Читать книгу The Sojourner - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 4

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On a cold December morning Ase Linden paced slowly, studying them, the acres whose crops must soon be planned for. A dusting of granular snow whirled across the frozen ground ahead of a biting wind. His father’s old buffalo greatcoat hung long and loose on his gaunt frame. His hands were paws in fur-backed leather mittens. A muskrat cap with earmuffs sat low on his head. His deep-set eyes searched the landscape, his long nose sniffed the scent of coming snow, his shaggy-furred shoulders were stooped. He looked a winter-poor bear come wandering from his den. He crossed the road to the south and took shelter for a moment in the lee of the log cabin.

The Linden land was fertile for the most part. Its three hundred acres divided themselves naturally into woods, pastures, and fields suitable for varying crops. A country road bisected the farm. The house sat back from it to the north, the barns to the south. The richest soil lay south and west of the barns. Here the money crops were grown, the beans, the wheat, the potatoes. The land dipped to a willow-bordered stream that ran from east to west, and the cow pasture began beyond the stream. The hill that lifted again, still to the south, was stony and was given over to the sheep. The high extreme southeastern corner of the land consisted of forty acres of wood-lot, from which trees were cut selectively for fuel and for building. The woods ended suddenly and blackly with a hemlock-rimmed bog, from which springs seeped down to join the brook, and so dangerous that a cow breaking loose and wandering there would perish within a few minutes if unnoticed and unrescued. A crystal lake, believed to be bottomless, fed the stream from the east, and the western border became marsh, infested with small rattlers.

The land on the house side of the road ended to the northwest with a smaller wood-lot and with a sugar-bush adequate to supply a family with maple syrup and sugar. Wheat was grown west of the house as well, alternating in years with the southerly field. Rye, oats and barley, corn and buckwheat, were staple crops for home consumption. A small fruit and vegetable garden was near the house to the east, where it received full sun all day. The house itself was large and square, white painted, eared with red chimneys, with a fine fan-lighted doorway carved in a Greek design. It was distinguished, but bleak, uncompromising, needing, Ase recognized, the softening of trees and shrubbery. Across from the house, a few hundred yards west down the road, still stood the original Linden home, a log cabin chinked with white marl, and beside it an icy spring, stone-enclosed.

The wind veered and caught Asahel full and the cabin no longer sheltered him. He moved on slowly, across the level field. There was no living thing in sight. The stock was snug in barn and cote. No sheep nibbled among the granite, no cows drifted across pasture, no horses rolled in clover, no poultry pecked and clattered. The farm was only bare land, frozen clay and loam waiting for new moulding at his hands.

He halted to the south where the field dipped gently to the stream. He heard the muffled rushing of the current under the ice. The willows along the borders tossed scraggled branches like the sparse, whipping hair of hags who had once been beautiful, and by miracle would again be young and garlanded and fair. He turned and looked back toward the cabin, small and huddled at the distance. This level field, he estimated, would run close to twenty acres. In the six weeks since Benjamin’s leaving he had given it special thought. Knowing that Ben was done with the farm, it had seemed to him important that some sections of the Linden land be given over to crops which, once established, would be both profitable and requiring little care. Sizeable fruit orchards were plainly the answer. He visualized here an apple orchard. In spring a pink and white cloud would draw the bees to hum among the blossoms. Birds would nest and sing in the summer greenery. The waxen globes would shine like lamps in autumn, yellow and green and red, windfalls would thud to earth, to lie deep in buckwheat sown broadcast between the rows, to be crushed, wine-scented, in dripping jowls of swine and cattle, to be stung by wasps. The black boughs of apple trees in winter made, he thought, patterns like no other tree.

His father had never planted an orchard. No growing thing was graceless, but that scowling, snarling man, Hiram Linden, had seemed purposely to avoid all crops that flowered in beauty. All were utilitarian, sown with surliness and harvested with oaths. Ase was the first Linden of three generations to consider the earth and its bounty with reverence and affection, to long to adorn it as best he might during his tenure. To the Linden men ahead of him, it had been only a means of subsistence. His father, his brother, had been not even grateful that the rich loam made the tilling so little arduous, the lush harvests so rewarding.

The apples here, then, he decided, if his mother would allow it. He moved down the slope to the brook, crossed carefully on the icy stepping stones, trudged up the farther slope to the sheep pasture and halted again. Because of the granite out-croppings, no other use could be made of the high expanse. Sheep were profitable in any case and the flock might well be enlarged. In that case, his mother would have to permit him a dog, a sheep dog. He had never had one, where every farm lad had his own. Amelia, through distaste an indifferent housekeeper, had always forbidden it on the excuse that she would have no dirty animal following to the kitchen door and tracking up the woodshed. He had accepted the verdict, as he must, puzzled and unsatisfied. The truth unguessed, or unacknowledgable, was that she would admit no living thing save one to her affection, to her tolerance or compassion. The fire within her was a hoarded thing, nurtured jealously, an iron box of hot embers for the warming of the hands of one. That one was Benjamin. Ase had gone his boy’s way in loneliness, tagging hopefully after his brother, longing to be tagged in turn by some soft-eyed mongrel, equally faithful and adoring.

He opened a gate into the stock lane. Well, he thought, perhaps soon he would have his dog. It was not so important, now he was a man. The wind whipped under the buffalo coat and chilled his long scant-fleshed legs. There was no need to go to the end of the lane to the hemlocks and the bog. He had known for a year or more that it was time to begin cutting from the wood-lot adjoining the hemlocks, to give a rest for growth to the lot to the northwest of the house. There was no need, either, to pace the southeast acres above Pip Lake. They would be required for some time for wheat and corn. Eventually, he would like to try there a small peach orchard, increasing it from year to year if it thrived. The rounded summit was probably too exposed to the cold, but it seemed to him that the slope rolling toward the brook and the barns, and the eastern, dipping to the lake, offered protection for such delicate fruit and trees. This soil was pebbly, with a high admixture of clay.

He turned down the lane to the barns. He would have a look at the stock in passing. The wind at his back ruffled the curls of the buffalo pelt, it pushed him downhill, so that his big feet stumbled over rocks, his gait more awkward even than usual. Opening the gate to the sheep-shed he heard familiar horse’s hoofs on the road, the scrape of the runners of the light cutter on the inadequate snow. His mother had returned sooner than he expected from her drive to the post office at Peytonville. She had insisted on making the trip with a superstition, he felt, that if she went alone a letter from Benjamin would be waiting for her. He joined her at the side driveway beside the house. She handed him the reins. He looked at the newspapers in her gloved hands.

“No,” she said. “Nothing from him. Nothing at all.”

He put the cutter in the light carriage shed by the driveway, unhitched the mare, led her to the barn, stalled, fed, watered, and curried her. Because of his slowness, he was occupied more than half an hour. He went to the house and hung his coat and cap in the woodshed attached to the kitchen. He found his mother warming her hands by the living-room stove, still dressed in her velvet pelisse, bonnet and fur capelet. She was a slight woman past fifty, long of neck, with smooth black hair, small black eyes and a tight, thin mouth. She carried herself stiffly erect in well made clothes of good material. She was not unattractive until she focussed her eyes on a human being, when their unblinking coldness gave the effect of the stare of an adder.

She lifted her head and turned the jet-like glitter on her younger son.

She said, “I have been expecting Benjamin to return every day. This is most unusual. He has never been away so long without writing me. I begin to feel something different about this absence. He went with a reason and for a purpose. It comes clear now to my mind. He is ambitious, if you can understand that. He wishes to make a much needed backlog of money to bring home. It will take him a little time. He naturally prefers to have good news before writing me. It will come. Meantime—”

She studied him, frowning.

“Are you listening to me? Your expression is completely blank.”

Behind the mask of his face Ase was suffering. It seemed to him that he must awaken her to the truth, as one shakes a sleeper in a nightmare. Yet for her it was not nightmare, but a sweet dream from which she would be cruelly aroused. It was necessary, he thought. How else might life begin again for her?

He said desperately, “Mother, Ben is gone.”

“That’s exactly what I am talking about. It may be as late as summer before he comes home. Meantime, you must make plans for the spring planting. I have come to a decision. I am putting everything here in your hands. Get advice if you need, but not from me. I know nothing of these things. And care less. It is a hateful life. But the farm is all we have and I expect you to make the most of it. Everything is up to you until Benjamin’s return.”

He did not speak.

She said sharply, “Do you understand? Are you prepared to take this responsibility?”

He nodded. She went to her room and closed the door.

He was ready. He had been ready a long time. He was old in farm lore. He had learned it with fascination from childhood, as the child of a musician absorbs the patterns of sound, and may astonish its elders by climbing to the piano stool and playing accurately a little tune at the age of five. Benjamin had vanished for three months the summer when Ase was sixteen, their father had been out of his mind with fever, and the stripling, with the help of a stupid ox of a hired hand, had brought through the crops to a prosperous harvesting. Because he loved the earth, its ways, its seasons, its flowering and its fruiting, he accepted the charge of these acres not as a burden, but as though an unrequited passion had been suddenly returned. His heavy spirits lifted. Whether his mother’s gift of authority came of her necessity or of her acknowledgment at last of his manhood, he could not tell, nor did it matter.

He was surprised that she had given him complete freedom of decision. He was somehow not surprised at her refusal to admit that Benjamin was gone perhaps forever. He had best leave her unmolested in her dream.

The fire in the round-bellied stove had died down. He built it up until the isinglass front glowed red. He sat close, leaning forward in his mother’s Boston rocker, and was still cold. A bleakness lay over the room, over the house, that was of an icier substance than the winter temperature. The large sitting-room was well proportioned, with bay windows on two sides to let in the sun and the sight of trees and flying birds, the barns, the rolling contour of the farm. Its cherry, pine and walnut furnishings were solid and good, as were the furnishings of all the other rooms, yet none had sat here in content or ease. The warmth and vitality of the land were strong past harming. The dwelling house was chill with human misery and always had been.

He wondered how far back the Lindens went in time, as Lindens, and which was the first to start the strange, interlocked, unhappy and often violent chain. He knew nothing of them past the first one in America, a Hollander, whose name of Lindh’oeven, or something of the sort, (there was an old deed in the attic with such a name) had become simplified with pioneer usage and spelling to “Linden.” This was in the middle 1600’s, and the Hollander had married a Frenchwoman. An English strain came in somewhere later. Amelia was second generation Scotch-Irish, with all the Scot dourness and none of the Irish lilt. He had heard that the Irish were supposed to be a light-hearted people, but the only signs of it, certainly, had been in Benjamin.

Perhaps the trouble had begun with his immediate grandfather, Arent Linden. He had moved inland from the Hudson River valley, had taken up a large tract of land, and had two sons, Joshua the elder and Ase’s own father, Hiram. It seemed to him that it was a repetition of the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, one son beloved, the other despised, for Arent Linden and his Joshua had made a pact with Hiram, that if he would help them clear six hundred acres of land in this virgin place, would help them build two houses, they in turn would help him clear three hundred for himself, would build him a house, too, and a prosperous family would establish itself in the wilderness. The betrayal had been complete.

Hiram had worked for his father and brother, unpaid, merely fed and clothed and sheltered, until he was in his early thirties. The time came at last to turn to his land, to the building of his home, and they had laughed at him. That could make a man snarl at life. That could make Amelia, a bride no longer young, in a log cabin, nurse her spite, like some half-mad woman watering a poisonous weed in a flower pot. Yet it seemed to young Ase that the greater the injustice that came to one, the deeper would be the desire to give justice and warmth to one’s children.

His father had fought through, after all, had cleared his land, which proved richer than that of the other two, had sold his timber on a high market, had built at last his house, larger if not so fine of line and contour as the earlier, more gracious ones, and now was dead and unlamented. And Benjamin, who had provided, carelessly, all this house knew of light and laughter, was gone, taking the brightness with him. Ase considered the spell cast by his brother on all who knew him, for spell it was. It was conceivable that Ben would conquer the world, for he moved like a whirlwind, catching up men and women breathless in the brief gusts of his enthusiasm. It was also unlikely. Ase knew and acknowledged his brother’s instability. Ben’s restless impatience took always the apparently easy way, he raced light-footed and light-hearted, his tawny hair, his cloak of charm, streaming in the wind he created, until the swift feet met the smallest rock, the shallowest ravine, the slightest thickening of the forest, when he stopped confused in his tracks, then was off again in search of a smoother path through a more open glade.

For this, Ase felt no criticism, but only concern. His love was so vast a thing that he longed to clear away the rock, to bridge the ravine, to fell the forest, ahead of Benjamin. If he had received in return only the most casual affection, all the more room was left in him for the longing, some day, to be truly as one with his brother and so end his aching loneliness. He could not take offense at his mother’s blindness nor surely at her own adoration of her elder. He had a timid hope that in her loss she might turn a little toward him. He loved her, too, with tenderness, and wished he might be other than he was, to please her. He supposed he was difficult to care for, inarticulate and brooding, unbeautiful and awkward.

Amelia had not come from her room. It was nearly noon. For all her bravado, he knew that she was in torment. He went to the kitchen and made a fire in the range. He prepared a meal as best he was able. He went to the cellar for a bottle of elderberry wine. He poured a glass of it and took it to her room.

She sipped the wine and nodded her thanks.

“Come, Mother. Dinner’s ready.”

His cooking was no worse than her own. She had done no baking for a week and the bread was hard and stale. She was especially fond of sweets and took a great deal of jelly with her bread and tea. The wine and strong tea set her to talking with animation. She told anecdotes of early hardships. Suddenly she frowned.

“Asahel, I want you to tear down the log cabin. It reminds me of too many dreadful things. Anyway, it’s an eye-sore.”

To him the cabin was significant and beautiful. When the apple trees were grown sheltering around it, the stone chimney, the brown walls with white marl chinking, would seem those of a little house in a fairy tale. For an instant he pictured himself living there with Nellie Wilson, of whom Ben had said, “Better marry Nellie in the spring.” But Nellie was Ben’s girl. She could not be taken over as he had inherited Ben’s discarded clothing; could not be given away as Ben had given him their father’s watch. He set the thought aside and wondered how he might dissuade his mother from the cabin’s destruction. He had neither power nor words to influence her. She had many irrational impulses, and if he paid no attention to this one perhaps she would forget it. Ben of course could have had her decking the cabin with banners if the notion struck him.

His mind groped toward a question that had lain dormant and festering in him all his life. There was something more in his mother’s passion for Ben and her coldness for him than was called for by Ben’s grace and charm and his lack of it. He had been a toddler when she had struck him smartly because he made mild protest that his older brother had run off with his new birthday toy. Blinking through tears he refused to let fall, he cried out, “Why?” and even then the question had held the larger implication. From his mother’s expansive mood he might now draw his answer. His throat tightened, the words were hopeless captives.

Amelia said, “At first I was happy in the cabin.”

Her face was one he had never seen. Her eyes were half-closed, the thin mouth was relaxed and soft, lifted at the corners in a smile. The sallow skin glowed luminous, like an apricot in sunlight.

“Very happy. I had waited so long. I was past thirty. Still handsome, I believe.”

She closed her eyes entirely.

She went on dreamily, “I could hear the spring bubbling in the night. There was a red rambler rose outside the window and once he reached his hand out in the moonlight and broke a spray and laid it on my pillow. The thorns scratched my cheek and we laughed together.”

She opened her eyes and leaned toward him.

“I have had two husbands, you know,” she said.

He stared at her.

“Oh, they were both named Hiram Linden.”

She touched her handkerchief to her lips.

“Everything else was different. The minds, the bodies—two different men. I loved the first one, oh yes, I loved him. I lived with him a year. He died. He was killed, of course. Your grandfather and your uncle killed him. For a year, he thought they meant to keep their promise. Oh, the fine house, the cleared acres, when they came to pay back his years of servitude! When he knew the truth, it killed him. And why? Because he was a coward. He died because he was a coward, and I told him so.”

She wiped her wet forehead.

“The first man gave me my only truly begotten son, my Benjamin, conceived in love. The second gave me you.”

She looked at Ase and the adder’s eyes did not flicker. He was cold to his marrow. The answer was coming, it was sharp and fanged, he would now avoid it if he could.

“I never lived with the second Hiram Linden as a wife. I loathed the sight of him, I loathed his touch. He didn’t give me you, he forced me. He forced you on me. Not in love, not even lust. No, in anger. I hated him to the last inch of his guts. And I hated you.”

She sat back in her chair. Her voice broke.

She said, “I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

His first impulse was to take himself from the house of horror at once, free her from the very sight of him, free himself from her eyes and the ice of her voice. He went to the log cabin and built a fire on the hearth and crouched before it. He thought desperately of fetching his friend Tim McCarthy for comfort and for council, then knew the matter was private and shameful and he must look it in the face alone. He was stricken, a tangible knife in his heart would be less painful, a kinder thing, than this sharp-bladed knowledge. The fire died to embers and he sweat in the cold cabin, then felt the chill and brought in broken boughs to feed the fire again. The sun dropped toward its setting and the pale gold filtered through the dusty windows. Well, then, what had happened, after all? Only that where he had lived under lowering clouds the storm had broken over him. What had been a puzzling uncertainty, without meaning, was become a fact. He had guessed and wondered, and now he knew.

He watched the fire until it was safely ashes. He stood up and stretched his cramped legs. He drew a long breath in what seemed a clearer air. The truth was a liberation. He could go on. The earth was still solid under him. He felt a surge of pity for his mother. Even as she rejected him, she needed him. Trapped in the ruins of her life, he thought, she was also brave. He returned to the house to find her staring from a front window at the empty road. He stoked automatically the sitting-room stove. He could find no words of comfort, but he laid his big hand on her shoulder.

She said, not turning, “Why do you waste the wood?”