Читать книгу The Sojourner - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 13

Table of Contents

McCarthy was playing his fiddle from the wintergreen beside the bog. The last of the hayers had gone home in creaking wagons, whistling to be done so early of an August day. Ase stood alone in the high south opening of the hay mow. The new-mown timothy and clover smelled as sweet as honey. The late afternoon sun reached into it, as though long fingers fondled golden hair. Ase liked the color and texture of hay at any time, even toward the end of its life, when brown and dry as an old woman. It was most pleasant at this moment of its fresh cutting, piled thick and yellow in the big shadowy loft. Soon the mice would breed there and squeak and scurry, the barn cats would climb the ladder to hunt them, the hens would leave their own house with its trim rows of troughs to steal their nests in the fragrant softness, having at last to be helped down ignominiously with their broods of downy biddies, to more conventional quarters.

McCarthy’s fiddle grew harsher, the sound like robins chirping. Ase smiled. Tim was signaling him to join him with his flute. A week of good work was over. His winter wheat had ripened early, the thrashers had come, a twenty of them, the days had been filled with the rich noise and confusion of the thrashing machine, the talk and roars of laughter of the neighbor men come to help, and since other wheat was not yet ready, they had stayed on to help Ase with his haying. He would join his help to the others, on other farms, a little later. Single-handed he had raised a huge stand of heavy-headed wheat and could afford next year a hired hand of his own. Wheat was bringing more than two dollars a bushel, and after saving out next year’s seed and enough to take to the mill for the grinding of his own flour, with middlings and good bran left over for his stock, and paying the miller his tithe of the grain, he would have several hundred bushels to sell for cash.

He took his flute from a broad beam in the hay mow. He played a few notes on it. They fluttered like the cry of turtledoves, joining the robins. He walked slowly up the sheep-lane, up through the high south pasture, toward the bog.

The scent of the wintergreen, crushed by Tim’s sitting, met him, along with Tim’s dog. He stooped under the low hanging hemlock boughs and dropped down on the dark redolent carpet beside his friend. The spot, so close to the menacing bog, was secret and satisfying. From the high, shaded place he could see the entire farm, with the great square house looking white in the sunlight, and far away. An odor stronger than the wintergreen came to him. McCarthy was drinking again.

Tim said plaintively, “Fancy now, the first time we’ve been to play together since the past sweet springtime.”

Ase put his flute to his lips.

“No, boy, now I have you alone for the instant, I’d be talking a bit instead of making the music. I’m somewhat on the drink, and feeling bold. I’ll be reading your mind and heart, a thing part happy and a thing part sad.”

Ase stroked the head of the white dog and waited. It came to him that he could only be at ease with those who read his mind and heart and spoke aloud for him, where he was unable to speak for himself. Benjamin had sometimes done this for him. This little Irishman, twice his age, often did so, too. Nellie read his heart, for all his wordlessness, but he realized with discomfort that the trackless chaos of his mind had for her no meaning. He corrected himself. It had had no meaning for Benjamin, nor for McCarthy, either, nor the gypsies. The Old One, yes, and Mink the Indian. Crushing a leaf of wintergreen between his strong fingers, listening for what McCarthy, drunken but yet wise, might have to say, he was swept by a wave of loneliness.

Tim said, “You’re after being so young, for the things have come to you. You have the grand pretty wife, the right one for you, and the baby son. You’re by way of being prosperous, and you’ll be needing the prosperity, for one reason and another, the new babes that will be coming, and the brother. Aye, the brother.”

He reached behind him and took a long pull from his jug.

“The brother. And the mother—. Now well I know, to cast a slur on a lad’s mother is to have him at the throat. I’d not be doing that. ’Tis plain you love the woman, for all the harm she’s doing to you, and ’tis this harm of which I’d be speaking. Say nothing, me boy-o, but let me tell it as I see it.”

McCarthy had never before gone so far. The hostility between him and Amelia had been quiet and tacit. It seemed to Ase that he must stop his friend at once, for loyalty to his mother, but as always, he could not answer.

“So, my Ase-one, you have the mother grieving for the other son, and she will be making trouble for you and the sweet Nellie until the end of her life. And what frets me, she’ll be having you feeling yourself the hired man on your own property.”

Ase knew instantly and unhappily that Nellie had talked with Tim.

Tim continued, “Your mother tells it up and down, not open, but sly-like, how you’re doing the fine job for Benjamin, and it’s pleased and astonished he’ll be on his return to take over, at the richness building, the new orchard and all. Now I’d not see your heart be broken along with your back. I’m full of ideas, and one is to have it out with the old harridan—excuse me, ’twas me brother’s word. Make her sign papers if needs be, not to find your wife and babes by the side of the road one fine day.”

McCarthy took another swig.

“You’d not spend the best of your life, would you, working as you work, on land you held but temporary?”

Tim had opened a door to the small dark room he had been avoiding. Ase entered it with relief. He had only half asked himself too many questions. For all his joy in Nellie and the child, in the crops like miracles, the orchard taking hold of the earth with strong roots and young exultant branches, he had suffered from his mother’s hints and secret smilings. The first unfaced question had been actually of her sanity. To deny facts, to insist on fancies, was this what made for madness? It seemed to him that every man and woman must do this to some degree, must refuse in the privacy of the mind the unacceptable, taking for truth in the heart the longed-for and desirable. No, he decided, his mother was not truly mad. She had an obsessive love for her absent elder son, but why not? Benjamin drew such love, as he knew for himself. And it was not for him, the younger, quite accidentally unloved, to condemn her vagaries.

He pulled a leaf of wintergreen and crushed and tasted it. McCarthy and the white dog sat quiet. Ase dismissed the next question as he asked it. Ben would not be ever coming home. Here was perhaps the greatest anguish, for in his deepest love and yearning for his brother, he feared that Benjamin was a lost soul, would always wander, strong and beautiful and admired, incompetent, reckless and futile.

But suppose he was mistaken, that Ben did return, either prosperous as he had boasted, or broken by life. Why, then, the way was clear. Nothing would give him greater content than to share all he had made, had built, with his brother. Powerful or crushed, Ben was so intimate a part of him that it made no difference, Ben could receive all the enriched land or share it, it was all one, when a man so loved his brother.

The land. Ase stroked the little dog. The land. Why, any man had only temporary rights on the earth. His mother’s talk of control, of ownership, Tim’s talk of legal rights and papers, these were nonsense. No man owned the land. He wondered again how long the earth had existed before the creation, emergence, evolution or what-not, of humans. He had hoped to find the answer in his copy of “Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy and Poetical Geography,” but while he still pored of nights over the volume, he was left unsatisfied. He asked himself now what he expected of the land. A thought brushed him briefly as to what he expected of life itself and he dismissed it. But the land. It was not what he expected of it, but what it required of him. He felt himself on firm ground. The land asked to be worked, to be taken care of properly, and in return it would nourish all men, as long as they were indeed its brothers.

McCarthy said, “You are the most wordless man ever, but do be saying in words, would you waste yourself working temporary?”

Ase said, “Why, yes. I would.”

He could not understand his mother, nor even his wife, but he had such pity for his mother, such adoration for Nellie, that he would give his best to everything, land, mother, wife, child and vanished brother, to go on steadily. His way was clear. He put his flute to his lips.

McCarthy said, “Then the saints preserve you. I’ve no more to say.”

He tuned his fiddle and lifted his bow. He led off in an Irish lilt. By tacit consent the friends played the gayest of tunes. There was no need today of the sad sweet songs that often eased their shared melancholy. When the sun dropped low west of the bog, Ase went to his belated chores. McCarthy clutched his jug in one arm, his fiddle in the other, and staggered home behind the little white dog. The dog watched over his shoulder, for there were times when his master did not make it.