LITTLE FARM IN THE OZARKS

by Roger Lea MacBride
BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

LITTLE FARM IN THE OZARKS

The Little House books have captivated
generations of readers with their story of the little pioneer
girl Laura Ingalls growing up on the
American frontier. Now the Little House story
continues with The Rocky Ridge Years, books
that tell the story of Laura and Almanzo
Wilder's daughter, Rose.
The first book in this series, LITTLE HOUSE
ON ROCKY RIDGE, describes the
Wilders' covered-wagon journey to Missouri
and how they came to live in their own little farmhouse.
In LITTLE FARM IN THE OZARKS, Rose and
her parents are settling into their new life at
Rocky Ridge Farm. For Rose, it is a
time of new beginnings as she explores the
countryside around the farm, makes new friends, and
begins the school year as the new girl in class.
LITTLE FARM IN THE OZARKS continues the
Little House story that Laura Ingalls Wilder
began more than sixty years ago--a story whose
wonder and adventure have charmed millions of
readers.

The late Rose Wilder Lane grew up,
like her mother, to be a novelist. She wrote the
introduction to ON THE WAY HOME,
Mrs. Wilder's diary of the journey she,
Almanzo, and Rose took from South Dakota
to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. She is
also the author of LET THE HURRICANE
ROAR.

Roger Lea MacBride is Rose
Wilder Lane's adopted grandson. He is the
editor of WEST FROM HOME: Letters of
Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco
1915 and ROSE WILDER LANE: Her
Story and was an active participant in the
creation of the television shows Little House on the
Prairie and Young Pioneers. Mr.
MacBride divides his time between Miami
Beach, Florida, and Biddeford Pool,
Maine.
Praise for LITTLE HOUSE
ON ROCKY RIDGE
by Roger Lea MacBride

"Told from Rose's perspective, the story
recounts the saga of the Wilders' 1894 move from
drought-ridden DeSmet, South Dakota,
to Mansfield, Missouri. Many of the episodes
will make memorable read-alouds--crossing the
Big Muddy (missouri River) by ferry in a
dust storm; adopting an abandoned, starving dog
found along the trails; and locating Laura's
missing $100 bill just in time to purchase the new
Missouri farm. The main characters are particularly
well drawn--Almanzo, the taciturn but always
generous father, who worked hard to provide for his
family; Laura, the outspoken mother, who did not
think twice about helping her husband clear trees
from their farm with a crosscut saw; and Rose, their
much-loved only child, who relished excitement and
adventure as much as her mother did. MacBride,
Lane's adopted grandson and heir, is well
steeped in Wilder/lane lore, making this a must
purchase for libraries where the Little House
books are popular."--ALA Booklist

"Pieced in part from Rose's written account of
that trip, interviews with contemporaries and
historians, and other research, the story centers
on Rose's adventures and scrapes, and, like
its models, pays tribute to the strength and
security of a close family."--Publishers
Weekly

"A fine continuation of the beloved chronicle, in
similar attractive format (including quietly
evocative soft-pencil illustrations 'print
edition' of places and things)."--The
Kirkus Reviews
THE LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS
By Laura Ingalls Wilder

LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE
FARMER BOY
ON THE BANKS OF PLUM CREEK
BY THE SHORES OF SILVER LAKE
THE LONG WINTER
LITTLE TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE
THESE HAPPY GOLDEN YEARS
THE FIRST FOUR YEARS

THE ROCKY RIDGE YEARS
By Roger Lea MacBride

LITTLE HOUSE ON ROCKY RIDGE
LITTLE FARM IN THE OZARKS


















For my daughter Abby,
who shares with me the legacy of Rose.
In them both, God got it right.
LITTLE FARM IN THE OZARKS

Thief!

Rose was sitting at the table in the little log
house on Rocky Ridge Farm, finishing a letter
to Grandma Ingalls, when she heard snarling
outside in the dark, snowy woods. Fido, the
little white terrier with black and tan spots,
raised his head from the hearth and growled deep in his
chest. His ears lay flat against his head.
"What was that?" Rose asked.
Mama closed her book and looked at
Papa.
"That's a new one on me," he said. "Might
be it's just a bobcat, but I'd best check the
horses." He set down the leather horse
collar he was oiling and wiped his hands on a rag.
Papa lit the lantern and pulled on his heavy
buffalo coat. Fido followed him to the door.
Papa took his gun down from its rack. "Stay
here, boy," he told Fido. "I can handle
this."
Mama laid more wood on the fire and hugged
herself against the chill air that blew in when Papa
opened the door.
Rose read the letter to herself by the light of the lamp:
"Dear Grandma," she had written. "Thank
you very much for the good, warm socks, and for sending us the
De Smet News every week. I am reading
the story about poor General Custer.
"It is not so cold here as South Dakota, but
my feet get cold sometimes. It snowed today. But
Papa said spring will come soon, even if it is just
Febuary! I like Missouri, but I miss
everyone so very much. Your loving granddaughter,
Rose."
"Mama, how do you spell this month?"
"Feb-ru-ary," said Mama. "How does it
sound?"
Rose saw her mistake and squeezed a
small r in between the b and the u.
They both looked up when they heard Papa
open the outside door to the lean-to and kick the
snow off his boots.
"Everything seems to be in order," he said.
"The horses are quiet and I don't see any
strange tracks in the snow."
Papa went back to oiling the collar.
"I was thinking, Bess," Papa said to Mama.
"It's getting on toward spring and I'll
be needing some help around the place. Reynolds
at the general store told me this morning that here in
the Ozarks folks plant their peas in February
and their potatoes in March."
"I can scarcely believe it, Manly,"
Mama said. "We never planted anything before
April in South Dakota. Are you sure he
wasn't pulling the wool over your eyes?"
"I wouldn't have believed it myself," Papa said.
"But Reynolds has his onion sets and seed
potatoes in stock already, and he just put his plows
and hoes out as well. Some fellows were in today
signing their crop liens."
"What is the interest?" asked Mama.
"Fifteen percent," Papa replied.
"Why, that's as bold as thievery!" Mama
complained. "How can we ever get ahead when we must
wait four more years for the apple trees to bear
fruit?"
"We've been through all that," Papa said
calmly. "We have acres of good timber to hack
into railroad ties and fence rails that we can always
sell. But I can't do it alone and still raise our
own corn and grain."
"I'm just not accustomed to waiting so long for a
crop to come in," said Mama. "In South
Dakota, we had the wheat crop to count on every
summer."
Suddenly Fido barked. They all heard a
burst of cackling.
"The henhouse!" Mama cried out. Rose's
heart fluttered in her chest.
Papa and Mama jumped up at the same time.
They threw on their coats and shoes. Papa
grabbed his gun again. Mama lit the lantern and
they both rushed out the door with Fido leading the
way.
Rose shivered in the doorway and watched the
lantern light throw trembling shadows among the
trees as Mama and Papa ran. Then the light
disappeared into the henhouse. She could hear their
voices, but she could not tell what they had found.
Finally they came walking back. Someone else
was with them! When they drew close, she was shocked
to see it was a boy. Papa gripped him by the arm.
The boy jerked his shoulder, trying to pull away.
His hat fell to the ground and Mama picked it
up. Rose backed into the house and they all came
in.
"All right, son," Papa said in his
most sober voice. "Now just you calm down a
spell. Have a seat over there, by the table."
The boy sat down with a huff. He tucked his
hands under his elbows and scowled. His thin, pale
face poked out of clothing that looked like a pile of
old rags. His coat was a man's threadbare
suit jacket that hung to his knees. His
pants were too big also, man's pants that had
been cut off and patched. They were so big the
pockets hung on the inside of his legs. His
patched shirt was made of flour sacks, sewn with
twine. The soles of his shoes flapped loose.
A white feather clung to one of the pant legs.
He glared at Rose and stuck his chin out
defiantly.
Rose didn't know what to think. She had never
seen such a stern look on Papa's face.
Mama's face was grave and furrowed.
"Now, son," Papa said. "Let's have your
name."
The boy stared at the floor in silence. Papa
watched him, waiting and stroking his chin.
"We're going to straighten this out, one way or
another," he said. "Stealing is serious business.
We can go into town and talk to the sheriff if you like.
Now why don't you tell us, who are your
folks?"
"Ain't got none," the boy muttered in a
raspy voice. He shivered and hugged himself.
"Come sit by the fire," Mama said. "You must
be cold."
The boy got up and moved his chair over by the
fireplace. He held his palms out to the
flames and then rubbed them together. Rose sat on
the big bed. She couldn't take her eyes off
him. The boy looked about her age, which was eight,
or perhaps a bit older. His face was plain. His
ears stood out, and his nose was too big. His
blue eyes seemed to show nothing at all. Rose
noticed a bad smell had come into the house.
"Everybody has folks somewhere," Papa said.
"Are you from these parts?"
"I ain't from nowhere," the boy said
defiantly. Rose thought she saw his mouth wobble
in the flickering firelight. Mama and Papa
looked at each other over the boy's head.
"You must be living somewhere nearby, son,"
Papa said. His voice was softer now and his eyes
shone with a gentle warmth. "If you're hungry we
might be able to scare up a bite or
two."
The boy looked at Papa for the first time.
"Are you hungry, son?"
The boy nodded. Papa let him sit warming in
front of the fire while Mama put up some
beans and cold potatoes in the spider-legged
skillet to heat in the fireplace. The food
began to sizzle and the room filled with the warm
smell of cooking. Rose spotted a tear
glittering on the boy's cheek.
"Now, just you relax. We aren't going to harm
you," Papa said. "But you must tell us who you are.
We can help, if you're alone."
"I ain't alone," the boy said. "I got my
big brother. He's out a-working, is all."
"I'm Mr. Wilder," Papa said. "This is
my wife, and our daughter, Rose."
"Hello," Rose said softly. The boy
looked at her, but his face was blank, like a
clock without hands. She could not tell what he was
thinking.
"I'm Swiney," the boy finally said.
"Swiney Baird. It's just me and my big
brother, Abe."
"What about your folks, your ma and pa?"
"Dead," Swiney said simply.
He licked his lips and swallowed. His eyes
followed Mama lifting the skillet out of the
fireplace and spooning the steaming beans and
potatoes onto a plate on the table.
"All right, Swiney," Mama said. "Come and
eat."
Swiney pulled his chair over, sat down, and
spooned the hot food into his mouth as fast as he
could. Mama wrinkled her nose and frowned as she
watched him. In an instant he was mopping up the
plate with a piece of corn bread. Rose had
never seen anyone eat so fast.
Mama took the empty plate away.
Swiney stood up and looked around the little log
house, as if to leave. But Papa motioned with his
hand to sit back down.
"Now, then," Papa said. "Let's see if
I have this right. Your folks have passed on, and you
live with your brother. Where is that?"
Swiney pursed his mouth and stared into his lap.
"Yonder," he said after a long pause, jerking his
thumb. "On Kinnebrew's place. In the
tenant house."
"Kinnebrew," Mama said slowly.
"I've heard that name in town. Aren't they the
folks who moved here from Illinois last fall?"
Swiney nodded his head.
"And your brother," Mama said. "He left you
nothing to eat?"
"The latch busted on the door. Raccoons
got in and stole every bit."
"But surely the Kinnebrews would take you in
for a meal."
Swiney shook his head gravely. "Abe
says they're city dudes. They don't like us
country jakes." Then he looked at Mama, his
eyes suddenly wide with fear. "You ain't a-going
to tell them, is you? There wasn't no real harm
in it, honest. I was just a-looking for eggs is
all."
"Don't you worry about that," Papa said. "The
important thing is that you don't have to steal from us
to eat, Swiney. We'd never let a boy go
hungry if we had a crumb to spare. Now, when
is your brother coming home?"
"I ain't sure," said Swiney. He wiped
his nose with the back of his dirty hand. His nails
were chipped. "He drove a load of timber
to Cabool."
"Cabool is a good two days' wagon
trip," said Papa. "You must stay here with us
tonight."
"But I cain't," Swiney whined, standing up.
"I got to be going, mister."
"You'll stay here, son, and that's final,"
Papa said. "We'll fix a pallet for you
to sleep on, by the fire, where it's warm. After a
good breakfast we'll go to your place and see about
fixing that latch."
Swiney's shoulders slumped and his face
puckered as if to cry. But he sat quietly as
Mama got out extra quilts and made up his
bed.
When they were all settled for the night, Mama and
Papa in their big bed and Rose in her trundle
bed, Rose couldn't sleep. She listened to the
crackling and hissing of the fire. She could hear
Swiney tossing and turning under his covers. It
frightened Rose to think a stranger would sneak into their
henhouse and steal their eggs.
She did not think she liked Swiney very much.
He was a thief, he was dirty, and he hadn't
thanked Mama for his supper. But she was sorry
he had no mother or father to make sure he
had food to eat.
And it was something new to have a stranger in the
house. Their first winter in Missouri had been
lonely. Mama had kept Rose home from
school until they could get a little money ahead.
There were taxes to pay, and Rose needed new
shoes.
Mama had said Rose could start school in
July, when the next session began. By then the
chickens would be laying again and Mama would have eggs
to trade at Reynolds' store for
necessities like new shoes and slate pencils.
"Besides, I have been a schoolteacher and I can
certainly keep you up with your studies here at
home," Mama had said.
It had been too cold, and the days too short,
to explore outdoors or play with her friend
Alva, who lived nearby on her father's farm.
Her only other friends were Paul and George
Cooley, who had come with Rose's family
to Missouri from South Dakota. When they weren't
in school, Paul and George helped their mama
and papa run the Mansfield Hotel in town.
Mr. and Mrs. Cooley were best friends with Mama
and Papa. Rose saw Paul and George
only on Sunday, when the two families went
to their new church in town.
Rose's restless thoughts were interrupted
by Swiney crying out in his sleep, "Mumphster
fluff!" Rose was curious about him. She
wondered about his life, and how he got such a
funny name.

Peeping Frogs

When Rose woke up in the chilly dawn,
Mama was gathering up Swiney's bedclothes.
Swiney was gone. He had slipped out of the house
before the first rooster crow.
"Phew!" Mama said, making a face and
holding the quilt away from her. "That boy
smelled as skunky as an old dog. We might
as well do a wash today, Rose."
"Why did he leave?" asked Rose.
"I expect he was afraid we would change
our minds and turn him over to the sheriff," said
Papa. "That little shaver's as bold as a sparrow.
I'm sure last night wasn't the first time he
found himself in a fix."
"Will he have to go to jail?"
Papa laughed. "Little boys don't go to jail
for stealing eggs. There isn't a boy alive
hasn't done something as bad or worse. He
might be put in an orphanage, if we
complained to the sheriff. But I wouldn't anyway.
It's no crime to be hungry. I'll ride
over to Kinnebrew's after breakfast and see how
he's getting along."
The day dawned warm and soft. To look at the
snow-covered ground was to be in winter. But when the
sun rose high, its light fell strong on
Rose's face. The sky was brighter than it had
been in a long while. Before dinnertime the snow had
turned mushy. In the bare spots the earth softened
to reddish mud that clung to her shoes and made
squishy, sucking noises when she walked.
While Rose helped Mama hang the sheets
to dry in a sunny spot, she noticed a
strange noise coming from the direction of Fry
Creek. It sounded like a multitude of tiny
bells, or many people whistling.
"I hear it, too," said Mama. "I wonder
what it could be? It's too early for
grasshoppers and crickets."
After dinner, when she was done with her laundry
chores, Rose walked down toward the creek
to explore. The whistling sound grew louder and
louder. It seemed to be coming from a marshy place
near the creek. But she couldn't see what was
making such a racket. She walked toward the
marshy spot. When she got close to it, when the
sound was at its loudest all around her, it suddenly
stopped.
Rose stood there for a long moment in confusion.
There was nothing to see but swampy water full of
dead leaves and the dead stems of last year's
grass and reeds. Then she heard a single peep
close by her. "Peent," something said. She stood
very still, trying to see what had made that sound without
startling it into silence. Farther away, there was an
answer, "Peent. Peent." In no time that
whole swamp was alive with the noise of all those
peents.
Rose took a step. A fallen branch
crackled under her foot. Immediately she saw
several splashes in the water and the noise stopped
again. She squatted down at the edge of the swamp
and looked closely into it. All she could see at
first was decaying leaves and bubbles and twigs.
Then she spotted some bubbles close
together that seemed to move. She stared at those bubbles
for the longest time, until finally she saw that they were
a tiny pair of frog's eyes and a little frog's
nose floating in the murky water. But as long as
she sat there, no frogs would peep.
She walked a little way from the swamp and
waited. In a minute, it started again. "Peent.
Peent. Peent." But no matter how hard she
tried to sneak up on the frogs, they would not peep
when she was close. So she backed far away and just
listened. It lightened her soul to hear those frogs
singing their hearts out. Rose realized with
astonishment that even though it was still winter, this was a
sound of spring, the very first sound of spring.
Rose was telling Mama about the peeping frogs
when Papa came riding home on May. Behind
him, riding together on a mule with notched ears, were
a young man and Swiney.
"We have company," Mama said with a sigh, "and
I can't think what we have to feed them. Draw a
pail of water from the spring, Rose. At least
we can make tea."
When Rose brought the water, Mama and Papa
were talking to the young man, who held his battered
hat in his hand. Swiney stood beside him, staring at
the ground and kicking at a clump of snow.
"This is our daughter, Rose," Mama said.
"Rose, this is Abe Baird, Swiney's big
brother."
"Hello," Rose said politely.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Rose,"
Abe said in a warm, deep voice. His face was
young and smooth, like a boy's. But it was also strong
and bony, like a grown man's. A great shock of
black hair fell across his forehead. His thick
eyebrows met in the middle. Rose couldn't
help staring at him. He didn't look anything
like Swiney at all.
"It's like I was a-telling Mr. Wilder,
ma'am," he said to Mama. "Swiney's and me's
ma and pa passed on when Swiney was just a pup.
Ma died birthing our baby sister. I reckon
she was wore out after a-bringing twelve little ones
into this world. The apoplexy carried off Pa just six
months after."
"Twelve children," Mama said in wonderment.
"However did you manage? Where are the rest?"
"We stuck together for a spell," Abe said.
"But we durn near starved. In time all us kids
just flew off like a bunch of quail. The
little ones was a-taken in here and there. The older ones
went out to find work. Swiney here always was a
fractious little hornet, so I kept him on with
me.
"But I ain't been much of a pa. I'm real
sorry about last night. I told Swiney,
stealing ain't no path to go."
He turned his head and spat a stream of amber
tobacco juice onto the ground.
"Well, you must stay to supper," Papa said.
Mama cleared her throat. "We haven't much,"
Papa went on. "But what we have ..."
"I ain't a-aiming to put no burden on
you'uns," Abe said. "No sirree. I
brung you some meat in this here poke, to show no harm
meant." He reached into a sack at his feet and
pulled out a dead raccoon by the tail. Rose had
seen the skins of raccoons that her friend Alva had
trapped.
"I don't think ..." Mama began. "I
mean, I wouldn't know the first thing about cooking a
... what is it?"
"Coon, ma'am," said Abe. "You folks
ain't tasted no coon yet?"
"No," Mama said firmly. "I'm not sure
we're quite ready for that."
"Ain't nothing to it," Abe said heartily.
"Why, coon's some of the best eating meat we got
in these here hills. Swiney and I'll skin it, and
I can tell you just how to cook it."
Mama looked at Papa. The color drained
from her face. But there was nothing more she could
politely say. Abe would not take no for an
answer, and Mama would never argue against the
generosity of strangers.

Tree-Topping

Abe and Swiney stayed to supper of roast
raccoon and turnips. After they had ridden away
on their mule, Mama scraped her full plate
onto a slab of wood and put it outside for
Fido.
"I just couldn't eat it," she said, making a
face. "I have never seen so much greasy fat on
an animal."
"I liked it," Rose said. "It tasted like
rabbit."
"I wouldn't have guessed it myself, but it was
delicious, Bess," agreed Papa.
"It did smell good," Mama admitted with a
chuckle. "But that's the last time you are going to find
a raccoon in my oven."
"It won't be the last we see of Abe and
Swiney," Papa said. "Abe is going to be our
hired man."
"Are you sure he's reliable?" asked
Mama. "Isn't he sharecropping for Mr.
Kinnebrew?"
"He is," Papa said. "But he's also
cutting railroad ties and fence rails on his
own. He's a good strong boy, just a little young and
rough around the edges is all. And Swiney can
help with the chores around the place."
"Very well," Mama said. "You can never tell
through what door Providence may walk."
After breakfast the next morning Abe and
Swiney came back.
"You listen to Mrs. Wilder same as if she
was our ma," Abe told Swiney before going off with
Papa to the woodlot.
"Now, Swiney," Mama said. "First thing we
need to do is get you a good hot bath."
"A bath?" Swiney said in a whining voice.
"But why? Abe don't make me take no
bath."
"I'm not Abe," Mama said, "and you've got
skunk scent in all your clothes. Don't you
smell it?"
"No, ma'am," said Swiney, wrinkling his
big nose. "I did catch me a skunk a little
time back. But I cain't smell nothing now."
Rose giggled. Swiney glared at her.
"So long as you are going to be part of this
family, I'll thank you to leave skunk
business to the skunks," said Mama.
"Awww," Swiney grumbled.
But he took his bath anyway, in a corner
of the house behind a sheet Mama had hung from the
rafters. While he splashed around in the tin
tub, Rose helped build a fire under the big
cast-iron pot outside. Then Mama scrubbed
his threadbare clothes with soft soap. She gave
him Rose's extra flannel union suit
to wear while he sat in a chair and his things
dried, hanging from the fireplace mantel.
When he was dressed again, Swiney still looked
shabby, but his face shone pink and clean, and his dark
hair glistened. Then Mama said Rose could show
him around the farm.
The weather had turned wintry again.
Silver-gray clouds pressed down upon the
hills. A pair of jaybirds, crying out in
shrill voices, flashed across the open space in
front of the house to hide in a bush. Rose
shivered against the cold and pulled her woolen
fascinator tight around her head.
The surface of the snow had frozen to a crust as
hard as a plate. The horses' hooves had
left holes in the mud, which had frozen into little
pools of ice. The ice crackled when they
walked on it.
Rose kept her thoughts to herself as they walked
by the henhouse. Swiney stared at the ground until
they had passed it.
Then Rose showed Swiney the new barn that their
neighbors had helped Papa build one day in
the fall. They looked at the mares, Pet and
May, in their stalls. They were fat and sleek from
having so little work to do in the winter.
Then they fed handfuls of oats to the colts, Little
Pet and Prince. Papa had been breaking and
gentling them all winter. Soon they would be old enough
to sell. Rose hated to think of it. But she knew
they couldn't keep the colts forever, and someday the
mares would have new ones.
Swiney hardly spoke a word as Rose told
him about their long trip to Missouri from South
Dakota in the wagon. She told him about her
friend Alva, and how she sometimes went with Alva in
the darkness before dawn to check Alva's trap
lines for rabbits and raccoons.
Swiney threw rocks at squirrels and the little
black-capped chickadees that flitted from branch
to branch singing, "Day-day-day."
It was wicked to hurt or kill anything that one
didn't need. But Rose did not know Swiney
well enough to scold him.
Swiney pulled out a folding knife and began
to sharpen it by scraping it on a whetstone he carried
in his pocket. He spit on his arm and shaved off
a tiny patch of the fine, damp hair.
"Why did you do that?" Rose asked.
"To see if it's right sharp," Swiney said.
"That's how to tell."
"Can I try it?"
"Girls ain't supposed to play with
knives," Swiney scoffed. "Besides, this here was
my pa's knife. Abe gave it me and I
ain't never let nobody else touch it."
He wiped the blade on his pants, snapped it
shut, and dropped it back in his pocket.
They walked to the apple orchard. Fido
sniffed for rabbits around the brush piles left from
Papa's clearing the land. Papa had felled forest
trees all winter. As soon as the ground had
thawed enough, he would replant all of the slender
young apple saplings that came with Rocky Ridge
Farm when they first moved there in the fall.
"When I am thirteen years old, all those
trees will bear apples," Rose explained.
"Then the apples will go on the trains to big
cities, where people will buy them to bake pies."
Then, Rose added to herself, Mama and Papa will
have everything they ever wanted. Those fragile young
apple trees were their whole future. Mama and
Papa had brought Rose here from South Dakota
to get away from a drought. For as long as Rose
had been alive, too little rain had fallen on the
prairie and the wheat crop failed year after year.
Finally they could live there no longer.
So they had packed all their belongings into a little
black wagon and driven to Missouri, to The Land
of the Big Red Apple, with the Cooleys. They were
starting a new life in a place where good water
pours right out of the ground all year long and the winters
are short.
The Land of the Big Red Apple was a name the
railroad companies gave the Ozark Mountains,
to persuade people to come there, buy land, and grow
apples to ship on the trains.
Mama and Papa had come to Missouri to make
a new future. They bought the little run-down
farm, called it Rocky Ridge, and began
to fix it up. They had been very lucky. The farm
came with nearly a thousand apple saplings all
heeled in, waiting to be planted. In a few
years those apple trees would begin to bear fruit
that Mama and Papa could sell. They would never
want for anything again.
But for now, Rose knew they must make do with
what they had.
Rose and Swiney were walking through the woods
around the apple orchard when Swiney suddenly
stopped and peered up at a particular tree.
"Want to play tree-topping?" he asked.
"What is that?"
"You ain't never tree-topped?" Swiney said,
his eyes wide with amazement. "Just you watch."
Swiney climbed up the tree as quick as
a squirrel. When he got near the top, it
began to bend under his weight. He grabbed hold
of a thin branch over his head. He let his legs
swing out. Slowly, with a little groan, the tree bent
down until Swiney's feet touched the ground.
Then he began to jump up and down, still holding
the top of the little tree. Each time he came back
down he bounced a little higher. The tree limbs
rattled and shook wildly. Finally he bounced so
high that the tree stood straight up and then bent
all the way down on the other side until his
feet touched the ground. Swiney had ridden that
tree all the way over the top!
Rose had never seen anything like it. Swiney
bounced way up in the air and then down the other
side of the tree, back and forth, back and forth.
Fido raced around the tree, barking excitedly.
Rose shrieked with delight.
"Let me try!" she shouted.
Swiney stopped bouncing, but he held on to the
branch. "Come and grab on," he said. Rose
took it and held on as tight as she could. She
felt the springiness in it.
"Now start a-jumping, is all," Swiney
said. "Don't let go."
Rose took a little jump, but her feet
barely left the ground.
"Come on," Swiney said. "Jump high, and
keep a-jumping, high as you can."
Rose jumped higher and higher. She felt
herself starting to fly. She laughed.
"Higher!" Swiney shouted. "Higher!" Each
time she came down she saw his grinning face
looking up at her, and then up she went again,
higher and higher. But she still wasn't over the top.
Finally she pushed off with all her might, and she
knew she was going to go over. She felt herself going
up and up, as if she would never come down. Up and
up, into the sky. Just as she felt her feet swinging
out from under her, she heard a sickening crack, like a
gunshot. The branch she was holding didn't
feel springy anymore.
Now she really was flying, spinning sickeningly,
away from the tree. Then she was falling and falling,
for the longest time. She heard herself crashing against
branches as they flew by. She felt twigs
whip her face and legs.
In an instant, everything came to a stop with a
horrible thud that stole her breath. Lights
exploded in her head. The back of her
neck hurt. The side of her face burned.
Her ears rang. Tears stung her eyes.
Rose tried to get up, but she could not move
her arms and legs. She was in a peculiar, misty
place of no sound, no time, and no color. There
was only a warm stinging in her face, and the ringing in
her ears, like bumblebees trapped in a jug.
Faintly, through the buzzing, Rose heard
Swiney calling her name.
"Wha-what happened?" Rose asked in a
quavering voice.
"That old tree broke right off," said
Swiney. "You sure went a-flying."
Rose slowly got up, brushing off her
coat. Her legs wobbled at first, but then she
felt like herself again and laughed.
"That was fun," she said. "I want to do it again.
I mean, without it breaking."
Swiney picked another tree. He bent it
extra hard to be sure it wouldn't break. Then
they took turns tree-topping. Rose lost her
grip at first and tumbled to the ground. But soon she
understood how to do it and she was flying again, watching the
forest floor zoom away as she went up and up.
Then she watched it come rushing at her as she came
back down on the other side, Fido's pointy
little face barking at her. Rose thought nothing could
ever be so much fun.
Finally they were tired of tree-topping and walked
quietly back to the house.
Rose still did not know if she liked Swiney.
He was rough, and she could not forget that he had tried
to steal from them. But they had had fun playing together.
"What on earth have you been up to?" Mama
exclaimed when they got back. "Your face is
scratched, your braids are all undone, and your
coat! It's torn."
"I was running. And ... and I fell,"
Rose fibbed. She didn't want to tell
Mama about tree-topping. She was afraid
Mama might forbid her to do it again. She had
been running, and she did fall. Rose stole
a sideways glance at Swiney. He was grinning
at her. Rose struggled to keep her face
straight.
"You were just running and fell?" Mama asked.
She wiped her hands on her apron and raised an
eyebrow doubtfully. She looked at Swiney and
then back at Rose. "That's a mighty lot of
scratches for running and falling. And
look at that tear. It will need mending."
Rose held her breath. She was just about to tell
Mama the truth when Mama sighed. "All right,
then," she said. "Come sit while I dab some
coal oil on those scratches. Then you two
wildcats can gather some firewood. Abe shot
two rabbits today. He and Swiney are staying
to supper."

Abe's Wolf Story

Rose loved company. The little house rang with the
warm sounds of rattling plates and lively
voices. The everyday fire in the hearth seemed
festive, and the everyday food tasted as good as
Sunday's.
Rose especially liked Abe. She enjoyed
the full sound of his deep voice, and his curious
way of speaking.
"Yes, ma'am," he answered to a question of
Mama's. "Our pa, he had no care but
to build him a cabin and get his meat from the bounty
of the forest. From day's ending to day's ending he was
a-relying on the Providence of God. But Pa,
he's gone to his reward, and poor Ma also, and
them times are buried with them. It's the peaceful
way of living that is past and gone."
"The whole country is pretty well settled
up," Papa said, nodding. "Even on the open
prairie, where we used to live, the game is
mostly hunted out."
"When I was a little girl, the wolves would
sometimes come at night and serenade our little house,"
said Mama.
"There's still wolves a-roaming these here
hills," Abe said. "You don't see but a few
now and then, but they are surely about. I
recollect Pa a-telling wolf stories such as
would put your hair straight up."
"Tell us one!" Rose blurted before she could
stop herself. Abe laughed a great hearty laugh.
Even Mama chuckled. She did not mind that
Rose had spoken out of turn.
"Yes, Abe," Mama said. "We do so like
to hear stories. I'm afraid Rose has
heard nearly all of mine."
"Let me study on it a spell," Abe
said, pursing his lips in thought. The whole house
seemed to listen as they waited. The lamp purred
peacefully on the table. Far away they
heard the mournful whistle of a train. The coals
in the fireplace settled with a crunching sound.
"Now this here's a story Pa told me when I
was a sprout. I never could forget it," Abe
began. "Pa, he was a fiddler. Now and again
he'd fiddle here and there, at a frolic or a
wedding. There always was music about him, a-singing or
a-fiddling."
"My pa played the fiddle also," Mama said,
her face shining in the warm light. "I think
sometimes we never could have gotten through the hard times
without his music. I miss it still."
"I am surely glad to hear of it," said
Abe. "Pa left me his fiddle, you see, and
I fiddle myself.
"Well, Pa was on his way home from
a-fiddling one night. It was dark as a poke
full of black cats. He'd left his gun
home, a-thinking it weren't a far piece to walk
and him a-having his hands full with the fiddle and all.
But when he'd gone down the road a lick, he
heard a terrible howl a-coming up the hollow at
his back.
"Pa weren't afraid of much, but that howl put
spring in his step. He knowed it were a wolf, and where
there's one wolf, there's surely a pack.
Soon enough, he heard more howling."
Abe got up and walked to the fireplace.
He stood with his back to the fire, warming his hands
behind him.
"Now Pa recollected there was an old
empty house in the woods nearby, so he lit a
shuck for it. He could hear them wolves a-crashing
through the woods, a-getting mighty close. By the
time he broke out into the clearing, he could hear them
a-breathing on his heels.
"Them folks he was a-fiddlin' for that night had
given him a poke full of leftover corn
pone, so he throwed it on the ground, a-hoping them
wolves would hold up to eat it.
"Pa ran into that empty house, a-thinking he were
finally saved. He weren't too pleased to find the
door busted clean off, and it being too dark
inside to find a chunk of wood to block it up.
He did find a ladder up to the loft, so he
climbed it, quick as a squirrel and none too
soon at that. The wolves come a-pouring into the
house."
Rose's skin tingled with excitement. Everyone
was very still, even Swiney, listening to Abe's
every word. The only sound was the clock, clearing its
throat to chime the hour.
"Them wolves--there must of been four or five
--was bold with hunger, being they was in a pack and
all. They was a-licking their chops, and a-snarling
down there on the floor, and a-looking for a way
to get up into that there loft.
"Pa figured he'd make out fine just
a-setting up there. But then the biggest of them
wolves, the leader of the pack, stood up,
a-putting his paws on the wall. Then he
jumped, and got his front paws hooked on one
of them rafters. He slipped off, but them other
wolves got the idea and the whole pack was
a-jumping.
"Pa felt around in the loft and found himself a
stick of wood. He started a-swinging it at them
wolves, and a-kicking with his feet, a-knocking this
one back, and that one. But he could see it was a
losing fight. Them wolves weren't a-giving up.
"Pa was a-swinging that stick when once he
missed and busted a place clean through the roof
shingles where they was rotted. He got the idea he
might fare better on the roof. So he broke
him that hole bigger, grabbed his fiddle, and slung
it by the cord over his back.
"He was a-pulling himself up through the hole, them
wolves a-scratching and a-snarling just a few
feet below, when the fiddle got snagged on the
strings. He pushed and that there fiddle let out with an
awful screech. Pa eased himself back down, and
tried again. Screech! that old fiddle cried out.
"All of a sudden, Pa noticed them wolves
was a-getting real peaceful like. He quick pushed the
fiddle through the hole and climbed out onto the roof.
"Now he studied on his fix a spell and got
himself an idea. He took up his bow and
scratched himself a long note on the fiddle. Then
he listened. It was quiet down below. So he
started a-playing a slow tune. Them wolves either
liked it, or it scared them. But they was real
quiet, like they was a-listening. He looked down
through the hole and them wolves was a-sitting there like a
church full of mourners.
"So Pa kept right on a-playing, one tune
after another. He played slow, then fast; loud,
then soft. If he stopped, them wolves would stay
still a spell, then they got restless and started
a-snarling and a-jumping again.
"Some songs set them a-howling, low and
sorrowful. Sometimes they just sat there polite as can
be.
"It was a long night, but Pa played and
played, a-laughing at them wolves. Finally the
first light came a-creeping into the clearing. The
big wolf slunk off into the forest. Then, one
by one, the rest of them gave up and slipped away.
Pa waited a good long while till it was
sunup, and then he climbed down and walked on
home."
Rose clapped her hands with delight when he was
done. She loved scary wolf stories. "Tell
another, Abe!" she cried out. "Please."
"That was a wonderful story, Abe," Mama
said, getting up to wind the clock. "But I think
that's enough for tonight, Rose. We don't want
to tire Abe out."
Rose was sorry to see Abe and Swiney
leave. But it had been a wonderful evening. It
left her eager to meet the next day, and all the
days that would follow. It was a feeling, like the
peeping frogs and the lengthening days, of newness and
change. Rose felt it rushing through her veins.
The rustle of spring was everywhere, even in Abe's
voice.

Fresh Greens

Gentle spring rains fell all the next
week, slowly melting the snow. Gray mist often
hung in the air, or gathered in little wisps of
clouds that settled in the valleys. The rain and
gathering warmth began to soften the earth.
Abe did not come every morning. Sometimes he had
spring chores to do for Mr. Kinnebrew. On those
days Swiney stayed with Abe.
One day Papa hitched the mares and began
to plow the new ground he had cleared for the garden, the
orchard, and the crops. But almost as soon as he
started, Papa came back to the house with a frown
on his face. His shoes were balls of mud, and his
overalls were spattered with it.
Mama and Rose were scrubbing the floor, so
Papa stood in the lean-to.
"This beats all," he said. "It's as if the
bottom dropped out of the earth! Nothing but mud.
You could walk the whole forty acres and your feet
never leave the ground. And the worst of it is, the
horses' hooves sink right into it. They hurt
themselves trying to pull out."
"Surely you can wait a bit, until the
ground dries some," Mama said.
"I can but I shouldn't," said Papa. "There's
too much plowing and logging to be done. We'll have
to trade the colts for a pair of mules. They work
better, and they have narrow feet that won't hurt the
garden or get stuck in the mud.
"Spence at the livery stable was just saying the other
day that he could use a good pair of young horses,
to pull the buggies he hires out."
Rose sighed heavily. A hard lump jumped
into her throat.
"But surely a pair of colts are not worth
two full-grown mules," said Mama. "How will
we make up the difference?"
"Spence knows my way with horses," Papa
said. "He has been asking me to break some
colts for him. I bet I can talk him
into letting me work off the difference."
"It was bound to come to this sooner or later," said
Mama. "We had to borrow Mr. Stubbins'
mules last fall, to plow the ground for the garden.
The colts are broken now, and there's no sense
wearing out the poor mares."
So Papa put leads on Little Pet and
Prince and walked them away from Rocky Ridge
Farm, to a new life at the livery stable in
town. They tossed their graceful heads and whinnied
to their mothers as they went. Pet and May answered from
the barn with troubled neighs. Papa had locked them
in so they couldn't follow.
Rose could not stifle a sob as she watched them
go.
"You mustn't cry," said Mama, hugging Rose
to her. "There is no work for the colts here anyway.
They will be happier pulling a buggy and getting some
exercise."
But Rose could not make herself feel better.
She remembered how the little colts had trotted
alongside their mothers all that hard, dusty trip from
South Dakota. She remembered how Prince
would nuzzle her arm asking for a carrot or a
bunch of clover. She remembered the time Papa
had let her sit on Little Pet as he led the
colt around the barn. Now she would never ride him
again.
Rose went to the barn and stroked Pet's
nose, and then May's. But they were fidgety.
They kept sticking their heads out of their stalls
into the hallway, looking this way and that for
their colts. Across the open hallway the still-warm
stalls stood empty and silent.
When Papa came back with the mules and put
them in the barn, Rose did not go to look at them.
The mules were not beautiful and graceful like
horses. Mules were bred for work, not for riding.
They didn't toss their heads gaily, like
horses. Their necks were short and thick and their
bellies low-slung. Their coarse coats did
not shine, their ears were too big, and their mossy
faces looked at everything with discontented eyes.
The next day Papa hitched up the mules and
plowed the garden. He had broken the ground in the
fall and hurt himself when the plow point struck a
root. Now he knew to be very careful not to stumble.
The ground was still full of roots, and rocks,
too. The mules had to fight every inch of the way. The
soil was as sticky as pudding. Everywhere Rose
walked there was reddish-brown mud.
The new ground Papa had cleared was all
stumps and piles of dead brush, surrounded by the
bare trees. The world was brown and gray and muddy.
Rose thought the farm looked as desolate as a
cornfield after the harvest, bristly broken
stalks.
When Papa finished plowing the garden, Mama and
Rose went to work, clearing the rocks and hoeing it
smooth. Pools of water stood in the holes where
Papa had taken out stumps. For days and days they
picked stones out of the mud, and Swiney came
to help.
Swiney made a game of it, hurling stones
at tree trunks and squirrels until Mama
scolded him. But picking up those rocks was no
game for Rose. The mud got on her clothes and
under her nails. Her back ached from stooping over,
and her hands became raw and chapped.
"Where did all these stones come from?" Rose
asked with a weary sigh. They had picked stones out
of the garden in the fall until the soil was clean.
But now it was full of them again.
"I don't know," said Mama, pushing her
hair from her face. Her cheek was streaked with
mud. "The earth here is very thin. It just seems
to grow them."
The days were often cold and damp. But it felt
good to be out of doors after being cooped up all
winter like a possum in its den.
The melting snow told the story of winter in the
woods. On the forest floor she found
skeletons of animals and scatterings of feathers
where an owl or hawk had eaten a bird. Tiny
nests told where mice had raised their litters.
On neighboring farms she could hear newborn
calves bawling for their mothers. Flights of
geese, crying joyfully in their harsh voices,
circled the valley at sunset and landed in last
year's fields to look for forgotten kernels of
corn. Groundhogs sunned themselves on rocks,
or waddled through the fields to feed along the
streams.
Shyly at first, then more boldly, the forest
birds rehearsed their spring voices. The
simple chipping and aimless twittering that Rose
had heard all winter gave way to new songs,
clear and sweet and hopeful. "Cheerio!
Cheerio! Cheerio!" the robins sang.
Brilliant red cardinals cried, "What cheer!
What cheer! What cheer!" Little white-throated
sparrows called out, "Old Tom Peabody,
Peabody, Peabody."
Rose whistled those songs as she worked. All the
woods seemed to be a bustle of mysterious
affairs.
Rose was resting from picking up rocks and throwing
them to the side of the garden when she saw someone coming
through the trees. At first she did not know who it
was. But then she saw it was a little girl with fiery
red hair sticking out from under her bonnet.
"Alva!" Rose cried out. It was her first friend
in the Ozarks, Alva Stubbins. She had not seen
Alva since before Christmas.
"Hello, Rose," Alva said. "Hello,
Mrs. Wilder."
"Hello, Alva," Mama said. "What a
pleasant surprise. What brings you visiting?"
"My ma sent me over with some sassafras,"
Alva said.
Alva handed Mama a bundle of small
tree roots tied up with a string. Rose could
smell the pungent odor from where she was standing.
"That's very nice," Mama said. "But I
don't know what to do with it."
"It makes tea," Swiney piped up.
"To thin your blood. Everybody takes
sassafras tea in the spring."
Alva frowned at Swiney. "Yes," she
said. "It perks your blood up when it gets too
thick in winter."
"This is Swiney Baird," Rose
said. "His big brother Abe is my papa's
new hired man."
Alva looked at Swiney, but she did not
say anything.
"Can Rose come and play a spell?" Alva
asked Mama. "I found some pokeweed down
by Wolf Creek. We could pick you a mess for
salad."
"Pokeweed?" said Mama.
"It's greens," Swiney piped up again. "And
cow parsley. We always eat greens in spring."
"I don't see why not," said Mama. "Are
you sure you know what's good to eat, and what
isn't?"
"Yes, ma'am," Alva said. "I help my
ma with the picking every year. We ain't never got
sick yet."
Rose took a pail from the house and walked
down to Wolf Creek with Alva. Swiney
trailed behind. Rose told Alva about the
wonderful wolf story Abe had told at
supper one night. All through the story, Swiney
kept interrupting to tell parts of it. Just as she was
about to tell the ending, about Swiney and Abe's father
playing the fiddle all night, Swiney shouted it
out.
Then Rose frowned at Swiney, too.
At Wolf Creek, Alva showed Rose a
clump of pokeweed. Rose had seen green
leaves pushing up here and there in the forest, but she
didn't know which ones she could safely eat.
"You take the little soft leaves," Alva
explained. "But not the root. That's the bad part."
"I got a knife, so I'll be the cutter,"
Swiney announced. He took out his knife and
started sharpening it.
"Who says?" said Alva. "We don't need
no cutter anyway. We can just tear them off."
"Can not!" Swiney shouted. Rose was
surprised at how foolish Swiney was being.
"Can too!" Alva shouted back. "You can just go
find your own poke and cut it if you like. We
don't care."
"Humph!" Swiney grumbled, shaving a little
patch of arm hair. Then he began carving his name
in the trunk of a tree.
Alva showed Rose how to check to make sure
there weren't any bugs or insect eggs hiding on
the undersides of the bright green leaves. They tore
the tenderest leaves off and dropped them in
the pail. Then Alva showed her lamb's-quarter
and cow parsley. On the edge of the creek, growing
right out of the clear cold water, they found
watercress. "Try it," said Alva. "It's
real good."
Rose pulled some of the tiny leaves from the stem
and put them in her mouth. Nothing had ever tasted so
fresh and tangy, like radishes. Rose had not
realized how hungry she was for fresh vegetables.
Swiney brought some pokeweed to put in the pail,
but after a while he stopped helping.
Alva and Rose were busy picking when Swiney
called out to them: "Watch me! Look! Bet you
can't do this!" he shouted. He was standing next to a
fence. He climbed up and began to walk shakily
along the top rail, holding his arms out for
balance.
"That's nothing. We don't care, anyway,"
Alva sniffed. Just as Swiney got to the end of the
section, he tried to turn around. But he lost his
balance. He fell, head first. Rose gasped.
But just in the instant before Swiney's head would have
hit the ground, one of his pant legs got
tangled in the fence. He stopped short, hanging
upside down, just above the ground.
"Ow!" he screamed. "I'm stuck!" He
wriggled and tried to lift himself back up with his
arms. He twisted and turned, and huffed and
kicked. But try as he might, he couldn't
unstick himself. His face turned bright red and the
veins stood out on his neck.
"Ha, ha, ha," Alva shouted gleefully.
"Now I know why they call you Swiney. You got
your snout into everything. Now you look like an old
hog at butchering time. Maybe we ought to take
your knife and cut you up for sausage."
Rose giggled. She hadn't thought of it before, but
Swiney really did get into things like a rooting
hog.
"Get me down," Swiney pleaded. "Help
me!"
"Maybe we ought to just leave him there," Alva
said, putting her hands on her hips. "It would
serve him right, sticking his swiney snout
into everything. Whiney Swiney!" she shouted in
singsong.
"No," Rose said. She didn't like Swiney
as well as she liked Alva, and she could laugh
at how foolish he looked. But Rose could never
be truly mean, and especially not to poor
Swiney, who had no mother or father. His face
puckered up.
"Come and help," she said to Alva. Together they
lifted Swiney up until his pant leg came
loose. Then he fell to the ground in a heap, like
a pile of old clothes.
Swiney got up and brushed himself off. His
face was crimson, and pinched with anger.
"I guess you're really something," Alva said
mockingly.
"Are you all right?" asked Rose.
"Awww, never mind!" Swiney shouted. He
stomped off toward the house, and they followed him.
When the bucket was full of greens, Alva
went home. Mama cut the sassafras roots
into short pieces and put them in a big kettle
of water to simmer. The house quickly filled with a
strong, spicy smell.
Then Rose brought pails of fresh spring
water and helped Mama wash the greens, three
times to be sure they were good and clean. Mama
parboiled the greens in a pot. Then she drained
off the water and added them to the salt pork that was
frying in the skillet.
When everything was cooked, they sat down to eat it
with chunks of fresh corn bread to sop up the
delicious pot liquor. The greens were a little
bit bitter, but it was a refreshing kind of bitter
for tongues tired of beans, salt pork, and
corn bread three times a day, six days a
week.
Then Mama served them the sassafras tea,
sweetened with molasses. It was tart and spicy and
sweet, all at the same time. Rose liked it
better than grown-up tea.
"That was delicious," Papa said, wiping his
mustache with his napkin. "Sure whets a
fellow's appetite for real garden food. I'd
say it's about time to start planting."
"Yes, the garden is about ready and it's coming up
on a full moon," said Mama. "After that will be
time to put in the ground crops. Rose and I will go
with you tomorrow to town and I'll pick up some onion
sets and seed potatoes. And some seed to start my
hotbeds."
Rose had hardly been to town since they first
moved to Mansfield, only to church on Sunday
when everything and everyone was quiet and sober. Each
day on Rocky Ridge she heard the trains
whistle as they arrived and left the station.
She watched their ribbons of smoke unfurl above
the trees and hills. She heard the school bell
ringing and imagined all those children running not to be
late for their lessons.
But she had never gone to town with Papa on his
errands. Now she looked forward to seeing the town on
a market day, full of life. It would be fun
to see something different for a change.

Market Day

The next morning's chores were all done in a
rush. Rose was in such a hurry, she spilled the
water Mama had warmed for the chickens. It
didn't do for them to drink water cold right from the
spring, but Mama said there wasn't time to heat more.
The hens would have to make do.
Rose scrubbed her face, hands, and feet in
the washbasin in the lean-to. Mama washed where she
had missed, the back of her neck and in her ears.
Then she brushed Rose's hair and plaited it
tightly into two braids. When she was done she
tied on Rose's yellow hair ribbons.
Rose wriggled into her blue calico school
dress. When she put her arm into the tight
shoulders, she heard a ripping sound.
Rose looked at Mama and made a face.
"Never mind," Mama said. "I had hoped it
would last till summer. We'll just have to get some
goods today for a new one. No one will notice with your
coat on."
Then Mama and Papa washed and dressed
themselves. Mama put on her second-best
dress, a calico that beautifully set off her
long, shimmering, roan-brown hair. Then she
wove her hair into one wide braid and wound it,
ladylike, into a bun.
Papa combed bay rum through his hair. The rich
scent always made going somewhere seem special.
He put on a fresh pair of overalls, his
jacket, and his felt hat. Mama and Rose
tied on their bonnets. Then they were ready to go.
Mama and Rose carried their shoes to the wagon
so they wouldn't get soiled.
Pet and May stamped their feet
impatiently. Papa had brushed them so their
coats shone brightly in the early light.
Patches of thin mist floated above Wolf
Creek as they splashed across the ford to the other
side. Then the wagon rumbled alongside
it, through the little valley that lay between Rocky
Ridge Farm and Mansfield. The creek
chuckled to itself. The horses' hooves clattered
on the flinty stones. The strong sun lay like a
weight on Rose's shoulders. She wanted
to take off her coat, but then she remembered the
ripped shoulder of her dress.
A pair of crows flapped past them, diving and
twisting playfully in the bliss of spring. A
tufted titmouse called out from a bush as they
passed, "Wheedle! Wheedle! Wheedle!" never
stopping to catch its breath.
"Do you think Reynolds will give us credit enough
to get all our spring provisions?" Mama asked
over Rose's head.
"Can't see why not," said Papa. "Folks
know me now, from my winter job, delivering coal
oil for Mr. Waters. And I've sold our
stove wood to half the houses in town. Anyone
can see we're honest, hardworking farmers."
"It just makes me uneasy, Manly," said
Mama. "It was hard enough on the prairie, praying
all summer for the wheat harvest to come in only to see
it blown away by cyclone, or burned up
by drought.
"At least the prairie gave us free
grassland to feed the livestock. Now with taxes
and the mortgage, and this land so thin and stony, it's a
wonder we can raise enough just to--"
"Now, Bess, you're putting the oak before the
acorn," Papa interrupted. "Besides, you forget
all that timber we have to be made into fence rails
and railroad ties. Nothing can take that away.
It's cash money we can always count on.
"And the hens will be laying again soon. We've
always made out somehow. We always will." He smiled
and reached over to squeeze Mama's hand.
Mama sighed and looked out across an orchard of
grown apple trees they were passing. Rose
prayed that their orchard would hurry and grow.
The bumpy, muddy wagon tracks turned
away from the creek and climbed a steep hill.
The railroad tracks curved toward them and then
ran alongside. When they crested the ridge, they
could see the whole town spread out before them. The
horses began to trot down the long, gentle
hill into the center of town. Papa had to rein them
in to keep their hooves from kicking up clods of
mud.
Town was crowded. Farmers streamed in from
all directions. The square swarmed with wagons
and horses. Children raced shouting and laughing across the
steaming muddy streets. Papa had to drive around
the square twice to find an empty hitching
spot.
Some men waved and called out to Papa,
"Howdy, Wilder!"
While Papa hitched the team, Mama and
Rose brushed off their feet and put on their
stockings and shoes. Then they all walked on the
gravel path around the square. Mama put her
hand through Papa's arm, and held her skirt up from
the muddy ground with the other. Rose thought Mama and
Papa looked lovely together, walking like that.
Rose's senses were keen in the strong
sunlight. It was exciting to be among all those
people, to hear all the strange voices calling to each
other. The loneliness of the cold, gray winter
melted away.
In the middle of the square was a park, with trees
and a bandstand. Around the square were the stores that all
those people had come to trade in. The signs read
"Newton's Groceries," "Coday's
Drugs," "The Bank of Mansfield,"
"Opera House," and "The Mansfield
Hotel," where Paul and George lived. The
railroad tracks made one side of the square,
with the depot for the Kansas City, Fort Scott,
and Memphis Railroad. Some men were unloading
boxes onto the platform with bumping sounds.
"Mama, can we visit the Cooleys?
Please?" Rose pleaded.
"No," said Mama. "A hotel is a
business. It is not a place for visiting."
Now they came to Reynolds' Store. Some
men sat in tipped-back chairs on the wooden
sidewalk. They were spitting tobacco juice and
carving pieces of cedar wood into little piles of
reddish-brown shavings. Sacks and boxes were
piled on the sidewalk waiting to be loaded
onto wagons. Two boys were playing, taking
turns pushing each other off the sidewalk.
Rose took Mama's hand.
As they passed from the bright sunlight to the darkness
inside the store, Rose's eyes could see only
shadowy shapes. But her nose instantly filled
with a delicious riot of scents and smells. A
tingle ran all through her body and settled in her
stomach.
"Wait here, Rose," said Mama.
Then she and Papa walked all the way to the back
of the store to speak with Mr. Reynolds.
Slowly Rose's eyes began to see. She
looked at what made all those smells. And she
looked, and looked.
The store was a wonderland. Everywhere she turned
were tables, shelves, rolls, bins, barrels,
kegs, and boxes of every imaginable made thing in the
world, all piled up every which way.
On the floor around her were sacks marked
Flour and Corn Meal, and bags of potatoes
with the tops turned down. There were barrels brimming
with pickles, and crackers, and raisins, and kegs
of horseshoes and nails.
The dark wooden counters had moldings that seemed
to frown down at her. On top there were piles of
overalls, socks, pants, and men's hats.
On other counters there were coffeepots, dishes,
pitchers, and washbasins. There were boxes of seed
packets painted with beautiful pictures of shiny
red tomatoes, and dark green watermelons, and
pale green cabbages.
The walls of the store were all made of
shelves. Some drooped with great bolts of
colored calicoes, gaily checked ginghams,
dotted swiss, sleek silks, and shiny
ribbons. There were boxes of different-colored
sewing thread arranged like a rainbow, and piles of
pencil tablets, schoolbooks, and slates.
There were rows of metal tins lined up like
soldiers, and bottles of every size and shape,
full of colored liquids, with brightly colored
labels.
Even the ceiling had been used to hang water
buckets, and tools, and horse collars.
Rose walked farther back into the store.
Waves of scents washed over her and made her
giddy. She took deep breaths of nutmeg, and
coffee, and tobacco, and pickle brine, and
onions, and coal oil, and paint, and leather.
A young man in a crisp white shirt was
cutting a wedge from a big wheel of cheese. He
pulled a sheet of paper from a long roll and
tore it off to wrap the cheese. Then he pulled
some string and cut it to tie the package up.
A woman was giving her order to another clerk,
and he was writing it down on a piece of paper.
Rose stared as she passed jars and kegs
crammed with brightly colored candy. She could
smell the peppermint and it made her mouth
water. There were perfumed candy bananas, and
licorice sticks, and striped hard candy, and
lemon drops.
"Hello there, young lady," a man's voice
boomed out close by. "What can we do for you
today?"
A man with a big belly stood with his hands on
his hips, looking down at her. His big teeth
grinned at her from under a bushy mustache.
"Which one do you like?" he asked.
Rose was startled. Her ears warmed. She
didn't know what to say. The man laughed.
"It's all right," he said. "I'm Mr.
Reynolds. This is my store. Your ma and pa
are right over there, giving their order. How about these
lemon drops. Do you like them?"
Rose nodded. She had never eaten a lemon
drop, but she just knew she would like them.
The man pulled a little brown bag with red
stripes on it from a rack. Then he took a
tiny shovel and scooped up a whole scoopful
of the sunny lemon drops. He poured them into the
bag, folded the top, and handed it to Rose.
Her heart fluttered so, she almost forgot
to say, "Thank you, Mr. Reynolds."
"You bet," Mr. Reynolds said. He
called out to a customer and walked away.
Rose weighed the bag in her hand. It was heavy
with lemon drops. She wanted to eat one right
then, but she would wait to share with Mama and Papa
on the ride home.
Mama was holding up a piece of cloth,
brown calico with white polka dots.
"How do you like this, Rose?" Rose looked at
the fabric. Then she looked at the other bolts
of cloth on the shelves. Her eyes rested on a
bolt of pale blue and pink gingham.
"I like that one," Rose said. The brown
reminded her of mud. The gingham made her think
of flowers.
"It's very pretty," said Mama. "But I
don't think it will wear as well as the brown. It
will show when it's soiled."
Rose had always worn calico. She thought she
would like gingham, for a change. She looked at the
blue and red, the blue and black, and at a dark
blue and deep lavender.
"That one," she said, pointing to the blue and
lavender. The clerk took down the bolt,
measured out five yards, and cut it with a
big shears. Watching him do it, Rose felt a
wave of happiness. She had not had a new
dress in almost a year, since Mama had sewn
up the sprigged blue calico.
Rose wanted blue hair ribbons to go with her
dress, but she knew not to ask. She could have new
hair ribbons when Mama said so.
Finally they were finished and it was time to go home.
Papa backed the wagon up to the sidewalk and
loaded everything in. Rose's mouth watered when
she saw the big bag of flour. They would have light
bread again after a long winter eating corn bread
day in and day out.
On the short ride home they ate some of the
puckery-sweet lemon drops. The day had
turned so warm that Rose had to take off her
coat, now that no one would see the rip. The sky
was clear and blue. A lone white cloud rose from
the horizon in front of them.
In the wagon behind them were new shuck collars
for the mules, spring onion sets, packages of
seeds for the garden, seed potatoes, the coal oil
can filled to the top with coal oil, a sack of
sugar, a sack of flour, a box of salt, a
tin of tea, a big piece of salt pork, a
tin pail of molasses, the gingham for Rose's
new dress, thread, a large piece of denim,
and chambray for shirts. Mama said she would sew
Papa a new shirt and pair of overalls. She
would make a shirt and pair of overalls for
Swiney, too.
"You see, Bess," Papa said.
"Reynolds treated us square. We'll have
everything we need to get through till settling up time
in the fall, and then some."

Fighting Mules

As they came to the crest of the hill, the lone
cloud seemed to grow taller, and to billow. It was
a strange-looking cloud, Rose thought. It
seemed to be coming from the ground, right on the wooded
hill where the house and barn stood.
All at the same time, Papa whipped the
reins and Mama cried out, "Manly, fire!"
The horses jumped forward. The coal oil can
shot backward through the wagon and crashed against the
endgate. Bits of mud hit Rose's cheek.
The wagon flew down the bumpy tracks. The
horses' shod feet struck sparks on
the stones. Rose's teeth clattered as she
bounced on the hard seat. Mama stared at that
cloud of smoke. Her face had gone white.
Papa's mouth was set in a pale, thin line.
Rose's stomach flip-flopped. No one
spoke a word.
In no time at all the horses were grunting up
the hill. Fido pranced down the wagon tracks
to greet them, his tail wagging. As soon as the
house came into view, Mama breathed a big
sigh. Then they could see the barn as well.
Everything looked as normal as could be.
"Praise be," Mama said in a trembly
voice. "It's not on our place. It just looked
that way. The smoke is coming from farther off."
"I'd best take a look," said Papa.
"It's downwind from us, but you never can be too
careful."
Papa unhitched May and rode into the woods
toward the smoke, toward Mr. Kinnebrew's
farm. Mama unhitched Pet and put her in the
barn. Then Rose helped unload the wagon.
They watched that cloud of smoke every minute. It
grew smaller, and smaller, and paler. Finally
only blue sky remained. Then Papa
returned.
"It was only Abe, burning off one of
Kinnebrew's brush piles," he said. "There was
never any danger." But worry lines darkened his
forehead.
"That's a relief," said Mama. "My heart
was in my mouth when I saw that smoke."
"That's not all," said Papa. "He was also
burning off the fields and even the woods, too.
Just letting the fire burn through perfectly good
timber."
"Whatever for?" Mama asked.
"It's the most confounded thing I ever heard. He
says folks here always burn off the underbrush and
new fields in spring. They just let the fires go
till they burn themselves out."
"But why?" asked Mama.
"They say it improves the soil, and clears
out the weeds and stump sprouts. But I don't like
it," Papa said. "It's a crime to treat good
land that way!"
The roughness in his voice startled Rose. It was
always so calm and patient. Even horses trusted
Papa when he spoke. But fire was a monstrous
thing. They were all terribly afraid of
it. Rose still remembered the fire that had burned
up their house in South Dakota many years before.
"We'll just have to be on our guard, is all,"
he said. "We can be thankful at least that the land
here is good and wet. A fire can't travel far
and do too much harm."
Now began the hard work of planting the garden.
First Papa got out the harrow he had made during
the winter. He sharpened the wooden teeth with his
knife.
Then he hitched the harrow to the mules and they
dragged it back and forth, breaking up the clods of
earth into smaller and smaller clumps. Finally,
after many passes, the garden was smooth and soft.
Then he hitched the mules to the plow and plowed
deep rows in the garden, leaving high ridges of
dirt on either side.
Rose helped Mama cut the potatoes
into small pieces, making sure each piece had
at least two eyes. Then they carried them to the
garden in a sack and buried the pieces in the
ridges of dirt. They made sure the eyes were
facing up. That way they could see the sun and
sprout properly. They buried the bits of seed
potatoes deep, where they would be safe and warm in
case of a late frost.
Then they planted the onion sets and the turnip
seeds. Mama planted the tomato seeds in
soil she put in wooden hotbeds Papa had
made. On warm days she brought the hotbeds out
of the house and set them in a sunny place. She
always made sure to bring them in before supper, so the
cold nights couldn't hurt them.
Every day fires burned on farms all around
them. The air was always full of wood smoke.
No matter what she was doing, Mama would stop every
so often and look around, through the trees at the
columns of smoke. If she was inside, she would
come outside to look. If she was crouched down in
the garden, she would stand up, shield her eyes from the
bright sunlight with her hand, and sniff the air.
At night they could sometimes see the orange glow
of a neighbor's burning brush pile or field.
"I just can't get used to the idea of it,"
Mama said to Papa at breakfast one morning.
"I can't forget those terrible fires on the
prairie, and how hard we fought to make the little
cottonwood trees grow. People here treat trees
like a nuisance."
"But you can't keep piling up the cut
brush forever," said Papa. "There'd be no room
for planting before long. We have to burn some of our
brush piles, as well."
One day, after a soaking rain, Papa told
Mama and Rose and Swiney to meet him in the
orchard. He and Abe poured some coal oil on
the great mounds of branches and stumps that had
collected all winter. Then they lit them.
Papa told Rose and Swiney to watch that no
sparks fell in the woods and started another
fire. But the rain had wet everything down. No
fire could start anywhere except where Papa
wanted it.
So Rose and Swiney played around the great
bonfires, watching them grow until long
tongues of scorching orangey-red flame licked
the sky. Terrified rabbits scurried out from where
they had been living under the piles and bounded off
into the woods with Fido chasing after them. Rose and
Swiney tried to catch them, too. But the rabbits
were too scared and too fast.
Papa did not try to shoot any of the rabbits.
It was spring, when all the wild animals have their
babies. There would be no more fresh meat until
fall, when all the woods creatures had grown
up.
Rose and Swiney threw sticks into the flames
and watched them burn. They listened to the roaring and the
popping and hissing. Then they pulled the sticks out
and drew smoke pictures in the air. Their
faces turned pink from the searing heat, and Rose
burned her fingers playing with her stick. But she was
having too much fun to care.
The fires burned all day. They took
turns going back to the house to eat, so that someone
always was watching. The fires burned into the night,
too. Papa stayed to watch until the coals had
cooled and no sparks came out. The next
morning, all that was left was piles of ash and a
few blackened tree limbs and smoking stumps,
sticking up like the bones of a skeleton.
One beautiful, warm Sunday, after they got
home from church and ate dinner, Mama said Rose
must be good and watch the farm. She and Papa were
going back into town, to see the Cooleys.
"Can't I go, too?" Rose pleaded. She
never got a chance to play with Paul and George
in church. They had to sit still and be quiet.
"No," said Mama. "Paul and George are
staying behind also, to watch the hotel. We
are going for a buggy drive, just Mr. and Mrs.
Cooley, Papa and I."
Rose sat on one of the trunks by the bed and
sulked while Mama quickly changed out of her good
black cashmere into her white lawn. It was
pretty and light, with a collar crocheted in
pineapple shapes.
Rose pouted while Mama put extra wood
in the little stove in the lean-to kitchen. Then she
put in two loaves of bread to bake. They would
be ready when she and Papa came home.
Papa saddled the mares, and Mama and Papa
rode off toward town.
"Be good, Rose," Mama called out.
"Don't wander off, and watch the stove."
Rose was bored. The first thing she did was take
off her stockings and shoes. At least if she had
to stay home alone, she could go barefoot. She
put her shoes under the bed. Her feet were pale from
being cooped up all winter. She wiggled her
toes. They were happy to be free again.
"I'm not wearing shoes anymore till winter
comes again," Rose told herself out loud.
Then she went outside and sat on a stump in
the yard. She listened to the wind sighing in the
trees. Far away a train whistled, grew
close, and passed. The first tiny leaves were
sprouting, tender and blushing pale pink and yellow
and green. The air smelled fresh with the scent of
newly turned earth.
Little white butterflies fluttered here and there
in the new grass. Bumblebees butted and
buzzed, starting their nests. They landed on purple
violets, bending the delicate flowers with their
weight and nosing in them for nectar.
Goldfinches fluttered from tree to tree,
calling out their spring cheer. A robin snatched up
a tiny twig and flew away to the nest it was
building high up in a tree.
Rose was bored again, so she decided to look
at the mules. Papa had told her to stay away
from them. But Rose thought she would just give them a
little salt. The mules loved salt almost as much as
they liked the tender young blades of new grass that
were pushing up everywhere. Rose got a handful of
salt from the house.
One of the mules was bay-colored, and the other was
gray. Papa had named the bay mule Roy, for
his big brother Royal. Mama named the gray
mule Nellie, after a little girl she had
known a long time ago.
When Rose walked into the hallway of the barn,
the mules did not come to the stall gates to see
her. They stood at the backs of their stalls,
eyeing her suspiciously. Rose climbed up
on the log wall and laid the salt on top of the
low wall that separated their two stalls.
Both of the mules went straight to the salt.
Nellie got there first, and when Roy tried
to lick some, Nellie squealed horribly,
wheeled around, and kicked at the log walls with
all her might. Little chips of wood flew into the
air. Roy backed up, his ears laid back,
snapping at the air with big yellow teeth. Then
Nellie wheeled around and started licking again.
The sound of their fighting and braying and squealing was
horrible, but it struck Rose as funny, and she
shrieked with laughter. She had never seen anything
like it.
The mules fought and fought, each getting a little
lick of salt now and again, until finally all the
salt was gone. Rose had been terribly
naughty. She blushed just to think of what Mama
would say if she knew. But of course she
wouldn't.
Rose was trying to think of something else to do when
Swiney came riding up on Abe's mule,
Old Guts. Rose could hear Old Guts'
stomach rumbling as he walked. That was why they
called him Old Guts.
"Howdy, Rose," Swiney called out,
sliding off Old Guts' saddle. His foot
got caught in the stirrup and he tumbled to the
ground. Rose giggled. Swiney got up and
brushed himself off. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," said Rose. "Mama and Papa
went riding. I was playing with the mules. They were
fighting over salt. Do you want to see?"
"You bet," he said.
Rose got another handful of salt. This time the
mules smelled the salt and started fighting before she
even put it down for them. Swiney and Rose
laughed and laughed. Then, when the salt was all
gone, Swiney showed Rose how to imitate their
squeals and braying. It made the mules fight
again because they thought there was more salt.
While they were watching the mules fight,
Swiney spat a stream of brown juice onto the
ground.
"Abe lets you chew tobacco?"
Rose asked in surprise. Chewing tobacco was
a thing done by grown-up men. Mama did not
approve of a man chewing tobacco. She said it was
a disgusting habit, and once she had told Papa
he'd better think twice before he ever took it
up.
"Sure he lets me," said Swiney. "Abe
lets me do anything. He ain't my pa."
"What does it taste like? Is it good?"
Rose asked.
"It's all right, I reckon," Swiney said
with a shrug. "It's just a thing to do."
Finally they tired of the mules. "Mules are
mean," Rose said. "I like horses better.
Does Old Guts fight?"
"Naw. He's tame as a kitty-cat. I
been a-riding him since I was a baby. Want
to ride him?"
"Could I?" Rose asked eagerly.
Swiney untied Old Guts and turned him so
Rose could put her foot in the stirrup. Papa
had let Rose sit on the mares a few times,
and had led her around with the halter on Little Pet.
But she had never ridden by herself.
Rose knew how to pull herself up. She
scrambled up on top of Old Guts and
settled into the saddle. The mule turned and
looked at her with baleful eyes.
"Go on," Swiney said. "Give him a
kick."
Rose kicked her heels a little against the
mule's sides.
"Aw, come on," Swiney said. "Kick him
good."
Rose kicked harder, but Old Guts
ignored her and nibbled some grass.
Swiney picked up a stick and swatted Old
Guts on the backside with a whap!
The mule leaped into the air, tossing his head.
Rose pitched forward and her forehead hit him hard
between the ears with a clunk. Old Guts galloped
a few steps, his stomach rumbling, and then stopped
short. Rose's head spun. She climbed
trembling down from the mule's back. She wobbled
a few steps and then sat down hard.
Swiney came running. "What happened?" he
shouted.
"I hit my head," Rose groaned.
Everything was spinning.
"Uh-oh," Swiney said. "You're
looking kind of puny, Rose. I'll fetch some
water."
Rose sat there as still as she could for a long time.
Swiney brought the wooden water bucket. Rose
drank a dipperful. The cold, clean water
refreshed her. The spinning slowed down, and then she
just felt a little woozy.
"You look like a ghost, Rose," Swiney said.
Rose grinned weakly. She stood up on
wobbly legs. Swiney picked up the water
bucket and followed her to the house. Just as she
got to the lean-to door, Rose smelled
smoke. She remembered Mama's bread cooking
in the stove. Out of the corner of her eye something
made her look up.
She glanced at the chimney pipe coming out of the
lean-to roof and gasped. Little flames were licking
up from the lean-to roof, around the chimney opening.
The roof was burning! The house was on fire!
Rose's mind went black with horror.
Her breath snagged in her throat. Her legs
turned to stone. She stood there in frozen terror,
staring at the tiny orange flames that danced in the
breeze. They were growing bigger even while she
watched.
Then, suddenly, Rose snatched the bucket from
Swiney's hand.
"Say," he shouted. "What's the idea?"
Rose raced around the back of the house. She
ran to the edge of the gully where the spring was. She
tripped on a root and tumbled down the path,
splashing into the water. She got right up, scooped
a bucketful, and scrambled up the slippery,
muddy path. Her eyes stung. A sob jerked from
her throat.
Swiney stood on the roof. He had taken off
his shirt and was beating the fire with it.
"Quick, Rose!" he shouted. "Hand that bucket
up. Hurry!" He squatted and leaned over the
edge of the roof. It was low, but not low enough. The
bucket was too heavy for Rose to lift all the
way to Swiney's hand. Another sob strangled
her breath.
She poured some water out. Then she lifted the
bucket with all her strength in both hands.
Swiney barely caught the bail in his fingertips.
He heaved the bucket onto the roof with a loud
grunt. Then he poured the water all around the
chimney. Steam and smoke mingled in the sunshine.
Rose peered inside the lean-to.
Water ran sizzling down the outside of the
stovepipe. It splashed and hissed on the top
of the stove. It crackled inside the stove, where it
put out the coals. The bread was ruined.
Rose sighed a great shivery sigh. There was no
fire in the house. Only the roof had burned, and
only a little.
She slumped against the doorway and sat on the
sill. She put her face in her hands. She
began to shake all over. Then she cried.
Swiney sat down next to her. They sat there
a long time, Rose crying and Swiney saying
nothing. Finally Rose snuffled up the last of her
tears. She wiped her face with the hem of her
skirt.
"I better go," said Swiney.
Rose walked with him to Old Guts, who was
scrunching up some grass. Swine climbed up
into the saddle and looked down at Rose.
"You shouldn't cry none," he said. "It's all
right now."
"Thank you," said Rose. "You saved our
house. If you hadn't gone up on the roof. ...
I don't know how you did it ... I ... I
couldn't have reached it by myself." The thought of what
might have happened brought tears welling in her
eyes again.
"I just climbed up the logs," Swiney said,
grinning. Rose had to smile a little herself.
Now Rose waited for Mama and Papa with a
dreadful sinking feeling. They would be upset about the
fire. And Rose had been very naughty, teasing the
mules. A little bit of her even thought the fire
might have been her own fault.
Rose was afraid she would cry when she tried
to tell them. But she didn't.
"The roof caught fire from the stove," she said
as soon as Mama and Papa rode close enough
to hear. "But Swiney was here. He helped put it
out."
Mama and Papa jumped down from the horses
at the same time, their faces lined with worry.
"What! How in the world ..." Mama blurted.
She looked at the roof. Then she looked inside
the lean-to, and inside the stove.
"Are you all right, Rose?" Papa asked.
Then Rose told Mama and Papa the whole
story of that afternoon, except the part about feeding salt
to the mules. She flushed hot with shame. She
promised herself she would never do such a
terrible thing again.
When she told about knocking heads with Old
Guts, Papa guffawed loudly. Mama frowned
at him. Rose didn't know what to think.
"Now, Bess," said Papa. "I'll bet you
were some kind of shaken up, weren't you Rose?"
Rose nodded. Her forehead ached a little.
Mama bit her lip. Her eyes glimmered with
tears, and she gave Rose a hug.
"It's my fault," Mama finally said.
"Trying to save a little time by leaving that flimsy
stove hot like that. The pipe sections must have come
apart, letting the sparks get to the roof."
"Now, Bess, don't you fret so. It's just
like your ma used to say, there's no loss without some
gain. First thing, I'm going to tear down that old
lean-to and build you a real kitchen, with a proper
chimney."

The New Room

The next day Papa took the little stove out of the
lean-to. Then he and Abe tore the lean-to
away from the house, log by log. When they finished,
there was nothing left but the hard bare ground that had
been the lean-to floor, and the doorway into the
house. Papa and Abe began to build a new,
bigger room on that spot which would be the kitchen.
First they made a low stone wall, in the shape
of a large box. One side of the box was the log
house. The stone wall was the foundation. Rose and
Swiney helped find stones that Papa could fit
snugly together to make it solid and level.
On top of the foundation they made another box
by laying down four heavy squared-off logs of
white oak. That was the sill. The sill must be good
and sturdy to hold up the floor, the stove, and the
walls. The stone foundation would keep the wooden
sills from touching the ground, so they would stay dry and
season hard.
Next they laid heavy joists across the sill,
to hold up the floor.
But instead of building the walls out of logs, like
the walls of the house, Abe helped Papa
split logs into hewn clapboards. The
clapboards were rough like shingles. They were thick on
one edge and thinner on the other like shingles, too.
They weren't as fine and smooth as sawed boards.
But Papa said, "Abe is a mighty fine wood
cobbler. Those walls will stand as long as time
lasts."
"How long is that?" Rose asked.
"Nobody knows," said Papa.
While they worked, Abe sang and whistled songs
that Rose had never heard before. He called them
frolic songs.

"Lips a-like a cherry,
Cheeks a-like a rose,
How I love that little gal,
God A'mighty knows!

"Get along home, Cindy, Cindy,
Get along home, Cindy, Cindy,
Get along home, Cindy, Cindy,
I'll marry you sometime."

"Why is it called a frolic song?" Rose
wanted to know.
"On account of it's played at a frolic.
Why else?" Swiney chimed.
"What's a frolic?"
"It's a time when folks get together and dance,"
Abe said, holding a board so Papa could nail
it in place. "Of a Saturday night, some
folks will clear the beds out of their house, wax the
floor up real slick, and bid their neighbors
and friends come by for a frolic. Some fellow, like me,
comes up and fiddles, or picks the banjo. Then
they all dance till their toes are a-twiddling in
their boots."
Rose laughed and twiddled her toes.
"You never seen the like of it," said Swiney.
"If it's a real good frolic, them big boys
get to fighting over some girl."
A frolic sounded like fun. Rose wanted
to see one, although she didn't think she wanted
to see any fighting.
"Can we go, just one time?" Rose begged. "Just
to see?"
"I think that a frolic is not something for little
girls," Mama said politely.
In no time at all, the walls were up and the roof
was on. Papa left two square holes, one in
the east wall and one in the west wall. He made
two wooden doors for those holes and hung them
on leather hinges. When they were closed, the room was
very dark.
"In the fall, when it gets cold again,
we'll get you proper glass windows,"
Papa told Mama. "But for now, while it's
warm, we can leave the shutters open during the day
when you want the light."
"It's just beautiful the way it is," said
Mama, her eyes bright with pleasure.
There was a hole in the roof, too, where the
stovepipe would go. Papa said he would line the
hole with tin, so the roof could never catch fire
again.
Next Papa and Abe laid down the
floorboards on top of the heavy joists. Rose
noticed for the first time that the floor went right out the
door and made a shelf outside, in front of the
kitchen.
"The part outside is the porch," Papa said.
"Now Mama can sit out outside like a lady and
cool off on a hot summer day."
The last floorboard Papa laid down was
short, and it was in the middle of the floor. The
board had a hole in it, too, big enough to stick
your fingers in. That board was a trapdoor.
Mama could pull it up and store vegetables and
eggs in the cool space under the kitchen.
Then, the last thing, Papa took the old door
from the house and fitted it to the doorway of the new
room. Finally Rose could walk all around the
new room. She was sorry to see dirty
footprints on the bright new floor. But it was
beautiful and clean-smelling inside.
Rose noticed light peeking between the
clapboard walls.
"Won't the wind come through when it's cold?"
Rose asked Mama.
"We'll batten the walls with thin strips of
wood," said Mama. "But the stove will warm it up
when we're using it, and when we aren't, we'll be
cozy in front of the fireplace in the house."
Mama and Rose swept all the dirt and
sawdust out of the kitchen. Then they moved the table from
the house into the kitchen, and laid one of the rag
rugs over the trapdoor. Papa gathered up his
tools and began to put them away.
"What about the stove?" Mama asked.
"It's getting late and I've got to feed and
water the mares and mules," said Papa. "The
weather's good. Why don't you cook outside?
We'll move the stove tomorrow, after breakfast."
"Very well," said Mama. "But it isn't a very
big job. It's just a small stove."
The next morning after breakfast,
Papa said he had a load of fence rails
to deliver in town. He was gone most of the morning.
Mama and Rose hoed the garden to make new rows
where they would plant beans and squash. Crows had
been digging in the potato hills, eating the seed
potatoes. So they had to cut and plant more.
"I wonder what can be keeping him?" Mama
said as they worked. "I've got my dough ready
to bake. But I don't want to start a fire in
the stove if we're going to move it."
Finally, just as Mama had decided to go ahead and
start dinner, they heard the wagon splashing across the
ford on Wolf Creek and rumbling up the hill.
Fido raced down the wagon tracks to meet it.
The mares were grunting and slipping on the flinty
stones, trying to pull the wagon. Papa had
draped the oilcloth covers over something in the
wagon-box, which rode low on its springs.
"I wonder what that could be," said Mama,
mopping her forehead with the hem of her apron. She
laid down her hoe and followed the wagon.
Papa drove right up to the kitchen porch and
whoa-ed the horses. He set the brake and
jumped down. A grin crinkled his mouth.
"I can see you've got something up your
sleeve," Mama said. "What is it?"
Papa climbed into the wagon-box and pulled
off the oilcloth covers. Mama's mouth flew
open. Sitting there, still half in its crate, was a
brand-new cast-iron stove. Papa crossed his
arms and waited for Mama to speak.
"Oh, Manly!" Mama cried out finally.
Her hand flew to her mouth.
"It isn't the best stove money can buy,"
Papa said proudly. "But when I do a thing, I
do it right. It's got a hot water reservoir.
Now you can heat water and cook at the same time!"
The stove was beautiful. A pattern of
sprigged flowers and leaves spread all over the
doors. The nickel knobs and pins gleamed in the
sunlight.
Rose waited for Mama's face to melt
into happiness. But her mouth was tight, and her
forehead furrowed. Finally she said, simply,
"No."
Papa's eyes widened. "No?" he said.
"Yes," said Mama, more firmly this time. "I
mean no. I mean, you must take it back."
"What in tarnation?" Papa said.
"We cannot afford the expense," said
Mama. "It's that simple. I couldn't bear
to cook on it knowing we had gone into debt for it.
You know how I feel. You will just have to take it
back. I'm sorry. I know you only meant
to please. But no."
Papa stared at Mama in disbelief. Rose
held her breath. She had never heard Mama
speak so to Papa.
"Now just a durn minute," Papa said,
jumping down from the wagon. "I went to no end of
trouble trading with Reynolds for fence rails and
railroad ties. Prices are high now.
There's never been a better time. One way or
another, I'll pay for the blasted thing. Now quit
this foolishness and let's get on with unloading
it."
"Manly Wilder, you won't talk me
into anything by cussing," Mama said. Rose
flinched. "You can unload it yourself. You can install
it yourself. But I'll cook in the fireplace like
my ma did before I'll cook on that stove.
It's a sinful, wasteful extravagance for folks
as poor as us.
"I have a perfectly good stove already," she
said, pointing to the little tin stove sitting near the
porch. "How can we ever get ahead if we keep
going deeper and deeper in debt?"
Now Papa's face was deeply creased between the
eyes. He stared at Mama for a long moment.
"Dash it all, Bess!" he shouted. "Hang
the expense. What's the difference if we owe an
extra twenty dollars? It may as well be
two hundred. If we can't pay it,
Reynolds will give us more time. But I gave my
word and I don't aim to take it back."
Mama took a step back. "I just--" she
began to say. But Papa's earnest voice
drove on.
"See here," he said, "it's been more than
fifteen years since I set out to find my
fortune on the frontier. We can't live like
sodbusters all our lives, letting the land grind
us down year after year. I wouldn't wear out a
dumb horse that way, not for any reason.
"Why should I let you wear yourself down, bending and
slaving over a flimsy stove, worrying yourself
half to death about fire? By jiminy, sometimes I
..."
Then Papa ran out of words. He took his
hat off and threw it to the ground, hard as
he could. It landed with a puff of dust. Then he
took a big breath, picked it up, and brushed it
off.
"I've got work to do," he muttered. He
turned and stalked off to the barn, forgetting
to unhitch the team. Mama looked after him with a
long face. Her hands wrung each other. Then
she walked slowly into the kitchen.
Rose was dumbfounded. She had never seen
Mama and Papa quarreling so. She had never
heard Papa speak so forcefully. She didn't
know what to think, or do, or say.
Even the horses seemed stunned, standing still as
statues. Fido looked at Rose, his head
cocked in a question. Then he trotted off to the barn
after Papa. The yard filled with a terrible silence.
A gloom thickened around Rose and pressed
down on her. She yearned to go off somewhere where she
could be alone, and think. But she knew she shouldn't.
Now was a time to be extra good, and quiet as a
mouse.
She gathered kindling to cook dinner. She laid
it next to the little camp stove where it sat outside
near the porch. The sound of rattling pots came
from the kitchen. Presently Papa came and
unhitched the horses. After he led them away,
Mama came out and lit a fire in the little stove.

Chickens

Dinner was dreadful. Mama and Papa did not
speak to each another. Rose could not enjoy the
beautiful new kitchen. The cozy clatter of
dishes and utensils could not defeat the silence.
Papa ate quickly and left to go work in the timber
lot. Mama sighed after he had walked out the
door.
"Well," Mama said after they had washed and
dried the dishes. "It's time we cleaned out the
henhouse. Two of the chickens have gone broody and
I think one of them has stolen her nest out somewhere.
Maybe you can find it for me."
Rose called Fido to help. She looked in
the bushes near the house first. When Rose got
down on her hands and knees to peek under them,
Fido thought it was a game. He sniffed around the
other side from where Rose was peering, a
quizzical look on his face.
Then she hunted around the outside of the barn, and
under a pile of brush that was left from when the
barn had been built in the fall. But she found
no nests.
It was wonderful to be outside. In the cabin the
hearth fire had gone out for the last time. There were no
more ashes to carry or wood to gather in the slushy
mud and snow of winter. The door and windows stood
wide to the spring. The log walls were no longer a
shelter, but a prison opening to freedom with every
dawn.
Spring was hazy on the Ozark hills. The
skeletons of the trees were covering themselves in
leaves. The brown slopes were burying themselves under
drifts of green. White-oak leaves hung in
rich masses. Blackjack leaves glittered in
the morning sun. Little nuts were forming on the tufted
walnuts.
The ground had finally begun to dry out. The dust
of the path by the spring branch was velvety cool
to Rose's bare feet. In the sunshine the flints
were warm.
Papa had fenced in a small pasture, and the
horses and mules had been turned out to graze.
Baby quail were hatching. Squirrels and
rabbits had their little ones.
Rose could not find the hen's nest.
"Either way, she'll show up one of these days with
her babies," said Mama. "She's got
awfully good sense. She has never lost a single
chick for me. And Fido is such a good dog, he
will watch out for her as well."
Next they cleaned out the henhouse. They swept
out all the dirty litter from the floor. They
emptied all the old straw out of the nest boxes that
hung on the henhouse wall. Mama took out the
roosting perches. She dabbed coal oil on the
perches and in the cracks in the walls of the henhouse
to kill lice and mites.
Then they put down a blanket of fresh
leaves, mixed with wood chips and sawdust.
Mama put fresh straw in all the nest boxes.
She showed Rose how to make sure each nest had
a cozy little hollow in the middle.
"It should be deep enough so the eggs won't roll
off to the side and get cold," Mama explained.
"But not so deep that a clumsy hen will step on the
eggs and break them."
Then she brought two white china doorknobs from
the house that she had kept in one of the trunks.
She set one in each of two nests. The hens would
think they were eggs and lay their eggs in with
them, instead of hiding them in the woods.
"That old rooster is starting to wear out," Mama
said, looking over the flock as she fed them their
ration of corn. "I'll have to find a young one.
Maybe I can trade some chicks with Mrs.
Stubbins. She has such nice Leghorns."
Rose thought chickens were not very smart and,
except for roosters with their shimmering colored
feathers, not pretty to look at. She couldn't
play with them, or teach them tricks.
"Mama, why do you like chickens so well?"
Rose asked. "They take so much care."
"A chicken is a miracle of nature," said
Mama. "And the salvation of any farm. A hen
asks very little: a dry, safe place to sleep at
night, sunlight, fresh air, water, some mash
every day, and a place to scratch for worms and bugs
and grasshoppers.
"In return, she is a factory for food.
She gives us eggs for nearly two years. She
gives us young pullets to fry up for Sunday
dinner. And when she is old and tired, she cooks
into a delicious stew with dumplings.
"Just think of it; a good chicken will lay an egg
every day. Now I have twenty hens. If they lay a
dozen eggs each day, and Mr. Reynolds will
give nine cents the dozen, how much is that after a
week?"
Rose was better at reading and writing than at
arithmetic. She had to think a minute before she
answered, "Sixty-two cents?"
"Sixty-three cents," Mama corrected.
"Now, how much do you think that is after a month?"
That was too complicated a problem. "Two
dollars and more than four bits," Mama said.
Rose looked at her in surprise.
"And in a year," Mama said, as she showed
Rose how to multiply again, "that makes about
thirty dollars."
Rose thought for a moment. Then she cried out,
"Mama, that's more than the cost of the stove!"
The shadow of a frown flickered in Mama's
blue eyes. Then she brushed away the numbers
she had drawn in the dust.
"Yes, it is," she said. "But chickens are not
predictable. They get sick, and remember last
winter when that owl carried off my best layer? There
are hawks waiting to carry off the spring
pullets, and snakes to steal the eggs. And besides,
we have many other things to pay for.
"Well, never mind about that now. Let's get
back to work on the garden. We need to get those
fence rails up if we're to keep the chickens from
eating it up."
While they were working, Papa came back to the
house with Abe. They climbed up into the wagon
where it still stood by the porch. Rose tried not
to stare, but she couldn't help it. Papa and Abe
slid the cast-iron stove out of the wagon. Then
they dragged it across the porch, into the kitchen.
After that, there was nothing to see. But Rose heard
the sound of metal banging, and hammering. After a
time, the round chimney pipe poked up through the roof
hole Papa had made and lined with tin. Rose
stole sidelong glances at Mama, but Mama
never looked up at the house. She just kept
working, lifting fence rails and fitting them together.
When it was time for supper, Mama built a
fire in the tin stove outside. Supper was almost
as quiet as dinner had been. Only now, sitting
in a corner of the kitchen was the shiny new stove.
Rose dared not open the heavy iron doors, or
lift any of the four covers on top.
When she had finished helping Mama with the
dishes, Rose went to the barn in the gathering
twilight to watch Papa doing his evening chores.
He pitched fresh straw into the stables.
"How's my little prairie Rose tonight?" said
Papa. "How do you like that new stove?"
Rose's face grew warm. She stammered from
not knowing what to say.
"That's all right," said Papa, setting down the
pitchfork. "I must have given you quite a fright, carrying
on so. were you scared?"
"A little," Rose said. "You never did that
before."
"No, I never did," said Papa, his eyes
wrinkling into a smile. "Hopefully never will again.
Your mama's strong-willed, is all. Always
was. Fact is, it's what I liked about her from
the first. She's got spunk and spirit."
Then Papa looked at Rose with mirth in his
eyes. "If you can keep it a secret, I'll
tell you a nickname your grandpa used to call
Mama."
"What!" Rose shouted with a giggle.
"Shhhh!" Papa shushed. "You must keep it a
secret."
"I will," Rose whispered loudly.
"Just between us?" he said.
"Yes!" Rose nearly squealed.
"Flutterbudget," Papa said.
"What?"
"Flutterbudget," said Papa again. "When
your mama was young and she'd get her dander up, your
grandpa teased her by calling her
Flutterbudget."
Rose giggled. She couldn't imagine
anybody calling Mama such a funny name. But
she thought it sounded a little like Mama. Rose liked
it.
"All right, now," said Papa with a wink.
"That's the last word on the subject."
"But can we keep the stove?" Rose asked.
"That's for Mama to decide," said Papa.
"We must wait and see."
Rose walked back to the house. Just as she was
about to walk into the kitchen, she heard the metal
clank of a stove door closing. When she walked
in, Mama was patting down her apron and looking
around as if she had lost something.
"Here, Rose," she said, snatching the broom
from its place in the corner. "Sweep out the
kitchen. Then it's time for your lessons."
Rose's heart grew lighter with each swish
of the broom. Having a secret with Papa made
her feel grown-up. She understood that everything would
turn out all right.

Going Fishing

Rose woke in the fresh dawn to a chorus of
birdsong and clattering stove lids. She
smelled wood smoke, coal oil, and coffee.
She heard the crackling sound of a fire. Her
eyes popped open.
Rose leaped out of bed and threw off her
nightgown. She wriggled into her dress and peered
around the corner of the door. On the table, sprouting
from a glass jar, was a beautiful bouquet of
flowers.
Mama was bent over in front of the new stove,
poking a stick of wood into the firebox.
Sour-milk biscuits sizzled in a hot
greased pan. Rose's heart jumped for joy.
"Good morning, Rose," Mama said
cheerfully. "Look at the flowers Papa picked
this morning."
The bouquet was lovely. There was a thin,
twisted tree branch of white
cross-shaped flowers. The outer edge of each
petal was tinged reddish-brown, and the middle had a
cluster of tiny seeds. "What's that?" Rose
asked.
Mama said it was a kind of tree. "I've
never seen it before," she said. "Papa said it grows
down in the woods, on the other side of the timber
lot."
There were tiny purple violets in the bouquet,
and pink-edged spring beauties, and delicate
yellow buttercups, and blushing purple
blossoms of some sort, and sweet williams.
The flowers and birdsong and the cozy warmth of the new
stove in the corner made a merry breakfast.
Mama and Papa did not speak of the stove, but when
Papa came in to eat, he looked at Rose and
winked.
After breakfast, Mama put a dried-apple
pie to bake in the oven. They would take it with them
to church the next day. Mama was also going to bake
a chicken pie, the next morning.
Sunday was Decoration Day and there would be a
church picnic. Rose jumped for joy. A
picnic, with Paul and George!
"It isn't just for having fun," Mama said.
"Decoration Day is when the church members weed
and tidy up the graveyard. But it will be fun,
too," she added.
Papa helped Mama and Rose finish the fence
around the garden. They wove sticks through the lower
rails to keep out rabbits and groundhogs. The
sun was bright, and soon the day grew warm and smothery
like summer.
Papa made a little log gate for the garden fence
that fastened with a loop of rope on the top. When
they were done, the garden looked very safe. No
wild hogs could get in to root up the tender young
plants.
Then Mama stretched pieces of string between the
fence tops, across the garden. She tied scraps of
cloth to the strings. The fluttering scraps would
scare away crows and other birds.
At noon, when it was time for dinner, they were all
hot and thirsty. When they sat down to eat,
Papa had a surprise.
"How would you girls like to go fishing this afternoon?"
"Fishing?" Rose had never been.
"Abe says he knows a good spot up on
Wolf Creek," said Papa. "I could do with some
fresh fish for a change."
So Papa hitched the mares to the wagon and they
drove past the Kinnebrews' farm. Abe and
Swiney were waiting for them at the end of the lane,
by the wagon track. Abe was carrying his fiddle.
As soon as they had climbed into the wagon box,
he plucked the strings, tuning it up. Swiney
got out his knife and sharpened it. Fido sat on
Mama's lap where he could see everything better.
"I thought you folks might fancy a bit of
music to pass the while," said Abe.
"That would be wonderful," Mama said. Abe
drew the bow and began to play a lively song with
simple words they could learn right away.

"Lark in the morning, sailing from her nest,
Lark in the morning, sailing from her nest,
Lark in the morning, sailing from her nest,
Dew-drops falling from her snow-white breast.

"The higher she flies the sweeter she'll sing,
The higher she flies the sweeter she'll sing,
The higher she flies the sweeter she'll sing,
And we'll all turn back to the green fields
again."

Their voices rang out through the bare trees. The
strong light made a lacy pattern through the tiny
spring leaves. If Rose squinted her eyes,
the woods looked like fall. But the gentle warm
breeze and drowsy scent of the growing earth spoke
only of the coming summer.
On the limbs of the still-bare oaks the wise
squirrels ran fearlessly, frisking tails and
cocking saucy eyes. Fido's ears perked up,
and the squirrels scolded, "Chit! Chit!
Chit!"
Then the wagon passed trees blooming a
purple haze. Those were the same flowers in
Mama's bouquet. Abe said it was redbud. The
little blossoms were bunched up all along the
branches. Up close they looked like swarms of
little purple bees with delicate pink wings.
Here and there in low places stood a few short
trees with twisting branches, lighting the forest with
snowy drifts of blossom. Those were the white
flowers in Mama's bouquet.
"That there's dogwood," said Abe.
Finally the road ran by a large, deep stream
and the wagon stopped. That was Wolf Creek.
Great tall trees lined the banks.
Their tangled roots, like gnarled toes, stuck out
of the mud at the water's edge. A flock of
brown birds that had been pecking in the mud flew
up into the trees. Their bottoms flashed white.
Their open wings showed golden yellow.
In a swampy place next to the creek,
Abe showed them where a grove of cane grew.
Swiney used his sharp knife to cut everyone one of
those slender trees. The cane stems had little
knuckles on them, and they were hollow inside.
They stripped all the delicate branches and
feathery leaves from the cane. Papa and Abe tied
long pieces of heavy sewing thread on the ends.
Close to the ends of the threads they tied little bits
of wood. Then they tied hooks on the ends of the
threads.
Swiney showed Rose how to find bait. That was
a game. They peeked under old rotting logs and
found pale grubs, and slithery worms, and
small slippery salamanders. Fido played,
too. He pawed through the rotted soil, sniffing and
sneezing.
Swiney took a worm and poked his hook through
it. The worm squirmed and fought to get away, but
it was stuck there.
"Here," Swiney said, giving Rose a worm.
"Stick your hook in real good."
The worm waved and writhed in Rose's fingers,
making itself short and fat, then long and thin. She
hated the feel of it. She hated to hurt the worm
by sticking the hook through it. She tried, but the worm
kept slithering away. It stretched and stretched
until it was impossibly skinny. She jabbed
at it, but the hook stuck her finger instead.
"Let me help you with that," said Papa. He
took the worm in his hand, andwitha flick of his fingers
the worm was wriggling on the hook.
Now they spread out along the bank to fish.
Mama sat on an old log, pushed her
bonnet back, and watched. "It's so peaceful
here," she said. "I'm perfectly content to sit and
enjoy it."
Rose stood on the bank, at the edge of the
water, and dropped her line in.
"Not like that," said Swiney. "The fish can see
you. You got to be sneaky or they ain't going
to bite. Come on."
They walked a little way upstream along the
broad deep creek, hiding like Indians behind the
bushes and logs along the banks. Then
Swiney told Rose to hunch down. When they were
almost flat on the ground, Swiney said, "Just
crawl up close, but keep your head down. Then
whip your pole over and let the hook fall in."
Rose flicked her pole back, and then
forward. She felt something pulling right away. She
peeked to see if the hook had fallen in the
creek. But the thread was pointing behind her. Then she
felt it, tugging in her dress. Swiney unstuck
her and showed her how to cast her bait.
Finally, they were really fishing.
"How do you know if you caught one?" Rose
asked.
Swiney laughed. "You'll know," he said. "The
little hunk of wood starts to bob. Then the fish
yanks your line like he's a-going to drag you right in
the water." Rose grabbed the pole tightly with
both hands.
They lay there in the leaves. Rose was
impatient. She peered over the edge of the bank.
Her line disappeared into the water. The piece of
wood floated calmly. She lifted up, to see
if there were any fish on the hook. But there was
only the worm, still wriggling. She sighed and
dropped it back in. Then she picked it up
again. Still no fish. Downstream she could hear the low
voices of Papa and Mama and Abe. She
checked again. Nothing but the worm. Now it was
limp.
Rose noticed a blood blister on her
wrist that had not been there a moment ago. The
blood blister wriggled a little. It had legs!
Rose had to scrape and scrape at it to scrape
off that flat brown bug. Swiney said it was a
tick.
Rose scratched a bite on her leg. She
watched spots of sunlight dancing on the water.
Dead leaves floated lazily by. A breeze
stirred, roughing up the water's surface.
Rose lifted her pole again. This time something
pulled back. She jerked the pole hard. Something
was holding it down.
"I got one! I got one!" Rose shouted.
She could hardly breathe, she was so excited. She
stood up and yanked as hard as she could. Then
Swiney helped. He took the pole and pulled.
"Wait a minute," he said. He waded into the
creek and fished around in the water with his hand. Then
he pulled up Rose's hook. At the end was a
stick, covered with dead leaves. The
worm was gone.
"Let's go upstream, where that old dead tree
is hanging out over the water," said Swiney.
"Them fish cain't look up and there won't be no
sticks out there."
Now they sat out high over the water and dropped
their lines into Wolf Creek. Rose liked
fishing better when she could see the whole creek.
She could see Abe and Papa fishing way
downstream. In a shallow place, Fido was
catching a fish that was trapped on a gravel bar.
He grabbed it in his mouth and trotted off into the
woods to eat it.
Abe had caught a fish and was taking it off the
hook. Then he held it up by its tail. The
dripping silver fish flashed like a knife blade
in firelight.
Rose could see the dark shadows of fish
swimming in the creek. She could even see fish
come to look at her hook. But none of them wanted
it.
She looked out on the creek. A fallen log
on the far bank was covered with bumps. The bumps
were turtles, lined up in a row, sunning themselves and
catching flies.
Suddenly, right behind them on the bank, Rose
heard a loud splash. A long, slinky brown
creature climbed up on the mud. It had
beautiful shiny-wet fur on its arched back, and a
pointed face, and whiskers. It shook itself like a
dog. Then it looked around and scampered off into the
woods.
"What was that?" Rose asked.
"Mink," said Swiney. "He's scared the fish
away. Maybe we can catch something by noodling."
"Noodling?" Rose asked.
"I'll show you," said Swiney.
He climbed down from the dead tree and walked
along the creek bank to a log that had fallen
into the water. Rose watched from her perch.
"Sometimes the fish hide in here," he said.
Swiney rolled his pants up and waded into the
water along the log. When he got to the hollow
end, he climbed up and sat on the log. Then
he leaned over and stuck his hand under the water, into the
hollow part.
He reached around inside for a moment.
"Cain't feel nothing," he said. "Wait!
I think there's something in there!"
He leaned over, to get his hand farther
in. "Something's in there!" he shouted. His head was
almost in the water, he had to reach so far in.
Then he shouted, "Got it!" He pulled his
hand out of the water. Something was writhing in the splashing
water. It was long and ...
"Look out!" Rose shouted. "It's a
snake!" Swiney had it by the tail.
"Jiminy!" Swiney screeched. He flung
the snake away from him. It landed in the water with a
plop. Then it swam wriggling away across the
creek, its head poking out of the water.
Swiney stumbled and splashed out of the creek.
He clambered up onto the bank, his eyes big
and round. He was shaking. He looked at his hands
and his arms. But the snake had not bitten him.
"Jiminy!" he said again. "I ain't never
noodled no snake before. Jiminy!"
Rose was watching Swiney so intently, she
didn't notice the tugging on her fishing pole.
Then, all of a sudden, it nearly jumped out of her
hands. She grabbed tight.
Her line slashed the water, this way and that. She
could see the shadow of the fish. Its bright belly
sparkled as it turned and fought the hook.
"I got one!" she shrieked.
She yanked on her pole, but that fish fought
hard. The pole bent way over until she thought
it might break. The fish dashed out into the middle
of the creek. Rose gripped the tree trunk with
her legs to keep from falling off.
"Don't jerk so hard!" Swiney shouted. "The
hook will come out."
The fish fought and fought, but soon it tired and
floated near the surface. Then Rose swung
her pole over by the bank, where Swiney grabbed the
line and unhooked it. It was a big fish with
beautiful gold and blue scales and wide
surprised-looking eyes. Swiney strung it through
the gill on a piece of vine.
Rose ran downstream, carrying the still flopping
fish by the piece of vine. "Papa, Mama,
look!" she shouted.
"You got yourself a pretty little smallmouth
there," said Abe.
Rose showed the fish to Mama and Papa. "That
will make good eating tonight," Papa said. Rose
beamed. He took the fish and strung it with the fish
he had caught. Rose counted. She and Papa
had caught seven fish! And Abe had caught
five fish for himself and Swiney. Swiney
hadn't caught any.
Rose was proud as a gander. It made her
feel good to help put food on their table.
They all fished a little while longer, but the fish
had stopped biting. Finally Papa said it was time
they got back to do chores.
He put all the fish in the keg he had
brought, with water to keep them fresh. Then they all
climbed back in the wagon and drove home.
Great piles of white clouds mounted in the hazy
blue sky. The air seemed to press down, hot
and sticky.
"Looks like we might get some rain," said
Mama. "We could use it, too. The garden is
drying out."
"Most likely it'll be a gully-washer,
too," said Abe. "I seen a couple snakes
heading for high ground this morning. And the rocks in
my corn patch was a-sweating dew. Them is
sure signs a good rain is a-coming."
"We had better hurry and get the chores
done soon as we get home," said Mama.
Rose pulled the string of fish out of the barrel of
water, to see her fish again. She knew exactly
which was the one she had caught.
"Sakes alive. That's the fourth time you've
looked, Rose," Mama said. "You're going
to wear those poor fish out before I get a chance
to clean them."
Abe tuned his fiddle again and began to play and
sing. The song was a story.

"Down in the Missouri mountains
Far from the cares of the world,
Stood Dan Kelly's son and he leaned on his
gun,
Thinking of Zeb Turney's gal

"Dan was a hotblooded youngster,
His paw raised him sturdy and right.
A gun he had worn since the day he was born,
To shoot every Turney on sight."

The sky darkened and the wind picked up as they
dropped Abe and Swiney off at the
Kinnebrews'. Papa hurried the horses,
to beat the coming storm home.
The Flood

Papa unhitched the team and put the horses in
the barn. Then he brought the mules in from the little
pasture.
The sky closed in, shutting out the last rays
of sunlight. The forest grew dim and murky with
an early dusk. The undersides of the dark clouds
boiled. Thunder grumbled in the distance. Rose's
heart beat with a strange excitement, and she felt
feverishly hot. The sound of beating wings startled
her. She looked up to see a flock of crows
fleeing before the storm.
"It smells like hail," Mama said.
"Let's get the chickens inside."
She rattled a spoon in a bowl the way she
always did at feeding time. The chickens came
running with their necks stretched out, flapping their
wings. Soon the yard was alive with scratching,
quarreling, cackling chickens.
Rose helped Mama herd them into the henhouse.
Just as the last chicken went in, Fido burst out
barking from behind the large rock at the head of the
spring. A moment later, Mama's missing hen
strutted into the yard, all ruffled and cackling
loudly. Behind her, running to keep up, was a little
parade of fluffy chicks, eleven in all. Behind
them was Fido, herding them toward the henhouse!
"What a good dog!" Mama exclaimed. "The
rain might have washed the poor things away. But the
baby chicks are too little to sleep in the
henhouse."
She caught the hen and put her in the wire
coop. The hen growled and pecked Mama's hand.
But when the little peeping chicks crowded in around her,
she sat down and preened herself.
Mama laid down old newspapers in a
corner of the kitchen. Then she set the coop on
top of the newspapers. She put in a bowl of
water and another bowl with cornmeal. The chicks
crowded into the bowl, trampling the cornmeal and
peeping excitedly.
"We will keep them in the kitchen until the
weather clears up," Mama said.
The black clouds tumbled and rolled. The wind
began to bend the tree branches and thrash the young
leaves. The first drops of rain spattered dark
spots in the dust as Rose raced to bring in
extra stove wood.
Papa tipped the rain barrel over to dump out
the old, stale water. Then he put it
where it could catch rain running off the roof. Mama
did not like to wash with spring water. Rain made
better suds and it took less soap.
When all the animals were safe and snug and there
was plenty of stove wood piled up on the porch,
they all went inside and shut the door. Fido
turned around three times and curled up next to the
stove.
Rose peeked out the glass window in the house.
A tongue of lightning licked at Patterson's
Hill just across the valley. The thunder boomed
loudly. It seemed caught among the hills,
unable to escape, rolling and echoing. Then the rain
came rushing into the valley. It drummed loudly
on the roof and poured off like water from a boot.
It beat so hard that Rose barely heard
Mama call her to help with supper. Then hail
fell, rattling as though someone were throwing rocks
on the roof. The wind howled through the trees. It
clawed at the walls and rattled the shutters in the
kitchen. It shrieked down the chimney. It
banged the damper in the stove.
The wild sounds of the storm made Rose
shiver. She wanted to climb into bed and pull the
covers over her head.
"It's just a rainstorm, Rose," Mama
nearly had to shout. "Come and help me clean these
fish."
Mama cut off all the heads. There were two
perch, four fat catfish with long whiskers, and
Rose's smallmouth bass. Mama showed Rose
how to clean out the insides. Then she let Rose
scrape the scales off the bass she had caught.
The scales sparkled like jewels in the
lamplight.
Mama sprinkled cornmeal on the cleaned
pieces and fried them in drippings in the
skillet. When they had turned golden brown,
she put them on the serving plate and sprinkled a
few drops of vinegar over them. Then she fried
the wild greens she had picked that day at Wolf
Creek. The last thing she did was make a flour
gravy to sop up with corn bread.
Finally they ate the delicious, delicate
fish. It melted in Rose's mouth. She was
hungry, and she ate and ate to fill the emptiness
inside her.
The hail stopped and only rain pounded on the
roof all through supper. The dampness made the
house stuffy. But the wind was blowing too
hard to open the door or the shutters. They could
hear broken branches and twigs rattling and
sliding down the roof.
It was Saturday, so after dinner they took their
baths. Rose always bathed first. Mama set the
tub near the stove and filled it partway with warm
water. The splash of the water pouring into the tub and the
splash of the rain pouring on the earth were one sound in
Rose's ears.
Papa went into the bedroom to read a letter he had
gotten from his sister, Rose's Aunt Eliza.
When Rose was done and Mama had checked her
neck and ears, Mama freshened the bath with warm
water from the reservoir. When she had finished
bathing, she freshened it again for Papa. Papa
always took his bath last, because he was the dirtiest.
While Papa bathed in the kitchen, Rose
looked out the window of the bedroom again. She rubbed
a little clear spot in the fog that had collected
on the glass. It was pitch black outside,
except now and then when a flash of lightning showed
the trees bending and flailing in the wind. After that
all she could see was running drops of rain, and
light reflected from the lamp on the mantel.
Rose noticed a new sound, a roaring.
"What is that?" Rose asked.
Mama listened. "It must be the spring, flooding
from all the rain."
When Papa was done bathing, Rose played with the
baby chicks. She cupped one of the tiny
trembling creatures in her hand. It peeped
loudly for its mother. Then the warmth of her hand made
it drowsy. It blinked sleepily and looked up
at her, its little head bobbing. Rose could feel
its fragile, bony body and its rapid breath
through the downy ball of its feathers.
Then she kissed its head and set it on the
floor. The chick peeped and tottered about
comically. It walked right in front of Fido's
head, which was resting on his paws. The chick looked
at Fido and peeped at him. Fido's ears
perked up and he sniffed at it. Just then the chick
pecked Fido's nose. Fido jerked back in
surprise. He looked at Rose with a startled
face that made Rose laugh.
"That bullheaded sister of mine is trying
to talk my whole family into moving
to Louisiana," Papa said. "She's so
determined, she just might do it, too."
"I suppose Eliza Jane is a
bit lonely, down there by herself with a new husband,"
said Mama. "And now with a baby due."
"She's already talked my little brother,
Perley, into it. He's on his way there now
by boat down the Mississippi, from
Minnesota," said Papa. "He's going to be a
rice farmer. Now she wants the rest of us
to move down there as well."
"We're staying where we are," Mama said
firmly. "I have moved enough times, and left behind enough
gardens for the rabbits, for three lives. Wherever
would she get the idea we would even consider it?"
"You know Eliza," said Papa. "She was your
teacher once. Nobody has to give Eliza
Jane any ideas. She's got plenty all on
her own. I wouldn't be surprised if my mother and
father took her up on it, too."
Just before bedtime, Papa lit the lantern and went
to check the barn. It was still raining hard. When he
came back he had a worried look on his
face.
"This is a bad storm," he said. "The whole
ground is running like a river. There are a lot of
tree limbs blown down. Fry Creek is
over its banks."
They went to bed with an uneasy feeling. The
rain lashed the window. The roaring of the spring and the
creek was loud now. Rose was tired, but the
drumming on the roof kept her awake.
She had just drifted off when the squeak of the
lantern globe woke her up. Papa struck a
match to light it. Mama was looking out the window.
Her forehead was knobby with worry.
"Is it morning?" Rose asked.
"No," said Papa. "I heard a noise.
I'm going to take a look."
Papa had been gone only a few moments when
he came back in. His shoes were muddy and water
poured off his hat. He shook himself like a sparrow.
"It's the henhouse," he said in a grim
voice. "A tree fell on it."
"Oh, no!" cried Mama. "Is it bad?"
"I'm afraid so," said Papa. "We'll have
to move them into the barn. Otherwise they may drown
in this downpour, or catch a chill at the least."
"Get dressed, Rose," Mama said quickly.
Rose hurriedly pulled on her dress.
Then she and Mama followed Papa out the door,
into the driving rain and the inky blackness. Big
drops of rain stung her face, like
bullets fired by the wind. In an instant she was
soaked to the skin. The wind howled in the trees.
The rushing water of the spring roared in her ears.
She could feel mud squishing between her bare
toes. The air smelled like newly plowed earth and
freshly cut wood.
It was just a few steps to the henhouse. When the
circle of lantern light fell on it, Rose
gasped. A great tree had toppled over, right
onto the roof. The sturdy little henhouse was crushed
in half. The tree trunk blocked the door.
She could hear the chickens squawking inside.
Papa fetched the ax and two-handled saw from the
barn. Rose held the lantern while he and
Mama sawed the tree in half. When they had
cut almost all the way through the trunk, there was a
loud cracking sound. The trunk twisted and began
to roll off the henhouse toward Mama. The
chickens squawked in fright. The henhouse leaned as
if it were going to fall on her.
Rose tried to shout, "Look out!" But the
water ran off her hair, down her nose, and
into her open mouth. Nothing came out.
"Watch it, Bess!" Papa shouted.
At the last moment, Mama jumped out of the
way. The tree trunk splashed in the mud right
at her feet. The henhouse walls sagged. Now
it was not a henhouse anymore. It was an old
pile of wet logs.
Papa and Mama began to pull loose logs
away, one at a time. When they had made a
hole in the pile of logs, Papa took the
lantern and looked in. Over his shoulder Rose
could see some chickens huddled in a pile.
Papa began to hand chickens out to Mama, one
at a time. Mama gave the first two to Rose.
"Take these and wait for me," she said. The
chickens were soaked and muddy and they smelled
rank. They were too terrified to struggle or
flap their wings. Rose took one in each arm.
Then Mama took three in her arms, and Papa
picked up three more.
Then he held up the lantern and they walked
through the squishy mud and pools of water to the barn.
The wavering light lit the faces of the horses and
mules and shone in their dark eyes as they poked their
curious heads over the stall gates to see.
Papa set the wet hens in the damp straw on
the hallway floor.
"We had best put them in the loft where
they'll be safe and dry," he said. He climbed
partway up the ladder. Then Mama handed him the
chickens and he set each one in the soft, dry
hay.
Then they went back for more. They made three
trips altogether. They saved seventeen of Mama's
hens. The old rooster was dead, and so were six of the
young chickens.
"Thank goodness we kept the baby chicks
inside," said Mama. "They never would have gotten
through it."
When they were finished they walked by the spring
to look. The lantern light was too weak to reach
across the gully, but they could see foamy water
boiling halfway up the sides.
"Be careful!" Mama shouted. "It's
slippery here." She pushed Rose away from the
edge with her hand. Rose was astonished to see how
high up the thrashing water reached. The rain had
turned the purling little spring into an angry
torrent.
Then they walked down the wagon tracks toward
Fry Creek. Rose could not see into the
blackness. But when they had walked only
halfway, she heard an even deeper, more
terrifying roar. She noticed a wet, slapping,
gurgling sound. Then, suddenly, her feet were in
water!
"Mama! Papa! Look!" Rose cried out.
Fry Creek, which Rose could usually walk
across in her bare feet, had climbed all that way
up the wagon tracks toward the house. They stared
into the darkness. All they could see in the lantern
light was the black, rippling water. It lapped
against the nearest tree trunks and foamed around the
bushes. Rose could not picture it, but she knew
the valley must be one great river! They would never
get to Decoration Day now.
Somewhere out in that horrible flood they heard the
piteous bawling of a cow. Rose shivered.
"Do you think we're in any danger?" Mama
shouted. "It's awfully high. Maybe we should
move the livestock up the ridge."
"No," Papa said. "We're safe up here.
But I better check on the neighbors when it's
light. I reckon some of them will need help."


Baby Birds

Mama made an early breakfast in the dark.
As soon as the first smudge of light showed in the
window, Papa saddled one of the mules and rode
off toward Kinnebrew's.
"If anybody needs a hand today, it'll be the
folks downstream," he said. Mr. Stubbins'
farm was upstream, on higher ground.
Mama and Rose hurriedly washed the dishes.
Then they went outside to look at the flooded
land. Shattered tree limbs lay everywhere on the
ground. It was still raining, though more gently now than
during the night. The rain barrel overflowed.
Fog and mist hung in the treetops. The voice
of the wind was stilled.
The henhouse was ruined, a pile of rubble.
Mama fed and watered the chickens in the hallway
of the barn.
"This is a bother," said Mama. "They were so
stirred up last night they probably won't
lay for a week."
The garden was all piles of mud and pools of
water. Little rivers had cut swirling paths through
the middle, washing away some of the seeds and tender
shoots. Here and there seed potatoes, their tender
shoots sticking up, peeked out of the wet ground.
A large limb had fallen on the fence and broken
it down.
"We have our work cut out for us," Mama said with a
weary sigh. "I reckon we'll have to replant.
The potatoes will rot in this dampness. At least
we have the tomato plants still in the hotbeds. We
can plant them as soon as the soil dries out."
All over the ground, little brown toads were
hopping. There were so many the earth seemed alive and
moving. Fido chased one, trying to catch it in his
mouth. Rose caught one in her hand. Its tiny
eyes looked without blinking. Its frowning mouth
bulged underneath and puffed with every breath. Its brown
skin was covered with warty bumps.
Rose looked up to see Fido sitting in
front of her. He cocked his head quizzically
and raised an ear. Rose looked at him. His
face had an expression Rose had never seen.
"What is it?" she asked him.
Fido's other ear perked up. Then he opened
his mouth. Out jumped a toad!
Then she and Mama walked down the
wagon track to the flood's edge. Water
rippled around the tree trunks. Beyond the trees
they could see the brown plain of the flood. The
swirling water was the color of dirty cream,
spreading out as if poured from a pitcher. It boiled
in places like stew.
Mama shook her head slowly. "Land
sakes," she finally said. "The railroad must be
washed out as well. I never heard the whistle of
Number Six this morning. I wonder how the
Cooleys are doing. Decoration Day must
certainly be rained out."
"At least there isn't a drought anymore,"
Rose said, remembering the years of dry weather
where they used to live, in South Dakota.
Mama chuckled. "Just think. Last summer we
were choking on dust. Then the fires, and now this. As
Papa says, if it isn't chickens, it's
feathers."
Waves of churning, roiling water raced by.
Fry Creek, only yesterday sparkling
peacefully among the rocks, had vanished.
Rose could not tell where it flowed.
In its place, the flood covered everything. You
couldn't see an inch into the murky water. No one
could ever cross it alive. Rose stared at the
flowing water so long it made her dizzy. When
she looked away the earth seemed to slide
backward.
Everything the flood had stolen from the land hurtled
past them on the waves: brush, boards, chicken
coops, a drowned muskrat, fence rails,
railroad ties, split wood, bottles.
Rose wondered about all the little creek
creatures. Where did the crayfish go in the
flood?
A cow stood bawling on a little island of land
surrounded by swirling water. A mud-smeared
chicken clung to a board, its feathers plastered
to its body. The chicken squawked every time the board
bounced over a wave.
Then Rose heard a man's voice shouting.
Across the flood, on the town side, some people were
standing.
"I see them, too," said Mama. "It is the
Cooleys! They must have come to see how we are."
They listened and Mr. Cooley shouted again. But
they could not understand him over the sound of the flood.
Now Rose could see Paul and George. She
waved. Mama shouted back, "We're
all right!"
But her voice was too small to reach. They
all waved to each other, and then the Cooleys
walked back to town.
On their way to the house, Rose spied something
moving in a pile of leaves. She looked
closer. It was a fallen nest, with four baby
birds in it.
"Look, Mama!" Rose shouted. The baby
birds' eyes were barely open. Their tiny naked
heads wobbled. When Rose touched the nest, they
stretched their scrawny necks and opened their
delicate pink mouths to be fed.
"The poor things," said Mama. She looked
about in the trees, but there was no mother bird to be
seen. "She must have been killed, or flown off in
the storm. They will die for certain if we leave
them. Let's bring them inside and see if we can
save them."
Mama carried the little nest carefully in both
hands. In the house she took an old feed sack
and rolled down the sides to make a cozy place
to cuddle the nest in. Then she set it near the
stove, where the little birds would stay warm.
"What can we feed them?" Rose asked.
"They are very young," said Mama. "I don't
know if they are grown enough to eat worms and such.
Let's try giving them cornmeal. I'll soften
some in water."
Then Mama showed Rose how to feed the
trembling chicks. She dipped a hollow stem of
straw in the corn mush to pick up a little of it.
She poked the stem in the mouth of one of the nestlings.
The baby bird grabbed at the food greedily and
gulped. The others made chattering noises and
opened wide their trembling mouths.
Rose fed them all, again and again. She made
sure to give each bird the same number of
turns. After a long time they began to settle
down. Then they huddled together and fell asleep.
Mama carefully tucked the top of the feed bag
closed to make it more cozy for them.
Rose and Mama spent the rest of the morning
cleaning up. They moved the chicken coop into the
barn. Then they pulled the tree limb off the
garden fence and put the rails back in place.
The rain stopped and the creek began to go down. The
gray sky lightened.
Finally, just in time for dinner, Papa came
riding back. He was soaked and muddy.
"It was pretty bad all right," he said.
"We had to rescue a couple of Kinnebrew's
cows from the creek. He lost three of his best
milkers. They were standing under a tree when lightning
struck it.
"But here's some good in it, anyway," he said,
handing Mama a sack. "He butchered one of them
and gave us a nice piece of beef."
There wasn't time to cook the beef for dinner.
Mama said she would make a good stew of it for
supper, with onions.
When Rose went to feed the nestlings she found
one of them outside the nest, curled up in the
corner of the feed bag. She touched it, but its
fragile little body did not stir. It was dead.
Rose's heart ached to see it.
"Perhaps it was injured," said Mama. "The others
look quite healthy."
Rose fed the three nestlings again. Their tiny
pinfeathers had dried out and stood up from their naked
bodies. When she was done, she asked Mama if
she could bury the poor dead bird.
"We'll do it together," Mama said.
She got the shovel and dug a little hole where
Rose asked her to, under the big oak tree
near the barn. Rose laid the tiny creature's
body in the bottom. She crumbled up some muddy
soil and covered it. She jabbed a stick in the
ground, to mark the spot. Then they walked slowly
back to the house.
Rose fed the three little birds many times, every
chance she could, all afternoon in between helping Mama
hoe the garden.
By supper the creek was almost back inside its
banks. All in the woods and across the creek the
land was covered with a layer of mud. Close by the
creek the tree trunks wore necklaces of
twigs and muddy grass above Rose's head,
showing how high up the water had come. Across the
valley some buzzards picked at a dead
animal.
The dark clouds had moved on, and white ones
filled their places. The lowering sun was a great,
yellow eye sending a shaft of sunlight to fill
the valley with a hazy glow. Then the light faded
and a mist rose over the creek.
"We can thank our good fortune we didn't
buy bottomland," said Papa over supper. The
savory beef stew was delicious, the best meal
they had eaten in a long time. "This may
be a poor rocky ridge, but at least we know
it'll never flood."
Rose fed the three baby birds every chance she
could. Each morning she jumped out of bed and ran
to the feed sack to see them. Each morning their
pinfeathers had grown a little. Their voices were
stronger, and they ate more hungrily. They could not seem to eat enough.
Sometimes the little birds stretched their tiny wings,
like babies trying to walk for the first time. Rose
put in little sticks for them to climb up on. She
was so happy to see how well they were doing. Rose
felt like a great mother bird. She would protect the
babies and feed them until they were strong enough to fly
away on their own.
But after three days, Rose noticed that the
birds were not getting any stronger.
"Perhaps they need something different to eat," said
Mama. "Why don't you catch some bugs and
worms?"
Rose caught tiny grasshoppers and ants.
She dug worms up in the garden. But the nestlings
did not know how to eat those things. The
grasshoppers and ants crawled out of their mouths.
The birds shook their heads to spit out the worms.
Rose tried everything she could think of, bits of
grass, oats, leftover beans.
But the little birds began to weaken. Their chattering
hunger calls grew softer. More and more slowly they
raised their open mouths to be fed. Rose became
frantic with despair.
Then, one morning when she got up, she found the
littlest one outside the nest, in the bag. It was
barely breathing. She put it back in the nest, but
it would not eat any of the cornmeal. By dinnertime, it
was dead. Rose buried it under the oak tree,
next to the first one.
That afternoon, when she went to feed the two that were
left, one of them was outside the nest. She put
it back in. An hour later, it was out again, but it
would not open its mouth to eat. At suppertime, it was
dead, too. Now there was just one nestling left, the
largest.
Rose's spirits fell. She picked at her
supper and answered when spoken to only as much as
she must. She wanted to do something to save the last
little bird. She prayed for it to live. But her
hope was melting away.
In the morning, Rose could not stifle a tiny
sob when she looked inside the feed bag
and saw the lifeless little body huddled in the
corner.
"I'm sorry, Rose," Mama said, hugging
her gently. "That is the nature of wild
creatures sometimes. Only a mother bird can
properly raise its young."
Rose knew Mama was right. But she could not
stop thinking how small and weak those little birds had
been, yet how bravely they had struggled
to live. All the rest of that day her eyes stung
with unshed tears.

Visiting Alva

Now every day was summery warm. The garden dried
so quickly after the flood that the potatoes were saved
from rotting. Weeds sprang up everywhere. The
alfalfa and oats that Papa had planted in the
ground between the apple saplings seemed to grow inches
overnight. Even the oaks, the slowest of all the
trees, began to unfurl their leaves. All the
woods were bathed in a soft green light.
Papa rebuilt the henhouse. Then he plowed
up a patch of new ground for corn. After it was
harrowed smooth, he plowed long furrows with the
mules. Then, when the oak leaves were the size of
squirrel ears, Rose helped plant the corn
in the furrows, four grains of corn together in each
spot.
Each time she did it, she sang a ditty
Mama had taught her:

"One for the blackbird,
One for the crow,
And that will leave
Just two to grow."

Sure enough, crows and other birds came
to steal the corn as soon as they had dropped them in
the furrows. Papa shot two crows and hung them
from tree limbs to scare away other crows.
When all the corn had been planted, Papa
hitched a log sideways behind the mules. The
log pushed the soil along, covering up the
kernels. But the crows still came to dig them out.
Papa had to stay in the corn patch a long time,
shouting and shooting at the thieving crows. Then at
night the woods creatures came to steal the
corn. But Fido barked and chased them away.
Abe and Swiney did not come to help
very often now. They were busy helping Mr.
Kinnebrew plant and hoe his crops.
When the corn was laid by, Rose had more time
to play. She often went for walks in the woods with
Alva. They hunted bobwhite nests along the
fencerows. They were hard to find because the hen always
covered her eggs with leaves when she was away. They
counted thirteen of the tiny, pointed eggs in one
nest.
They waded in Fry Creek, capturing
crayfish and finding tiny Indian arrowheads along
the banks. A frowning kingfisher dove into the water
to catch fish. Rose stood in a small pool and
watched the minnows going like flights of tiny arrows
over her insteps. When their slithery bodies
touched her skin, they tickled. Now and then a little
belly flashed silver.
They tried to trick buzzards in!coming down
to earth. Rose and Alva flopped in the grass and
lay as still as they could be.
"You cain't even twitch your little finger," said
Alva. "They won't come down if they see we
ain't dead. Buzzards only eat dead things."
They lay there in the grass the longest time.
Rose opened her eyes just a little to peek now and
then. The great birds soared and circled high above
them in the sky. Each time she peeked, they were a
little bit closer. But Rose couldn't be still so
long. Ants crawled on her skin and made her
itch and squirm. Right away those buzzards
sailed off until they could see them no more.
Rose loved the woods. All the forest
creatures were busy eating and nesting and raising their
young. Beautiful flowers bloomed everywhere she
looked. And now there were patches of blackberries
to eat.
One morning Rose was helping Mama scrub
the wash in the yard when Alva came tramping up
the hill. She invited Rose to come to her house for
dinner. Rose had never been to Alva's house.
She was very excited and begged Mama to let her go.
"Very well," said Mama. "Remember your
manners, and thank Mrs. Stubbins. I will
expect you home in time for evening chores."
The Stubbinses' house was a log house, too.
But it was very big, with two whole floors of
rooms. The first floor was two rooms, with an
open-air hallway between them. Alva said that was the
dogtrot. Two lanky, bony hunting dogs
came loping out to greet them, panting and
pleading with their eyes to have their heads scratched.
On the porch were a spinning wheel and a loom.
Under an oak tree stood a quilting frame.
The week's washing hung in the morning sunshine.
There was line beyond line of sheets, overalls,
shirts, underwear, and dresses.
Dozens of hens scratched in the yard. Geese
walked statelily on the banks of a little spring
branch. Ducks swam in a pond below the stone
milkhouse. Rose could see pigs rooting in the
woods above the spring. There was a summer kitchen,
and a little smokehouse, and corncribs and cattle
sheds, and a large ash hopper, and a pasture with a
herd of beautiful Jersey cows, and horses and
mules, too.
Rose had not known that Alva's family was so
rich.
"Howdy, Rose," Mrs. Stubbins said
heartily as she came out of the house. "We're
right proud to welcome you. It's about time you was
a-visiting. Alva's all the time bragging on
you."
A wisp of gray hair fell across Mrs.
Stubbins' smiling face. Rose liked her very
much. She remembered meeting her last fall when
all the neighbors came to help Papa build
the barn.
Dinner was a merry feast. She sat next
to Alva at a long table with all of Alva's
brothers and sisters, six in all, her mama and
papa, and a hired hand. Mrs. Stubbins had fried
a big plate of chicken and another plate of
ham. There were boiled potatoes and hominy and
biscuits with butter to spread on them. Rose
split open a biscuit and laid it crumbly
side down in the fried-ham gravy. Then she
carefully ate the biscuit halves, making four
bites of each. She couldn't remember when she
had eaten so well.
Mrs. Stubbins even gave Rose a big
glass of delicious cold milk to drink.
On the other side of Rose from Alva sat
Alva's oldest sister, Effie. Two of
Alva's sisters were older than Alva, and one of
her brothers was a grown-up man. Alva had a
little sister and a baby brother. Everyone was talking
and laughing, all through dinner.
"How do you find it here in the Ozarks?" asked
Effie.
"I like it very much, thank you," Rose
said politely. "Except for snakes and
chiggers."
Everyone laughed good-naturedly.
"Yep, we got ourselves a mess of snakes and
other pests in these hills," said Mr. Stubbins,
spearing another piece of ham with his fork. "You young
'uns got to watch out, running around barefoot
all summer. Most snakes are harmless. But we
got some that are right poisonous. Say, now, you
ain't seen none of them hoop snakes about, have
you?"
"No, sir," said Rose. "What kind of
snake is that?"
Mr. Stubbins looked around the table with a
twinkle in his eye. Effie giggled.
"Well, now," he said. "The hoop snake
is one of God's strangest creatures. He
only lives here in the Ozarks and not many folks
has ever seed one.
"He climbs uphill like any sneaky old
snake, slithering and sliding on the ground through the
leaves and bushes." Mr. Stubbins wriggled his
arm to make it slither like a snake.
"But when he wants to come back down the hill,
he bites his tail in his mouth, makes himself into a
wheel, and rolls down, just like a hoop. And fast
as lightning, too."
"Oh, Emmett!" Mrs. Stubbins said.
"Filling their heads with such nonsense."
"Oh, it's true, all right," Mr. Stubbins
went on. "Now that old hoop snake is
ornery. He likes to chase folks. The thing about
it is, he's got a horn on his tail that is
right sharp and mighty poisonous. Worse than a
rattlesnake, or even a copperhead.
"His aim ain't too good, though. A hoop
snake most always runs into a tree before he can
hurt you. Then his horn gets stuck in the bark.
And do you know what happens then?"
"What?" Rose said, her fork paused in
midair.
"The leaves of that old tree curl right up, and
in a few days, the tree dies."
Rose giggled uncertainly. Mrs. Stubbins
rolled her eyes and got up to clear the dishes.
Rose looked at Alva, but Alva was looking
at her father with wondering eyes.
Then it was time for the grown-ups to go back to work.
"Thank you, Mrs. Stubbins," Rose said.
"It was a very good dinner."
"Don't you even mention it," Mrs. Stubbins
said. "You come any old time you please. And tell
your ma and pa to come a-visiting of a day, too.
There's always room at our table for good neighbors
such as you'uns."
Rose began to pick up plates to help with the
dishes.
"You ain't got to do that," said Alva. "My
sisters do the washing up. Come on. I'll show you
around our farm."
Rose thought Alva was very lucky to have big
sisters to help with the chores. At home Rose
helped with everything. She was almost as busy as
Mama, all day long.
Alva and Rose went into Mr. Stubbins' great
barn and played with the baby calves. They let the
calves suck their fingers. Alva showed Rose
how to milk a cow, but Rose's hands weren't
strong enough to make the milk come out.
They found one of the barn cats nursing her
kittens in a hollow place in the hay. The mother
cat was rust-colored, with a white spot around one
of her eyes. She raised her head and blinked
dreamily at Rose. The kittens were as tiny as
mice. They paddled around with their little paws and
sucked at their mother's stomach.
Rose picked one up and cuddled it in the palm
of her hand. The kitten nosed between her fingers and
mewed softly.
"When they get older, you can have one if you
want, Rose," said Alva.
"Could I!" Rose shouted.
"Pa said we got too many cats," Alva
said. "Which one you want?"
They all looked the same, with softly striped
orange fur on their backs and velvety white fur on their bellies. Their tiny eyes were shut
tight, and their tiny ears lay close to their heads.
Their short, pointy tails stood straight up and
trembled as they nursed. Only one had a black
foot, and it was a little smaller than the rest.
"That one," said Rose. "I like that one because I
can tell it from the others."
"I'll tell Pa and when he says it's old
enough, you can come and take it," Alva said.
Rose clapped her hands with joy. "Thank you,
Alva! Thank you so much."
They played away the rest of that afternoon. They
watched Mr. Stubbins and the hired hand cutting hay
and pitching it into stacks. They made a
little dam in the branch of the spring and watched the
water spiders darting on the water's surface.
They made mud pies and left them to bake in the
warm sun.
Alva noticed some bees drinking water from a
rock. They tried to follow the bees when they
flew away.
"If we can course them, we can find where the
bee tree is," said Alva. "Then Pa can chop
it down for the honey."
The bees took off one at a time, loaded
down with water, and spiraled up into the air. But
hard as they tried, Rose and Alva could not see
where they flew off to.
Then it was time for Rose to go home. She went
back to the barn to peek at her kitten one last
time. She decided to name it Blackfoot.
Rose ran home, full of excitement. She
ran through the Stubbinses' pasture, startling the cows
chewing their cuds in the shade. She skimmed
bushes and leaped over stumps. She laughed out
loud when a frog she had startled kerplunk-ed
into Fry Creek.
But when she got close to home, she slowed
down and walked. And she thought. It had been a
wonderful day. She was very happy about her kitten.
But a part of Rose felt hollow. She liked
Alva's family. She had enjoyed all those people
around to listen to and talk with.
Rose wished she had brothers and sisters
to play with. She wished she could visit Alva's
house more often. She imagined how wonderful it must
be to live at Alva's house, to be Alva and have
so many wonderful things to do every day. Rose wished
Mama and Papa had a cow, so she could have milk
to drink, and butter for her bread.
Then she blushed hot with shame at her thoughts.
But she could not stop from having them. A long time
ago, when Mama and Papa had decided to move
to Missouri from South Dakota, Mama had
told Rose they would have sheep and cows again.
Soon it would be a whole year since they had
left Dakota.
Rose could see it would be a long while before
Rocky Ridge Farm looked anything like Mr.
Stubbins' wonderful farm. When the apple trees
came into bearing they would have everything they ever wanted.
But that was years and years away. Rose did not
know how she could ever stand the wait.
Off to School

"A kitten?" Mama said in surprise. She
stood over the kitchen table, ironing Rose's
new dress, which she had just finished sewing up. "But where is it?"
"It's too little yet to leave its mother," said
Rose. "It's orange and white, with a black
foot. Its name is Blackfoot. I picked
it."
"We certainly could use a good mouser,"
Mama said, changing the iron for a freshly hot
one that sat on the stove. "When we get the
crops in this fall we will need a cat to keep the
rats and mice out of the corn and oats.
"There," she said, holding up the dress.
"All done. Let's put it on you so I can pin
the hem."
Rose wriggled into the new blue and lavender
gingham. The cloth was stiff with ironing and newness.
Mama had tatted a lace collar for it.
"Your hands are soiled," Mama said. "Try
to keep them away from the cloth." She stepped
back to look at Rose, chin in hand. "That was a
good choice you made. The blue matches your
eyes. You look very pretty in it."
Mama's eyes shone as she looked. Rose
fidgeted happily. She couldn't wait for a chance
to wear it.
Rose stood on a chair so Mama could pin
up the hem. Rose told her all about dinner at
the Stubbinses', and about trying to milk the cow, and
about hoop snakes.
"Are there really hoop snakes here?"
"I've never heard of one," said Mama. "I
expect Mr. Stubbins was playing a little joke
on you."
Rose was quiet for a moment as Mama worked her
way around the hem. Then she asked, "Mama, can
we have a baby brother, or a baby sister?"
Mama stopped pinning and looked at Rose with
searching eyes. A shadow seemed to pass across her
face, and then she sighed.
"I don't think so, sweetheart," she said
softly. "Are you lonesome?"
"A little, sometimes," said Rose. "Why can't
we have a baby? God brings babies to everyone
else."
"You can take your dress off now," Mama
said. Rose slipped back into her soft, cozy
everyday dress and sat on the chair
while Mama fed wood into the stove.
Finally Mama came and sat down at the table.
"Do you remember, when you were a baby, when Papa
and I were sick and you stayed with Grandma?"
"A little, I think," Rose said. She
remembered living with Grandma.
"And do you remember right after that, the baby boy
we had in South Dakota who died before we could
give him his name?"
"Yes," Rose said in her smallest voice.
"Well, Papa and I wanted to have another
baby, and we prayed for another baby. But I
think that when I was sick, God decided we
won't have one. We cannot do more than pray. After
that, we must accept God's judgment. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," said Rose. "But ... why
does God bring babies to some people and not to us?"
"God brought you, Rose. That was the greatest
gift of all for Papa and me. To have you is enough,
if that is His will. No one can know why God
decides anything.
"And as for feeling lonesome, you won't be for
long," Mama said. "School starts next
week. Just think of the friends you'll make!"
Rose's mouth flew open to speak, but nothing
came out. She had not thought about school for a long
time. She had loved her school in South
Dakota, but she didn't know if she would like it in
Missouri.

The first day of school, Rose had to get up
early to have time for all her chores. First she
gathered stove wood from the woodpile and put it
on the porch. Then she carried buckets of water
from the spring for the horses and mules. She carried
warmed water from the reservoir in the stove for the
chickens.
She fed the chickens their mash and collected the
eggs. Then she washed up and set the table. As
soon as breakfast was done, she helped Mama
wash the dishes.
Finally, she put on her new dress. The
crisp new fabric felt smooth and cool against
her warm skin. Mama buttoned up the back.
Rose tried out the arms by hugging herself. The
fabric didn't bind in the shoulders like her old
dresses. Her body felt as free inside it
as if she were wearing nothing at all.
Mama plaited Rose's hair
tightly into two braids and bound the ends with
thread. She tied on Rose's yellow hair
ribbons. Then she went to the trunk and got out
Rose's ruffled pinafore.
"Don't make a face, Rose," she said.
"I know it covers up the cloth, but you must wear it
to keep the dirt off. That dress must last until
school finishes, at harvest time."
Then Mama took out of the trunk her old
copy of McGuffey's Third Eclectic
Reader. Mama had been a schoolteacher.
While Rose was waiting to start school, Mama
had taught the lessons at home using her old
textbooks. Rose was all the way through the
Third Reader and she knew it practically
by heart.
Mama gave Rose her slate and a new
slate pencil. She slipped the pencil in the
pocket of the pinafore. Then she handed Rose an
old molasses tin with a lid on it and a handle for
carrying. That was her dinner pail.
"There's a surprise in it for you," Mama
said. "Don't you peek or nibble before Teacher
calls dinner. Promise?"
"I promise," said Rose. Now she was
ready. Suddenly she saw that she really was going
to school. Something churned in her stomach.
"Mama, would you walk with me to school?"
"Why, Rose! You're a big grown-up
girl now. I have chores to do, and Papa needs
help in the woodlot. You know the way."
Rose sighed. "Can Fido come?"
"School is no place for a dog, and we need
him here, to keep the snakes and hawks away from the
chickens. Don't fret so, Rose. School will
be fun, and Paul and George will be there. You
best hurry now or you'll be late."
Mama kissed Rose and watched from the porch as
she walked down the wagon tracks toward Fry
Creek. Fido bounded alongside her, but
Mama whistled for him to come back. Fido looked
at Rose and cocked his head. Mama whistled again
and he scampered away, back up the hill.

New Girl

Rose waded across the creek, holding up the
hem of her dress so it wouldn't get wet. The
cool water tingled on her bare feet and washed
away the dust.
The footpath that went over Patterson's
Hill started on the other side. Rose trudged
up the hill past Williams Cave, where she
had explored with Alva. They were going to play there
again, but now that Rose was in school, she would have no
time. The ringing of Papa's ax in the woodlot
echoed in the valley. A train whistled loudly as
it chugged into town.
The sun was already high, and the air was shimmery
warm. Rose pushed her sunbonnet back off
her head. She could hear the voices of farmers as
they went to work, shouting at their horses. Yellow
daisies with black centers speckled the
hillside as if someone had dusted it with yellow
powder. Little white and yellow butterflies
fluttered among the wildflowers.
Finally she reached the top of Patterson's
Hill, from which she could see the back of the tall
brick schoolhouse. Children were walking up the road
from town. Other children were playing on the bare ground
to the side. Three little girls rode a horse
up to an open shed. Then they got down and tied up
their horse with the other horses that were already hitched
there. Rose looked for Paul and George, but
she did not see them.
She walked slowly down the slope toward the
school. Her heart pounded in her chest. Just then the
bell began to ring and all the children raced toward the
front door. Rose hurried not to be last.
Then she was in a crowd of children who were pushing,
jostling, and laughing. At the head of the crowd, children
were pouring through the big double doors. Rose caught
a glimpse of Paul as he was swallowed up by the
doors.
Finally Rose reached the entryway. A tall
bald man with a long beard called out, "Fourth
Readers upstairs to the left, Fifth Readers
upstairs to the right. First and Second Readers to the
left, please. No pushing. Third Readers to the
right.
"You there, little girl in the plaid. What reader
are you in?"
Rose stood just inside the door, not knowing which
way to turn. A stream of children poured in around her.
"Which reader?" the man said again, impatiently.
He tapped Rose on the shoulder.
Rose didn't know what to say. Then the man
saw her book. He pointed, "Third Reader,
to the right."
Rose walked through another door. A
boy rushed past her, knocking her dinner pail
to the floor. She picked it up and looked around.
The room was full of double desks, four rows of
four desks. The floor was bright yellow wood and
shiny. The room smelled of linseed oil.
There were many great tall windows all around on
three walls, and a large heating stove against one
wall. The opposite wall from the stove was partly
painted black. That was the blackboard. All the
other walls were painted a pale sickly green.
On some of those walls were pictures of old
men with long beards. In between the pictures were
sayings, printed on large cards. One said,
"Kind Words Can Never Die," and another said,
"Be Diligent, Prompt, and Truthful."
Children were racing about the room, shouting and arguing
over seats. Rose stood uncertainly next to the
wall by the door. Then the tall man with the beard was
talking to her again. "Have a seat, please. Put
your dinner pail on the shelf and sit anywhere on
the girls' side."
Rose put her dinner pail up and looked
around the room. It seemed every seat was taken. Then
she spotted an empty one at the front, next
to a girl with beautiful curly black hair
falling in ringlets. She wore a lovely lawn
dress and shiny black shoes. Rose liked
to sit in the front in school, so she went to sit
in that desk. But when she put her book and slate
down on the desktop, the little girl turned and
frowned at her.
"You can't sit here," she said quickly. "It's
my friend's seat. She's coming in a minute."
Rose flushed hot. She stood in front of
all those desks of strangers, not knowing what to do
or where to go. Several children were staring at her. Two
girls sitting together whispered to each other and
pointed at her.
Finally Rose spied an empty seat in the
back row. She almost ran down the aisle and
quickly sat in it. She was relieved to be where no
one could stare at her.
Then Rose looked at her seatmate. Her
head was resting on her hands on the desk, her
face turned the other way. Rose couldn't tell
if she was resting or sleeping. Her faded brown
calico dress had a large patch of gingham
sewn on the front. Her brown hair fell
limp and unbraided over her shoulders. Her
feet were dirty. Then she sniffled
loudly.
"Hello," Rose said politely. "My name
is Rose Wilder."
The little girl looked at Rose blankly with
weary eyes.
"I'm tired," she said. Then she wiped her
nose with the back of her hand and laid her head down
again.
Rose's heart began to sink. There was no
sign of Paul or George. They were older, so
they would be upstairs in the Fourth Reader.
Now the teacher began to speak.
"My name is Professor Kay," the man
said. He wrote his name on the blackboard in
chalk. "You may wonder why I have such a long
beard. Well, it is to cover my shirt so I do
not have to wear a tie."
There were giggles all around the room. Rose
could not tell if Professor Kay was making a
joke or not.
Then Teacher took the roll. He called out
many names. Rose had seen some of the last names on
stores in town. "Blanche Coday," he called
out. Rose remembered Coday's Drugs.
The girl with the beautiful black hair called
out, "Present, sir." Her seatmate was very
pretty, too. Her blond hair hung in a
silky braid down her back. Her white
dimity dress had a butterfly pattern on it.
A gold bracelet hung from her wrist. She was
looking around the room with bright, curious eyes and
whispering to Blanche.
"Quiet in the classroom," Professor
Kay said. "Maude Reynolds, Hattie
Talbott, Tarah Tarbutton, Clella
Rippee, Ida Goss, Oscar Hensley,
Harry Carnall ..." And everyone answered,
"Present, sir," or "Here."
Rose listened anxiously so she wouldn't miss
her turn. One by one, the students answered to their
names. Her throat grew so choked with expecting
to speak that she could hardly breathe. Finally, all the
names were called, including Irene Strong, the
snuffling girl sitting next to Rose. All the
names had been called except Rose's.
"Is there any scholar here whose name I did not
call?"
Rose raised her hand.
"Stand up, please," Professor Kay said.
He pointed a long stick at her.
Everyone in the room turned to look at Rose.
Her neck blazed hot under all those eyes.
"What is your name, please?"
"Rose Wilder," Rose whispered.
"Speak up. I can't hear you." Titters
rippled around the room.
Rose said her name again.
"Very well," Professor Kay said, writing
it down. "Be seated."
Rose hated being stared at, and laughed at.
Irene Strong smelled like a barnyard. She
snorted and sniffled.
The desk seat was too tall. Rose's legs
ached from dangling. The room was stifling hot. A
trickle of sweat ran down the back of her
neck.
Rose had never had a teacher who was a man.
She had loved Miss Barrow, her teacher in
South Dakota. Miss Barrow was pretty and
she had a beautiful voice; she liked to lead the
class in singing. Rose had loved her classes
there, and she had had many school friends to play with.
Now Rose had only one thought in her mind,
to run out of that school and all the way home. She
would go home and she would never come back. But she
did not budge from her seat. She was too shy
to run away.
Then the lessons began with recitations.
Professor Kay called on the boys first.
"Harry Carnall, recite, please, the first
paragraph of "George's Feast.""
A boy in overalls stood up and read slowly
from his reader, "George's mother was very poor.
'Stead of havin' bright blazin' fahrs in winter,
she had nothin' to burn ..."
"Ing!" Professor Kay barked.
"No-thing." He stood up and wrote on the
blackboard, having, blazing, and nothing. The
chalk jabbed and scratched angrily as he
wrote. After nothing he wrote ten times, ing,
ing, ing.
He turned around, folded his arms across his
chest, and glared at Harry Carnall.
Harry giggled nervously and looked around at the
other boys. Professor Kay just stared at him.
Finally Harry said, "What's the ing, ing,
ing doin' up thar a whole passel of times?"
"I am glad you asked that question," Professor
Kay said. Then he wrote out what Harry had
said on the blackboard, with spaces between
the words.
"I wrote the ing up there ten times so you
won't forget it. I have hardly heard anyone
pronounce ing since I came to this school last
winter. We are going to learn it now. Let us
all say ing together, ten times."
Everyone sang out a chorus of ings. All
those ings together sounded like a pondful of spring
peepers. Rose kept her mouth shut. She did
not need to learn how to pronounce ing. The
lesson was stupid.
"Now," Professor Kay said. "The word is
fire, not far. And it is there, not thar."
Everyone took turns reciting. One boy could
not read at all.
"Do you at least know your ABC'S?"
Professor Kay asked.
"Heck no!" the boy shouted out in amazement.
"I ain't been here but a few minutes."
The room erupted in laughter. Even
Professor Kay cracked a small smile.
Then he sent the boy to the First Reader across the
hall.
Rose grew bored waiting her turn. She was
the last to recite.
"Recite, please, the first two paragraphs
of "Johnny's First Snowstorm.""
Rose knew her whole book almost by heart.
She recited easily:

"Johnny Reed was a little boy who never had
seen a snowstorm till he was six years old.
Before this, he had lived in a warm country, where the
sun shines down on beautiful orange groves,
and fields always sweet with flowers.
"But now he had come to visit his grandmother, who
lived where the snow falls in winter. Johnny was
standing at the window when the snow came down."

"Very well done," Professor Kay said.
"Please be seated."
Rose knew she should have been pleased with
Teacher's praise, but she didn't care. She
knew all of her Third Reader. She had even
read the Fourth and Fifth Reader as well. She
had read The Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, and she often read The Chicago
Interocean, a newspaper Papa brought home.
So she sat there, legs aching, prickly hot,
listening to Irene's horrid snuffling,
looking at the ugly green walls, and watching
Professor Kay. He tipped back in his
chair against the blackboard. He looked out over
the class through steel-framed spectacles. He
carried a long stick that he poked down the back
of his soiled shirt to scratch himself.
Finally Professor Kay rang a tiny
bell that he kept on his desk. That meant to put
books away. He rang it a second time for
everyone to stand up. The third time he rang it was
dismissal.
Rose could hardly wait to see Paul and George. She raced outside with all the other
children and waited by the doors. Paul came clomping
noisily down the stairs with two other boys. His
face lit up in a wonderful way when he saw
Rose. His bright smile was like the sun coming up.
"Hey, Rose!" he shouted. "Finally came
to school, huh?"
"Yes," said Rose cheerfully. "But I
don't like it very much. I wish I could be upstairs
where you are."
"It's not so bad," he said. "At least you
don't have to stay home and do chores. And then you can
play at recess and dinnertime."
Just then another boy cried out, "Two-cornered
cat and one my bat!"
All the boys raced around to the boys' side
of the schoolhouse to play a game.
"See you later!" Paul shouted. Then he
dashed off to follow them.
George came racing out of the schoolhouse.
He shouted hello to Rose and ran off to play
two-cornered cat.
Rose was by herself. She watched four boys
carrying water buckets down to the spring at the
bottom of the hill. A group of town girls in
pretty dresses, including Blanche Coday,
were playing house with some rocks. But they did not
invite Rose to join them and she was too shy
to ask.
Some other children were playing crack the whip. But
Rose's spirits were so low, she did not feel like
joining. She looked longingly at the crest of the
hill that stood between her and home.
Recess was over in fifteen minutes. The
bell rang and all the children crowded through the door
again. Inside they pushed and shoved to get a drink
of water from the bucket before they had to sit down.
Two boys wrestled over the dipper,
knocking it to the floor.
Rose waited until everyone else had
gotten a drink. But when she looked in the
bucket, there was not enough water left to get even a
dipperful.
The rest of the morning dragged on. Professor
Kay wrote on the blackboard, Exercise
in verbs. Insert words in the following sentences:
The dog ---- at the cat. The horse ---- the
wagon.
Rose stared out the window at the trees rustling
in the breeze. A bluebird flashed past the
windows. Rose wondered what Alva was doing today. Probably she was helping her papa bring in
the hay, or playing with the kittens, or just about
anything that was more fun than sitting in that stuffy
schoolroom.

Afternoon Lessons

At noon, Paul and George went back
to the hotel to eat dinner with their mama and papa.
The children who stayed at school gathered in groups of
friends, or sisters and brothers. Rose ate by herself
under a tree at the edge of the playground.
In her molasses tin she found two pieces
of brown bread with bacon fat spread on them, a
boiled potato, and a dried-apple turnover.
That was Mama's surprise.
Rose ate the turnover first. The sweet,
crisp taste melted in her mouth. Eating it
made her feel a bit better. Then she slowly
ate her bread and the potato. Two girls who were
twins sat near her. They were dressed exactly
the same, in sprigged green calico. Their hair
was fixed exactly the same, arranged in a tidy
bun on the tops of their heads. Out of their large
tin they each took a piece of fried chicken and a
biscuit.
"You're a new girl, aren't you?" one of the
twins said. "Come and eat with us. We like to meet
new girls."
"Thank you," Rose said gratefully. She
picked up her things and sat down next to the
twins.
"My name is Dora," one of the girls said.
"This is my sister, Cora. We're the Hibbard
twins. Have you heard of us? Everybody knows us in
town. What's your name?"
"Rose Wilder," said Rose.
"You aren't in the Fourth Reader," said Dora.
"I'm in the Third Reader," Rose said.
"This my first day in school. I used to live in
South Dakota."
"I know where that is," Cora said proudly.
"It's very far. All the way north. Almost
to Canada."
"Are Paul and George in your reader?"
Rose asked. "Their mama and papa brought them
here from South Dakota, too."
"Paul and George? Are they brothers who
live in the Mansfield Hotel?" asked
Dora.
Rose nodded.
"We don't like George very well," said
Cora. Dora nodded in agreement.
"He is in our class," said Dora. "He
teases the girls by putting bugs down their
backs. Boys are pests, anyway."
"And he pulls their braids," Cora added.
Rose thought Dora and Cora were like one person,
split in half. Even their voices were exactly
the same. She wondered how anyone could tell them
apart.
"Would you like a piece of our chicken?" Cora
asked. "We have lots."
She held out a crisp, golden-brown chicken
leg. Rose's mouth watered at the sight of it.
She wanted to accept. She loved chicken and
Mama only made it sometimes, when a hen got
too old to lay. But she thought it might be
impolite to take food from strangers.
"No, thank you. I'm full."
"We love school very much," said Dora. "The
first day is so much fun. We like to see our friends
again, and everyone is so excited."
"We hate it when school ends," Dora said.
"There's nothing to do until it starts again."
"I liked school in South Dakota, but I
don't like it very much here," said Rose. "The
girls are not very friendly. I mean, except for you.
And the teacher is a man. I like a woman teacher
better."
"So do we!" Dora said cheerfully. "We like
Miss Pimberton so very much."
Rose chatted with the Hibbard twins until they
had finished their dinner. Then they all joined some
other girls who were playing cat and mouse.
All the children held hands in a circle. One
person was the cat and another was the mouse.
The mouse started in the middle of the circle. The
cat prowled around the outside. Then the cat chased
the mouse, darting into the circle under clasped hands.
The mouse dashed out and the cat chased her around and through
the circle until the mouse was tagged.
Then the mouse became the cat, and it was someone
else's turn to be the mouse.
Rose liked cat and mouse. The sound of other
children giggling and shouting, and the excitement of all that
running and shrieking, cheered her up. When it was her
turn to be mouse, her legs rejoiced to be running
and free. Soon she was laughing as hard as anyone
else.
When the bell rang for afternoon books, Rose
went to say good-bye to Cora and Dora, but she
hesitated.
"Good-bye, um ..."
"I'm Cora," Cora helped. "Would you like
to know how to tell us apart?"
"Oh, Cora," Dora moaned, making a
sour face.
"Just look at Dora's left ear. See,
she has a fawn's ear."
Dora's ear was pointed. But the twins' names were
so much alike, Rose thought she would never get them
straight. On her way back to her seat, Rose
wondered what it would be like to have a sister who looked
and sounded exactly like her. Twins were lucky, she
decided. They always had a best friend to play with.
When Rose sat down in her seat, the two
girls sitting in front of her were whispering
excitedly and looking at one of the boys. Rose
looked at the boys' section. There was a great
deal of giggling and snorting among them, but Rose could not tell what it was about.
Professor Kay had just rung the bell
to take up books when Harry Carnall jumped
to his feet.
"Ow!" he shouted. Then he began jumping and
writhing in the strangest way, as if he were having
a fit. All the children burst out in noisy
laughter.
"What's the meaning of this?" Professor Kay
demanded.
Harry didn't answer. He was jumping about and
digging his hands in his pockets, trying to pull
something out of them. Suddenly, from the bottom of his
pant leg, a blacksnake slithered out and raced
across the floor.
The room erupted in shrieks and
shouting and stamping as everyone tried to frighten the
snake away or stomp on it. Rose stood on
her seat. She would never shriek at a snake, but
she didn't want one crawling on her.
Finally Teacher took his stick and picked up the
snake. He threw it out the window.
"Harry Carnall," he said in a terrible
voice. "I will not tolerate such disruptions in my
classroom. Step to the front."
Harry's face was scared and flushed, but he could
not stop himself from giggling.
"Hold out your hand," Professor Kay said
sternly. Harry held out a hand. Professor
Kay took it and bent the fingers back. Then he
whipped the open palm of Harry's hand with his stick
five times. Harry winced in pain.
Finally, Teacher went to the blackboard and drew
a small circle in chalk.
"You will stand here until recess with your nose
pressed on the board in the middle of this
circle," he said. "And you will remain in at
recess."
No one could concentrate on lessons with
Harry standing there, his face pasted to the
blackboard. When Professor Kay rang the
bell to put down books, Harry was finally
allowed to go to his desk. His nose was red and there
was a damp spot on the blackboard where it had
been.
After recess was spelling. Professor Kay
drew a long, straight chalk mark on the floor
at the front of the classroom. Everyone stood
on it in a line, in alphabetical order,
facing Professor Kay. No one's name started
with an X or a y or a Z, so Rose's
name was last. She must start at the foot of the line.
Then Teacher called out words and each student took
a turn spelling, beginning with the person at the head
of the line.
Spelling was Rose's best exercise, and she
knew all the words.
"Frequently," Professor Kay said when
it was her turn.
"Frequently," Rose repeated. "From-rather-every
fre, quite-us-every-not-that quent, frequent; like-you
ly, frequently."
Rose felt a tingle of excitement every time she
got a word someone had misspelled and she could
move up one place in line. Soon she had
spelled down to two students, and she was
third from the foot.
All afternoon they spelled. Rose moved up the
line, closer and closer to the head, closer
to Blanche Coday, the girl who wouldn't let
Rose sit with her. Blanche was a good speller,
and she had spelled down the two boys who were
ahead of her.
Finally, Rose stood next to Blanche and
Rose was only one word away from being the best
speller in the class that day. Her stomach
quivered, her hands were cold, and her palms were
damp. She wanted more than anything to spell down
Blanche Coday.
But Blanche was a good speller, too. Every word
Professor Kay gave her she spelled
correctly: curious, purpose, material,
cautiously. Every time she got one right,
Blanche looked at Rose smugly. But every word
Professor Kay gave Rose, Rose
spelled correctly as well: reminded,
including, constructed.
The next time it was Blanche's turn,
Professor Kay said, "Chiefly."
Rose knew that word, too. She crossed her
fingers behind her back.
"Chiefly," Blanche said, tossing her head
so her curls shook. "Can-have-every-i-from chief."
Rose trembled with joy. "Like-you ly;
chiefly."
It was everything Rose could do to keep still. She
knew by heart the rule "I before e, except
after c." Blanche had got it wrong! Rose's
whole body poised to pounce on that word.
"Wrong," said Professor Kay.
"Next."
Blanche shot a hard, pinched look at
Rose.
"Chiefly," Rose said with confidence.
"Can-have-i-every-from chief, like-you ly, chiefly."
"Very good," said Professor Kay. He
wrote Rose's name on a corner of the
blackboard and put a mark next to it. That was a
headmark, for Rose had gotten to the head of the line
by turning down all the other scholars.
"That will be all for today. Class is dismissed."
Everyone scrambled to leave. Rose picked up
her book, her slate, and her molasses tin, and
bounded out of school. Girls like Blanche might
laugh at her, but she could beat any of them in
spelling. She flew home, running
down Patterson's Hill and splashing carelessly
across Fry Creek.
Fido ran down the wagon track to meet
her, barking with joy. Rose was never so happy
to see him, and Mama, too, when she came to the
kitchen door, drying her hands on her apron.
So much had happened that day that Rose didn't
know where to start the telling.
"First things first," Mama said. "Change your
dress and gather in some kindling for the stove. Then you
can help Papa feed and water the horses. You can
tell us all about school when we sit down
to eat."
Mama untied the sash of Rose's pinafore and
carefully pulled Rose's dress off over her
head. Then she hung it up behind the curtain in the
corner, so the wrinkles would hang out for tomorrow.
The whole house seemed to smile at Rose,
glad she was home. The warm, moist smell of
fresh bread hung in the air. Salt pork
sizzled cheerfully on the new nickel-plated
stove. Mama whistled as she rattled a stove
lid to check the fire. Rose could hear the mules
braying in the barn as Papa fed them their supper.
When Rose finished her after-school chores,
she washed her hands and face and set the table.
Finally, Papa came in to wash up. It was
wonderful to be home.
She told Mama and Papa that the town girls
in her reader were very pretty but they were rude. Her
seatmate was awful, she smelled bad, and her
nose ran all the time. She didn't like
Professor Kay very well, either.
"He's dirty and he's the stupidest teacher in
the world," Rose complained. She knew it was
wicked to say, but all her feelings from that day just
came tumbling out before she could stop them. "And he
gives the stupidest lessons. "The dog barked
at the cat.""
"That's enough of such talk, Rose," Mama said
firmly. "Besides, people aren't stupid. They are just
more or less foolish."
"He is more and more foolish," Rose said.
Papa chuckled, but then stopped when he saw that
Mama was not smiling.
Then Rose told Mama and Papa that the
schoolroom walls were painted an ugly green that
gave her a strange feeling in her insides. The
walls made her sick.
"You are just imagining it," said Mama.
"You must not be so silly. Besides, you would not be
looking at the walls if you were studying like a good
girl."
"But the lessons are dull," Rose said.
"I know them all. I know all the spelling words,
too. I made head in spelling."
"That's very good," Mama said. "I'm proud of
you."
But Rose did not feel proud. It had been
too easy.
They sat down to supper as the sun was setting.
A cooling breeze came in the doorway. A
mockingbird that had nested in a tree by the log
house began its long, sweet song from the chimney
top. The sound floated down the chimney and echoed
inside. Katydids and tree toads began their
nightly chorus, shattering the quiet with their
shrilling songs. From Fry Creek came the
chuckling songs of frogs.
"You must have seen Paul and George," Papa
said. "How are they doing?"
"I saw them," said Rose. "But they are in the
Fourth Reader, on the second floor. At
recess they play with the boys. They go to the hotel
for dinner."
As they ate supper, Rose told Mama and
Papa about the Hibbard twins and about Harry
Carnall and the snake. Papa laughed so hard he
nearly choked on his food.
Then Rose fell silent in thought. Mama
did not understand how unhappy she was in school.
Rose could not bear another day sitting next
to Irene, staring at those walls, and watching
Professor Kay scratch himself. She simply
couldn't.
When they were done eating and Papa sat back
to light his pipe, Rose finally screwed up her
courage to ask, "Do I have to go back? Can't I
stay home and study my lessons here, like before?"
"Why, Rose, it's only the first day!"
Mama said, getting up to clear the dishes. "You
mustn't give up so easily. In time the other
students will catch up to you, you will make some friends,
and then it will be more fun."
Rose frowned.
"Don't pout," said Mama. "What must be
done is best done cheerfully."
In Trouble

Rose woke the next morning with a terrible
feeling of dread. She would have begged Mama to let
her stay home, but she knew it would not change a
thing.
She dawdled so long on the way to school that
she was the last to take her seat. Irene did not
speak to her again. At recess she watched Paul
and George and the other boys playing. Morning
recitation dragged on, and Rose stared out the
window.
She listened to the birds singing and watched cloud
shadows moving across the hillside. She thought about
Alva, and about Blackfoot. She wondered if
the little kitten had opened its eyes yet. Rose
wished she were a bird. She would fly out the window,
over Patterson's Hill, up Fry Creek,
right to Alva's barn, where she would sit in the hay
and play with her kitten.
Rose was startled from her thoughts when Irene
nudged her in the ribs.
"Rose Wilder!" Professor Kay
called out impatiently. "I said, please rise
and recite."
Rose sprang to her feet, knocking her
reader to the floor with a thud. Blanche chortled and
some of the other children giggled. Rose's cheeks
burned hot.
She picked up her book. "I ... I'm
sorry," she said. "I lost my place."
"Please recite the first three paragraphs
on page thirty-one, "The Beaver.""
Rose found her place and recited those
paragraphs perfectly.
Noon finally came. Rose dashed outside and
wolfed her dinner down in nothing flat. When she
was done she put her tin back on the shelf in the
classroom. Then Rose left school. She
couldn't fly to Alva's, but she could run.
She ran all the way to the Stubbinses' farm.
She must hurry to have time enough to get back before afternoon
books. Alva was just coming out of her house from
dinner.
"How come you ain't in school?" Alva asked.
"I am," said Rose. "I just wanted to see
Blackfoot."
"Come on, then," Alva said. "Their little eyes
are open now."
Sure enough, all the kittens' eyes were wide
and shining and looking curiously at
everything. They had grown so in just a few days.
Now they played with one another, gnawing each
other's ears and tails, pouncing, and kicking with their
tiny back feet. Rose and Alva laughed at
how comical they were.
Rose picked up Blackfoot. He
climbed up her pinafore onto her shoulder. He
sniffed tiny breaths that tickled in her ear, and
batted at her hair ribbon. Then he mewed
softly to get down.
"Oh, Alva," Rose said. "I hate
school so."
"I'm glad my ma and pa don't make me
go to no school," said Alva. "My pa says you
don't need no schooling to know how to milk cows and
hoe corn. I just know I couldn't sit in those
old seats for a minute."
Then they left the kittens and walked out into the
yard to get a drink at the spring.
"Look, Rose!" Alva shouted. "The bees
are back drinking water. Let's follow them and
see if we can course the nest."
"I don't think I ought to," said Rose.
"I might be late for afternoon books."
"We won't go far," Alva insisted. "Come
on, there goes one now."
A bee had taken off from a moss-covered
rock. It circled around and around until it was
high in the air. Then it took straight off in a
beeline into the trees, flying slowly.
Alva took off running and Rose followed.
"I can still see it!" Alva shouted. They ran through
the woods, a long way. Rose could never see the
bee, but Alva kept shouting, "There it is!
Hurry up, Rose!"
But then she lost sight of it. "It don't
matter anyway," Alva said. ""A hive in
May is worth a load of hay, but a hive in
July ain't worth a fly.""
On the way back they passed by the horse
pasture. They watched two colts racing each other back and forth across the field. Then they
hunted quail nests along the fence. They found a
blackberry patch. Alva took a stick and
beat the bushes first, to scare away snakes. Then
they plucked and ate all the ripe berries they
could find.
Rose remembered school, but she was sure she
still had time to get back for afternoon books. She had
not heard the bell, and it wasn't so far
if she ran.
Along the spring branch they hunted crayfish.
Then they built a dam and watched a little pond
form behind it. Brilliant blue dragonflies
hovered darting to catch bugs.
Finally Rose said she had better go. She
ran all the way back to school. The sun
seemed much lower in the sky now. She had better
hurry not to be late. When she got to the top of
Patterson's Hill, Rose gasped. The
schoolyard was empty! She slowed to a walk,
catching her breath. Then she noticed that there were no
horses tethered in the shed. Her stomach
flip-flopped.
The last thing she noticed made her heart
skip a beat. There was a wagon standing by the front
of the school. She recognized Pet and May,
Papa's horses.
A great weight settled around Rose's
shoulders. She walked very slowly down the hill,
around the front of the school. She climbed the
steps, one at a time. Her feet were as heavy as
stones.
As she got to the top of the stairs, she heard
Mama's voice, and Professor Kay's.
Then she stood in the schoolroom doorway.
Mama was sitting in a desk with her back to the
door. Papa stood next to her. Professor
Kay looked up at Rose from his desk. He
nodded toward her and looked at Mama with raised
eyebrows. Mama turned and looked at Rose.
Her mouth was tight and her eyes glared fiercely.
Professor Kay cleared his throat. "I
best be going," he said. "I expect you have the
matter in hand now."
Then he left without another word.
"Where have you been?" Mama asked sternly. Her
voice had never had such a hard edge.
Rose could think of nothing to say. She stared at
the floor.
"I asked you a question," Mama said. "You
weren't in school all afternoon, and Teacher dismissed
class an hour ago. Papa and I have been
worried sick. Where have you been?"
Rose flinched.
"I went to Alva's," Rose said meekly.
"I'm sorry, Mama. I only wanted to see
the kitten. I didn't know it would be so long."
Mama said, "To think, you could have been lying
hurt somewhere, and Papa and I with no
idea where to begin to look. I can't imagine where you
got it into your head ..."
"Now, Bess," Papa interrupted. "There's
no need to get too stoked up. She's here now,
safe and sound. Just some childish foolishness. But
you mustn't ever do anything like that again, Rose."
"Yes, Papa," Rose said softly.
Mama said, "We have told Professor
Kay to keep you in during recess and dinner as many
days as he sees fit, until you have learned your
lesson. You must obey him the same as you obey
Papa and me."
"Yes, Mama," Rose said.
The silence on the ride home crashed in
Rose's ears. She wanted to cry, but she
didn't dare. She hated causing Mama and
Papa to worry.
Every day for the rest of that week Professor
Kay kept Rose inside during recess and
dinner. At first it was torture to be still and listen
to the high, light voices of the other children playing
outside.
But Professor Kay chatted pleasantly with
Rose while they ate their dinners.
"You are a very good student, Rose,"
Professor Kay said. "I don't blame you
much for being bored. By rights, you ought to be in the
Fourth Reader. Your mother taught you well."
"Thank you," Rose said, trying not to speak with
her mouth full. She munched on a carrot that
Mama had put in her lunch. Raw carrots were
Rose's favorite vegetable.
"I expect it takes some getting used to,
coming into these hills for the first time," said Professor
Kay. "A lot of these folks have never been out
of the Ozarks. Just a few miles from here there are people
who have never seen a railroad train."
"A man told Papa that once," said
Rose. "When we drove here last summer. The
man said people here had never seen an organ or a
train."
Professor Kay's beard crumpled into a
smile. "I'll tell you a story. Once there
was a young fellow who lived back in the hills who
had never seen a train. He had to go to town for the
first time, and it was several days' journey. One
night he slept on the ground, and along around
daybreak he woke up to a tremendous roaring
sound. He looked up and saw the biggest thing he
had ever seen come running out of a hole in
the hillside, near where he was sleeping.
"He was scared. He took off and ran away.
He just ran and ran. Finally he saw a
woodsman splitting rails. He stopped
to catch his breath, and the woodsman asked him what
he was running from.
"After the fellow got his wind back, he told
the woodsman that he had just seen the worst thing in his
life. It was some kind of beast, huge, that was
snorting and raging something fierce. The thing was
black and it had one great big shining eye and fire
and smoke were coming out of its head. He said it just
came tearing out of its den in a hillside, and it
was making a terrible racket and letting out a great
yell now and then."
Rose giggled.
"Now that woodsman told this young fellow that
he'd seen a train, is all. He told him,
"It won't hurt you. You can even ride on
it." And this hill boy said, "It'll have to catch
me first.""
Rose burst out laughing. Professor Kay
chuckled, too.
Then Rose had a new thought.
"Could I go into the Fourth Reader,
Professor Kay? My friends are in that class.
Paul and George. I promise I would be good
and study hard to keep up."
"I am sure you would, and I wish I could say
yes," Professor Kay said. "But Miss
Pimberton's room is full and you are a bit
young for her class. I'll tell you what, though.
There is a library of books in her room that have
been donated to the school. If you wish, you may
pick one out to read. Would you like that?"
"Yes, sir," Rose said. "I would like it very
much. Thank you."
When they were done eating and Rose had put
away her tin, she walked upstairs with
Professor Kay to Miss Pimberton's
room. In the corner was a bookcase with four
shelves. The bottom part was where the erasers and the
boxes of chalk were kept. Above it were three
shelves behind glass doors. Two of the shelves
were almost full of books.
Professor Kay said Rose could look through
those books. He opened the glass doors so she
could pull them out and see if she would like to borrow
one.
Rose had never seen so many books.
There were books of poems by Alfred, Lord
Tennyson and William Clement Scott;
Prescott's History of the Conquest of
Mexico and History of the Conquest of
Peru; The Green Mountain Boys, and
John Halifax, Gentleman, and another
true book, the biggest of all: Ancient,
Medieval and Modern History, full of
beautiful colored maps and pictures.
There were many storybooks, too: Afloat in
the Forest, Five Little Peppers and How They
Grew, Five Little Peppers Grown
Up, and important-sounding books: Sense
and Sensibility, Pride and
Prejudice, and The House of the Seven
Gables.
Rose loved the feel of the cloth covers and the
rich weight of the books in her hands. She couldn't
decide on just one. She wanted to read them all,
to learn the secrets hidden in all those hundreds
of pages of words. Finally she picked a big
book called The Leatherstocking Tales. It
had been written by a man named James
Fenimore Cooper many years before. Rose
picked it because she liked the title. Professor
Kay said it was a book of stories about the
beginnings of America.
At noon the next day Rose sat at her
desk, ate her dinner as quickly as she could, and
read. She began at the beginning. The first part was
called The Pioneers.
She read about Leatherstocking, a nickname for an
old man called Natty Bumppo who lived in
New York State and who hunted deer in the
wild forests. Rose did not understand some of it, and
there were quite a few words she had to ask Professor
Kay to explain.
But the more Rose read, the more she wanted to read.
It was very pleasant to sit quietly in the empty
classroom. In no time at all she was carried
away from school. She forgot about the green walls
and about Irene. Instead, she was tramping through the
winter snows of New York many years ago,
hunting deer with a smoothbore rifle, and wearing a
deerskin coat with the hair still on.
When the bell rang for afternoon lessons, she
hated to put it down. Rose thought the people in books
were more real than the people she saw every day.
In the afternoon each day there was spelling. Every day
Rose started at the foot and ended at the
head. She always turned down Blanche Coday.
But even though they ended up standing next to each
other, Blanche did not speak to Rose, and
Rose was too shy to speak to Blanche.
On Friday, Professor Kay let
Rose take the book home with her. On
Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, Mama read
aloud from it to Rose and Papa. Mama liked that
book very much.
"It reminds me of when I was a child, growing up
in the Big Woods of Wisconsin," she said.
"Your grandpa used to hunt deer and bear, just as
Natty Bumppo did."
On Monday Rose took The
Leatherstocking Tales back to school. Her
punishment was ended and she could go out with the other children.
But she would still read it. She propped herself up
against a tree at the edge of the schoolyard and opened
the book on her knees.
But before she could sit down to read, Professor
Kay gave her a chore. He asked Rose
to clean the erasers. That was a special chore that
he only gave to the best students. Rose was
surprised that after she had been disobedient he would
give her a special chore. But she was even more
surprised when Professor Kay picked
Blanche Coday to help her.
At dinnertime, she and Blanche took two
erasers each and walked quietly to the edge of the
playground. They clapped the erasers together to get
all the chalk dust out. A fog of chalk dust
floated on the breeze, making them both
sneeze. They must clap and clap those erasers
until no more dust came out of them.
They did not speak a word to each other. Rose
could not think of anything pleasant to say
to Blanche, and Blanche turned her back
to Rose.
Rose stole as many looks as she dared at
Blanche's beautiful lawn dress, her
shimmering, curled black hair, her shoes and
stockings. Rose hated to wear shoes, but all
dressed up that way, Blanche was simply
beautiful. And she seemed to wear a different
dress every day of the week. Rose could not imagine
owning as many school dresses as there were days in the
week. She had one dress, and it must last the
whole school term, until fall.
Blanche's father was rich. Rose had heard some
other children say it. He owned Coday's
Drug Store. Rose wondered what it must be like
to be rich. She would have liked to own any one of
Blanche's dresses, and she would like to eat
chicken every day, and have butter on her bread instead
of bacon fat.
The next day, as they were clapping the chalk dust
out of the erasers, Blanche startled Rose by asking
her in a haughty voice, "Where are you from? You
aren't from around here. Anyone can see that. You
don't talk like girls from around here."
"My mama and papa brought me here from South
Dakota," Rose said. "We drove last
summer in a covered wagon all the way."
Blanche clapped her erasers a few more
times. Then she said, "You haven't been in school
here before. How did you learn so many spelling
words?"
"My mama taught me," said Rose. She
did not like the tone of Blanche's voice, but she
tried to be polite anyway. "She was a
schoolteacher once. I like to read, too. I
learned many words from reading books."
"Well, anyone can see that plain as day,"
Blanche said tartly. "It's all you do, is
read and stare out the window and be teacher's pet. But
don't think we can be friends just because you are so smart.
After all, you're a country girl."
With that, Blanche flounced off to return her
erasers. Rose's face stung as though it had
been slapped. She stared hard after Blanche,
boiling with anger. Alva was right, Rose thought.
Town girls are stuck up.
Rose decided then and there that she would never, ever
let Blanche Coday spell her down.

Summer

Every day in spelling Rose turned down
Blanche and ended up at the head of the line. Every
day Professor Kay put a headmark next
to Rose's name on the blackboard. And Rose
remembered each time her promise to herself and
studied her spelling harder.
Irene took sick and stopped coming to school.
Irene's older sister said Irene had caught
diphtheria. The word echoed in Rose's mind like a
thunderclap. That was the terrible illness Mama and
Papa had once had.
The doctor had been to visit Irene, and now
the rest of her family could not leave their
house because they were quarantined. Only Irene's
sister could go out to school and to town on errands. But
she said she must sleep in the barn, so she would not
catch it, too.
Rose felt sorry for Irene, but she was
glad to have the seat all to herself now.
Summer flowed on, slow, lazy, and stifling
hot. Specks of dust hung in the still air,
catching the sunlight and shimmering in the heat. The
hot weather pressed down like an iron pot lid.
It was prickly and sticky sitting inside the
classroom, even with all the windows opened.
Everyone was glad to dash outside at dinnertime and
sit in the cool shade of a tree to eat. Most
days Rose ate by herself and read. Paul or
George visited with her sometimes. Sometimes she
played cat and mouse, or sat and talked with other
students. She liked Cora and Dora best of
all.
But Rose did not make a best friend at
school. Many children had brothers and sisters in
school. The families ate and often played
together. The town girls snubbed her. Rose did
not want to be friends with other country girls like
Irene whose mothers sent them to school unwashed in
shabby dresses. And the boys played rough games
and kept to themselves. Rose did not fit in anywhere.
But she was mostly content. She had grown to like
Professor Kay. She enjoyed watching Paul
and the older boys playing two-cornered cat. And
Rose had been an only child all her life.
She was used to pleasing herself.
At home, the whole farm was growing. The garden
was rows and rows of different shades of green.
Mama liked to keep a neat garden. She and
Rose hoed and chopped weeds every other day until
the soil was smooth and soft and clean between the lush
columns of leaves. There were radishes,
lettuce, onions, and carrots. But the carrots
did not grow like any carrots they had seen. They
were crooked and thin from struggling to reach down through the
stony soil. The tomatoes had blossomed, and
now there were shiny pale-green tomatoes hanging from
thin stems.
Baby melons clung to the melon vines, and
potato leaves sprouted all along their heaped
rows.
The corn had sprung up almost overnight. It
was growing taller every day, unfurling bright new
leaves that fluttered in the breeze like
ribbons. Already the stalks reached Rose's
waist. She could almost watch them grow, the corn was
shooting up so fast.
In the same soil with the corn Papa had
planted the pole beans. The thin tendrils of their
stems trailed along the ground, crawling straight
to the corn. Then they hugged the cornstalks and
began to climb them. The cornstalks were the
poles. Before they picked the corn in the fall, the
beans would be ready to harvest. That was a way to get
two crops out of one piece of ground. Rose
wondered how the beans knew to climb the
cornstalks.
In the orchard the young apple trees were filling
in with new growth. Slender, bright green fingers
reached out from the end of each gray branch and twig.
Papa brought home wagonloads of wood ashes
from town and spread some around each tree. The ashes
would sweeten the soil and keep away wood-eating
bugs that might hurt the trees.
One Sunday Alva came by, carrying a
sack that meowed loudly. She opened it and out
jumped Blackfoot. He shook himself, blinked
in the bright light, and rubbed, curving, against
Rose's leg.
"He remembers me!" she cried.
Blackfoot was even more beautiful than she
recalled. And he had grown so big. His short,
straight tail had become long and wavy.
When Fido came to sniff at him, the kitten
batted the dog's nose playfully. Fido
gave a short surprised bark that sent
Blackfoot skittering behind Rose. But in a
moment he came back out, sat down, and licked
his paw, keeping his bright eyes on Fido.
Soon after that they became friends and even played
together.
It was often too hot to sleep at night, even
with all the windows open. Some nights Rose's
legs itched so from chigger bites that even if she
could fall asleep, the burning and itching kept her
awake. And it was noisy, too. Katydids,
crickets, frogs, and other night creatures
made such a clamor in the dark woods that when
Mama read aloud she almost had to shout to be
heard. Only in the wee hours before daybreak did
all those creatures finally go to sleep.
One night at supper Papa said, "It's
too blamed hot for cutting wood. The crops
are laid by, not much hoeing and plowing
to be done. Why don't we gather up some folks
and throw ourselves a picnic?"
"That would be lovely," said Mama. "After
all, we were too busy with the corn to go to town on
Fourth of July. We could all do with a change of
scene. Do you think the Cooleys would come?"
"Don't see why not," said Papa. "I'll
ask them when I'm in town tomorrow."
"Perhaps we could ask the Kinnebrews as
well," Mama suggested. "We haven't all
met them yet."
In a day it was decided. The three families
would meet on the Ava Road south of town and
drive down to Bryant Creek.
The morning of the picnic they woke up in the
false dawn, hurriedly did their chores, ate
a cold breakfast, and loaded the wagon. Papa
pitched a pile of hay in the back to sit on
and for the horses to munch. The picnic food was
packed in a basket with a clean white towel
tucked over it. A jug of sweetened ginger water
sat under the wagon seat.
Rose gave Fido's head a good scratching
and explained to him that he must stay behind and guard the
farm. He whimpered in disappointment.
Then they were off in the first gray light of dawn.
They met the Kinnebrews in their wagon and the
Cooleys driving the hotel hack. There were many
shouts of hello, and they drove off into the fresh
morning with Papaeaness wagon in the lead. The
wagon track twisted and turned through the hills
under a canopy of branches heavy with leaves.
Rose tingled with excitement to be going somewhere
different, and to have a day away from school.
It had been a whole year since they drove
to Missouri from South Dakota. That had been a
great adventure, and now that it was summer again,
Rose remembered the wonderful, new things they
had seen along the way. Going somewhere made her
feel like singing. She hummed, "Oh Susanna."
Right away Mama began whistling it, and then they
were all singing as the sun peered over a ridge and
lit the tops of the trees.
The wagon rattled past many small farms
along the way, with log houses and barns tucked
away in little hollows. Horses and cows munching
the dew-fresh grass lazily watched them pass.
Farmers waved from their corn patches. They
passed small white churches and a schoolhouse.
Rose could see children inside studying their
lessons. They stopped often to let the horses
rest and have a drink from the little streams and springs they
crossed all along the way.
Nits and horse flies buzzed around the team.
Papa had to keep the lines tight in case they
suddenly bolted from being bitten and tried to run
away.
Finally, when Rose was getting fidgety and the
air was turning muggy, they came to a wide
stream, bigger than Wolf Creek. That was
Bryant Creek.
They set themselves up on a gravel bar, right
next to the water. Rose helped Paul and
George gather wood for a fire. Mama and
Mrs. Cooley hung an old sheet between two
trees for a private place to change into the old
dresses they had brought for swimming.
Mr. and Mrs. Kinnebrew had brought two
big watermelons for everyone to eat at dinner.
Rose's mouth watered just looking at them. Their
two sons, Coley and Claude, carried them
to the creek's edge and set them in a quiet pool
to chill. They weighted them down with stones to keep
the watermelons from floating away. Mr.
Kinnebrew scolded the boys to quit fighting
over how to pile up the rocks.
"I'm going to wear you two out if you don't
behave," Mr. Kinnebrew said irritably.
"It's bad enough we're missing a day's work without
having to listen to you two scrapping all the time.
Now give a hand unhitching the team."
There were three Kinnebrew children in all.
Coley was a big boy, a year older than
Paul, who was eleven. Then there was Ernestine,
who was nine, the same age as George.
Claude was the baby of their family. He was
seven, a year younger than Rose. Rose had
seen all of them at school, but they were in different
classrooms for lessons.
Mrs. Kinnebrew was a very proper-looking
lady. She wore a beautiful lawn dress, and
her hair was pinned up in a tight bun. She
carried a dainty white parasol, with ruffles
around the edges.
"I don't like to wear a bonnet if I
don't have to," she told Mama. "It's too
hot in this country."
"You came here from Illinois, didn't you?"
Mama asked.
"Yes, and a prosperous little town it
was, too," Mrs. Kinnebrew said, puffing up
like a hen that had just laid an egg. "I often
wonder what Mr. Kinnebrew could have been thinking
of when he dragged us all down here. This is
lovely country from nature's point of view, of
course. But it is a mighty poor excuse for a
place to try to dig out a living."
"The ground's a bit thin and stony," agreed
Papa. "But you can't beat it for fuel and the best
water that ever flowed out of Mother Earth."
"And the people are so friendly," Mrs. Cooley said.
"So neighborly and helpful."
"I suppose, although they are somewhat
poor-folksy, don't you think?" said Mrs.
Kinnebrew, smoothing the front of her dress.
"And there are so many pests and varmints in the timber
that try to destroy our livestock. We have had a
wolf carry off two of our pigs. And last
fall the rats killed eleven of my young
chickens, and two turkeys, too."
"A wolf?" Mama said, casting a worried
glance at Papa. "I hadn't heard of that.
Why, your place isn't a mile away from
ours."
Then Coley chimed in, "They call this
Missouri but they ought to call it the state of
Misery, right, Ma?"
"I wish you would stop making fun of this fine
country," Mr. Kinnebrew said. "We should use
our own judgment and push ahead and not let
discouraging words alter our course.
"I never saw a place yet that wouldn't
raise a fair crop if farmed right, and I'm
going to give this country a good tryout before I
give up. I'll work till doomsday but what
I'll succeed. I know we can make a good living
if we don't lose our ambition."
"It is never easy to start over," said Mama.
"We are doing it ourselves."
Finally, when the wagons were unloaded, the
horses tied up in the shade with buckets of
water to drink, and the food assembled for dinner, the
children were free to play.

Picnic

First they threw rocks into the creek. Claude
said he wanted to scare away all the cottonmouth
snakes in the creek so they could swim.
"I hate snakes," he said. "There
are too many snakes around here."
"You're afraid of everything," Coley
scoffed. He was tall and blond. A shock of his
blond hair covered his forehead and shook as he
hurled a skipping stone. It skipped almost all
the way across the creek. That stone somehow went into the
water and popped right out again, time after time. Rose
had never seen anything like it. She tried to make
stones skip, but they only plopped and sank.
"You think there's a bear behind every tree,"
Coley said with a smirk. "Just waiting to jump out
and eat you. You're afraid of your own shadow."
Claude turned red-faced and punched Coley
in the side. "I am not either," he shouted. In a
second they were on the ground wrestling. But
Claude could not possibly win against Coley.
Coley was a big grown-up boy. He sat on
Claude's chest and pinned Claude's arms with his
knees. Then he tickled the inside of
Claude's nose with a grass stem until
Claude cried, "Uncle!"
"I'm tired of you two fighting all the time,"
Ernestine huffed. "I'm going to go sit with Mother and
help with dinner."
Rose thought the Kinnebrews were not a very happy
family.
The creek was very wide. They had stopped in a
place where two streams flowed together. In the
middle where the streams met was a point of stony
land. It was like an island, or the bow of a boat.
The water made a rushing sound as it ran around it.
Rose wanted to explore the island. But the
current looked swift, and in the middle of the
creek was a large pool. It was dark there, too
deep to see the bottom even through the clear water.
The creek looked so fresh and inviting that Rose
wanted to jump right in and get her whole skin
wet. But Mama said she must stay dry until
after they ate, so she wouldn't have to change twice.
But even if she had been allowed to, Rose
did not know how to swim.
"Stay close to the bank," Mama called out,
as if she had heard Rose's thoughts. So Rose
only waded along the creek bank, hunting
crayfish and Indian arrowheads with Paul and
George and talking about school.
Then they chased grasshoppers to fish with after
dinner. Every minute Claude was hollering,
"There's a snake!" But there never were any. He
was just imagining them.
It was very hard to catch grasshoppers. They were
the same color green as the grass. The only
way was to scare them up and then watch one flutter
away to see where it landed.
Then Rose crept up behind that grasshopper.
When she was close enough, she swooped her hand
down to grab the grass stem where the grasshopper
clung. She tried many times before she finally
caught one. The grasshopper kicked and fought in
her fist, giving Rose's palm a queer
tickly feeling.
They put all the grasshoppers they caught in
a sack.
When dinner was ready they all gathered together
to eat. The men had dragged logs near the fire
to sit on. In the trees around them, cicadas
shrilled in the warmth of the day. Their raspy sounds
rose and fell, like knives being sharpened on
lopsided grindstones.
There were pickles and steaming potatoes that had
been roasting in the fire. Mama had brought
hard-boiled eggs. Mrs. Cooley had made a
big batch of biscuits with snowy white
insides, and she passed them around. Everyone
admired and enjoyed them.
"It's nothing, really," Mrs. Cooley said.
"When you feed a hotel full of guests you are
accustomed to making big batches."
"How is it, living in town?" Mrs.
Kinnebrew asked. "It must certainly be more
civilized than living on a farm in the middle of
nowhere. I suppose you see many interesting people in the
hotel."
"Yes, but we are too busy to visit," said
Mrs. Cooley. "It seems all we do is
work. And the noise! When it isn't the trains and the
trade coming into town, there are fights that break out
at the saloon. And just the other day some farmers
tipped over one of the boxcars on the siding."
"Whatever for?" Mr. Kinnebrew asked.
"It was parked right where the tracks cross the
road," Mr. Cooley said. "The town asked the
railroad to move it three times, but they never
did. Folks got tired of bouncing their wagons
over the rails and ruining their wheels. I guess
some fellows took it in their own hands to show the
railroad company a lesson."
"That reminds me of the story about Mr.
Arnold's hog," said Mama with a twinkle in her
eye. Rose perked right up. She had
never heard this story.
"It was in Walnut Grove, Minnesota,
one fall at butchering time when a freight train
ran over Mr. Arnold's fat hog about
halfway up the hill east of town. He couldn't
save the meat, but he rendered the fat into soap.
"Mr. Arnold tried to get the railroad people
to pay him for the hog, as they should have. But they
refused. He had no money to go into a lawsuit
and the railroad knew it.
"So one day, before the freight came through, he
went and soaped up the rails. He smeared the soap all up and down the track. When the train
came along its wheels spun and spun on the
slippery rails and it couldn't pull up the
grade. The train crew used up all the sand they
were carrying and had to get out and throw dirt on the
tracks to get going again.
"Every day after that, the freight train never could
get up the grade without sand and trouble. The
passenger train went through all right, but when the
freight came, it slipped and fell behind
schedule.
"The railroad people were suspicious, but they never
could catch Mr. Arnold in the act. Finally, the
railroad sent a man out to Arnold's one day and
paid him cash money for his hog. Sure enough, the very
next day the freight went through without any trouble.
"After that, Mr. Arnold bragged in town that
he'd given most of that hog to the railroad
company, bit by bit on the rails. But he had a
little of the soap left over, so he figured he had
beat them out of that much of it anyway."
Even Mrs. Kinnebrew laughed when Mama
finished.
When they had eaten their dinner, they cut and ate
the sweating watermelons. The melons were
deliciously sweet, and the children competed to see who
could spit the seeds farthest.
Finally Rose and Ernestine and Mama and
Mrs. Cooley changed into their oldest calico
dresses to go swimming. Mrs. Kinnebrew sat
on a log and watched. The men and boys went
swimming right in their overalls.
Papa swam far out into the deep water. He
dove down and disappeared with a splash. Rose
held her breath. She waited and waited for
Papa to come up again. No one could stay under water
so long. Rose was just about to scream for Mama when
Papa's head popped out of the water, far
away downstream from where he had vanished.
Rose wanted to swim with Papa and go under the
water. She wanted to see what it was like down there.
She walked deeper and deeper into the water.
Rose squatted down until the water came
to her chin. She felt herself rising up, light as a
leaf. Her dress blossomed up around her. Then
it got wet and sank, sticking to her all over.
Her whole skin drank up the refreshing
coolness.
"Don't go in any farther," Mama said.
Suddenly, Papa's dripping wet head rose up out of the water, right in front of her. He
laughed a great laugh that echoed from the creek
bank.
"Will you take me in the deep water, please,
Papa?" Rose begged. "I want to disappear
under the water."
Papa laughed again. "I think you need a
lesson first," he said. "Give me your hands."
Papa took Rose's hands in his own and
gently pulled her away from the shallow water.
Rose's feet lifted right off the gravel
bottom. Then she was floating like an angel. The
bank looked very far away. The water flowed over
her skin like a cool breeze.
"Now kick your feet," said Papa. "I'll
hold you up, and you kick with your feet." Papa
towed her into the deep water. Rose kicked as
hard as she could. Papa towed her around and around.
She stopped kicking to see if she could touch
bottom. But there was nothing there, nothing solid
to touch. Only deep dark water. And it was
colder down there, too. The coldness on her
feet scared Rose. If Papa let go, she
would sink down and down in that cold darkness and nothing
could stop her.
"Keep kicking," said Papa. His smiling
face was always in front of her, going backward.
"Now I'm going to let go of your hands. You must
paddle with your hands, as if you are climbing up a
slope, or crawling. And keep kicking, too."
Then Papa let go. Rose paddled as fast and
hard as she could. But she could not make her hands and
feet go at the same time. When she paddled with her
hands, her feet stopped. When she kicked with her
feet, her hands stopped. Then Rose felt herself
sinking. Her head went into the dark water and she
gasped, swallowing a great mouthful of water.
In an instant, she felt Papa's
hands lift her up. Rose sputtered and coughed
until she could catch her breath.
"Now you know what can happen if you go into deep
water without knowing how to swim," Papa said. "I
think that is enough for now." He towed Rose back
to the shallow water.
"Can we do it again, Papa?" Rose begged.
Papa laughed. "I have a better idea," he
said. "You can hold on to that old fence rail over
there. It will float and you can paddle around. But
only so long as I'm watching."
Rose kicked around the creek after that, her arms
draped over the fence rail. Sometimes Paul or
George would grab on to it, too. They were a
ship, sailing on the ocean. The current carried
them downstream to a wide shallow place. Then they
got out and pushed the fence rail back upstream
along the bank and floated down again.
All afternoon they played. There were horseshoes
to throw. They cut cane and fished for a while. But
the fish would not come to the grasshoppers. Papa said
it was so hot even the fish weren't hungry.
Coley and Paul played lap jack. They
locked their left arms together by hooking their elbows.
Then they swatted each other with switches they
held in their right hands.
Coley was taller than Paul and he landed the
best blows. Rose laughed to see them both trying
to get away and hit each other at the same time.
Soon their shoulders were covered with red welts, but
the boys were laughing loudly.
They stopped when Mr. Kinnebrew scolded
Coley for waking him up from his nap in the wagon.
"How is a poor farmer to get a little rest with
all this commotion!"
Finally all the play was drained out of Rose.
She lay down on her back on a wide, flat
stone that was big enough for her whole body. The heat from
the stone warmed her wet dress. She looked up
into the sky, at piles of fat, white clouds
floating above the trees.
She gazed at the shapes the clouds had made.
They were always changing, but she could never actually
see them change. She stared at one cloud, hard
as she could. It was a great tower of whipped cream.
She stared at the folds and bulges and nothing
changed. Then she looked away for a moment. When
she looked back, the shapes had begun
to dissolve, ruffled by the wind like tousled hair.
Each time Rose looked away, the
cloud had changed, tearing itself apart in shreds and
dissolving into a new shape.
She turned over on her stomach and yawned.
She stretched her arms out to the side and felt the
warmth of the rock soaking into her body. That rock
was alive. The heat of its life was flowing
into Rose. She hugged it. Rose felt as if
she were hugging the whole beautiful living earth and the
earth was hugging her back.
She loved that rock and she loved that summery
day. The warmth on her skin, the rich odor of the
damp soil, the peaceful chuckling of the water, the
lazy buzzing of insects, and the murmur of
grown-up voices all filled her with peace.
She could not possibly have an unhappy thought. It
seemed to Rose that summer could soothe every care and
heal every hurt.

Jungle of Green

They went picnicking two more times that summer,
with Abe and Swiney to Wolf Creek. By the last
time Rose had learned how to use her hands and
feet together. Now she could swim in deep water.
But she never did unless Papa was with her. Deep
water still frightened her.
At school, Rose stayed at the head of the
line in spelling, although often it was very close.
Blanche was a good speller and she only missed
the hardest words. Some days when Rose sat reading
her book at dinner, she noticed Blanche
studying her reader.
Rose learned her times tables as well.
Professor Kay had taught the scholars how
to sing the tables to the notes of "Yankee Doodle
Dandy." On the way home Rose skipped to the
beat and sang to herself, "Five times five is
twenty five, and five times six is thirty,
five times seven is thirty-five, and five
times eight is forty."
One morning, before they took up books,
Professor Kay stood before the class with a
grave look on his face.
"I have an announcement to make which is very
sad," he said. All the rustling and fidgeting in
the room stopped. Every head snapped to attention as
if they were all connected to Professor Kay
by strings he had pulled.
"Irene Strong, who has been out of school
these many weeks with diphtheria, has
crossed to that other shore from which no traveler
returns." One of the girls choked out, "Oh!"
All around Rose children were looking at each other with
open mouths and big, scared eyes.
Rose was confused. She leaned across the aisle
toward the boy sitting in the next row. "What
did he say?" she whispered.
"She's gone and died," the boy hissed.
"Irene's died."
"We will bow our heads now for a minute of
silent prayer," said Professor Kay.
Rose was too stunned to think of praying. Her
mind skittered about like a water spider. The only
person she had ever known who had died was her little
brother. But she had been only a baby then
herself. She didn't really remember anything at
all.
Irene had not been Rose's friend, but she had
sat right next to Rose. Rose remembered how
unkind she had been to Irene in her thoughts. She
remembered how she had complained to herself about
Irene's sniffling and shabbiness. Rose's whole
body blazed with shame.
Then she had a new thought. What if she
caught diphtheria? Would she die? Did it
hurt to die? And what would become of Mama and
Papa if Rose died? They would never have other
children. Mama had said so. Who would help on the
farm?
The thought of Mama and Papa alone was the most
unbearable of all. Tears flooded her eyes and
fell from Rose's bowed face, splashing on her
folded hands. She fought back a sob. She could
hear some of the other children muttering their prayers.
Someone was sniffling.
Professor Kay did not need to raise his
voice or punish anyone all the rest of that
week. Rose wished she could move her seat, but
all the other seats were full. She could not help
thinking of poor Irene whenever she looked at the
empty spot beside her.
The days flew by and summer grew old and
dusty.
"Seems as though it has been weeks since
we had a good rain, Manly," Mama said at
breakfast one morning. "The garden soil has just
about dried all through. It's cracking at the
surface. If this keeps up much longer, I'll
need to haul water."
"It's the rocky soil, Bess,"
said Papa. "It's too thin and porous to hold the
moisture. It drains right away. But the weather
evens up in the end. This is the best time for a dry
spell, just before the harvest. Too wet and the corn
could go moldy."
"Yes, and the dryness has kept the bugs down
in the garden," Mama said thoughtfully. "I just can't
help remembering all those years of heartbreaking
drought and stunted crops in South Dakota. How
many times the weather robbed all our hard work at the
last minute."
Papa only nodded in agreement as he got
up to go cut wood in the woodlot. There wasn't
anything to be said about the terrible hardships of the
prairie that had not been said a hundred times before.
The corn had grown very tall, and now it was
heavy with the ripening ears. The beans had climbed
up the stalks. Bulging pods hung everywhere. In
between the rows, here and there, pumpkins grew. Soon
they would have their first harvest from the new farm.
The flat, empty field Rose had helped
plant with the pitiful little seeds in the spring had
grown into a wonderful, mysterious place
to explore. In it Rose found another world, far
away from Rocky Ridge Farm, where she could
lose herself without being afraid. Sometimes she liked
to go into the corn patch and just sit and listen. It was
a jungle of green, rustling with life. The waxy
corn leaves shone in the sunshine. In the early
morning, sparkling beads of dew clung to the
leaves and trickled down into their dark throats.
Rose liked to walk down the shady rows between the
stalks, listening to the whispering leaves and imagining
that she was Natty Bumppo stalking wild
animals in the deep, dark forest, or Robinson
Crusoe exploring a deserted island. Sometimes
when Swiney came they played hide-and-seek
there. Fido and Blackfoot tagged along as
well.
September came, and the last day of the summer
school session drew near. Professor Kay
announced on Monday that there would be a special
spelldown on Friday after supper. Then there would
be no more school until after harvest time, in
December.
"Each classroom will have its own spelldown,"
Professor Kay explained. "Your mothers and
fathers are invited to come and attend and see how well
you are all getting along. There will be refreshments
after and a prize for the winner. I advise
you scholars to study well if you are to make a good
account of yourselves before your families."
Rose was terribly excited and jittery all
that week. Every time she thought about the spelldown, her
insides quivered. She knew she could win. She
had gotten almost all the headmarks in the class.
But Blanche was getting better and better. She
had gotten three headmarks when Rose made
mistakes. All that week during recess and
dinnertime, Rose stole anxious glances at
Blanche studying in her reader.
After dinner on Friday there was no spelldown.
Instead the students scrubbed the whole classroom
until it shone. Rose helped wash the
blackboard and sweep the floor. The windows were
washed as well.
Then they all cut pieces of red, white, and
blue paper into strips. They glued the strips
into little rings and strung the rings together to make paper
chains. Professor Kay stood on a chair and
tacked the paper chains around the windows.
When the classroom was spotless and decorated,
school was dismissed. Rose dashed home to do her
chores and get ready. Mama had washed and
ironed Rose's best calico. After supper they
all washed up, got dressed, and walked
to school.
When they got to the top of Patterson's
Hill, Rose and Mama slipped on the
stockings and shoes they had been carrying as the sun
began to melt into a puddle of gold. Rose
swallowed hard as they walked down the hill into the
schoolyard.

Spelldown

The schoolyard was teeming with wagons and
horses. People were streaming in from every direction,
dressed up and in a festive, friendly mood.
At the door of Rose's classroom,
Professor Kay greeted Mama and Papa and
invited them inside.
"Good to see you folks again," he said. "Come
on in and have a seat."
School looked very different with all those
grown-ups milling about. Rose spied Blanche,
standing with her parents. Blanche's best dress was
even more beautiful than the dresses she wore every
day. It was made of red serge trimmed with satin
that shimmered in the light of the setting sun.
Finally Professor Kay asked all the
parents to be seated. There weren't enough seats to go
around, so many people had to stand along the walls.
Lanterns were lit, and the air filled with the smell
of coal oil smoke. Rose took her place
at the foot of the line of scholars standing against the
wall. The grown-ups looked funny sitting in
the tiny seats, their knees crowded. They looked
like giant children. Professor Kay rose
to speak. He had dressed up as well. He was
even wearing a tie.
"We are honored to have all the parents here this
evening," he said as the scuffling and murmuring faded
away. A baby cried out in the back and everyone
giggled nervously. Rose could hear voices and
feet moving upstairs in the other classrooms,
where the older children were having their own contests and
recitations.
"We will begin the program with a few words from one
of our patrons, Mr. Elliot Hoover, who,
being the town livery man, a member of the school
board, and the father of one of our students, hardly
needs introducing."
Mr. Hoover stood and talked for a long time.
Everyone was very polite and listened solemnly. But
his voice was a blur to Rose. She was thinking of
words she might have to spell.
"We are proud of our scholars studying so
diligently ..." Mr. Hoover said.
"Diligently," Rose thought. "Do-i-like-i
dili, go-every-not-that gent, like-you ly.
Diligently."
Mr. Hoover was a tall, thin man with a
drooping mustache. His enormous Adam's
apple stuck far out of his neck and bobbed up and
down so much when he talked that it was all Rose
could do to keep from staring at it.
Mr. Hoover droned on and on until
Rose's legs ached from not bending. He talked
about the school board's business, how much money was
spent and how much was collected in taxes. Finally
he looked at the scholars and said, "In
conclusion, students, the town is pleased
to provide you this opportunity to improve the shining
hours of your youth, just as I did with mine. For I
was once only a schoolboy like any of you, and look at me now."
Professor Kay led the audience in singing a
song. Then there were recitations by two other
students. Finally, the spelldown began.
"We will begin with two warm-up rounds,"
Professor Kay said. He sat down at his
desk, pulled his gold watch from his vest
pocket, and opened the spelling book.
The words in the warm-up rounds were easy, and
Rose began to relax. Anyone could spell them
--kettle, beyond, mouse. Rose looked at
Mama and Papa and smiled.
Then the real spelldown began and the words got
harder, and trickier.
"Counsel," pronounced Oscar Walters,
the boy standing ahead of Rose. "Can-o-us-not
coun, so-i-like sil. Counsel."
"I'm sorry. That is wrong," Professor
Kay said. Oscar shrugged and hung his head as he
shuffled out of line to go sit with his mother and father.
Rose liked starting out at the foot of the line. It
gave her heart to hear other students making
mistakes.
"Next."
"Counsel," Rose said confidently.
"Can-o-us-not coun, so-every-like sel. Counsel."
Papa winked at her. Mama smiled.
One by one, the students were spelled down and
left the line to join their families. The line
became ragged, like an old comb with teeth missing.
"Constructed," Blanche said slowly, as if
she were confused. "Can-o-not con, so-that-rather-us ..."
She hesitated. Rose's heart fluttered.
"C struc, that-every-do ted. Constructed,"
Blanche said with a little sigh.
"That's my girl," a man in the audience
whispered loudly. It was Blanche's father, Mr.
Coday. Blanche blushed brightly and stared down
at her shiny black shoes.
Soon there were only three students standing,
Rose, Blanche, and a redheaded boy named
Oscar Hensley.
"Sheaves," Professor Kay said.
"Sheaves," Oscar repeated.
"So-have-every-every-very-every-so, sheaves."
"I'm sorry, Oscar. That is wrong.
Well, ladies and gentlemen," Professor
Kay said, "we are down to the two best spellers
in the Third Reader. May the better of them
win."
Rose felt every eye in the room on her.
Blanche got the first word. Then Rose, then
Blanche. Blanche spelled every one
correctly: pendulum, conquer,
locomotive, portrait. Each time she
spelled so slowly that Rose was certain she was about
to make a mistake. But she never did.
On and on they spelled, into the evening.
Clapping and a commotion upstairs in one of the other
rooms told Rose that some of the other spelldowns
had ended. Her mouth had grown dry, and she
desperately wanted to sit down.
"Occasion," Professor Kay said.
"Occasion," Rose repeated. She opened her
mouth to spell when suddenly her mind went blank.
"Occasion," she said again. Her thoughts raced.
One c or two; one s or two? Her chest
tightened and she felt herself gasping for breath.
She looked at Mama and Papa. Papa was
twirling his mustache. Mama twisted her
handkerchief in her hands.
"Occasion," she said a third time. All the
shuffling and fidgeting in the room came to a stop.
Everyone was staring at Rose. A chair creaked in
the awful silence as someone leaned forward to hear
better.
Rose was too terrified to speak. She
didn't know which it was, two c's or two
s's! Or two c's and two s's. Which was
it?
Professor Kay cleared his throat.
Rose's heart began to pound in her ears.
"Do you wish me to repeat the word and define it?"
Professor Kay said gently.
"No," Rose croaked. She must try, even
if she got it wrong. She closed her eyes
tight, trying to see that word in her mind.
"Occasion," she said slowly. "O-can oc
... can-a ca, so-i-o-not sion. Occasion."
"Good girl!" Papa called out rather loudly.
Nervous laughter broke out in the room.
Mama's hand flew to her mouth.
"Correct," Professor Kay said.
Rose let out a shivery sigh.
There were four more rounds of perfect spelling.
Then Professor Kay gave Blanche the word
precipice.
"Precipice," Blanche said slowly.
Rose thought she saw Blanche tremble, but she
wasn't sure.
"People-rather-every pre, can-i ci, people-i ... so-every
pice. Precipice."
"Oh!" someone in the audience cried out. Papa
slapped his hand on the desktop. Mama
turned and shushed him.
At first Rose did not understand what had
happened. Then Professor Kay said,
"Wrong."
Rose could hardly believe her ears. She
knew how to spell that word. Blanche had got it
wrong!
Professor Kay looked at Rose.
""Precipice,"" he said.
"Precipice," said Rose. "People-rather-every
pre, can-i ci, people-i ... can-every pice.
Precipice."
The room erupted in a swirl of shouting and
clapping and confusion. Suddenly everyone was on his
feet, moving about and talking. Oscar clapped
Rose on the back as he ran past.
Professor Kay was shouting something about
lemonade on the second floor. Then Mama
and Papa came pushing through the crowd up to Rose.
Papa gave her a big hug. Mama smiled
her biggest smile.
Rose realized with a shock that she had actually
won the spelldown.
"That's our smart girl," Papa said. "You
did it! You beat 'em all hollow."
"We are very proud of you," said Mama.
Then Professor Kay was there. "Very well
done, young lady," he said. "Here is your
prize, well deserved I must say, close as
it was."
He held out to Rose a book. She took it
in her hands. It was heavy and thickly covered with
plush. The plush was deep red, soft as moss.
Inscribed on the cover in shiny gold lettering was the
word "Autographs."
Inside that book all the pages were blank, with
beautiful curlicue borders printed in pale
blue. Mama said it was an album, for friends and
loved ones to write little sayings and poems in.
It was a place to keep memories of good friends and
special times.
"Every girl must have one," said Mama. "I
did."
Rose looked at all those blank pages.
How would she ever fill them up? She didn't know
very many people she could ask to write in it. But she
trembled with excitement to think of those empty
pages filling up with words no one had thought of
yet.
Rose was jumping with joy inside her
skin, but she said politely, "Thank you,
Professor Kay." She ran her hands over the
velvety cover. It was so smooth and silky it
could have been alive.
But when Rose spotted Blanche across the
room, her joy began to melt into something else.
Blanche stood slump-shouldered with her face
buried in her mother's bosom. Her father was patting
her on the head and saying something to her.
While Mama and Papa talked
to Professor Kay over her head, Rose stared
at Blanche's heaving back. The more she looked,
the worse Rose felt. Yet she could not tear
her eyes away. She thought about how close she
herself had come to losing.
Rose looked at her beautiful new album,
and then back at Blanche. She tried to think of
something to do. Blanche had been unkind to Rose,
but Rose did not hate her. She didn't really
ever hate anybody. She just thought they were more or
less foolish, as Mama said.
But Rose did hate to be the cause of
Blanche's tears. She thought and stared and thought some
more. Then, in a flash, she knew what she must do.
Rose walked across the schoolroom, right up
to Blanche's family.
"Why, hello there, young lady," said Mr.
Coday. "You really gave us quite a show here tonight."
Blanche turned from her mother to look at
Rose. Her cheeks were damp and her face was
blotched. Her reddened eyes flashed and her mouth
pinched itself into a frown.
"Please don't cry," said Rose. "I'm
sorry you lost. I almost lost first. I couldn't remember if occasion has one c or two. I
only guessed. I was just lucky."
Blanche's frown softened. She looked down
at the autograph album in Rose's hands.
"Professor Kay gave me this for winning.
It isn't fair to give only one prize when
we are such equally good spellers," said Rose.
"We can share it, if you like."
Rose held out the album.
Blanche stared at it with disbelieving eyes.
"Well, isn't that something?" Mrs. Coday
said. Then she nudged Blanche with her elbow.
"Have you lost your tongue?" she said sharply.
"Thank you," Blanche murmured.
"That's a fine gesture, young lady," Mr.
Coday said quickly. "You are an
example to us all. But a memory album, now,
that isn't a thing easily shared. Besides, you did
win it, fair and square, luck or no."
"Yes," Blanche said, the storm clearing from
her face. "It is your prize. You must keep it
for yourself. But thank you. You are very nice to offer."
"We can take turns keeping it," said
Rose.
"It wouldn't be right," said Blanche. "Thank
you very much."
Rose thought for a moment. Then she had another
idea.
"Will you write in it, then?" Rose asked.
"Since we are both the best spellers, I would
like you to be the first one to write in it."
"I ... I wouldn't know what to write,"
Blanche stammered. Then she blushed.
"Take it home with you," said Rose. "Then you
can think of something."
Mr. Coday said that since the school session was
over, he could give it to Papa when he came
into the drugstore.
"All right," said Blanche softly. She
took the album from Rose, ran her hand over the
mossy cover, and tucked it under her arm. Now she
looked at Rose with shining eyes and smiled. She
snuffled up the last of her tears. "I'll take
good care of it. I promise."
"Good-bye, Blanche," Rose said.
"Good-bye, Rose," said Blanche.
Rose skipped back to be with Mama and
Papa. They were still talking to Professor Kay
and some other parents. People were leaving the room and going
upstairs for lemonade. Rose tugged
Mamaeaness skirt and whispered in her ear,
"Lemonade."
Mama laughed. "Very well," she said. "But
where is your album?"
"I gave it to Blanche. She is going
to write something in it. Mr. Coday said he will
give it to Papa when he goes to town."
"That's very sweet, Rose," said Mama.
"Now I have two reasons to be proud of you tonight.
A good winner is a gracious winner."
Blanche did not come upstairs to drink
lemonade. Rose did not see her again the rest
of the evening. But as she walked home in the dark between
Mama and Papa, the lantern throwing its quivery
circle of light on the path, Rose remembered
Blanche's grateful smile. It
made Rose happy to think she could make someone
smile.
Rose wondered what Blanche might write
in her autograph book. She couldn't wait
to see.

Harvest Moon

The first cool breaths of autumn stole into the
Ozarks at night, pulling heavy blankets of
fog over the hills and hollows. Each day the
sun rose strong and golden to chase off the gray
dawn.
Rose bounded out of bed each morning, delighted
she didn't have to dress for school. While she
fed the chickens and poured their warmed water into a
pan, she took deep breaths of the spicy
autumn air. Everywhere Rose looked there were
spiderwebs in the grass, sparkling with
dewdrops. Puffy white clouds floated in a
deep blue sky.
The leaves of the trees had begun to fade.
Rose noticed that many of the leaves had jagged
holes and edges where insects had been chewing, and
brown spots. It was a sure sign that summer was
getting old.
Woolly brown and black caterpillars
crawled across the barnyard, looking for a good safe
corner to spin a cocoon and rest until spring.
You could pick one up and put it facing the other
way and it would always turn around and crawl rippling
off the way it had been going. The wind could bowl
them over and they would right themselves and march off in the
same direction.
Rose even tried shaking one up in her hand.
It curled up into a tiny round pincushion. She
carried it to another part of the barnyard. When she
set it down, it uncurled itself and started crawling
in the very same direction it had been going before.
How did it know?
But there was no time for play. This was the month of the
harvest moon. They must hurry to gather in the
crops before frost.
Mama said they should pick the potatoes first.
"They could wait, but the market is high now.
Two and a half cents a pound! And this Ozark
weather is almost too good to believe," she said,
bent over and huffing as she dug with her hands. She
brushed the dirt off a large one and weighed it in
her hand. "Two potato crops in one
summer! We'll have almost a wagonload to sell
and enough to winter over. And we have second plantings
of turnips and carrots, yet."
Harvesting potatoes was a treasure hunt.
Papa walked along the rows with the shovel and
loosened up the hardened hills of earth. Then
Rose dug with her hands into the loose soil
until she found the pale yellow potatoes
clinging to the roots. She made sure to get every
one, even the tiniest buttons. They would keep the
smallest for eating and trade the big ones at
Reynolds' Store.
They stacked the potatoes in piles between the
rows. Mama separated the good ones out to sell.
When they were done, she and Rose put the graded
potatoes into sacks. Then Papa loaded the
heavy sacks onto the wagon and drove into town.
Rose and Mama stood outside and watched him
go. Rose swelled with pride to see the food she
had helped grow going off to market.
That night after supper Papa went to the mantel
and got down a little book he often wrote in.
He sat by the fireplace and scribbled some
numbers in pencil. Papa called it his accounts
book. He wrote down everything they bought,
traded, and sold.
"Why?" asked Rose.
"Any farmer worth his salt keeps his
records," said Papa. "It tells how we're
doing. See here," he said, showing her the page he
was writing on. It had blue lines printed on
it, and three columns. The first column had
writing, "375 lbs potatoes at
2-1/2cents." In the second column he had
written a number, $9.38. The third column
was blank.
The book was pages and pages of writing and
numbers.
"Every time we trade at Reynolds', I
write that down in the third column," Papa
explained. "That's a minus. Every time I sell a
load of stove wood, or fence rails, or
railroad ties I made, or potatoes, or
Mama sends in eggs, I write it down in the
second column. That is a plus.
"When it comes settling-up time, after the harvest
is all in, I will add all the minuses and all
the pluses and I can see which one is
greater."
"What does it say now?" Rose
asked. "Are we plus or minus?"
Papa laughed. "Too soon to say for sure,
Rose. But we're getting by."
Papa's account book was a little confusing, but
Rose understood that it was very important.
Next Papa dug a shallow pit in the ground
in a little clearing between two trees, close to the
house. He began to line it with small stones.
"Why, Papa?" Rose wanted to know.
"What's it for?"
"Curiosity killed the cat," Papa said.
"Run and fetch some straw from the barn."
Rose made several trips, gathering up as
much straw as she could carry in her arms. Papa
spread the straw over the stones until they were all
covered.
He drove the wagon up to the pit. It was
piled with the keeping potatoes and the keeping onions
that had been hanging from rafters in the barn to dry.
"Now you can help me put all this treasure
into the pit," he said.
Papa used the shovel and Rose carried as many
as she could in her hands.
"Don't take too many," Papa said. "They
mustn't be dropped or bruised. One bad
potato will spoil all the rest."
They kept piling up potatoes and onions
until Papa said the mound was high enough. Then he
sent Rose to fetch more straw. He spread a
thick layer of it on top, and shoveled a thick
layer of soil on top of that.
The pit had grown into a small hill. Papa
dug a hole, just big enough to stick an arm through, on
each side. He stuck his hand in to make sure
he could reach the potatoes and onions. Then he
covered up the holes with some stones and straw. He
laid some boards on top of the mound, to make it
harder for raccoons and other animals to dig into it
and steal the food.
Finally, he stood up and brushed the dirt from his
hands.
"All tucked in for winter," he said. "The
soil and straw will save them from rot and frost,
almost until spring. Anytime we want
potatoes or onions, all we have to do is
stick an arm in and pluck them out."
The rest of the potatoes and onions went
into sacks that Mama stored under the kitchen, through the
trapdoor in the floor.
Then they dug up the sweet
potatoes that Papa had planted in a corner
of the corn patch. They brushed off the dirt and
set the gnarled roots out on planks to dry in the
sunshine. Rose sorted out the long stringy ones that
weren't good for eating. Mama would save them to use
for seed next spring.
When the sweet potatoes were dry, Rose and
Mama wrapped each one in a scrap of old
newspaper. Then they put all the wrapped
potatoes in a wooden box in a corner of the
kitchen.
They gathered chestnuts that had fallen from a
chestnut tree near the orchard. Mama packed
them in layers of salt in a big pickling jar.
She tucked the jar away in one of the trunks where
they wouldn't be tempted to eat them. She was saving
them for Christmas.
One night at supper, after Papa had been
to town to pick up some liniment for his sore shoulder,
he laid Rose's autograph album on the table. Rose opened it at once and looked on the
first page. Blanche had written something there in
blue ink. Mama peered over Rose's shoulder
and read:

Too wise you are, too wise you be;
I see you are too wise for me.
Your friend, Blanche Coday. October 3,
1895.

Rose tingled with excitement when she read the
words "Your friend."
"That's very sweet," said Mama. "I
suspect your book will fill up quickly when you go
back to school in December."
"I want you and Papa to write something,
too," Rose said.
When the dishes had been cleared, Papa took
Mama's pen, twisted his mustache for a few
minutes, and then scratched away at the page.
Rose fidgeted impatiently. Then Papa
carefully blotted the page with Mama's blotter
and showed it to Rose.

To my prairie Rose:
Be faithful in all things,
Superficial in none,
And always remember,

that home is home.
--Papa.

Mama said she must think of what to write. The
next Sunday she spent a long time writing in
Rose's book. When she was done she showed it
to Rose. It was a poem Mama had composed.

There were some naughty flowers once,
Who were careless in their play;
They got their petals torn and soiled
As they swung in the dust all day.

They went to bed at four o'clock,
With faces covered tight,
To keep the fairy, Drop O'Dew,
From washing them at night.

Poor Drop O'Dew! What could she do?
She said to the Fairy Queen,
"I cannot get those Four o'Clocks
To keep their faces clean."

The mighty Storm King heard the tale;
"My winds and rain," roared he,
"Shall wash those naughty flowers well,
As flowers ought to be."

So raindrops came and caught them all
Before they went to bed,
And washed those little Four o'Clocks
At three o'clock instead.

Mama's poem was beautiful, as good as any in
Rose's McGuffey's Reader. She read it
over and over again, and liked it better each time.
Beans were the next crop to harvest. Abe and
Swiney came to help. They would get a share of the
harvest for helping.
For days and days, from morning to night, they
picked bean pods off the vines that had climbed
up the cornstalks. Rose and Swiney picked the
pods that were closest to the ground. Mama and Papa
and Abe picked up high.
They all wore tow sacks tied around their
waists with string. The tow sacks were long and narrow.
Rose's drooped on the ground, and she kept
tripping over it. When it began to get full, it
was very heavy to drag.
Picking beans was hard work. But Abe made it fun by teaching them a song. They all
sang it as they picked, their voices rising from
different places in the field.

"My papa came from town last night
As sad as a man could be,
His wagon empty, cotton gone,
And not a dime had he.

"Huzzah! Huzzah!
'Tis strange, Ma did declare!
We make the clothes for all the world,
But few have we to wear."

One morning before the first rooster crow, Rose
woke up with a start. A sound had disturbed her
sleep, but she didn't know what it was. The
soft, slow sighs of Mama and Papa sleeping
came from their bed in the corner. A square of bright
moonlight from the window lay on the floor at the
foot of her bed. The wind was still and the woods
quiet, as if they were listening, too.
Rose heard water dripping outside, like
rain. But it couldn't be raining if there was
moonlight. It was so bright inside that Rose could
read the clock face. It was three o'clock.
Then Rose heard the sound again. At first she
thought it was a train whistle. It was a wild
howling, far away. Then more howling and baying, in
different voices. Rose had never heard
wolves crying before, but she thought for sure that was
what it must be.
She crept out of bed and tiptoed across the cold
floor into the kitchen. Fido got up from his
sleeping place by the stove and stretched with a tiny
moan. Then he tapped across the floor and stood
at Rose's feet.
Far away the voices howled again. It was a
wild sound that sent shivers up her back. She
opened the shutters of one of the windows and looked out.
The cool night air flowed over her skin like
water.
The whole world was bathed in the bright light of the
harvest moon. Heavy dew dripped from all the
trees. It gently splattered on the leaves.
Moonrays fell like dark sunlight, dappling the
ground with shadows. Down toward Fry Creek,
fingers of morning mist were starting to creep up among
the trees.
Far away the howling took up again. One of the
horses snorted in her stall in the
barn. The spring purled quietly in the gully
behind the house.
Rose went to the front door and opened it. It
complained with a tiny squeak. She stepped out onto
the porch and looked up at the moon through an opening
in the trees. The bright circle of light was
clothed in a fuzzy halo that was brownish around the
edge.
Rose looked at the moon for the longest time,
trying to see the man's face. But it was a harvest
moon, when the moon is so bright farmers can work
into the night gathering the crops. It was too bright
to see the dark spots of its eyes and nose. She
had to look away.
She sat down on the porch and stared hard at the
trees. She thought she could see the green in the
leaves, but only just barely, and only just the
darkest green. But even then she wasn't sure.
She could just barely see the brown of the soil and
rocks. The shadows seemed as crisp as
daylight, but the harder she looked the more they were
smoothed and softened, the way moss softens a
rock. Her eyes kept playing tricks on
her.
The gathering mist made the air glow in
places. She could see the dark outlines of
spiders asleep in their webs in the eaves of the
porch, waiting for the earth to warm up and send them a
morning meal. Rose felt herself part of the night.
A creaking floorboard in the kitchen startled
her. Mama appeared in the doorway, ghostly
white in her nightgown.
"Is something the matter?" she asked
sleepily. "I heard the door creak."
"Something was howling in the woods," said Rose.
"I thought it was wolves."
"I heard it, too," said Mama, sitting
down next to Rose on the porch's edge. She
yawned. "But it isn't wolves. I think it is
just some farmer out hunting a raccoon with his hounds."
They sat in silence for a moment. Rose shivered
against the cool morning air. Mama put her arm
around Rose's shoulder and squeezed. Then the
ghostly shape of Blackfoot came padding toward
them across the yard from the barn where he had been
sleeping. He mewed softly and rubbed against their
legs, purring loudly in the stillness.
"The moonlight is lovely, isn't it?" said
Mama. "It's as though you were inside a dream.
You can see everything, but you can't see it
either."
Rose sat cuddled up against Mama for the
longest time, watching the mist floating quietly
into the moon-washed yard. She wished that moment could
go on forever.
But just then the rooster crowed. A new day was about
to begin.

THE END