The Prairie Wife
sixty, and yet her husband said she was just thirty-seven. Their water
is strong with alkali, and this and the prairie wind (combined with a
something deep down in her own make-up) have made her like a vulture,
lean and scrawny and dry. I stared at that hard line of jaw and
cheekbone and wondered how long ago the soft curves were there, and if
those overworked hands had ever been pretty, and if that flat back had
ever been rounded and dimpled. Her hair was untidy. Her apron was
unspeakably dirty, and she used it as both a handkerchief and a
hand-towel. Her voice was as hard as nails, and her cooking was
wretched. Not a door or window was screened, and, as I said before, we
were nearly smothered with flies.
Dinky-Dunk did not dare to look at me, all dinner time. And on the way
home Mrs. Dixon's eyes kept haunting me, they seemed so tired and vacant
and accusing, as though they were secretly holding God Himself to
account for cheating her out of her woman's heritage of joy. I asked
Dinky-Dunk if we'd ever get like that. He said, "Not on your life!" and
quoted the Latin phrase about mind controlling matter. The Dixons, he
went on to explain, were of the "slum" type, only they didn't happen to
live in a city. But tired and sleepy as I was that night, I got up to
cold-cream my face and arms. And I'm going to write for almond-meal and
glycerin from the mail-order house to-morrow. _And_ a brassiere--for I
saw what looked like the suspicion of a smile on Dinky-Dunk's unshaven
lips as he watched me struggling into my corsets this morning. It took
some writhing, and even then I could hardly make it. I threw my wet
sponge after him when he turned back in the doorway with the mildly
impersonal question: "Who's your fat friend?" Then he scooted for the
corral, and I went back and studied my chin in the dresser-mirror, to
make sure it wasn't getting terraced into a dew-lap like Uncle
Carlton's.
But I can't help thinking of the Dixons, and feeling foolishly and
helplessly sorry for them. It was dusk when we got back from that long
drive to their ranch, and the stars were coming out. I could see our
shack from miles off, a little lonely dot of black against the sky-line.
I made Dinky-Dunk stop the team, and we sat and looked at it. It seemed
so tiny there, so lonely, so strange, in the middle of such miles and
miles of emptiness, with a little rift of smoke going up from its
desolate little pipe-end. Then I said, out loud, "Home! My home!" And
out of a clear sky, for no earthly reason, I began to cry like a baby.
Women are such fools, sometimes! I told Dinky-Dunk we must get books,
good books, and spend the long winter evenings reading together, to keep
from going to seed.
He said, "All right, Gee-Gee," and patted my knee. Then we loped on
along the trail toward the lonely little black dot ahead of us. But I
hung on to Dinky-Dunk's arm, all the rest of the way, until we pulled up
beside the shack, and poor old Olie, with a frying-pan in his hand,
stood silhouetted against the light of the open door.
_Monday the Sixth_
The last few days I've been nothing but a two-footed retriever,
scurrying off and carrying things back home with me. There have been
rains, but the weather is still glorious. And I've discovered such heaps
and heaps of mushrooms over at the old Titchborne Ranch. They're thick
all around the corral and in the pasture there. I am now what your
English lord and master would call "a perfect seat" on Paddy, and every
morning I ride over after my basketful of _Agaricus Campestris_--that
ought to be in the plural, but I've forgotten how! We have them creamed
on toast; we have them fried in butter; and we have them in soup--and
such beauties! I'm going to try and can some for winter and spring use.
But the finest part of the mushroom is the finding it. To ride into a
little white city that has come up overnight and looks like an
encampment of fairy soldiers, to see the milky white domes against the
vivid green of the prairie-grass, to catch sight of another clump of
them, suddenly, like stars against an emerald sky, a hundred yards away,
to inhale the clean morning air, and feel your blood tingle, and hear
the prairie-chickens whir and the wild-duck scolding along the
coulee-edges--I tell you, Matilda Anne, it's worth losing a little of
your beauty sleep to go through it! I'm awake even before Dinky-Dunk,
and I brought him out of his dreams this morning by poking his teeth
with my little finger and saying:
"Twelve white horses
On a red hill--"
and I asked him if he knew what it was, and he gave the right answer,
and said he hadn't heard that conundrum since he was a boy.
All afternoon I've been helping Dinky-Dunk put up a barb-wire fence.
Barb-wire is nearly as hard as a woman to handle. Dinky-Dunk is fencing
in some of the range, for a sort of cattle-run for our two milk-cows. He
says it's only a small field, but there seemed to be miles and miles of
that fencing. We had no stretcher, so Dinky-Dunk made shift with me and
a claw-hammer. He'd catch the wire, lever his hammer about a post, and
I'd drive in the staple, with a hammer of my own. I got so I could hit
the staple almost every whack, though one staple went off like shrapnel
and hit Diddum's ear. So I'm some use, you see, even if I am a chekako!
But a wire slipped, and tore through my skirt and stocking, scratched my
leg and made the blood run. It was only the tiniest cut, really, but I
made the most of it, Dinky-Dunk was so adorably nice about doctoring me
up. We came home tired and happy, singing together, and Olie, as usual,
must have thought we'd both gone mad.
This husband of mine is so elementary. He secretly imagines that he's
one of the most complex of men. But in a good many things he's as simple
as a child. And I love him for it, although I believe I _do_ like to
bedevil him a little. He is dignified, and hates flippancy. So when I
greet him with "Morning, old boy!" I can see that nameless little
shadow sweep over his face. Then I say, "Oh, I beg its little pardon!"
He generally grins, in the end, and I think I'm slowly shaking that
monitorial air out of him, though once or twice I've had to remind him
about La Rochefoucauld saying gravity was a stratagem invented to
conceal the poverty of the mind! But Dinky-Dunk still objects to me
putting my finger on his Adam's apple when he's talking. He wears a
flannel shirt, when working outside, and his neck is bare. Yesterday I
buried my face down in the corner next to his shoulder-blade and made
him wriggle. As he shaves only on Sunday mornings now, that is about the
only soft spot, for his face is prickly, and makes my chin sore, the
bearded brute! Then I bit him; not hard--but Satan said bite, and I just
had to do it. He turned quite pale, swung me round so that I lay limp in
his arms, and closed his mouth over mine. I got away, and he chased me.
We upset things. Then I got outside the shack, ran around the
horse-corral, and then around the hay-stacks, with Dinky-Dunk right
after me, giving me goose-flesh at every turn. I felt like a
cave-woman. He grabbed me like a stone-age man and caught me up and
carried me over his shoulder to a pile of prairie sweet-grass that had
been left there for Olie's mattress. My hair was down. I was screaming,
half sobbing and half laughing. He dropped me in the hay, like a bag of
wheat. I started to fight him again. But I couldn't beat him off. Then
all my strength seemed to go. He was laughing himself, but it frightened
me a little to see his pupils so big that his eyes looked black. I felt
like a lamb in a lion's jaw, Dinky-Dunk is so much stronger than I am. I
lay there quite still, with my eyes closed. I went flop. I knew I was
conquered.
Then I came back to life. I suddenly realized that it was mid-day, in
the open air between the bald prairie-floor and God's own blue sky,
where Olie could stumble on us at any moment--and possibly die with his
boots on! Dinky-Dunk was kissing my left eyelid. It was a cup his lips
just seemed to fit into. I tried to move. But he held me there. He held
me so firmly that it hurt. Yet I couldn't help hugging him. Poor, big,
foolish, baby-hearted Dinky-Dunk! And poor, weak, crazy, storm-tossed
me! But, oh, God, it's glorious, in some mysterious way, to stir the
blood of a strong big man! It's heaven--and I don't quite know why. But
I love to see Dinky-Dunk's eyes grow black. Yet it makes me a little
afraid of him. I can hear his heart pound, sometimes, quite distinctly.
And sometimes there seems something so pathetic about it all--we are
such puny little mites of emotion played on by nature for her own
immitigable ends! But every woman wants to be loved. Dinky-Dunk asked me
why I shut my eyes when he kisses me. I wonder why? Sometimes, too, he
says my kisses are wicked, and that he likes 'em wicked. He's a funny
mixture. He's got the soul of a Scotch Calvinist tangled up in him
somewhere, and after the storm he's very apt to grow pious and a bit
preachy. But he has feelings, only he's ashamed of them. I think I'm
taking a little of the ice-crust off his emotions. He's a stiff clay
that needs to be well stirred up and turned over before it can mellow.
And I must be a sandy loam that wastes all its strength in one short
harvest. That sounds as though I were getting to be a real farmer's wife
with a vast knowledge of soils, doesn't it? At any rate my husband, out
of his vast knowledge of me, says I have the swamp-cedar trick of
flaring up into sudden and explosive attractiveness. Then, he says, I
shower sparks. As I've already told him, I'm a wild woman, and will be
hard to tame, for as Victor Hugo somewhere says, we women are only
perfected devils!
_Wednesday the Eighth_
I've cut off my hair, right bang off. When I got up yesterday morning
with so much work ahead of me, with so much to do and so little time to
do it in, I started doing my hair. I also started thinking about that
Frenchman who committed suicide after counting up the number of buttons
he had to button and unbutton every morning and evening of every day of
every year of his life. I tried to figure up the time I was wasting on
that mop of mine. Then the Great Idea occurred to me.
I got the scissors, and in six snips had it off, a big tangled pile of
brownish gold, rather bleached out by the sun at the ends. And the
moment I saw it there on my dresser, and saw my head in the mirror, I
was sorry. I looked like a plucked crow. I could have ditched a
freight-train. And I felt positively light-headed. But it was too late
for tears. I trimmed off the ragged edges as well as I could, and what
didn't get in my eyes got down my neck and itched so terribly that I had
to change my clothes. Then I got a nail-punch out of Dinky-Dunk's
tool-kit, and heated it over the lamp and gave a little more wave to
that two-inch shock of stubble. It didn't look so bad then, and when I
tried on Dinky-Dunk's coat in front of the glass I saw that I wouldn't
make such a bad-looking boy.
But I waited until noon with my heart in my mouth, to see what
Dinky-Dunk would say. What he really _did_ say I can't write here, for
there was a wicked swear-word mixed up in his ejaculation of startled
wonder. Then he saw the tears in my eyes, I suppose, for he came running
toward me with his arms out, and hugged me tight, and said I looked
cute, and all he'd have to do would be to get used to it. But all dinner
time he kept looking at me as though I were a strange woman, and later I
saw him standing in front of the dresser, stooping over that tragic pile
of tangled yellow-brown snakes. It reminded me of a man stooping over a
grave. I slipped away without letting him see me. But this morning I
woke him up early and asked him if he still loved his wife. And when he