The Prairie Wife
I love to watch the wheat, now that it's really turning. It waves like a
sea and stretches off into the distance as far as the eye can follow it.
It's as high as my waist, and sometimes it moves up and down like a
slowly breathing breast. When the sun is low it turns a pure Roman gold,
and makes my eyes ache. But I love it. It strikes me as being glorious,
and at the same time pathetic--I scarcely know why. I can't analyze my
feelings. But the prairie brings a great peace to my soul. It is so
rich, so maternal, so generous. It seems to brood under a passion to
give, to yield up, to surrender all that is asked of it. And it is so
tranquil. It seems like a bosom breathed on by the breath of God.
_Wednesday the Sixth_
It is nearly a year, now, since I first came to Casa Grande. I can
scarcely believe it. The nights are getting very cool again and any time
now there might be a heavy frost. If it should freeze this next week or
two I think my Dinky-Dunk would just curl up and die. Poor boy, he's
working so hard! I pray for that crop every night. I worry about it.
Last night I dreamt it was burnt up in a prairie-fire and woke up
screaming for wet blankets. Dinky-Dunk had to hold me until I got quiet
again. I asked him if he loved me, now that I was getting old and ugly.
He said I was the most beautiful thing God ever made and that he loved
me in a deeper and nobler way than he did a year ago. Then I asked him
if he'd ever get married again, if I should die. He called me silly and
said I was going to live to be eighty, and that a gasoline-tractor
couldn't kill me. But he promised I'd be the only one, whatever
happened. And I believe him. I know Dinky-Dunk would go in black for a
solid year, if I _should_ die, and he'd never, never marry again, for
he's the sort of Old Sobersides who can only love one woman in one
lifetime. And I'm the woman, glory be!
_Tuesday the Twelfth_
Harvest time is here. The stage is cleared, and the last and great act
of the drama now begins. It's a drama with a stage a thousand miles
wide. I can hear through the open windows the rattle of the
self-binders. Olga is driving one, like a tawny Boadicea up on her
chariot. She said she never saw such heads of wheat. This is the first
day's cutting, but those flapping canvas belts and those tireless arms
of wood and iron won't have one-tenth of Dinky-Dunk's crop tied up by
midnight. It is very cold, and Olie has lugubriously announced that it's
sure going to freeze. So three times I've gone out to look at the
thermometer and three times I've said my solemn little prayer: "Dear
God, please don't freeze poor Dinky-Dunk's wheat!" And the Lord heard
that prayer, for a Chinook came about two o'clock in the morning and the
mercury slowly but steadily rose.
_Thursday the Fourteenth_
I had a great deal to talk about to-day. But I can't write much.... I'm
afraid. I dread being alone. I wish I'd been a better wife to my poor
old gold-bricked Dinky-Dunk! But we are what we are, character-kinks and
all. So when he understands, perhaps he'll forgive me. I'm like a
cottontail in the middle of a wheat-patch with the binders going round
and round and every swathe cutting away a little more of my covering.
And there can't be much more hiding away with my secret. But I shall
never openly speak of it. The binder can cut off my feet first, the same
as Olie's did with that mother-rabbit which stood trembling over her
nest of young. Why must life sometimes be so ruthlessly tragic? And why,
oh, why, are women sometimes so absurd? And why should I be afraid of
what every woman who would justify her womanhood must face? Still, I'm
afraid!
_Wednesday the Fifth_
Three long weeks since those last words were written. And what shall I
say, or how shall I begin?
In the first place, everything seemed gray. The bed was gray, my own
arms were gray, the walls looked gray, the window-glass was gray, and
even Dinky-Dunk's face was gray. I didn't want to move, for a long time.
Then I got the strength to tell Mrs. Watson that I wanted to speak to my
husband. She was wrapping something up in soft flannel and purring over
it quite proudly and calling it a blessed little lamb. When poor
pale-faced Dinky-Dunk bent over the bed I asked him if it had a receding
chin, or if it had a nose like Olie's. And he said it had neither, that
it was a king of a boy and could holler like a good one.
Then I told Dinky-Dunk what had been in my secret soul, for so many
months. Uncle Carlton had a receding chin, a boneless, dew-lappy sort
of chin I'd always hated, and I'd been afraid it might kind of
skip-and-carry one and fasten itself on my innocent offspring. Then,
later on, I'd been afraid of Olie's frozen nose, with the split down the
center. And all the while I kept remembering what the Morleys' old
colored nurse had said to me when I was a schoolgirl, a girl of only
seventeen, spending that first vacation of mine in Virginia: "Lawdy,
chile, yuh ain't no bigger'n a minit! Don't yuh nebber hab no baby,
chile!"
Isn't it funny how those foolish old things stick in a woman's memory?
For I've had my baby and I'm still alive, and although I sometimes
wanted a girl, Dinky-Dunk is so ridiculously proud and happy seeing it's
a boy that I don't much care. But I'm going to get well and strong in a
few more days, and here against my breast I'm holding the God-love-itest
little lump of pulsing manhood, the darlingest, solemnest, placidest,
pinkest hope of the white race that ever made life full and perfect for
a foolish mother.
The doctor who finally got here--when both Olga and Mrs. Dixon agreed
that he couldn't possibly do a bit of good--announced that I had come
through it all like the true Prairie Woman that I was. Then he somewhat
pompously and redundantly explained that I was a highly organized
individual, "a bit high-strung," as Mrs. Dixon put it. I smiled into the
pillow when he turned to my anxious-eyed Dinky-Dunk and condoningly
enlarged on the fact that there was nothing abnormal about a woman like
me being--well, rather abnormal as to temper and nerves during the last
few months. But Dinky-Dunk cut him short.
"On the contrary, sir; she's been wonderful, simply wonderful!"
Dinky-Dunk stoutly declared. Then he reached for my hand under the
coverlet. "She's been an angel!"
I squeezed the hand that held mine. Then I looked at the doctor, who had
turned away to give some orders to Olga.
"Doctor," I quite as stoutly declared, "I've been a perfect devil, and
this dear old liar knows it!" But our doctor was too busy to pay much
attention to what I was saying. He merely murmured that it was all
normal, quite normal, under the circumstances. So, after all, I'm just
an ordinary, everyday woman! But the man of medicine has ordered me to
stay in bed for twelve days--which Olga regards as unspeakably
preposterous, since one day, she proudly announced, was all her mother
ever asked for. Which shows the disadvantages of being too civilized!
_Sunday the Ninth_
I'm day by day getting stronger, though I'm a lady of luxury and lie in
bed until ten every morning. To-day when I was sitting up to eat
breakfast, with my hair braided in two tails and a pink and white
hug-me-tight over my nightie, Dinky-Dunk came in and sat by the bed. He
tried to soft-soap me by saying he'd be mighty glad when I was running
things again so he could get something fit to eat. Olga, he admitted,
was all right, but she hadn't the touch of his Gee-Gee. He confessed
that for nearly a month now the house had been a damned gynocracy and he
was getting tired of being bossed around by a couple of women. _Mio
piccino_ no longer looks like a littered whelp of the animal world, as
he did at first. His wrinkled little face and his close-shut eyes used
to make me think of a little old man, with all the wisdom of the ages
shut up in his tiny body. And it is such a knowing little body, with
all its stored-up instincts and guardian appetites! My little _tenor
robusto_, how he can sing when he's hungry! Last night I sat up in bed,
listening for my son's--Dinky-Dink's--breathing. At first I thought he
might be dead, he was so quiet. Then I heard his lips move in the
rhapsodic deglutition of babyland dreams. "Dinky-Dunk," I demanded,
"what would we do if Babe should die?" And I shook him to make him
answer. He stared up at me with a sleepy eye. "That whale?" he commented
as he blinked contentedly down at his offspring and then turned over and
went to sleep. But I slipped a hand in under little Dinky-Dink's body,
and found it as warm as a nesting bird.
_Monday the Tenth_
I noticed that Dinky-Dunk had not been smoking lately, so I asked him
what had become of the rest of his cigars. He admitted that he had given
them to Olie. "When?" I asked. And Dinky-Dunk colored up as he answered,
rather casually, "Oh, the day Buddy Boy was born!" How men merge down
into the conventional in their more epochal moments!
The second day after my baby's birth Olga rather took my breath away by
carrying in as neat a little wooden cradle as any prince of the royal
blood would care to lie in. _Olie had made it_. He had worked on it
during his spare hours in the evening, and even Dinky-Dunk hadn't known.
I made Olga hold it up at the foot of the bed so I could see it better.
It had been scroll-sawed and sand-papered and polished like any
factory-made baby-bed, and my faithful old Olie had even attempted some
hand-carving along the rockers and the head-board. But as I looked at it
I realized that it must have taken weeks and weeks to make. And that
gave me an odd little earthquaky feeling in the neighborhood of the
midriff, for I knew then that my secret had been no secret at all.
Dinky-Dunk, by the way, has just announced that we're to have a
touring-car. He says I've earned it!
_Tuesday the Eleventh_
Yesterday was so warm that I sat out in the sun and took an ozone-bath.
I sat there, staring down at my boy, realizing that I was a mother. My
boy--bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh! It's so hard to believe! And
now I am one of the mystic chain, and no longer the idle link. I am a
mother. And I'd give an arm if you and Chinkie and Scheming-Jack could
see my boy, at this moment. He's like a rose-leaf and he's got six
dimples, not counting his hands and feet--for I've found and kissed 'em
all--on different parts of his blessed little body. Dinky-Dunk came back
from Buckhorn yesterday with a lot of the foolishest things you ever
clapped eyes on--a big cloth elephant that grunts when you pull its
tail, a musical spinning-top, a high-chair, and a projecting lantern.
They're for Dinky-Dink, of course. But it will be a week or two before
he can manipulate the lantern!
_Wednesday the Thirteenth_
Dinky-Dunk has taken Mrs. Dixon home and come back with a brand-new
"hand," which, of course, is prairie-land synecdoche for a new hired
man. His name is Terry Dillon, and as the name might lead you to
imagine, he's about as Irish as Paddy's pig. He is blessed with a
potato-lip, a buttermilk brogue, and a nose which, if he follows it
faithfully, will some day lead him straight to Heaven. But Terry,
Dinky-Dunk tells me, is a steady worker and a good man with horses, and
that of course rounds him out as a paragon in the eyes of my
slave-driving lord and master. I asked where Terry came from.
Dinky-Dunk, with rather a grim smile, acknowledged that he'd been
working for Percy.
Terry, it seems, has no particular love for an Englishman. And Percy had
affronted his haughty Irish spirit with certain ideas of caste which
can't be imported into the Canadian West, where the hired man is every
whit as good as his master--as that master will tragically soon find out