Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 February 1884 — THE TWO MRS. TUCKERS. [ARTICLE]

THE TWO MRS. TUCKERS.

BY HOSE TERRY COOKE.

“You can make the fire while I put the hoss out,” said Amasa Tucker, as he opened the back door of a gray house, set on top of a treeless hill, tracked hero aud there wjth paths the geese had made in their daily journeys to the pond below, and only approached at the back by a lane to the great red barn, and a rickety board gate set between two posts of the rail fence. This was wealthy Ann Tucker’s home-coming. She had married Amasa that morning at her father’s house in Stanton, a little village twenty miles away from Peet’s Mills, the town within whose wide limits lay the Tucker farm, and had come home with him this early spring afternoon in the old wagon behind the bony horse that did duty for Amasa’s family carriage. Mrs. Tucker was a tall, thin young woman, with a sad, reticent face, very silent and capable; these last traits had been her chief recommendation to her husband. There was no sentiment about the matter. Old Mrs. Tucker had died ttvo weeks befoi’e this marriage, but Amasa was “fore-lianded,” and knowing his mother could not live long had improved his opportunities and been “sparkin’’ Wealthy Ann Minor all winter, in judicious provision for the coming event of his solitude. He had thought the thing all over, and concluded that a wife was cheaper than a hired girl, and more permanent; so when he found this alert, firm-joint-ed, handy girl living at her uncle’s, who was a widowor on a great farm the other side of the village, Amasa made her acquaintance as soon as possible and proceeded to further intimacy. Wealthy liked better to work for her uncle than for a step-father with six secondary children, but she thought it would be better still to have a house of her own; so she agreed to marry Amasa Tucker, and this was the home coming.

Slite opened the door into a dingy room with an open fireplace at one end, a window on the north ar.d one on the south side, small, paned with old, green and imperfect glass, and letting in but just enough light to work by. One corner, to the north, was petitioned off to make a pantry, and a door by the fireplace led out into the woodshed. The front of the house contained two rooms. One opened into the kitchen and was a bed room, furnished sparsely enough; the other was a parlor, with high-backed rush-bot-tomed chairs against the wall, a round table in the middle, a fireplace with brass andirons, and fire-irons, a family Bible on the table, and a “mourning piece” painted in ground hair on the •mantel. Green paper shades and white cotton curtains, a rag carpet fresh as it came from the loom—if its dinginess could everj be called fresh—and a straight-backed sofa covered with green and yellow glazed chintz, made as dreary an apartment as could well be imagined. Wealthy shut the door behind her quickly, and went to the shed for materia] to make her fire. It was almost sundown and she was hungry; but she found only the scantiest supply of wood, and a few dry chips of kindling. However she did her best, and «he had brought some provisions from home, so that she managed to lay out a decent supper on the rickety table, by the time Amaea came stamping in from the barn. He looked disapprovingly at the pie, the biscuit, the shaved beef, and the jelly set before him. “I hope ye ain’t a waster, Wealthy,” be growled. “There’s vittles enough for a township, and the’ ain’t but two of us.” “Well, our folks sent ’em over, and you no need to eat ’em,” she answered, cheerily. “I a’n’t goin’ to; don’t you break into that jell, set it by; sometimes or nutlier somebody may be a cornin’, and you’ll want of it.” Wealthy said no more; they made a supper of biscuit and beef, for the pie also was ordered “set by.“ She was used to economy, but not to stinginess, and she excused this extreme thrift in her husband more easily, for the reason that she had always been poor, and she knew very well that he was not rich, to say the least. But it was only the beginning. Hard as Wealthy had worked at her ancle’s, here she found harder burdens; she had to draw and fetch all the water she used from an old-fashioned well, with a heavy sweep, picturesque to see,

but wearisome to use; wood was scarce, for though enough grew on the hundred acres that Amasa owned, .he grudged its use. “I sha’n’t cut down more than is reelly needful,” he said, when site urged him to fetch her a load; “wood’s allers a growin’when ye don’t cut it, and a makin’ for lumber; and lumber is better to sell, at sight, than cord wood. Ye must git along somehow with brush; mother used ter burn next to nothin’. ” She did not remind him that bis mother was bent doublo with rheumatism, and died of the fifth attack of pneumonia. Wealthy never wasted words . Then there were eight cows to milk, the milk to strain, set, skim, churn or make into cheese, and nothing hut the simplest utensils to do with. A cloth held over the edge of the pail served for a strainer; the pails themselves were heavy wood, the pans old and some of them leaky, the holes stopped with hits of rag, often to he renewed; the milk room was ia the shed, built against the chimney that it might not freeze there in the winter, only aired by one small slatted window; the churn was an old wooden one with a dasher, and even the “spaddlc” with which she worked her butter was whittled out of a maple knot by Amasa himself, and was heavy and rough. Then belonged to her the feeding of the pigs—gaunt, lean animals with sharp snouts, ridgy backs, long legs and thin flanks, deepset eyes, that gleamed with malice and never-satisfied hunger. Wealthy grew almost afraid of them when they clambered up on the rails pf the pen in their fury for food, and flapped their pointed ears at her, squealing and fighting for the scant fare she had brought. For Amasa underfed and overworked everything that belonged to him.

Then there were hens to look after—the old-fashioned barn-door “creepers,” who wanted food, too, and yet catered for themselves in great measure, and made free with barn and woodshed for want of their own quarters, and were dec mated every season by hawks, owls, skunks, weasels and foxes, to say nothing of the little chickens on which crows and cats worked their will if they dared to stray be} ond the ruinous old coop contrived for them by Amasa’s inventive genius out of sticks and stones. Add to all this the cooking, washing, baking and sewing, the insufficient supply of pork, potatoes ar.d tough pies, the “biled dinners” whose strength lay in the vegetables rather than the small square of fat pork cooked with them, of which Amasa invariably took the lion’s share; these accumulating and never ceasing labors all wore day by day on the vitality of Mrs. Tucker, and when to these were added an annual baby, life became a terror and a burdeu to the poor woman.

But what did Amasacare? He too worked “from sun to sun.” He farmed in the hard old fashion, with rude implements and no knowledge, but “My father done it afore me, so I am agoin’ to do it now, no use talkin’.” One by one the wailing puny children were laid away in the little yard on top of the sandhill, where the old Tuckers and their half-dozen infants lay already; rough inclosure, full of mulleins, burdocks and thistles, overrun with low blackberry vines and surrounded by a rail fence. It had been much handier for the Tuckers to have a grave-yard close by than to travel five miles to the Mills with every funeral; and they were driven by public opinion in regard to monuments; they all lay there like the hearts that perish, with but one slant gray stone to tell where the first occupant left his tired bones. Two children of Wealthy’s survived. Amasa and Lurana, the oldest and youngest of seven. Amasa, a considerate, intelligent boy, who thought much and said little, and Lurana, or ‘ Lury ’ as her name was generally given, a mischievous, selfwilled little imp, the delight and torment of her little worn-out mother. Young Amasa was a boy quite beyond his father’s understanding; as soon as he was old enough he began to help his mother in every way he could devise, and when his term at the village school was over, to his father’s great disgust, he trapped squirrels and gathered nuts enough to earn him money and subscribe for an agricultural paper, which he studied every week till its contents were thoroughly stored in his head. Then began that “noble discontent” which the philosophers praise. The elder man had no peace in his old-world ways; the sloppy waste of the barnyard was an eyesore to this “book-learned feller,” as his father derisively called him. And the ashes of the wood fire were saved and sheltered like precious dust, instead of being thrown in a big heap to edify the wandering hens. The desolate garden was plowed, fertilized and set in order at last, and the great ragged orchard manured, the apple trees thinned and trimmed, and ashes sown thick over the old massy sod. Now these things were not done in a day or a year, but as the boy grew older and more able to cope I with his father’s self-conceit more was done annually, not without much opposition and many hard words, but still done.

Then came a heavy blow. Lurana, a girl of 15, fresh and pretty as a wild rose, and tired of the pinching economy, the monotonous work, and grinding life of the farm, ran away with a tin peddler and broke her mother’s heart; not in the physical sense that hearts are sometimes broken, but the weary woman’s soul was set on this bright, winsome child, and her life lost all its scant savor when the bright face and clear young voice left her forever. “I don’t blame her none, Amasy,” she sobbed out to her boy, now a stout fellow of 22, raging, at his sister’s folly. “I can’t feel to blame her. I know ’tis more’n a girl can bear to live this way. I’ve lied to, but it’s been dreadful hard—dreadful hard. I’ve wished more’n once I could ha’laid down along with the little babies out there on the hill, so’s to rest a spell; but there was you and Lury wanted me, and so my time hadn’t come. “Amasy, you’re a man grown now, and if you should get married, and I suppose you will, men folks seem to think it’s needful, whether or no, do kinder make it easy for her, poor cretur 1 Don’t grind her down to skin

and bone, like me, dear; ta’n’t just right, I’m sure on’t, never to make more of a woman than es she was a homed critter; don’t do it. ” “Mother, I never will,” answered the son, as energetically and solemnly as if he were taking his oath.. But Wealthy was nearer to her rest than she knew; the enemy that lurks in dirt, neglect, poor food, constant drudgery, and the want of every wholesome and pleasurable excitement to mind or body, and when least expected swoops ;down and does its fatal errand in the isolated farmhouse no less than in the crowded city slums, the scourge of New England, typhoid fever, broke out in the Tucker homestead. Wealthy turned away from hyr weekly baking one Saturday morning just as the last pie was set on the pantry shelf, and fainted on, the kitchen floor, where Amasa the younger found her an hour after, muttering, delirious and cold. What he could do then, or the village doctor, or an old woman who called herself a nurse, was all useless; but the best skill of any kind would have been equally futile; she was never conscious again for a week, then her eyes seemed to see what was about her once more, she looked up at her feoy, laid her wan cheek on her hand, smiled—and died. Hardly had her wasted shape been put away under the mulleins and hard hack when her husband came in from the hayfield smitten with the same plague; he was harder to conquer; three weeks of alternate burning, sinking, raviDg and chills ended at last in the gray and grim repose of death for him, and another Amasa Tucker reigned alone on the old house on the hill.

It is not to he supposed that in all hese years Amasa the younger had been blind to the charms of the other sex; he had not “been with” every girl who went to school with him, or whom he met at singing school or spelling matches, or who smiled at him from •her Sunday bonnet, as he manfully “held up his end” in the village choir. He had been faithful always to the shy, delicate, dark-eyed little girl who was his school sweetheart, and now it was to Mary Peet he hastened to ask her to share his life and home. He had intended to take a farm on shares the next summer, and work his way slowly upward to a place of his own; now he had this 100-acre farm, and, to his great surprise, he found $3,000 laid up in the bank at Peet’s Mills, the slow savings of his father’s fifty years. He began at once to set his house in order; he longed to build a new one, hut Mary’s advice restrained him, so he did his best with this; the cellar he cleaned and whitewashed with his own hands; cleaned its one begrimed window and set two more, so that it was sweet and light; the house was scrubbed from one end to the other; a bonfire made of the old dirty comfortables and quilts, the kitchen repainted a soft yellow, and with clear large glass set in place of the dingy old sashes: the woodhouse was filled with dry wood and good store of pine cones and chopped brush and kindling. A new milk-room was built hut a little way from the back door, over a tiny brook that ran down the hill north of the house, and under the slatted floor kept up a cool draught of fresh air,a covered passage connected it with the kitchen, and a door into the old milk-room made of that a convenient pantry; while the removal of the old one from the kitchen corner gave to that apartment more room, air, and light. A new stove t with a set boiler, filled up the hearth of the old fireplace, but further improvements Amasa left for Mary. A different home-coming from his mother’s she had indeed, on just such a spring day as Wealthy came there. The kitchen shone clean and bright, a bowl of pink arbutus blossoms made its atmosphere freshly sweet and the fire was laid ready for her to light, the shining teakettle filled, and the pantry held such stores as Anaasa’s masculine knowledge of household, wants could suggest; flour, butter, eggs, sugar, all were in abundance, and no feast of royalty ever gave more pleasure to its most honored guest than the hot biscuit Mary made and baked for their supper, the stewed dried apples, the rich old cheese and the fragrant tea gave Amasa this happy evening. Next day they took their wedding trip to Peet’s Mills in the new and sensible farm wagon Amasa had just bought, with a strong, spirited horse to draw it.

“I want you should look around, Mary, ” he had said the night before, “and see what is needed here. I expect most everything is wanting, and we can’t lay out for finery. But first of all get what’ll make your work easy. Your weddin’ present will come along tomorrow; to-day we’ll buy necessities.” Mrs. Peet had not sent her only girl empty-handed to the new house. A good mattress, two pairs of blankets, fresh, light comfortables, and some cheap, neat, white spreads; a set of gay crockery, a clock, and a roll of bright ingrain carpeting had all come to the farmhouse soon after the bride’s arrival; her ample supply of sheets and pillow cases, strong towels and a few tablecloths had been sent the day before, so this sort of thing was not needed; but there was a new churn bought, and altogether new furnishings for the dairy, several modern inventions to make the work of a woman easier, a set of chairs, a .table, and an easy lounge for the parlor, some cretonne covered with apple blossoms and white thorn clusters, and pails, brooms and tinware that would have made Wealthy a happy woman, crowded the over-full wagon before they turned homeward. The old house began to smile and blossom under this new dispensation, and the new mistress smiled too. Amasa milked the cows for her, and lifted the heavy pails of milk to strain into the bright new pans; he filled the woodbox *by the stove twice a day, put a patent pump into the old well, and, as it stood above the house, ran a pipe down into a sink set in the woodshed, and so put an end to the drawing and carrying of water. The fat, round, placid pigs that now enjoyed themselves in the new pen he took care of himself. “Ta’n’t work fdr women folks,” he said. “You’ve got enough to do, Mary; there’s the garden you’ll have an eye on, and the chickens, if you’re a mind to; I’m going to build a hen-house and

a yard to it right off, that’ll be good I enough for ydu as well as the chickens, : and I want you to promise if any time i the work gets a mite hefty and worries you, yoa’U speak right out. I can as- • ford to have everything else worn out l rather than my wife.” Really, it paid. It does pay, my | masculine friends, to give any woman a ! kindly word now and then. If yon had ! done it oftener, or your father had in the past, the rights of women nevet would have angered or bored you a* j they do now. or unsexed and macU ! strident and clamorous that half of creation which is and always was unreasonable enough to have hungry Try it and see. Amasa was wise above his generation. He had seen his mother suffer, and learned a lesson. Mary never pined for kindly appreciation of her work, or lacked help in i . When she had a door cut through into the parlor, the stiff chairs' and soia banished, the flowery curtains hung at either window, the gay carpet put down, and the new furniture put in place, with her wedding present —an easy stuffed rocker—drawn up to the table, on which lay two weekly papers and Harper’s Magazine, j she had still sense enough to make this hitherto sacred apartment into a real sitt ng-room, where every evening she and Amasa rested, read or talked over the day’s doings; and when the first fat, rosy baby came, and Mary was about again, it added another pleasure to have the old cradle beside them all the evening with its sleeping treasure. Can I tell m words what a sense of peace and eheer pervaded that household, in spite of some failures and troubles? If the rye did blast one year, the two best cows die another; if a weasel once invaded the new and wonderful hen-house and slaughtered the best dozen of Plymouth Rocks; if sweeping storms wet the great crop of hay on the big meadow, or an ox broke a leg in a post-hole, still there was home to come back to, and a sensible, cheerful woman to look on the bright side of things when Amasa was discouraged. But on the whole, things prospered; and as Amasa heard the sweet laughter of his happy children, and met the calm smile of his wife, he could not hut look back at his mother’s harassed and sad experience, and give a heartfelt sigh to the difference between the two Mrs. Tuckers, unaware how much of it was due to his own sense of justice and affection. There are two morals to this simple sketch, my friends: One is, the great use and necessity of being good to your wives. Accept which you like Or need most. In the language of the ancient Romans; “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”