He made a box on the ground; three sides of the box were made of rocks and mud, and the other side was the log wall of the house.
With rocks and mud and more rocks and more mud, he built the walls as high as Laura’s chin. Then on the walls, close against the house, he laid a log. He plastered the log all over with mud.
After that, he built up rocks and mud on top of that log. He was making the chimney now, and he made it smaller and smaller.
He had to go to the creek for more rocks. Laura and Mary could not go again, because Ma said the damp air might give them a fever. Mary sat beside Ma and sewed another block of her nine-patch quilt, but Laura mixed another bucketful of mud.
Next day Pa built the chimney as high as the house-wall. Then he stood and looked at it. He ran his fingers through his hair.
“You look like a wild man, Charles,” Ma said. “You’re standing your hair all on end.”
“It stands on end, anyway, Caroline,” Pa answered. “When I was courting you, it never would lie down, no matter how much I slicked it with bear grease.”
He threw himself down on the grass at her feet. “I’m plumb tuckered out, lifting rocks up there.”
“You’ve done well to build that chimney up so high, all by yourself,” Ma said. She ran her hand through his hair and stood it up more than ever. “Why don’t you make it stick-and-daub the rest of the way?” she asked him.
“Well, it would be easier,” he admitted. “I’m blamed if I don’t believe I will!”
He jumped up. Ma said, “Oh, stay here in the shade and rest awhile.” But he shook his head.
“No use lazing here while there’s work to be done, Caroline. The sooner I get the fireplace done, the sooner you can do your cooking inside, out of the wind.”
He hauled saplings from the woods, and he cut and notched them and laid them up like the walls of the house, on top of the stone chimney. As he laid them, he plastered them well with mud. And that finished the chimney.
Then he went into the house, and with his ax and saw he cut a hole in the wall. He cut away the logs that had made the fourth wall at the bottom of the chimney. And there was the fireplace.
It was large enough for Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie to sit in. Its bottom was the ground that Pa had cleared of grass, and its front was the space where Pa had cut away the logs. Across the top of that space was the log that Pa had plastered all over with mud.
On each side Pa pegged a thick slab of green oak against the cut ends of the logs. Then by the upper corners of the fireplace he pegged chunks of oak to the wall, and on these he laid an oak slab and pegged it firmly. That was the mantel-shelf.
As soon as it was done, Ma set in the middle of the mantel-shelf the little china woman she had brought from the Big Woods. The little china woman had come all the way and had not been broken. She stood on the mantelshelf with her little china shoes and her wide china skirts and her tight china bodice, and her pink cheeks and blue eyes and golden hair all made of china.
Then Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura stood and admired that fireplace. Only Carrie did not care about it. She pointed at the little china woman and yelled when Mary and Laura told her that no one but Ma could touch it.
“You’ll have to be
careful with your fire, Caroline,” Pa said. “We don’t want sparks going up the chimney to set the roof on fire. That cloth would burn, easy. I’ll split out some clapboards as soon as I can, and make a roof you won’t have to worry about.”
So Ma carefully built a little fire in the new fireplace, and she roasted a prairie hen for supper. And that evening they ate in the house.
They sat at table, by the western window. Pa had quickly made the table of two slabs of oak. One end of the slabs stuck in a crack of the wall, and the other end rested on short, upright logs. Pa had smoothed the slabs with his ax, and the table was very nice when Ma spread a cloth over it.
The chairs were chunks of big logs. The floor was the earth that Ma had swept clean with her willow-bough broom. On the floor, in the corners, the beds were neat under their patchwork quilts. The rays of the setting sun came through the window and filled the house with golden light.
Outside, and far, far away to the pink edge of the sky, the wind went blowing and the wild grasses waved.
Inside, the house was pleasant. The good roast chicken was juicy in Laura’s mouth. Her hands and face were washed, her hair was combed, her napkin was tied around her neck. She sat up straight on the round end of log and used her knife and fork nicely, as Ma had taught her. She did not say anything, because children must not speak at table until they are spoken to, but she looked at Pa and Ma and Mary and at Baby Carrie in Ma’s lap, and she felt contented. It was nice to be living in a house again.
Chapter 10
A Roof and a Floor
All day long, every day, Laura and Mary were busy. When the dishes were washed and the beds made, there was always plenty to do and to see and to listen to.
They hunted for birds’ nests in the tall grass and when they found them the mother birds squawked and scolded. Sometimes they touched a nest gently, and all in an instant a nest full of downiness became a nest full of wide-gaping beaks, hungrily squawking. Then the mother bird scolded like anything, and Mary and Laura quietly went away because they did not want to worry her too much.
In the tall grass they lay still as mice and watched flocks of little prairie chickens running and pecking around their anxiously clucking, smooth brown mothers. They watched striped snakes rippling between the grass stems or lying so still that only their tiny flickering tongues and glittering eyes showed that they were alive. They were garter snakes and would not hurt anybody, but Laura and Mary did not touch them. Ma said snakes were best left alone, because some snakes would bite, and it was better to be safe than sorry.