But to Helen the days were like notes in a melody. Linnet’s songs and sunshine streaming through the attic windows or gray panes and rain on the roof were one to her. She woke to either as to a holiday. She slipped from beneath the patchwork quilt into a cold room and dressed with shivering fingers, hardly hearing Mabel’s drowsy protests at being waked so early. Life was too good to be wasted in sleep. She seemed made of energy as she ran down the steep stairs to the kitchen. It swelled in her veins as a river frets against its banks in the spring floods.
Every sight and sound struck upon her senses with a new freshness. There was exhilaration in the bite of cold water on her skin when she washed in the tin basin on the bench by the door, and the smell of coffee and frying salt pork was good. She sang while she spread the red tablecloth on the kitchen table and set out the cracked plates.
She sang:
“You’re as welcome as the flowers in Ma‑a‑ay,
And I—love you in the same o‑o‑old way.”
It seemed to her that she was caroling aloud poetry so exquisite that all its meaning escaped the dull ears about her. She walked among them, alone, wrapped in a glory they could not perceive.
Even her mother’s tightlipped anxiety did not quite break through her happy absorption. Her mother worked silently, stepping heavily about the kitchen, now and then glancing through the window toward the barn. When her husband came clumping up the path and stopped at the back steps to scrape the mud from his boots, she went to the door and opened it, saying almost harshly, “Well?”
He said nothing, continuing for a moment to knock a boot heel against the edge of the step. Then he came slowly in, and began to dip water from the water pail into the washbasin. The slump of his body in the sweat-stained overalls expressed nothing but weariness.
“I guess last night settled it,” he said. “We won’t get enough of a crop to pay to pick it. Outa twenty buds I cut on the south slope only four of ’em wasn’t black.”
His wife went back to the stove and turned the salt pork, holding her head back from the spatters. “What’re we going to do about the mortgage?” The question filled a long silence. Helen’s song was hushed, though the echoes of it still went on in some secret place within her, safe there even from this calamity.
“Same as we’ve always done, I guess,” her father answered at last, lifting a dripping face and reaching for the roller towel. “See if I can get young Mason to renew it.”
“Well, he will. Surely he will,” Helen said. Her tone of cheerfulness was like a slender shaft splintering against a stone wall. “And there must be some fruit left. If there isn’t much of a crop what we do get ought to bring pretty good prices, too.”
“You’re right it ought to,” her father replied bitterly. “A good crop never brings ’em.”
“Well, anyway, I’m through school now, and I’ll be doing something,” Helen said. She had no clear idea what it would be, but suddenly she felt in her youth and happiness a strength that her discouraged father and mother did not have. For the first time they seemed to her old and worn, exhausted by an unequal struggle, and she felt that she could take them up in her arms and carry them triumphantly to comfort and peace.
“Eat your breakfast and don’t talk nonsense,” her father said.
But her victorious mood revived while she washed the dishes. She felt older, stronger, and more confident than she had ever been. The news of the killing frost, which depressed her mother and quieted even Mabel’s usual rebellion at having to help with the kitchen work, was to Helen a call to action. She splashed the dishes through the soapy water so swiftly that Mabel was aggrieved.
“You know I can’t keep up,” she complained. “It’s bad enough to have the frost and never be able to get anything decent, and stick here in this old kitchen all the time, without having you act mean, too.”
“Oh, don’t start whining!” Helen began. They always quarreled about the dishes. “I’d like to know who did every smitch of work yesterday, while you went chasing off.” But looking down at Mabel’s sullen little face, she felt a wave of compassion. Poor little Mabel, whose whole heart had been set on a new dress this summer, who didn’t have anything else to make her happy! “I don’t mean to be mean to you, Mabel,” she said. She put an arm around the thin, angular shoulders. “Never mind, everything’ll be all right, somehow.”
That afternoon when the ironing was finished she dressed in her pink gingham and best shoes. She was going to town for the mail, she explained to her mother, and when her sister said, “Why, you went day before yesterday!” she replied, “Well, I guess I’ll just go to town, anyway. I feel like walking somewhere.”
Her mother apparently accepted the explanation without further thought. The blindness of other people astonished Helen. It seemed to her that every blade of grass in the fields, every scrap of white cloud in the sky, knew that she was going to see Paul. The roadside cried it aloud to her.
She let her hand rest a moment on the gate as she went through. It was the gate on which they leaned when he brought her home from church on Sunday nights. She could feel his presence there still; she could almost see the dark mass of his shoulders against the starry sky, and the white blur of his face.
The long lane by Peterson’s meadow
