Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 12

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Edvard Stene had come to America as a boy, not long after steam had proven itself something more than a hazardous experiment. The immigrant lad from the fjords had somehow won his diploma in medicine, had even been with the Army of the Potomac at the close of the Civil War, and then had journeyed westward with his brother Johannes, beyond the Mississippi to the Röd Elv the newcomers from Norway were so excitedly talking about—that Red River of the North whose valley soil had already become a wild and fantastic promise, pure earth-gold to be turned over by the plow. Edvard and Johannes had traveled by ox-cart up to the border trading post of Pembina, and on the journey the young doctor had taken shrewd and ample notes. But it was to the undulating stretch of prairie somewhat east of the fabulous waterway that they returned, before 1870, to settle on land near the trail of the Red River carts. The brothers called their farm Solbakken—slope in the sun—and Johannes worked the land while Edvard made his professional rounds of the countryside, in every kind of weather, over roads and in vehicles that must surely have dismayed a lesser man. It was Doctor Edvard Stene who was one of the founders of the village of Inglebrook.

When Eric tried to reconstruct the character of his grandfather, it was upon his childhood memories of him that he drew, rather than upon the wealth of written testimony the old doctor had left behind him. He had been a lean, ruddy-cheeked, knotty man, never old, who smelled tangily of winesap apples and burning autumn leaves, and who never tired of thinking up new games to amuse a small boy. Eric was five when his grandfather, then seventy-six, rescued three children from drowning in the icy swollen waters of Pistol River, that spring of 1912. Eric could recall the hushed, solemn talk in the house on that day soon afterward when his grandfather had died of pneumonia. For the simple country people were awed by what they looked upon as something more than a coincidence: a great ship called the Titanic had gone down at sea on the very day that Doctor Edvard Stene had closed his eyes forever.

The family strain, being devoutly, biblically accustomed to propagation in the old country, must have felt thwarted in America. The begetting had not, Eric reflected, gone on as it should have done. In his middle thirties, the doctor had married a pioneer woman much older than himself, who had with some difficulty given him one son. The son was named, appropriately, Edward, and in later years married a pretty young Dutch girl from the settlement near Inglebrook, who died giving birth to Eric. And that had been the sum and substance of it. Johannes, with some mysterious, ill-starred romance in his past, despised all women.

Eric could recall Johannes declaring that if Edward’s pretty wife had been attended by old Doctor Edvard instead of by a young numskull who didn’t know a leg from an arm, all would have gone fair enough and Eric’s advent into this world would not have brought tragedy in its wake. But Doctor Edvard was seventy-one at the time and had retired from medicine gracefully, if perhaps with some wistful regret, to make way for a more “modern” practitioner. At the moment of Eric’s birth, the old doctor was probably reading Ingersoll in his little tobacco-colored upstairs study that smelled of camphor and nameless horse remedies and gun barrels newly cleaned.

Since the village was only two miles from Solbakken, the aging doctor had, during the latter years of his practice, spent as much time at the farm, where he could be summoned by telephone, as he had in his Inglebrook office overlooking Main Street. Eric believed that the old man had made his ready availability an excuse for long hours of solitude and mulling over the past, adorning his already lustrous chronicle with those vivid happenings forgotten in youth and remembered in age, like kernels of grain sprouting to greenness after a long and dark-sealed slumber.

With Granduncle Johannes, Eric’s father had run the farm. The sod house had long since disappeared and had been replaced by a proper shelter of snug log, oak and tamarac, chinked with dried earth and grass. Later, in 1882, a frame dwelling of four rooms—which was to grow with innocent disregard for architectural design during the next thirty years—was reared proudly within its circle of evergreens and elms, a trim sight and a prediction of times to come for any chance traveler on the road hard by. Eric’s father was a man of tremendous, impatient energy, brusquely scornful of any display of sentiment, as only the oversentimental can be. The death of his young wife must have been a staggering blow to him. When he rallied from it he blankly ignored the infant who had been the cause of his bitter trial. His acknowledgment of his son had been limited to a perfunctory kindness, a duteous, almost grim heed to his physical well-being which never overstepped the line into the realm of the emotional or spiritual. Eric had been obliged, after the death of his beloved grandfather, to content himself at home with the companionship of his taciturn but well-meaning granduncle and the half-deaf housekeeper, Libby Kerr. When Edward Stene died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, it was Libby Kerr who felt herself bereft; the eleven year old Eric felt nothing in particular, unless it was a vague, unhappy sense of incompleteness, of being deprived even of the reality of grief, a sense which would be with him always. He hated any justifying self-analysis, but it was obvious enough that the home life of his boyhood had left its ungentle mark upon him.

He wondered now about Solbakken. Since his granduncle’s funeral he had not returned to the place—partly because he shrank from the melancholy feeling it stirred in him that something strong and essentially noble had come to an end, for he himself who was the last of his line had already started upon his academic career. But partly also because his vacations had been crowded with post-graduate work or with travel which he had in his fatuous earnestness hoped would the better fit him for his profession. He laughed acidly now as he thought of that.

The farm, he mused, must have weathered the depression, if the payment of the yearly rental through the agent was any conclusive evidence. The fellow who ran the place, Andrew Clarence, even appeared to have ambitions toward buying it. But this was a poor time to sell, even if Eric had not been possessed of an inscrutable reluctance to sever in such a way all contact with his own past, his own kinship with a piece of earth that reached from its rich surface where the winds roved, down to the unknown, gloomy fury of its core.

The years had not blurred his memory of any detail of the place. Clearly he saw the springhouse, where the moss had been fine as fairies’ hair in his young thinking; the ungainly, gingerbread trimmed structure of the main dwelling which had grown haphazardly through long time, the barns and the implement sheds—and farther back, beyond the orchard, the old sod house and the log cabin that succeeded it. What kind of tenants were the Clarences? he wondered. Was the old well back of the barns still there, with its stone top, and the echo that used to bay so weirdly up at him from far down within it?

And how were those young cousins of his, the Sadlers, getting along in Inglebrook?

It seemed to come to him with a suddenness, his desire to go back there, westward toward that rounded sunset, toward that river. But even as he thought of it he knew that it had been with him for a long time. He would pack, and in the morning he would bid Sibert good-by and head his cheap little roadster north and westward through the state. Natalie—well, it didn’t matter about her. She had her own prismatic destiny, unhampered by any need, material or spiritual. She might possibly drive to Inglebrook and seek him out, if she cared to. He doubted it. Natalie could find diversion without going out of her way to get it.