Читать книгу The Adventurers - Ernest Haycox - Страница 4

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FROM the doorway Sheridan saw the dismal morning struggle in through the steady rain. Mist rolled along the earth before the insistent wind and above the mist lay choked dark clouds. A creek left the lake, turned a bend and ran out of sight toward the ocean beyond the hill. Clara Dale came back from the creek, both hands holding her hair. She gave him a short side glance and went on into the shack. He felt dull and exhausted and irritable, and so did she. North lay directly ahead of him, across the creek, and north appeared the only avenue of escape; both behind him and to his right—to the west—the huge black mountains blocked his way.

She came back to the door, her hair pinned down wet to her head. She said in a half-cranky voice: "I'm not attractive, am I?"

He smiled at her. "You're alive."

She shrugged her shoulders and looked down at her wrinkled, partly torn dress. She put her arms crosswise over her breasts and she stared at the day with her mouth pressed down. She hated what she saw. "How far will we have to go?"

He shook his head. She watched him a moment. "Well," she said, "I got through one day and one night. I'll get through another. I think I'll never live for more than one day at a time." She caught sight of the great raw track along his arm, and her expression tightened. "I should wrap it."'

"Let the rain wash it out." He went back into the shanty and got his coat. It was still damp but he put it over her shoulders. "That'll be good for an hour or two."

They turned back into the timber, found the trail and followed it to the bluff. Here, under the partial shelter of a tree, they looked out upon the ocean and saw no ship. "It must have gone down right after we got away." He ran his glance along the shore, to the driftwood lying well up from the tide marks. He saw the darker objects lodged in the driftwood and other dark objects half buried in the sand; he saw one bobbing in the surf. "Not as many as I thought," he said. "They'll be drifting in for a week. Some won't come in at all."

They dropped down the bluff and walked through the soft sand to the hard-packed beach, here turning north. The creek lay in front of them, meandering across the sands. He lifted the girl and waded over and put her down and went on through a steady-falling rain, the beach curving in and out of its coves before them. The wind blew behind them, the smell of the sea was exceedingly strong. He saw other black bits of wreckage scattered on the sand, and other bodies. He saw one body stripped, marble pale in the morning and he turned inshore to avoid it.

They covered one long beach, waited the falling away of the surf and ran around a rock ledge to another beach. This led them into a cove, and the cove trapped them with its low promontory, over which they had to climb. Near what must have been noon they were half the distance toward a huge head standing in the foreground, and at this point Sheridan saw something that resembled a trail opening through the timber. He turned toward it. They climbed a short sand bluff, passed a brief meadow spongy with water, and found a break in the trees; the trail went directly into the semi-darkness of the forest, and the forest rose up into bulky mountains.

"We'll cross over," said Sheridan.

She set her mouth—which normally had so little hardness into the tightest, homeliest line and nodded for him to go ahead. He stepped before her, passing into the windy, droopy shadows. The climbing ground was quite rough and quite soft; around a bend, fifty yards on, Sheridan reached a short clearing which, taking the waters of a rain-swollen creek, had become a marsh. Here, sitting on a log with the completest air of human dejection upon him, was George Revelwood.

He was ill, he was at the end of his rope; that long narrow face was pale and strained and listless. "My God," he said in a voice meant to carry feeling, "are you alive?" He spread his hands before him. "I can't find a way across this swamp." Rain dropped from his face. He wiped it with his hand and seemed to be crying.

Sheridan broke his way through the brush, traveling along the edges of the marsh. Beyond sight of Revelwood he came upon an area of old logs fallen over the creek. They made a bridge across the marsh to solid ground beyond. He called back: "Come over here."

He waited and heard nothing. He returned to find Revelwood still seated. The girl looked at Sheridan and shook her head. "He won't try."

"God damn you," said Sheridan, "get up and walk."

Revelwood stared at Sheridan with an owlish interest. "I'm tired," he said. "I was on my feet all night, trying to keep warm."

Sheridan reached over, hooked his hand under Revelwood's armpit, and lifted the man from the log. Revelwood offered him a momentary resistance, trying to find anger enough to fight. Sheridan set him in motion with a push, and followed behind. The girl brought up the rear. When they reached the logs Revelwood stopped. "I can't cross the damned things. I'd fall in."

Sheridan gave him another push, whereupon Revelwood gave out a dismal groan and painfully climbed to a log. He pulled his coat around his neck and wiped the dripping water from his nose. The log on which he stood ran out into the marsh, its lower end under water; but another log lay over it, providing further passage, and this in turn reached solid ground beyond the marsh. Too exhausted to have confidence in himself, Revelwood crept along the first log, climbed to the second with an old man's painful slowness and, suddenly aware of the marsh yawning beneath him, sat down a-straddle the log and completed the journey an inch at a time. He stepped to solid ground and put his back to a tree. Sheridan motioned the girl to go ahead; he followed, guiding her over.

Revelwood stared at the hill running upward before them. "How do we know where that goes?" The girl listened to him and turned her glance on Sheridan, waiting for his answer. He shook his head and nodded onward. She turned and started up the hill. Revelwood followed her.

Sheridan said: "How'd you get ashore, George?"

"The ship just dropped out from under me. I grabbed a plank."

The slope stiffened. The girl stopped to catch her wind and Revelwood again put himself against a tree; his nostrils flared out for wind and his pulse throbbed rapidly against the skin of his neck. The girl had assumed an almost brutal expression, her chin set, her mouth turned down at the edges. In this manner, plodding on, and halting and plodding on again, they crawled up the mountain, stumbling over fallen trees, threading the vines which slapped them and drenched them, sliding backward in the rain-softened earth.

They came, long afterward, to the summit of the ridge and were lost in its thickness; but the way was moderately level and the girl reached into some new strata of endurance; she went on without prompting, taking the trail downward. Arriving at a break in the trees she stopped and pointed into a small, stumpy clearing. Coming forward, Sheridan saw a house and a lean-to barn. A spiral of smoke came from the house and a cow grazed on a miniature side-hill meadow. None of them said anything; they moved slowly down the trail. A dog barked through the rain, a bell tinkled, and when they came to the edge of the clearing they found a woman in the yard watching them.

Clara Dale was first to reach the woman. She began to say something but the woman stopped her. "You're from the wreck. There's a man here already from it." She was a dark, grave girl and pity softened her eyes. She put an arm out to Clara. "You come in," she said. "All of you come in."

Revelwood said, "I don't believe—" and fell on his knees and tried to support himself, and collapsed on his side. An older man ran from the dilapidated barn with a boy and a girl at his heels. Sheridan stared down at Revelwood, knowing he ought to lift him from that wet earth, yet having nothing much left in the way of strength. Clara Dale stared at Revelwood woodenly. Then she lifted her eyes to Sheridan. "I'm stronger than he is," she said.

She turned into the house. The man and his two youngsters came up and the older man said, "I'll take care of this fellow. Anybody else coming?"

"No," said Sheridan. "That's all," and went into the house.

They had eaten and they had slept; now it was another gray morning, the wind at half strength and the rain falling in lazy gusts. The survivors sat at breakfast—these three and a rough, short Irishman who had preceded them down the trail.

The story came out with no prompting from the man who sat by the stove with his pipe and interfered with his eldest daughter Katherine's cooking. She was the mother of the Morvain family in place of the real mother who was dead. She was the eldest daughter, as silent as her father was talkative. The two boys, sixteen and twins, were Bob and Harry—the best hunters in the county. "Venison," said Morvain, "is a poor man's way of stayin' alive. Bear's not bad, but my family don't like it." The eleven-year old girl was Suzie. There was a boy a year younger; he was Elgin, and looked nothing like the others.

The small kitchen was warm and filled with the close, keen odors of coffee, bacon and hotcakes. Comfort soaked into Sheridan and his vitality came back; and Clara felt well enough to smile. It was Revelwood who sat jaded and drawn. Katherine Morvain worked steadily from stove to table, possessing practical gifts which her father obviously did not have. Her hair, remarkably black, lay neatly over her head, her dress was smooth around a strong body, and a summer darkness lay on her skin. She observed Revelwood's lethargy particularly and filled his coffee cup again and paused over him. "You'd better eat. It's cold outside and you'll be driving ten miles through the rain."

Revelwood shook his head.

"I'll ride you into Seaside," said Morvain. "You can catch a wagon of some sorts on to Astoria. There's daily boats from there to Portland. But if you're tired, stay here longer. My house is open. What we've got is yours."

Katherine Morvain's glance touched her father with a small warning which he didn't see. "This coast is rough country," he said. "I've had three ranches along it in five years. I'd like to go on over to the valley and would of done it earlier if I wasn't deputy sheriff."

He was mild and vain and blind to himself; he believed himself a bigger man than he was. That, Sheridan suddenly decided, was what Katherine Morvain knew about her father. This family was dirt poor. The rough room showed it; the misfit barn, the sidehill clearing, the clothing of the children, the slackness of Morvain himself—these things showed it. Out in the rain stood one thin cow and out in the rain too stood a plow gathering rust.

"We'll move on," said Sheridan. "We're under great obligation to you."

Revelwood spoke one of his rare sentences. "This was as far as I could come last night. If the house hadn't been here I'd have died in that timber."

"I ought to know the names of the drowned," said Morvain. "I guess that's part of a deputy's job. Maybe I ought to go over to the beach and see what I can identify."

Revelwood said rather quickly, "Let the coroner do that. It's not what anybody would want to see who doesn't have to see it."

"Oh," said Morvain indulgently, "I've seen a lot of death." His face was smooth and entirely free of care. He had no knowledge of care, Sheridan thought; it would be his daughter who took the care.

Rising, Sheridan reached into his pocket for the wallet which once, during the shipwreck he had thought of throwing away because of its weight. He took out two double eagles and extended them toward Morvain. "Will you be good enough to take this? And if at any time I meet you again and you are in need of help of any kind, I'll consider it an obligation."

Morvain had enjoyed himself in the role of an open-handed host, and this offer offended him. "By God, no. What do you consider me? If you knew me better—as people around here know me—you wouldn't offer it."

"Well," said Sheridan, "any time you feel like hitching up, we're ready," and went to the yard. With a full belly and a night's rest he couldn't bring back the sharp edge of yesterday's misery, but some of it came back when he saw the dripping timber. Morvain walked to the barn. Clara Dale rose from the table and came into the yard. She said, under her voice, "Give me that money."

He dropped the two eagles into her hand. She stared at them a moment with a scheming warmth in her. "Could you afford more?"

He brought out his wallet and opened it to her.

She said, "Is that what you start with in this country, Mark?"

"That's all of it."

She bent her head, thinking. Then she said, "They need it so much worse," and took two more double eagles and turned back into the room. She said something and put the gold pieces into Katherine Morvain's hands. Sheridan noticed the tightening expression come to her—something like the cut pride her father had shown. Clara put her hand on Katherine Morvain's arm and said some other thing. Katherine Morvain shook her head; she held one gold piece in her hand and passed the other three back to Clara.

The Irishman came out and stood near Sheridan without speaking. He put his hands into his pocket and looked blankly at the timber. Sheridan said: "How'd you get ashore?"

"I don't know," said the Irishman. "Never will know, I guess."

"Bound for Portland?"

"We were," said the Irishman. "My wife and three kids went down with that ship."

Morvain drove the wagon forward and Revelwood and Clara walked from the house. Sheridan gave Clara a hand to the seat and climbed into the rear with Revelwood. They waited for the Irishman to join them but he stood still, looking into the trees. In a moment he said: "I'll be going back to the beach," and turned away at once with his mind made up.

Katherine Morvain brought out a blanket for Clara. "Wear it to Seaside," she said. The rain mist put a crystal net over her hair. Her eyes, Sheridan thought, had a good deal of pity in them. She knew enough about trouble to feel what they'd gone through. He looked at the long, firm fingers and the lean body within the plain dress, and at that dark face with its suppressed womanliness and he thought, "Another ten years of this and she'll be broken." She wasn't now. He said to her, "Will you ever be in Portland?"

"It is unlikely," she said, and gave them a kind, softening glance. "I wish you all well." Her eyes touched Sheridan and he saw the distant Irish flash of warmth. She let it come through her self-control, and gave him as good an appraisal as he gave her. He sat still, appreciating it, until Morvain clucked the horses down the hillside to the road. Braced in the wagon bed Sheridan looked back to the girl; she stood in the light rain, and as the wagon entered the trees she lifted a hand and this sight of her struck him and stayed with him—she motionless in the dull day, posed against the impoverished clearing and against the shabby house.

Morvain took them to Seaside; for ten dollars a rancher drove them the twenty miles into Astoria, a wind-beaten village crouched on a lumpy clearing beside the Columbia. They put up at a flimsy caricature of a hotel and had some chance to improve their clothes at a general store. Toward evening they went aboard the steamboat Western Wave, bound upriver for Portland, a hundred miles inland.

Katherine Morvain watched the strangers go, feeling the loneliness of their departure, yet glad that their eyes no longer saw the shabby poverty of this place. Bob and Harry had drifted into the woods with their guns, the only thing they cared about, or knew about. In ten years of moving from one wild hillside clearing to another they had known but one year of schooling; they were growing up to be illiterate men who would marry, breed shiftless children, and sink deeper into the mud—all the love and brightness and good usefulness which lay under the Morvain skin at last dying.

She turned into the kitchen. Suzie had already begun on the dishes. Elgin sat behind the stove, working out a box trap with a knife. Elgin said, "I want to go look for bodies."

"No, the cow's to be milked."

Elgin put down his trap and rose without enthusiasm. He was young and at that age all boys were lazy, but she feared he too showed the slack streak which was in his brothers. He needed a harness put on him and he needed school. She went about her work in deep silence, her mouth pressed together. She cleaned the house. The older boys came back for noon meal, punctual in that one thing, and were gone again. She put Suzie to sewing the edges of the ragged tablecloth. She laid out an old school reader on the table. "Elgin—one hour."

He said: "What's the good of it?"

She said: "Do you want people to laugh at you?"

"What'd they laugh for?"

"Because you couldn't talk right, and you wouldn't get a job, and you wouldn't have clothes. Didn't you notice how nice those men talked? They're the kind that travel around and see things. That's what we want. You study a whole hour."

"All right," he said and went slowly to the book.

She stood in the doorway with her back turned to him and felt the gloomy day press in around her and narrow her life to this drab muddy yard with its stumps, its half-fallen fences, its cow standing uncomfortably under a weeping fir, its sagged barn and manure pile steaming in the rain; there was not a hopeful sight anywhere. She crossed her hands over her breasts and her stubbornness returned. "There's hope for him. I've got to think ofxr a way." She was ashamed of herself for pinning her thoughts so much on Elgin. Suzie needed to be thought of too, but Suzie was a different problem.

Her father should have been home long before, but she knew he would visit along the way, talking politics because as deputy sheriff he considered himself a politician; or talking about farming though he hated all chores, or just talking. He never knew that he was deputy sheriff only because no other man wanted a job that took time and paid nothing, and never knew that these roundabout people smiled at his shiftlessness. He lived in a little false world and was happy. Now, though, she read the signs of restlessness on him. He had stayed here two years, and that was longer than he had stayed anywhere.

She turned to the bedroom and put on a coat and went into the rain, walking around the house toward a small gulch which ran along the eastern end of the place. She remembered very clearly her mother's words when they had come here. Her mother, stepping into this but—then dirty and long unused and overgrown with fern—had turned to her father with a soft, terrible outpour of feeling.

"Well, Morvain, each move makes us poorer. The next move we'll have nothing—we'll be beggars. But there won't be a next move. Bad as it is, I'll never leave this place. You couldn't make a go of it anywhere else—and maybe you can't do it here. But if there's any power in you to provide a living, you'd better bring it out now. We'll live here or we'll starve here. I'll not follow you another step, nor any of the children."

She remembered her father's blindly hopeful answer. "Now, Liz, you're tired. It'll be all right. This country's a fine place and we'll get along fine."

Her mother retorted: "If it's a fine place, find me something for supper!"

She followed the pathway through the overgrown bracken fern to the edge of the gulley. A cedar fence enclosed a very small cleared plot with its single grave; at the head of the grave stood a board, worked slightly askew in the soft earth, its black lettering faded so that only her memory traced the inscription: "Agatha Morvain. Beloved Wife and Fond Mother. 1821-1864."

This was an infrequent visit for Katherine. She hated this damp, closed-in spot. There never was any sun on it, and the vines grew around it and crept through the fence and threatened to hide it. After the misery and unhappiness of life, it was hard to see her mother lying in this unfavored place. Katherine stood here with her downborne thoughts. She knew her father would soon bring up the subject of moving and now she was her mother's voice and ought to answer as her mother would have answered. Her mother, beaten down by the years of moving around, by the poverty and hunger always hanging over them, had given up her ambitions one by one until she had left but one terror—the terror of her children being hungry. For food she had surrendered all other hopes.

To Katherine food was not enough. She hadn't yet been beaten down that far. The sight of her older brothers turning shiftless, the thought of Elgin maturing empty-handed and empty-headed, the knowledge that Suzie's bright sweetness would some day fade into the dullness of a drudge woman—this was worse than a lack of food. Thus, standing before the ragged grave, she knew she would not argue against her father when he decided to move.

She put her hands on the fence. She couldn't wish her mother back; her mother had been far too tired and nothing now would have made her mother any happier for living. But she wished she might have some feeling that her mother knew why they had to move. There was nothing so degraded as ignorance and poverty together. They had nothing, they had not even the certainty of knowing that this grave would remain. When she left this ranch, Katherine realized, she wouldn't return; the fence of this grave would fall down, the vines would grow over it, the headboard would rot away. Nobody would know, in another two years that anybody was buried here. The poor couldn't even keep alive the memory of their dead.

She turned away, so bitter that she was blinded. She stumbled along the greasy wetness of the trail and returned to the house. Elgin sat at his book, looking craftily at her from the corner of his eye; he hadn't been studying. Suzie sat near the doorway with her needle and the frayed tablecloth. She watched Suzie. "I want to fix your hair," she said, and went for the comb. It was pretty hair—light brown and silky in its fineness; she couldn't let it grow shabby and unkempt. She had to fight against that. She had to fight against everything.

Her father came home at supper time, made cheerful by the elderberry wine of the Thomas family, and sat down to his meal. "The Thomas boys said I ought to run for sheriff. Patton's not liked. He don't get out and visit people. I said I didn't know. Your mother was right about this country. It was good when we came, but the weather ain't the way it was then. The rain's soured the soil. We ought to be over in the Tualatin."

"Elgin," said Katherine, "pull your chair closer to the table and sit up."

"Winter's coming on," Morvain suggested. "We've got everything out of this ground we're going to get. Now's the best time, if a man's to move."

Katherine said, "I don't mind moving."

He was truly surprised at his daughter's consent. He said, bright and brisk: "Then we will. I was talking to the Thomas boys about the cow. They'll take it off my hands for thirty dollars."

She remembered her mother's fear about food—and a thread of that same fear played through her. "We won't sell the cow. That's milk."

Morvain looked at her with his uncertain impatience. "Lord, girl, we can't lug cow and tools and stuff clear across the mountains. The road's a terror."

She rose and turned toward the stove for the coffeepot; she brought it back and stood by the table. She saw that light, shallow eagerness in her father's eyes, and she saw the two older boys looking on with their alert attention. "What we've got, we've got. It's something. We won't sell anything. Not anything. We'll take with us."

"Katherine," he said, "there ain't room for stuff and us both in the wagon."

"We'll walk."

He was uncomfortable and irritable and she knew he already had made some arrangement with the Thomas people to sell. A little bit of money looked big—it made him feel rich. Already he was dreaming of a big ranch and shiny new tools; he was envisioning a lucky accident which never would happen. As far as his head was concerned he was no older than Elgin. He had broken his wife's heart and didn't realize it. He had pulled his family down, blaming the weather, or luck, or anything, but never blaming himself. He wasn't thinking of them. He was thinking of himself, he was dramatizing himself with his visions of some big strike, he was seeing himself large-handed and influential in some new neighborhood. He lived in a golden world which nowhere touched the earth.

"Well," he said, "I sort of made a deal with the Thomas boys about the stuff. I wouldn't want to go back on what I said!"

"No. As long as we've got something—anything—we're not beggars."

He flashed a stung glance at her. "We never begged, girl."

"We've borrowed," she said. "And never paid back. We won't sell."

"I don't know what they'll say," he murmured. "I agreed to sell." He looked at her but after a while he looked away, knowing she wouldn't change—and knowing he could not force her as he had so often forced his wife. He wasn't pleased. "All right. Well, if we're goin' to go, we'd better not waste time. I'd like to pack tomorrow."

She turned to the two older boys. "In the morning I want you to chop away all the brush around Mother's grave. I want the sun to get into that spot."

Morvain said: "We'll come back once in a while and look after the grave."

She knew they wouldn't. The poor were never free to do the nice things. The poor couldn't afford to carry out the wishes of their hearts. She said nothing throughout the meal; she was searching for some way to carry this family out of the wilderness and lift it from its slow degeneration. People had used them, people had laughed at them, people didn't care—and should anybody care for the Morvains if the Morvains had no pride in themselves? "Who has the big saw?"

"Why," said her father, "I lent it to Jim Terry."

She nodded at one of the older boys. "You go get it in the morning, Bob."

"Well," said her father, again uncomfortable, "he's done me favors, and maybe he'd like to keep it. Maybe he thinks it was a swap."

"I'll go get it then," said Katherine.

Morvain said, "No. I'll get it. But it's such a little thing."

"That's all we've got," said Katherine. "We never had anything big because we gave away all our little things. Mrs. Burian's got our churn. You go after that tonight, Harry."