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Page 9
Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for
prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several
Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I
wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah.' I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbours
lived in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our
white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above the basement, stood
at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close
by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to
the barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and
bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs,
at the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty
willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came
directly by our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little
pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie
to the west. There, along the western sky-line it skirted a great
cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and
the sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight.
Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough,
shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the
plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is
the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of
winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.
The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and
the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother
called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung
by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake
cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife;
she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little
girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been
sick all summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping ...
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found
standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of
the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at the
hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in
the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. `Aren't you afraid of
snakes?'
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