Dust

M >> Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman Julius >> Dust

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"Yes, Martin, I do," she returned fervently. "It's a wonderful
monument to leave behind you--this farm is."

His eyes grew somber. "That's what I've always thought it would
be," he answered, very low. "I've felt as if I was building
something that would last. Even the barns--they're ready to stand
for generations. But this minute, when the end is sitting at the
foot of this bed, I seem to see it all crumbling before me. You
won't stay here. Why should you --even if you do for a few years
you'll have to leave it sometime, and there's nothing that goes
to rack and ruin as quickly as a farm--even one like this."

"Oh, Martin, don't think such thoughts," she begged. "Your fever
is coming up; I can see it."

"What has it all been about, that's what I want to know," he went
on with quiet cynicism. "What have I been sweating
about--nothing. What is anyone's life? No more than mine. We're
all like a lot of hens in a backyard, scratching so many hours a
day. Some scratch a little deeper than those who aren't so
skilled or so strong. And when I stand off a little, it's all
alike. The end is as blind and senseless as the beginning on this
farm--drought and dust."

Martin closed his eyes wearily and gave a deep sigh. To his
wife's quickened ears, it was charged with lingering regret for
frustrated plans and palpitant with his consciousness of life's
evanescence and of the futility of his own success.

She waited patiently for him to continue his instructions, but
the opiates had begun to take effect and Martin lapsed into
sleep. Although he lived until the next morning, he never again
regained full consciousness.

XI

THE DUST SETTLES

ROSE'S grief was a surprise to herself; there was no blinking the
fact that her life was going to be far more disrupted by Martin's
death than it had been by Bill's. There were other differences.
Where that loss had struck her numb, this quickened every
sensibility, drove her into action; more than that, as she
realized how much less there was to regret in the boy's life than
in his father's, how much more he had got out of his few short
years, the edge of the older, more precious sorrow, dulled.
During quite long periods she would be so absorbed in her
thoughts of Martin that Bill would not enter her mind. Was it
possible, that this husband who with his own lips had confessed
he had never loved her, had been a more integral part of herself
than the son who had adored her? What was this bond that had
roots deeper than love? Was it merely because they had grown so
used to each other that she felt as if half of her had been torn
away and buried, leaving her crippled and helpless? Probably it
would have been different if Bill had been living. Was it because
when he had died, she still had had Martin, demanding, vital, to
goad her on and give the semblance of a point to her life, and
now she was left alone, adrift? She pondered over these
questions, broodingly.

"I suppose you'll want to sell out, Rose," Nellie's husband, Bert
Mall, big and cordial as Peter had been before him, suggested a
day or two after the funeral. "I'll try to get you a buyer, or
would you rather rent?"

"I haven't any plans yet, Bert," Mrs. Wade had evaded adroitly,
"it's all happened so quickly. I have plenty of time and there
are lots of things to be seen to." There had been that in her
voice which had forbidden discussion, and it was a tone to which
she was forced to have recourse more than once during the
following days when it seemed to her that all her friends were in
a conspiracy to persuade her to a hasty, ill-advised upheaval.

Nothing, she resolved, should push her from this farm or into
final decisions until a year had passed. She must have something
to which she could cling if it were nothing more than a familiar
routine. Without that to sustain and support her, she felt she
could never meet the responsibilities which had suddenly
descended, with such a terrific impact, upon her shoulders.

In an inexplicable way, these new burdens, her black dress--the
first silk one since the winter before Billy came--and the
softening folds of her veil, all invested her with a new and
touching majesty that seemed to set her a little apart from her
neighbors.

Nellie had been frankly scandalized at the idea of mourning.
"Nobody does that out here--exceptin' during the services," she
had said sharply to her daughter-in-law when Rose had told her of
the hasty trip she and her aunt had made to the largest town in
the county. "Folks'll think it's funny and kind o' silly. You
oughtn't to have encouraged it."

"Oh, Mother Mall, I didn't especially," the younger woman had
protested. "She just said in that quiet, settled way she has,
that she was going to--she thought it would be easier for her.
And I believe it will, too," she added, feeling how pathetic it
was that Aunt Rose had never looked half so well during Uncle
Martin's life as she had since his death.

"Oh, well," Mall commented, "Rose always was sort of sentimental,
but there's not many like her. She's right to take her time, too.
It'll be six or eight months, anyway, before she can get things
lined up. She's got a longer head than a body'd think for. Look
at the way she run that newspaper office when old Conroy died."

"That was nearly thirty years ago," commented his wife crisply,
"and Rose's got so used to being bossed around by Martin that
she'll find it ain't so easy to go ahead on her own."

With her usual shrewdness, Nellie had surmised the chief
difficulty, but it dwindled in real importance because of the
fact that Rose so frequently had the feeling that Martin merely
had gone on a journey and would come home some day, expecting an
exact accounting of her stewardship. His instructions were to her
living instructions which must be carried out to the letter.

She had attended with conscientious promptness to checking the
trouble that had brought about his death. "I promised Mr. Wade it
should be the first thing," she had explained to Dr. Hurton.
'You'll let it be the first thing, won't you?' Those were his
very words. He depended on us, Doctor."

When the time came to plan definitely for the disposal of the
purebred herd, she went herself to Topeka to arrange details with
Baker. She was constantly thinking: "Now, what would Martin say
to this?" or "Would he approve of that?" And her conclusions were
reached accordingly. The sale itself was an event that was
discussed in Fallon County for years afterwards. The hotel was
crowded with out-of-town buyers. Enthused by the music from two
bands, even the local people bid high, and through it all, Rose,
vigilant, remembered everything Martin would have wanted
remembered. She felt that even he would have been satisfied with
the manner in which the whole transaction was handled, and with
the financial results.

She began to take a new pleasure in everything, the nervous
pleasure one takes when going through an experience for what may
be the last time. The threshing--how often she had toiled and
sweated over those three days of dinners and suppers for
twenty-two men. Now she recalled, with an aching tightness about
her heart, how delicious had been her relaxation, when, the
dinner dishes washed, the table reset and the kitchen in
scrupulous order with the last fly vanquished, she and Nellie had
luxuriated in that exquisite sense of leisure that only women
know who have passed triumphantly through a heavy morning's work
and have everything ready for the evening. Later there had been
the stroll down to the field in the shade of the waning
afternoon, to find out what time the men would be in for supper;
and the sheer delight of breathing in the pungent smell of the
straw as it came flying from the funnel, looking, with the
sinking sun shining through it, like a million bees swarming from
a hive, while the red-brown grain gushed, a lush stream, into the
waiting wagon.

"It always makes me think of a ship sailing into port, Nellie,"
Rose had once exclaimed, "the crop coming in. It gives me a queer
kind of giddiness, makes me feel like laughing and crying all at
once," to which her sister-in-law had returned with more than her
usual responsiveness: "Yes, it's the most excitin' time of the
year, unless it's Christmas."

More nebulous were the memories of those early mornings when she
had paused in the midst of getting breakfast to sniff in the
clover-laden air and think how wonderful it would be if only she
needn't stay in the hot, stuffy kitchen but could be free to call
Bill and go picnicking or loaf deliciously under one of the big
elms. Most precious of all--the evenings she and her boy had sat
in the yard, with the cool south breeze blowing up from the
pasture, the cows looking on placidly, the frogs fluting
rhythmically in the pond, the birds chirping their good-night
calls, and the dip and swell of the farm land pulling at them
like a haunting tune, almost too lovely to be endured. Oh, there
had been moments all the sweeter and more poignant because they
had been so fleeting.

As she passed successfully through one whole round of planting,
harvesting and garnering of grain, she began to realize her own
ability and to be tempted more and more seriously to remain on
the farm. She understood it, and Martin would have liked her to
run it. If it had not been for the problem of keeping dependable
hired hands and the sight of the mine-tipple, which, towering on
the adjoining farm, reminded her more and more constantly of
Bill, she would not even have considered the offer of Gordon
Hamilton, one of Fallon's leading business men, to buy her whole
section.

"There's a bunch going into this deal, together, Rose," Bert Mall
explained. "They want to run a new branch of their street car
line straight through here and they're going to plat this quarter
into streets and lots. The rest they'll split up into several
farms and rent for the present. It's a speculation, of course,
but the way the mines are moving north and west it's likely
this'll be a thickly settled camp in another two or three years."

"But they only offer seventy-five an acre," Rose expostulated,
"and it's worth more than that as farm land. There's none around
here as fertile as Martin made this--and then, all the
improvements!"

"They'll have to dispose of them second-hand. It's a pity they're
in exactly the wrong spot. Well, of course, I'm not advising you,
Rose," he added, "but forty-five thousand ain't to be sneezed at,
is it, when it comes in a lump and you own only the surface? You
may wait a long while before you get another such bid. Seems to
me you've worked hard enough. I'd think you'd want a rest."

In the end, Mrs. Wade capitulated to what, as Martin had foreseen
so clearly, was sooner or later inevitable. She was a little
stunned by the vast amount of available money now in her
possession and at her disposal. "But it's all dust in my hands,"
she thought sadly. "What do I want of so much? It's going to be a
terrible worry. I don't even know who to leave it to," and she
sighed deeply, pressing her hands, with her old, characteristic
gesture, to her heart. Everybody would approve, she supposed, if
she left it to Rose and Frank--her niece and Martin's nephew--but
she couldn't quite bring herself to welcome that idea--not yet.
And anyway it might be better to divide it among more people, so
that it would bring more happiness.

Her own needs were simple. The modest five-room house which she
purchased was set on a pleasant paved street in Fallon and was
obviously ample for her. She hoped that during part of each year
she could rent the extra bed-room to some one, preferably a boy,
like Bill, who was attending high school. There was a barn for
her horse and the one cow she would keep, a neat little
chicken-house for the twenty-five hens that would more than
supply her with eggs and summer fries, and a small garage for
Martin's car. It would seem very strange, she thought, to have so
few things to care for and she wondered how she would fill her
time, she whose one problem always had been how to achieve
snatches of leisure. She saw herself jogging on and on, gradually
getting to be less able on her feet, a little more helpless,
until she was one of those feeble old ladies who seem at the very
antipodes of the busy mothers they have been in their prime. How
could it be that she who had always been in such demand, so
needed, so driven by real duties, should have become suddenly
such a supernumerary, so footloose, and unattached?

But when it came to that, wasn't Fallon full of others in the
same circumstances? It was not an uncommon lot. There was Mrs.
McMurray. Rose remembered over what a jolly household she had
reigned before she, too, had lost her husband and three children
instead of just one, like Billy. Two of them had been grown and
married. Now she was living in a little cottage, all alone, doing
sewing and nursing, yet always so brave and cheerful; not only
that, but interested, really interested in living. And Mrs.
Nelson. Her children were living and married and happy, but she
had given up her home, sold it--the pretty place with the
hospitable yard that used to seem to be fairly spilling over with
wholesome, boisterous boys and chatty, beribboned little girls.
She was rooming with a family, taking her meals at a restaurant,
keeping up her zest in tomorrow by running a shop. She thought of
how her friend, Mrs. Robinson, gracious, democratic woman of wide
sympathies that she was, had lived alone after David Robinson's
death, taking his place as president of the bank, during the
years her only daughter, Janet, had been off at college and later
travelling around the country "on the stage"--of all things for a
daughter of Fallon. When hadn't the town been full of these
widowed, elderly women made childless alike by life and by death?
What others had met successfully, she could also, she told
herself sternly, and still the old Rose, still struggling toward
happiness, she tried to think with a little enthusiasm of her new
life, of the things she would do for others. One recreation she
would be able to enjoy to her heart's content when she moved into
town--the movies. They would tide her over, she felt gratefully.
When she was too lonely, she would go to them and shed her own
troubles and problems by absorption in those of others. She who
had been married for years and had borne two children without
ever having had the joy of one overwhelming kiss, would find
romance at last, for an hour, as she identified herself with the
charming heroines of the films.

She was to surrender the farm and the crops as they stood in
June, but as there was to be no new immediate tenant in her old
house it was easily arranged that she could continue in it until
the cottage in Fallon would be empty in September.

Meanwhile, preparations were begun for the new car line which
would pass where the big dairy barn was standing. As the latter
went down, board by board, it seemed to Mrs. Wade that this
structure which, in the building, had been the sign and symbol of
her surrender and heartbreak, now in its destruction, typified
Martin's life. It was as if Martin, himself, were being torn limb
from limb. All that he had built would soon be dust. The sound of
the cement breaking under the heavy sledges, was almost more than
she could bear. It was a relief to have the smaller buildings
dragged bodily to other parts of the farm.

Only once before in her memory had there been such a summer and
such a drought. The corn leaves burned to a crisp brown, the
ground cracked and broke into cakes and dust piled high in thick,
velvety folds on weeds and grass. It seemed too strange for words
to see others harvest the wheat and to know that the usual crop
could not be put in.

Rose was thankful when her last evening came. Most of her
furniture had been moved in the morning, her boxes had left in
the afternoon, and the last little accessories were now piled in
the car. As, hand on the wheel, she paused a moment before
starting, she was conscious of a choking sensation. It was over,
finished--she, the last of Martin, was leaving it, for good.
Before her rolled the quarter section, except for the little
box-house, as bare of fences and buildings as when the Wades had
first camped on it in their prairie schooner. With what strange
prophetic vision had Martin foreseen so clearly that all the
construction of his life would crumble. Would Jacob and Sarah
Wade have had the courage to make all their sacrifices, she
wondered, if they had known that she and she alone, daughter of a
Patrick and Norah Conroy, whom they had never seen, would some
day stand there profiting by it all? She thought of the mortgages
in the bank and the bonds, of the easier life she seemed to be
entering. How strange that she whom Grandfather and Grandmother
Wade had not even known, she whom Martin had never loved, should
be the one to reap the real benefits from their planning, and
that the farm itself, for which her husband had been willing to
sacrifice Billy and herself, should be utterly destroyed. A
sudden breeze caught up some of the dust and whirling it around
let it fall. "Martin's life," thought Rose, "it was like a
handful of dust thrown into God's face and blown back again by
the wind to the ground."

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