From the Improvement Era, December 1923 –

The Mother of the Gold Star

By Elizabeth Cannon Porter

The gold star mother sat in her shining kitchen. It was Christmas eve and the little house was in perfect order, but from long habit its mistress sat in this room even on festive occasions. As in most farm houses, the life of the household revolved around the kitchen. It was Mrs. James’ laboratory when she evolved the dishes from recipes handed down from a French Grandmother that made her the best cook in the country. It was to this room that her young husband used to bring his harness to mend in the evening, the year before he died. Her boy, Ernest, sat on the floor, when a baby, in the patch of sunlight that streamed through the south windows. Now, his man’s body lay in a grave in France.

Outside, the world lay under a mantle of fresh snow that swathed it like a shroud. This added cheer to the light of the lamp and the warmth of the fire indoors. Along the windows up under the eaves stood potted red geraniums. The floor reminded one of the advertisements of “spotless town.” The kitchen range shone like an ornament. The blue and white plates reflected their luster from the cabinet. At the oak table, Mrs. James held open a book. It was the “Doctrine and Covenants,” the book of modern revelation.

A knock came at the door and she raised startled eyes to the clock. It was after nine and as she made her way to the entrance she wondered who could have come at such a time and on such a night. She flung open the door and her neighbor, Joseph Dart stood revealed.

“You must excuse me, Mrs. James,” he said as he stamped the snow from his feet and entered the room, “for coming so late, but I’ve been out tonight and I had something special that I wanted to say to you.”

Mrs. James looked enquiringly at him as she took his hat.

He sat down by the stove and cleared his throat.

“It’s about our Danny. He had set his heart on going to the bright lights of the city. His pals had gone and they kept telling him how much easier it is to make a living in the city, and about the dance halls and picture shows. They said he was a fool to stay here. Not that our place has much to offer, but there is always plenty of work. Dan had set his heart on going when you offered him your fields to work and your equipment. We all know how well he did. Now he has decided to stay with the farm and is making plans for next year. You ought to hear him. The change in him is wonderful. Somehow I feel that if he had drifted off it would have finished his mother. She couldn’t bear another disappointment. If she’d died, what with the mortgage and all, it would have been the end with me.”

Mrs. Dart was a chronic invalid. She was disappointed in everything, her marriage, her home, her husband, her children. She had succumbed to it. People did not know whether it was a sick mind acting on a body, or a sick body acting on her mind, but the result was disastrous to the Dart household which was a poor place at best.

“Danny’s work has been a good thing for me. So are the bursting granaries good for the people,” smiled Mrs. James.

‘My wife feels grateful for Danny staying home and the bountiful harvest, and all, and she knit you this as a slight token of her appreciation.” Mr. Dart held out a paper bundle.

His hostess cut the string and shook out a fluffy lavender and white shawl. She hung it over a chair and exclaimed over its beauty.

“I don’t see how Mrs. Dart can do such wonderful work when she is sick. I appreciate such a lovely gift from one mother to another. Tell Danny that I think that he has done splendidly. I don’t know of any one who could have done better in Ernest’s place.” Her eyes misted with tears.

Long after her visitor had gone, the woman pondered while the fire died down. Just as Ernest James had been at the head at school and Danny Dart at the foot, so when the great war came the former had been the first to enlist and the latter had waited for the last draft. Her boy had always been so good and progressive that she had found it necessary to refuse him few things. When America entered the conflict he begged his mother for her consent to go.

It was in vain that she pleaded.

“Son, you are all I’ve got.”

“All the more reason, mother, why you should give your one man to the cause,” he answered blithely. “Mother, you wouldn’t want me a slacker?”

At last he had won out.

She remembered the last time she had seen him. He marched with the troops through the streets of the city. She stood at the curb as they passed. How her heart leaped when she caught sight of him! How sober he looked; how well he carried his uniform; and how young the boys all were! She found herself running, a tall aristocratic looking woman in black, to try and catch another glimpse of him. She had been caught in a jamb and had stopped to cry in a doorway. She never saw him again.

There had been letters. One came after he was dead. The morning that she drew it out of the rural mail box she almost swooned in the road. Then she had clutched it to her bosom, the wild hope leaping in her heart that Ernest might after all be alive. But when her trembling fingers tore it open she found it neither a refutation of his death, nor a message from the spirit world, but the words of a sick boy in a hospital behind the lines waiting for his leg to be amputated.

Months afterward had come the cross of war from the government for “bravery in action.” She put the metal disk on the ribbon away with Ernest’s baby pictures and a lock of his hair. It was one of war’s grim jokes that she never knew what the “act of bravery” consisted of.

Two of the precious letters lay in her book and she turned to their worn pages.

Dearest Mother: — Well here we are in France at last. The boys are all crazy to get to the front, though I guess the poor fellows up there are just as anxious to get away. We haven’t seen much of France’s famous buildings nor fashionable ladies as we have been billeted through the country districts. The people live in villages and go out some distance away to farm their lands. This makes it more sociable for the people and does away with the loneliness of the American farm house. The people have piles of manure which they turn over with a pitchfork. The peasants have a passion for their land and it is pitiable to see the devastation that has come upon it. I saw a shell hole where there must have been an old fashioned garden. It had petunias drooping over the edge as big as saucers, and pinks — well, you could smell ’em a block off.

Our company has a real cook, not a mere can opener like some of the other companies have. At one town he got some rabbits and made a stew; I tell you it was fine after the bully beef. Do you remember the little cottontail that you split and fried in butter for me that tasted just like chicken? Our K. P. is sure fine at hustling fire wood which is often scarce, for the chow. At one place he actually chopped up a bed. He said if he didn’t the Germans would, so we might as well have it. The French think that the Americans come from a very rich and cold country, they demand so much fire wood. The government has placed some of their century-old forests at the disposal of the army of occupation. The natives keep warm by wearing a great deal of clothing, one layer over another. That must have been why Sarah Bernhardt was always wrapped up to her ears in her pictures. She must have felt cold.

One of the boys had a rather funny experience the other day. He went to a farm house and asked for a drink of water. Water and milk are almost the same in French. After he had waited an interminable time a girl appeared with a glass of milk. She had run out, caught the cow, and milked her!

Well, mother, I am anxious to know how you are. It will be a good thing when all this waste is stopped and we men can get home and do our work.

With best love, Ernest.

The other ran:

Mother Mine: — It is a long time since I heard from you. The mail is irregular and I worry about you: I am writing this in a hospital back of the lines. About two hundred of us were barracked in a building at St. Mihiel when it was shelled. Some of the fellows were blown all to atoms; but others hurt not at all. I got mine in the left leg. At first the surgeons thought they could save it, but now it seems that the veins are torn. It interferes with the circulation and they have got to take it off below the knee. I know how you must feel, mother, but I guess that you will be glad to get part of me back, rather than not at all. Only I won’t be able to run the farm so well.

Teddy Wymes is here near me. They took him out of the trenches screaming with inflammatory rheumatism, three days before I left the last time. Everything they said about the trenches is true — the rats, the mud, the filth. It seems good to be in a bed again. But as I lie here I do not think of the horrible carnage of this war, which I fail to understand, but I dream of the wind in the elm trees at home and your sweet face.

Your boy, Ernie.

He had died of shock on the operating table. The last word he said under the ether had been “Mother.” These few meager details had been supplied by a nurse who knew how mothers set store by such things. How gladly Mrs. James would have welcomed any portion of her boy. How she would have loved it and nursed it back to life. But she knew that it would have been a grievous cross to Ernest to have gone through life a cripple, for he could not bear anything marred or broken.

Now in the gray marble rotunda of the great state capitol, which stood upon a hill, Ernest’s gold star hung with a great many other gold stars, on an immense flag. In the memorial grove where a tree was planted for each man who had lost his life in the world war, a horse chestnut tree bore a plate with the name “Ernest James.” Mrs. James dedicated a corner of her garden to her son. In it were only blue flowers. Blue is the rarest color in nature, but Ernest had always shown a predilection for it from the blue milk bowl of his babyhood to the neckties of his youth. His mother thought that when the time came to choose a wife that he would select a blue-eyed girl. So in his garden she planted larkspur, baby-blue-eyes, bachelor-buttons, and forget-me-nots.

Folks wanted her to give up the farm, but she pleaded that she was too old to be transplanted, so she clung to her abode with its memories. She chose to “carry on.” So she tended her kitchen garden and her white leghorn chickens and let out her big fields to Danny Dart. She had watched them turn from green to gold. Her heart sang with the whir of the threshing machine for she exulted that the grain would go to feed the hungry. Wheat had ever been wrapped up in the history of her people. They had been encouraged by their leaders to till the soil. When the fabulous prices born of the exigencies of war sent most of the nation’s grain over seas, the Relief Society poured out its stored up hoard, gathered by women, to re-seed the earth.

Of all the seasons Mrs James loved autumn best. It was then the earth yielded up its abundance. With housewifely skill she gathered her harvest and stored it up against the cold of winter.

In her cellar in neat bins, along the wall, were the “roots,” potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips and onions. There were also Pearmaine apples and hubbard squash buried in wheat.

On her white-washed pantry walls hung bunches of herbs, sage, savory thyme, parsley, and mint. There were also strings of dried apples and vivid red sweet peppers, bags of hops and sacks of dried peas and beans. There were salted string beans, pickles, covered with horseradish leaves, and a stone crock of mince meat. Sugar-cured hams, salted bacon, smoked dried beef and country sausage made one’s mouth water. The high lights fell on rows of gorgeous bottled fruit, — Oxheart and Black Tartarian cherries, raspberry jam, whole bunches of grapes, half peaches floating in amber liquid, gingered pears and mint apple jelly, containing all the concentrated fragrance of the harvest.

Mrs. James’ gift was house-keeping. As she kept up the exquisite freshness of her home she reflected ironically that it was all wasted on one lonely, old woman. Was it wasted? Some claim that the only way to teach is by example. If that is true Mrs. James was a great teacher in home economics.

The clock struck twelve. It was Christmas morning. The woman shivered and closed her book. She picked up the shawl that Danny’s mother had knit and wrapped it around her shoulders. No wonder that they were worried over Danny, for Danny’s elder brother had “gone to the dogs.” She locked the door, picked up the light and carried it into her bed room. From her mahogany dresser her son’s handsome eyes looked at her. She picked up the portrait.

“I thought that you died to save mankind, my Ernest, but it seems that you also died to save Danny Dart.”

She sighed, and kissed the pictured face.