Clara Whitbow Journal

April 10, 1885 My birthday, and I am now fourteen years old, though I do not feel any taller in the morning than I did last night when I blew out the lamp and promised myself I should wake changed. Mother says one grows like a field—seed by seed, day by day—and that birthdays are for counting mercies, not inches. I declared I would rather count inches, and she laughed and kissed my forehead where my hair seldom lies obedient. I was woken early by Tom’s clatter. He is ten and takes up as much space as a man when he is trying not to—elbows in the butter, boots on the stool, everything knocked half off the table so that Mother keeps up a quiet rescue with her hands, the way she rescues us all. The kettle sang; the stove ticked; frost had crept its thin fingers along the window in the night and left lace there, though the snow itself is mostly gone. Outside, the yard sucks at one’s boots with a noise that would shame a lady; inside, the room smells of coffee, bacon rinds, and the good sharpness of soap that Mother boiled last week in the big kettle. We ate johnnycakes and a stingy slice of ham, for Father says we must mind the smokehouse if we wish to taste meat come winter. Tom dropped his fork and dove for it, banging his head on the table so we all jumped except Father, who never startles, but only glances with that look which says, *Try again, son*. After breakfast, while Tom hunted his mittens (under his chair where he had kicked them), Mother set a small parcel wrapped in blue calico beside my plate. The calico was faded at the corners, as if it had been folded and refolded through several lives before coming to me, which is the way of things here: clothes begin as Sunday best and end as quilt squares, and if you hold a quilt long enough, you can remember a whole childhood by touch. I wanted gloves. I confess it. My old pair are more patch than glove, and one finger has turned into two. But when I untied the string, there lay this stack of blank papers that I was to refer to as my notebook. Mother said, “Clara, you must write in this notebook every fortnight. Set down the happenings, and do not forget to add your gratitude with them. For memory blows away quicker than dandelion fluff, but gratitude roots like the burdock.” I sighed, because I do not always love extra duty when chores already run round like a team that will not halt, but Father—who sat quietly with his coffee, looking at the window as if he could see through frost and mud to all that lay beyond—turned his eyes toward me, and his eyes carry more words than his tongue. I understood that this was not a trifle but a trust. So I said, “Yes, Mother,” and I tied the notebook’s string to the leg of my chair so Tom could not misplace it in one of his catastrophes before I had even written a word. The morning light was the color of tin. Out doors, the yard was a patchwork of last year’s straw and this year’s mud. I carried the egg-pail to the henhouse while Tom fetched wood, though he fetched more splinters in his hands than wood on his shoulder. The hens have taken to escape lately, slipping through the broken place in the fence like old ladies ducking out of a long sermon, and Father says if I will bring him two straight rails, he will set it right. The hens greeted me with their usual ungraciousness. They look at me sideways, as if I had come to steal their secrets instead of their eggs. I told them out loud that I would take the eggs regardless, and one pecked at my boot, so I pecked at her with a finger, which is undignified, but so are hens. On my way back, I stopped because the meadowlark sang. It is the first this spring, and its song is like someone calling you by name from far across a field—so plainly that you answer before you remember you are alone. The earth looked brown, but there, if you knelt (which I did, forgetting the mud), you could see green blades tucked down in the thatch, and the damp smell that rose up was sweet as anything, even cake. When I came in, Tom came in also, but wetter, as if the morning had found him appetizing and taken a bite. He had the milk pail on his arm—tilted. Never trust Tom with a pail in April, for the ground makes mischief under his boots, and so does Tom himself. Half the milk had baptized his trousers before he crossed the threshold. Mother did not scold. She set a cloth in his hand and said, “There now. Wipe up what the floor does not want,” in the same voice she uses to sing hymns, which made Tom look more ashamed than any scolding would have done. I told him if he wished a milk bath, we should put a cow in the washtub and save the trouble. He threw the cloth at me and missed. Father went out to walk the fence lines. He carries a coil of wire over one shoulder and a hammer at his belt, and when he goes like that, I always think of the men in Bible pictures going to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls—only ours is a fence that must stand against cows who think the grass is better on the road than the field God gave them. I followed for a while, because the sun pushed through the gray at last and lay across the pasture like warm hands. Father does not say much when he works, but he will make a small remark about a knot in the wood or a print in the mud—“Fox,” he said, and I looked down and there it was, delicate as embroidery. We mended the fence where the rails had gone soft. He let me pound one nail, though the nail, being a nail, turned crooked and I, being a girl, felt first flustered and then proud to straighten it. “There you are,” he said, as if I had done something grand. We came in at dinner-time (noon), and Mother had left a pot of bean soup to burble, and a loaf of bread sat cooling near the window where the air made it a little tough on top, which is my favorite way. I asked if a birthday girl might have the heel, and Mother said a birthday girl might, and Tom said the heel was for the dog, and Mother said the dog would eat whatever part of the loaf he was offered and consider it a banquet. We ate with the spoons clinking, the windows steaming, and Father’s hand once coming to rest, heavy and warm, on my shoulder for no reason at all, which is my favorite kind of reason. The afternoon brought mending. There is always mending. If clothes were souls, Mother would be a pastor, saving them with her needle. She set me to darning socks while she turned the heel of one and patched the elbow of another and straightened a hem that had gone on a spree. She tells stories while she sews—little ones, not the grand tales of books, but the kind that sew people together the way stitches do: how Grandmother scolded a rooster by name; how Aunt Eliza once put salt instead of sugar on the strawberries when she was courting Father for Mother (for though Mother will not say she was ever clumsy, she will gladly say that this was Aunt Eliza’s doing). We laughed till the thread jerked, and then we laughed because the thread jerked. By late afternoon, the sun had brightened for good and dried the yard enough that I could bring the washing in. The sheets smelled of wind. I put my face in them and breathed the prairie as if it were a flower. Mother caught me and said, “Do not smudge them, Clara,” in her firm voice that has kindness braided through it like ribbon. She had a little powder of flour on her cheek; I dusted it with my thumb. “You will not keep the years off your face with bread,” I said, and she answered, “No, but I will keep the hunger off yours,” and we smiled at one another until Tom came through the door and broke the spell, as is his talent. For my birthday supper, Mother roasted one of the hens that had grown too cross for its own good. I said a prayer for the hen—brief, as I did not wish to grow ungrateful while the gravy congealed. We had potatoes and pickled beans, and a jar of apple preserves opened as carefully as if it were a bank vault. Mother made a cake. It was not large, but it was high, and she frosted it with white sugar she has been saving since Christmas. Tom burned his tongue in enthusiasm and blew like an engine until Father sent him to the door to cool himself in the yard. Father himself smiled, which is a rarer thing than cake, and I felt as tall as the cottonwoods down by the creek. After the dishes were cleared and the crumbs swept into Tom’s pockets (which he says is thrifty), we sang the Doxology. Father’s bass is like a river under the rest of us. Mother’s voice goes up sure as a lark, and mine wobbles but stays with her. Tom comes in half a beat late, but his heart is so loud you can hear it through his mouth. We three girls—Mother, me, and the kettle—kept time; Father kept the tune; God kept us all, which is the point of singing. When the last note hung like a thread and then parted, I sat with my plate before me—crumbs like a little map of where the cake had been—and thought that perhaps I would like this notebook after all. For there are tastes and smells and sounds that do not want to be forgotten: the vinegar of pickled beans, the iron sweetness of blood in my bitten lip when I laughed too hard at Tom, the tick of the stove, the way the lamp smokes a little when the wick is too high, the creak as Mother’s chair speaks to the floor, Father’s hand on the table—broad, quiet, honest. Memory is a sieve; perhaps words are the cloth we lay in the bottom to catch what would otherwise fall through. So here is my first record. I am Clara, and I live on a farm in the wide and windy Midwest, where the horizon goes on like an unfinished promise. My father is Samuel, who is as strong as the windmill post and as steady, and my mother is Abigail, who is warm as bread and twice as nourishing. Tom is my brother—more energy than intention—and Lydia is my friend, whose bonnet is always correct even when everything else is mud. We have hens that disapprove of us, a dog that approves, a cat who will not say, and a God who has kept us through another winter into this muddy, hopeful spring. I set this down so that when I am old—should God grant me the years—I may see who I was and who I became, and whom I owed for the becoming. If I write poorly, my children (if I have any) must forgive me; if I write well, I must remember that talent is also a loan, not a possession, and pay it back in useful sentences. *“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”* (Psalm 103:2) And if Mother reads over my shoulder—as I suspect she will, for mothers have eyes in front and behind—I hope she knows I am already more grateful than I was this morning, when I wished for gloves and received instead a mirror for my days. Mother says we must drive to town in a fortnight with eggs and butter to trade, though the road is more mud than earth just now. Father says the river crossing may be troublesome if the rains continue. I do not fear the trip, though I do hope the wagon holds together. If it does not, I daresay this little book may soon have a far more exciting tale than I intended for its second entry. —Clara