Читать книгу Milk Route - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Ben stopped his truck in the lane behind the home of Rupe Prile, clerk of the Wahwahnissa Creek Water Works. Carrying crate in hand, he paused—as he always did—before opening the gate. Rupert Prile was the meanest man in the village.

Ben was careful, in walking up the path through the vegetable garden, not to step on a single stray leaf of beet or cabbage plant. Children, delivery men, peddlers, and dogs had been known barely to escape with their lives after such accidental trespassing on the sacred plot.

Though the Prile back yard was still in shadow, Mary Prile was already out scouring the cement steps on her hands and knees. Her sweater sleeves were rolled up, and before she noticed Ben he saw that her bony arms were mottled blue with cold. Now, aware of his approach, she turned her weak eyes toward him over one shoulder, flushed with embarrassment and jerked her sleeves down to her wrists as she fled into the house.

Ben picked up the two empty milk bottles from beside the steps and replaced them with two full ones from his crate. No order for cream this morning—nor had there been for more than two weeks now. The cream from the top of the milk bottles would do for Rupe, of course. Mary could get along with what was left. The damned skinflint, with his pious pose every Sunday morning in the community church!

Ben felt a muscle in his jaw work nastily. Some day, he promised himself, he would take a swing at Rupe Prile, just for the satisfaction it would give him ...

The end of the lane brought him to the back of the Panker mansion. The blinds were still drawn, but old man Bratruud, the gardener, was already at work among the rows of vegetables. Years ago, Ole Bratruud had been skipper of a fishing boat on Lake Superior. Ben strode through the broadening flush of light to give the old Norwegian the greeting that never failed to flatter him.

“Goddag, Captain!” he hailed him with a brisk salute. “Hvordan staar det til?”

“Bare bra!” Ole grinned, and came toward him.

“I’m off north this afternoon for two weeks fishing,” Ben told him. “Better come along.”

The old man chuckled. “Yah—I vish it might be so. But my fishing days, dey are ended, except for on de creek here.” His face puckered pathetically as he looked up across the saddle of gilt and red the sun had thrown across the late summer brilliance of the tree tops. “Might be I go back to Sogn some day, if I live so long. Ah, yah! Till den—here I stay!”

He turned away to his work among the vegetables and Ben hurried off, the bottles rattling in his crate.

He slammed on his brakes just as he was about to pass Doctor Knutson’s house. The doctor’s car was gone from the garage. Somewhere another young stranger was probably protesting his entry into this grotesque world, Ben supposed. Through the screen of the sleeping porch upstairs a child’s voice trebled a greeting to him.

“Hi, Gooben!”

It was Doctor Knutson’s ten-year-old Jimmie, standing in his pajamas with his face pressed to the screen.

“Hi, old timer! What gets you up so early?”

“Nothin’! I just woke up. I ate watermelon last night and got a stomach-ache.”

“Your dad fixed that up, I bet you,” Ben said and grinned up at him.

“He didn’t, either! He ain’t got time for us, Mom says. We’re goin’ out to the farm next week.”

“Good! And I’m going fishing up north.”

“Oh, gee, you are? Dad says there ain’t a damn fish left in our lake. He says all the damn people from Kansas came up and cleaned out—”

Ben heard Jimmie’s mother call sternly from somewhere within the house. He smothered a laugh with one hand and hurried around to the back porch ...

At his next stop, he halted at the sight of four empty bottles, from one of which protruded a scribbled order for a gallon of milk. He scratched his head and read the note again. Yes, a gallon. He whistled softly. What in Sam Hill could a man living alone want with four quarts of milk?

“Brother Pinwinder,” he said to himself, “there’s more in this than meets the eye.”

A glance at the windows revealed no sign of Brother Pinwinder, although frequently he would be peering out as if he suspected the presence of burglars. Ben’s eyes followed a narrow footpath that ran diagonally across an adjacent vacant lot to the rear of Widow Gates’ snug little cottage. Brother Pinwinder was in his seventies, Widow Gates was a lively fifty and some.

Ben placed the four bottles side by side and turned away with a soft chuckle. After all, there was room in the world for old fools as well as young, and perhaps a lesser havoc lay in the wake of their peccadillos. No one seemed to know much about the widow except that she had come to live in the village shortly after Gilbert Pinwinder, having fathered a dozen children, resolved henceforth to shun the world, the flesh, and the devil. He had immediately shunned his long-suffering wife as well, who had gone to live with one of her married sons. At the same time, he had retired from his position as clerk in the city post office, and had turned carpenter, emulating the humble Carpenter of old. With his own hands he had built himself a small cottage in Wahwahnissa Creek, where he composed religious pamphlets on an ancient typewriter for free distribution among the villagers.

As he made his way back to his truck, Ben smoothed out the bit of paper upon which the old zealot had written his order for milk. The decrepit typewriter with its faded ribbon had done its poor best to shed eternal light upon the dark places of the world:

Awake! Awake! Nation has risen against nation. The sword has been unsheathed. Armageddon is at hand. The wicked shall be cast into everlasting darkness and the righteous shall inherit the earth. Seek ye the Lord—today! Call ye upon Him—now! For the hour of His vengeance is upon us.

Ben pressed the paper into a tight ball and flung it away. Omens and portents! He shook himself as if to free his mind of something he could not name, some sense of confusion and futility that bore more heavily than the knowledge of Gilbert Pinwinder’s mawkish love affairs.

The sun had cleared the roof-tops across the street, and in the gutters last night’s rain lay like fragments of gold-foil crumpling fragilely under the slight fingers of a breeze. A yellow leaf or two shalloped down the air, early tokens of the season’s wane.

It was a beautiful morning ...

Herman Shatts, the plumber, had ordered his milk delivered on the front porch, so that the bottles might not be confused with those of his sister, Mrs. Bill Clifford, who lived in the basement while her husband was with the Navy in the South Pacific. Two deliveries, then, fore and aft. Ben stood for a moment outside the house and looked up at the sunlight that glistened along the wet eaves like little fangs of pale flame. Down there in the basement, Bill’s wife Molly was probably still asleep and dreaming of her hero husband.

Through an open upstairs window came the exquisite notes of a violin, young and pure as the dawning boyhood of the lad who held the bow. Twelve-year-old Frederick Shatts, the plumber’s son, who had been hailed as a genius by the foremost teachers of the city, who had won the Phillips Gold Medal at the Institute of Music a year ago—what did a world all but stripped of beauty hold in store for him?

The narrow tongues of sun-fire darted along the eaves of the house as Ben drove away. The frail music seemed like a shimmering radiance made audible ...

The green flounce of the hill above Miles Hopewell’s mink ranch was plumed with goldenrod and buttoned with wild white asters. Ben stopped his truck at the top of the steep sandy road and sat for a minute looking down across the creek valley to the mysteriously webbed islands of marsh beyond. The islands were mere cones of silt into which a man might sink to his waist, but which gave support to the reaching roots of willows. Only in broad, blank daylight, Inga had once said, could you look at this region without a sense of primordial fear. And she was right. By moon or starlight the fibrous haunches of the marsh seemed to set themselves in motion for a spring toward the innocent creek threading its indolently resolute way to the Mississippi and eventually to the Gulf and the wide seas. By dawn, and for an hour or more afterwards, the black and red and gold of the swamp’s waters, with muskrat heads arrowing darkly before a wake of liquid, metallic gloom, struck into the seeing heart an emotion mixed of chill resentment and reverent awe for the preoccupation of Nature apart from the small concerns of man.

But the swamp was never really the same in any two hours of light. It seemed to Ben now that the bosky islets were pinnacled up by some invisible support from the water, or were floating on banners of pink-gold mist that held them suspended.

Miles Hopewell, the mink farmer, was a middle-aged bachelor whose regard for womankind was something less than tolerant. He was stooping over one of his precious mink pens when Ben saw him.

“Can I sell you some horse-meat this morning?” Ben called to him as he set his wire crate down on the back steps of the cottage.

Miles looked over his shoulder and grinned, then beckoned to him. Ben walked over to glance down into the screen-topped pen where a sleek, onyx-eyed creature curveted about in his costly raiment.

“That’s a Koh-i-nur,” Miles said, “—a rare Black-cross. You saw him when he was a kit.”

“How much will you take for him?”

Miles shook his head. “Well, the pelt will go better than a hundred dollars in another couple months. Worth it, too, any way you look at it. Horse-meat comes high these days, what with a few million starving Europeans yammering for it. Over there it’s a delicacy, they tell me. Over here, it keeps our fancy ladies warm in the winter. I see ’em strutting in a full-length coat of pelts like that, and I say to myself—horse-meat!”

He unlocked and slid back the cover of the pen, and with a quick maneuver of his welder’s leather-mittened hands captured the squirming occupant within. The mink was the utter embodiment of furred grace, a curious product of mutation, but more than that a triumph of patience in man’s search for a beautiful result that Nature herself would promptly eliminate as a freak. His fur was ivory except for a silvery black stripe down his back and a dark bar crossing the stripe at his shoulders.

“A coat of those pelts would cost about—” Ben said.

“About twelve thousand dollars,” Miles told him as he thrust the little animal back into its tidy pen and closed the cover. “But you haven’t seen my Silverblu. A coat of that would come to twenty thousand. Show me any slut in the country that’s worth it—and kids starving to death all over the goddam world! It makes me sick.”

“You’re in a fine mood this morning, Miles,” Ben laughed.

“I get that way sometimes,” Miles admitted. “I get that way, just looking at ’em—and thinking. Makes me sick!”

Ben hurried away. It was getting late and most of his work was still to be done. Near by was Colin Trale, the preacher in the Community Church; and Della Prince, the mother of Josie Stone, whose young husband had been killed in the Pacific; and the hide-bound Wilsons, with their grandniece Adelberta, and a score of others in the immediate neighborhood. After that there was Red Willow Terrace, the home-site acreage that had grown up steadily along the north bank of the creek in the five or six years immediately preceding the war. The tract had been part of the original Panker estate, and had developed noticeably even during the war years, thanks to the enterprise of George Panker, whose object in fostering the project was to provide neat and inexpensive homes for the men and women who had come to help produce war materials in his factory.

The Red Willow Terrace names ran in fair parallel through Ben’s mind with what he knew about each of them. He had come to know them, for the most part, through their back doors, where they unwittingly betrayed themselves as much in their petty quibbling as in their open-hearted charity. Meanness and generosity stood cheek by jowl on the Terrace. In one house a woman would declare that she had been cheated out of due credit on empty bottles. In the next, a housewife who had to count her pennies would order an extra quart of milk for the neighborhood’s stray cats.

It was almost eleven o’clock when he finally drew up in front of The American Flagg Market, Sam Flagg’s neighborhood grocery that stood a stone’s throw away from the railway trestle over the creek. As Ben got down from his truck, Sam’s dog Midget, a Great Dane, came forth like an animated bronze statue to greet him with friendly dignity and a lolling tongue.

“Anything rotten in Denmark today, old fellow?” Ben said as he stooped to rub the dog’s satiny ears.

Almost as he spoke, the South-State and Freling Short Line freight came thundering across the trestle, and Midget lifted his massive head in a doleful complaint that might have been an answer to Ben’s question.

Sam was alone in the store. He looked up from the morning paper spread on the counter before him, and pushed his glasses back on his forehead as Ben lugged his bottle-filled crates in at the door.

“Hi, Sam! What’s new?”

Sam jerked his glasses off. “Don’t you young whipper-snappers ever get tired of askin’ what’s new?”

“You’ve been reading the morning paper, haven’t you?” Ben said, with a nod toward the counter as he made his way to the cooler in the back of the store.

“Yup! Tryin’ to.” The old man’s crisp New England accent persisted still, in spite of his forty years in the Middle West. “Can’t see a thing since I started usin’ these pesky bifocals. Got along better without glasses at all.”

Ben chuckled as he opened the cooler and began stowing away the bottles of milk. “I suppose that’s why you balled up your figures last week, and tried to gyp the Mayflower out of three bucks on that butter deal.”

Sam grinned. “Got to make a livin’, don’t I?”

“Living, my eye! If I had half the money you’ve gouged out of the poor devils around here in the last—”

“Gouged, eh?” Sam muttered, half to himself. “There’s one thing you don’t know about that, young feller. I’m a poorer man today than I was when I came here.”

It was probably true, Ben thought as he closed the cooler. Sam Flagg and his wife Sadie had been serving the community one way or another for as long as he could remember. The old man had never turned away anyone who was in actual want, and Sadie had been frequently spoken of as the community mother. Down through the years they had ministered to the sick and the needy in the neighborhood, so that people often wondered how the old couple managed to pay their own bills.

“How’s Sadie?” Ben asked abruptly.

“All right, I guess. But women are notional. Complain when there’s nothin’ wrong with ’em, an’ not a word other times when they might be dyin’. Says now she’s feelin’ old all of a sudden. I don’t like that. Been plannin’ to have a talk with Doc Knutson, but I don’t know. Seems like somethin’s wrong wherever you look these days.”

“Take your time, Sam. We’ve been fighting a war. You can’t expect to get over that in a day.”

“We’re not even tryin’ to get over it, Gooben,” Sam replied morosely. “Read the papers and see what I mean. You don’t have to take my word for it. There’s a blight on the country. You can see it right in your own town, if you look around you. All you got to do is stand behind this counter for a couple o’ days an’ listen to the women talk. Sometimes it scares me just to think about it.”

Ben assembled the empty bottles and piled them into his crates. “Well, I’ve got my job to look after,” he observed as Sam turned away to attend to a customer who had just come in. “I’m going up north this afternoon for a couple of weeks’ fishing. See you when I get back.”

Only another hour on the route, he thought to himself as he left the store. Then a hurried lunch with his mother and Maggie Fraghurst before he got into some decent clothes, packed his bag, and drove his old Chevvy around to pick up Inga. He had told her to be ready at two.

For fourteen days there would be no Mayflower Dairy, so far as he was concerned, no smell of milk, no rattle of bottles, no getting out of bed before dawn, no back doors, and no silent sharing of the misfortunes of people he rarely saw and rarely thought of except when he filled the orders they left on their doorsteps. For fourteen days there would only be Inga and the tall pines under the sun or the stars on Lost Moon Lake.

It was Inga herself who had first suggested the plan—as serenely, as happily, as though it were the simplest, most natural thing in the world. Never, in the months during which their friendship had grown into love, had they really been alone together. Inga lived with her married sister, Selma Thole, whose houseful of children afforded no more privacy than did Ben’s home, crowded by that lynx-eyed pair, Hortense and Maggie. Thus far, they had had to content themselves with the commonplace occasions of movies and brief drives into the countryside.

There had been other, casual girls in his life, some of whom had been importunate, wanting to marry him in spite of an invalid mother, to say nothing of all the other obstacles that stood in the way of his marrying any of them. Inga knew all about those obstacles. She knew his mother, and his mother’s formidable companion, Maggie Fraghurst. But Inga had demanded nothing. That very fact, indeed, had worked its strange effect upon him. For the first time in his life he had become aware of a sense of frustration. A man had a right to a home of his own, a wife and a family—and he had allowed himself to be thwarted by mere circumstances. Had Inga been demanding, as the others had been, he would have instinctively fallen back upon the defensive. But little Inga, of the dove-gray eyes, the softly curling cocoa-brown hair, who was in charge of the Book Nook at Higgins’ drug store, and who managed to write poetry in her tiny bedroom in her sister’s noisy household—little Inga had done what none of the others had been able to do. From the moment he had first set eyes on her, in fact—that day when he stopped by to pick up another murder mystery for his mother—he had sensed the difference. He had suspected that she was the one. And ever since, when he paused to think about it, he had felt an unease within him that was both harsh and sweet. Even now, after months of being circumspectly in love with her, the thought of their two weeks together in the north woods stirred in him a vague sense of apprehension. Why should a girl like Inga, talented, vivacious and pretty—to say nothing of her being nine years younger than he—bother her head over a big lunk like himself? Why should she fall seriously for his lazy good nature, his blue eyes, his rather foolish blond hair, when he had so little to offer that would make her future secure? It didn’t seem quite credible.