"LITTLE BOY BLUE"
UP and down the oxen toiled before the plow, licking out their tongues, as they went along, for wisps of the sweet, new grass which the mold-board was turning under. After them came the biggest brother, striving with all his might to keep the beam level and the handles from dancing as the steel share cut the sod into wide, thick ribbons, damp and black on one side, on the other green and decked with flowers. And, following the biggest brother, trotted the little girl, who from time to time left the cool furrow to run ahead and give the steers a lash of the gad she carried, or hopped to one side to keep from stepping with her bare feet upon the fat earthworms that were rolled out into the sunlight, where they were pounced upon by rivaling blackbirds circling in the rear.
It was a cloudy morning near the end of May. The spring work on the farm was long past, and already the fields rippled with corn and wheat, barley and oats, and blue-flowered flax. But it was not yet time to begin the yearly onslaught against intruding weeds, so the big brothers were busying themselves with the erection of a sod smoke-house, which, at hog-killing time, would receive fresh hams and sides for the winter's curing.
A strip of prairie land bordering the northern edge of the grain had been chosen to furnish the building material because its fertile top layer was tenaciously root-bound and free from boulders. And while the biggest brother plowed it up, the other two came slowly along with the Studebaker, chopped the sods into pieces twice as long as they were wide, and laid them carefully on the bed of the wagon.
The little girl let the biggest brother hang the gad about his neck and helped for a while with the sod-carrying. But every time she put her chubby arms around a slab, it broke in two; so her brothers told her to stop. Then she climbed to the wagon-seat and drove the horses beside the furrows, and, later, went to the farm-yard with a load.
The smoke-house was being built beside the corn-cribs. Before any sod had been laid, the eldest brother had marked out on the ground with a stick a nine-foot square, and in one side of it had left a narrow door-space where two scantlings were driven in upright to serve as sides of the casing. Then, with the dirt lines as a guide, he had begun the walls, giving them the thickness of two sods. When the little girl rode up they were already above her head. But she did not wait to see the load she had accompanied bring them up to the eldest brother's waist, for it was close upon noon and it occurred to her that there would soon be a table to set in the kitchen, so she hurried out of call up the weedy path between the wheat and the corn, to where the oxen were still lazily drawing the plow.
She picked up the gad again and sent it whisking about the black flanks of the steers. But when she had gone up and down till three long sods lay lapping each other like heavy ruffles, she grew tired of following the biggest brother and went up the carnelian bluff to the stone pile and sat down.
Her mother, standing at the kitchen door, shading her eyes with her hand, saw the fluttering blue calico on the hillside and smiled at it through tears. Nearly four years and a half had passed since the rock-covered mound had risen among the snow-drifts, yet during all this time the little girl had never been told its sad secret, for the family wished her to go about the farm without fear.
She had often wondered, however, why, when her mother wanted to have a good cry, she always sat at the kitchen window that looked out across the row of stunted apple-trees, the sorghum patch, and finally the corn, to where the carnelian bluff lifted its pebbly head; and why, whenever the big brothers saw their mother weeping there, if it were winter, they always coaxed her into the sitting-room, where a pile of magazines and books, bought to divert her, lay beside the lounge; or, if it were summer, out into the front garden, where a low bench stood against the house, under the lilac-bush, facing the round and diamond-shaped beds of scarlet verbenas, yellow marguerites, bachelor's-buttons and pansies.
But, though the little girl was ignorant of what the stone pile hid, she was, nevertheless, thinking of mournful things as she sat there. The Christmas before, Santa Claus had stingily dropped but one present down the long stovepipe that carried up the smoke from the sitting-room stove—one present to serve as both a holiday and a birthday remembrance; and that had been a big, ugly crockery doll's head with bumpy brown hair, staring blue eyes, fat, pink cheeks, and flinty shoulders. The gift, aided by the confidences of the Swede boy, had almost shaken her belief in Santa Claus, whom she had asked in a letter to give her a bought riding-whip and a book that told more about Robinson Crusoe. Instead, the homely head had been left, and she felt sure (and the Swede boy assured her) that it could only have been picked out for her by the eldest brother. And when, after gazing down upon her stupidly for two or three months from the clock-shelf, it was finally fastened, by thread run through the holes in its shoulders, to a clumsy, jointless, sawdust body, it had only served to remind her more bitterly than ever of the ill fortune that could make two great events in one small life fall upon the selfsame day.