Читать книгу Little Man - George Herbert Sallans - Страница 11

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George brushed one side of King, and Harold brushed the other. King was the Indian pony that came by magic into their lives. Mostly black, but with grey speckles like a pepper-and-salt suit of the times, was King. Fleet-footed, Roman-nosed as the Indians who raised his forebears, straight-necked, stout-hearted little scrub, he was five years old. Uncle Jim produced him from somewhere, out of a herd that came back from distant, wooded, winter-grazing grounds. King had the gift belonging only to native horses; he could run at full gallop across the prairies and never step in a hidden badger hole. Some instinct as old as time guided him, and he could jump sideways even in the air to avoid them.

King, according to Harry, was a brother of Blackie, but Uncle Jim told Daddy confidentially that the parentage of both of them was one of life's unknown things. Indian ponies don't have parents, they just happen, he said. So far as white people knew, there had always been Indian ponies. Nitchies, the farmers called them, and gave them no pedigree or social status.

"Guess the boys'll want a pony, Charley," Uncle Jim had said. "Just tell them you got him somewhere—" And then, when Daddy started to protest: "Oh, well, if you feel that way about it, just gimme a cheque on the Snow Bank." And he made the spring air dance with his laughter.

George had the brush, Harold the curry comb. King's hair was long and matted like the prairie wool. He had need of a thick coat in that climate, for the thermometer dipped down sometimes to forty below zero. But these hardy animals of the plains roamed in herds, pawed their way through the crusted snow into the softer mass beneath, down to the grass that lay packed and preserved within it. That was their winter diet. For water they ate snow. A tough breed was King.

"You can't kill a western horse," Uncle Jim said.

George and Harold had King tied to a door post on the sunny side of the log and sod stable. Daddy was busy with other horses, clipping their long wool off them, for the spring was here and the sun streamed down bright and warm. The snow was peeling away from the fields, and patches of bare ground were everywhere.

Thirty yards from the stable stood the house, also of logs, its chinks filled with rough home-made plaster, a solemn house of four rooms, two downstairs, two up, with a chimney stuck through the centre of the roof. Daddy said you could spit through the walls, but though George had gone around to the back and spent an exhausting half-hour, he secured no evidence that Daddy was right.

They were living in their new home on Uncle Jim's "West Half," four miles from Uncle Jim's place. It was a farm of three hundred and twenty acres adjoining other lands of Uncle Jim's, one he had bought from a German who'd given up the idea of the soil and gone into the nearest town to build houses for a living. Daddy had rented the farm. Uncle Jim furnished the place with implements, wagon, sleigh, hay rack, and supplied the horses to operate them.

"Pay me when you can, Charley. I'll take the payments out of the crops," he said, and grinned. A fabulous man was Uncle Jim. Charley Battle thus became a share cropper, in those beneficent days when it connoted no hardship but only an easy way to become a squire and a capitalist.

Over in the house was Aunt Mary. It was a memorable thrill to George and Harold when they learned she had agreed to come and live with them, for Jean's junior years fell short of the needs of a farm housekeeper. For too long she had been a child without a childhood, and now she was to have her release and enjoy the freedom of her age.

So here was Aunt Mary with them again. Aunt Mary with her sewing machine and her songs and her voice that wavered slightly off key. Aunt Mary who used to put drops in their eyes at night, then come in the morning with a wet cloth when they woke terrified to find they could not open the lids. Aunt Mary who made the hideous doses of epsom salts.

The same Aunt Mary. They whooped with joy when Daddy brought them from Uncle Jim's with the last load of the furnishings they would have. There was Aunt Mary at the door throwing water into the roadway from a wash basin. But to their amazement her voice greeted them harshly, an irritated note that was new and alien. She scolded them for tracking mud onto the bare board floors, for throwing their coats and caps on the floor, for racing through the house upstairs and down, "making a din that would drive a body mad."

George had an uncomprehending surprise, a disappointment that he could not fathom. This moment they had so counted on, when they would enter their new house, not so nice as Uncle Jim's, but their own home, back with Aunt Mary just like down east. And now Aunt Mary didn't seem the same. There were sharp times ahead with Aunt Mary.

Grooming King, George's mouth worked as he thought with mingled terror and exhilaration of school. Tomorrow he and Harold must start, and they would drive King with the buckboard. Maybe Harold would let him drive for a while.

It was two miles to school. The kids there seemed big and rough and they played unmercifully, from what he had seen on his visits with Harry. Of course Harold could look after himself, for he was bigger, and the kids, boys and girls alike, respected Pitch, small as she was.

"I guess they're pretty scared of Uncle Jim," George thought. Harry upset that theory, for he rough-and-tumbled with all of them. Harry wasn't shy. He was young and small compared to Harold, but he never seemed to get hurt.

George already knew the teacher, who boarded at Uncle Jim's, but he had little respect for him—a man, he figured, doing a woman's work. A dandy, he sniffed, and when he came to your desk he smelled like talcum powder.

"Aw, he talks law-de-daw," snorted George, with make-shift bravery. What really bothered George was that Mr. Henderson taught Pitch singing and made her talk that silly way. Mr. Henderson did, too. He didn't sound his R's like everybody else did. For all his talcum and slurred R's, Mr. Henderson had an uncomfortable way of barking suddenly when some pupil didn't behave. And it was no satisfaction to think of him as a sissy, either, for Mr. Henderson made home runs at baseball in the Westview team workouts which had already started. And he had a reputation for out-skating the huskiest young farmers when they played hockey on the outdoor ice in winter.

Later that year, George rode King bareback—because they had no saddle. King's little backbone was mercifully padded with the muscle of his hardy breed. His back was rounded now, in the early summer, and so sleek was his hair, growing from the stubble of his spring clipping, that it shone in the sun under George's brushing.

The first time George trotted King a jolt went up his spine that made his teeth chatter. The horizon started going up and down crazily. King trotted serenely along the pasture fence. When he came to the corner near the barn he turned abruptly, as nitchies do. That is, he did not round a corner, he suddenly ceased going one way and by some reflex of his muscles, after the manner of jack-rabbits and without a pause, he went at right angles. It was a native trick with the Indian ponies of the prairies, an art which unfortunately has all but died out. When King turned the corner, therefore, George didn't. That is to say, George continued in a straight line, fell on his head, and stars flashed. King stopped and ate grass.

"Doggone yuh!" said George, and repeated the experiment.

It was painful, but he who learns to ride bareback learns the hard way. At supper-time Aunt Mary demanded crossly and nervously:

"What on earth's the matter with you!"

"Oh, nawthin', jiss nawthin'," said George.

Green heavy carpets grew swiftly over the fields, the fields that Daddy and a hired man had plowed and harrowed. The sleek sod was giving its energy now, seducing the young roots of the wheat into its depths, feeding with the salts and the iron and the lime of its store, chemicals that had gathered there for thousands of years while a wiser, happier race of people had roamed it, carrying their villages with them.

They were fabulous men to George, these farmers of the plains. They bore their nobility with a rustic good nature, and next to the idolatry he reserved for Uncle Jim, he held them all in awe. But they were not all good, for he found devils among them, too.

Johnny Wilbur, their next door neighbour to the west, pulled up at the Battles' door one day with a team of horses, both in a lather of perspiration. The Battles had seen him coming down the road on the dead run. The off-horse was next to the house as they stopped, and George saw with horror that one of his shoulders was raw, that his whole side and rump were lined with welts. The horses trembled with tired muscles when Johnny stopped them.

"How's chances for a drink o' water? Thanks!" Johnny grabbed the tin dipper in the pail at the door, drank, dashed it back into the pail. He smelled high of liquor and tobacco, Daddy eyed the horses with a strained, narrow-eyed expression, a frozen toothy smile on his face.

"Well, guess I'll be goin'," yelled Johnny.

He swung himself into the wagon, grabbed the reins in one hand, the whip in the other, swung it wide in the air, and cracked it like a gunshot.

"Giddap, you—" yelled Johnny, using a filthy word.

"Hey, Snort, git int'l it, yah bastard!" he roared again, and brought the lash down over Snort's body with a searing cruel blow. Snort reared and plunged wildly into his collar.

George ran suddenly out into the road and shook tiny fists into the sky. "Yer a bastard yerself, you dirty know-nothin'!" His vocabulary failed him in his childish rage, and the wagon raced away with its heavy load, and went bumping and rumbling down the trail.

"George, come back here!" Daddy's voice came in stern anger. "Don't you dare say those words. Come here."

White-hot and shaking, George came stumbling back. "He's a pig an' a sow," he sobbed. "He's a dirty sow an' I hope God kills him!"

Through a torrent of tears he saw Daddy pick up a switch from the ground, and reality burst on him in a white terror that banished even the agony of the horses.

"I didn't mean ut!" he cried, and started to run to the barn. "I didn't mean to say a bad word."

"Come back here, Georgie!"

"I won't—I won't—"

Strong hands caught him by the seat of the pants, whirled him on his stomach over Daddy's prayer-hardened knee; down came the pants. The sun beat on George's backside. Then swish, swish, swish, the hot stinging switch on his bare skin. George yowled, more frightened than hurt. Daddy set him down on his feet with a jolt.

"Now you come with me, young fellow," he said sternly. He left George no choice, but drew him by his arm to the kitchen door. "Give me that soap, Mary."

Dutifully Mary snatched up the washing soap from beside the washbasin outside the door. George held his hands before his mouth.

"No, no, don't!" he sobbed. "Do-ho-hon't. I didn'—Ugh!" The filthy, smelly, home-made, lye-ridden soap was crushed between his teeth. Daddy's eyes bored into him with their righteous flame of indignation.

"Now maybe that will wash the badness out of your mouth," said Daddy in an outraged voice.

"Ph-tha! Ph-tha!" George spat the slimy stuff out of his mouth in a panic of nausea and hatred. He scrambled to his feet and bolted blindly for the door.

"You'd better go to the stable where you belong," said Aunt Mary, with an alert eye on Daddy whose Puritanical rage she thought it well to applaud.

"I hate yuh!" he screamed in a shattered voice, and then he turned and rushed blindly for the barn.

In the red rage that burned him Daddy stood, an accusing figure, a scolding figure who in George's view thought more of his Bible teaching than of his own son. More dimly, Aunt Mary—smirking, afraid of Daddy, always taking Daddy's part, always yapping, always cranky and singing her crazy songs at her sewing machine: "There's a good time coming and it's almost here, but it's been a long time on the—way" Harold—Here George's mind had a hurdle. Yes, even Harold, always getting the best of it. Why didn't they hit Harold with a switch, eh? Why didn't they stuff his mouth with their rotten soap? Because Harold worked on the farm and saved a hired man, thass why!

Well, he'd be mad at all of them. Even Harold, even Pitch. "I'll git on King and I'll ride away so far they'll never find me. They'll be sorry, d-damn them!"

That night at prayers Daddy prayed: "And grant Thy repentance to those who practise cruelty upon Thy creatures, bless and save them ..."

George shifted uneasily on his knees on the hard, slivery floor, and his lips moved. "Damn Johnny Wilbur, yah mean! Bless and save the horses—Oh, Lord, I didn't mean that, honest. Forgive him if you feel you must, Lord. But don't count on me. Nodda bit of it. I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna jiss as sure—"

"For ever and ever. Amen," said Daddy.

Aunt Mary took up her knitting where she'd laid it for prayers, and clicked away with maddening calm, her thoughts masked far behind her wrinkled, discontented face. Harold took the lantern and went out to the barn for a last look at his horses before going to bed.

George finally mustered up voice to say, "G'night."

"Good-night," said Daddy from behind his paper.

"Good-night!" snapped Aunt Mary.

Then George climbed the dark wooden staircase with a mind as black as his attic room. He lay awake till Harold came up and jumped in beside him, then he poured out his whole story in a torrent of passionate whispers.

Harold listened in a silence that might have been sympathy, and was more likely the blissful twilight of thought before a farm boy, up at five a.m., falls into the brief, deep abyss of sleep.

"Yeh," Harold agreed without excitement when George finished. "He's a stinkin' brute, but he's the best pitcher we got on the team. Go ta sleep."

The farmers chafed till the soil could be raked and tortured anew, till they could rush in the seed, then fidget and pray till the wheat sprouts came above the black ground once again.

Swifter still was man's cupidity. Nature, fast, loose and reckless as she was, moved too slowly. Men capitalized and borrowed against the future, made money while it was still in the shot blade of the wheat, spent the farmer's crop before the farmer grew it. Nobody had time to spare.

George, impatient also for his future, reached upward till his father got the habit of saying to people: "Getting as tall as his Daddy." At fifteen George was awkward, big-footed, rough-handed and tanned, dreaming of the day when people would call him "Slim" as they called a long-eared hired man at Uncle Jim's.