On The Banks Of Plum Creek (9 page)

Downstairs the lids clattered on the new, fine cookstove. Ma's voice came up through the square hole where the ladder went down.

“Mary! Laura! Time to get up, girls!”

That was the way a new day began in the new house.

But while they were eating breakfast in the large, airy downstairs Laura wanted to see the creek. She asked Pa if she might go back to play there.

“No, Laura,” Pa said. “I don't want you to go back to that creek, where the dark, deep holes are. But when your work is done, you and Mary run along that path that Nelson made coming to work, and see what you find!”

They hurried to do the work. And in the lean-to they found a boughten broom! There seemed no end to the wonders in this house.

This broom had a long, straight, perfectly round, smooth handle. The broom part was made of thousands of thin, stiff, greeny-yellow bristles. Ma said they were broom straws.

They were cut absolutely straight across the bottom, and they curved at the top into flat, firm shoulders. Stitches of red string held them tight. This broom was nothing like the round, willow-bough brooms that Pa made. It seemed too fine to sweep with. And it glided over the smooth floor like magic.

Still, Laura and Mary could hardly wait to follow that path. They worked fast; they put away the broom, and they started. Laura was in such a hurry that she walked nicely only a few steps, then she began to run. Her bonnet slid back and hung by its strings around her neck and her bare feet flew over the dim, grassy path, down the knoll, across a bit of level land, up a low slope. And there was the creek!

Laura was astonished. This was such a different-looking creek, too, so gentle in the sun between its low, grassy banks.

The path stopped in the shade of a great willow tree. A footbridge went on across the water to level, sunny grass. Then the dim path wandered on until it curved around a tiny hill and went out of sight.

Laura thought that little path went on forever wandering on sunny grass and crossing friendly streams and always going around low hills to see what was on the other side. She knew it really must go to Mr. Nelson's house, but it was a little path that did not want to stop anywhere. It wanted always to be going on.

The creek came flowing out of a thicket of plum trees. The low trees grew thickly on both sides of the narrow water, and their boughs almost touched above it. The water was dark in their shade.

Then it spread out and ran wide and shallow, dimpling and splashing over sand and gravel. It narrowed to slide under the footbridge and ran on gurgling till it stopped in a large pool. The pool was glassy-still by a clump of willows.

Laura waited till Mary came. Then they went wading in the shallow water over the sparkling sand and pebbles. Tiny minnows swam in swarms around their toes. When they stood still the minnows nibbled at their feet.

Suddenly Laura saw a strange creature in the water.

He was almost as long as Laura's foot. He was sleek and greeny-brown. In front he had two long arms that ended in big, flat, pincer-claws. Along his sides were short legs, and his strong tail was flat and scaly, with a thin forked fin at the end. Bristles stuck out of his nose, and his eyes were round and bulging.

“What's that!” Mary said. She was scared.

Laura did not go any nearer to him. She bent down cautiously to see him, and suddenly he was not there. Faster than a water-bug, he shot backward, and a little curl of muddy water came out from under a flat rock where he had gone.

In a minute he thrust out a claw and snapped it. Then he looked out.

When Laura waded nearer, he flipped backward under the stone. But when she splashed water at his stone, he ran out, snapping his claws, trying to catch her bare toes. Then Laura and Mary ran screaming and splashing away from his home.

They teased him with a long stick. His big claw snapped that stick right in two. They got a bigger stick, and he clamped his claw and did not let go till Laura lifted him out of the water. His eyes glared and his tail curled under him, and his other claw was snapping.

Then he let go and dropped, and flipped under his stone again.

He always came out, fighting mad, when they splashed at his stone. And they always ran screaming away from his frightful claws.

They sat for a while on the footbridge in the shade of the big willow. They listened to the water running and watched its sparkles. Then they went wading again, all the way to the plum thicket.

Mary would not go into the dark water under the plum trees. The creek bottom was muddy there and she did not like to wade in mud. So she sat on the bank while Laura waded into the thicket.

The water was still there, with old leaves floating on its edges. The mud squelched between Laura's toes and came up in clouds till she could not see the bottom. The air smelled old and musty. So Laura turned around and waded back into the clean water and the sunshine.

There seemed to be some blobs of mud on her legs and feet. She splashed the clear water over them to wash them off. But they did not wash off. Her hand could not scrape them off.

They were the color of mud, they were soft like mud. But they stuck as tight as Laura's skin.

Laura screamed. She stood there screaming,

“Oh, Mary, Mary! Come! Quick!”

Mary came, but she would not touch those horrible things. She said they were worms.

Worms made her sick. Laura felt sicker than Mary, but it was more awful to have those things on her than it was to touch them. She took hold of one, she dug her fingernails into it, and pulled.

The thing stretched out long, and longer, and longer, and still it hung on.

“Oh don't! Oh don't! Oh, you'll pull it in two!” Mary said. But Laura pulled it out longer, till it came off. Blood trickled down her leg from the place where it had been.

One by one, Laura pulled those things off.

A little trickle of blood ran down where each one let go.

Laura did not feel like playing any more.

She washed her hands and her legs in the clean water and she went to the house with Mary.

It was dinner-time and Pa was there. Laura told him about those mud-brown things without eyes or head or legs, that had fastened to her skin in the creek.

Ma said they were leeches and that doctors put them on sick people. But Pa called them bloodsuckers. He said they lived in the mud, in dark, still places in the water.

“I don't like them,” Laura said.

“Then stay out of the mud, flutterbudget,”

said Pa. “If you don't want trouble, don't go looking for it.”

Ma said, “Well, you girls won't have much time for playing in the creek, anyway. Now we're nicely settled and only two and a half miles from town, you can go to school.”

Laura could not say a word. Neither could Mary. They looked at each other and thought,

“School?”

The more Laura was told about school, the more she did not want to go there.

She did not know how she could stay away from the creek all day long. She asked,

“Oh, Ma, do I have to?”

Ma said that a great girl almost eight years old should be learning to read instead of running wild on the banks of Plum Creek.

“But I can read, Ma,” Laura begged.

“Please don't make me go to school. I can read. Listen!”

She took the book named Millbank, and opened it, and looking up anxiously at Ma she read, "The doors and windows of Millbank were closed. Crape streamed from the door knob—

“Oh, Laura, ” Ma said, "you are not reading! You are only reciting what you've heard me read to Pa so often. Besides, there are other things to learn—spelling and writing and arithmetic. Don't say any more about it.

You will start to school with Mary Monday morning."

Mary was sitting down to sew. She looked like a good little girl who wanted to go to school.

Just outside the lean-to door Pa was hammering at something. Laura went bounding out so quickly that his hammer nearly hit her.

“Oop!” said Pa. "Nearly hit you that time. I should have expected you, flutterbudget.

You're always on hand like a sore thumb."

“Oh, what are you doing,Pa ? ” Laura asked him. He was nailing together some narrow strips of board left from the house-building.

“Making a fish-trap,” said Pa. “Want to help me? You can hand me the nails.”

One by one, Laura handed him the nails, and Pa drove them in. They were making a skeleton box. It was a long, narrow box without a top, and Pa left wide cracks between the strips of wood.

“How will that catch fish?” Laura asked. “If you put it in the creek they will swim in through the cracks but they will swim right out again.”

“You wait and see, ” said Pa.

Laura waited till Pa put away the nails and hammer. He put the fish-trap on his shoulder and said, “You can come help me set it.”

Laura took his hand and skipped beside him down the knoll and across the level land to the creek. They went along the low bank, past the plum thicket. The banks were steeper here, the creek was narrower, and its noise was louder. Pa went crashing down through bushes, Laura climbed scrooging down under them, and there was a waterfall.

The water ran swift and smooth to the edge and fell over it with a loud, surprised crash-splashing. From the bottom it rushed up again and whirled around, then it jumped and hurried away.

Laura would never have tired of watching it.

But she must help Pa set the fish-trap. They put it exactly under the waterfall. The whole waterfall went into the trap, and boiled up again more surprised than before. It could not jump out of the trap. It foamed out through the cracks.

“Now you see, Laura,” said Pa. “The fish will come over the falls into the trap, and the little ones will go out through the cracks, but the big ones can't. They can't climb back up the falls. So they'll have to stay swimming in the box till I come and take them out.”

At that very minute a big fish came slither-ing over the falls. Laura squealed and shouted,

“Look, Pa! Look!”

Pa's hands in the water grabbed the fish and lifted him out, flopping. Laura almost fell into the waterfall. They looked at that silvery fat fish and then Pa dropped him into the trap again.

“Oh, Pa, can't we please stay and catch enough fish for supper!” Laura asked.

“I've got to get to work on a sod barn, Laura,” said Pa. “And plow the garden and dig a well and—” Then he looked at Laura an'

said, “Well, little half-pint, maybe it won't take long.”

He sat on his heels and Laura sat on hers and they waited. The creek poured and splashed always the same and always changing. Glint of sunshine danced on it. Cool air came up from it and warm air lay on Laura's neck. The bushes held up thousands of little leaves against the sky. They smelled warm and sweet in the sun.

“Oh, Pa,” Laura said, “do I have to go to school?”

“You will like school, Laura,” said Pa.

“I like it better here,” Laura said, mournfully.

“I know, little half-pint,” said Pa, "but it isn't everybody that gets a chance to learn to read and write and cipher. Your Ma was a school-teacher when we met, and when she came west with me I promised that our girls would have a chance to get book learning.

That's why we stopped here, so close to a town that has a school. You're almost eight years old now, and Mary going on nine, and it's time you begun. Be thankful you've got the chance, Laura."

“Yes, Pa,” Laura sighed. Just then another big fish came over the falls. Before Pa could catch it, here came another!

Pa cut and peeled a forked stick. He took four big fish out of the trap and strung them on the stick. Laura and Pa went back to the house, carrying those flopping fish. Ma's eyes were round when she saw them. Pa cut off their heads and stripped out their insides and showed Laura how to scale fish. He scaled three, and she scaled almost all of one.

Ma rolled them in meal and fried them in fat, and they ate all those good fish for supper.

“You always think of something, Charles,”

said Ma. “Just when I'm wondering where our living is to come from, now it's spring.” Pa could not hunt in the springtime, for then all the rabbits had little rabbits and the birds had little birds in their nests.

“Wait till I harvest that wheat!” Pa said.

“Then we'll have salt pork every day. Yes, by gravy, and fresh beef!”

Every morning after that, before he went to work, Pa brought fish from the trap. He never took more than they needed to eat. The others he lifted out of the trap and let swim away.

He brought buffalo fish and pickerel, and cat-fish, and shiners, and bullheads with two black horns. He brought some whose names he did not know. Every day there was fish for breakfast and fish for dinner and fish for supper.

Monday morning came. As soon as Laura and Mary had washed the

breakfast dishes, they went up the ladder and put on their Sunday dresses. Mary's was a blue-sprigged calico, and Laura's was red-sprigged.

Ma braided their hair very tightly and bound the ends with thread. They could not wear their Sunday hair-ribbons because they might lose them. They put on their sunbonnets, freshly washed and ironed.

Then Ma took them into the bedroom. She knelt down by the box where she kept her best things, and she took out three books.

They were the books she had studied when ¡

she was a little girl. One was a speller, and one was a reader, and one was a 'rithmetic.

She looked solemnly at Mary and Laura, and they were solemn, too.

“I am giving you these books for your very own, Mary and Laura,” Ma said. “I know you will take care of them and study them faith-fully.”

“Yes, Ma,” they said.

She gave Mary the books to carry. She gave Laura the little tin pail with their lunch in it, under a clean cloth.