One of Ours by Willa Cather (best romance ebooks .TXT) 📕

He felt the smart of tears in his eyes, and to hide them bent over the metal basin and began to scrub his face. Enid stood behind him, adjusting her hat in the mirror.

“How terribly smoky you are, Claude. I hope you don’t smoke before breakfast?”

“No. I was in the smoking car awhile. I suppose my clothes got full of it.”

“You are covered with dust and cinders, too!” She took the clothes broom from the rack and began to brush him.

Claude caught her hand. “Don’t, please!” he said sharply. “The porter can do that for me.”

Enid watched him furtively as he closed and strapped his suitcase. She had often heard that men were cross before breakfast.

“Sure you’ve forgotten nothing?” he asked before he closed her bag.

“Yes. I never lose things on the train⁠—do you?”

“Sometimes,” he replied guardedly, not looking up as he snapped the catch.

Book III Sunrise on the Prairie I

Claude was to continue farming with his father, and after he returned from his wedding journey, he fell at once to work. The harvest was almost as abundant as that of the summer before, and he was busy in the fields six days a week.

One afternoon in August he came home with his team, watered and fed the horses in a leisurely way, and then entered his house by the back door. Enid, he knew, would not be there. She had gone to Frankfort to a meeting of the Anti-Saloon League. The Prohibition party was bestirring itself in Nebraska that summer, confident of voting the State dry the following year, which purpose it triumphantly accomplished.

Enid’s kitchen, full of the afternoon sun, glittered with new paint, spotless linoleum, and blue-and-white cooking vessels. In the dining-room the cloth was laid, and the table was neatly set for one. Claude opened the icebox, where his supper was arranged for him; a dish of canned salmon with a white sauce; hardboiled eggs, peeled and lying in a nest of lettuce leaves; a bowl of ripe tomatoes, a bit of cold rice pudding; cream and butter. He placed these things on the table, cut some bread, and after carelessly washing his face and hands, sat down to eat in his working shirt. He propped the newspaper against a red glass water pitcher and read the war news while he had his supper. He was annoyed when he heard heavy footsteps coming around the house. Leonard Dawson stuck his head in at the kitchen door, and Claude rose quickly and reached for his hat; but Leonard came in, uninvited, and sat down. His brown shirt was wet where his suspenders gripped his shoulders, and his face, under a wide straw hat which he did not remove, was unshaven and streaked with dust.

“Go ahead and finish your supper,” he cried. “Having a wife with a car of her own is next thing to having no wife at all. How they do like to roll around! I’ve been mighty blamed careful to see that Susie never learned to drive a car. See here, Claude, how soon do you figure you’ll be able to let me have the thrasher? My wheat will begin to sprout in the shock pretty soon. Do you reckon your father would be willing to work on Sunday, if I helped you, to let the machine off a day earlier?”

“I’m afraid not. Mother wouldn’t like it. We never have done that, even when we were crowded.”

“Well, I think I’ll go over and have a talk with your mother. If she could look inside my wheat shocks, maybe I could convince her it’s pretty near a case of your neighbour’s ox falling into a pit on the Sabbath day.”

“That’s a good idea. She’s always reasonable.”

Leonard rose. “What’s the news?”

“The Germans have torpedoed an English passenger ship, the Arabic; coming this way, too.”

“That’s all right,” Leonard declared. “Maybe Americans will stay at home now, and mind their own business. I don’t care how they chew each other up over there, not a bit! I’d as soon one got wiped off the map as another.”

“Your grandparents were English people, weren’t they?”

“That’s a long while ago. Yes, my grandmother wore a cap and little white curls, and I tell Susie I wouldn’t mind if the baby turned out to have my grandmother’s skin. She had the finest complexion I ever saw.”

As they stepped out of the back door, a troop of white chickens with red combs ran squawking toward them. It was the hour at which the poultry was usually fed. Leonard stopped to admire them. “You’ve got a fine lot of hens. I always did like white leghorns. Where are all your roosters?”

“We’ve only got one. He’s shut up in the coop. The brood hens are setting. Enid is going to try raising winter frys.”

“Only one rooster? And may I ask what these hens do?”

Claude laughed. “They lay eggs, just the same⁠—better. It’s the fertile eggs that spoil in warm weather.”

This information seemed to make Leonard angry. “I never heard of such damned nonsense,” he blustered. “I raise chickens on a natural basis, or I don’t raise ’em at all.” He jumped into his car for fear he would say more.

When he got home his wife was lifting supper, and the baby sat near her in its buggy, playing with a rattle. Dirty and sweaty as he was, Leonard picked up the clean baby and began to kiss it and smell it, rubbing his stubbly chin in the soft creases of its neck. The little girl was beside herself with delight.

“Go and wash up for supper, Len,” Susie called from the stove. He put down the baby and began splashing in the tin basin, talking with his eyes shut.

“Susie, I’m in an awful temper. I can’t stand that damned wife of Claude’s!”

She was spearing roasting ears out of a big iron pot and looked up through the steam. “Why, have you seen her? I was listening on the