . . well, Tom, then . . . I admire you, too. . . . No . . . you mustn’t . . . with all these people.”

Quite suddenly, with Suzanne’s face hot from the excitement and secrecy of it, as plain as day she saw Tom Bostwick and Sabina step over the threshold into her magic world. When they were driving home from Wayne Lockwood’s she would not have believed that she could ever think of that other world again for the fear of the Injuns coming. But here in Ma’s bed she was remembering it. Nor would she have believed that plump Sabina and tall black-whiskered Tom Bostwick could ever get over into that secret country of hers. But now there they were. It was very strange and very exciting. She lay unmoving thinking it all out, not quite so fearful of the Injuns now. No matter what the Injuns did, they could never follow you into a magic country.

The next thing she knew, she could smell sausage frying and the strong odor of coffee. The Injuns hadn’t come yet. She looked over at Celia still sleeping, with the cream dried on her cheeks in wrinkled patches like a map of the colonies in the atlas. She sat up and swung her legs off the high bed and peeked out between the calico curtains. The rooms were still full of people, but they were no longer scared. They were laughing and talking, and agreeing that if the Indians hadn’t come by now, it was all a false alarm. Horace Akin was saying that this scare was just like the others they’d had, all just started from somebody’s idle talk and that bad news always went like a prairie fire. And Pa was roaring and slapping his knee and saying it was worth the loss of a pig to see Ed Armitage’s face when he found he had shot an old sow instead of an Injun.

Breakfast for fifty people was a queer confused sort of meal collected from every one’s supplies. Suzanne, eating her mother’s sausage and corn cakes and trying politely ever and anon to bite into one of Mrs. Burrill’s hard fried cakes, kept glancing out of the corner of her eyes at Tom Bostwick and Sabina around whose heads she had expected to see halos shining this morning but which were strangely missing. Only Wayne Lockwood, tall and handsome, was still a hero.

While the big crowd was eating, a Mr. Cady Bedson from Prairie Rapids rode into the yard on horseback on his way up the river road to see if there had been any depredations in the night. He told them a lot of queer things that had happened around Prairie Rapids. One man had thought some stray colts following his team were Indians and had taken his family off into the corn-field at a wild gallop and was still out there as far as anybody knew. A woman in her nightgown had wandered all night in the woods, which seemed to amuse him no end. Several families had really started for the more thickly populated country down around Cedar Rapids.

He took the center of the main room while he talked and gave the impression of thinking that they should consider themselves honored because he was here. Suzanne, looking at him from the corners of her gray-blue eyes, saw that he was quite good-looking with his dark hair and dark mustache. But she had no desire to take him into that other world where she so easily took Wayne Lockwood. Every time she tried to put him into her imaginary country she could not make him stay there. He popped right out again. Some people belonged in that magic world and some did not, and nothing you could do about it would make them stay if they did not fit.