11. Jean Makes a Discovery
“Oh, we’re ever so glad to know you, Sally,” Jean said at once. “Buzzy’s told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you.”
Sally blushed deeper than ever, just as Buzzy did, and brushed a fly off her horse’s neck. She sat her horse well, in a pair of navy-blue riding breeches and a man’s shirt open at the throat. Altogether both Mrs. Craig and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl edition of Buzzy himself.
Sally told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left after they passed the cemetery.
“I’m going down the other way or I’d ride along and show you where it is.”
“You must come down to see us when you can, please. We’re rather lonesome, since we’re quite new around here. Are there many boys and girls?”
“Quite a few,” said Sally. “And luckily there are just about as many girls as boys. The Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there are two French girls near us. Their father’s the carpenter, Mr. Chappelle. Etoile’s the older one and the little on they call Tony. I’ll be over to see you one of these days.”
“Isn’t she a darling, Mother?” Jean exclaimed when they drove on. “I do hope she’ll come down. Kit would be crazy about her.”
“Anybody would be,” agreed Mrs. Craig, still smiling. “You know, Jean, I think that you youngsters are going to find a special work up here that only you can do. A work among these boys and girls of our own neighborhood.”
“But, Mom, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten miles.”
“Even so. Rebecca’s old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it for forty years. He knows all of the families as if he were a census taker.”
Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and she shifted into second. “There seem to be so few real American girls up here, Mother,” Jean began slowly. “I thought we’d find ever so many, but while I lived up at Maple Grove I rode around a good deal, and you’d be surprised how many foreigners are up here. Becky told me the reason. The old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns, and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply.”
“Well, dear?”
“But, Mother, you don’t understand. There are all sorts. French Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the real old families, of course—”
“Are you thinking of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old families, Jeannie?”
Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother’s voice.
“Of course not, Mom. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into a new place like this. We don’t want to get intimate with everybody. You’ll like some of the old families.”
“I think I’ll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather run-down-looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably of first settlers?”
“Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them too, how they came out—walked, actually walked most of them—from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a breakup, and a few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in villages wherever they happened to stop. I found a cemetery in the woods near Becky’s, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717.”
“I’d like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can’t you understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean, and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles who sought a haven in our land. There was Sienkiewicz, the great novelist, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend’s name and my mother and aunts didn’t like me to be so friendly toward her because she was a foreigner, completely forgetting that they themselves had come from foreign extraction. I think that you children are very fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these race barriers, are being torn down and the idea of one world is coming forth. Up here in our lonely hills, we are going to face this same problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can help open the gates of the future.”
“Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before,” Jean exclaimed. “You always seemed just sweet and feminine. I—why, somehow I never felt you were interested in such things.”
“If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?” she asked, her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. “And you are going to do your share right here in Elmhurst, making a circle that shall join together the hands of all these boys and girls from different races. We’ll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now let’s pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house.”
Jean turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it had been outdoors all its life, it was so weatherbeaten and gray. “Ma” Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own Plymouth Rocks.
“Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?” she said. “Well, I guess I can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder.” She led the way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay. “Ma” scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch for it.
“I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to, too,” she said pleasantly. “Now, we’ll take any that you like and put them into bags. I’m going to sell you my very best rooster. His name’s Jim Dandy and he’s all of that. He’s pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You don’t have to worry about hawks when he’s around.”
After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put into the trailer, “Ma” waved goodbye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that was moving into her house.
“I’m going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don’t know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as neighbors. There’s a man and his widowed sister and her children. All God’s folks, you know.”
“Finns,” murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. “There’s a new blend to our community, Mom. I’ve always wanted to know someone from the Scandinavian countries and Sally told me there is a Swedish family here too.”
Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit awhile, Becky said. One day the earth still looked windswept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.
One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons’ pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. It sounded keenest and sweetest over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.
“It’s the peep frogs,” called Buzzy, coming up from the barn with Buttercup’s creamy contribution to the family. “They’re just waking up. That means it’s spring for sure.”
“Isn’t it cute of them to try to tell us all about it,” Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Tommy come out and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the porch. Once Doris stopped below their father’s window to call up to him.
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Tommy, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging.
Sally paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls and Tommy received their first real information about the other neighbors around Elmhurst.
Buzzy was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Sally at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, poring over a seed catalogue.
“I’d love some zinnias and snapdragons and blue delphiniums in big beds along the terraces,” she said. “Think of the splashes of blue up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies’ place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.”
“You’ll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better,” Sally declared merrily. “We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what’s left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you’ve got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don’t need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl.”
The girls were silent, remembering what Rebecca had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Tommy’s curiosity got the better of his caution and he coaxed Sally away to hunt for the lilies of the valley hidden away under the hazel bushes.
It was Sally, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Sally, who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.
“She’s perfectly wonderful,” Kit declared that day at lunch. “She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trillium and bloodroot, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn’t let us pick many either, only a few. She says it’s just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds’ nests.”
Here Doris chimed in.
“And she’s going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Mom. We’re going to take some of that monk’s cloth and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin.”
“Sally seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities,” said Mrs. Craig amusedly.
“She is just exactly that,” Kit answered earnestly. “I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they’re as poor as churchmice. Sally told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Elmhurst without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it.”
“Sally’s going to peddle our rhubarb for us,” Kit went on. “I think that rhubarb is a most wonderful plant. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Sally told me it was rhubarb, and we’re going to market it. She says there’s a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we’re going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mom, from the window over the kitchen sink, and heaven help anybody who takes our cranberries!”
“I wouldn’t start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won’t be along until frost,” laughed Mrs. Craig.
Tommy, with Buzzy’s help, was devoting himself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Tommy had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the “coming offs,” as Buzzy put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Rebecca’s incubator, and over these Tommy fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.
One of “Ma” Parmelee’s pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.
Jean named her “Hamlet” in fun, because she said she was always looking for “rats in the arras.” But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn’t have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn’t even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at mealtime and eat her share.
“There’ll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays,” Kit prophesied darkly, but Tommy begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Tommy always begged off any of his flock from execution, and Buzzy had to go to one of the neighboring farms and buy one.
“It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you’re well-acquainted with,” Tommy explained. “And another thing, Mom, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it’s in the fall. I had Buzzy paint me some signs on shingles and I’m going to put them all over the place.”
“What do they say, dear?”
“They say just this.” Tommy’s tone was full of firmness and decision. “Any traps set on this property will be sprung by ME.”
“Do they state who ‘Me’ is?”
“I signed it with Dad’s name, and put underneath ‘Per T.’”
The screen door slammed and Kit walked into the living room from the porch. “Good night, everybody,” she said. “The night is yet young, but I’ve promised Buzzy—or rather, Buzzy and I have a bet that I can’t get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my tennis racket against five of Buzzy’s records. Don’t anyone call me, because it’s got to be fair.”
Doris and Tommy decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living room. Presently Mrs. Craig glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean’s lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old fireplace.
“What is it, dear?” she asked. “Tired?”
Jean shook her head, and smiled. “No, country life doesn’t tire me. I love it even though I am lonesome for my old friends. I think I’ll go over to Sally’s tomorrow and see if she’ll take me to meet some of the young people.” Jean dangled her legs over the arm of the chair and studied her scuffed saddle shoes. “If they are all as nice as Buzzy and Sally they must be swell.”