When Mr.Thomas was ready to go she longed to relent,to throw herself into his arms,make her peace with him and be comforted.Never before had she let him go from her farther than to the schoolhouse with a difference between them unrighted.Yet there had been no real falling out,no words,no quarrel.It might be that she only imagined he knew how deeply he had hurt her;perhaps he had forgotten all about it.
He took the baby up and kissed him,then kissed her and said,"This is no blizzard.It will be dark when I get home,but there is nothing to worry about.I have got you in fuel and water.Good-by,my love."
She whispered,"Good-by,"and he went out,got on his waiting horse and rode away.This time she did not stand at the window,holding the baby,to wave his hand with hers until the rise of the bank hid him from sight,but stood by the cradle,suddenly unsure in her righteous resentment,and lonely.
Then,as it always did eventually,responsible housewifery came mightily upon her.A change was worked in her,not through thought or resolutions but through the passing of time and the fact that her busy,creative tasks demanded good spirits uppermost.She heated water,scoured the unpainted tabletop and chairs,the washbench and shelves,with homemade soap and ashes.She polished the stove,washed the little window and put up the other pair of white curtains,refilled the lamp and polished its chimney and the spares.With a dampened broom she swept the earthen floor with such vigor she loosed a tuft of grass roots that had fretted the broom from the first day of her housekeeping in the dugout.She knelt and repacked the earth into the hole.Then she went over the floor with a damp cloth wrung from warm water with a little coal oil in it to make the floor shine.When it was dry she brought a roll of rag carpet her mother had given her—the carpet strip she had saved,new,against a day company might be coming—and spread it between the bed and doorway.Then she lifted the baby from his haven in the bunk bed and said,"Come—creep!Crawl on the pretty,warm new carpet!"she tossed him up,then held him to her and said,"Now our house is all clean,let us have our baths,wash our hair and be happy!"on the word"happy,"a last sob came up from within her.She whirled the baby about.Her hair came down,uncoiled,as she danced.At last,breathless,she sat down in the little rocking chair that had been her father's gift to her home and rocked her boy,kissed him,spanked him lovingly while he crowed and laughed,and when she got her breath she sang:
"Weeping may endure,may endure
For a night,
But joy cometh in the morning!"
Would it always be thus?she wondered.Would she know hurt,indignation,resentful loneliness,her life with Mr.Thomas darkened for hours or for days through some slight or seeming indifference on his part,only to find after a spasm of housework great happiness and even delight in life itself welling up in her,past any need for forgiving?
Augusta wrapped the baby in her shawl,put on Mr.Thomas'chore coat and her mittens and went out,set the baby in the snow and went back for the copper washboiler to fill it with snow.The baby promptly struggled from his shawl cocoon,got himself upright,took two steps and fell,and strove to get up again.She ran to him,caught him up and cried,"Your first steps you take not where it is easy,on the warm rug in the house,but where it is hard,out in the cold and the snow!Oh,if only Ma or Bird were here to see you take them!"
When they had had their baths Augusta sat with her damp hair about her shoulders,and with the baby wrapped in the blanket,nursed him and recalled how Mr.Thomas had once called her,as she sat rocking the baby while her hair dried,"The Madonna of the rocking chair."
Mr.Thomas rode slowly along the wagon trail in the spitting snow,the reins loose on the horse's neck,and remembered,as he seldom let himself remember at any length,his early childhood.There was no Christmas time to recall.His mother had been a small woman,sturdy and fair,come of gentle Dutch people,some of them Quakers.His memories of her were few,but he recalled them as a man recalls blossoms and birdsong in a long winter.Of those times he had but one memory of his father that was in anywise tender.He remembered his mother's voice saying,"Poor Willie has played himself out and has fallen asleep on the stairs."His father had come to take him up,to carry him to bed,and the hand that pressed his head to his shoulder was kind,almost loving.
His mother had died when he was five,and he had been amazed to see his father kneel by her bed and sob,as amazed as he was to touch his mother's hand and find it cold and uncaring.
The stepmother his father brought home had been a school teacher.She was tall,straight-backed,unsmiling.She had lost a hand in a feed-chopper as a child,but could do as much work with her one hand as most women did with two,and was a passionate housekeeper.He would stand mesmerized to watch her knit,the sock on the stump of her wrist,the needles twinkling under the fiercely purposed,flying fingers of her hand.At table she sat with a switch across her lap for the stinging of the children's legs should dangling heels reach for chair rungs.Unmindful of his cries,she held her stepson's chapped feet under the very hot water in the little wooden foot tub,her arm stump pressed hard across his knees,and scrubbed his feet and shins with a stiff-bristled brush and homemade lye soap,the while she said,through her teeth,"You must be clean,clean,clean!"
When his father came home from his pastoral journeyings she would go out to meet him,stand by his horse,and while he was still in the saddle tell every wrong and dreadful thing his sons had done and every fine and good thing their sons had done,and his father,never asking to hear his sons'side of any story,took them to the stable and strapped them before he would sit down to the good meal prepared for him.
