One of Ours, Willa Cather [feel good fiction books txt] 📗

“Were you thinking of going up to Lincoln, for a little?”

“I guess not.”

Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back on old pleasures and old friends.

“Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in Frankfort?”

“I think so, Mother,” he answered a little impatiently. “I told her she could attend to it when she was in town some day.”

“Of course,” his mother persevered, “some of the programs are not very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of what we have.”

He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that. His horses stopped at the water tank. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be along in a minute.” Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled. “Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool the other.”

She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost disappeared. “I thought I was smart that time!”

It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.

While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her they were all photographs⁠—she knew no other way of making a picture.

“Mr. Claude,” she asked, “how comes it all them Germans is such ugly lookin’ people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here ain’t ugly lookin’.”

Claude put her off indulgently. “Maybe it’s the ugly ones that are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our neighbours.”

“Then why don’t they make their soldiers stay home, an’ not go breakin’ other people’s things, an’ turnin’ ’em out of their houses,” she muttered indignantly. “They say little babies was born out in the snow last winter, an’ no fires for their mudders nor nothin’. ’Deed, Mr. Claude, it wasn’t like that in our war; the soldiers didn’t do nothin’ to the women an’ chillun. Many a time our house was full of Northern soldiers, an’ they never so much as broke a piece of my mudder’s chiney.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must have my dinner and get back to work. If we don’t get our wheat in, those people over there won’t have anything to eat, you know.”

The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages, things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry that used to stop to drink at her mother’s cold mountain spring. She had seen them take off their boots and wash their bleeding feet in the run. Her mother had given one louse-bitten boy a clean shirt, and she had never forgotten the sight of his back, “as raw as beef where he’d scratched it.” Five of her brothers were in the Confederate army. When one was wounded in the second battle of Bull Run, her mother had borrowed a wagon and horses, gone a three days’ journey to the field hospital, and brought the boy home to the mountain. Mahailey could remember how her older sisters took turns pouring cold spring water on his gangrenous leg all day and all night. There were no doctors left in the neighbourhood, and as nobody could amputate the boy’s leg, he died by inches. Mahailey was the only person in the Wheeler household who had ever seen war with her own eyes, and she felt that this fact gave her a definite superiority.

Claude had been married a year and a half. One December morning he got a telephone message from his father-in-law, asking him to come in to Frankfort at once. He found Mr. Royce sunk in his desk-chair, smoking as usual, with several foreign-looking letters on the table before him. As he took these out of their envelopes and sorted the pages, Claude noticed how unsteady his hands had become.

One letter, from the chief of the medical staff in the mission school where Caroline Royce taught, informed Mr. Royce that his daughter was seriously ill in the mission hospital. She would have to be sent to a more salubrious part of the country for rest and treatment, and would not be strong enough to return to her duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a box of cigars toward him and began to talk despondently about missionaries.

“I could go to her,” he complained, “but what good would that do? I’m not in sympathy with her ideas, and it would only fret her. You can see she’s made her mind up not to come home. I don’t believe in one people trying to force their ways or their religion on another. I’m not that kind of man.” He sat looking at his cigar. After a long pause he broke out suddenly, “China has been drummed into my ears. It seems like a long way to go to hunt for trouble, don’t it? A man hasn’t got much control over his own life, Claude. If it ain’t poverty or disease that torments him, it’s a name on the map. I could have made out pretty well, if it hadn’t been for China, and some other things.⁠ ⁠… If Carrie’d had to teach for her clothes and help pay off my notes, like old man Harrison’s daughters, like enough she’d have stayed at home. There’s always something. I don’t know what to say about showing these letters to Enid.”

“Oh, she will have to know about it, Mr. Royce. If she feels that she