On the Way West
or
"An Incident of the Prairie: A Board, a Saw, a few Nails,
and a Mother's Hot Tears"
One can imagine Michael Cleary coming home to supper from his work at the lumber yard and relating the seed of this incident to Kate. The deaths of two of her own children helped her imagine "the rest of the story" and emphathize with the grieving mother.
He drops from his painting horse. He slouches into the lumber-yard. He is tall and gaunt. His cheeks are sunken. His eyes are sullen--or sad. "One ten-foot board."
"Twenty cents."
He produces a consumptive wallet and pays. "Kin I have a saw an' measure?"
These are handed him. The men present look on in stolid curiosity as he cuts the board in lengths.
"What fur?" asks one.
"Coffin."
Up the street he buys some nails. He rides out of town. A scorching day. Overhead a vault of brass. All around tawny seas of stunted, tattered, drought-dried corn. On he goes, the bundle of boards in front of him. Under the cottonwoods by the dry creek is a prairie schooner. Back of it are slung household utensils and a baby's chair. Cattle graze near. Bare-legged children run to meet him. A pale woman seated on the ground cries at the sight of him and strains more tightly to her bosom the little form in her arms. She rocks to and fro while he nails the rough boards into a box. He goes toward her.
"Wait!" she quavers savagely.
He leans patiently against the wagon, his head bowed on his arms. The children keep on playing. He rouses himself. He cuts down some cottonwood branches. The children help him to strip off the pale-green leaves. He lines the box with them.
"Now, Annie!"
She kisses the dead baby. She gives it to him. Then she tries to snatch it back. Not ungently, he pushes her hands away. He tenderly lays the tiny body on the leaves. He covers the wee face with an old gauze veil. The children are silent now. He digs a little grave. He puts the coffin into it. He pushes in the powdery clay with his great hands. Does the baked earth dream the rain at last is falling?
The sun has set. It is still chokingly hot. The horses toil westward. They reach the top of a bluff. The woman looks back towards the creek. Then the wagon jolts down the draw.
(Published in the Chicago Tribune, ca. 1895. Reprinted with the title "On the Way West" in The Nebraska of Kate McPhelim Cleary. Ed. James M. Cleary. Lake Bluff, Ill: United Educators, 1958: p. 49.)