There was a hut in the woods, but the sun was shining, rain did not beat on the windows. He took us there to get water lilies.
A man with a horse and trap met us at the station. We were drawn toward a new scent, a new feel of trees, of light. It was evening.
As the daylight faded, there was new definition or exact understanding of twilight.
We had never been out in the woods in the evening.
Papa talked to the man who drove the horse, Papa had been here before; with whom? Not Mama. Had he brought those other children, Alfred and Eric and Alice (who was dead), here, before he married Mama? There was a world, a life of mystery beyond him; we could ask him about Indiana and how his father had gone out in a covered wagon and how frightened his mother was and how disappointed his father was to stay in Indiana because he wanted to go to California and how he himself had run away to go off with Alvin to the Civil War, and where did he find the Indian skull?
But we did not ask him what lay nearest, “Did you come here with Alfred and Eric and Alice who is dead. Did you come with their Mama?”
There was another mother, she was a mystery, she was dead, her name was Martha, we must not ask about her.
Here, the cart wheels went along a track just as wide as the wheels, for there was no road in the woods, only this opening in the trees that brushed Papa’s head so that he had to duck his head, like going under a bridge in the canal boat when we took the canal boat and a picnic basket and a watermelon that Uncle Fred stopped to buy, on the way there.
Here there was no picnic basket, for we were going to spend the night in a place where we had never been, whose name was Sailor’s Lake; “Is it a big lake?” asked Gilbert.
Papa snorted the way he did like a horse, when he laughed; he said, “It’s a pond really.”
A pond is a flat muddy waterhole where there are mosquitoes, back of the shanty-hill houses behind the mill where the goat once was, that Gilbert said looked like Papalie. But were we going to a shanty hill? We were going through a tunnel in the woods and the leaves brushed Papa’s hat off and now he was holding his hat on his knees and looking up at the trees. Papa liked trees. He knew all about trees. We had a little chest of drawers he made, with little drawers and polished wood and brass handles to the drawers, that was too nice, Mama said, for me to use for my doll, but could I have it? Mama did not give it to me, but Mamalie gave me a little old chest that was hers, for my doll clothes.
The trees were deeper and maybe we were lost, but the man let the horse go along, he did not hold the reins, he was stuffing tobacco into his pipe. He offered Papa the tobacco and Papa laughed and said he had left his pipe in the pocket of his other coat, in the back of the cart; he said he liked a corncob pipe, too, best.
The horse was going to step on the little frogs.
“Stop the horse,” I told Papa, “tell the man to stop the horse.”
“Why?” said Papa.
“There is a little frog,” and the man laughed and Papa laughed. He stopped the horse and told us to get out and there were a thousand-thousand little frogs on the track; they looked like small leaves fallen on the track until they began to hop.
“We can’t help it,” said the man, “if they get in the way, can we?”
We saw that the thousand-thousand little frogs lay like leaves on the track in the woods, that had two marks in it, just as wide as the wheels on the man’s cart.
“Where is it?” we said. But then we saw from the porch, the way the field ran down along the side of the woods. There were no flowers along the edge of the porch, there was no wisteria, no climbing rose, no honeysuckle.
It was a hut in the woods.
There was the track from the wood-edge and marks where the cart stopped in front of the door. We came here last night. They said it was too late to run down to the lake.
“Then it is a lake?” said Gilbert.
“Of course,” said the man.
It was a lake.
Here it was; we could not see how far it stretched because of the bulrushes, but there were boats tied to a wooden landing, so it must be a big lake. We ran back, up the slope of the field to the porch; there were no porch steps, the porch floor lay flat on the grass, the grass ran up to the floor of the porch; it was a house without a garden, the field was the lawn, the grass was long and short and you could see where the wheels of the cart stopped and went away again.
No one said, “Come along, come in to breakfast,” but we went along and saw through the window that they were eating in the dining room. Papa was there at the table and the man who had the horse and an old lady and one or two others. They sat at a long table; there was a glass dish of pickled beets on the table and a pie and Papa was drinking coffee.
We saw Papa at a table without us, drinking coffee from a thick white cup.
We went in the hall and in the door to the dining room. Nobody said, “Where have you been?” The man-with-the-horse said, “Mother” to the door and the voice said, “Coming,” and it was his mother we guessed or did he call his wife mother, like Papa called Mama sometimes? We could not tell if she was the cook or the man-with-the-horse’s mother or his wife.
There were no children.
We sat along the table where there were places, not in a row.
The man-with-the-horse said, “Beets, pie, pickles?”
We said, “Yes.”
Papa did not say, “You cannot have pie for breakfast.”
We had pie for breakfast. It was huckleberry pie and we had napkins with red squares.
The coffee in Ida’s house, when she took us to see her father-and-mother, smelt like this. But this was bigger than Ida’s mother’s-and-father’s house and the windows were all open.
He did not come; he said yes, he would have more coffee.
We sat on the porch; I looked in the window and he was talking and laughing and everyone had gone but the man-with-the-horse, and they were smoking their pipes. The lady came in and put the cups on the tray; “Now he will come out,” we thought, and he came out with his pipe and the man said, “Well, I better be off,” and he knocked out the tobacco from his pipe on the railing of the porch, and he went off.
“Oh,” he said and he came back, “Mamie leaks,” and he laughed.
“Who is Mamie?” we said.
Papa said, “Come and see,” and we ran down the grass, looking for Mamie. It was a boat, there was Lucy and Polly and Mamie; Papa read out the names and said, “Which do you want?” and we said, “Polly.”
Polly is the name of a parrot. Aunt Jennie had a Polly that ate crackers, or you said, “Polly have a cracker,” and if it said, “Polly have a cracker,” back at you, we gave it some sunflower seeds. The sunflower seeds are like little nuts if you bite into them.
Papa took the two oars. The oars caught in the bulrushes, everywhere there were bulrushes; we were caught here and the sun was shining.
We waited for Papa to put back the oars in the boat, and he pulled the boat along by the bulrushes; then I saw what it was we had come to see. It spread back and it was bigger than a white rose.
“Stop, stop,” I said, though the boat was going slowly.
“What is it?” said Papa.
“Look,” I said, and Harold looked and Gilbert looked.
“The boat will run over it,” I said. I was in the front of the boat and Gilbert was in the back with the two ropes for the rudder. Harold crawled along.
“Is it a naligator?” he said.
I said, “No, you know they come from Florida. It’s gone, Papa you have run over it.”
Papa said, “What?”
He went on pulling the boat along by the bulrushes.
It was gone. I would never see it again, it would be squashed and dead, it would be torn up by the boat. I wanted the boat to go back.