Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 14

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The distance he had traveled today could not be computed in miles, nor the time in hours. The lidless, wintry eye of the sun had gone down. Over this strong land of black plowed fields or grass-pale stubble, the bleak, greenish November twilight belonged to the marginless, tranced region of his boyhood, to a lost and gold-dark time. It was to this age, this luminous space strangely droning with faint, forlorn winds, that he had become transported, it seemed without his own volition. He had struggled against a sentimental surrender to this nostalgia of the past, yet had found himself overwhelmed.

The land was a slow tumult of gentle, overlapping hills, small, reedy, secret lakes, and wood-deep watercourses. The groves that sheltered the once opulent farmsteads dotted the rich prairie sea like brooding islands. He had a few miles still to go—across the broad flank of Seward Larch’s cornfield, then over the bridge of Pistol River where he had swum and skated in his boyhood, and fished through long, somnolent hours for perch and bullheads. The firm and defiant contours of Solbakken would rise out of the west, its shaggy hemlocks and pines fringing the imposing elms that would be spectral now in this season against the sky, and he would see the high-shouldered, ugly house with its absurd “observation platform” which his grandfather had built and from which the old doctor used to gaze at the stars when he was wont to be alone with his humors. The barns would appear, the granaries and the implement sheds, the silo and the windmill, and the log cabin beyond the orchard. Perhaps even the grassy ruin of the old sod house would still be there, crouching against the earth from which it had come, as if in a desire to return to it. If it should be gone—no, it would be harder still if any sign of it remained.

The light was softening to smoky violet when Eric came near enough to distinguish the features of the place where he was born. The agent, Vernon Adams, had spoken of the present tenant as somewhat hare-brained, with his schemes for raising blooded cattle and his experimenting with corn that was sound enough to start with. That had been five years ago, however, and Andrew Clarence had not once been tardy in paying the rent.

The gate was open to the driveway between the two tall pines he remembered so well. The mail box stood as valiantly as ever on its post. There was blurred light toward the rear of the house, and a sad rustle in the few remaining leaves of the Virginia creeper on the side porch. Everything was the same except that old Uncle Johannes did not come forth to greet him in his bluff, disapproving way, a way that fooled nobody but himself.

Eric stopped his car and got out. A yellow collie barked and came bristling toward him, but Eric quieted him with a reassuring pat on the head. Two men were at work in the yard. One, bandy-legged in knee-boots, came away from the gasoline engine that was attached to the pump, and spat out of one corner of his mouth as he approached Eric.

“How do?” he greeted Eric and halted at a respectable distance.

“Are you Mr. Clarence?” Eric asked.

“Him?” The man opened a cleft of mouth and laughed incredulously. He turned and called over his shoulder to his companion, who was dragging a sack of feed out of a Ford pick-up. “Hey, Lucky—come over here!”

The one called Lucky shuffled forward, his burly shoulders rising against the narrow space of blue dusk between the trees so that he himself looked like an enormous, mysteriously animate sack of feed.

The first man lowered his voice, glanced cautiously toward the house. “Listen, Lucky, he wants to know if I’m Mr. Clarence. Ain’t that something!” He snorted again, but more discreetly. “If I was Mr. Clarence, I wouldn’t be workin’ for him, would I?” he went on, his eyes upon Eric. “I’d be runnin’ some swell church racket or something, that’s what. I’d be rollin’ in dough, instead of slavin’ my guts out for twenty a month and found. And that goes for Lucky, here, except he ain’t good for much the way he is. Lucky’s got an implement in his speech, but he thinks like I do. Don’t you, Lucky?” The burly one nodded solemnly. “Sorry, mister, but we got orders not to let anybody see the boss till half-past six, this bein’ Thursday. Ain’t that right, Lucky?”

All this, Eric reflected, belonged to the shapeless dreams of his recent illness; and yet he had certainly been in his right mind when he had driven in through the gates of Solbakken only a moment ago.

“Would you mind explaining a little,” Eric ventured. “Or perhaps I ought to do a little explaining. My name happens to be Stene. I’d like to see Mr. Clarence, if—”

Both men gaped, but the one with the bandy legs took on an attitude of composure and self-importance as he hastened to reply. “I—I’m the foreman here. Gifford’s my name. And this is Lucky Best. He plows and hauls and helps around.”

“I’d like to know about Mr. Clarence,” Eric said.

“I’m comin’ to that. You see, it’s like this. There’s a preacher down here to the church at the corners only twice a month. On the other Sundays—and every Thursday night except durin’ the harvest—Mr. Clarence runs the show down there. Not only Bible preachin’, either, though he’s a sight better’n the regular sky pilot, at that. He really rares ’em up! Say, he can read you a psalm that would make you look out the windows expectin’ to see the hills singin’. And he reads ’em poetry and the like—stuff you an’ me wouldn’t understand the half of it! Poetry, by cripes—an’ the milk of human kindness. That’s what he calls it himself. You see, it’s mostly his voice—that’s how I’ve got it figgered. He’s got a voice like honey in a comb, an’ when he talks at ’em, they all drip like honey. That’s the God’s truth, mister! An’ when he gets them right down to real singin’—boy, they really go to town! Don’t think they don’t. He could make money if he just stepped out and went up an’ down the country with what he’s got. Like I sez to him, he’s wastin’ his time on a farm, blooded stock or no blooded stock. But he don’t give a damn for money, an’ that’s a shame, because the boss has got ideas. An’ that’s why I had to laugh when you ast me if I was him!”

Gifford chuckled modestly at his own joke and the silent one grinned as if to make it clear that he saw the point just as well as the next one.

Eric glanced at his watch. “So—I have to wait for another fifteen minutes, do I!”

“Well, now, gosh-almighty—I don’t know what to think.” He rolled his tobacco from one jaw to the other and scratched his head. “If he knew it was you—you, see, he’s workin’ on his talk before the meetin’ tonight. But I’ll tell you what you can do. You can go set in the kitchen. He might just come out to see who’s hangin’ around—and there you’d be. He’s likely to look in on the kitchen anytime. He’s got a mess of pork an’ beans in the oven, an’ baked potatoes. I figger we’ll all eat as soon as he gets through with his meditatin’.”

“I thought he was married,” Eric said.

Gifford’s eyebrows rose almost to meet his hay-colored hair beyond the narrow isthmus of forehead. “Sure, he’s married. To as fine a woman as you’ll meet I don’t care where you look. He married her just before he took this place on. She’s the quiet kind, don’t mix much.” He nodded southward. “Over there, beyond them red willows is where she spends most of her time, except in winter. She raises peonies for the market. Bulbs with names, an’ all that. She’s a worker, she is. Can’t stand seein’ things just doin’ nothin’. If it ain’t producin’, she makes it produce, by cripes, or she just knocks it off and the hell with it! Yes, sir.”

Eric was puzzled. This man Gifford was likely to go on talking for hours. “Well, could I see Mrs. Clarence, then?”

“No, you can’t, mister. She’s down in Ioway just now. The mother took sick the other day. She’s dead, p’rhaps, by this.” He let fly a tidy jet of tobacco juice and added laconically, “Telegram—phoned to us at two in the mornin’. Mr. Clarence was dog tired, but he druv her to the depot in Inglebrook to catch the four o’clock, just the same. Wouldn’t let I nor Lucky get up outa bed. That’s the sorta fella he is. Always considerant.”

While he talked, a ruminative change crept over Gifford, remarkably reducing the strutting self-esteem he had shown at first. Eric, looking forward to meeting Andrew Clarence, was prepared for almost anything.