The Long Winter (Little House 6)

“There!” he said. “The stove and the cupboard’ll both be handy to the table in the other room.”

“Yes, Charles, that’s well thought out,” Ma praised him. “Now, when we get the beds upstairs, we’ll soon be through.”

Pa handed up the pieces of the bedsteads while Ma and Laura drew them through the trap-door at the top of the stairs. He crowded the fat featherbeds through, and the blankets, quilts, and pillows, and then he and Carrie went to fill the strawticks from the haystack. They must fill the strawticks with hay, because there was no straw in this new country where no grain had yet been raised.

Under the attic roof, a building-paper partition made two rooms. One had a window to the west and one to the east. From the eastern window at the top of the stairs, Ma and Laura could see the far sky line and the prairie, the new house and the stable, and Pa and Carrie busily stuffing hay into the strawticks.

“Pa and I will have this room at the head of the stairs,” Ma decided. “You girls can have the front one.”

They set up the bedsteads and laid in the slats. Then Pa pushed the fat, crackling strawticks up to them and Laura and Carrie made the beds while Ma went down to get supper.

The sunset was shining on the western window and flooding the whole room with golden light while they leveled the sweet-smelling, crackling hay in the strawticks and laid the featherbeds on top and stroked them softly smooth. Then, one on each side of a bed, they spread the sheets and the blankets and quilts, drawing them even and folding and tucking them in square at the corners. Then each plumped up a pillow and set it in place and the bed was made.

When the three beds were done, there was nothing more to do.

Laura and Carrie stood in the warm-colored, chilly sunset light, looking out of the window. Pa and Ma were talking in the kitchen downstairs and two strange men were talking in the street. Farther away, but not very far, someone was whistling a tune and there were many little sounds besides that, all together, made the sound of a town.

Smoke was coming up from behind the store fronts. Past Fuller’s Hardware, Second Street went west on the prairie to a lonely building standing in the dead grasses. It had four windows and the sunset was shining through them, so there must be even more windows on the other side. It had a boarded

-in entry, like a nose, in its front-gable end and a stovepipe that was not smoking. Laura said, “I guess that’s the schoolhouse.”

“I wish we didn’t have to go,” Carrie almost whispered.

“Well, we do have to,” said Laura.

Carrie looked at her wonderingly. “Aren’t you… scared?”

“There’s nothing to be scared of!” Laura answered boldly. “And if there was, we wouldn’t be scared.”

Downstairs was warm from the fire in the cookstove, and Ma was saying that this place was so well-built that it took hardly any fire to heat it. She was getting supper, and Mary was setting the table.

“I don’t need any help,” Mary said happily. “The cupboard is in a different place, but Ma put all the dishes in the same places in the cupboard, so I find them just as easily as ever.”

The front room was spacious in the lamplight when Ma set the lamp on the supper-table. The creamy curtains, the varnished yellow desk and chair, the cushions in the rocking chairs, the rag rugs and the red tablecloth, and the pine color of the floor and walls and ceiling were gay. The floor and the walls were so solid that not the smallest cold draft came in.

“I wish we had a place like this out on the claim,” Laura said.

“I’m glad we have it in town where you girls can go to school this winter,” said Ma. “You couldn’t walk in from the claim every day, if the weather was bad.”

“It’s a satisfaction to me to be where we’re sure of getting coal and supplies,” Pa declared. “Coal beats brushwood all hollow for giving steady heat. We’ll keep enough coal in the lean-to to outlast any blizzard, and I can always get more from the lumberyard. Living in town, we’re in no danger of running short of any kind of supplies.”

“How many people are there in town now?” Ma asked him.

Pa counted up. “Fourteen business buildings and the depot; and then Sherwood’s and Garland’s and Owen’s houses—that’s eighteen families, not counting three or four shacks on the back streets. Then the Wilder boys are baching in the feed store, and there’s a man named Foster moved in with his ox team and staying at Sherwood’s. Count them all, there must be as many as seventy-five or eighty people living here in town.”

“And to think there wasn’t a soul here this time last fall,” said Ma. Then she smiled at Pa. “I’m glad you see some good at last, Charles, in staying in a settled place.”

Pa had to admit that he did. But he said, “On the other hand, all this costs money and that’s scarcer than hen’s teeth. The railroad’s the only place a man can get a dollar for a day’s work and it’s not hiring anybody. And the only hunting left around here is jackrabbits. Oregon’s the place to be nowadays. The country out there’ll be settled up, too, pretty soon.”

“Yes, but now is the time for the girls to be getting some schooling,” Ma said firmly.

Chapter 9

Cap Garland

Laura did not sleep very well. All night, it seemed, she knew that the town was close around her and that she must go to school in the morning. She was heavy with dread when she woke and heard steps going by in the street below and strange men speaking. The town was waking up too; the storekeepers were opening their stores.

The walls of the house kept strangers outside. But Laura and Carrie were heavyhearted because they must go out of the house and meet strangers. And Mary was sad because she could not go to school.