Читать книгу The Sojourner - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 11

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Apple McCarthy seemed to be made unhappy by Nellie’s breakfast. He eyed sorrowfully the pile of griddle cakes on his plate. He poured maple syrup over them until his plate ran with gold. He took a tentative forkful, laid down his fork, swallowed a mouthful of the strong coffee lightened with heavy spooned cream, and reached for the platter of savory sausages. He chewed, staring at nothing, then pushed his plate aside.

“ ’Tis punishment,” he said, “nothing but punishment.”

Nellie lifted her eyebrows.

“What’s the complaint about my cooking, Mr. McCarthy?”

The little man beat his chest with his fists.

“ ‘Complaint!’ says she! ‘Complaint!’ ’Tis the cruelty of life I complain of, to be in Heaven and then kicked out again. Lucifer, that’s me, Lucifer McCarthy. If I could leave me stummick here behind me, mayhap I could bear the road.”

Nellie laughed.

“That’s one way of asking for more hot cakes,” she said, and went to the smoking griddle on the range.

McCarthy said, “Look now, Asahel Linden. Would this be fair or would it not be fair? I to stay a bit to help you plant the fine young trees, whilst Mistress Linden sets a place for me at your table. No charge on either side.”

Ase said, “The work is worth good wages, but I’m short on ready money.”

“ ’Tis a deal, then.”

He buttered his fresh six-inch stack of griddle cakes.

“Now I can eat me fill with a clear conscience.”

He sighed.

“Where on the blessed earth would I be getting better board and company? After all, I but part with the little trees to pass the time and make me simple living.”

It was agreed that haste must be made on the planting. The saplings had been long on the road. McCarthy had kept them moist in their burlap wrappings. They were instinct with life, the tight buds were aware of April, and if the stirring roots did not soon find foothold and nourishment, an orchard would die a-borning. With time to spare, it would have been best first to plow the entire acreage, but the loamy soil was soft with spring, grass and weeds yet tender, and Ase began the digging of holes to receive the beginnings of trees. Apple McCarthy followed behind him, expert with the setting, the tamping down of the earth. Working back toward the log cabin at the end of the second row, Ase looked up to see his mother staring from the window. She appeared at the house for the noon dinner, but Apple had given out of inventions concerning her Benjamin. She queried him closely as to whether Benjamin was certain already to have left Ohio. She had been thinking, she said, that she might ride there in the apple wagon. Something had prevented her son’s return, an illness that he was hiding, or a temporary lack of funds. Or if he was on the way to making his fortune, he would rejoice to have her join him, at least for a while.

“I promise, Ma’am, he was leaving for westward close behind me, and where you’d be finding him now, no man can tell you.”

She did not appear in the house again.

The planting went fast and well. The completed field had a strange appearance.

Apple said to Nellie in private, “At the moment, ’tis as though the old harridan in the cabin had raised a crop of witches’ brooms.”

The geometric pattern of stark black twigs was more of graveyard than of nursery. Fire might have swept an orchard, leaving this stricken residue. But the fire was in the mounting sun, the sun unwrapped the sheathed buds with hot fingers, showers came daily, the roots clutched and swelled, and one morning Ase saw under the early mist a drift of palest green. The young orchard was in leaf, it had come through, it was alive.

Apple McCarthy was reluctant to move on. Nellie complained of the delay to her own kitchen garden and took him for helper there. He used his horse and Ase’s Brinly plow to turn the ground. She was ambitious, and after the past Linden leanness the fenced plot she planted seemed enormous. There were carrots and beets, cabbages and turnips and rutabagas, Irish potatoes and sweet, peas, tomatoes and lettuces, onions and sweet corn, pole beans and simlins and patty-pan squash and cucumbers. Ase’s commercial planting would provide her with string beans, and pumpkins and Hubbard squash were to be planted with his field corn. She drove over the countryside in the light buggy collecting seeds and slips of herbs from her friends, mint and thyme, sage and dill, rose geranium, sweet lavender and rosemary.

Ase plowed the apple orchard and sowed buckwheat broadcast. Nellie turned from the kitchen garden to flowers, and Apple McCarthy said it must be his last bit of helping, for the pot-belly her table had given him was in the way of his stooping. She was up with the morning star, cooking breakfast by lamplight, and by the time the birds were twittering sleepy fragments of song and the pale early sun washed the polished floor and bright braided rugs with silver, breakfast was over, Ase sent to Amelia with a special tray, and Nellie was out of doors, digging as busily as the robins pulling earthworms near her. Ase lingered in his coming and going, to watch her, round and plump, her curls damp over her intense, flushed face.

Tim McCarthy came every evening. The twilights lengthened. The yard grass grew thickly and Ase herded the sheep across the road to crop it smooth. Ase and Nellie and the brothers sat on the sweet grass to play and sing. Shep beat his plumed tail beside Nellie and her mother cat, bulging again, came from the barn to sit heavily in her lap and purr. A lamp burned late in the cabin on the brightest nights, and if Amelia heard and hated the sound of music and of laughter, she gave no sign. Ase went several times to say goodnight to her, but as his footsteps approached her door, the light went out and there was no answer to his rap.

June came in, the buckwheat made a tapestry for the embroidery of the full-leaved apple saplings, Nellie’s garden was up, with satisfaction she picked the first greens and the first early flower. Apple McCarthy hitched his well-fattened horse to his wagon and was at last on his way, woeful in parting. The summer passed in hard work, for Ase was single handed at heavy crops that needed at least another hand. Nellie was in a frenzy of canning and preserving. The mother cat littered behind the wood box in the kitchen and Nellie moved in a welter of kittens until the most ambitious climbed to the table and upset the cream, when the whole batch was relegated again to the barn.

In August Nellie informed Ase that she was with child. She had suspected it a month ago but was only now certain. The birth would come sometime the following April. He was profoundly stirred, but she was as casual as though she announced a pleasant morning. A woman was wed, she tended her household, she bore her children. She laughed at his gravity and tweaked his long nose.

“If you’d worked a little harder,” she said, “it would have started earlier. I’d rather have my babies come in the winter and have it out of the way by spring.”

He supposed that the large size of the Wilson family made birth to her more commonplace. He asked her permission to give his mother the good news. She nodded.

“Sooner or later something will bring her around,” she said. “Maybe this will do it.”

He found Amelia dipping water from the spring by the cabin. He laid his hand on her shoulder. He could say only the few necessary words.

“Mother, Nellie’s going to have a baby.”

She lifted the dipper to her thin lips, then poured the remainder of the clear icy water over her hands.

“Of course. I told you myself. Very soon now, too.”

She leaned over the pool and in its mirror carefully arranged her crow-black hair.