Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 5

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Ned Larkin hung the towel in its place above the wash basin. “Erne’s back from town, I see,” he announced as he began to brush his sandy hair back from his glistening forehead.

“He’s early. Put another plate down for your pa,” Jo’s mother ordered mechanically.

“I seen him comin’ in the gate just now,” Ned added. “Guess he didn’t get to see Hilyard about them seed oats he was gettin’. I’ll have that east thirty plowed by the end o’ next week.”

“Well, sit in, anyhow. I expect you’re starved.”

“I could eat all right. This raw weather makes an appetite when you’re workin’. If it don’t pick up soon, things is goin’ to be backward.” Ned drew a chair and seated himself.

“This is the last of the salt pork,” said Jo’s mother. Streaks of the original gold rim were still discernible on the platter she set on the table.

“We’ll eat cake, then, as the Queen o’ Sheba said to the Czar of Russia.”

“It wasn’t the Queen of Sheba,” Jo corrected as she set a knife and fork beside her father’s place.

“Bring the gravy, Jo,” her mother said peremptorily, then smiled at Ned Larkin. “I don’t know where you pick up half the things you say.”

Ned lifted his brows and pursed his lips. “Oh, I been around, Mabel. There’s a heap o’ education in travel.”

The door opened and Jo’s father came in. “Well—just in time, eh?”

“We’re waitin’ for you, Erne,” Ned replied as he reached for the bowl of potatoes.

In a moment they were all at the table.

“That’s the last of the salt pork,” Jo’s mother announced again.

Jo gazed past her mother’s flushed face to the whitewashed wall on which hung a calendar with the figure of Pocahontas a-dream over a forest pool. Beside it was a reproduction of “The Age of Innocence,” which her mother had cut from a magazine and had had framed and glassed in town for fifty cents.

Then she turned to her father and saw him looking at the gravy beside Ned’s plate. Ned had taken four or five potatoes and a good deal of gravy. Ernest Porte took two potatoes slowly, as if he were counting them, and then a spoonful of the white gravy.

“Well, let’s eat hearty!” he urged with a dry twinkle at Jo. “We won’t have meat of any sort for a spell now with the venison gone, unless Ma can spare us a chicken.”

Ned bent a fervent look upon the platter of salt pork before he took it into his hands. His eyes met Jo’s mother’s across the table. He brushed back a damp, sandy lock from his sloping forehead and said, “You first, Mabel!”

Jo’s mother protested nicely, shrugging her high, thin shoulders. “You know I’m sick to death of the stuff, Ned. You and Ernest eat it. I fried those eggs for Jo and me.”

She was too old to blush, Jo thought—thirty-nine—and yet she was blushing. Over a platter of salt pork! The blush seemed to pass up to her blue eyes and into her smoothly parted dark hair. For the first time, Jo saw threads of gray in those neat strands.

The mean little moment of anxiety about food passed, as it always did, leaving everybody looking smaller afterwards, and the low room narrower. Jo’s father shook his shoulders as if he were trying to get into some sort of freedom from everything, and Ned Larkin slid three slices of the crisply fried pork to his plate.

“Did you get in to see Hilyard?” Ned asked.

“No, but I saw Royce in town. He says the seed oats’ll be ready for us when we’re ready for them.”

“Is Royce back from school, then?” Jo’s mother asked.

“Hm-m—him and young Ash. Back for the Easter holidays, I expect. They were in showin’ off that new red car they got—Dorothy was with ’em, too.”

“You were talking to Royce?”

“Sure! He came halfway across the street and shook hands with me like I was an old friend of his. Well, I guess I am, too, in a way. He don’t forget the time I found him hollerin’ his head off down there in the Owl Country—been lost in the peat bog a good hour before I found him—and took him home to his mammy. Though she never as much as said, ‘Thank you!’ The Tates were always a bit uppish, except the old doc. And I guess Alda was the worst of the lot.”

“She can afford to be,” Jo’s mother observed acidly.

“I s’pose she can, but—well, sakes alive, Mabel, it takes all kinds to make a world. You can’t say Len is uppish.”

Her father seldom spoke of Mr. Leonard Hilyard as “Len,” Jo thought with a running thrill. It seemed to bring the Stately Mansion so intimately near that it was almost not decent.

“He must have been when he picked Alda Tate for a wife,” Jo’s mother retorted. “And the three brats she brought into the world are worse than she is—with their going away to school and college. As if the schools in Carthia weren’t good enough for them.”

“Well, there’s no accountin’ for a man’s taste in women, I guess. I might ’a’ married Alda Tate myself if I’d got here ten years sooner. What’s more, the older I get the more I realize there’s a lot o’ guesswork in breedin’. More in humans than in cattle, too. With two like Len Hilyard and Alda Tate, there’s no telling which way the strain will run. Dorothy is like her mother, young Ashbrooke isn’t like either of them, but Royce is a fine, upstandin’ young fellow, gettin’ to be. More like his dad every year. He has the makin’s of a good man if he don’t get too many fool notions out of goin’ to college—and if he don’t marry some scatterbrain of a woman.”

“There’s time enough for that,” Jo’s mother remarked.

“Well, he’s—let’s see—Royce’ll be twenty-two come August. I remember because once when he was a kid his father bought him a Shetland pony for his birthday and I was along. Won’t be long before he’s lookin’ round. But, gosh, I came near forgettin’. They’re givin’ an Easter party for the kids around the lake. They want Jo.”

Jo looked up quickly.

“Who’s giving an Easter party?” her mother asked.

“Why, the Hilyards, of course. They’re askin’ the neighbors’ kids over tomorrow afternoon.”

Jo’s hands throbbed where she pressed them together under the table. It was unbelievable.

“About four o’clock, Royce said,” her father added.

“Must be something funny about that,” Ned Larkin spoke up. “First time in all the years I been around here that any of the Hilyard tribe has put themselves out for—”

“What difference does that make, Ned?” Jo’s father put in. “Let the kids go and have a good time. Can’t come any harm out of that, far as I can see. We’re neighbors, ain’t we?”

“Like hell!” Ned sneered. “We’re as far apart as the Medes and the Persians. But it’ll probably be rainin’ pitchforks by tomorrow and—”

Jo winced. “It won’t! And if it does I’ll go anyhow! I’ve never seen the inside of their house.”

Her mother turned sharply. “There you go! What good will it do you to see the inside of the Hilyard house? I’d like to know. It isn’t as grand as all that. Mrs. Vandermeyer was there once and she ought to know. The Vandermeyers had plenty of money before they lost it and had to come up here to live.”

“Sakes, Mabel—let the child be! If she wants to see the inside of the place, let her. It can’t hurt her to have a look at how other folks live.”

Jo’s mother sighed resignedly. “I’m not saying against it, I’m sure. But it won’t do her any good getting ideas.”

What might have come of the argument Jo was never to know. From behind the stove came Bounce, the venerable collie who was just Jo’s age. He was at the door, barking gruffly, his neck ruff bristling with a show of anger, but his great plume of a tail wagging.

“There’s Brade Toufang and Tom Matthews,” Jo’s mother announced, looking from the window. “I wonder what they’re after.”

There was a scraping of chairs away from the table and Jo’s father went to the door.