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Excerpted Inspirations #238

Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Jul 6
0 min read

[Caddie Woodlawn is determined not to spoil her new white dress at the Fourth of July festivities.]

To celebrate the Fourth of July meant something definite in those days. Beyond the picnic lunches, the spread-eagle speeches, the greased pole, the water sports, and the fireworks in the evening, there was the consciousness of happiness and good fortune. It was a day in praise of freedom. The Civil War was still close enough, and even the War of the Revolution, to make them thankful for peace and liberty. It was a kind of summer Thanksgiving Day when they could raise their voices in gratitude for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and dedicate themselves anew to the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

Father’s voice, full of the fervor of the day, started them all to singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Caddie’s heart swelled as she sang. Best of all she loved the fourth stanza.

He has sounded forth the trumpet
That shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men
Before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him!
Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

[…] [Caddie goes to watch the log-rolling contest with her friends. Ezra McCantry is a little neighbor boy, Emma is his older sister, and Robert Ireton is the Woodlawns’ hired man.]

Now Robert had reached his log and mounted it. His feet were light and quick on the rolling log. He might have been dancing one of his Irish jigs on the threshing floor of the barn at home, to see him lift his feet. The water flashed and sparkled over the rolling log. Everybody was looking at him. He was better, more light and graceful, than the lumbermen from up the river.

But suddenly, in the midst of her pleasure and excitement at Robert’s success, Caddie saw out of the tail of her eye that another log walker was performing near at hand. Ezra McCantry was stepping gingerly from log to log, and running the length of them and back with arms outstretched to keep his balance.

“Come back here, Ezra!” Caddie cried.

But Ezra only ran a little farther out and called out mockingly, “Look at me! Look at me! I c’n walk ’em too!”

“Oh, dear!” Caddie said to Katie. “I just wish Emma had come down with us. She’d make him come back in pretty smart, I guess!”

Katie raised her gentle voice and called him, too; but Ezra was puffed up by the importance of the moment to even greater feats of daring. It seemed to him that everyone was looking at him now instead of Robert Ireton.

“Look-it me now! Look-it – ”

Even as he uttered his howl of triumph, the log he was on began to roll. Slowly and gently it rolled, but it took Ezra by surprise and he rolled with it. He made a wonderful, big splash for such a very small boy.

“Oh, dear!” cried Caddie. “Oh, dear!” – and all sorts of disconnected things went like a panic through her mind. “Be swift, my soul. Be jubilant, my feet …. But, oh, my dress! Whatever happens, it must not get wet.”

And then she saw Ezra coming up to the surface and clawing the air an instant, trying to catch the log – and going down again without having succeeded. She knew that the millpond was deep, and that Ezra couldn’t swim – and neither could she. She heard people behind her beginning to shout, and Katie bursting into tears. Then, before she knew it, her clean white slippers were stepping out on the first logs and then the next ones, and she was frantically untying the long piece of bunting which had been over her shoulder.

She heard her own voice calling, “Ezra! Ezra!”

When he came up again she was still calling, and somehow she got his attention and flung one end of the bunting near enough to his clutching hands so that he could grasp it.

As he went down again, clutching the bunting, it snapped out tight, like a kite string in the wind, and Caddie, holding the other end, felt the log she was on beginning to roll. She tried to make her feet go fast, like Robert’s feet, in order to keep her balance; but still her log kept rolling, rolling – and the clean white slippers with the satin rosettes could not go fast enough. There was a second wonderful splash – and it was Caddie Woodlawn!

But she never let go of the bunting; and Ezra was holding onto his end, too. There was a log between them, and with the bunting over it neither one of them could go
down too far. Caddie struggled desperately up until she could cling to the
log with one hand and pull in the bunting with the other; and presently
Ezra was clinging to the other side of the log, coughing and blowing water.
With one on each side of it the log had stopped rolling, and they could hold
to it and catch their breath for a moment until help came.

Robert was the first to reach them, swimming from his log in mid-pond
with long, sure strokes.

“Oh, Robert!” Caddie cried, between gulps and coughs. “You had to get
off your log! We made you lose the contest, Robert.”

“Eh, divil take the contest,” Robert roared, “and my Caddie drowning!
What do you think, lass? What do you think!”

When they were safe on shore again, with the water running from them in
streams and an anxious crowd surging around them, Caddie looked down and
saw that she was still clutching the Fourth of July bunting against her breast.
The red and blue dye was running in gaudy little streams all down the front of
her lovely new white dress. As she stood there speechless with this new
calamity which topped all the others, she heard the first notes of the fife and
drum calling the people to the speaking and the singing.

The crowd began to drift away, now that they saw Caddie and Ezra safe.

-Carol Ryrie Brink, Magical Melons: More Stories about Caddie Woodlawn (1939), pp. 183, 187-190

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