Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 6

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They were men with a surface hardness baked upon them by the brief, fierce suns of northern summers, frozen upon them by the cold of winters legend-long. But beneath their weathering they were ordinary men, likable or unlikable in part, sensitive or dull to the impact of life upon them—as ordinary as the very rich, the very poor, the unimportant, and the chance great.

Brade Toufang and Tom Matthews, tenant brush farmers on the Hilyard tract, had been sitting for the better part of an hour in the whitewashed kitchen while Jo and her mother went about their housework. Beyond the windows the early spring afternoon scudded gray and wet. It had reached into the kitchen with a long, chilling hand, and neither the brisk wood fire in the range nor Mrs. Porte’s good coffee and doughnuts had been able to prevent its touching the shoulder of each of the men seated there.

Jo had finally crouched to the floor beside the wood-box, listening to the talk between her father and the neighbor men and running her hand through the silky mane of old Bounce. Now that she was fourteen she could understand in some measure what it was these men wanted, for she had heard the insistent chant of it ever since she was ten, the year the war came to an end.

She had heard the story over and over—of how old Ashbrooke Hilyard had bought all the land about Fallen Star Lake in the rough days, of how his land hunger had forced other settlers from their holdings, of how his ambition had later given way to a different sort of impulse when he had promoted the Eden Enterprise and had brought in new settlers to work the land at a nominal rental, since he could till only a part of it himself. He had even allotted Phineas Baggott a few acres where he could live out his days—old man Baggott, from whom he had taken two full sections of good woodland by involvement in debts of one kind or another that were never paid when they fell due. Jo had heard it all, times without number, and was growing tired of it now. She had heard how her father, alone among the settlers, had prevailed upon Ashbrooke Hilyard to sell him the eighty acres he had been renting. But then Ernest Porte had somehow had the cash in hand, and old Ashbrooke, for some reason, had always favored Ernest above the others. Now the talk was, as usual, about the desire of the other settlers to gain title to the acres they had turned for so many years and for which they had paid annual tribute to the Hilyards who stubbornly refused to sell. Of late Jo had begun to feel that Brade Toufang and Tom Matthews and their like had no right to own land. It took a man like old Ashbrooke Hilyard, however hard he might be, to give dignity and meaning to the soil. It seemed like a sacred heritage from the past, and a man must be something more than common to merit it.

And yet she knew, she felt, something of what these others had given to the land and were giving to it still. They seldom spoke of it except to curse it and to complain, bewailing their lot from year to year, but they were of it nonetheless and would never get away from it. The years might bring their ups and downs and the seasons their changes, but once a man had thrust his hands into the soil and knew the grit of it between his teeth, he felt something rise within him that was not of his day or generation, but had persisted through birth and death from a time beyond recall.

These things Jo understood vaguely, though they always seemed to escape her understanding just when she was on the point of grasping them. It was like looking at the outer rim of a rainbow. If you looked intently enough you could almost feel the violet hues that eluded the eye. It was while men talked of such things, however haltingly, that she could sit and listen. But when they turned to figures, so and so much an acre and so and so much for taxes, Jo stopped her ears. If there had been other women here besides her mother, there would have been fascinating conversation about the Hilyards themselves, so that her inner dream of them would glow and darken excitingly moment by moment. But there was little to be gained from listening to the talk of men. She patted the head of old Bounce, who labored to his feet as she stood up.

“If you’re going out, Jobina,” her mother called from the pantry, “put your jacket on. It’s raw.”

Jo took her knitted red tam and her old black and red plaid mackinaw down from the hook beside the kitchen door.

What if the skies were gray and threatening and the wind chill? Tomorrow she would walk within the Stately Mansion.