Soars a Dove
by Steven A. Mroz
EXCERPT
flying into the storm
“Good morning, class! My name is Ann Rutledge and I
will be your tutor for this quarter. You have all come here
to learn how to read and write – skills I trust will
serve you well the rest of your life. We are all children
of God and children of the prairie, and so we are all united
by this common bond of humankind. Family, hard toil and self-sufficiency
are our constant companions here on the plain. Honesty, fidelity,
and goodwill guide our every action. Our country is an infant,
and we will do our best to nurture her into adulthood.
“We will read Robinson Crusoe, a man who, like all
of us, finds himself battling the whims of nature to gain
for himself a more pleasant and nobler existence.”
So class ended. Ann’s brief introduction to her course
in no way compared to the effort expended by each of her young
students to attend the first day of class. Some came by horse,
others by foot, and in no less then an hour of time. But for
their experience for today, Ann deliberately contrived that
the path to enlightenment is not always easy, and she hoped
her little speech would make them eager to return for more.
Ten stacks of books were neatly arranged on a long table
in the back of the room and each student picked up theirs
on their way out the schoolhouse door. Besides a copy of Robinson
Crusoe, the students would learn American language and style
from Lindley Murray’s English Grammar and penmanship
from the Art of Writing by Jenkins. So the children filed
out, Ann right on their heels, until, once out of doors, she
engaged them all in a game of Hoop and Stick, or simply to
play Jackstraws. This was planned too, for she also wished
to impress on her students the necessity of allowing time
for fun in life – something that at that time often
escaped settlers of the prairie.
The year was 1830 near the town of Decatur, Illinois. The
land was open and vast, the pristine air free. Somehow this
seemed to suit the disposition of every frontiersman splendidly,
for most came there to exploit the richness of the land, its
fertile soil, with an untamed independence and an indomitable
hope for a better life. Most, too, led insular lives and,
were it not for the toil of the farm that occupied their mind
and body from dawn to dusk, a formidable sense of isolation
would. Scarcely six families per square mile occupied the
land in owner-built log cabins, and sometimes even the view
of chimney-smoke off in the remote distance was enough to
satisfy the longing for a neighbor. All who came here seemed
to share the same values of hard work, loyalty to family,
moderation, and a cherished sense of self-reliance. The only
thing that matched there “us against nature” mindset
was a keen longing for community, and so it happened, some
years ago, that men came from miles around to build a pine
lapp-siding one-room schoolhouse and nearby a church for Sunday
worship. Services was then followed by a noon-day brunch prepared
beforehand by all the wives.
Ann’s father, Benjamin, moved the family here from
eastern Illinois some ten years ago. Benjamin’s father
was a Methodist preacher and wished his son to follow in his
steps. This Benjamin did in earnest until, upon hearing of
frontier life on the prairie with all its opportunities in
a new land promising of fortune and a settled way of life,
he decided to move Ann and her mother to Decatur to embark
anew. He purchased an eighty acre plot for $1.25 an acre and
cultivated most of the land with corn, setting aside nearly
five acres for wheat. The fair growing season with its ample
rainfall had always been a welcome ally, and twice or more
yearly he could count on sending his harvest southwest to
the town of Alton, where it could be loaded on flatboats,
or even steamboats, to points southward down the Mississippi
river. Life was good, and everyone long ago had settled in
on a daily routine.
Ann had no formal education of her own. Instead, nights spent
reading the bible with father began her education and now,
at the age of sixteen, it had become one of Ann’s fondest
memories of childhood. The Old and New Testaments were her
primer, though by age ten she took to the reading of Shakespeare
and the ancient Greek poets and philosophers. Now she began
her second year of teaching at the schoolhouse, a subscription
school primarily for the young, though anyone up to the age
of their early twenties eager to learn how to read and write
could attend. The fee was five dollars a pupil for the quarter,
and so Ann was thrilled to earn fifty dollars for this one
term.
So the children played under Ann’s watchful eye. A
dark figure of a man on horseback off on the distant plain
caught Ann’s attention, and now and then she would lift
her gaze to observe the man approaching. The man rode at a
slow, steady pace and, upon seeing Ann’s comely figure
standing near the children, pulled the reigns in their direction
unawares. A casual observer might suppose the horse wandered
toward them on his own accord, but instead it was the rider
who could not resist being drawn to the woman whose figure
he at once admired. He had not even seen a woman of her age
and beauty in these parts for some time, and so was want to
make her acquaintance.
As he approached closer and closer Ann pondered the curious
figure of the man on horseback. She at once noticed his tall,
slender stature and his manner of disposition, somewhat awkward
or clumsy as he rode. She noticed his strikingly dark features,
a deep head of black hair, unkempt to be sure, with the likes
of someone who cut his own hair, which in fact he had. There
was the first onset of a beard, but he did not seem to her
to be unshaven. So he rode right up to her and stopped his
horse. He dismounted and with a seemingly forced grin introduced
himself.
“Good day, ma’am! My name is Abe.”
He intended not to seem too formal, so he used Abe instead
of his given name Abraham.
“I live back yonder a fair piece and I’m headed
into Decatur, but I make it my purpose to meet everyone I
come across in these parts.”
“Does Abe have a last name?” Ann retorted.
“Lincoln, ma’am, and yours?”
“My name is Ann. I am the daughter of Benjamin Rutledge.
We live about a mile from here on a corn and wheat farm. This
is my first day of class teaching the children here, but we’re
done for today and they’re out to play.”
Abraham then turned and caught sight of the children’s
delight in their frolic. He wished to join in on their fun
too and, motioning with his hands for the children to draw
near him, shouted out:
“Hey everybody, come on here and gather round and I’ll
tell you a story.”
Abraham took a seat on a tree stump, hands on his knees,
and the children all stopped what they were doing and ran
up to him and sat down before him, eager to hear him speak.
“Now give a listen, Abraham began, and I’ll
tell you the story of Rapunzel. Once upon a time there lived
a man and his wife in a little cottage, but they had no child.
They could see out there kitchen window far away a beautiful
garden, with all sorts of good vegetables to eat. It was a
witch’s garden, though, and none dared trespass on her
land. One day the woman saw some beautiful bellflowers, called
Rapunzel, and she wanted more than anything, except to have
a child, to make a salad of them. The woman’s husband
saw her strong longing for Rapunzel and wished to please her
by getting her some. So one day, after it was dark, he hopped
over the fence into the witch’s garden to get some for
her. But the witch was standing there too and said to him:
“How dare you steal my Rapunzel. For that I’ll
demand your wife’s firstborn child.
Abraham leaned forward as if to imitate the witch’s
scorn with a scowl on his face. The children giggled.
“The man was worried for his life and so he agreed.
One day his wife gave birth to a girl, and the man gave it
to the witch. ‘I know,’ the witch said, ‘I’ll
name her Rapunzel for the flowers that man tried to take from
me.’ So the child grew and became a very beautiful woman
with very long, golden blonde hair. The witch, though, kept
her hidden in a tower high above the ground, where no one
saw her. When the witch wanted to see her, though, she stood
below the window and cried out:
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
let your hair down.
“Then the beautiful maiden let her hair down out the
window to the witch below and she climbed up her hair all
the way up. One day a man, the son of a king, heard the witch
calling up to Rapunzel and, when it was night, he came up
to the tower and cried:
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
let your hair down.
“She let down her hair and the king’s son climbed
up. He saw that she was very beautiful and asked her to come
away with him and be his wife. He left her the same way he
came, by lowering himself down on Rapunzel’s hair, only
on the way down he let go and fell into a briar patch. He
could no longer see and wondered helplessly in the forest
for a long time. The witch saw all this and so cut off all
of Rapunzel’s hair and threw her into the forest. One
day while she was walking through the forest she came upon
her love, and falling on him she wept that at last they were
together. Her tears fell on the man’s eyes and he could
suddenly see once more. So they left hand in hand to depart
back to his kingdom, where they lived happily ever after.”
The children clapped their hands in delight.
“Did you like that?” Abraham asked, seeking their
approval.
“Yeah!” they all shouted at once.
At that Abraham stood up and went back to Ann and picked
up the conversation where they left off.
“My family owns a stretch of farm too,” Abraham
said, “Near the Sangamom River. I help the neighbors
some on their farms, but I’m entertaining other aspirations.”
Abraham spoke in a deliberate, measured tone, and when he
began to speak those who heard quickly forgot his graceless
posture.
“Well, good fortune to you then Abe,” Ann said
almost dismissingly, “and Godspeed.”
Ann was somewhat taken aback by this display for, she thought,
the children were in her charge and Abe threatened that. The
children’s acceptance of him allayed her concerns, however,
and she developed a quick fondness for the man as he told
the children the story.
“Pleased to have met you ma’am,” Abe said.
Maybe some day our paths will cross again.
At that Ann left him with a smile and he departed on his
way.
“C’mon children,” Ann yelled out, “time
to get on home.”
With the children now off, she began her casual stroll homeward.
This had always been the best part of the day for her, something
she looked forward to with great enthusiasm, the walk home.
The mile walk home affected her in a deeply spiritual way,
she supposed, since it was a time to be alone with her thoughts.
But it was much more than that. It was the sky, yes, the sky,
ever so boundless it left the treeless horizon below eye-level
off in the distance and seemed to envelope her entire being
above. Underneath the vastness of an impending clear, blue
sky she seemed small, even insignificant, yet to her it was
a sign of God’s watching over her.
She arrived home and began helping her mother prepare the
evening meal. It was to be a simple fare of fried chicken,
corn on the cob and biscuits. The slaughtering of the chicken
and the dressing of it was left in Ann’s hands, something
she considered necessary, yet distasteful all the same. Benjamin
would be home at the dawning of the sun, right on the mark,
as was his daily habit. All was ready when he walked through
the door.
Everyone sat down at the dinner table and began eating. Benjamin
scarcely finished his first piece of chicken before he began
to speak. His usual manner was to finish eating his entire
meal before saying a word to anyone, but today something weighed
heavily on his mind.
“How was your first day of class, Ann?” Benjamin
asked.
“Just fine, Ann replied. It was a short day. I said
what I wanted to say and then let them pick up their books
and go out for some play. So, it was a fine first day. A man
stopped by on his way to Decatur, by the name of Abe Lincoln.
Do you know him?
Ann’s eyes lighted up when she mentioned Abe, and it
did not go unnoticed.
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