Читать книгу The Sojourner - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 3

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Three crows flew low over the fresh mound in the Linden burying-ground, dark as the thoughts of the three unmourning mourners. These were the widow, Amelia Linden, and the two tall sons, Benjamin and Asahel. The funeral assembly had gone. The clomp of horses’ feet and the rattle of wheels were faint down the frozen lane. There was a pure instant of silence. Then a wind keened far off in the west, nosed across the hills and leaped into the clearing, snapping its fangs at the limbs of the oak trees. The last leaves shivered to earth and scurried like thin brown rats across the grave.

Amelia turned the black veil back from her face, and walked to the carriage. She settled herself in the front seat.

“Benjamin, take the reins.”

Asahel moved to the heads of the span of horses to unhitch them from a cedar post. He stroked the velvet muzzles and the horses nickered. He slid off the blankets, and placing them in the rear of the carriage, found his elder brother sitting stiffly with folded arms in the back of the seat. His mother’s face was gray. He waited for her to move into the driver’s seat. The untethered horses sidled restlessly. When young Dan lunged and Amelia did not stir, Asahel jumped clumsily into the carriage and jerked the reins. The team broke into an unseemly trot for home.

The bereavement of life rather than grief for death chilled Asahel’s bones. There was no sorrow among the three in the carriage for the harsh, snarling man left behind under the wings of crows, except the sorrow all men feel face to face with death, even that of a stranger dead on the turn-pike, which is an unassuageable anguish for themselves, the evidence of their own destinies. Yet this was a moment, surely, when mother and sons should draw close together, pile high the barricade, build up the fire, against the outer darkness. Instead, his mother and Benjamin were still separated by the violent quarrel he had heard late last night from his bedroom. He had not heard the words, he could not guess what they might quarrel about, but it was the first time his mother had not found her elder pleasing in her sight. Asahel had hovered for his twenty years outside her adoration, like a shy and hungry dog that skirts a lighted house, longing to be called in for a plate of food and a few caresses. Because he loved Benjamin too, he had no sense of loss for himself, was warmed when his mother’s eyes lighted for his brother, and asked only to be present. Now with his father’s death something had come between these two, life was hurt more cruelly. There were no longer Benjamin’s bright sun with its two satellites, Amelia powerful and near, he far and futile, but three cold stones pendulous in space.

The November gale caught them full at the turn into the Linden place. The time was late afternoon, but sky and landscape were as gray as though there had never been a sun and so there was no sun for setting. The house loomed large and bleak on its rise above the road. Its windowed eyes were blank. The low scudding clouds seemed to catch and tatter on the two tall brick chimneys. Asahel drove the carriage up the drive to the side and stopped. Amelia waited for Benjamin to help her down. He did not move. She stepped out then and took the graveled path to the door, her billowing black skirts flattened against her thighs.

Asahel turned the horses around and drove across the road to the lower-lying barns. Here Benjamin got out and rolled open a wide sliding door. Asahel drove up the earth ramp and over the rattling board floor into the dusk. The brothers took down overalls from nails on a wall and pulled them over their good clothes. They unharnessed the horses together. Asahel led young Dan to the stock stalls on a lower level and the mare followed. Benjamin pitched down hay while Asahel measured out oats. Only one cow was fresh at the moment and Asahel milked her, stripping her carefully. Benjamin scattered fodder in the lot for the assorted cows and calves. The sheep had not yet been brought in from the hill pasture for the winter.

Nothing remained to be fed but the hogs and poultry. The chickens, guinea hens, geese, ducks and turkeys, always ravenous, assumed from the color of the sky that it was evening and made a raucous crying. Benjamin brought them grain while Asahel took the foaming bucket of milk to the house and returned with skimmed milk and slops for the hogs. The brothers worked together smoothly, Benjamin quickly and impatiently, Asahel with deliberation. Benjamin was finished first. He leaned on the rail of the pig-pen, waiting, Asahel hoped, to speak with him, to tell him of the quarrel. Benjamin had nothing to offer. He was perhaps avoiding facing his mother alone, or there might be nothing, after all, to say.

The two young men shared as few similar genes as was possible, still to be blood brothers. The differences in physique made folk say, “Ben favors the Lindens,” and “Ase isn’t like any of the family, either side.” Benjamin was hard-muscled, six feet tall, quick-fighting, quick-dancing, moving lightly like fighter or dancer, rocking on the balls of his feet, with panther-colored hair and green eyes, so that all his effect was of one of the great cats. Asahel, twenty years to his twenty-three, reared, six-feet-four, like a gaunt sapling, over his brother, and as though in apology for his assumption of the greater height, carried himself stooped and gangling. His hair was black, with an Indian straightness, his face was high-cheek-boned, his deep-set eyes were gray with black striations. He was all slowness and awkwardness, his big feet a nuisance rather than a help. His hands, of terrific strength, hung like gnarled pine stumps at the ends of long bony arms.

The disparities of the brothers’ minds and spirits were profound.

Benjamin had had four years at the Academy, while Asahel, after the simple schooling of the one-room stone schoolhouse two miles down the road, had been kept at home to work. Yet it was Benjamin who remembered nothing from his textbooks, scarcely read the weekly county paper, and Asahel who knew those books secretly by heart, and read, as laboriously as he did everything else, any scrap of paper with printing on it, poring hungrily over the magic of words. It seemed to him, who was all but inarticulate, that if he could read enough of them he would know the answers to the questions that tormented him. He had no way of knowing that wiser men had asked those questions, which never had been, perhaps never would be, answered. It was Benjamin who was wild, who ran away periodically, who returned with empty pockets and not even a tale to tell. It was Asahel, who had been no more than twenty miles from home, who traveled in his mind so far that those who thought they knew him would have been terrified by his consorting with the stars.

Benjamin hesitated at the kitchen door.

He turned abruptly to his younger brother.

“Listen, Ase. You’ve got to back me up. I’m leaving for good.”

This, then, had been the quarrel.

Asahel’s first sickness was for his mother. In the barren ground of her life, of her own character, Benjamin had been the bright tropical bloom that satisfied and startled, making the desert not impossible. Only Benjamin had brightened those hard black eyes, only Benjamin had brought music to that low, cold voice. He had seen his mother stiffen in her chair on a winter night, thinking she heard the loved one’s step on the icy road, sit back trembling because it was not he. He had seen her lift her arms, like a bird taking happy wing, when at last he came, Benjamin, he came. Then he was sick for himself. His heart, too, had beat so fast that he was dizzy, when Benjamin came home. And this was not for any meagreness of life and thought without his brother, but because of his own gift for love and for devotion. It did not seem to him this bond could be one-sided.

He washed out the empty swill buckets at the rear pump. Now was the moment to call on words, to find the proper ones to hold his brother home. The place would be desolate without him. He could not let him go, to roam the world in trouble. He turned the buckets upside down to dry. He followed Benjamin, wordless, into the kitchen.

Part of the ample funeral foods brought by relatives and neighbors sat on the white-clothed table in the dining-room beyond. Coffee simmered on the back of the kitchen range. A pitcher of buttermilk was cool and fresh from the stone cellar. The brothers washed their hands at the cistern pump and dried them on the roller towel. Their mother poured coffee and led the way to the table. Benjamin picked and chose from his favorite dishes, but ate little, his mind and body restless. Asahel heaped his plate at random and plodded away, as at a job of haying. One food was almost the same to him as another. He was seldom conscious of hunger, and he ate prodigiously, filling his stomach slowly, steadily, like an ox, until the moment came when he realized, with a mild surprise, that he could literally hold no more. He was the delight of fine cooks, who took his absent-minded capacity for appreciation.

Amelia said, “Asahel, if you can bring yourself to finish eating, I need your help. Benjamin has something stupid to say.”

“I’ve told him, Mother. Ase understands. He agrees. Don’t take it out on him, when it’s settled.”

“Oh. Settled. He’s perfectly contented, I suppose, to farm it alone. There isn’t enough money, you know, to hire a man to replace you. This is a three-man farm, at the least. Now it’s to be down to one boy. Or am I expected to work in the fields?”

The last mouthful of pie stuck in Asahel’s throat. His mother shocked him. How could she bring herself to put Benjamin’s leaving on such a basis, when he knew her heart, as his, was crying, “Son and brother, we cannot face life without you, because of love, never because of a living!”

She said, “Asahel, do you care to speak for yourself, or will you have another piece of pie?”

They were both looking at him, each asking in their ways, one bitter, the other eager, for his support.

Benjamin said, “Ase, you know I’ve always hated farming. I wouldn’t even be any help to you. I’d be leaving when you needed me most. I can’t change it. I’ll admit it now, I was afraid of Father. I kept coming back because I was more afraid of him away, than here. Ase, you’re a man to plow and sow and reap. You’ll manage without me. I’ll give you my share in the farm. Just let me go.”

Amelia smoothed the black funereal satin over her thin breast.

“You forget that the place is mine. Neither of you can give away a share he doesn’t own. Your father was a difficult man, but he saw his duty, and the farm is mine, all mine, until I say otherwise. I shall not release you, Benjamin, from your share. It will be yours as long as I live. You can’t run away from that. Well, Asahel?”

Still, he could not speak. Benjamin pushed away from the table and went up to his room. He returned to the silence with his valise, his coat over his arm.

He said, “How much money do we have?”

Amelia went to her downstairs bedroom and came again to the table with a tin box, and opened it. She counted out the paper bills and the silver. She set aside a portion.

“This should cover the funeral expenses and a tombstone.”

The remainder amounted to little over six hundred dollars. Benjamin pocketed a third of it. On a scrap of paper he scrawled:

“Rec. of Amelia and Asahel Linden payment in full for share in Linden farm. Signed, Benjamin Linden.”

Amelia stared at the paper, then threw it in the door of the red pot-bellied stove.

She turned away into her room and closed the door behind her. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders.

“She thinks I’ll be coming back again. Maybe some day, Ase, when I’m rich.”

He took from his pocket their father’s gold hunter’s watch, given him by Amelia before the funeral.

“Keep this. No, take it.”

He turned to go.

“Don’t hitch up. I’d rather walk. I’ll catch the night train west from the village. I’m a dog to leave you, Ase.”

Asahel followed him out of the front door, across the porch, down the steps, over the lawn, to the road. The road ran level for a way, rose a little, dipped down to the valley where the stream ran under a wooden bridge, wound its way four miles to the village of Peytonville, to the train, to the West, to the unknown and far away.

He wanted to say, “Don’t leave me. Take me with you.”

Benjamin said, “Don’t come any farther.”

He held out his strong arms and drew him tight. Asahel trembled.

“Better marry Nellie Wilson in the spring, boy. Then you won’t miss me so much.”

Asahel said at last, “I’ll never be done missing you.”

Sunset had come, yet there was still no sun, only livid and evil streaks in the west, where Benjamin was going. The bond was a stout cord that tore him and would not release him, and he was drawn by it to the little rise. Benjamin was a small figure on the wooden bridge far below. Asahel lifted his arm and waved, but his brother did not look back. He turned back toward home. There was now no color in the sky. The world was fast darkening. Everything was retreating, going away into distant places, and he was left behind, to plow, to sow, to reap.