The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

Of our cañon children, Jack was the only one who could remember grandfather’s house, although Polly had romanced about it so much that she thought she could remember. Polly was born there, but as she was taken away only eighteen months afterward, it’s hardly likely that she knew much about it. And Baby was born in the cañon, and never in her life had heard the words grandpapa or grandmamma spoken in the second person.

For the sake of these younger ones, deprived of their natural right to the possession of grandparents, the mother used to tell everything she could put into words and that the children could understand about the old Eastern home where her own childhood was spent, in entire unconsciousness of any such fate as that which is involved in the words “Gone West.”

The catalogue of grandfather’s gates always pleased the children, because in the cañon there were no gates, but the great rock gate of the cañon itself, out of which the river ran shouting and clapping its hands like a child out of a dark room into the sunlight, and into which the sun took a last peep at night under the red curtain of the sunset.

Grandfather’s gates were old gates long before Jack began to kick out the toes of his shoes against them, or practice with their wooden latches and latchpins. Most of them had been patched and strengthened in weak places by hands whose work in this world was done. Each had its own particular creak, like a familiar voice announcing as far as it could be heard which gate it was that was opening; and to Jack’s eyes, each one of the farm gates had a distinct and expressive countenance of its own, which he remembered as well as he did the faces of the men who worked in the fields.

Two or three of them were stubborn obstacles in his path, by reason of queer, unmanageable latches that wouldn’t shove, or weights that a small boy couldn’t lift, or a heavy trick of yawing at the top and dragging at the bottom, so that the only way to get through was to squeeze through a wedge-shaped opening where you scraped the side of your leg and generally managed to catch some part of your clothing on a nail or on a splinter. Others fell open gayly on a down-hill grade, but you had to tug yourself crimson in order to heave them shut again. Very few of those heavy old field gates seemed to have been intended for the convenience of boys. The boy on grandfather’s farm who opened a gate was expected to shut it. If he neglected to do so he was almost sure to hear a voice calling after him, “Hey, there! Who left that gate open?” So on the whole it was no saving of time to slip through, besides being a strain on one’s reputation with the farm hands.

Some of the gates were swinging and creaking every day of the year; others were silent for whole months together; others, like the road gate, stood open always and never creaked, and nobody marked them, except that the children found them good to swing upon when the grass was not too long.

The road gate had once been a smart one, with pickets and gray paint, but it had stood open so many years with the grass of summer after summer cumbering its long stride that no one ever thought of repainting it, any more than they would of decorating the trunk of the Norway spruce which stood nearest to it, between it and the fountain that had ceased to play and had been filled up with earth and converted into a flower bed.

The road gate being always open, it follows that the garden gate was always shut. The garden was divided from the dooryard by the lane that went past the house to the carriage-house and stable. Visitors sometimes spoke of the lane as the “avenue,” and of the dooryard as the “lawn;” but these fine names were never used by grandfather himself, nor by any of the household, nor were they appropriate to the character of the place. The dooryard grass was left to grow rather long before it was cut, like grandfather’s beard before he would consent to have it trimmed. Dandelions went to seed and clover-heads reddened. Beautiful things had time to grow up and blossom in that rich, dooryard grass, before it was swept down by the scythe and carried away in wheelbarrow loads to be fed to the horses. It was toward night, generally, that the men wheeled it away, and the children used to follow load after load to the stable, to enjoy the horses’ enjoyment of it. They always felt that the dooryard grass belonged to them, and yielded it, at the cost of many a joy, as their own personal contribution to those good friends of theirs in the stable—Nelly and Duke and Dan and Nelly’s colt (which was generally a five-year-old before it ceased to be called “the colt”).

The garden gate was a small one, of the same rather smart pattern as the road gate. The grapevine which grew inside the fence—and over, and under, and through it—had superadded an arch of its tenderest, broadest, most luminous leaves, which spanned the gate-posts, uplifted against the blue sky, and was so much more beautiful toward the middle of summer than any gate could be, that no one ever looked at the little garden gate at all, except to make sure that it was shut.

It had a peculiar, lively click of the latch, which somehow suggested all the pleasures of the garden within. The remembrance of it recalls the figure of John, the gardener, in his blue denim blouse, with a bunch of radishes and young lettuces in his clean, earthy hands. He would take a few steps out of his way to the fountain (it had not then been filled up), and wash the tender roots, dip the leaves and shake them, before presenting his offering in the kitchen.