These Happy Golden Years (Little House 8)

“Oh!” Carrie discovered. “We’ve made one bag too many. Grace miscounted.”

“I did not!” Grace cried.

“Grace,” Ma said.

“I am not contradicting!” cried Grace.

“Grace,” said Pa.

Grace gulped. “Pa,” she said. “I didn’t count wrong. I guess I can count five! There was candy enough for another one, and it looks pretty in the pink bag.”

“So it does, and it is nice to have an extra one. We haven’t always been so lucky,” Pa told her.

Laura remembered the Christmas on the Verdigris River in Indian Territory, when Mr. Edwards had walked eighty miles to bring her and Mary each one stick of candy. Wherever he was tonight, she wished him as much happiness as he had brought them. She remembered the Christmas Eve on Plum Creek in Minnesota, when Pa had been lost in the blizzard and they feared he would never come back. He had eaten the Christmas candy while he lay sheltered three days under the creek bank. Now here they were, in the snug warm house, with plenty of candy and other good things.

Yet now she wished that Mary were there, and she was trying not to think of Almanzo. When he first went away, letters had come from him often; then they had come regularly. Now for three weeks there had been no letter. He was at home, Laura thought, meeting his old friends and the girls he used to know. Springtime was four months away. He might forget her, or wish that he had not given her the ring that sparkled on her finger.

Pa broke into her thoughts. “Bring me the fiddle, Laura. Let’s have a little music before we begin on these good things.”

She brought him the fiddle box and he tuned the fiddle and resined the bow. “What shall I play?”

“Play Mary’s song first,” Laura answered. “Perhaps she is thinking of us.”

Pa drew the bow across the strings and he and the fiddle sang:

“Ye banks and braes and streams around

The castle of Montgomery,

Green be your woods and fair your flowers,

Your waters never drumlie;

There summer first unfolds her robes

And there the langest tarry,

For there I took the last fareweel

Of my sweet Highland Mary.”

One Scots song reminded Pa of another, and with the fiddle he sang:

“My heart is sair, I dare na tell,

My heart is sair for somebody.

Oh! I could make a winter night,

A for the sake o’ somebody.”

Ma sat in her rocking chair beside the heater, and Carrie and Grace were snug in the window seat, but Laura moved restlessly around the room.

The fiddle sang a wandering tune of its own that made her remember June’s wild roses. Then it caught up another tune to blend with Pa’s voice.

“When marshalled on the mighty plane,

The glittering hosts bestud the sky