Читать книгу Little Man - George Herbert Sallans - Страница 10

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They came at last to a farm cluster that was greater than the others. The inevitable barbed wire was there, but the fence had an imposing gateway, and the wire was held by five-inch poles, a contrast to the scraggly poplars of other fences.

The house was long and deep green and homey and comfortable looking, as it snuggled down behind the big snowdrifts, with the smoke curling from one of its chimneys. Beyond it was a group of barns, with the high, fresh manure pile near by bespeaking much livestock housed within. Between house and barns was an acre or two of yard, half filled with a collection of farm machinery, including a steam engine and threshing machine, all pulled together with little pretence at order. The steam engine faced one of the barns, and on fine days in winter Uncle Jim steamed it up, strung a belt from its fly-wheel to grain choppers within the building, and ground wheat and oats and barley for his horses and cattle and pigs.

Beyond the main barn stood one of the many straw stacks that dotted the farms, ringed around under a snow cap with a streak of yellow where the horses and cattle chewed at the straw or lay down contentedly in it to sleep.

A team of horses hauled a bobsleigh carrying a huge rack filled with straw across the field toward the barn, and atop the straw George could see two men sprawling. Everything about this place breathed home and happiness and plenty.

"Is this where we're gonna live, Daddy?" he asked, half in fear and half in delight as Uncle Jim turned his horses into the gateway. Daddy laughed. "Oh, we'll see about that later," he said mysteriously. And Uncle Jim grinned and said: "Guess we'll put you up here for the night, anyway, Georgie."

A great dog, part collie and part spaniel, came bounding out with a clamour of barking and excitement at sound of the sleigh bells. The front door of the house was flung open and out of it burst two boys, one of them George's size and the other smaller. They raced up the snowbanks and over to the sleigh as the horses stopped. At the door then appeared two faces, one of them blessedly familiar—Aunt Mary! The two women shaded their eyes against the long slanting rays of the sun.

"Aunt Mary!" Jean shrieked, and the two women waved. The other woman, they knew without asking, was Aunt Sadie.

From one of the stables came a hired man to unhitch the horses. The two little boys stood with friendly smiles for the newcomers as Uncle Jim jumped over the side of the sleigh box and hung the reins on a peg. Daddy descended with more dignity. Harold jumped over the side of the box as Uncle Jim did, and George scrambled out to imitate him, but tripped and fell face first in the snow. Jean got herself gingerly out at the back of the box, where Uncle Jim let down the door.

"Lo," said the larger one. The other shrank behind his brother's sleeve. Uncle Jim bellowed with good nature: "Well, Harry and Billy, that's your cousin George from the east. Tell him welcome to the wild and woolly west."

"I gotta pony," said Harry, the older. "Wouldja like to see it?"

"Gee, yes," said George.

"C'mon, then," and Harry set off at a dead run, with Billy after him, protesting breathlessly: "I gotta calf all my own, I have." Behind them George struggled stiffly and awkwardly through the deep snow, his legs not yet working freely.

"Hyar!" yelled Uncle Jim. "That's no way to welcome a cousin. Take George into the house and get him warm first."

"We'll be back in a minute, Paw," Harry shouted, and raced on to the stables.

His heart thumping, George went with Harry and Billy down the passageway between the rows of stalls. Horses stood in some, and George expected flying heels to kick him into eternity any moment. At the very end of the barn they came to a smaller stall with a lattice door in front, and here a small, shaggy black head was thrust toward them, with bright eyes peering intently, and incredibly small ears pointed.

Harry pulled the lattice door open and pushed in beside the little black pony. "C'mon in, George—" and then, as George hesitated shyly: "Aw, he won't hurt yuh!" And Harry unceremoniously yanked the quivering George in beside him. "His name's Blackie." He ran his hands through Blackie's mane and forelock, and Blackie's inquisitive, toy-sized muzzle sniffed at George's sweater and coat collar and cheek, and blew his nose with a "shdv-dv-dv" sound when George pulled back.

"I'm gonna ride him to school this spring," said Harry proudly. "Are you gonna have a pony, too? Can you ride?"

"I—don't know. No, I guess I can't," George admitted, feeling very inferior. "I bin on a horse, though."

"Aw, it's easy," Harry assured him. "Gee whillikens, didja have fun on the train? I'd like to go on a train. You can see them from here. C'mon and I'll show you." And the impulsive Harry pulled George headlong out of the stall, closed the door on Blackie, and rushed for the yard again, with Billy panting after them.

"I bin on a train," Billy said.

"Yeh, you been on a train—like fun you have!" Harry jeered.

"I have too!" Billy insisted stoutly.

"Fer about six stations, is all. Howdja like to be on a train for about six days and six nights, eh? Howdja like that?"

"I bin on a train, anyways," said Billy doggedly.

At the barn door Harry pointed over the distant fields. A thin line of black smoke stood out there, miles away and, sure enough, as Harry said, you could see a black engine crawling along with an endless string of red freight cars behind it.

"That's five miles away, mindja," said Harry.

George breathed in awe at what he felt must be something of importance. "Gee," said George, "five miles! Jist think!"

"I'd like to see your calf, too," said George to Billy.

"So would Billy," snorted Harry in great glee. "He's jiss waitin' to see it his self."

George looked mystified.

"I have so gotta calf," said Billy, "and its name is gonna be Sooner."

Harry shouted with amusement, and turned a somersault in the snow. "Yeh, the sooner the better."

"I—don't unnerstand," said George, completely baffled.

"Aw, it ain't even born yet," Harry explained condescendingly. "Y'see, Spotty's gonna have a calf in April, and it's gonna be Billy's when it comes."

"Well, you hadda wait for Blackie, din'cha? Now din'cha?" Billy demanded, not the slightest perturbed at Harry's noisy but affectionate teasing. He tugged at George's sleeve. "C'mon an' I'll show you."

They trudged around the barn to another door, and this was a separate stable. The door stood partly open, and here the smell was even more composite and compelling than in the horse stable.

"Careful where you step," said Harry generously, eyeing George's clean felt boots and rubbers.

Cows stood in small stalls, or munched hay leisurely, or lay and chewed their cud. "Here's Spotty!" said Billy. Spotty lay calmly, her legs folded under her, brown and white side and belly stretched languidly and eloquently over the straw-littered floor. Billy pointed to Spotty's generous sides and to her swelling udder. "Thass where Sooner's gonna come from," he said, and the fire of proprietorship glowed in his eyes.

"Race yuh to the house," Harry shouted, and was off. He plunged through the snowdrifts to the kitchen, and burst through the door like a stampede. Harry, in fact, didn't come anywhere; he suddenly exploded in a geyser of sound and reality right where you were.

They all sat in the kitchen around the range. Jean was prowling restlessly, looking at pictures on the walls, and the week-old newspapers on the ironing board, or stroking the brown fur of the cat as it stretched in luxury beside the stove. The range was a marvel in itself, with huge heating ovens half-way up the pipe, on which were piled steaming leather mitts of the men and boys, put there to dry.

Aunt Sadie came up to George, bent down and put her arms around him. "So this is Georgie," she said, and kissed him. "What a fine big man he is."

George submitted with stiff but good grace. He liked Aunt Sadie instantly.

"Harry and Billy, come and meet your Uncle Charley, and Jean and Harold," said Aunt Sadie.

"'Lo," said Harry with friendly respect for all, and Billy screwed up his face and made to say something, but grinned instead.

"Soon be as big as his dad!" Uncle Jim laughed in a way that George knew was on his side, and pretended to grunt ferociously as he raised George on to one of his overalled knees. "I should say he would! No hollow legs about this man. He's solid meat."

George liked Uncle Jim instantly and tremendously. Everyone did, and for the same reason that George did. Because he was as broad in his mind and his heart as he was in the shoulders of him. A hearty man was Jim Black, six-feet-four and built in proportion, a man who instinctively led and commanded, a man born to succeed because he had never had any conception of failure. A loud-voiced, kindly, rough-and-tumble nobleman, scrupulously honest, merciless if he had to be, with a compassion as vast as the outdoors he loved.

In the eighties he left his family in the east, after his sister had been married to Charley Battle. He took the little money he had and came to the plains, a giant of a youth who brushed difficulties away as if they never existed. He stormed over the inviting tablelands of the early settlements, pushed on beyond the known places of the boldest, and drove on westward with unerring instinct until he found a spot which others had shunned because it was forested with the indomitable poplar of the West. There he planted himself squarely in the lush lands near the railroad right-of-way. Uncle Jim had an eye for utility as well as for beauty. A creek ran through his farm from end to end, gave him running water, the rare luxury of a dam, and a welcome break in the flatness of the plains.

Bluff upon bluff of trees grew where he paused, and each one of them marked a pond, or slough as they were called in disparagement, a fertile breeding-place for mosquitoes—but to Uncle Jim's practised eye the tell-tale marks of a good land. He strode from corner stake to corner stake of the land surveyor's marks, picked out his first quarter section, and earmarked several more that stood in the title of the railway, to augment his holdings.

"Here," said Jim Black, "I'll build my home." And when the community grew there was he in the centre of it, near the school, near the church, his home fronting on the best-travelled road. He was a power in the land, perpetual reeve of the municipality, chairman of the school board. His farm was a complete industry from the seed bed in the soil to the anvil in the blacksmith shop and the pegs in the smoke-house where he cured his own meat. No other farmer had nearly the completeness and self-sufficiency that Jim Black built around himself.

"He'll over-reach," people used to say. "He'll get in so deep that he'll never get out. He's land-poor right now."

But Jim Black sent his four- and six-horse teams up and down the great fields, with his unheard-of variety of machinery after them—plows, discs, cultivators, harrows, modern seed drills, and where he got the money to pay for them his neighbours knew, but swore in jealousy that they didn't. Aye, well they knew. It was in the golden wheat that he threshed with his own machines from his hundreds of acres, and hauled to the tall red elevators that followed him into the wilds. It was in the herds of cattle that he found time to raise for milk and beef, in the great pens of pigs and in the yards of chickens that he and Aunt Sadie kept. It was, most of all, in the tremendous heart of him, in his simple and mighty integrity that made his word a bond and his nod a pledge.

He was generous to such a fault that everyone said no man in his senses could afford it. He gave, they said, too much money to the church, paid out too much in wages to the great gang of hired men that he had perpetually around him, lent too much money to relatives who came impecuniously but gratefully from the east to share in the new El Dorado of the farmer, and he was never known to ask for repayment. He was always buying, always sharing, always giving. But Jim Black was always a safe jump ahead of the bailiff; always had money, always got his wheat to the market for the best prices. His fame spread and his house expanded.

Uncle Jim's overalls were hard, impregnated with grease and oil, and his sweater with its great roll collar was little less so. His hands were hard as iron, his face had a short stubble on it always. George thought this mammoth uncle the epitome of all the rugged heroes of his dreams.

"Where's your cousin Harold?" Uncle Jim asked Harry, and Harry said: "Pitch took him in the parlour."

"Pitch?" George echoed, and thought of ponies. "Who's Pitch?"

Aunt Sadie turned from the stove. "He means Margaret, dear." And to Harry: "You mustn't call her Pitch in front of others, Harry. You know she doesn't like it."

"Aw, gee," Harry began, but intercepted a wink from Uncle Jim, a solemn, stern wink, and was silent. In truth, Pitch had been one of Uncle Jim's inventions. Margaret had been born with hair and eyes so incredibly black, and with such a dark though temporary down on her chubby body, that Uncle Jim had roared, with a burst of delighted laughter: "Why, the little beggar's as black as pitch!"

And Pitch Black she had remained, despite all family edicts and prohibitions against it.

Suddenly, now, she appeared, leading Harold by an unwilling hand. Harold grinned with embarrassment, and pulled his hand away when they came into the room, but Pitch imperiously seized it again.

"Margaret, this is your cousin Georgie," said Uncle Jim, bouncing George on one knee and setting him with mighty hands to his feet on the floor. "Come and kiss him—if you can catch him. He doesn't like kissing girls; he's just like his uncle."

George saw her coming toward him, her long raven-black hair in ringlets, her glowing molten eyes so black they looked unnatural, her cheeks of a perfection that escaped his inexperienced eyes, and a mouth that smiled widely. She was his own age in years, but seemed far ahead of him in her childish sophistication. She was, thought George in a panic, the loveliest little girl that ever was. He thought of all the girls he had known at school, and they were dumpy and plain by comparison. This deduction stammered through his mind in blushing confusion, and not in any semblance of order.

Pitch came to him unhesitatingly, with no shyness, but with all the confidence and candour of her feminine years which equalled his in numbers and therefore surpassed them by far. George balanced on his heels, looked frantically left and right, saw no avenue of escape, grinned foolishly, and choked on words. In one more second it happened. Pitch put soft little arms around George's neck and kissed him with vigour. Ringlets of her hair brushed his cheek, soft as the spring breezes in the woods where he had held his church.

"Hello, Geo'ge," she whispered caressingly. She slid her hands down and took George's, stood back a little, looked into his eyes seriously, calmly, appraisingly, appeared satisfied and drew a long happy sigh.

George was bedevilled by such behaviour. He found voice at last. "Gee," he said. And in the deep dark wells of her eyes, he saw the tiny twin images of his own face.

"Guess she's gonna marry you, awright, Geordie," said Billy. His face had been working, a sure sign that he had something important.

A shout of laughter greeted this. Pitch dropped George's hands and whirled on her impertinent younger brother. "Billy! That's an aw-ful thing to say!"

"Well," Billy defended, "you saidja would if you liked him, now dincha?"

George's face flamed as if on fire. There was a tumult like a thunderstorm in his head. Pitch took George in tow firmly and without consulting his wishes. From then on he was to know that she would have her way at all times.

"She's been taking singing lessons from the school teacher," Aunt Sadie said when they had gone. "He boards here, and says she has a voice."

Modesty forbade Aunt Sadie to say more, but she could have added without suspicion of a mother's boasting that her child's voice was phenomenal, amazed all who heard it, and was far ahead of her tender years. Also phenomenal was her imperious will and her gift of imposing it on people—and George, had he been gifted to read the future, might have taken a fatalistic comfort in that at least.