Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 17

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The smell of coffee came sturdy and snug from the kitchen. Jo’s mother had issued no invitations and her neighbors had given her no warning, but the old habit had prompted her to prepare for their “dropping in” on their way home from the funeral. The Toufangs, the Dibneys, Peter Torkelson, who had taken over the Morris place a year ago, and even Tom Matthews and his wife were there, though they had driven a mile past their own place and would have to go back again. Young Luther Billings, who had lately bought a farm south of the Hilyards’, had come no farther than the barn, where he and Ned Larkin had fallen into talk of their own.

Jo only half listened to the voices in the Porte living room as she went from one to another with cups and saucers.

“He was just about the last of the old-timers,” Tom Matthews said solemnly. “We won’t meet his kind again.”

Brade Toufang cleared his throat roughly. “He’ll make way for someone else.”

“Ve all do,” Peter Torkelson put in quietly. “Sometimes it vorks out good—and den sometimes it vorks out not so good. Ve never know. T’ings change vit’out us. Ve yust go on.”

“That’s because people like us can’t do much about it, Peter,” George Dibney observed. “It’s people like the Hilyards that make the changes for us.”

“There won’t be much change,” Ernest Porte said quickly. “While the old man was alive we had our farms and we worked ’em year in and year out. And we’ll do the same now after he’s dead.”

“Yes, and what has it ever got us?” Jo’s mother asked as she paused before Mrs. Dibney, coffeepot in hand. “Are we any farther ahead today than we were when we came here?”

Well, Jo thought, we own our land, anyhow. And wasn’t that being farther ahead?

“How much farther ahead has anybody got in the last ten years—or the last twenty for that matter?” Ernest was lighting his pipe. In that attitude, Jo thought, he always looked like somebody of importance. She felt, just then, very proud of him.

Jo’s mother sniffed contemptuously. “That’s you all over!”

“They’re all alike, the men!” Mrs. Dibney spoke up. “If they can eat and sleep and have a rag of a shirt to their backs, they’re satisfied!”

“In thirteen years,” Mabel Porte went on, “I’ve been off this place just once—and that was when I went home to bury my own father.”

Jo saw that her mother was close to tears now.

“Well, I sort o’ like it here,” her father said mildly.

Brade Toufang shifted his chair noisily. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we all had a title to the land we’re workin’. It was all right to pay rent to the old man—it was his scheme in the first place and we came into it under him. But I’ll be damned if I’m goin’ to pay rent all the rest of my life to them Hilyard brats that never done an honest hand’s turn since they was born.”

“There’ll be a change there, you’ll see!” George Dibney declared. “The Hilyards ain’t settin’ as high today as they once did. Charlie Vandermeyer says he was talkin’ to Len Hilyard last week. Len looks to a sharp drop in beef this fall. He ain’t goin’ to feed more’n about a hundred head or so this summer.”

An anxious crease appeared between Ernest Porte’s brows. “Yes, Charlie was tellin’ me about that. I don’t know—but when a man like Mr. Hilyard thinks we’re in for a mean spell, it don’t look too good for the rest of us. We can’t expect the war prices to last forever.”

“One thing about the old man,” Tom Matthews said, “you could always count on him carryin’ you over a bad year or two if—”

“And if we get stuck again, Len Hilyard’ll do just as much for us—any time,” Ernest Porte assured him.

“If he can, that is,” Brade Toufang suggested. “By the time he looks after that family of his, he won’t have much left for anything else. And if anything happens to him—”

“I declare he looked ready to drop any minute there today,” Jo’s mother interrupted.

Ernest laughed. “He’s good for a long pull yet. Why, he’s a young man—not much over fifty—and he comes from a hardy stock. No sense in us gettin’ all worked up about nothin’.”

“But did you see Royce throw that lump of dirt into the grave?” Mrs. Dibney asked with proper dramatic effect. “My land, wasn’t it the queerest thing? It gave me the creeps! And the way he did it! For a moment I was afraid he’d jump in himself.”

“I seen that happen once,” Tom Matthews said. “Down home in Iowa it was. Only the boy wasn’t as old as Royce—about fourteen or fifteen, mebbe—and it was his mother’s funeral instead of his grandfather’s. He jist jumped in before anybody could stop him. My own father was one of the men that went down and got him out. He was always kind o’ queer, the boy was. The whole family was a little off. Totten, their name was—Totten, down in Iowa.”

“George saw a man get right up out of his coffin once, didn’t you, George?” Mrs. Dibney prompted her husband.

George Dibney smiled reminiscently. “That was old man Wilkie. He’d been dyin’ for years. When he finally kicked the bucket they laid him out a sight neater’n he’d ever been when he was alive. Course it was probably the first time he’d been sober in twenty years. Anyhow, when the preacher was readin’ a prayer over him in church, old Wilkie sat right up in front o’ the whole congregation and hollered, ‘What the hell’s goin’ on here?’ And he lived for eight years after that!”

They always laughed at George Dibney’s stories, and Brade Toufang always slapped his thighs when he laughed. They would talk and laugh for another hour, the men would begin to tease their wives, and finally the women would go to the kitchen to gossip among themselves, leaving their husbands to talk of the weather and the fields and the sowing. Jo had heard it all before, and although she often found pleasure in listening, especially to the gossip of the women, it bored her today. She was glad when her mother, glancing from the window, told her to run out and bring Ned Larkin and Lute Billings into the house for their coffee.

“I don’t know what’s keeping them out there to themselves.”

“It ain’t like Ned to sit outside when there’s eatin’ goin’ on in the house,” Jo’s father said.

“If a man works he’s got to eat,” Mabel Porte remarked, and turned from the window.

Jo found Ned and the younger man seated on a bench just inside the stable doorway. The smell was warm and comfortable there in the shelter from the chill wind off the lake.

“If you want your coffee, Ma says you’d better come in now and get it,” Jo announced abruptly.

But Ned Larkin was talking and made no response beyond knocking the cold ashes from his pipe and getting to his feet.

“... and that’s why I figger on gettin’ out this fall for good. Farmin’ used to give a man a livin’, but them times is past. Anyhow, what kind of a livin’ do you get out of it even when times is good? A man only lives once, Lute, and he owes it to himself to get out in the world a little. Anyhow, that’s my idea of it.”

Young Lute Billings got up and brushed the back of one hand thoughtfully with the palm of the other. Jo noticed how tall he was alongside Ned Larkin, and how straight and sturdy his legs were. He must be about the same age as Royce Hilyard, she thought. For a moment she was fascinated by the growth of fine, dust-colored hair on the backs of his strong hands. There was something almost pathetic about it, as there was about the slow way he had of brushing one hand with the other when there was no call for it.

“Still,” he said quietly, “I figger on stayin’ for a while now that I’m here. I guess I like it, that’s all. Don’t know any other reason.”

And as he spoke his pale hazel eyes were looking into Jo’s face with a kind of inner light that she had never seen in them before.