Soars a Dove

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.