Читать книгу Lantern Marsh - Beaumont Sandfield Cornell - Страница 3

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Mauney Bard did not enjoy mending fences. They were quite essential in the general economy of farming. Without them the cows would wander where they had no business, trampling precious crops or perhaps getting mired in these infernal boglands. In principle, therefore, his present occupation was logical, but in practice it was tedious.

During the long afternoon he occasionally paused for diversion to gaze across the wide tract of verdant wilderness before him. Like a lake, choked by vegetation from beneath and strangled by determined vegetation on all sides, the Lantern Marsh surrendered its aquatic ambition. There was very little water to be seen. Only a distant glare of reflected sky remained here and there, espied between banks of thick sedges. A cruel conspiracy of nature! Acres of rice-grass and blue flags with their bayonet-like leaves stabbed up through the all-but-hidden surface, while a flat pavement of rank lilies hastened to conceal any water that dared show itself. For two gloomy miles the defeated thing extended, while outraged evergreens, ill-nourished and frantic, crowded close, like friends, to shield its perennial disgrace.

It had always been there, unexplored and forbidding, inhabited by the mud hen, the wild duck, and the blue crane. Mauney sometimes hated its desolate presence and wondered why his father’s farm had to be so near it. But the question challenged custom and actuality—things his young brain had not learned to affront.

Late in the afternoon he was roused from work by a sound as of tensed, satin fans cutting the air. He looked up to behold the broad wings of a blue crane, passing low. The rising wind which had roused it from its feeding grounds brought the dank odor of decayed poplar wood and the wild aroma of rice-grass. His eye dropped to the green waste of the marsh, brushed into fitful waves of tidal grey, and then shifted to the moving limbs of bare hemlocks and birches at the border of the swamp.

Chilled by the sharp blast, he straightened himself to his feet, his shirt moulded to the underlying sculptory of his vigorous young chest. His wind-tossed, auburn hair peeled back from his fine forehead, as his wide, blue eyes received the rugged beauty and his lips smiled from sheer visual delight. Then, as he gazed, a bright magic, bursting from the west behind him, transformed his wilderness momentarily to a static tableau of metallic gold.

It was supper time. Moments since the kitchen bell had been ringing, rocking under its cupola on the kitchen roof. His father, his brother and the hired man, fertilizing the grain field beyond the shoulder of the hill, would have heard it and be promptly on their way. After drawing on his faded coat, he picked up a pair of pliers from the ground and shoved them into the hip pocket of his overalls. He shouldered his axe and saw, then started.

The long marsh was separated from his father’s farm by the Beulah road, a narrow clay highway curving past the head of the swamp toward the village of Beulah. In the opposite direction, it ran on eventually to the town of Lockwood on the bank of the St. Lawrence. The Bard farmhouse, a prosperous red brick structure, faced the road and the swamp, presenting a stone fence of dry masonry, and within the fence an apple-orchard. At one side a lane, guarded by a board gate, led in from the road.

As Mauney swung up the lane toward the farmyard the crisp snap of a whip was borne to his ears from below the shoulder of the grain-field, followed by a man’s call to his horses:

“Git ap!... yah lazy devils!... git ap!”

A second crack of the whip—then the rumble of heavy wheels and the rattle of the board-bottom of the wagon. The usual, boring sights and sounds!

The yard echoed to the barking of a collie who was springing in savage enjoyment at the heels of tardy cows. The lazy animals jogged in awkward trot, as their full udders swung to the rhythm of their gait. As Mauney crossed the yard, wading with gluey steps through the soft under-foot, the dog darted toward him, splashing through brown-stained pools of stagnant water.

“Go on back, Rover!” he commanded, stepping aside to avoid his rough welcome. “Chase them up, Rover!”

Rover paused on his four feet only long enough to cast up a glance of searching inquiry at his young master’s face, when, as if satisfied that his mood were congenial, he immediately returned to his task with doubled despatch.

In making toward the great, red barn at the farther side of the yard, Mauney passed the henhouse, from which radiated a pungent, ammoniacal odor, all too familiar to his nostrils. In the drive shed, on the beams several white hens were settling to roost. One of these fowl, jealous of position, pecked the head of its fellow, causing an expostulant cackle of pain. The sudden disturbance of this sound spread to the precincts of the quiescent henhouse, whereupon one crescendo of rasping invective followed another, leading to a distracting medley of full-throated excitement, that subsided only at the masterly clarion of a rooster, angry at being disturbed.

The returning wagon now rumbled nearer, over flat stones behind the barn, its heavy roar measured by the regular, metallic clip of the horses’ well-shod hoofs. “Git ap, there! What’re yuh doin’ there!” came the gruff voice of his father. A loud whip-crack broke the steady rhythm of the horses’ hoofs into an irregular gallop, while the thunder of the wagon filled the yard with increasing vibration.

Mauney ascended the stone bridge to the great double doors, which, owing to the wind, he opened with difficulty, and entered to grease the teeth of his saw and hang it carefully on two spikes driven into the side of the hay mow. He stood his axe in a corner and tossed the pliers into an empty soap box that stood on a rough carpenter’s bench. One of the doors, which he had left open, now slammed shut, stirring up a stifling cloud of chaff and rendering the interior of the barn unpleasantly dark. In turning he stumbled over a stick of stove-wood, used for blocking the wheels of the hay-wagon, and fell forward. Putting, out his right hand, he brought the palm down heavily on the sharp end of a spike that projected from an upturned board. He regained his feet quickly and clasped his injured hand. It was too dark to see, but he felt a trickle of hot fluid accumulating in his other palm. A sickening pain mounted his arm in spirals, but he whistled a snatch of a song, and left the barn.

As he passed quickly toward the kitchen, the heavy team of Clydesdales rounded the corner of the yard, lifting their front feet high, their heads tightly reined, with foam blowing from their white mouths. As they were pulled up to a stop a horse within the barn whinnied. Then Mauney presently heard the jingle of chains as the team were being unhitched, and in the quiet air, his father’s voice saying:

“The young fellah’s gave us the slip!”

His brother William’s voice replied in the same disagreeable tone: “Wonder he wouldn’t give us a hand unhitchin.’ Fixin’ fences is easier’n spreadin’ cow dung. Least he could do would be to throw the horses a little hay!”

A warm wave of anger flushed Mauney’s face as he halted in the middle of the yard, half determined to go back, but his hand drove him imperatively toward the kitchen. On the edge of the porch he relieved his boots of adhering mud and manure on a scraper made from an old draw-knife turned upside down between supports. The two long upper panels of the kitchen door were replaced by glass and draped inside by a plain cotton curtain, through which a glow of lamp-light gave Mauney a grateful impression of homely coziness. After rubbing his boots on the oval verandah mat of plaited rags, he pressed down the thumb latch and entered.

“Hello, Maun,” came a woman’s voice from the pantry, half-drowned by the noise of a mechanical egg-beater. “D’juh get the marsh fence finished?”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, you remember,” he replied as affably as his feelings allowed.

“That’s right,” she called above the sound, “but your old man prob’ly thinks it didn’t take over a week.”

Mauney was examining his hand near the coal-oil lamp on the kitchen table. The spike had completely perforated his palm leaving a torn wound that still bled. He tossed his hat to the old couch by the door and bent nearer the lamp. Although big-bodied he had a boyish face, filled now with youthful perplexity. The skin over the prominent bridge of his nose had an appearance of being tightly drawn, although his nostrils were as sensitive as the young lips beneath them. His chin, by its fullness, suggested a vague, personal determination to be expected in one older, but his eyes sparkled with that devotion of eager attention which is reserved to youth alone.

He glanced toward the pantry from which the beating sound still emerged. “Do you know what to do for this?” he asked loudly.

The noise of the beater stopped.

“What d’juh say?”

“I hurt my hand and—”

She came forth, with her muscular arms covered by shreds of dough, and walked to glance at his stained hand.

“Oh good God!” she exclaimed, turning away. “I certainly do hate blood, Maun.”

She began rubbing the adherent dough from her arms.

“Just a minute,” she said. “Go soak it in the wash basin—here’s some warm water.” Taking a tea-kettle from the flat-topped stove, she poured into the basin, adding some cold water from the cistern pump.

As Mauney proceeded to follow her advice she rummaged through a cotton bag, hung on the back of the pantry door. “It’ll be all right, Maun,” she cheerfully prophesied. “A cut like that is safe if it bleeds, but if it don’t, watch out!”

She was a well-formed woman of twenty-seven, a trifle masculine about the shoulders, but with a feminine enough face displaying sharp, hazel eyes beneath black, straight brows. Her nose was passably refined, but her full lips wore a careless smile that lent not only a gleam of golden teeth, but a mild atmosphere of coarseness to her face. The excitement of Mauney’s injury had called up circumscribed patches of crimson to her cheeks and accentuated the nervous huskiness of her voice.

“One time,” she continued, while she tore a white cloth into long narrow strips, “my cousin ran a nail in her foot. They got Doc. Horne, and he did—God only knows what—but her foot got the size of a pungkin, only redder.”

“Blood-poisoning?”

“Yep.”

As she rolled two or three crude bandages she glanced occasionally at Mauney, with keen, appraising eyes that followed the stretch of his broad shoulders bent over the sink. As she nervously applied the bandage, a moment later, the sound of boots scraping outside the door contributed an added haste to her manner. Before she had finished, the door opened to admit Seth Bard.

Mauney’s father was of average height, but heavily built, with ponderous shoulders and a thick, short neck. Beneath the broad, level rim of his Stetson the lamp-light showed the full, florid face of a man who continually peered at life through half-closed lids in calloused, self-confident reserve, or as if hiding what men might read in his eyes, if he opened them. He stopped abruptly inside the door, his thumbs caught into the top of his trousers, and stood haughtily still for an instant, the personification of master in his house.

Mauney’s back was turned toward him so that the father could not see the occupation causing such seemingly friendly terms between his son and his hired woman. His narrow eyes studied them in mystification.

“What’s all this?” he gruffly demanded, as the face of William appeared over his shoulder with the same inquisitive expression.

“Annie’s doing up my hand,” Mauney replied calmly.

Bard covered the floor in long strides to glance at the white bandage through which a red stain had already soaked.

“Do it up yerself!” he commanded, seizing the woman’s arm and pulling her away. “Where’s the supper, Annie?”

“Oh, it’ll be ready by the time you get some o’ the muck off your hands,” she said, good-naturedly, as she set about stirring a boiling pot on the stove.

As Mauney stood trying to adjust the dressing, he struggled to overcome an instinct of fight, wondering how much longer he would be able to tolerate his father’s crude domination. Presently the woman had the supper served and the men, having washed themselves, were sitting down.

The oval table was covered with a plain yellow oil-cloth. At the middle stood a heavy earthenware dish filled with steaming, half-peeled potatoes, and near it, on a folded newspaper, an agateware sauce-pan held beet-roots. Five plates of blurred willow pattern were piled by the father’s place, while before them a roast of pork, with crisply-browned skin, still sizzled in its own grease. By the woman’s place, at the opposite end, stood a large agate tea-pot and a chunk of uncolored butter, upon whose surface salt crystals sparkled in the lamplight. The lamp was shaded by a sloping collar of scorched pasteboard, while the constant flicker of the yellow flame rendered tremulously uncertain the faces around the board.

Mauney’s usual taciturnity, inspired by a feeling of being constantly misunderstood whenever he spoke, was increased by the pain in his hand, so that he sat in silence, catching the conversation of the others as something quite outside his own immediate consciousness. He was thinking about a new book the school teacher had loaned him.

“Well,” remarked Bard, seizing his carving knife, and plunging his fork deep into the roast, “I guess this just about finishes the pig, don’t it?”

“Yep. You’ll have to kill to-morrow,” the woman replied, as she reached for the hired man’s tea cup. She noticed he was nibbling at an onion, which he had taken from his pocket. “Ain’t you afraid yer best girl will go back on you, Snowball?” she teased.

“Nope,” he said with a weak-minded grin. “I d-don’t never worry much about the women folks, so I don’t!” He was a small-bodied, but wiry, individual of perhaps forty-five, with a scranny, wry neck and a burnished face of unsymmetrical design. The cervical deformity tilted his head sidewise and gave him an appearance of being in a constant attitude of listening, as if an unseen, but shorter, person were always beside him whispering in his ear. When he spoke he snapped his eyelids as if he alertly appreciated the full significance of his environment, and was perpetually on guard against the wiles of his associates.

“Hold on, Snowball!” William said, across the table, with a glare of mock earnestness, as he reached to sink his knife into the butter. “You know you’re lyin’. All the pretty gals up to Beulah is crazy about you.”

Snowball laughed a silent, internal kind of laugh that caused his shoulders to rise and fall in rapid jerks to its rhythm, and ended in its first audible accompaniment—a sound exactly like the suction of a sink-basin drawing in the last eddying portion of water.

“The gals is g-gone on you, Bill, not me!” he retorted, with much keen winking of his lids, and entered immediately on a second bout of noiseless, private laughter which terminated, after the others had forgotten his remarks, in the same astonishing sound.

“D’juh see the bay mare to-day, Bill?” Bard presently inquired, across the level of a wide slice of bread, from which he had bitten out a semi-circular portion. William looked up knowingly from his well-loaded fork and nodded his head sagely with a slight lifting of his brows, as though an intimate understanding existed.

“I should say so. What are you going to do with her, Dad?” he asked.

Bard’s slit-like eyes narrowed even more than usual, as for a moment, he chewed meditatively.

“Goin’ to get rid of her,” he said, with the careless quickness of one pronouncing expert opinion. “Sorry I raised her, Bill. Never liked her sire. Thompson never had much luck with that Percheron stud. He’s been leadin’ that horse around down the Clark Settlement, and I seen some o’ the colts. All the same!”

“What’s the matter with the bay mare?” Mauney enquired anxiously.

“She’s goin’ to be sold—that’s what’s the matter with her!” he replied curtly. “And I don’t want to hear no growlin’, understand me!”

“I wasn’t growling.”

“No—but you was a-thinkin’ in them terms.”

“Well, I thought she was mine, Dad. You gave her to me when she was a colt. I never thought so much of any animals as I do of her, and, more than that, I never noticed anything wrong with her.”

“H’m!” sneered Bard. “You got to go into farmin’ a little deeper’n you do, to notice anything.”

Outside the door, the dog growled, then barked in an unfriendly tone. The sound of a horse’s hoofs in the lane and the squeaking of a buggy caused them to stop eating.

“Dave McBratney!” William announced presently, glancing through the window into the twilight. “I’d know that horse if I seen it in hell.”

Bard, after first loading his mouth, rose to open the door.

“Good evenin’, Dave!” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Bard,” came a young man’s voice. “Wait till I tie up this here hoss. He’s liable to run away.”

This provoked laughter around the table which lasted until McBratney, a tall, dashing youth with playful, black eyes, stepped into the kitchen and greeted the people with individual nods. A slight discoloration of his lips indicated that he was chewing tobacco. He wore a black, soft hat, with its rim pulled down in front, and the tip of a peacock feather stuck into the sweat-stained band at one side. Beneath his jacket, a grey flannel shirt with soft collar boasted a polka-dot bow-tie and a heavy watch chain, whose large golden links connected two breast pockets. From the handkerchief pocket of his coat, protruded the border of a red bandanna and the stem of a pipe.

“Been up to Beulah?” William asked.

“Yep!”

“Anything new?”

“Nothin’ much, Bill,” replied McBratney, as he seated himself in the low, yellow rocking-chair and began to teeter back and forth. “The only stir is the new preacher, I guess. I heard he was comin’ down the Lantern Marsh this afternoon to make some calls.”

“I reckon that’s why you cleaned out, Dave!” said Bard.

“You bet; but they say he’s quite a nice, sociable little chap. Joe Taylor was telling me in Abe Lavanagh’s barber shop that he seen the new preacher up at the post office, waitin’ for the mail to be distributed. He says he was grabbin’ right aholt o’ everybody’s paw, just like a regular old-timer.”

“What’s his wife like, Dave?” Bard enquired.

“I don’t know. Dad was sayin’ last night, it don’t matter about the preacher so much; it all depends on his wife, whether they’re goin’ to take with the people.”

“Surely,” agreed Bard. “You take McGuire who was here before Squires. McGuire may have had his faults—I’m not sayin’ he didn’t—but he wasn’t too bad a little fellow at all. But that wife o’ his—why, she’d a’ ruined any man!”

“Lap-dogs!” laughed McBratney.

“Sure, and you’d a’ thought she had some kind o’ royal blood in her the way she’d strut down the sidewalk.” Bard delved in his hip pocket for his pipe as he pushed his chair back from the table. “A preacher’s wife,” he continued philosophically, but with his usual oracular impressiveness, “has got to be sort o’ human-like. Did you hear what happened to McGuire?”

“No.”

Bard, his empty pipe perched between his teeth, blew several quick blasts of air through it to clear it of sticky contents, while he cut fine shavings of tobacco from a plug with a large-bladed jack-knife.

“I was talkin’ to somebody who had been out west,” he continued, “and McGuire was runnin’ a real estate office, makin’ money too.”

McBratney reserved his comment until he had gone to the door to spit. “That’s a nice job for a preacher to go into, Mr. Bard,” he said, sarcastically. “I guess he wasn’t called of the Lord.”

“I never blamed him!” Bard exclaimed, striking the table with his stubby right hand, from which the middle fingers were gone. “No, sir! He showed the man in him. But there’s just one thing more I’d a’ done!”

“What’s that, Dad?” William asked.

Bard leaned eagerly forward and clenched his fists. “I’d a’ got that prig of a woman cornered up between me and the end of the room, and I’d a’ choked her till she was green in the face, and then I’d a’ handed over all her lap-dogs an’ yellow parasols and I’d a’ shot her right out onto the road!”

“You’re damned right,” approved McBratney.

“You bet,” agreed William Bard.

The humor of his master’s threat had evidently appealed very forcibly to Snowball, for, after a few seconds, he emitted the queer suction sound, heralding the termination of his period of mirth.

A few minutes later they all left the kitchen for the dairy shed, where the cows waited to be milked. Mauney, disabled for milking, pumped water and carried pails. He noticed McBratney conversing in low tones with his brother, who occasionally turned up the cow’s teat to sprinkle Rover with a warm spray of milk.

When the milking was finished, the cows were wandering slowly back toward the pasture and William had driven off toward Beulah with his companion, Mauney entered the stable and unfastened the latch of a box-stall.

“Whoa, Jennie girl!” he said softly.

The mare, crunching hay, turned her head, whinnied, and stepped over for him to come in. In the dim light that entered from a cobwebbed window he could just see her big eyes watching him, as he put out his hand and stroked her sleek neck. She was his great pride, for, since the day she had been given to him, he had watered and fed her himself, brushed and washed her and led her to pasture. She was the only living thing that he had regarded as his very own, but to-night he felt uncertain about his claim. Quickly he ran his hand over her legs, patted her chest and listened to the sound of her breathing.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Jennie, girl,” he said as he took a fork and threw straw about the floor of the stall.

It was as if he was being robbed of an old friend. Her face haunted him as he went back to the kitchen where his father and the woman were discussing a new cream separator; and when he went upstairs to his room he could see the dark eyes of his pony looking toward him with pathetic appeal.

If his father and brother were studying to render his life miserable, he thought, they would not improve on their present success. What had he done to deserve their constant dislike? If he picked up a book he had learned to expect their ridicule. If he were detected in a mood of quiet reflection, a seemingly normal occupation, why should he have learned to expect a sarcastic jeer? He felt that his mother, had she but lived, would have understood better, for her nature was more like his own.

In such a mood of discontent he sat idly on the edge of his bed, striving to find some possible fault of his own that might merit his evident ostracism. Previously, the possession of his bay pony had given him unbelievable comfort, for in moments of suppressed exasperation he had gone to her stall and transferred, with gentle pattings, the affection that he was prevented from bestowing on his kin. “We’re old chums, aren’t we, Jennie?” Then the world would look brighter and consolation would come to him. But the prospect of her being sold to a stranger made him very sad.

Presently a horse and buggy drove up the lane and stopped almost beneath him. Mauney opened the window to listen, since he knew it was too early for William to be returning.

“Who’s that?” he heard his father’s voice enquire.

“Is this where Mr. Bard lives?” enquired a strange but cultured voice.

“You bet.”

“I’m your pastor, Mr. Bard,” the strange voice continued. “And if you have a few moments, I’ll come in just long enough to get acquainted. It’s a little late, but I didn’t think you’d be in bed yet. I’ll just tie her here, thanks. My name, as I presume you’ve heard, is Tough, but I’m not as tough as I look.”

“How are yu’, Mr. Tough?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“There’s nobody here, but me an’ the hired woman—but—”

“No matter! I’ll take you as I find you. I understand that Mrs. Bard died some years since.”

“Yes. My wife wasn’t never very strong, an’ I never married again.”

“Very sad, indeed. We can’t always tell what’s behind these things, but we try to think they happen for a purpose.”

In Mauney’s breast something tightened at these words. Dim recollections of his mother’s faded face, so thin, but so ineffably sweet, as she closed her eyes in their interminable rest, made him wonder if her going had not been better than staying—staying with the man who had looked, dry-eyed, upon her dead face! Staying to share the unhappiness of her younger son! A wave of joy thrilled him. For one thing he would remain for ever glad—that his mother was dead, safely dead—out of his father’s reach!

He did not know how long he had stood by the window, but he presently heard the kitchen door open.

“That’s one of Tom Sunderland’s livery horses, ain’t it, Mr. Tough?”

“Yes, and he’s very slow and lazy. As a matter of fact I wanted to mention horses to you.”

“You ain’t got a horse o’ yer own, then?”

“Not yet. You might know perhaps where I could get a reliable pony, quiet enough for Mrs. Tough?”

“Now, Mr. Tough, maybe I might. I suppose you want a purty good piece o’ horse flesh?”

“Well, yes, I do.”

“Wife a horse fancier, Mr. Tough?”

“Oh, she’s fond of driving; yes.”

A slight pause, during which Bard coughed.

“It’s purty hard,” he said, clearing his throat, “to buy a horse that’s a good roadster and at the same time a good looker an’ quiet like; understand me.”

“Just so.”

“Now I’ve got a three-year-old mare here that ain’t never been beat in these here parts for looks. O’ course, I ain’t never even thought o’ sellin’ ’er. She was sired by the best Percheron that was ever led around this section.”

“Something fancy, I imagine.”

“She lifts her feet like a lady; she’s fast, and intelligent more’n the hired man.”

“What’s she worth?”

Bard laughed. “Well,” he replied “I hardly know, as I say, I never thought o’ lettin’ ’er go.”

“But you could give me some idea.”

“I know I turned down a three-hundred-dollar offer a couple o’ months ago.”

The Reverend Tough whistled softly. “The Lord’s servants,” he said, “are notoriously lacking in the world’s goods, Mr. Bard. I fear I would have to seek a cheaper animal.”

There was a well-considered pause before Bard spoke.

“You better come down and see her in the daylight,” he said. “You might not want her. But I’d like to see you with a good horse—your profession calls for it.”

“I think so, too.”

“And when it comes to that, I wouldn’t be against knocking off, say, a hundred, if you really want her.”

“Really! That’s good of you. Now, look here, Mr. Bard, I’ll come down to-morrow and see her. It’s comforting to know that a man in these days can get a little for love, when he hasn’t got the price.”

With mutual expressions of good will their conversation ended and Mauney listened to the preacher’s buggy squeaking down the clay road toward Beulah. He walked to the front window of his room and watched it until it disappeared in the mist that had blown westward from the swamp. Then his gaze moved to the Lantern Marsh, a grey, desolate waste under a fog through which the moon struggled. His nature recoiled from the hated picture.

Soon he slept. He dreamed of his father—and of a warm stream of blood he could not see, but only feel in his hands.