Bess Streeter Aldrich - Song of Years

Just as Pa had started on the Whigs . . . that he hated to go back on his own party, “but by granny, our Whig leadership have showed they can’t grapple with modern problems . . . now take this convention up at Jackson, Michigan . . .” she had run off down here by herself in the prairie-chicken circle near the slough.

There were no sounds now in the sleepy warmth of the day excepting a few plaintive mourning-doves’ calls and the occasional plop of some water animal. A wild mother duck sailed lazily and noiselessly with her brood not far away. This would be a good time to call out Echo. She lived over there to the southeast, not far from the Indian council tree. If you stood in a certain open place back from the slough where the land dipped toward the river and called out “Ho-ho,” she answered; and if you sang, she sang with you, but always a note behind you, never catching up. There was something pretty creepy about it, too, because of the Indian girl. Off there in that same direction, but back from the river a ways, a dead Indian girl was in a blanket up in a red cedar. She’d been there for four years, people said. It was almost as if it was the dead Indian girl who sang back. Maybe it was—how could you know for sure? The eeriness of the thought fascinated her so that, wanting to call out, she was yet half afraid to do so.

And then suddenly she heard movement in the bushes as of light-footed walking, and her heart stood still with fright. Her body turned cold and she shook a little in the summer heat, recalling her avowal never again to go away from the house alone. And yet here she was and twigs were crackling and bushes moving. “Give me one more chance,” went through her mind. “If I get through it all right this time, I’ll never . . .”

Then Wayne Lockwood, gun in hand, came through the underbrush and stood there, tall and stalwart and handsome.

“Well, hello, there,” he was saying. “Where’d you come from? Are you lost?”

“Oh, no.” Suzanne, relieved and happy, laughed aloud at that. “This place belongs to me.”

She had never been one moment alone with him. The few times she had seen him the whole family had been around, as like as not plaguing her, too. For the first time she felt at ease in his presence.

“So this is your lake, is it? Then I must be trespassing. Well, Princ-cess Suzanne”—he swept off his cap, placed it across his breast, and bowed low in mock homage—“will you kindly allow me to cross your domain so that I can get to my castle on the other side of the Black Forest?”

Suzanne’s eyes were wide with astonishment and she could not know how the playful words had lighted the candles that lay behind them. No one had ever said anything like that but her secret people. That was the way they talked. That was the way they acted. Her face grew pink with the excitement and embarrassment of it, and her voice trembled when she said shyly, “Yes, I guess I’ll let you this once.”

Long after he had gone on, turning around to laugh that he was walking here only by her permission, she remembered just how he looked and what he said.

It was going to be very, very easy after this to live in that magic world.

The general store over at Sturgis Falls had been opened by one Andrew Mullarky four years before, and for two years of that time the Martin men folks occasionally had made the long hundred-mile trip by ox team to Dubuque for the owner, taking grain to sell there and hauling back supplies, receiving credit at the store for their pay. From Dubuque the grain was hauled by other teams to Warren, Illinois, loaded on the cars for Chicago, that young city which surprisingly just now was beginning to pass Detroit in population.

Jeremiah liked to be the one to make the trip. Harder than the farm work, if by chance great storms came up while en route, still the journey was more interesting than being tied down to the fields. He was a garrulous soul and he liked an audience; he enjoyed the contacts with the merchants in Dubuque and the stopping on the way to talk with incoming settlers, the opportunity to puff up the valley of the Red Cedar in his conversation and influence new-comers to locate near Sturgis Falls. More than once his chance meeting with families on the trail, journeying westward to locate but not knowing just where, had ended in their making straight for the prairies north of the two settlements. A lone horseman usually meant some single man, who would soon marry and who was looking in the meantime for suitable holdings, or the head of a family coming on before his folks to choose and purchase their land. These Jeremiah always hailed in friendly fashion and if they sounded promising he steered them to localities near his own place. Sometimes he met men who apparently did not relish telling their prime objects in arriving in the Valley. These he always put down as the land speculators and proffered them little encouragement. Altogether, probably no one of the settlers gave so much advertising to the section by word of mouth as did talkative Jeremiah Martin.

It irked his wife, Sarah, so that she scolded a great deal about it to the girls. “You’d think Pa owned the Valley and was parcelin’ it out to the rest of the world.”

The girls usually stood up loyally for their father.

“Everybody likes Pa and they know his word is as good as gold, Ma,” they would say. “Folks look up to him. He’s kind of a big man in these parts. Even the men at the settlement know that.”

“Well, you can have too much of this ‘big man’ notion.”

But all Sarah’s scolding about it was as the wind in the maples to Jeremiah. At the slightest provocation he rode Queen to Prairie Rapids or to Sturgis Falls, talked up improvements long hours in the taverns and on the wooden platform of the little store, took the tedious trips to Dubuque, returning with news of people he had met and more than likely influenced to come to this section of the Valley.

This particular time, though, it was Henry who had gone on the long journey, taking a load of wheat and expecting to bring back supplies for the Mullarky store. He had been gone nearly two weeks, and every day now the girls looked down the trail to see if they could catch sight of Red and Whitey, Baldy and Star. They had a wager about whichever one should first see them—that this girl might choose her work for the week among all the tasks, hoeing the sweet corn, baking, cooking, cleaning, berry-picking, carrying water in from the newly dug well by the east lean-to door, helping with the chores, mending, herding cattle on the prairie. Sarah had agreed to the foolishness reluctantly, scolding that it would mix things all up and her orders wouldn’t be obeyed. But it made life exciting to see which one would win. They kept the spy-glass handily on the barrel-stand near the front door while Sarah complained that the work lagged from some one of them having an eye glued to it every minute of the day.

Even then it turned out that Celia and Suzanne saw them simultaneously without the aid of the glass, so there was no chance of a decision between the two. Far down the grassy trail they had seen the wagon, the huge heads of the oxen swaying and the brass knobs of their horns gleaming in the slanting afternoon sun.

“Henry’s coming,” they shouted, and the call was relayed from yard to house, to loft, to garden and field.

It was such a long time that the oxen’s slow old legs were taking to get along the trail that the two girls ran a half-mile to meet the merchandise wagon. In fact, so slow were the clumsy old creatures that they did not even have to be stopped to allow the girls to clamber on the back of the wagon and hang there, laughing breathlessly, swinging their legs precariously above the lush grass.