“Have you been here long?”
“Long enough,” said Barbara, simply. “I came in November.”
The lady sighed again, and went to get her spade. She asked again if Barbara had a place for the rose. Barbara was offended at the suggestion she might not cherish that plant until death. Where can you buy them here? she asked again.
That rose, the lady explained, she had brought with her from Davenport, in a little box with grape cuttings and the peony, which she had carried in her lap in a covered wagon long before there were railroads to the town. She had brought it to Davenport coming down the Ohio and up the Mississippi soon after she was married. A woman had given it to her when she left Ohio for the West. The peony her mother had brought from eastern to western Ohio many years ago, and when she had died, her daughter had chosen the peony for her share of the estate. Her mother had got it from her mother, who came a bride to Ohio from western New York, clasping it against her noisy heart, out of the way of the high waters her husband had led her horse through, across unbridged streams, cherishing it more resolutely than the household stuffs which had to be abandoned in pathless woods. Her great-grandfather had brought it west in New York in his saddle bag, soon after Washington’s inauguration as he returned from New York City. She supposed before that the Dutch had maybe brought it from Holland to Long Island. There had been tulips, too, but the pigs had eaten them in Ohio. She had wondered sometimes if it was the fate of the peony to be carried clear to the Pacific by lonely women. At least, if she gave a bit of it to Mrs. McNair, it would be that much farther west on its way to its destination, which she, for one, hoped it might soon reach, so that there would be some rest for women. Let Mrs. McNair remember to come for a root of it in the fall, when her fence would be finished. Without fences it is useless to try to protect flowers. Her mother in Ohio had had a sort of high stockade made of thorny brush around a little garden, so that one had to come near, and look down over the top to get a glimpse of the blossoms. But the pigs had been very hungry in those days. Their destruction of that garden and the rescue of the peony she had heard her mother tell about with tears in her eyes twenty years afterwards. It was one of the sorrows of her life.
When Mrs. McNair went home that day, she had with her the roots of all transplantable things, lilacs, white and purple, roses pink and red and yellow, pinks and young hollyhocks, grape cuttings and snowballs. She had a pile of old “Horticultural Advisers” from the lady’s library, full of advice about planting windbreaks, and letters from frontier gardeners who had morning-glories growing over their young pines, and walls of hollyhocks twelve feet high. She had been urged to stay at the lady’s for dinner, and the German had made her promise always to come back to her for coffee when she came to town. The road was full of ruts and swamps, and her bones ached long before the springless wagon got home. But her plants had felt no joltings, for she had held them carefully in her lap. That was the first day she sang in the United States of America. It was her “Americanization.” Her husband never even noticed her song, however. He was suffering acutely from the price of glass windows.
CHAPTER XIII
WULLY and Chirstie and their bonny wee Johnnie moved into their new house towards the first of May, and at the end of that month, Wully’s brother John, having finished his second year in the snug little New England college, came to work for him. That institution was only fifty miles away, a distance that a lame McLaughlin, unfit for the army, walked to vote for Lincoln in sixty-four, not being able to give one great big valuable dollar for the hire of a horse. John himself walked when his sister Mary’s company didn’t necessitate a wagon. Having John at Wully’s suited the whole family. His mother liked it because Wully was such an excellent example of patience and goodness for John, who needed just that. Chirstie liked it not only because she was spared the unpleasantness of having a strange hired man at the table, but because she saw in John the first of a succession of younger brothers, to whom, as they worked for Wully, she might in some degree repay their mother’s kindness to her. Wully heartily admired John, and never neglected to point out the signs of his brilliancy to those who were interested, especially his mother. There was no one like John in the family, and therefore, of course, in the community, in Wully’s estimation. The books which the other children in the little school studied ragged, John glanced at, and mastered. He never had anything to read, because the few books that Wully went slowly through, he read in an hour or two, getting more out of them in that fashion than Wully could in his. He had read every printed thing in the neighborhood: the books Wully had sent home from St. Louis, most of Scott, and some of Dickens, and Macaulay’s histories. (“You understand that no stolen book comes into my house, Wully!” his mother had written him, enraged by the boys’ stories of war plunder.) He had read those three hundred pious volumes that the governor of an eastern state had sent to the library of a Sunday school near by, in which he had become, in so romantic a manner, interested. He had read the college library from start to finish, and the more precious books his interested teachers would lend him. His teachers thought sometimes that John was to have a great career. But they were all amateurs in expectations, compared to his mother.
John had two very good reasons for wanting to work for Wully. The first was that at Wully’s he could study all the Sabbath day in peace, which he was not allowed to do at his father’s. To be sure, he was still expected to appear at church, which he did but seldom, and then only with great groans and complainings. Wully told him it wouldn’t hurt him to rest his mind an hour or two once a week, and he retorted that after a week in the field, rest was the thing his mind needed least. He scolded about his father’s intolerance. Wully only grinned at him, and remarked that he couldn’t see that the father was much more intolerant than the son. However, if John was seized with a pain on the morning of the Sabbath, Wully wouldn’t minimize his agony when his father inquired about it.