Pa cut and peeled a forked stick. He took four big fish out of the trap and strung them on the stick. Laura and Pa went back to the house, carrying those flopping fish. Ma’s eyes were round when she saw them. Pa cut off their heads and stripped out their insides and showed Laura how to scale fish. He scaled three, and she scaled almost all of one.
Ma rolled them in meal and fried them in fat, and they ate all those good fish for supper.
“You alway
s think of something, Charles,” said Ma. “Just when I’m wondering where our living is to come from, now it’s spring.”
Pa could not hunt in the springtime, for then all the rabbits had little rabbits and the birds had little birds in their nests.
“Wait till I harvest that wheat!” Pa said. “Then we’ll have salt pork every day. Yes, by gravy, and fresh beef!”
Every morning after that, before he went to work, Pa brought fish from the trap. He never took more than they needed to eat. The others he lifted out of the trap and let swim away.
He brought buffalo fish and pickerel, and catfish, and shiners, and bullheads with two black horns. He brought some whose names he did not know. Every day there was fish for breakfast and fish for dinner and fish for supper.
Chapter 20
School
Monday morning came. As soon as Laura and Mary had washed the breakfast dishes, they went up the ladder and put on their Sunday dresses. Mary’s was a blue-sprigged calico, and Laura’s was red-sprigged.
Ma braided their hair very tightly and bound the ends with thread. They could not wear their Sunday hair-ribbons because they might lose them. They put on their sunbonnets, freshly washed and ironed.
Then Ma took them into the bedroom. She knelt down by the box where she kept her best things, and she took out three books. They were the books she had studied when she was a little girl. One was a speller, and one was a reader, and one was a ’rithmetic.
She looked solemnly at Mary and Laura, and they were solemn, too.
“I am giving you these books for your very own, Mary and Laura,” Ma said. “I know you will take care of them and study them faithfully.”
“Yes, Ma,” they said.
She gave Mary the books to carry. She gave Laura the little tin pail with their lunch in it, under a clean cloth.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Be good girls.”
Ma and Carrie stood in the doorway, and Jack went with them down the knoll. He was puzzled. They went on across the grass where the tracks of Pa’s wagon wheels went, and Jack stayed close beside Laura.
When they came to the ford of the creek, he sat down and whined anxiously. Laura had to explain to him that he must not come any farther. She stroked his big head and tried to smooth out the worried wrinkles. But he sat watching and frowning while they waded across the shallow, wide ford.
They waded carefully and did not splash their clean dresses. A blue heron rose from the water, flapping away with his long legs dangling. Laura and Mary stepped carefully onto the grass. They would not walk in the dusty wheel tracks until their feet were dry, because their feet must be clean when they came to town.
The new house looked small on its knoll with the great green prairie spreading far around it. Ma and Carrie had gone inside. Only Jack sat watching by the ford.
Mary and Laura walked on quietly.
Dew was sparkling on the grass. Meadow-larks were singing. Snipes were walking on their long, thin legs. Prairie hens were clucking and tiny prairie chicks were peeping. Rabbits stood up with paws dangling, long ears twitching, and their round eyes staring at Mary and Laura.
Pa had said that town was only two and a half miles away, and the road would take them to it. They would know they were in town when they came to a house.
Large white clouds sailed in the enormous sky and their gray shadows trailed across the waving prairie grasses. The road always ended a little way ahead, but when they came to that ending, the road was going on. It was only the tracks of Pa’s wagon through the grass.
“For pity’s sake, Laura,” said Mary, “keep your sunbonnet on! You’ll be brown as an Indian, and what will the town girls think of us?”
“I don’t care!” said Laura, loudly and bravely.
“You do too!” said Mary.
“I don’t either!” said Laura.