2018.07.23

It's Monday.

Pa had brought four fat ducks, and he said he could have killed hundreds. But four were all they needed. He asked Ma to save the feathers from the ducks and geese they ate, and he would shoot her a feather bed. He could, of course, have got a deer, but the weather was not yet cold enough to freeze the meat and keep it from spoiling before they could eat it. And he had found the place where a flock of wild turkeys roosted. He said those would be their Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys, great, big, fat fellows, and he would get them when the time came. Pa went whistling to mix mud and cut green sticks and build the chimney up again, while Ma cleaned the ducks. Then the fire merrily crackled, a fat duck roasted, and the cornbread baked. Everything was sung and cozy again. After supper Pa said he supposed he’d better start to town early next morning. He said that it might as well go and get it over with. Ma said to him he had better go. Pa said that they could get along all right if he hadn’t, and there was no need of running to town all the time, for every little thing, and he had smoked better tobacco than that stuff Scott had raised back in Indiana, but it would do, and he would raise some next summer and pay him back, and he wished he hadn’t borrowed those nails from Edwards. Ma replied that he had borrowed them, and as for the tobacco, he didn’t like borrowing any more than she did, and they needed more quinine, and she had been sparing with the cornmeal, but it had almost gone and so was the sugar, and he could find a bee-tree, but there was no cornmeal tree to be found, so far as she knew, and they would raise no corn till next year, and a little salt pork would tasted good, too, after all this wild game, and she would like to write to the folks in Wisconsin, and if he mailed a letter now, they could write this winter, and then they could hear from them next spring. Pa said she was right and she always was.