“We have to scrub the floor,” Carrie pointed out.
“I know we have to,” Laura said grimly. She sat on the floor, gripping her ankle. Her straggling hair stuck to her sweating neck. Her dress was damp and hot and dirty, and her fingernails were positively black. Carrie’s face was smudged with dust and sweat and there were bits of hay in her hair.
“We ought to have a bath,” Laura murmured. Suddenly she cried out, “Where’s Grace?”
They had not thought of Grace for some time. Grace had once been lost on the prairie. Two children at Brookins, lost on the prairie, had died before they could be found.
“Here I yam,” Grace answered sweetly, coming in. “It’s raining.”
“No!” Laura exclaimed. Indeed, a shadow was over the house. A few large drops were falling. At that moment, thunder crashed. Laura screamed, “Carrie! The straw ticks! The bedding!”
They ran. The straw ticks were not very heavy, but they were stuffed fat with hay. They were hard to hold on to. The edge kept slipping out of Laura’s grasp or Carrie’s. When they got one to the house, they had to hold it up edgewise to get it through the doorway.
“We can hold it up or we can move it, we can’t do both,” Carried panted. Already the swift thunderstorm was rolling overhead and rain was falling fast.
“Get out of the way!” Laura shouted. Somehow she pushed and carried the whole straw tick into the house. It was too late to bring in the other one, or the bedding from the line. Rain was pouring down.
The bedding would dry on the line, but the other straw tick must be emptied again, washed again, and filled again. Straw ticks must be perfectly dry, or the hay in them would smell musty.
“We can move everything out of the other bedroom into the front room, and go on scrubbing,” said Laura. So they did that. For some time there was no sound but thunder and beating rain, and the swish of scrubbing cloths and the wringing out. Laura and Carrie had worked backward on hands and knees almost across the bedroom floor, when Grace called happily, “I’m helping!”
She was standing on a chair and blacking the stove. She was splashed from head to foot with blacking. On the floor all around the stove were dribbles and splotches of blacking. Grace had filled the blacking box full of water. As she looked up beaming for Laura’s approval, she gave the smeared stove top another swipe of the blacking cloth, and pushed the box of soft blacking off it.
Her blue eyes were filled with tears.
Laura gave one wild look at that house that Ma had left so neat and pretty. She just managed to say, “Never mind, Grace; don’t cry. I’ll clean it up.” Then she sank down on the stacked pieces of the bedsteads and let her forehead sink to her pulled-up knees. “Oh, Carrie, I just don’t seem to know how to manage the way Ma does!” she almost wailed.
That was the worst day. On Friday the house was almost in order, and they worried lest Ma come home too soon. They worked far into the night that night, and on Saturday it was almost midnight before Laura and Carrie took their baths and collapsed to sleep. But for Sunday the house was immaculate.
The floor around the stove was scrubbed bone-white. Only faintest traces of the blacking remained. The beds were made up with clean, bright quilts and they smelled sweetly of fresh hay. The windowpanes glittered. Every shelf in the cupboards was scrubbed and every dish washed. “And we’ll eat bread and drink milk from now on, and keep the dishes clean!” said Laura.
There remained only the curtains to be washed and ironed and hung, and of course the usual washing to do, on Monday. They were glad that Sunday is a day of rest.
Early Monday morning, Laura washed the curtains. They were dry when she and Carrie hung the rest of the washing on the line. They sprinkled the curtains and ironed them, and hung them at the window. The house was perfect.
“We’ll keep Grace out of it till Pa and Ma come home,” Laura said privately to Carrie. Neither of them felt like even taking a walk. So they sat on the grass in the shade of the house and watched Grace run about, and watched for the smoke of the train.
They saw it rolling up from the prairie and fading slowly along the skyline like a line of writing that they could not read. They heard the train whistle. After a pause it whistled again, and the curling smoke began again to write low above the skyline. They had almost decided that Pa and Ma had not come yet, when they saw them small and far away, walking out on the road from town.
Then all the lonesomeness for Mary came back, as sharply as if she had just gone away.
They met Pa and Ma at the edge of Big Slough, and for a little while they all talked at once.
Pa and Ma were greatly pleased with the college. They said it was a fine place, a large brick building. Mary would be warm and comfortable in it when winter came. She would have good food, and she was with a crowd
of pleasant girls. Ma liked her roommate very much. The teachers were kind. Mary had passed the examinations with flying colors. Ma had seen no clothes there nicer than hers. She was going to study political economy, and literature, and higher mathematics, and sewing, knitting, beadwork, and music. The college had a parlor organ.
Laura was so glad for Mary that she could almost forget the lonesome ache of missing her. Mary had always so loved to study. Now she could revel in studying so much that she had never before had a chance to learn.
“Oh, she must stay there, she must!” Laura thought, and she renewed her vow to study hard, though she didn’t like to, and get a teacher’s certificate as soon as she was sixteen, so that she could earn the money to keep Mary in college.
She had forgotten that week of housecleaning, but as they came to the house Ma asked, “Carrie, what are you and Grace smiling about? You’re keeping something up your sleeves!”
Then Grace jumped up and down and shouted, “I blacked the stove!”
“So you did,” said Ma, going into the house. “It looks very nice, but Grace, I am sure that Laura helped you black it. You must not say—” Then she saw the curtains. “Why, Laura,” she said, “did you wash the—and the windows—and— Why, I declare!”
“We did the fall housecleaning for you, Ma,” said Laura, and Carrie chimed in, “We washed the bedding, and filled the straw ticks, and scrubbed the floors, and everything.”