Ma held Carrie, and Laura and Mary crowded into the rocking-chair, too. They heard the wild voices of the storm and felt Jack’s eyes shining, till Ma said:
“Better run along to bed, girls. The sooner you’re asleep, the sooner it will be morning.” She kissed them good-night, and Mary climbed the attic ladder. But Laura stopped halfway up. Ma was warming Carrie’s nightgown by the oven. Laura asked her, low, “Pa did stay in town, didn’t he?”
Ma did not look up. She said cheerfully, “Why, surely, Laura. No doubt he and Mr. Fitch are sitting by the stove now, telling stories and cracking jokes.”
Laura went to bed. Deep in the night she woke and saw lamplight shining up through the ladder-hole. She crept out of bed into the cold, and kneeling on the floor she looked down.
Ma sat alone in her chair. Her head was bowed and she was very still, but her eyes were open, looking at her hands clasped in her lap. The lamp was shining in the window.
For a long time Laura looked down. Ma did not move. The lamp went on shining. The storm howled and hooted after things that fled shrieking through the enormous dark around the frightened house. At last Laura crept silently back to bed and lay shivering.
Chapter 38
The Day of Games
It was late next morning when Ma called Laura to breakfast. The storm was fiercer and wilder. Furry-white frost covered the windows, and inside that good tight house the sugary snow was over the floor and the bedcovers. Upstairs was so cold that Laura snatched up her clothes and hurried down to dress by the stove.
Mary was already dressed and buttoning Carrie up. Hot cornmeal mush, and milk, with the new white bread and butter, were on the table. The daylight was dim white. Frost was thick on every window pane.
Ma shivered over the stove. “Well,” she said, “the stock must be fed.”
She put on Pa’s boots and jumper, and wrapped herself in the big shawl. She told Mary and Laura that she would be gone longe
r this time, because she must water the horses and the cattle.
When she was gone, Mary was scared and still. But Laura could not bear to be still. “Come on,” she told Mary. “We’ve got the work to do.”
They washed and wiped the dishes. They shook the snow off their bedcovers and made their bed. They warmed again by the stove, then they polished it, and Mary cleaned the woodbox while Laura swept the floors.
Ma had not come back. So Laura took the dust-cloth and wiped the window sills and the benches and every curve of Ma’s willow rocking-chair. She climbed on a bench and very carefully wiped the clock-shelf and the clock, and the little brown-spotted dog and her own jewel-box with the gold teapot and cup-and-saucer on top. But she did not touch the pretty china shepherdess standing on the bracket that Pa had carved for Ma. Ma allowed no one else to touch the shepherdess.
While Laura was dusting, Mary combed Carrie’s hair and put the red-checked cloth on the table, and got out the school-books and the slate.
At last the wind howled into the lean-to with a cloud of snow and Ma.
Her skirt and her shawl were frozen stiff with ice. She had had to draw water from the well for the horses and Spot and the calf. The wind had flung the water on her and the cold had frozen her soaked clothes. She had not been able to get to the barn with enough water. But under the icy shawl she had saved almost all the milk.
She rested a little, and said she must bring in wood. Mary and Laura begged her to let them bring it, but Ma said:
“No. You girls are not big enough and you’d be lost. You do not know what this storm is like. I’ll get the wood. You open the door for me.
She piled wood high on the woodbox and around it, while they opened and shut the door for her. Then she rested, and they mopped up the puddles of snow melting from the wood.
“You are good girls,” Ma said. She looked around at the house, and praised them for doing the work so nicely while she was gone. “Now,” she said, “you may study your lessons.”
Laura and Mary sat down to their books. Laura looked steadily at the page, but she could not study. She heard the storm howling and she heard things in the air moaning and shrieking. Snow swish-swished against the windows. She tried not to think of Pa. Suddenly the words on the page smeared together and a drop of water splashed on them.
She was ashamed. It would be shameful even for Carrie to cry, and Laura was eight years old. She looked sidewise to make sure that Mary had not seen that tear fall. Mary’s eyes were shut so tight that her whole face was crinkled, and Mary’s mouth was wabbling.
“I don’t believe we want lessons, girls!” Ma said. “Suppose we don’t do anything today but play. Think what we’ll play first. Pussy-in-the-corner! Would you like that?”
“Oh yes!” they said.
Laura stood in one corner, Mary in another, and Carrie in the third. There were only three corners, because the stove was in one. Ma stood in the middle of the floor and cried, “Poor pussy wants a corner!”
Then all at once they ran out of their corners and each tried to get into another corner. Jack was excited. Ma dodged into Mary’s corner, and that left Mary out to be poor pussy. Then Laura fell over Jack, and that left Laura out. Carrie ran laughing into the wrong corners at first, but she soon learned.
They all ran until they were gasping from running and shouting and laughing. They had to rest, and Ma said, “Bring me the slate and I’ll tell you a story.”