Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (22 page)

Parson said, “You’ve gone and changed. You’ll have a fight making me believe you’re still Sam at heart,” and he smiled back and forth between Patience and me in a little quiet happy way that made me think he saw everything about us and thought it was grand.

I said, “Patience is fixing me, but it’s uphill work.”

The children begged, “Don’t fix her, don’t fix her!” If only for that I would’ve like them.

I liked the whole family of them, and I just wished they had a better house, worthy of them. It wasn’t bad from the outside, tall and narrow, about what a house had to be in New-York. But inside it was all outdoors brought in, all the messes that belong to be outside, like animals and plants and even a bird, and you could work night and day without getting ahead of a house like that, or making it the kind of fresh neat place Parson’s van was. And naturally a woman like Mrs Peel, with her mind on other things, didn’t work night and day or have much chance of making her hired help do it. You could see why Parson had to get away summers.

Everything cloth was in shreds, and everything wood was scratched deep. Nobody’s got mice enough to need that many cats. There was a soft gray layer of cat hair on everything, including on us after we’d been there a while. Be softheaded about kittens and see what comes of it. I’m not being picky. I always let Pa be the one to drown kittens myself. But I think if I’d lived in Parson’s house I could’ve brought myself to it.

There was a dog too, if such an odd pale flat-faced critter is entitled to the name. But it yapped like a dog, more or less, and had doggy feet so I guess that settles it. Mrs Peel was fond of it and let it get up on her lap, which shows again how big her heart was. It had a little curled-over tail like a hog. It was a lot like a hog, except the feet.

The bird was called a parrot. The children were very proud of it. They made us look at it first thing, and I will say it was a sight, like painted. It was in a cage made of bendy wood. The children said it was unhappy there and it should be on a stand but the cats would get it then. I said, “I’d lay my money on the bird,” and I would too. It was built on the plan of an eagle. It could’ve been a help with the cats. They claimed it could talk, but it never did in my hearing. They claimed it was talking Dutch. That may or may not be so. I knew
they
believed it, but with somebody like Parson around you have to add a pinch of salt, and they didn’t know that yet. They begged and begged it to say, “Pretty Polly,” and finally it let out a squawk that with a lot of fancy could be taken for that, about like sometimes at night you can fancy the wind is saying something. But to humor them we said yes, sure enough, it truly says Pretty Polly.

They put on a regular show for us, playing the pianoforte, and speaking pieces they had by heart, and showing us pictures they’d made, and examples of their handwriting, and how they could read and turn somersets, until Parson got tired of it all and sent them upstairs.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t like to see children put themselves forward like that, but I could see they only did it to give us the best things they had. The biggest one could read better than me. I was about like the second one.

Then there was a chance to talk to Parson. Patience and Mrs Peel were jawing and laughing on the other side of the parlor. I think they were comparing Parson and me like any two regular husbands. At least I overheard Patience say, “Mine never had enough cake. I intend to see that she gets all she wants.”

I sure liked hearing her call me “mine,” even if it did make me blush and Parson smile. There was no hiding anything from him, not that I cared to hide. The problem was to keep from bragging. I wanted to listen some more, but Parson began asking about our trip and our plans.

While I was telling him the children came stealing down the stairs, and when Parson didn’t yell them back up again, they took encouragement and came on in and sat on my lap and beside me and at my feet. They didn’t bother us. We kept on talking.

Parson said that prices were going up very fast in the Purchase, which was his name for Genesee, because there was going to be a canal run right through it and open it all up. He said the State Assembly was absolutely certain to pass the bill this spring, and just the thought of it had shot up land prices all along the line.

“It’s bad for the kind of price you hoped for,” he said, “and it’s bad for the turnpike towns along the Hudson, but it’s a wonderful thing. Think of it! A ditch three hundred and fifty miles long, floating barges full of wheat and corn and lumber from the Great Lakes to the Hudson!”

I said, “Well, that’ll be some ditch, uphill and down. Water might be a little deeper in the valleys than on the hilltops.”

He explained about locks.

I could see how it might be done, and the heart went out of me. Then I saw the real flaw of it all. “What’s to keep the ditch water from running down the first river it crosses?” I asked him.

He explained about aqueducts. A bridge to get a boat across a river! Any fool could see they’d never manage that, but why did they have to think they could and ruin land prices the very year Patience and me wanted to buy a farm?

Parson said, “So buy. In twenty years you’ll sell your farm for city lots, and be rich.”

“Sell our
farm
? Who could do that? Anyhow, I don’t want to be rich. I just want to live with my – I want to live with Patience and be happy.”

“You just want to live,” he said, not as a question.

“With Patience,” I said.

“My understanding was that you wanted to bring the wilderness to its knees and call yourself king of all you looked upon.”

“It’s Patience wants that. I want something more like what we can hope to do.”

“Last summer it was what you wanted.”

“I’ve had to get sensible since then. With somebody to take care of now. If one is foolish, the other must be sensible. If Patience was sensible, I’d still be foolish.”

Patience must’ve heard me say her name because she got up and sat in a nearer chair, and Mrs Peel dragged over the stool from the pianoforte. They sat there waiting for what we’d say next. We couldn’t think of anything we wanted them to hear.

But the little girl on my lap had plenty to say. She was about eight. She had big new teeth half grown in, and rosy cheeks, and shiny brown hair. Her name was Dora. She’d been patting my cheek and chin and throat for quite a while, and now she said, “I would always have known you weren’t a boy.” She talked very fast, to make use of us keeping still. She said, “You know what my favorite Sam story is? It’s how one morning Papa couldn’t find his shaving kit, and he looked and looked and
looked
for it.”

Parson was looking at me with a look that was half prayer and half laugh, and holding his breath.

Dora said, “And he asked you if you had it, and you didn’t, and if you knew where it went, and you didn’t, and he had to ask if he could borrow
yours
.”

The other children couldn’t keep still past that point, so they all yelled out the rest: “And you didn’t
have
one. And you had to admit, you’re a
girl
!”

I bent my head back and laughed until I noticed Patience looking extra-ladylike to make up for me, and then I stopped and said, yes, that was my favorite story too. I said, “Every time I think on it, I laugh like I never heard it before.”

With her little hand on my face again, Dora said, “But that was silly of Papa. I would have always known.”

I said, “Well, he didn’t have your advantages.”

I was glad to be able to make Parson look as happy as he did then, except he maybe carried it too far. He maybe made it run over into relief, like he never did find out till then that I can say the right thing sometimes.

He was just so pleased with me that he invited us to go to a show with him and Mrs Peel that evening. “Nothing fancy – we’ll sit in the pit,” he said. “It’s something you should see while you’re here.
Nights in Naughty New-York
.”

I thought to say I had something else naughty planned, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to call it naughty, and while I was thinking up another way to say no, I looked at Patience and she was smiling and her eyes were shining and I could see she wanted to go something fierce.

It gave me a little turn to see she wasn’t in the same hurry as me to get back to Heaven. And another little turn to see I couldn’t, from now on, just say yes or no without finding out what she wanted too. It was kind of a hard lesson to get ahold of. I won’t say I learned it once and for all right then. But I did get a start on it.

I said, “We’d be pleased,” and then while they all made plans I thought about how if Patience could make me wait and wish, I could do the same to her, and if what she wanted counted, so did what I wanted, and another time, I thought, I’ll weigh my own wish as heavy as hers before I say yes. And I thought, here I am worried sick about land prices and where to find a place for us, and here she is wanting to see a silly show. Of course she didn’t
know
about the canal and all there was to worry about, and what a strain it was to play the man’s part and think about dull hard things like land prices. I wanted to spare her, but I did wish I could tell her just enough to make her grateful that I bore it all alone.

After supper at our lodging, we met Parson and his wife and walked to the theater. There was no use taking Potiphar, Parson said – no place to leave him.

I was all settled into a fret, and half enjoying it. I couldn’t help thinking I made a pretty good man. There was Patience, so light and silly, laughing with Mrs Peel and there I was, as gloomy as Pa, trudging along beside Parson, asking him where
he
thought we should go.

“For cheap land close to market?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My Susquehanna Turnpike bonds have dropped enough to make me guess the bottom’s fallen out of Greene County. If all you want to do is live, in a country that’s cleared and settled and safe, you could do it there.”

“Is it far?”

“No, it’s near. About ninety miles. It’s on the Hudson. You’ll pass it. It’s the first county this side of Albany County. It’s freehold. The patroons missed it.”

“Maybe they didn’t want it,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Reckon it should be looked at. No sense getting way out west and then wondering.”

“No. You could do worse than look at it.”

“Don’t mention it to Patience?”

Parson grinned and said, “I won’t, Sam. I can hold my tongue as well as you. Thank you for that.”

We got to the theater. It was all bright paint and bright lamps and noise and stink. At least down in the pit it was stink. I won’t say any one city man stunk worse than any one farmer, but you don’t generally find farmers bunched up like that, and smoking cigars, and spitting. I looked at Patience, to get her to make some sign she’d liefer be alone in bed with me. She made a little face and wrinkled her nose, to show she wasn’t overfond of every single thing here, but it was plain to see she was happy and excited and while she had an ounce of fight left in her she wouldn’t leave. I was near sick, but she most needed a millstone in her lap to keep from flying right off the bench. I just had to shake my head.

Then some horns and fiddles started and the big curtains opened up, and some girls and men came prancing out, all decked out so bright, singing and jangling things in their hands and whirling around and smiling, and I swear, I felt like a fool to feel it, but I never felt so cheerful in my life. I just didn’t have the grip I thought I did on being manlike.

The crowd let out a yell and clap, me right along, and everybody was so ready to laugh it didn’t matter what was said. I’m still studying on some of the jokes. Like, this farmer boy that was one of the heroes? I mean, these two farmer boys come to the city – kind of like Patience and me, I see. And this one farmer boy says, “How fur north must I walk, to get to the North River?” That’s one of the jokes I study on yet, but at the time I laughed right along, till the tears came, and Patience too.

(One mistake people make is thinking actors sink to going onto the stage, like any other form of going bad. I want to say, I believe they do it because they get an ambition to, men and women both. They want to do what will bring that love and happiness up at them, I believe.)

Afterwards, Mrs Peel, who had a gift that way, remembered quite a few of the songs and hummed them as we walked along the street.

It all made a little speck of cheerfulness in a nervous time, and later the memory came and livened many a dull day. But it couldn’t brighten the whole of its own night. I had a new worry that came at me when we got alone again.

My mind was clear on where to go – Greene County, no matter what it was like – but the worry was getting Patience to agree to it. Her with her dreams of being heroes and homesteaders and shoulder-to- shoulder and all.

Well, I’d told her plain I wouldn’t take her to wild country or let her think I would. But did she remember that? And if she did, did she think she’d changed it all somehow? And if I was foolish enough to talk it over with her, was there any hope she’d be sensible?

I just wished I knew a sure-fire way to have my own way. Did Pa ask Ma what she thought about going to the Hooestennuc Valley? She went and she made-do, that’s all. At the time it riled me for Ma’s sake, but that night in New-York I saw there was a lot to be said for a way where there’s no backtalk and everybody’s place is set.

We went up the two sets of stairs to our room, me first and Patience behind me, tickling me through my skirt and laughing and whispering what we’d do when our door was shut again, and I swear I was near as cross at her as if I’d already spoke of Greene County and heard her say unreasonable things about the frontier.

I almost didn’t even love her, because I couldn’t say, “That’s it, woman! Now get used to it!” It just felt beneath me, somehow, to be sneaky and sly and plotting how to get her to stop at Greene County without letting on why. I blamed it all on her. If only she’d had good sense, I could be my regular aboveboard self. Didn’t it show how open I generally was, that Parson was relieved I could tell a lie?