Читать книгу Impatient Virgin - Donald Henderson Clarke - Страница 5

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Ben spent a few hours most days in his small real-estate office.

On the four acres around his seven-room frame house, he kept bees in a score of hives. The hives stood in a single row on the north side of the woodshed in the apple orchard. Ben loved nothing better than to let the bees swarm on him. When he went to their hives to collect honey, he first pumped them full of smoke from a bellows.

“A bee is one of the noblest of living creatures,” he used to say.

When a bee stung him, which was infrequently, he suffered tortures. He was particularly susceptible to the poison. But he said:

“I must have done something to the bee. It must’ve been my fault. Bees are all right. It’s us humans that are wrong, mostly.”

He had a hundred apple trees on the place—Baldwins, Northern Spies—and was one of the first to set out MacIntosh Reds. There was a tree of Golden Sweets at the most northerly end of the row of hives; and there was a tree of Early Harvests at the most southerly point. And there were Red Astrakhans, and Greenings, and single trees of many varieties. But the Baldwins, Northern Spies and MacIntosh Reds were the favorites, and he was famous for his hand-picked apples, in a day when the custom still was to barrel apples with good ones at each end of the barrel, and rotten ones in the center.

Katherine always kept a considerable number of chickens. She was judged a genius at caring for the fowls; and her kitchen more often than not was turned into a nursery for a new hatching.

Katherine also was noted for her way with flowers. Honeysuckle climbed over her front porch, where humming birds poised on hot summer days. She kept an old-fashioned flower garden and a remarkable collection of rose beds. She owned three Jersey cows, for which she cared personally, and a six-toed black cat, which she called Sir Joseph. Sir Joseph was an eunuch.

Ben had two brown water spaniels, Elmer and Gert. Elmer and Gert went for his slippers the moment Ben said the word. And either of them always was available for errands. They even fetched meat from Hooper’s Market.

“If you took as much time training yourself as you take training dogs, you might be somebody,” Katherine told him.

“You don’t see any dogs training themselves,” Ben replied. “I’m a good trainer, but a poor trainee. I was neglected in my youth.”

Ruth was a good cook before she was ten, and she made all the dresses for her dolls.

“She’ll make some man a good wife,” Katherine said.

“But she won’t be cooking and sewing for any man if I have anything to do about it,” Benjamin asserted. “Ruthy is going to be trained right. She’ll get on in the world.”

“Oh, dear, Benjamin. I don’t know what is going to happen—with you putting ideas in that poor child’s head. What is better than being a good cook, and housekeeper, and wife and mother, for a good man?”

“You’ll see, Susie,” Ben replied.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Susie,” Katherine exclaimed a bit wearily. “Why can’t you call me by the name I was baptized?”

“It doesn’t seem brotherly,” Ben said.

That afternoon—a shimmering hot day in August—Ben harnessed his big black mare, Bertha, to the buckboard, and called for Ruth.

“Ahoy, Ruthy!”

Ruthy came running out of the milk house, where the stone floor was cool on bare feet, and climbed into the seat beside Ben.

“Giddap, Bertha,” Ben said.

In his mouth he had a corncob pipe, without which he seldom was seen unless he was asleep. And he was in shirtsleeves and suspenders.

Bertha ambled easily over the grass-lined trail which answered for a driveway, and turned into the macadam street. A horn sounded, and an automobile chugged by.

“Time is near when everything’ll be done by machinery,” Ben said. “Personally, I’d rather have kerosene, horses and wagons, back houses, and peace, than gasoline, electricity, tiled plumbing, Twentieth Century Limiteds, and excitement.”

They jogged along in silence for five minutes. Elmer and Gert were roaming happily, first on one side of the road, and then on the other.

“Where do babies come from, Uncle Ben?” Ruth asked.

“What made you ask that?”

“Well, Edith says the stork brings babies; and Aunt Katherine says the doctor brings babies; and Dr. Pease says God brings the babies; and Peter, the Browns’s hired man, says babies come right out of you. He told Myron, and Myron told me.”

Ben removed the corncob from his mouth and spat into the dust, and clucked needlessly to Bertha.

“You’ve seen how fussy I am about getting a good bull for your aunt’s cows, haven’t you, Ruthy?”

“What do you get a good bull for, Uncle Ben?”

“Shucks, Ruthy. You’ve heard me say if a bull isn’t right, the calves wouldn’t be any good, haven’t you?”

Ruth nodded, not in a very convinced manner.

“It’s the same way with dogs, and horses, and humans,” Ben continued. “You got to have good, healthy stock for the fathers and mothers, or you won’t have good children.”

“Where do they come from—the children?”

“They are made by their fathers and mothers loving each other,” Ben said. “The father has seeds in him, and the mother has eggs in her, and two seeds come together inside the mother, and then the baby grows.”

“How does it come into the world?”

“You’ve seen hens laying eggs haven’t you Ruthy?”

“But I can’t lay eggs, can I, Uncle Ben?”

“Nope,” Uncle Ben replied, grinning, “you can’t lay eggs. Hens, and birds, and fish lay eggs. But in the case of human beings, the women have the eggs inside of them, and the young grow right next to their mother’s heart, nice and warm and cosy until it’s time to be born.”

“But how ...”

“Now listen, Ruthy,” Ben said. “I’ve agreed to tell you anything that you can understand any time you ask me, and I’ve had this question you’ve just asked figured out for some time. I’ve got a book at home I’m going to give you to read. It’s a physiology book. And it’ll tell you the details better than I can.”

“I’d rather have you tell me, Uncle Ben.”

“Well, I’d rather have you read this, and then I’ll answer any questions you have to ask me. But there’s one thing I want you always to remember.”

“What is that, Uncle Ben?”

“I want you always to remember that if we are so fussy with getting healthy animals together so that they can have healthy children, human beings should be even more fussy.”

“Am I healthy?” Ruth asked.

“Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho!”

Uncle Ben put his head back and roared; and Bertha, pricking up her ears, increased her gait about a mile an hour.

“Healthy!” he repeated. “You’re the healthiest and sweetest little lady in the county, and maybe in the country.”

“I’d like to have a whole lot of babies,” Ruth said.

“Well,” Ben replied, “there’s nothing better. And since you want good, healthy babies, you want to keep yourself clean, and sweet and sound.”

“How can I do that?”

“Just take as good care of your body as you do of your mind, and remember that a poor bull can ruin a good cow.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means that you never want to do any loving with a man that isn’t a real he-man—and a bearcat,” Ben explained. “Your real big job is to keep yourself sweet, and your next job is to find a sweet man.”

Ben picked the whip out of the socket and switched Bertha with it. Bertha was startled into a swifter trot. Ben hit her again with the whip. Bertha broke into a canter. Ben lashed her a little harder a third time, and she broke into a run.

Elmer and Gert went tearing after the swaying buckboard, smothered in the billowing fog of dust raised by Bertha’s threshing hoofs and the spinning wheels of the buckboard.

“Is Bertha running away?” Ruth asked, a little quiver in her voice.

Ben took the reins in his right hand and held Ruth tight with his left as they rounded a sharp curve on two wheels. An automobile and a wagon loaded with hay, both coming towards them, blocked the narrow road. The automobile was stalled in the ditch, and the driver of the wagon was swinging to the ground.

“Hang on, Ruthy,” Ben ordered.

He took the reins in both hands and swerved Bertha into the opposite ditch. The buckboard raked along the piled hay and almost overturned before he pulled Bertha to a stop. Ruth picked a handful of hay from her lap, and looked up, wide-eyed.

“It was a runaway, wasn’t it, Uncle Ben?”

Ben guided Bertha back into the road on the far side of the hay wagon, giving all his attention for a moment to the task. Then he turned to Ruth.

“Never was in a runaway before, were you, Ruthy?”

She shook her head, her big, dark-blue eyes still wide with excitement, and the color suddenly suffusing her cheeks.

“You’ll probably always remember this day, won’t you, Ruthy?”

“We might have been killed if you weren’t so strong—huh, Uncle Ben?”

“It’s a good thing to never forget it,” Ben advised, restuffing his pipe with fine-cut tobacco from a muslin sack. “And whenever you think of loving a boy or a man, you remember this afternoon, and what I told you about keeping yourself fine and sweet and healthy so that you can have healthy babies.”

“What has Bertha running away got to do with babies?” Ruth asked.

“Some day you’ll understand that it’s better to have a horse run away with you than to let your worse self run away with your better self,” Ben said.

“That was white clover—that hay,” Ruth exclaimed, looking back. “My, but didn’t it smell good!”