After supper the big man and his wife stood at the window looking out into the wet, dismal night. After a little hesitation he put his arm gently around her. She did not throw it away as she did when he tried to comfort her in the swamp, but rather pulled it closer. After Ike had cleared up his dishes and caught and dressed the gray rooster we all sat before the fire and talked. With a few shrewd questions the lumberman drew out Ike’s story. Years before he and Annie had owned a good farm in New York. There they heard of the wonderful new town that was to be built in Northern Michigan. A city was to arise there, the railroad was coming, and fortune was to float on golden wings over the favored place. It is strange how people like Ike and Annie cannot see how much they need home and old friends and old scenes to make life satisfying. They are not made of the stuff used in building pioneers, but they cannot realize it and they listen to plausible dreams and go chasing after the impossible. So Ike and Annie sold the farm and came to start the great city. It never started. The railroad headed 20 miles west. Out among the scrub oaks you could find some of the rotting stakes marked “Broadway,” “Clay St.,” or “Lake Avenue.” The swamp and forest refused to be civilized. Ike built his hotel in anticipation of the human wave which would wash prosperity his way. It never came, and only a rough, rambling house remained as the weatherbeaten gravestone of Sawdust City. Of all the pioneers there were only Ike and Annie—last of them all—celebrating their happy Thanksgiving!
“Why don’t you sell out and move to some town?” said the practical lumberman.
“Well, sir—it would be too far from home! Me and Annie know this place—every corner of it. Every crick of a timber at night brings a memory. We are just part of the place. And the little girl is buried off there by the brook. We couldn’t go away from that, could we?”
“But isn’t it so awful lonesome?”
It was the young woman who asked, and it was Annie who softly answered her.
“No, for we have great company. I have Ike and he has me. All these long years have tried us out. We know each other, and we are satisfied. Each Thanksgiving finds us happier than before, because we know that our last years are to be our best years.”
The rich man looked over to Ike and Annie with something of hopeless envy printed on his face. His wife nodded her head gently and then sat gazing into the fire until Ike gave us clearly to understand that 10 o’clock was the hour for retiring at the “Farmers’ Rest.”
We stayed for our Thanksgiving dinner, and the gray rooster, stuffed with chestnuts and bread-crumbs, might well have stood up in the platter to crow at the praises heaped upon him. The forenoon was gloomy and dull, but just as we came to the table the sun broke through the clouds. A long splinter of sunshine broke through the window—falling upon Annie’s snow-white hair. Ike hurried to move her chair out of the sun, but the rich man asked Ike to leave her there, for I think something in that sunny picture took him back to childhood—where most men go on Thanksgiving Day.