One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

smiled at her on one of his good days, as if to tell her that all was well in his inner kingdom. She had seen that same look again and again, and she could always remember it in the dark⁠—a quick blue flash, tender and a little wild, as if he had seen a vision or glimpsed bright uncertainties. XIII

The next few weeks were busy ones on the farm. Before the wheat harvest was over, Nat Wheeler packed his leather trunk, put on his “store clothes,” and set off to take Tom Wested back to Maine. During his absence Ralph began to outfit for life in Yucca county. Ralph liked being a great man with the Frankfort merchants, and he had never before had such an opportunity as this. He bought a new shotgun, saddles, bridles, boots, long and short storm coats, a set of furniture for his own room, a fireless cooker, another music machine, and had them shipped to Colorado. His mother, who did not like phonograph music, and detested phonograph monologues, begged him to take the machine at home, but he assured her that she would be dull without it on winter evenings. He wanted one of the latest make, put out under the name of a great American inventor.

Some of the ranches near Wested’s were owned by New York men who brought their families out there in the summer. Ralph had heard about the dances they gave, and he was counting on being one of the guests. He asked Claude to give him his dress suit, since Claude wouldn’t be needing it any more.

“You can have it if you want it,” said Claude indifferently. “But it won’t fit you.”

“I’ll take it in to Fritz and have the pants cut off a little and the shoulders taken in,” his brother replied lightly.

Claude was impassive. “Go ahead. But if that old Dutch man takes a whack at it, it will look like the devil.”

“I think I’ll let him try. Father won’t say anything about what I’ve ordered for the house, but he isn’t much for glad rags, you know.” Without more ado he threw Claude’s black clothes into the back seat of the Ford and ran into town to enlist the services of the German tailor.

Mr. Wheeler, when he returned, thought Ralph had been rather free in expenditures, but Ralph told him it wouldn’t do to take over the new place too modestly. “The ranchers out there are all highfliers. If we go to squeezing nickels, they won’t think we mean business.”

The country neighbours, who were always amused at the Wheelers’ doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph’s lavishness as he did himself. One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table. August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph. Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude in town one day and shouted;

“My God, Claude, there’s nothing left in the furniture store for me and Susie! Ralph’s bought everything but the coffins. He must be going to live like a prince out there.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Claude answered coolly. “It’s not my enterprise.”

“No, you’ve got to stay on the old place and make it pay the debts, I understand.” Leonard jumped into his car, so that Claude wouldn’t have a chance to reply.

Mrs. Wheeler, too, when she observed the magnitude of these preparations, began to feel that the new arrangement was not fair to Claude, since he was the older boy and much the steadier. Claude had always worked hard when he was at home, and made a good field hand, while Ralph had never done much but tinker with machinery and run errands in his car. She couldn’t understand why he was selected to manage an undertaking in which so much money was invested.

“Why, Claude,” she said dreamily one day, “if your father were an older man, I would almost think his judgment had begun to fail. Won’t we get dreadfully into debt at this rate?”

“Don’t say anything, Mother. It’s Father’s money. He shan’t think I want any of it.”

“I wish I could talk to Bayliss. Has he said anything?”

“Not to me, he hasn’t.”

Ralph and Mr. Wheeler took another flying trip to Colorado, and when they came back Ralph began coaxing his mother to give him bedding and table linen. He said he wasn’t going to live like a savage, even in the sand hills. Mahailey was outraged to see the linen she had washed and ironed and taken care of for so many years packed into boxes. She was out of temper most of the time now, and went about muttering to herself.

The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep, washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old mother, and given to her for a marriage portion. The patchwork on each was done in a different design; one was the popular “log-cabin” pattern, another the “laurel-leaf,” the third the “blazing star.” This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it “to give Mr. Claude when he got married.”

She slept on her feather bed in winter, and in summer she put it away in the attic. The attic was reached by a ladder which, because of her weak back, Mrs. Wheeler very seldom climbed. Up there Mahailey had things her own way, and thither she often retired to air the bedding stored away there, or to look at the pictures in the piles of old magazines. Ralph facetiously called the attic “Mahailey’s library.”

One day, while things were being packed for the western ranch, Mrs. Wheeler, going to the foot of the ladder to call Mahailey, narrowly escaped being knocked down by