the younger woman had protested. “She just said in that quiet, settled way she has, that she was going to—she thought it would be easier for her. And I believe it will, too,” she added, feeling how pathetic it was that Aunt Rose had never looked half so well during Uncle Martin’s life as she had since his death.
“Oh, well,” Mall commented, “Rose always was sort of sentimental, but there’s not many like her. She’s right to take her time, too. It’ll be six or eight months, anyway, before she can get things lined up. She’s got a longer head than a body’d think for. Look at the way she run that newspaper office when old Conroy died.”
“That was nearly thirty years ago,” commented his wife crisply, “and Rose’s got so used to being bossed around by Martin that she’ll find it ain’t so easy to go ahead on her own.”
With her usual shrewdness, Nellie had surmised the chief difficulty, but it dwindled in real importance because of the fact that Rose so frequently had the feeling that Martin merely had gone on a journey and would come home some day, expecting an exact accounting of her stewardship. His instructions were to her living instructions which must be carried out to the letter.
She had attended with conscientious promptness to checking the trouble that had brought about his death. “I promised Mr. Wade it should be the first thing,” she had explained to Dr. Hurton. `You’ll let it be the first thing, won’t you?’ Those were his very words. He depended on us, Doctor.”
When the time came to plan definitely for the disposal of the purebred herd, she went herself to Topeka to arrange details with Baker. She was constantly thinking: “Now, what would Martin say to this?” or “Would he approve of that?” And her conclusions were reached accordingly. The sale itself was an event that was discussed in Fallon County for years afterwards. The hotel was crowded with out-of-town buyers. Enthused by the music from two bands, even the local people bid high, and through it all, Rose, vigilant, remembered everything Martin would have wanted remembered. She felt that even he would have been satisfied with the manner in which the whole transaction was handled, and with the financial results.
She began to take a new pleasure in everything, the nervous pleasure one takes when going through an experience for what may be the last time. The threshing—how often she had toiled and sweated over those three days of dinners and suppers for twenty-two men. Now she recalled, with an aching tightness about her heart, how delicious had been her relaxation, when, the dinner dishes washed, the table reset and the kitchen in scrupulous order with the last fly vanquished, she and Nellie had luxuriated in that exquisite sense of leisure that only women know who have passed triumphantly through a heavy morning’s work and have everything ready for the evening. Later there had been the stroll down to the field in the shade of the waning afternoon, to find out what time the men would be in for supper; and the sheer delight of breathing in the pungent smell of the straw as it came flying from the funnel, looking, with the sinking sun shining through it, like a million bees swarming from a hive, while the red-brown grain gushed, a lush stream, into the waiting wagon.
“It always makes me think of a ship sailing into port, Nellie,” Rose had once exclaimed, “the crop coming in. It gives me a queer kind of giddiness, makes me feel like laughing and crying all at once,” to which her sister-in-law had returned with more than her usual responsiveness: “Yes, it’s the most excitin’ time of the year, unless it’s Christmas.”
More nebulous were the memories of those early mornings when she had paused in the midst of getting breakfast to sniff in the clover-laden air and think how wonderful it would be if only she needn’t stay in the hot, stuffy kitchen but could be free to call Bill and go picnicking or loaf deliciously under one of the big elms. Most precious of all—the evenings she and her boy had sat in the yard, with the cool south breeze blowing up from the pasture, the cows looking on placidly, the frogs fluting rhythmically in the pond, the birds chirping their good-night calls, and the dip and swell of the farm land pulling at them like a haunting tune, almost too lovely to be endured. Oh, there had been moments all the sweeter and more poignant because they had been so fleeting.
As she passed successfully through one whole round of planting, harvesting and garnering of grain, she began to realize her own ability and to be tempted more and more seriously to remain on the farm. She understood it, and Martin would have liked her to run it. If it had not been for the problem of keeping dependable hired hands and the sight of the mine-tipple, which, towering on the adjoining farm, reminded her more and more constantly of Bill, she would not even have considered the offer of Gordon Hamilton, one of Fallon’s leading business men, to buy her whole section.
“There’s a bunch going into this deal, together, Rose,” Bert Mall explained. “They want to run a new branch of their street car line straight through here and they’re going to plat this quarter into streets and lots. The rest they’ll split up into several farms and rent for the present. It’s a speculation, of course, but the way the mines are moving north and west it’s likely this’ll be a thickly settled camp in another two or three years.”
“But they only offer seventy-five an acre,” Rose expostulated, “and it’s worth more than that as farm land. There’s none around here as fertile as Martin made this—and then, all the improvements!”
“They’ll have to dispose of them second-hand. It’s a pity they’re in exactly the wrong spot. Well, of course, I’m not advising you, Rose,” he added, “but forty-five thousand ain’t to be sneezed at, is it, when it comes in a lump and you own only the surface? You may wait a long while before you get another such bid. Seems to me you’ve worked hard enough. I’d think you’d want a rest.”
In the end, Mrs. Wade capitulated to what, as Martin had foreseen so clearly, was sooner or later inevitable. She was a little stunned by the vast amount of available money now in her possession and at her disposal. “But it’s all dust in my hands,” she thought sadly. “What do I want of so much? It’s going to be a terrible worry. I don’t even know who to leave it to,” and she sighed deeply, pressing her hands, with her old, characteristic gesture, to her heart. Everybody would approve, she supposed, if she left it to Rose and Frank—her niece and Martin’s nephew—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to welcome that idea—not yet. And anyway it might be better to divide it among more people, so that it would bring more happiness.
Her own needs were simple. The modest five-room house which she purchased was set on a pleasant paved street in Fallon and was obviously ample for her. She hoped that during part of each year she could rent the extra bed-room to some one, preferably a boy, like Bill, who was attending high school. There was a barn for her horse and the one cow she would keep, a neat little chicken-house for the twenty-five hens that would more than supply her with eggs and summer fries, and a small garage for Martin’s car. It would seem very strange, she thought, to have so few things to care for and she wondered how she would fill her time, she whose one problem always had been how to achieve snatches of leisure. She saw herself jogging on and on, gradually getting to be less able on her feet, a little more helpless, until she was one of those feeble old ladies who seem at the very antipodes of the busy mothers they have been in their prime. How could it be that she who had always been in such demand, so needed, so driven by real duties, should have become suddenly such a supernumerary, so footloose, and unattached?
But when it came to that, wasn’t Fallon full of others in the same circumstances? It was not an uncommon lot. There was Mrs. McMurray. Rose remembered over what a jolly household she had reigned before she, too, had lost her husband and three children instead of just one, like Billy. Two of them had been grown and married. Now she was living in a little cottage, all alone, doing sewing and nursing, yet always so brave and cheerful; not only that, but interested, really interested in living. And Mrs. Nelson. Her children were living and married and happy, but she had given up her home, sold it—the pretty place with the hospitable yard that used to seem to be fairly spilling over
