Читать книгу Trouble Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 9

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You would of known that a little, dried-up, waspish sort of a man like the sheriff would have a wife laid out on the general lines of a Percheron. I should of expected it, but it took me so by surprise that I nearly laughed out loud at the window.

She was all billowy. Do you know what I mean? God had been making New England Yankees, and he was tired of straight lines when he come to her. A lump of ice on the forehead was what she looked like needing, all of the time.

But she was jolly, and she was always saying something that wasn’t worth even a smile, and then laughing at it herself with her elbows working up and down like two pump handles. She shook all over, when she laughed, and so did the whole room. The tablecloth trembled where it hung down in folds, and the forks shivered against the spoons, and the water quavered into little waves in the glasses. You could see that she had cooked this meal, and you could see that nobody was going to enjoy it any more than she did. Now, music is fine for some, and theaters for others, and pictures for the smart people, but for me, I would stop for dinner, y’understand? Mrs. Ops, she sounded to me!

More I looked at her, the more I could see to her. First look, I wondered how come the sheriff had ever married such a tubby woman, but if you could blow away the bubbles and the froth and look at the real drink—which I mean to say, if you could look through the fat to what she once was, she was mighty pretty. She had ten pounds of blond hair piled onto the top of her head, with the fag ends of the lower part curling around little pink ears that she wasn’t ashamed to show, and no wonder. And the nacheral smallness of her hands throwed the fat of her fingers into dents and dimples ever whichway.

Not that she was the only one at the table, but, being the chief engineer of that meal, I had to begin with her. But the sheriff’s son, Lew, was there, too. He was about twelve with blond hair like his ma and freckles and a black eye that had reached the purple-green stage. And opposite from Lew there was the girl, whose name I gathered was Julie. It was a real rest to look at her. She had her dad’s black hair and her mother’s blue eyes and she looked like she was too full of life to do any sleeping. She was very good-natured, you could see, but smiling was her best bet, than which nobody ever done it better or more dimpled on one side of her face.

“Why don’t you put another beefsteak on your eye, Lew?” says the girl to her brother.

He was admiring himself in the mirror when she spoke, and he gave her a scowl.

“It ain’t your eye,” says he, “and you didn’t fight two boys to get it.”

“They were both smaller than you,” says she.

“Will you listen to Julie talk?” says Lew. “Anybody knows that Sam Marvin is half an inch bigger than me. And Chuck ain’t much smaller.”

“Stuff!” says Julie. “I could hold them both with one hand and spank them with the other!”

The kid, he started to answer, and then he changed his mind and he scowled at her very dark.

“Jiminy!” says he. “Wouldn’t I want to be by when you was trying it? Ma, will you pass the carrots?”

“There’s pie and cake coming,” says Ma. “You better keep a corner. Julie, we’ll clear off.”

They snaked the dishes off of the table.

“Sammy is a skinny little runt,” says Julie, taking out a load.

“He’s got a terrible reach,” said Lew. “And that’s what counts. I never seen such a girl. If Danny Murphy could hear you talk, he wouldn’t be so hot to take you to the dance tonight and—”

He laid off talking, as she went through the kitchen door. But when she come back on the next trip he says good and loud:

“You like that Murphy, don’t you?”

“Who said I did?” says Julie. “And why shouldn’t I, Lew?”

“Well, you know what the other gents call him?”

“What do they call him?”

“Dummy!” says Lew. “Dummy Murphy, they call him, he’s so thick!”

He had his laugh, then, and his mother, she laughed, too. She would always laugh at anything, but Julie, she turned up her nose and sailed out with another pile of vegetable dishes and things, not seeming to notice.

A minute later there was a whoop.

“Lew!” yells his mother.

He gave a jump and his chair rattled. You could tell that he was pretty familiar with that kind of a call.

“Yes, Mother,” says Lew, very sweet but a little shaky.

“ ‘Yes, Mother!’ ” says Mrs. Ops, coming humming back, and crowding herself through the doorway. “Where’s that pie?”

Lew walled his eyes a little.

“What pie?” says he.

“The pie I left cooling on the window sill?” says Mrs. Ops.

“Oh,” says Lew, sort of relieved. “I dunno. What about it?”

“What about it?” says Mrs. Ops. “What about it? I’ll let you know what about it in a minute, unless you confess right up that you snaked it off and ate it—”

“Why, Ma, I didn’t touch it. I didn’t even know where it was!”

“A loganberry pie—you didn’t know where it was! I suppose that it had legs, then, and it walked off?”

“I dunno,” said Lew. “Don’t ask me. I don’t read the minds of pies!”

“D’you dare to lie right to my face?” says Mrs. Ops. “Who would steal it?”

“You can search me!”

“You little good-for-nothing! You come with me!”

She fetched a hold of him by one ear, with a good twist, and brought him out of the chair and dragged him into the kitchen, him hollering: “Hey, Mom, you’re tearing my ear off—”

I shifted around to the kitchen window. I was sorry for the kid, but I was curious, too. I seen Mrs. Ops snatch a whip from a nail on the wall and swing it, and I seen the kid trembling, but standing for the licking, even if he didn’t deserve it.

“Don’t!” says Julie, all at once, and she stood in between them.

“Julie,” says her mother, “will you stand away? Or do I have to—”

“Don’t whip him!” says Julie. “He’s too big—and it shames him too much, Mother. Please don’t—”

“Am I gunna waste my time and strength on you?” says Mrs. Ops. “Stand away from him, Julie!”

“Mother,” says Julie, “I was hungry, and I took the silly pie! I didn’t know—”

“Julie!” says Mrs. Ops, and she dropped the whip.

“It was a silly thing to do,” says Julie.

“And that’s where your appetite went to,” says Mrs. Ops. “And you nineteen! When your pa comes home, he’s gunna hear about this!”

“Yes, Mother,” says Julie, but she winced a little, and you could see that it wasn’t only the crooks in the mountain-desert that was afraid of Wally Ops.

“Go back and sit down!” says Mrs. Ops.

“I would like to help!” says Julie, very scared and small.

“You would like to help!” says Mrs. Ops in a terrible voice. “You go back and sit down!”

Back went Julie and Lew and sat down like two frightened mice, making big eyes at each other across the table.

“My God, Julie,” says Lew, “you are most terrible white. I swear I didn’t steal the pie.”

“I know you didn’t, dear,” says Julie. “I can tell when you fib. But who did take it, then?”

Mrs. Ops come back carrying the cake and she put it down, looking very dark and stern; but when she knifed into it, and the frosting crumbled down even and smooth in front of the knife edge, and the slice lifted off as neat as you please, her frown disappeared.

“There’s no dance for you tonight, young lady.”

“No, Mother,” says the girl, very submissive.

“Hey, Mom,” says Lew, “you don’t mean it! With Danny Murphy coming all this here way to fetch her and—”

She pointed the cake knife at Lew.

“You’ve said enough!” says Mrs. Ops. “Your sister is sick, that’s what she is. She’s in bed with a terrible, raging headache, that’s what she’s got. Like the same kind that she has when that fine, clean, respectable Charlie Goodrich comes over to call on her. A whole loganberry pie! What on earth possessed you?”

“It looked so good, Mother,” says the girl, pulling down the corners of her mouth.

“Stuff!” says Mrs. Ops, and passed over a slice of cake. “Ain’t you eating that?”

“I—I—” says Julie, and then she drops her head into her hands and a shiver runs over her back.

Mrs. Ops straightened in her chair.

“Julie!” says she.

“Yes, Mom-mom-mom-mother!” says Julie. And here she begun to sob hard and heavy.

And why not, I ask you, having got her heart fixed on a dance, and all flounced and fluffed up in white frills so dainty you never seen anything like it, and then got herself into trouble for the sake of her brother? It made me feel like stepping in there and telling them the truth. It made all the punching muscles turn hard along my arms. It pretty near brought the tears into my eyes.

And then she turned her head a little. And what do you think that I seen?

Why, man, she wasn’t crying at all. She was just laughing till the tears ran down the face of her, except that she was smart enough to make the laughing sound like sobs!

Would you believe it? No, you wouldn’t, nor wouldn’t I, neither. But that was the fact.