Читать книгу Cross Creek - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 11

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The Widow Slater and I understood each other from the beginning. She was a violent person and I was warned to beware of her eccentric and unpredictable indignations. I found that nothing about her was unpredictable, for all her being was keyed to the one idea, that whatever is, is good. At the time when I was warned against her, she had just made a local reputation by lifting a shotgun in defiance against the starched white bosom of a county nurse. The occasion was simple and her violence was no contradiction in her character. The order had gone forth from health authorities that all school children were to be inoculated against smallpox or typhoid or something or other. The Widow Slater had refused to have done anything so unnatural and savoring of witchcraft as injecting the blood of a horse in the veins of her offspring.

Her feeling was, simply, that God knows best. What she meant by "God" I do not know, and no two people mean the same thing in their invocation of the mystic Word. My own idea is that those of us who are least positive are closest to the truth. We know only that as human beings we are very stupid and that somewhere beyond us are forces unintelligibly wiser or cleverer or more fixed than we. The forces may concern themselves with us or they may not, but it seems to me, and seemed to the Widow Slater, that people live or die, thrive or pine, quite beyond human reason. In the matter of the inoculation and in several kindred matters I believe that the belligerent mother was wrong. I am only applauding her philosophy.

Her firm conviction that God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform, applied to the delights of life as well as to its burdens and its sorrows. In this, she differed from most "professing" Christians, who see God in everything difficult and unpleasant, but seldom in the natural joys. I have never known a person who had less over which to rejoice, who found more in daily living to rejoice her. She was herself almost constantly ill, local doctors being certain that she had a tumor that required removal. This she rejected, saying, "I come into the world in one piece and I aim to go out the same way. I'll not have a part of me buried here and the rest yon." Yet for all the reverence for the short, stout, untidy body which had been given her, she never spared it. People with a philosophy are usually inconsistent.

She had been a widow for some years and her family was large for one of no means at all. There was a daughter, distant in Alabama. There was Snow, a grave, brown-eyed youth, sullen when I first knew him under the family difficulties. There was Henry, a cripple, with the same indomitable spirit as his mother, who took a course in watch repairing and set up in a hole in the wall in Gainesville and became a personage. There were Alvah and Little Irene. And there was the youngest, Rodney, whose club feet and twisted legs and tortured back made Henry seem an athlete in comparison. Somewhere in the family blood was a strain that should not, eugenically, have been perpetuated. Yet all of the Widow Slater's brood, the "chappies" as she called them, Carolina fashion, had a luminous quality that somehow set them beyond the well and fit and made of them more desirable citizens and friends and neighbors than many a well-cared-for aristocrat.

She was an artist in optimism. Her rented house leaked so badly that beds must be moved and all available pots and pans set under the worst holes whenever the rain fell.

She only said, "You know there's plenty of places in the roof I could get through, and a heap more Irene could," and chuckled at her own description.

In her place I should either have kicked down the walls of the house, or lain down and given up, putting the full responsibility for my care on that Providence that she was so sure watched over the sparrow's fall.

She asked me for work, in an early year at the Creek when I had little to spend for help of any sort. All I could offer was the washing. It was too heavy even for me, though I did it when necessary, and I told her so and did not see how she might manage it. But she insisted and took the unreasonable labor as a favor. She asked to do it of a Saturday morning, when Alvah and Little Irene were home from school to help, and begged of me only that I not hurry her at it. The washing was a long and incredibly sloppy procedure. The Widow Slater dressed always in a Victorian white shirtwaist and a long full-flowing black skirt. She trailed her long black skirts through the puddles of soapsuds splashed around her and carried great dripping armfuls of half-wrung sheets to the clothes line, and was concerned, not with the hardships, but with the weather and the phlox. The weather almost always suited her, for if it was fine the clothes would dry well and if it rained, why, nothing was better for bleaching them. The phlox bothered her for the reason that they grew wild in the yard around the wash-bench and she was afraid of stepping on them.

"They look up at you with little faces," she said, "and it seems treacherous to stomp them."

She reported happily one day that Snow was doing better at his fishing.

"Folkses has woke up a catfish market," she said.

The closest to complaint I ever heard her come was when she would say, as though it were a great joke, "I feel as if I'd been drug between two twisted Fridays."

She made high-spirited play even of our fence-repairing. The fences around Old Boss' orange grove and mine were old and rotten. Her cow Betsy and my Laura, pastured jointly in my sixteen-acre field, were wise in forbidden ways. They went through the old fence as if it were not there, until we learned to fool them. We did this by dragging boughs and brush to the weakest places and propping them up with a plausible look of impenetrability. We had done this through a steaming hot summer afternoon, through the poison ivy, until we had exhausted our supply of camouflage. We stood scratched and perspiring and very dubious.

"Well," she said, "I reckon it may look solid to a cow, but it's a mighty hypocritical kind of a fence."

The word "hypocrite" may have been a favorite in the family. Little Irene came out with it one day. She brought us a katydid to show, cupped carefully in her small grubby hands.

"I caught me a hypocrite," she said.

The widow chuckled.

"That's a jizzywitch, honey," she corrected her.

Irene stamped her bare foot.

"'Tis not. It's a hypocrite. I know, because all hypocrites is long-legged."

The Widow Slater, as I look back on it, did much more for me than I did for her. She trudged from our joint pasture night and morning with my bucket of milk. She gave me settings of eggs.

"Now if your hen," she said, "proves up anyways false to you, I have one setting I'll lend to you."

Most helpful of all, after we were well acquainted, she loaned me Alvah afternoons after school to wash dishes. Alvah saved part of her small pay to buy me a Christmas present. The present was a set of glass wind chimes, and until the day when a strong wind blew them to the floor in splinters, the high thin tinkling sounded to me like the laughter of the child herself. There was something fey about most of the family. Rodney, the cripple, foretold the weather with a strange accuracy. He had always some small pet, a squirrel or chameleon or perhaps a chicken hurt and crippled like himself. I think that "Fodder-wing" in The Yearling must have been Rodney.

The widow's confidence in me faltered only once. Several eminently respectable souls in the town of Ocala had offered me their friendship, among them the venerable white-haired mayor. It was time to return their hospitality and I invited them for supper. I asked Alvah to come and help me with the serving. She agreed with enthusiasm. The next day she did not meet my eyes. She said in a low voice that Mama would have to think about the question of her helping with the party. I assured her that the work would be light and I would take her home myself. The day of the supper the Widow Slater came unhappily, twisting her apron.

"You been mighty good to Alvah," she faltered. "I'm just obliged to let you have her." She laid a trembling hand on my arm. "Alvah's young," she quavered, "and I look to you to protect her."

I did not know the decorous gathering well enough to tell them that they came to Cross Creek as a menace to a young girl's virtue.

The widow and Alvah and Irene and I all wept when they moved away to Carolina. Some small stout cord bound us together. Alvah came back to visit Snow a year or so ago and came to see me. She was a tall shy young woman, and it was plain that, thanks no doubt to her mother's standards, much firmer than our fence, her virtue was still not only intact, but, I fear, inviolable.

I think that Snow, the widow's eldest, was her greatest concern. She grieved over him when she left him behind at the Creek. He had already left her leaking roof to shift for himself. She knew that he was fishing for a living but could not find out how or where he might be. From Carolina, she could get no word from him in answer to her letters, and wrote me, beseeching news. I had none to give her, but reported that I saw him pass now and again and he looked well. I could find out no more than she of his mode of life. Her occasional anxious letters kept the youth on my mind. I knew that at one time he had done satisfactory grove work for Old Boss and when I became desperate for male help, I decided to run him down. Tom Glisson told me where I should find him.

"I'm proud his Ma don't know how he's livin'," Tom said. "If she was here, she'd anyways keep him off the dirt."

I did not understand him until I drove down the dim hammock road to the lake edge where Tom told me I should find him. I could not believe that I had come to the right place until a dog I knew for Slater property came from the woods with wagging tail. The camp was a palmetto shack, no larger than six feet by eight. The four corners were sapling cypresses. Palmetto fronds joined these to make walls and were thatched overhead for a roof. Cockroaches ran among the fronds and darted inside the dark box of a home. There was a half-door, the lower half made from a crate and the upper of burlap sacking. I lifted the sacking and saw that he had built a sapling bunk along one side. The pallet on it was filled with moss. A ragged quilt was the only cover. A small rusty stove stood opposite the bunk, its pipe lifting crookedly and precariously above the dry palmetto thatching. I have seen only one other human habitation more primitive and desolate than this. A can of beans had made his last meal. I was glad the widow, grieving for his silent ways, could not see or know.

I left a note pinned on the sacking. The next day he came to work, his face pinched from privation, his overalls shabby. He walked the two miles back and forth each day, and while the wages I could pay shamed me to offer, they were standard in the section. His lean grave young face filled out, and his loose-limbed frame, and decent shirt and cap and breeches replaced the soiled raggedness. He was a fine grove man and we began a relationship somehow beyond that of employer and employee. A bond was forged that will last as long as either of us lives. Yet he was plainly unhappy. He was close-mouthed, and while he expressed anxiety over the grove and my own returns from it under his care, he did not discuss his own difficulties. At long last the truth came out. He was one of those who pined for his own piece of land, and he should never be content until he tilled his own acres, had his own house, and a wife to bring him the cheeriness the widow had brought to her brood. His wages only fed and clothed him. He could not save for his dream in a whole life's span.

When my own fortunes took a turn for the better, my first act was to raise his pay. As time went on, I raised it again, until he was getting twice the rate of other grove workers. This was low enough, by decent standards, yet out of it he could save regularly. We both admired the rich hammock land near his palmetto shack, and one day he came to report that thirty-five acres of the best could be bought for taxes. I sent him to the tax sale and he came back with the tax certificate to the land.

I said, "That land is for you, Snow," and wondered why I had not had the intelligence earlier to go hungry, if necessary, to get it for him. He was one who needed only the slightest edge on life to master it.

We planned his house together, poring, when his work was done, over the mail order catalogue for doors and windows and roofing. He built the house himself in his off hours and on Sundays, and it is a good house. It has old orange trees around it, and a magnolia tree by the gate, and the hammock soil around it as rich as any man needs for making his living. I hope that some day his mother will come and see it. She would say, "Of course he's gettin' along good. A person allus gets out of life what he's entitled to. The Lord sees to that."

One week-end Snow asked to borrow the grove truck.

"I got something I want to fetch from Gainesville," he said.

I said, "Of course. And since you're going, you can bring out the fertilizer I have on order there."

His expression was suddenly strange.

"Sure," he said.

On Monday morning he did not appear. Martha came to the door.

"I got a message for you from Snow," she said. "He couldn't carry the fertilizer Saturday and he's gone to get it this mornin'. He said tell you he was goin' on his own time and payin' for the gas."

"But why couldn't he bring it Saturday?"

"Sugar," she said, "a man bringin' a bed and a bride just ain't got the room nor the notion for a ton o' fertilizer."