The Able McLaughlins quotes

The prairie lay that afternoon as it had lain for centuries of September afternoons, vast as an ocean; motionless as an ocean coaxed into very little ripples by languid breezes; silent as an ocean where only very little waves slip back into their element.

One might have walked for hours without hearing anything louder than high white clouds casting shadows over the distances, or the tall slough grass bending lazily into waves.

“Why does he frisk his tail so?” Davie asked.

“He’s praising the Lord,” replied Hughie, wise and wan.

“Is he now!” exclaimed Davie, impressed. “Does God like it?”

“Aw, mother!” he exclaimed remonstratingly. “Even Davie knows that!”

Wully chuckled. He knew the world. He had seen cities. He had marched across states. He had eaten ice cream.

They came to the well. His hand trembled as he let the pail down into it. That may have been the ague. He filled the cup, and gave it to her to drink, looking straight at her.

She put it to her lovely lips and drank, looking across the prairie.

She handed it back to him, and he took it, and her hand. The grass about the well was very high. Some way—he put out his arms, and she was in them.

No, he said to Jeannie, he couldn’t stay for tea. He had had his drink.

He had indeed drunk deep.

He rode out into the loveliness of the distances, unconscious of everything but that girl in the sunlight. He was shaken through with the excitement of her lips. Her name sang itself riotously through his brain.

He had a boil on the back of his neck and was not able to turn his head, and he sat there, just looking at Wully, a long time, too long, Wully began to fear. And then he said:

“I wouldn’t punish you if you were my man, McLaughlin. And I don’t see why I should because you aren’t.”

And he called an orderly and told him to take the men to a mess.

“He’s a grand man for a’ that!” she asserted.

“He’s a grand man, I’m telling you, for a’ that!”

After that, every time she sang the Antichrist’s praise to her neighbors she had the last word of characterization. (After all, her family had not been Covenanters.)

“I wonder at you, Wully! Or else what?”

“I doubt the lassie wasn’t really bonnie. Not like mine!”

A deeper embrace. More kisses.

He stood still, looking at his son penetratingly a long time. Wully kicked an imaginary clod back and forth in the path. Presently the father said, with more bitterness than Wully had ever heard in his voice,

“It seems we have brought the old country to the new!”

Wully pondered this unexpected deliverance without looking up.

After a little the older man added, sighing,

“I prayed my sons might be men who could wait.”

“A lot he knows about waiting!” thought Wully, half angrily. “Thirteen of us!”

“And why did you not think!” she demanded, furiously. “Have you no mind of your own! You didn’t know what you were doing, I suppose! Oh, that I should have a son who is a fool!”

How terrible mothers are!

Fool was a word she hated so greatly that she never allowed her children to pronounce it. It was her ultimate condemnation. He had never heard her use it before. And now she used it for him!

At the sound of her voice he turned startled towards her. “What ails you?” he had begun to ask, but she was saying;

“Yon’s no child of Wully’s!”

His hands fell from the horse’s side.

She could see that he had done a generous thing. And she would see that the world saw that. She could run to meet Jeannie, now, across the floor of heaven, unashamed. Her husband stood enjoying her face. He said;

“It’s early for boasting, woman. You’d best wait twenty years!”

“Little I fear twenty years!” she retorted. A light shone down the path from the house. Wully had opened the door, and shut it, and was coming towards them.

But not a notch down would she go! Her pride, it appeared, was too strong for even this blow. The way she talked about her expectations scandalized the righteous.

Maggie Stewart said one would have supposed Wully had waited ten years for that baby.

It had been bad enough in the beginning, but after the child was born it grew out of all bounds. Her husband’s younger sister, Janet, a woman still of childbearing age, came to remonstrate with her.

His grandmother, who “just couldn’t abide a house without a baby in it,” would sometimes allow one of her children, sitting carefully in just a certain chair, to hold him a little while as a mark of her favor.

If Johnnie was a shame to the household, he was certainly an entertaining and a well-fed shame; if he was a disgrace, he was surely an amusing and a hungry one.

It was wonderful how completely Chirstie was sheltered from reproach. Though her humiliation was gossiped about by the hour, after all, the gossipers had to remember her mother, and, sighing, grant the daughter some little toleration.

McNair still wore such boots that one step in the thawing black mire would have ruined them. It was always that way. That little insignificant-looking person refused to adjust herself to the new country.

She just sat tight, and let the great significant country adjust itself to her as best it might.

The house towards which she neatly walked was not perhaps, to disinterested eyes, a very inviting place. But to Wully and Chirstie it was their very palace of love.

“You can’t go back to Scotland! Are you daft?”

“I canna’ live in a sty.”

They were off, then. He urged decency, morality, economy, honesty, pride, race, the waning reputation of Glasgow. After each argument she simply said, like one born foolish;

What could a man do in the face of that? Where in the name of the shorter catechism had the woman got those shoes, and when—after all the money she had wasted that day on houses? McNair simply gave up.

Like the Queen of Sheba before Solomon, he had no spirit left in him.

But he had acquired an uncomfortable amount of fear of women.

“Yon’s a fine woman, Wully!” she exclaimed, relishing her thoughts.

“She’s a grand wee captain!”

She heaved sighs of contentment from time to time all the afternoon, whose import was not lost on her son. Surely, late as it was, Jeannie was being avenged.

“Have you been here long?”

“Long enough,” said Barbara, simply. “I came in November.”

The lady sighed again, and went to get her spade. She asked again if Barbara had a place for the rose. Barbara was offended at the suggestion she might not cherish that plant until death. Where can you buy them here? she asked again.

It was the perfect symbol of rewarded, lavished labor, of requited love and care, of creating power, of wifely faithfulness, of the flower and fruit of life, its beauty, its ecstasy.

Wully was too essentially a farmer ever to try to express his deep satisfaction in words.

But when he saw his own wheat strong and green, swaying in the breezes, flushed with just the first signs of ripening, the sight made him begin whistling.

… petunias romping all along the front walk, laughing to the confederate heavens, flaunting their uselessness flippantly before the eyes of those who lived slavishly, blossoms with the Scriptures behind them to justify their toiling not, their spinning not, their being arrayed beyond kings’ glory—not economically.

The garden scouted the very principles of the hardworking, of those who would “get ahead.” It hooted aloud at frugality.

Barbara McNair kept a lamb, to be sure, but for no utilitarian purpose. She kept it to mow her lawn. And when its hunger had shaved its environments, she moved the stake which held it, to another spot.

The garden scouted the very principles of the hardworking, of those who would “get ahead.” It hooted aloud at frugality.

Barbara McNair kept a lamb, to be sure, but for no utilitarian purpose. She kept it to mow her lawn.

And when its hunger had shaved its environments, she moved the stake which held it, to another spot. She kept hens languidly, perhaps only to justify artistically that supernumerary luxury, the white fowl-house.

Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose, was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a mother.

He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking, swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance in the universe.

Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in her mother-in-law’s house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully;

“It ain’t usual,” the photographer protested. “I can’t take a picture like that! It ain’t usual!”

“This ain’t no usual baby!” Wully replied chuckling.

Who could have made a statement more paternal than that? “I want his face against mine!” And he got the picture taken that way, in the end.

He went to a room with me, and when he saw the pillows on the bed, he went and got me a pair of good pillows from some place. I hadn’t slept on a pillow for I don’t know how long!

A man notices those things when he’s most dead, I tell you!

Milk toast, and pillows, by Jiminy! And in the morning he sat and fed me such a lot of breakfast—no wonder I had trouble! I felt as if I’d never get enough to eat.”

“Yes!” he broke forth. “I saw him dying.”

“Oh, dying!” She tried to realize it. “Oh, if he’s dying, then we’ll be happy again!”

He said nothing. His lips worked.