The First Four Years (Little House 9)

Laura was muttering to herself, “The poor man gets his—”

“What’s that?” Manly asked.

“I was only saying,” Laura answered, “that the poor man got his ice in the summer this time.”

At two o’clock the next day hailstones were still lying in drifts in low places. Though plans are wrecked, the pieces must be gathered up and put together again in some shape. Winter was coming. Coal must be bought to last through. That would cost between sixty and one hundred dollars. Seed grain would have to be bought for next spring’s sowing. There were notes on the machinery coming due. There was the binder that had been used to cut only fifty acres of oats; there was the sulky plow and the mower and rake, the seeder that had sown the grain in the spring, and the new wagon. There was too the five hundred dollars still due on the building of the house. “Five hundred dollars’ debt on the house!” Laura exclaimed. “Oh, I didn’t know that!”

“No,” Manly said. “I didn’t think there was any need to bother you about that.” But something must be done about all this, and he would go to town tomorrow and see what could be done. Perhaps he could raise money with a mortgage on the homestead. That was proved up on, thank goodness. He couldn’t give a mortgage on the tree claim. That belonged to Uncle Sam until Manly had raised those trees. And Laura thought she could hear her father singing, “Our Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm!” Sometimes Laura was afraid her head was a little flighty, but that extra five hundred dollars’ debt had been something of a shock. Five hundred and two hundred was seven hundred, and the wagon and the mower… She must stop counting it or she would have her head queer.

Manly found he could renew all his machinery notes for a year by paying the interest. He could even make the first payment on the binder after the next harvest, postponing the second payment to the year after. He could sell all the wild hay he had for four dollars a ton delivered at the railroad in town. Buyers wanted it to ship to Chicago.

But he could not raise money with a mortgage on the homestead unless they were living on it. He must have money to pay the interest due, for living expenses, and for seed. There was no way to get the money except by moving to the homestead. If they were living on the homestead he could mortgage it for eight hundred dollars. A newcomer would buy Kate and Bill for more than Manly had paid for them. Manly would not need them, for he had found a renter for the tree claim on shares; Manly would furnish the seed.

Skip and Barnum, with Trixy and Fly to do the driving, could do the work on the one place. If someone else worked the tree claim, Manly could raise more crops on the homestead and have more profit from the farms than if he tried to work both claims all by himself. An addition would have to be built on the homestead claim shanty before they moved but they could do with one new room and a cellar underneath through using the original shanty for a storeroom.

So it was decided. Manly hurried to stack the oats, which the hail had threshed to the ground, but the oat straw made good animal feed to take the place of hay and that would leave more hay to sell.

When the oats were hauled to the homestead and stacked, Manly dug the hole in the ground for the cellar, and over it built the one-room addition to the claim shanty. Then he built the frame of a barn, cut slough hay, and when it was dry stacked it around the frame to make a hay barn.

Everything was ready now for the moving. Manly and Laura moved to the homestead the next day after the barn was finished. It was the twenty-fifth of August. And the winter and summer were the first year.

The Second Year

It was a beautiful day, the twenty-fifth of August, 1886, when Manly and Laura moved to the homestead.

“A fine day, as fine as our wedding day just a year ago, and it’s a new start just as that was. And a new home, if it is some smaller.

“We’ll be all right now. You’ll see! ‘Everything evens up in the end. The rich man—’”

His voice trailed silent but Laura couldn’t help finishing the Irishman’s saying to herself: “The rich man has his ice in the summer and the poor man gets his in the winter.” Well, they had got theirs in that hailstorm and in the summer too. But she mustn’t think about that now. The thing to do was to get things arranged in the new home and make it cheerful for Manly. Poor Manly, he was having a hard time and doing his very best. The house wasn’t so bad. The one new room was narrow (twelve feet by sixteen) and not very long, facing the south with a door and a window on a narrow porch, closed at the west end by the old claim shanty.

There was a window in the east end of the room. The looking glass was hung beside it in the south corner and th

e parlor table stood under it. The head of the bed came close to the window on the other side and extended along the north wall.

The kitchen stove was in the northwest corner of the room and a kitchen cupboard stood beside it. The kitchen-dining table stood against the west wall close to the south end.

The carpet from the old bedroom was across the east end of the room, and the armchair and Laura’s little rocking chair stood on it, close to each other between the windows. The sun came in through the east window in the mornings and shone across the room. It was all very snug and pleasant.

The room that had been the claim shanty was convenient as a storage room, and the stock were comfortable in their new barn. Sheltered from the north and west by the low hill and facing south, it would be warm in winter.

The whole place was new and fresh. The wind waved the tall grass in the slough that stretched from the foot of the hill by the barn to the south and to the east line of the farm. The house was at the top of the low hill and there would always be grassland in front of it. The plowland lay to the north of the hill out of sight from the house. Laura was glad of that. She loved the sweep of unbroken prairie with the wild grasses waving in the winds. To be sure the whole place was grass land now, except for a small field. Ten acres of cultivated land were required by law before proving up on a homestead. But the grass to the north of the house was upland, blue stem, and not the tall slough grass that grew so rankly in low places. It was haying time, and every day counted in the amount of hay that could be put up before winter. Because of the hailstorm, hay would be the only crop this year. So as soon as breakfast was over on the day after the moving, Manly hitched Skip and Barnum to the mowing machine and began cutting hay. Laura left her morning’s work undone and went with him to see the work started, and then because the air was so fresh and the new-cut hay so clean and sweet, she wandered over the field, picking the wild sunflowers and Indian paintbrush. Presently she went slowly back to the house and her unfinished tasks.

She didn’t want to stay in the house. There would be so much of that after the baby came. And she felt much better out in the fresh air. So after that she did as little as possible in the house, and instead stayed out in the hayfield with Manly. When he loaded the hay in the big hayrack to haul to the barn, Laura, already in the wagon, stepped up on each forkful as it was pitched in and so gradually rose with the load until she was on the top, ready to ride to the barn. At the barn she slid down the hay into Manly’s arms and was safely on the ground.

Manly made the stacks in the field with a bull rake. The bull rake was a long wide plank with long wooden teeth set in it at intervals for the whole length. A horse was hitched at each end, and, walking one on each side of a long windrow of hay, they pulled the plank sideways. The long teeth slipped under the hay and it piled up in front of the plank and was pushed along the ground.

When there was enough of a load and it was where the stack was to be, Manly tipped the plank. It went over the top of the hay which was left in a pile. Several of these piles started the stack. Then as the horses came to it, one went on each side of the stack, the rake went on up, Manly followed it and spilled the hay on top of the stack and then went down the other end after another load.

Barnum was good and always walked along with his end of the plank on his side of the stack. But Skip stopped when he had no driver, so Laura drove Skip the length of the stack and then sat against the sweet hay on the sunny side while Manly would bring up another load with the rake. When the stack was high enough, Manly raked down the sides with his pitchfork and gathered up all the scattered hay around and against it, making it all neat and even. Then he topped the stack with a load of hay from the wagon. So the nice fall weather passed. Nights grew cooler, frost came. The haying was finished. Manly had mortgaged the homestead for eight hundred dollars, so now he could buy the coal for winter, and it was stored in the storeroom. The taxes of sixty dollars (there were no taxes on the tree claim because they had no title yet) were paid. Interest, on the notes given for machinery, was paid. There was money for seed in the spring and to live on, they hoped, until next harvest.

The hay had helped. Manly had sold thirty tons at four dollars a ton, and the $120 was a year’s income from crops.

Wild geese were late coming from the north, and when they did, seemed in no hurry to go on south. Instead they fed in the sloughs and flew from one lake to the other, where the water was nearly covered with them as they swam about. The sky was filled with their V-shaped flocks and the air rang to their calls. Manly hurried into the house for his gun one day.

“A flock of geese is coming over so low, I believe I can get one,” he told Laura. Quickly he went out the door, and forgetting that the old gun kicked, he held it up before his face, sighted, and pulled the trigger. Laura followed him just in time to see him whirl around with his hand to his face.

“Oh, did you hit a goose?” she asked.