Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. Garland Hamlin
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and beetles did not scare her any more than they did the boys. She watched the beetles bury a dead gopher without the slightest repugnance; indeed, she turned to, after a long time, to help them, a kindness which they very probably resented, to judge from their scrambling.
She always urged the other girls to go down to the creek and see the boys go in swimming, and would have joined the fun had not the boys beaten her back with hands full of mud, while they uttered opprobrious cries. She saw no reason why boys should have all the fun.
When the days were hot they could go down there in the cool, nice creek, strip and have a good time, but girls must primp around and try to keep nice and clean. She looked longingly at the naked little savages running about and splashing in the water. There was something so fine and joyous in it, her childish heart rebelled at sex-distinction as she walked slowly away. She, too, loved the feel of the water and the caress of the wind.
She was a good student and developed early into a wonderful speller and reader. She always listened to the classes in reading, and long before she reached the pieces herself she knew them by heart, and said them to herself in the silence of the lane or the loneliness of the garret. She recited "The Battle of Waterloo" and "Locheil" long before she understood the words. The roll of the verse excited her, and she thrust her nut of a fist into the air like Miriam the Hebrew singer, feeling vaguely the same passion.
She went from Primer to First Reader, then to the Second and Third Readers, without effort. She read easily and dramatically. She caught at the larger meanings, and uttered them in such wise that the older pupils stopped their study to listen.
Scraps and fragments of her reading took curious lodgment in her mind. New conceptions burst into her consciousness with a golden glory upon reading these lines:
"Field of wheat so full and fair,
Shining with a sunny air;
Lightly swaying either way,
Graceful as the breezes sway."
They made her see the beauty of the grainfield as never before. It seemed to be lit by some mysterious light.
"Cleon hath a million acres,
Ne'er a one have I,"
seemed to express something immemorial and grand. She seemed to see hills stretching to vast distances, covered with cattle. "The pied frog's orchestra" came to her with sudden conscious meaning as she sat on the door-step one night eating her bowl of bread and milk, and watching the stars come out. These fragments of literature expressed the poetry of certain things about her, and helped her also to perceive others.
She was a daring swinger, and used to swing furiously out under the maple trees, hoping to some day touch the branches high up there, and, when her companions gathered in little clumps in dismayed consultation, she swung with wild hair floating free, a sort of intoxication of delight in her heart.
Sometimes when alone she slipped off her clothes and ran amid the tall corn-stalks like a wild thing. Her slim little brown body slipped among the leaves like a weasel in the grass. Some secret, strange delight, drawn from ancestral sources, bubbled over from her pounding heart, and she ran and ran until wearied and sore with the rasping corn leaves, then she sadly put on civilized dress once more.
Her feet were brown as toads, but graceful and small, and she washed them (when the dew was heavy enough) by running in the wet grass just before going in to bed, a trick the boys of the neighborhood had taught her. She ran forward to clean the insteps and backward to clean the heels. If the grass was not wet, she omitted the ceremony. Dust was clean anyhow. Her night-gowns were of most sorry pattern till her aunt came; thereafter they were clean, though it mattered little. They were a nuisance anyway.
She wore a pink sun-bonnet, when she could find one; generally there were two or three hanging on the fences at remote places. She sat down in the middle of the road, because she had a lizard's liking for the warm soft dust, and she paddled in every pool and plunged her hand into every puddle after frogs and bugs and worms, with the action of a crane.
She ate everything that boys did. That is to say, she ate sheep sorrel, Indian tobacco, roots of ferns, May apples, rose leaves, rose-buds, raw turnips, choke-cherries, wild crab-apples, slippery elm bark, and the green balls on young oak trees, as well as the bitter acorns. These acorns she chewed into pats, and dried in the sun, to eat at other times, like a savage.
She ate pinks and grass blades, and green watermelons, and ground cherries, and black-haws, and dew-berries, and every other conceivable thing in the woods and fields, not to mention the score of things which she tried and spit out. She became inured to poison ivy like the boys and walked the forest paths without fear of anything but snakes.
Summer was one continuous and busy play-spell for her in those days before her lessons became a serious thing, for as she sat in school she was experimenting in the same way. She chewed paper into balls and snapped them like the boys. She carried slips of elm bark to chew also, and slate pencils she crunched daily. She gnawed the corners of her slate, tasted her ink and munched the cedar of her pencil.
And through it all she grew tall and straight and brown. She could run like a partridge and fight like a wild-cat, at need. Her brown-black eyes shone in her dark warm skin with an eager light, and her calloused little claws of hands reached and took hold of all realities.
The boys respected her as a girl who wasn't afraid of bugs, and who could run, and throw a ball. Above all she was strong and well.
CHAPTER III
DANGEROUS DAYS
A farmer's daughter is exposed to sights and sounds which the city girl knows nothing of. Mysterious processes of generation and birth go on before the eyes of the farm child, which only come as obscure whisperings to the city child of the same middle condition. And these happenings have a terrifying power to stir and develop passions prematurely.
Rose heard occasionally obscene words among the hands. She listened unperceived to the vulgar cackling of old women during afternoon calls. Before her eyes from the time of her toddling youth had proceeded the drama of animal life. She had seen it all; courtship, birth, death. Nothing escaped her keen, searching, inquisitive eyes. She asked her father about these dramatic and furious episodes of the barnyard, but he put her off, and she finally ceased to ask about them. She began to perceive they were considered of that obscure and unmentionable world of sin, with which men alone had proper right to deal.
When the girls of her age in the grasp of some gale of passion, danced about her shouting foul words in the unknowing way children have, she could not take part by word of mouth, though she felt the same savage, frenzied delight in it.
She learned early the hideous signs which pass in the country to describe the unnamable and the covert things of human life. She saw them scrawled on the fences, on school-house doors, and written on the dust of the road. There was no escaping them. The apparently shameful fact of sex faced her everywhere.
And yet through it all she lived a glad, free, wholesome life. Her blood was sweet and clean and kept off contagion. Her brown skin flushed with its unhindered current. She dipped into this obscure questionable world only momentarily, and came back to her father wholesome and happy, except occasionally when some outrageous gesture or word had stricken her into weeping.
Then her father told her not to mind; just be good and sweet herself, and it would help the others to be good too. He blundered sometimes and struggled for words, and talked in grotesque riddles, but she understood his meaning some way and was comforted.
She did not go to her aunt. She had heard her say coarse words and she did not care to go and tell her of these strange things. Her father was her hero and guide. She went to him as naturally as to a mother. It was a great thing for him to achieve, but he did not know it. He did not seek it. It was indeed thrust upon him. He would gladly have escaped from it, but Rose refused to listen to anyone else, so the puzzled and disturbed father continued to be her timorous guide as a matter of need.
He could not understand her quick perception – something seemed to rise in the child to help him explain. Germs of latent perception seemed to spring up like a conjuror's