Читать книгу Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories - Ben Ames Williams - Страница 8

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Johnny Dree found a little time, even during the busy weeks of the apple picking, to go with Moore through his orchard, and to search out the trees scattered along the stone walls. He began the work of pruning and trimming them, showed Moore, and showed Lucy, how to continue it. Bade Moore plow under the thick sod around the base of each tree. “Nothing like grass to steal the water an apple tree needs,” he explained. “Grass is worse than weeds.” Before the snow came, much had been done. Moore said once, diffidently:

“I’d like to hire you to help me along with this, Dree!”

But Johnny shook his head. “You don’t want to hire help only when you have to,” he said. “I just come up when I’m not busy at home. You can help me with haying and things, some time.”

The seasons marched monotonously on. The crisp sunshine of fall days, with frost tingling in the air, gave way to bleaker weather, and then to the full rigors of harsh cold, when snow lay thick across the hills, blanketing everything. The routine of little tasks laid itself upon Moore, and upon his wife. Even Lucia, in greater and greater degree, submitted to it. But revolt was always very near the surface in the girl. One day she met Johnny Dree upon the road, and he asked in a friendly way: “Well, you getting to like it here?”

She was in ill humor that morning, and she flamed at him. “Oh, I hate it! I hate it!” she cried. “I wish to God I’d never seen this damned hole. But papa’s got us into it, and we can’t get out, and there’s nothing to do but work and work. Sometimes I wish I were dead.”

He had never heard her swear before; and he looked at her in some astonishment. She was, he thought, so small, and so serenely sweet to look upon that there was something incongruous in her profanity. But he did not speak of his thought at that time; said merely:

“Why, that’s too bad. I thought you were getting to like it, maybe.” And so passed on, leaving her curiously chastened by his very mildness.

There was an interminable sameness in the days. To rise early, to do the morning chores, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and dust, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and sew, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and read the paper, and go fumingly to bed. This was Lucia’s bitter life. But because it is impossible to hold indignation always at its highest pitch, there were hours when she forgot to be unhappy; there were hours when she found something like pleasure in this ordered simplicity of life. Now and then Johnny came in of an evening, and sat in the dining room with them all and talked with her father about apple trees; and Lucia liked, at first, to practice her small cajoleries upon him. He quickly began to call her Lucia, then Lucy as her father and mother did. She preferred the simpler name, upon his simple lips. When the snow thinned and disappeared, and new grass pushed greenly up through the brown that clothed the fields, she was stronger than she had ever been. Her arms were rounding, her figure assuming the proportions for which it was designed; and her color no longer required external application. When Johnny took Moore into his own orchards and showed him how to apply the dormant spray, and how to search out the borers in the base of the trees and kill them with a bit of wire, or with a plug of poisoned cotton, and all the other mysteries of orchardry, Lucy liked to go along, and learned to do these tasks as well as Johnny, and better than her father did. The trees, fed with well-rotted manure which Johnny preferred to any chemical preparation, and freed from the competition of the grass and weeds which had surrounded them and blanketed their thirsty roots, throve and put out a great burst of bloom, and all the hillside was aglow with color. Lucy began to see hope of release from this long bondage here. When the apples were sold, if the market was good, Johnny thought they might make five or six hundred dollars in a year....

Then one midnight she awoke shivering in a sharp blast from her open window, and drew fresh blankets over her; and in the morning there was white frost on the ground, and Johnny came up the hill with a philosophic smile upon his face. Moore met him at the kitchen door.

“Well,” said Johnny slowly. “We won’t do well this year. This frost has nipped them. I guess not bearing will give your trees a chance to get a better start.”

Moore accepted the calamity with mild protest. Said blankly: “No apples. Why, I’ve got to have something....”

But Lucy was not so mild. From the kitchen behind her father she pushed past him and out upon the porch, her eyes ablaze. “No apples!” she cried, in a voice like a scream. “Why not?”

“This frost has killed them,” said Johnny, his eyes hardening.

She almost sprang at him, beat on his broad chest with her fists, and tears streamed down her face. “You fool! You damned fool!” she cried. “There’ve got to be apples. There’ve got to be! You said there would be! You said if we worked, there would be! If we sprayed the damned trees! Oh, you make me sick, with your lies! Oh, I hate this farm! I hate the damned trees....”

Johnny surprised her. He took her by the shoulders, gripping them till she winced. “Stop it, Lucy,” he commanded.

“I won’t!” she cried. “Let go of me....”

“Be still your noise,” he said, no more loudly than before. But the insistence in his voice constrained her, and she began to weep bitterly, and slumped against him, shaken and half fainting. “You can’t talk that way,” he told her. “It’s no way to talk. You got to be a sport. It’s a part of the business, Lucy. Now you go in the house and wash your face and help with breakfast. I want to talk to your father. Go along.”

Her father watched her; and his face was white with surprise and consternation. But Lucy turned and went obediently into the house, and he looked after her, and looked at Johnny Dree; and Johnny grinned, a little sheepishly.

“You see,” he said, ignoring what had happened. “Thing is, you can raise some garden stuff, and some chickens and things, and get along. We’re due for a good year next year.”

Walter Moore nodded. “That’s all right,” he assented, and looked again at the door through which Lucy had gone. “But I’d like to shake hands with you, Dree. I’d like to shake your hand.”