From the West to the West

“I can’t see why old folks like us will persist in living after we’ve outgrown our usefulness,” exclaimed Grandfather Ranger, one sloppy March evening, as he entered the little kitchen and placed a pail of foaming milk upon the clean white table. The severely cold weather had given way to a springtime thaw; but a wet snow had begun falling at sundown, and a soft, muddy liquid made dirty pools wherever his feet pressed the polished floor.

“You’re right, father; we’ve lived long enough,” sighed the feeble mother of many children, following her husband’s footprints with mop and broom.

“If you and John think you’ve lived long enough, what do you think of me?” cried the great-grandmother, who had passed her fourscore years and ten, but who still amply supported herself (if only she and the rest of the family had thought so) as she sat from early morning till late at night in her corner, knitting, always knitting.

“Never mind, grannie,” said her son, swallowing a lump that rose unbidden in his throat. “You’ve as good a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any fellow that ever put his name to a Declaration of Independence! There’ll be room for you in the cosiest corner of this little house as long as there’s a corner for anybody. Don’t worry.”

“But this state of things isn’t just or fair!” exclaimed the wife, folding her last bit of mending and dropping back into her chair. “It seems to me that we, as parents, deserve a better fate in our old days than any set of bachelor hangers-on on earth, who’ve never had anybody but themselves to provide for. If Joseph would only come back, or the good Lord would let us know his fate, I could endure the rest.”

“There, there, mother! Not another word. Haven’t I forbidden the mention of his name?”

“But he was our darling, father. I can’t dismiss him from my thoughts as you say you can.”

“We must keep the grandchildren in ignorance of his existence, wife. It’s bad enough in all conscience for the stain of his misguided life to rest on older heads. We must forget our unfortunate son.”

“I can never forget my bonnie boy,—not even to obey you, father!”

The back door, which had been unintentionally left ajar, flew open, and Jean, who had for the first time in her life heard a word of complaint from her grandparents, or a word from them concerning her mysterious Uncle Joe, burst suddenly into the room and knelt at the feet of her grandmother, her whole frame convulsed with sobs.

“Forgive us, darlings, do!” she cried as soon as she could control her voice to speak. “You’ve borne so much sorrow, and we never knew it! We never meant to be thoughtless or unkind, but I see now how ungrateful we have been. We must have hurt your feelings often.”

“Don’t cry, Jean,” and the thin hand of the grandmother stroked the girl’s bright hair. “We don’t often repine at our lot. I am sorry you overheard a word.”

“But I am not sorry a single bit, grandma. We children have been thoughtless and impudent. I can see it all now. We didn’t ever mean to complain, though, about you, or grandpa, or you either, grannie dear. We only meant to draw the line at bachelor great-uncles and meddlesome second and third cousins, who ought to have provided themselves in their youth with homes of their own, as our parents did.”

“Do you think they can help themselves hereafter, Jean?”

“Why, of course! The feeling of self-dependence will make ’em young and strong again,—though they don’t deserve good treatment, for they ought to have had homes and families of their own in their youth, as you did.”

“It’s too late to lodge a complaint of that kind against them now, Jean,” said the grandmother, with a smile.

“Did you overhear all we were talking about?” asked the grandfather, his head bowed upon his cane.

“I am afraid I did, grandpa. I was cleaning the slush from my shoes, and I couldn’t help overhearing, though I hate eavesdroppers, on general principles. They never hear any good of themselves. But, say, grandpa, what about our Uncle Joe, whom I heard you denounce so bitterly? You haven’t said I mustn’t speak his name, you know.”

“Don’t talk about him, child, to us or anybody else. He’s an outlaw. Dismiss him from your thoughts, just as I have.”

“Your uncle may not be living now, Jean; if he is alive, I hope he’ll find a better friend than his father,” exclaimed the great-grandmother, speaking in a tone of reproach that surprised none more than herself.

“Tell me all about it, grand-daddie darling! Do! I know there’s a sad secret somewhere in the family. Something unusual must have happened a long time ago to bring us all under the ban of poverty. I have heard hints of it now and then all my life; and now I must hear the whole story. The schoolmaster will tell me if you don’t.”

“No, no, Jean,” exclaimed her grandfather, anxiously. “Don’t speak of family affairs outside. It is never seemly.”

“Neither is it seemly or just to keep members of the family in ignorance of family affairs when all the rest of the neighborhood knows all about ’em! We ought to know all, grandma darling. The reason children are so often unreasonable is that they don’t understand.”

“‘I have been young and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread,’” said the grandfather, his head still bowed low upon his staff and his white locks falling over his stooping shoulders. “Let us not repine, mother.”

“I am not repining, father, but I do feel so—so disappointed with the outcome of all our hard struggles that I can’t always be cheerful.”

“We’d just begun to get our heads above water when it happened, Jean,” said the old man. “We’d been making a new farm. You see, we’d manumitted our slaves before we left Kaintuck, and we had to begin with our bare hands in this new country and work our way from the ground up. We’d only got a part o’ the children raised when the older ones began to get it in their heads to get married. But our second son took to book-learning, and we sent him off to Tennessee to finish his schooling. That cost a pile o’ money. Then we had to set out the married ones. We’d got things going in tol’ble shape and was beginning to get on our feet again, when Joseph—”

“Do stop, husband. Don’t tell any more; please don’t,” cried the grandmother, nervously stroking the bright young head that nestled in her lap. “I cannot bear to hear it, though I thought I could.”

“Let him go on, grandmother dear! I don’t want to be driven to the schoolmaster for the information that I am bound to get someway. When I have grandchildren of my own, I’ll tell ’em everything they ought to know about the family, and then they won’t be teased by the school-children, as we are.”

“We had to mortgage the farm,” continued the grandfather; “and then there came a financial panic. The wild-cat banks of the country all went to pieces, and the bottom kind o’ fell out o’ things.”

“But why did you borrow money, grandpa? Why was it necessary to mortgage the farms?”

“We did it because we had to stand by Joe in his trouble.”

“What did you hear at school, darling?” asked the grandmother.

“Oh, nothing much. But one day Jim Danover got mad at me because I went head in the class; and he said I needn’t be puttin’ on airs, for everybody knew that my uncle had been hung.”

“Good Lord! has it come to that?” cried the great-grandmother, dropping her knitting to the floor and clasping her withered hands over her knees. “I’ve always told you that you’d better tell the older children about it yourself, John.”

“No, Jean; your uncle wasn’t hung,” said the old man; “but he got into trouble, and we all believe he is dead. He was the pride and joy of us all. He was so promising that we gave him all the education that ought to have been distributed evenly through the family.”

“But John and Mollie took a notion to get married young, and you know that ended their chances,” interposed the mother.

“Your uncle’s trouble would never have come upon him and us if he had stayed out o’ that college,” exclaimed the great-grandmother, who did not approve of the course the family had taken with Joseph at the beginning of his college days.

“That’s true, grannie,” replied the father; “but he ought to have kept out o’ the scrape, college or no college.”

“Do go on,” cried Jean.

“Your Uncle Joe got mixed up in a hazing frolic, or something o’ that sort,” resumed the grandfather. “One or two of the students got hurt, one of ’em so bad that he died,—or it was given out that he died,—and the blame fell on Joe. He declared he wasn’t guilty, but the college authorities had to fix the blame somewhere, though the case was uncertain. They never proved that the boy was dead, but we raised the money and bailed Joe out o’ jail. When the story was started that the fellow had died, Joe skipped his bail and left us all in a hole. That was what made and has kept us poor.”

“Did you never hear of the other man, grandpa?”

“Oh, yes; he turned up, but too late to do Joe or the rest of us any good.”

“Poor dear Uncle Joe!”

“You’d better say poor dear all the rest of us,” cried the great-grandmother, who had staked and lost her little all in the great calamity.

“But Uncle Joe was sinned against, grannie dear. How he must have suffered!”

“Them that’s sinned against are often greater sufferers than them that sins,” was the sad reply.

“When the bail was jumped, the hard times set in with all of us,” resumed the grandfather. “The banks, as I was saying, went broke, the interest on the mortgages piled up, and the notes fell due. The crops got the rust and the weevil, and everything else went wrong. You see, Jean, when a man starts down hill, everybody tries to give him a kick. The long and the short of it is that mother, here, and grannie and I have been the same as paupers for more than a dozen years.”

“I must be going, though you must first tell me how you two and dear old grannie are going to live when we are away in Oregon. Your way seems very uncertain,” said Jean.

“Your father has made some kind of a bargain for our support with your Uncle Lije. But he’s sort o’ visionary, and he never has much luck. If he loses the property, we can go to the poorhouse.”

“Are you to be allowed no stated sum to live on? Will you have no means of your own to gratify your individual wishes or tastes?”

“No, child; not a picayune.”

“What’s a picayune?”

“A six-and-a-quarter-cent piece.”

“I’m just as wise as I was before.”

“They’re wellnigh out o’ circulation nowadays, though I used to come across ’em frequently when I was sheriff,” said the old man.

Jean covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

“Don’t worry about us, dearie,” said the old man. “There is One above us who heareth even the young ravens when they cry. There is not a sparrow that falleth to the ground without His knowledge. Your Uncle Lije will move into the old homestead when you are all gone. Your father built this cottage for us when he assumed the mortgage, as you know. We won’t be entirely alone, but we’ll miss you all; and we’ll try to remember that we are of more value than many sparrows.”

“I’ve heard such talk as that all my life, grandpa. But I can’t help thinking that it would have been better to keep the ravens from having anything to cry about in the first place, and to save the sparrows from falling.”

“If none o’ God’s creatures ever had any hard experiences, they’d never know enough to enjoy their blessings, Jean. A child has to stumble and hurt itself many times before it learns to walk steady. We’ve all got to be purified and saved, as by fire, before we are fit to stand in the presence of the awful God.”

“The God I love and worship isn’t an awful God,” cried Jean. “I couldn’t love Him if He were awful. My earthly daddie whipped me once. No doubt I deserved the punishment, but I couldn’t love him for a whole month afterwards. And I’d have hated him for the rest of my life if I hadn’t deserved the whipping.”

“Didn’t it do you any good?”

Jean confronted her grandfather, her eyes flashing. “No, sir!” she cried. “I ought not to have been whipped, and I wasn’t a bit repentant after the punishment. I was sorry beforehand, though, and said so.”

“What was your offence, Jean?”

“I dropped a pan full of dishes and broke more than half o’ the lot. They fell to the floor with a crash, and scared me half to death.”

“Didn’t the whipping make you more careful afterwards?”.

“Not at all; it only made me mad and afraid and nervous, so I broke more dishes. But the next time it happened, I hid the broken pieces in the ash hopper, and when they were found, I saved myself a whipping by telling my first lie.”

“The Lord chasteneth whom He loveth, my child.”

“I once saw a mill-hand strike his wife,” retorted Jean, “and he said, as she rubbed her bruises, ‘I love you, Mollie. Take another kick!’ But I must go now. Be of good cheer. And remember, when I get to Oregon and get to making money, you shall have every cent that I can spare.”