From the Relief Society Magazine, 1948 –

A Place in the Country

By Ruby Scranton Jones

Story 1: The Arrival

The four-day trip from Chicago to Southern New Mexico had been, for the Martin family, as much a journey into the unknown as any pioneer journey fifty years before. The old Ford had rattled and wheezed and, at times, stopped altogether. The canvas-covered trailer, piled high with furniture, had bounced along behind, and swung perilously around corners. In the car, boxes and suitcases barely left room for John and Ellen, in the front seat, and the two children, Betty, eight, and Johnny, five, in the back.

As they neared the place on which they had put almost their entire savings as a down payment, sight unseen, Ellen’s excitement grew. This was the place in the country that she had dreamed about and planned for all her married life. Here Betty would grow strong and well, and John would lose the nagging cough which had kept him at home so much the past winter.

Finally, as they passed some tall roadside bushes, John exclaimed, “There it is! See the name Larson on the mail box.” He stopped the car, and they all leaned out to look.

“Let me see,” Johnny cried, pushing his sister aside. “Where are the clucks? I want to see the pond and the ducks.”

“Will there be a horse to ride?” Betty asked.

No one answered them.

Ellen gasped, “But this can’t be the place!”

Part of the front fence was down; the low frame house, back among some trees, was unpainted and two windows were broken. The grass in front was yellow, and the weeds along the driveway were waist high.

“Why, the ad said in good condition. Oh, John! What if we’ve made a mistake?”

All the way across the country, Ellen had entertained the children with stories of the Wisconsin farm to which her mother had taken her when she was ten. The rest of her twenty-seven years she had lived in a Chicago tenement district of narrow streets and murky atmosphere. It was not surprising, then, that the farm had remained in her memory as being in perpetual springtime. The fields were always green, the trees in blossom, lambs played in the pasture, and tiny pigs squealed from their pen. Even John, who had always considered Chicago a good enough place to live, had become infected by her enthusiasm. He had teased, “You must have had a glimpse into heaven, once.”

The place they were looking at bore not the slightest resemblance to anything Ellen’s stories had led them to expect.

John opened the gate and drove slowly up the driveway. When he stopped by the back porch, he said, laughingly, as he opened the car door for the children, “I bet your mother thought the fairies would have the house all spick and span for us. I bet she expected to pull radishes for supper.”

Betty’s blue eyes, so like her father’s, laughed back at him and a smile flitted across Johnny’s chubby, tired little face.

Then to Ellen he said, “You know, honey, a house not lived in goes down pretty fast. I can soon fix it up. I’m a better carpenter than I am farmer, you know.”

When she continued to stare at the house, he said, “But first I better see if the well’s as good as that agent assured me it was.” As he got a bucket from the trailer, and started for the pump, he began to cough.

A cold fear gripped Ellen’s heart. What if the work should be too hard for John? What if he should miss the city and never let her know that he longed to go back. Buying a farm had been her own idea, really. Maybe the rest of them wouldn’t be happy here, at all. The creaking of the pump seemed the saddest sound she had ever heard.

She walked slowly to the back door, unlocked it, and looked in. A musty, unclean smell rushed at her. When her eyes became accustomed to the dimness, she saw a rusty range in one corner. The breeze from the open door lifted a heap of soot from the fallen stovepipe and drifted it across the floor. A startled mouse scampered over some scattered papers and disappeared through a hole in the baseboard.

When the children came up behind her, Ellen shut the door hurriedly and said, with forced cheerfulness, “We’ll cook our supper in the yard. We’ll sleep under the trees. We’ll really camp out. Won’t that be fun?”

As they followed her back to the car, she advised Betty, “You take Johnny to see the orchard. See if you can find some flowers.”

Soon she had a small fire burning in the driveway. Then she got the food box from the car, spread a cloth on the ground nearby, and set out some bright pottery dishes.

John came with the water. “See,” he said, “it’s clear and cold.”

Ellen took a drink. “Yes, it’s fine.” She dipped some into a kettle and put it over the fire to boil for the eggs. She opened a can of tomatoes and unwrapped cheese and bread. She found some paper napkins and a clean bib for Johnny. She should have bought milk in the last town, but she had been too anxious to get to the farm to remember. Oh, well, water would do this once, she supposed.

John took the canvas from the trailer, and spread it under a tree. He got mattresses and bedding and made the beds. Then he gathered dry branches and stacked them near the fire.

As they worked, a quiet settled down on the countryside. It was broken only by the occasional low mooing of a cow, or the sleepy chirping of a robin. Both John and Ellen stopped in surprise. This was something they had never experienced before. They had never been where there were no honking cars, blaring radios, and footsteps over their heads.

Ellen looked around. ‘The neighbors are just far enough away to make every call seem a real visit,” she said. “I wonder if they have stiles. I’ve always wanted to walk across a field and over a stile to the neighbors. People in the country are so friendly—not always hurried and nervous, like city people.”

John came to stand beside her. “You must have read a book,” he teased.

The children came running back, shouting something about cherries and green apples. Betty had a bunch of dandelions and Johnny a last year’s bird’s nest. When Betty handed her mother the flowers, she stood in awe, pointing to the west.

“What is it, a fire?”

They all turned. A brilliant red sun was just touching the distant mountain peaks. Shafts, like flames tipped with gold, rose from it and extended both ways along the horizon. Fleecy clouds, whose undersides were tinged with pink, floated above.

“I’ve seen such sunsets on picture postcards,” Ellen whispered, “but I never believed them real.”

Thus they
stood, scarcely moving, till the sun was gone and swift twilight settled down, obliterating all that was old and unlovely,

“It’s all right,” Ellen said slowly, as she moved back to the fire and began to serve the supper. “It’s beautiful. Everything’s beautiful.”

(To be continued)