Читать книгу Milk Route - Martha Ostenso - Страница 3

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When Ben Start first began working for the Mayflower Dairy in the suburban village of Wahwahnissa Creek, he had made haste, morning and afternoon, to escape the mingled, smothering smells of the place. But that had been in 1930, fifteen years ago, when he was forced to leave college in his final year because of his father’s sudden and untimely death, and Ben had been left to take care of his invalid mother. The only work he could find during that first black year of the depression was driving a milk truck, and he had been snobbish enough to think that the job was beneath him, a mere makeshift until something better came along. But he had to make a living, after all, and forty-five dollars a week, in addition to commissions that frequently amounted to more than his wages, provided a rather comfortable bulwark against the demands of his creditors. Without knowing it, he had begun to like the work, and before long the characteristic aroma of the dairy came to have a homely friendliness, soothing and amiable to the senses.

This morning, when he had loaded his truck at daybreak, the blended fragrance was especially heartening. The scoured, moist-wood smells of the churns drifted in from the butter-making room to mix with the redolence of milk, steam, metal, and washed concrete in the pasteurizing plant. For a while he was able to forget the scene with his mother last night when he had announced his intention of spending his two weeks’ vacation on Lost Moon Lake. That, in itself, would have caused no commotion, Ben knew. He was thirty-seven, after all—quite old enough to plan his vacation as he pleased. But he had let it be known that Inga Nelson, who worked in the corner drug store, was going with him. They would spend the two weeks with Inga’s widowed aunt, Kari Bakken, who still lived in the log cabin on the old Bakken farm.

Even so, there might have been no “scene” had it not been for Maggie Fraghurst, the companion-housekeeper who had become a necessary adjunct to the Start household. Ben’s mother, Hortense, had suffered from arthritis ever since the death of her husband. It was Doctor Knutson’s opinion that Hortense Start was the victim of a curious psychosis, the basis of which was an arthritic condition genuine enough in itself, but aggravated by grief over the loss of her husband. For years now she had watched with an avid interest the advance of her disease, had been disappointed at its temporary abatement, and almost gratified when it progressed as far as her hands and knees. She would not permit it to reach her pretty ankles. That she would not tolerate. Any treatment, Doctor Knutson declared, was wasted money, because Hortense was determined to be a semi-invalid for the rest of her days.

For the rest of her days, too, Hortense would have Maggie Fraghurst beside her to care for her, humor her, attend to her every need. Ben had long since reconciled himself to the arrangement. He had to have somebody to look after things. It might have been somebody more bearable, but there Maggie was—and there she had been for ten years—and Hortense was used to her. Damn it, if the woman would only find herself a man—but then, what would Hortense do? You couldn’t hire anybody nowadays for love or money. If she didn’t have an “off” eye that winked dewily whenever she became excited, if she didn’t persist in calling his mother Honey, the pet name Ben’s father had used, if she didn’t call him Gooben whenever she felt maternal toward him, though she was almost exactly a year younger than he! Sometimes her use of the nickname infuriated him, even though he was known by nothing else in the village of Wahwahnissa Creek, where he had lived all his life. His mother had created the cognomen for him when he was a child. Benjamin—Good Benjamin—Good Ben—and so, Gooben. Maggie had as much right as anyone else to use the name, he realized. But it was just another of those trifles that, added up, irritated him beyond all reason.

Yes, it had been an unpleasant half hour or so last night. Ben had been angry, but one glance at his mother and his anger had left him at mid-surge, as it always did. She was a pitiable figure, and seriously quarreling with her was as unthinkable as it was futile. Their differences so far had never come to that.

After all, perhaps he was luckier than a lot of fellows he had known. They were coming back from Europe and the Pacific now, many of them maimed in body and soul, all of them thrown out of gear with the lives they had begun before the war. Some were not coming back at all. Ben had had his hour of bitterness when he saw his best friends leaving for the training camps, but he had known from the first that he would never be taken. His left leg had never fully recovered from the effect of an attack of infantile paralysis when he was nine years old.

All in all, he thought, as he drove away from the dairy in his neat butter-colored and sky-blue truck that had MAYFLOWER DAIRY painted in bold grass-green on either side of it, he had every reason to feel happy this morning. One more round of the village, and he would be free to do as he liked for two whole weeks. He and Inga would leave in the early afternoon and arrive at Kari Bakken’s place on Lost Moon Lake in time for dinner.

The day promised to be fine. Only a few flecks of cloud floated high against a clear end-of-August sky. In early summer, you would have heard orioles throwing liquid silver drops of sound into the sunrise—“Pretty birdie! Pretty birdie! I’m a good boy, yes?”—and red-winged blackbirds from their reed tenements in the swamp, and robins and bluebirds from their lofty apartments answering the query with their own warbled laughter. As if any bird was a good boy just before mating time!

But now, only the occasional sparrow chain-stitched his humble notes across the air, or a mourning dove reiterated his monotonous complaint. It was an all but silent world. As he drove down Sunway Boulevard and turned south, away from the village center, and entered the residential district, Ben watched the sun lift its ruddy bulk up between the towers of the city to the east. In a few minutes it would shed its warmth upon the windows of the room in which Inga lay sleeping, upon the long rows of windows in the Panker Factory beside the creek, across the little park whose carefully tended four acres adjoined the factory grounds on the north—and upon all the roofs of the blessed and the needy, the humble and the proud, the just and the unjust, who made their homes in the suburban village of Wahwahnissa Creek.