The first barrel was nearly full of flour. The second held corn meal. The third had a tight lid, and it was full of pieces of fat, white pork held down in brown brine. Laura had never seen so much salt pork at one time. There was a wooden box full of square soda crackers, and a box full of big slabs of salted fish. There was a large box of dried apples, and two sacks full of potatoes, and another big sack nearly full of beans.
The wagon was at the door. Laura ran out, shouting, “Oh, Ma, come quick and see! There’s so many things—And a big attic, Mary! And a stove, and crackers, soda crackers!”
Ma looked at everything and she was pleased. “It’s very nice, I’m sure,” she said. “And so clean. We can get settled here in a jiffy. Bring me the broom, Carrie.”
Pa didn’t even have to set up a stove. He put Ma’s stove in the lean-to outside the back door, where the coal was. Then while Pa built a fire they arranged the table and chairs in the large front room. Ma set Mary’s rocking chair by the open oven door. Already that good stove was giving off heat, and in the warm corner Mary sat holding Grace and amusing her, to keep her out of the way while Ma and Laura and Carrie were busy.
Ma made the big bed on the bedstead in the bedroom. She hung her clothes and Pa’s on nails in the wall there, and covered them neatly with a sheet. Upstairs in the large, low attic Laura and Carrie made two neat beds on the bedsteads there, one for Carrie and the other for Laura and Mary. Then they carried their clothes and their boxes upstairs; they hung the clothes on the gable wall by one window, and under it they set their boxes.
Everything was neat now, so they went downstairs to help Ma get supper. Pa came in bringing a large, shallow packing box.
“What’s that for, Charles?” Ma asked, and Pa said, “This is Grace’s trundle bed!”
“It’s the only thing we needed!” Ma exclaimed.
“The sides are high enough to hold her covers tucked in,” said Pa.
“And low enough to go under our bed in the daytime, like any trundle bed,” said Ma.
Laura and Carrie made up a little bed for Grace in the packing box, and slid it under the big bed, and pulled it out again for the night. The moving-in was done.
Supper was a feast. The surveyors’ pretty dishes made the table gay. Little sour cucumber pickles, from a jar the surveyors had left, made the warmed-over roast duck and fried potatoes taste different. And after they were eaten, Ma stepped into the pantry and brought out—“Guess what?” she said.
She set before each of them a little dish of canned peaches, and two soda crackers! “We’ll have a treat,” she said, “to celebrate living in a house again.”
It was fine to be eating in such a large place, with a board floor, and the glass windows glittering black against the night outside. Slowly, slowly they ate the smooth, cool peaches and the sweet golden juice, and carefully licked their spoons.
Then the dishes were quickly cleared away and washed in the handy pantry. The table’s leaves were dropped, the red-and-white checked cloth spread, and the bright-shining lamp set on its center. Ma settled with Grace in the rocking chair, and Pa said, “This makes a fellow feel like music. Bring me the fiddle box, Laura!”
He ti
ghtened and tuned the strings and rosined the bow. Winter evenings were coming again when Pa played the fiddle. He looked around contentedly at them all and at the good walls that would keep them comfortable.
“I must manage something for curtains,” Ma said.
Pa paused with the bow poised above the fiddle. “Don’t you realize, Caroline, that our nearest neighbor to the east is sixty miles away and our nearest west is forty miles? When winter shuts down, they might as well be farther off. We’ve got the world to ourselves! I saw only one flock of wild geese today, flying high and fast. They weren’t stopping at any lakes; not they! They were hurrying south. Looked to me like the last flock of the season. So even the geese have left us.”
His fiddle bow touched the strings and he began to play. Softly Laura began to sing:
“One night when the winds blew bitter,
Blew bitter across the wild moor,
Young Mary she came with her child,
Wandering home to her own father’s door,
Crying, Father, O pray let me in!
Take pity on me I implore
Or the child in my arms will die
From the winds that blow across the wild moor.
But her father was deaf to her cries
Not a voice nor a sound reached the door