The Long Winter (Little House 6)

“Never mind, it’s no trick to twist more,” Pa replied.

“I’ll help, Pa,” Laura offered.

“We’ve got all day for it,” Pa said. “Everything is snug at the stable till night. We’ll twist hay first, then we’ll read.”

Grace began to whimper. “My feet’s cold.”

“For shame, Grace! A big girl like you! Go warm your feet,” Laura told her.

“Come sit on my lap and warm them,” Mary said, feeling her way to her rocking chair before the oven.

After Laura and Pa had twisted a great pile of hay sticks and stacked them by the stove, Carrie brought Pa his big green book.

“Please read about the lions, Pa,” she asked him. “We can play the wind is lions roaring.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to have a light, Caroline,” Pa said. “This print is small.” Ma lighted the button lamp and set it by him. “Now,” he said, “this is a jungle night in Africa. The flickering light here is from our campfire. Wild animals are all around us, yowling and squealing and roaring, lions and tigers and hyenas and I guess a hippopotamus or two. They won’t come anywhere near us because they’re afraid of the fire. You hear big leaves rasping, too, and queer birds squawking. It’s a thick, black, hot night with big stars overhead. Now I’m going to read what happens.” He began to read.

Laura tried to listen but she felt stupid and numb. Pa’s voice slid away into the ceaseless noises of the storm. She felt that the blizzard must stop before she could do anything, before she could even listen or think, but it would never stop. It had been blowing forever.

She was tired. She was tired of the cold and the dark, tired of brown bread and potatoes, tired of twisting hay and grinding wheat, filling the stove and washing dishes and making beds and going to sleep and waking up. She was tired of the blizzard winds. There was no tune in them any more, only a confusion of sound beating on her ears.

“Pa,” she spoke suddenly, interrupting his reading, “won’t you play the fiddle?”

Pa looked at her in surprise. Then he laid down the book. “Why yes, Laura,” he said. “If you want to hear the fiddle, I’ll play it.”

He opened and shut his hands and rubbed the fingers while Laura brought the fiddle-box from its warm shelter on the floor behind the stove.

Pa rosined the bow, tucked the fiddle under his chin, and touched the strings. He looked at Laura.

“Play ‘Bonnie Doon,’” Laura said, and Pa played and sang:

“Ye banks and braes of Bonnie Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?”

But every note from the fiddle was a very little wrong. Pa’s fingers were clumsy. The music dragged and a fiddle string snapped.

“My fingers are too stiff and thick from being out in the cold so much, I can’t play,” Pa spoke as if he were ashamed. He laid the fiddle in its box. “Put it away, Laura, until some other time,” he said.

“I wish you’d help me, anyway, Charles,” Ma said. She took the coffee mill from Mary and emptied the ground wheat from its little drawer. She filled the small hopper with kernels and handed the mill to Pa. “I’ll need another grinding to make the bread for dinner,” she told him.

Ma took the covered dish of souring from its warm place under the stove. She stirred it briskly, then measured two cupfuls into a pan, added salt and saleratus, and the flour that Mary and Carrie had ground. Then she took the mill from Pa and added the flour he had made.

“That’s just enough,” she said. “Thank you, Charles.”

“I’d better be doing the chores now before it gets too dark,” Pa said.

“I’ll have a hot meal ready and waiting by the time you come in,” Ma reminded him. He put on his wraps and went out into the storm.

Laura listened to the winds while she stared at the blank window without seeing it. The worst thing that had happened was that Pa could not play the fiddle. If she had not asked him to play it, he might not have known that he could not do it.

Ma, with Carrie crowded in beside her, sat in her rocking chair by the stove, opposite Mary. She held Grace in her arms and rocked slowly, softly singing to her:

“I w

ill sing you a song of that beautiful land,

The far away home of the soul