"I guess Martha is a natural bread-maker," said her mother proudly. "Some is and some ain't."
Always good bread and plenty of it! That was Iowa. And it was of Martha's bread they partook around the kitchen table the next year—Eben and John, Martha and her father and mother—just before the two young men drove to the county seat to enlist.
"I guess we won't get bread like this in the army," John said, and he was right.
"When I'm chawing this sow-belly and hard tack," Eben wrote, "I wish I had some of that bread of yours, Marth. I guess this war won't last long and the minute it is over you'll see me skedaddling home for some of your bread. Tell ma I'm well and——"
They brought his body home because he was not killed outright but lived almost two weeks in the hospital at St. Louis after he was wounded. Martha scraped the dough from her fingers to go to the door when her father drove up with the precious, lifeless form. That day her bread was not as good as usual.
Martha and John were married the month he came back from the war, and the bread that was eaten at the wedding dinner was Martha's own baking. The bread that was eaten by those who came to prepare her mother for the grave and by those who came, a year later, to lay away her father, was Martha's. Once, twice, three times, four times Martha did a double baking, to "last over," so that there might be bread in the house while the babies were being born. Every week, except those four weeks, she baked bread.
In succession the small boys and girls of her own began coming to the kitchen door pleading, "Ma, may I have a piece of bread an' butter?" Always they might. There was always plenty of bread; it was Iowa.
In time Martha became something of a fanatic about flour. One kind was the best flour in the world; she would have no other. Once, when John brought back another brand, she sent him back to town with it. Her bread was so well known that the flour dealer in town was wont to say, "This is the kind Mis' Cartwright uses; I guess I can't say no more'n that." Eight times in twenty years she won the blue ribbon at the county fair for her loaves; the twelve other times John swore the judges were prejudiced. "It ain't the flour; that I do know!" Martha would answer.
Presently there were children of her children coming on Sunday to spend the day with the "old folks," and there was always enough bread for all. Sometime in the afternoon the big loaf would be taken out of the discarded tin boiler that served as a bread-box and the children would have a "piece"—huge slices of bread, limber in the hand, spread with brown sugar, or jelly, or honey, or dripping with jam. Then, one Sunday, young John's wife brought a loaf of her own bread to show Martha. They battled pleasantly for two hours over the merits of two brands of flour, comparing the bread, but Martha would no more have given up her own brand than she would have deserted the Methodist Church to become a Mahometan!
Then came a time when John had difficulty in holding his pipe in his mouth because his "pipe tooth" was gone. He no longer ate the crusts of Martha's bread except when he dipped them in his coffee. There was a strong, young girl to do the housework but Martha still made the bread, just such beautiful, richly browned, fragrant bread as she had made in her younger days. There had never been a week without the good bread, for this was Iowa.