Читать книгу The Stone Field - Martha Ostenso - Страница 8

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The eastern sky was still only mourning-dove color, but Jo had lain awake for a long time and had been alert with all her body to the venturing first bird notes before dawn because every note brought the full day more near.

Little matter to the Portes that this was Easter Sunday. They thought that boarding the itinerant Bible student for a month during the summer free of charge, so that all the children on the north shore might learn religion, released them from further obligation so far as spiritual affairs were concerned. Her father would spend until mid-afternoon repairing the barn, where it was raining through, and Ned Larkin would be out to finish plowing what he could of the oat field.

Jo reached up back of her head and pushed her long fingers against the kalsomined logs of the wall. Pretty soon, her father often said, if she kept on growing she would be too tall even to sleep in the “attic,” let alone stand up straight in it. It was really no attic at all. It was only the space beneath the ridgepole and above the kitchen ceiling, a long, narrow slot between two gables. But they had managed to put a window in at each end and had made it a proper room for Jo when she was nine years old, too old to sleep in the trundle bed downstairs.

Her bedstead was a narrow brass affair which her father had triumphantly brought home from an auction in the street market in Carthia. Jo could remember his saying then, “Since you can’t have any more, Mabel, we ought to do our best by Jo.” She had supposed he meant beds and she had been terribly grateful. A golden knob was missing from a corner post, and when she unscrewed the other three she had found in one of them a dry and sordid wad of gum. Besides the bed, there was a homemade pine stand with pink flowered cretonne flounced about it and a stool painted a light blue.

Jo sat up and slid her feet down to the small strip of rag carpet beside her bed. Of course, on this day of all days, there wouldn’t be a squeak of life downstairs when she was so vividly awake she couldn’t bear another second of it!

In her striped flannel nightdress she walked over to the window. The cold, scrubbed pine boards made her toes turn up erect all by themselves, like little separate people. The storm window was still on, but through the diamond-shaped opening at the bottom she could hear the robin in the birch tree outside juggling his iridescent bubbles of song. And when he plunged down from the tree with the rusty flame of his breast forward, not sweeping and elusive as later birds, she thought how known he was, how lavishly given, and wondered if this made him more dear or less. The orioles and tanagers, even when you saw them full on, were hidden in a secret of sunlight. It was difficult to decide which bird she would choose to be if the choice were offered her. But in her heart she felt somehow that the robin was more like her true self and that she would be putting on airs if she elected to change into one of the more gorgeous birds.

Across the lake now, beyond the squat turtleback of Spite Island, rose the sun, a vast, wet, ominous ruby. Then it meant to rain today after all, Jo thought with rebellious indignation. You could always tell when there was that limpid hush at dawn, as if the sun were trailing diaphanous veils, and suddenly at its rising the birds were still. She looked southward, past Crane Island, which was yet only a threaded, silvery promontory of poplars with here and there the changeless dark of a pine ascending. Around the blunt nose of Crane Island was the Hilyards’ beach, not to be seen from Jo’s window. If the ice, glowing from blue to lavender and transparent rose now, were only off the lake, she might take the boat and row across. As it was, she knew only too well there would be nothing for it but to walk the three miles around the end of the lake, rain or no rain. It would be too much to expect her father to take the team off the field even for an hour or so.

The water in the blue enamelware pitcher was numbingly cold to her hands and face, but this was only a wake-up wash anyhow, since last night she had had a warm bath in the wooden tub downstairs in front of the kitchen range. Her mother had washed her hair, too, adding vinegar to the rinsing water, so that it gleamed like pale shot silk, not with an even lightness. Perhaps in a few years it would not remind anybody of sawed pine. Perhaps it would be a shining amber or a lustrous, romantic chestnut, she dared to think while she parted it carefully on one side and pinned it back with the butterfly barrette Goldy Matthews had given her for Christmas.

Although it was no problem to choose the dress she would wear to enter the Stately Mansion, since only the blue serge with the red sailor collar had whole elbows, Jo nevertheless stood for some minutes before the rack where her clothes hung with a pensive finger pressed against her lip. It was fun to pretend that there were a dozen lovely creations waiting there, frilled and laced and enchantingly hued. It wasn’t hard even to imagine that the blue serge was sapphire velvet with a little collar, very white and soft and embroidered for the neck.

But there would be work to do before she could give herself wholly to such vain fancies. She slipped quickly into her old flannel bloomers, the heavy brown skirt made over from a cast-off of her mother’s, and the middy blouse that was too short in the sleeves.