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Page 42
Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live, was a clean,
well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green yards
about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing
along the wooden sidewalks. In the centre of the town there were two rows
of new brick `store' buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the court-house, and
four white churches. Our own house looked down over the town, and from our
upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two
miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost
freedom of the farming country.
We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt like town
people. Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church, grandmother
was busy with church suppers and missionary societies, and I was quite
another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term of school was
over, I could fight, play `keeps,' tease the little girls, and use
forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained from
utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest neighbour,
kept an eye on me, and if my behaviour went beyond certain bounds I was not
permitted to come into her yard or to play with her jolly children.
We saw more of our country neighbours now than when we lived on the farm.
Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them. We had a big barn
where the farmers could put up their teams, and their womenfolk more often
accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for dinner, and rest and
set their bonnets right before they went shopping. The more our house was
like a country hotel, the better I liked it. I was glad, when I came home
from school at noon, to see a farm-wagon standing in the back yard, and I
was always ready to run downtown to get beefsteak or baker's bread for
unexpected company. All through that first spring and summer I kept hoping
that Ambrosch would bring Antonia and Yulka to see our new house. I wanted
to show them our red plush furniture, and the trumpet-blowing cherubs the
German paperhanger had put on our parlour ceiling.
When Ambrosch came to town, however, he came alone, and though he put his
horses in our barn, he would never stay for dinner, or tell us anything
about his mother and sisters. If we ran out and questioned him as he was
slipping through the yard, he would merely work his shoulders about in his
coat and say, `They all right, I guess.'
Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm, grew as fond of Antonia as we had
been, and always brought us news of her. All through the wheat season, she
told us, Ambrosch hired his sister out like a man, and she went from farm
to farm, binding sheaves or working with the threshers. The farmers liked
her and were kind to her; said they would rather have her for a hand than
Ambrosch. When fall came she was to husk corn for the neighbours until
Christmas, as she had done the year before; but grandmother saved her from
this by getting her a place to work with our neighbours, the Harlings.
II
GRANDMOTHER OFTEN SAID THAT if she had to live in town, she thanked God she
lived next the Harlings. They had been farming people, like ourselves, and
their place was like a little farm, with a big barn and a garden, and an
orchard and grazing lots--even a windmill. The Harlings were Norwegians,
and Mrs. Harling had lived in Christiania until she was ten years old. Her
husband was born in Minnesota. He was a grain merchant and cattle-buyer,
and was generally considered the most enterprising business man in our
county. He controlled a line of grain elevators in the little towns along
the railroad to the west of us, and was away from home a great deal. In
his absence his wife was the head of the household.
Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house.
Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the
moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright,
twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick
to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember
her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her
eyes, was a burst of humour, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps
shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever
she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her
enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all
the everyday occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary,
at the Harlings'. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and
house-cleaning was like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made garden that
spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge
that separated our place from hers.
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