The Smoking Iron and Other Stories by Elisabeth Grace Foley

Author:Elisabeth Grace Foley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western, western fiction, short fiction, short stories, anthology, short story collection, historical fiction
Publisher: Elisabeth Grace Foley
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Lark’s Nest

The log walls were plastered and whitewashed and there were cheerful rag rugs on the wood floor, but to Alice, in the first few years after they came to Texas there was something a little bleak and bare about the front room. It was not yet home.

When she thought of home, the picture that came into her mind was the sunny parlor of the old farmhouse in Virginia and the mantel over the big fireplace there. The row of pretty things that lined it had been her chief fascination and formed her ideals of beauty when she was a little girl—the tall pewter candlesticks, the big oval platter that was only used on special occasions; a hand-painted vase, a couple of delicate china figurines, a little carved and inlaid wooden box—Alice could still remember every one. They gave to the room a feeling that people had lived there a long time and collected there during the living the things that brought pleasure to their eyes and hearts.

The sunshine dimmed from the memories in the last years of the war. Long before the end, the candlesticks and the platter and anything else of value in the house had been sold at far less than their worth to buy food—and later, after their father had fallen at Yellow Tavern, when Alice and her brothers were living with relatives in Winchester following their mother’s death and Grandpa was still away with the army, the uninhabited house had been ransacked by passing Federals, and many other little trinkets and keepsakes had vanished never to be seen again.

They had brought trunks and furniture west with them, enough to furnish the log house in Texas sufficiently, but there was nothing on the mantel except the clock and Grandpa’s box of pipe tobacco. Only the three-corner-shelved whatnot in the corner of the room held a few ornaments, but the sparseness of them seemed to Alice more pitiful than if there had been none. It was an awkward, lonely distance between the last two little surviving china figures on the top shelf and the family Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress and half a dozen other books on the bottom one, with only a vase Alice kept filled with wildflowers—a plain little vase that had used to sit on a kitchen windowsill in the old farmhouse—in between. It looked like an imitation of something that was meant to signify a home, Alice thought, rather than the real thing. When little throbs of homesickness pierced her, she rather preferred the sight of the long table at the other end of the room, which had a habit of collecting, between meals, the flotsam and jetsam of Grandpa’s pipe, a half-braided rawhide quirt, a handful of shotgun cartridges, a jackknife with two blades open, a bag of marbles. Grandpa and the boys—that was life and home to her now.

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