Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 10

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The hours had seemed endless with waiting, but Jo was on her way at last. The clock in the kitchen stood at three when she had taken her coat from its hook and her red wool tam that always sagged on the back of her neck after she had walked a little way. Her mother’s last admonition had fallen between rebuke and lament. “See that you get back before dark. Pa’s expecting Aggie to freshen any minute and she’s not been acting right. I might have to help him, and you’ll have to make supper.” She had hung the dishpan with a clatter on its nail above the wood-box and Jo had gone out without a word.

In deep summer this road around Fallen Star Lake humped and twisted like a long bright and dark serpent through the lush, sun-dappled tunnel of hardwoods and evergreens. But now, before elm and oak and poplar and birch were in leaf, it seemed naked and forlorn, exposed to the sky—a little sandy road only on which humble people came and went.

Jo walked with a hurry in her shoulders, for whenever she glanced up the clouds hung lower and more sullen above the bare trees. She hoped, with a twinge of disloyalty, that Goldy Matthews would not be waiting for her. She wanted to walk alone, to let her thoughts dwell upon what awaited her, to shake herself free from the sound of her mother’s talking, fast and sharp, that made Jo’s spine creep.

But at the end of a mile there was Goldy, seated beside a clump of dwarf sumac, wearing her brother’s ragged old gray sweater. Her little moon of a face brightened as Jo came around the bend in the road. She stood up and began clapping her hands. Against the still winy velvet of last year’s panicles on the sumac, her bare head was colorless and drab. Jo had often wondered how anyone could turn out so different from her name. Only her eyes had a soft, waiting radiance in them, as if she expected some day to have something lovely happen to her. Goldy was sixteen, but to Jo she had always seemed younger than herself, perhaps because of her fear of everything—lightning, climbing trees, Baggott’s dogs.

“I’ve been waiting for you!” Goldy exclaimed. “Ma won’t let me go to the Hilyards’ because I haven’t any clothes. But she let me make fudge out o’ some maple sap we got—and Toofy had kittens last night—in the barn—and I want you to come up right now and see them.”

Jo felt the miserable red dusting over her freckles. She glanced up the slope where the two-roomed slab shack of the Matthewses stood among the lofty white pines. The shack was edged and roofed in green and carried a jauntily sylvan air that moved summer visitors to remark, “How quaint!”

“I can’t stay, Goldy,” Jo faltered. “I’ll only have a little while at the Hilyards’ because I’ve got to be home to make supper.”

Tears of disappointment came into Goldy’s eyes, and Jo looked sternly away.

“You oughtn’t to go to their place,” Goldy said in a strange tone. “Baggott’s pack was running again last night.”

Jo looked at her, and the shiver she felt made her suddenly furious. Old Baggott’s pack of crazy dogs—what had they to do with her? Her father often said it made him laugh the way people on the north shore acted when those dogs went baying through the woods. Her mother thought there might be something to it, however. Remember the time Karsten Borg was drowned out fishing the dawn after the pack had been running?

“I’m not afraid of Baggott’s pack!” Jo said stoutly.

Goldy uttered a feeble gasp. “They’d tear you to pieces if you met them!”

“Anyhow, I’ve got to go,” Jo replied, her eyes stubborn. It had already started to sprinkle again and she had two miles still to go—and through the Owl Country besides. She hastily said good-by and set off down the road at a brisk pace.

The Owl Country was a gray, webby tangle of old vines among gaunt branches now, with an occasional evergreen interspersed, an uncouth place with little to inspire either awe or fear. Even the fine rain knitting through it made it only half mysterious, melancholy and unimportant as a ghost in daylight, Jo told herself. It was the bony look of the giant poplars that made her run.

Her wet tam sloped away from her high forehead and down about her ears. Wet gravel had got in through the lacings of her shoes and her feet itched, hot and cold. But the stone pillars of the Hilyard gate rose before her, higher and more overwhelming even than when you drove through them. The gate was open, and beyond it through the bare trees she could see the white frame house with its stonework base, its cupola, and its porch that had four thick white pillars. At a dignified distance from the house, and separated from it by gardens and an orchard, were blurred masses of outbuildings, barns, and pens.

Even now she could turn and run home, she thought to herself, but that would be shameful cowardice, and she would have nothing to tell Goldy Matthews. Her heart throbbed to bursting as she entered the gate and walked in the precise middle of the driveway, head high but with each foot heavy as a sadiron, up the steps and across the porch.

On the door, which looked square for all its height, there was a brass thing hanging—the thing she had seen from the driveway when she had come here with her father. It was shaped like a horseshoe, with an “H” in the middle of the curve near the bottom. Jo wondered why it wasn’t screwed down tight instead of hanging loose from the top. Clenching her teeth, she knocked on the door with her chapped knuckles.

A fat, pink-cheeked young woman, with hair braided about her head, opened the door. She wore a white apron.

“How do you do,” Jo said politely in a voice that was very small.

She was being looked up and down in a disconcerting manner. There was a wild fluttering somewhere inside her.

“You got plenty vet,” said the girl. “Better kom in first vit’ me to de kitchen and get dry.”

Before Jo followed her into the narrow passage to the left, she got a full glimpse of the entrance hall. Its floor seemed to her a lake darkly shining. The white balustrade of a staircase wound up from it, but to Jo it was an immaculate waterfall gliding down into a lustrous pool. In a yet unfolded time, when she—and the staircase—were to have known strange years passing, Jo was still to see it clearly in this way, undimmed and proud, through the strong flow of memory.