The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (small books to read .TXT) 📕

pigeons sat cooing. Then, the refreshments being finished, the woman took her by the hand, and led her out of the house, down a barren street, just as she was, in her wet dress, unhatted, red-faced. Barbara surmised she was being taken to a place where plants were sold.

They came to a large square house, built on a high foundation, in a yard planted with trees which were not just small sticks, approached by a walk which had wide blossoming borders which Barbara would fain have examined. But her guide waddled up determinedly and knocked on the door. A lady opened it, a lady perhaps fifty, whose gray calico was fastened at the throat most primly by an oval brooch. She was sad-faced, and gray-haired, and as the German woman babbled to her, she turned and smiled upon Barbara gravely and kindly, and asked them to come in. But the German was not for sitting in a house on such a morning. The lady put on a wide hat, and gloves, and came out to the border. In her foreign language, which was merely New England English, she discussed her loves, pointing out one blossom and another. Her pansies never equaled the German’s. But look at the number of buds on her peonies! She could hardly wait till they opened. And Mrs. McNair followed her about with the great question on her tongue, namely, where does one get these things in this country?

She was standing by a yellow rosebush when she asked that, first, and its owner, bending down, said;

“Here’s a good little new one now. You may have that. Have you a place for it? Where do you live?”

“Twenty-five miles west.”

The lady sighed.

“We have come for wood to build our house today,” Barbara informed her.

“Have you been here long?”

“Long enough,” said Barbara, simply. “I came in November.”

The lady sighed again, and went to get her spade. She asked again if Barbara had a place for the rose. Barbara was offended at the suggestion she might not cherish that plant until death. Where can you buy them here? she asked again.

That rose, the lady explained, she had brought with her from Davenport, in a little box with grape cuttings and the peony, which she had carried in her lap in a covered wagon long before there were railroads to the town. She had brought it to Davenport coming down the Ohio and up the Mississippi soon after she was married. A woman had given it to her when she left Ohio for the West. The peony her mother had brought from eastern to western Ohio many years ago, and when she had died, her daughter had chosen the peony for her share of the estate. Her mother had got it from her mother, who came a bride to Ohio from western New York, clasping it against her noisy heart, out of the way of the high waters her husband had led her horse through, across unbridged streams, cherishing it more resolutely than the household stuffs which had to be abandoned in pathless woods. Her great-grandfather had brought it west in New York in his saddle bag, soon after Washington’s inauguration as he returned from New York City. She supposed before that the Dutch had maybe brought it from Holland to Long Island. There had been tulips, too, but the pigs had eaten them in Ohio. She had wondered sometimes if it was the fate of the peony to be carried clear to the Pacific by lonely women. At least, if she gave a bit of it to Mrs. McNair, it would be that much farther west on its way to its destination, which she, for one, hoped it might soon reach, so that there would be some rest for women. Let Mrs. McNair remember to come for a root of it in the fall, when her fence would be finished. Without fences it is useless to try to protect flowers. Her mother in Ohio had had a sort of high stockade made of thorny brush around a little garden, so that one had to come near, and look down over the top to get a glimpse of the blossoms. But the pigs had been very hungry in those days. Their destruction of that garden and the rescue of the peony she had heard her mother tell about with tears in her eyes twenty years afterwards. It was one of the sorrows of her life.

When Mrs. McNair went home that day, she had with her the roots of all transplantable things, lilacs, white and purple, roses pink and red and yellow, pinks and young hollyhocks, grape cuttings and snowballs. She had a pile of old Horticultural Advisers from the lady’s library, full of advice about planting windbreaks, and letters from frontier gardeners who had morning glories growing over their young pines, and walls of hollyhocks twelve feet high. She had been urged to stay at the lady’s for dinner, and the German had made her promise always to come back to her for coffee when she came to town. The road was full of ruts and swamps, and her bones ached long before the springless wagon got home. But her plants had felt no joltings, for she had held them carefully in her lap. That was the first day she sang in the United States of America. It was her “Americanization.” Her husband never even noticed her song, however. He was suffering acutely from the price of glass windows.

XIII

Wully and Chirstie and their bonny wee Johnnie moved into their new house towards the first of May, and at the end of that month, Wully’s brother John, having finished his second year in the snug little New England college, came to work for him. That institution was only fifty miles away, a distance that a lame McLaughlin, unfit for the army, walked to vote for Lincoln in sixty-four, not being able to give one great big valuable dollar for