Laddie: A True Blue Story

by Gene Stratton-Porter

Then the chorus again, and then Isaac dropped on the front seat exhausted, and stayed there until some good-hearted woman, mostly my mother, felt so sorry about his shiftlessness she asked him to go home with us and warmed and fed him, and put him in the traveller's bed to sleep. The way we played it was this: we stood together at the edge of a roadside puddle and sang the first verse and the chorus exactly as Isaac did. Then I sang the second verse, and May was one of the "many dear childurn," and as I came to the lines she dipped her feet in the "glidin' stream," and for "fading away," she jumped across.

Now May was a careful little soul, and always watched what she was doing, so she walked up a short way, chose a good place, and when I sang the line, she was almost birdlike, she dipped and faded so gracefully. Then we laughed like dunces, and then May began to sway and swing, and drone through her nose for me, and I was so excited I never looked. I just dipped and faded on the spot. I faded all right too, for I couldn't jump nearly across, and when I landed in pure clay that had been covered with water for three weeks, I went down to my knees in mud, to my waist in water, and lost my balance and fell backward.

A man passing on horseback pried me out with a rail and helped me home. Of course he didn't know how I happened to fall in, and I was too chilled to talk. I noticed May only said I fell, so I went to bed scorched inside with red pepper tea, and never told a word about dipping and fading. Leon whispered and said he bet it was the last time I would play that, so as soon as my coat and dress were washed and dried, and I could go back to school, I did it again, just to show him I was no cowardy-calf; but I had learned from May to choose a puddle I could manage before I faded.

CHAPTER IX

"Even So"

"All things whatsoever ye would
That men should do to you,
Do ye even so to them."

Our big girls and boys always made a dreadful fuss and said we would catch every disease you could mention, but mother and father were set about it, just like the big rocks in the hills. They said they, themselves, once had been at the mercy of the people, and they knew how it felt. Mother said when they were coming here in a wagon, and she had ridden until she had to walk to rest her feet, and held a big baby until her arms became so tired she drove while father took it, and when at last they saw a house and stopped, she said if the woman hadn't invited her in, and let her cook on the stove, given her milk and eggs, and furnished her a bed to sleep in once in a while, she couldn't have reached here at all; and she never had been refused once. Then she always quoted: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye EVEN SO to them."

Father said there were men who made a business of splitting hairs, and of finding different meanings in almost everything in the Bible. I would like to have seen any one split hairs about that, or it made to mean something else. Of all the things in the Bible that you had to do because it said to, whether you liked it or not, that was the one you struck oftenest in life and it took the hardest pull to obey. It was just the hatefulest text of any, and made you squirm most. There was no possible way to get around it. It meant, that if you liked a splinter new slate, and a sharp pencil all covered with gold paper, to make pictures and write your lessons, when Clarissa Polk sat next you and sang so low the teacher couldn't hear until she put herself to sleep on it, "I WISHT I had a slate! I wisht I HAD a slate! I wisht I had a SLATE! Oh I WISHT I HAD A SLATE!"—it meant that you just had to wash up yours and stop making pictures yourself, and pass it over; you even had to smile when you offered it, if you did it right. I seldom got through it as the Lord would, for any one who loaned Clarissa a slate knew that it would come back with greasy, sweaty finger marks on it you almost had to dig a hole to wash off, and your pencil would be wet. And if there were the least flaw of crystal in the pencil, she found it, and bore down so hard that what she wrote never would come off.

The Lord always seemed bigger and more majestic to me, than at any other time, when I remembered that He could have known all that, and yet smiled as He loaned Clarissa His slate. And that old Bible thing meant, too, that if you would like it if you were travelling a long way, say to California to hunt gold, or even just to Indiana, to find a farm fit to live on—it meant that if you were tired, hungry, and sore, and would want to be taken in and fed and rested, you had to let in other people when they reached your house. Father and mother had been through it themselves, and they must have been tired as could be, before they reached Sarah Hood's and she took them in, and rested and fed them, even when they were only a short way from the top of the Little Hill, where next morning they looked down and stopped the wagon, until they chose the place to build their house. Sarah Hood came along, and helped mother all day, so by night she was settled in the old cabin that was on the land, and ready to go to work making money to build a new one, and then a big house, and fix the farm all beautiful like it was then. They knew so well how it felt, that they kept one bed in the boys' room, and any man who came at dusk got his supper, to sleep there, and his breakfast, and there never was anything to pay. The girls always scolded dreadfully about the extra washing, but mother said she slept on sheets when she came out, and some one washed them.