Читать книгу The Mad Carews - Martha Ostenso - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Ghosts of centuries of sunlight crowded this August afternoon. Here was no single summer’s day, dazzling the eyes, troubling the blood with its odors of drying, sweet and unexotic growth, but an æon of such days, spectral and lambent, in carnival on this prairie, on this flat and northern earth of Minnesota. Here eternity danced its static, vibrant dance of heat over the stubble, or floated in a gilded mote of dust down the ladder of sunlight thrust through the crack of a barn wall to the gloom and quiet within.

Elsa Bowers lay flat on her stomach in the doorway of the haymow, her eyes lost in the hot blue blur of the far horizon. Her bare legs waved fitfully in the air behind her, stretching out occasionally when the backs of her knees became hot and sticky. Yonder to the north—you could see the sharp steeple of the Methodist church and the shining tin roof of the big warehouse beside the railway—lay the little town of Sundower sprawled out sleepily under the hot afternoon. Far to the southward—you could just see the new wing that was being built to the big white house shining among the cottonwoods—was the Carew place, a vast reach of fertile acres that yielded their harvests to Seth Carew and his kin. Elsa had been to Sundower many times during the five summers since Steve Bowers, her easy-going father, had come north out of Iowa. She had been to the Carew place but once, when she had gone with her father, over a year ago, because of some business dealings he had had with Seth Carew and his younger brother, Peter. But then, it was only two years since the Carews had come to Sundower.

Elsa had been to the Carew place once—only once—but she had never forgotten the day. Who can forget the clear singing of saws and the ring of hammers in building, and the sharp, heady smell of new lumber, and the warm rose-pink of sunshine glowing through pine shavings, and the soft, smooth touch of a planed board when you lay your fingers along the grain, and man-talk and man-laughter coming to you over it all?

The Carews had been strangers to her then; they were strangers still. They had never ceased to be a fabulous family escaped from between the covers of a story book. Sometimes her mother, looking from the window toward the roadway going down to Sundower, would mention one of them. “There’s Hildreth Carew—going to town with money in her pocket, I’ll warrant!” Or her father, at the supper table: “Seth Carew bought a prize Hereford bull over to the Hurley fair today. Paid a price for him too, I’ll bet!” Or perhaps it was Uncle Fred, talking to himself over his pipe in a corner beside the stove: “I always said we’re planted on the wrong side o’ the hollow. The Carews knew what they were doin’ when they took land on the south side. Trust them!” The Carews—strange people out of another world.

Sundower to the north and the Carew place to the south—and between them all the world that Elsa Bowers knew save for the vague memories of a farm in Iowa, memories that might have died long since had they not been kept alive by the fireside talk of her father, Steve Bowers, and her Uncle Fred. There, too, almost midway between the two remote but sunny limits of her own small world, lay Elder’s Hollow and The Mountain. Elsa might have seen both hollow and mountain had she climbed to where the hay was piled against the other end of the loft and where there was a wide gap made by the fierce prairie wind when it had torn a weathered board from the gable of the barn, but Elsa had long ago decided there was little to be seen in that direction—and that little was gloomy enough, in all conscience.

The Hollow was nothing more than a shallow depression that stretched eastward through their own land and through Nate Brazell’s as well, a full two miles of sloughs girt with wild rice and brittle reeds and swaying cat-tails, where the mallards spent clamorous nights in autumn and where now, in mid-August, a lonely bittern stalked in the mud and dipped his long beak for snails and water-bugs. Lately, it seemed, Uncle Fred Bowers had discovered that misfortune waited upon all who lived north of Elder’s Hollow—unless, of course, you went as far as Sundower where the tin roof shone at noonday and where the steeple caught the red light from the sun at evening. But that, to be sure, was another matter.

Elsa Bowers, her eyes searching the glamorous distance, was convinced that Uncle Fred was right. Sooner or later, ill luck befell anyone who lingered about the Hollow, or sought a living on the side that lay toward Sundower. Had she not heard old Sarah Phillips declare to her mother that there was a “black curse” on the very ground itself? It was old Sarah Phillips, too, who had told of the time when a girl’s body had been found in a shallow grave among the reeds on Nate Brazell’s place. Elsa had heard that much herself, though she had been sent out of the house when her mother had found her listening in the doorway. That, of course, had happened years before Elsa’s father had come to the district. It was within her own memory, however, that young Mortimer Lucas, the mayor’s son, had been shot dead while hunting ducks in the Hollow with a companion from town. They had spoken openly of that incident, even when they knew she was listening. “The top of his head blown right off” was the way they had described it. And hadn’t two of their own heifers run blindly into the slough and sunk out of sight when they had tried to escape Nate Brazell’s dogs? Sometimes, too, she had come upon her father and mother speaking in whispers about Fanny Ipsmiller, who had come to live in the house of Nels Lundquist, but she had long since learned that there were things going on in the world concerning which one never asked, if one were wise.

Then there was The Mountain, of course, rising from the southern edge of the hollow, as if the great hand that had scooped out the earth along those two miles of reeking bog had piled it in a neatly rounded dome where the sun was always brightest in summer, where a frail cloud of mist might be found clinging in the early mornings of autumn, where the thin wraiths of snow flung their shrouds about them in their winter dancing, and where the clean winds swept in the early spring when you went there to look for the first brave crocus-cups showing purple in their coats of fur.

When ill fortune threatened, Elsa’s Good Spirit was wont to remind her that her father had had the wisdom to buy the land on which The Mountain stood when he had come to settle at Sundower. He insisted that the richest soil in the whole district was to be found on the gentle slopes of the mound. The crest he had allowed to go fallow for the sake of the cows, he said, who always found new green grass there in the spring long before the snow had disappeared from among the willows that skirted the creek by the house. When he had come to build, however, he chose the “wrong side” of the hollow. He argued with Uncle Fred that he would buy no land as long as he lived where there was not a bit of running water to cheer you in the evenings, and a curtain of trees to bring the birds about in summer, to say nothing of checking the wind in winter. But then, there was no telling what went on in his mind. Had he not told old Sarah Phillips that he had built the house in the hollow “to flout the devil”? And when she had asked him then why he had kept The Mountain and the land that lay south of the accursed spot—though it was well known that Seth Carew had tried to buy it—he had answered, “Why, to cheat the devil, of course!”

Elsa had long ago begun to fear that this double-dealing with the Evil One would come to no good in the end. It was this thought, precisely, that stood uppermost in her mind as she lay flat on her stomach in the doorway of the haymow and scanned the horizon half hidden in the summer haze. She was not thinking of the Carews and their fine white house with the new wing building, nor of Sundower, either, though her eyes watched curiously a gray drift of dust that approached slowly along the road leading southward from town. She was thinking of her brother, Rutherford—“Reef,” they called him—who was lying up there in the bed under the sloping eaves of the house. She shut her eyes tight and tried to imagine what he was feeling, but she was only ten years old and the one hurt she had ever felt was the hurt of a nail she had got in her heel once when she had gone wading in the slough in spring.

What puzzled Elsa now was that Reef should have been chosen to bear misfortune for the whole family and all the others have gone unharmed. Reef, who was so smart—Reef, who had helped his father shingle the very roof under which he now lay—Reef, who had carved his initials only yesterday on the sill on the haymow doorway, just where she could trace them with her finger! And he had put the date there, too—August 8, 1909. He had permitted her to start each one of the figures in the date and had laughed at her and taken his knife away when her hand had slipped on the difficult curves. They had talked, too, about other things while Elsa lay watching him guide his knife with infinite patience: of how Reef would grow up and become a lawyer, perhaps, like the mayor of Sundower, and have money to spend, like the Carews, and of how he would keep the farm and grow lilac bushes and honeysuckle and more cottonwood, because their mother had wished for such things about the place and had often said so, and of how he would see to it that she would never have to move again as long as she lived.

Reef was so smart—he could do everything! But what would he do now? Doctor Olson from Sundower had given him something to make him sleep. What if he never woke up again? Besides, couldn’t you dream a pain? You dreamt of other things, like being afraid of the dark when you had to go out before you went to bed and both Reef and young Leon were bored with accompanying you. Elsa was sure that he dreamt of the pain. She had crept upstairs when her mother was out getting water, and she had heard a moan come from Reef’s bed. Drawing nearer, she had seen his face. It was the color of skim-milk. She had run out of the house and had climbed to her place in the haymow where she could be alone to think it out by herself.

It was easier to struggle with such thoughts here where the quivering turquoise of the sky was a thing of beauty above you and where you could look out over the burnished spaces of ripe grain that spread to the horizon. There was something reassuring even in the sound of busy scratching that came from the barnyard below where the hens were industriously searching the pebbly ground beside the barn. The very farm buildings seemed striving to tell her that life was a steady, a settled thing, its grimmest misfortune only a ripple on the surface of the stream. From where she lay she could see all of the buildings save the shed where the hogs were housed and the pen where they slept like dead shapes in the sun, the flies standing on their scaly, purplish bellies. The buildings were as yet few, only those which could not be done without. There was the chicken-coop, which would have to be built tighter against the winter; the corncrib, the granary, and the house, all of cheap material and unenduring. No silo and no wagon shed just yet. But the windmill—ah! The white silver of its fan which had but yesterday cleaved the wind and mirrored the sun on every high facet, hung now in twisted, piteous shreds of worthless metal. A sudden wind had come up like a hurricane the night before. Reef had climbed up in the darkness to release the wheel—if Seth Carew had paid what he should have paid for that half section he had bought of Steve Bowers, there would have been no need of climbing up there in the darkness to release the wheel. There would have been a new windmill on the Bowers place that spring. Elsa’s father had often mentioned it. Perhaps they would be able to get one next spring, anyhow. But what could that matter now? Reef had climbed up there in the darkness....

Elsa became suddenly aware of a muffled sound that came to her from the roadway. She had forgotten the gray drift of dust that had been coming slowly along the road leading southward from town. For the moment, she had been thinking hard things of the Carews who had paid her father less than the land was worth. She had been blaming them because of what had happened to Reef. Now, as if her thoughts made some sort of magic, two of the Carew women came driving up the grassy lane into the Bowers farmyard. She had seen them before—these, or others of the Carews, she could not tell—driving past on the way from town, but none of them had ever come in, except once when Seth Carew himself had driven in to speak to her father. Now, in one breath-taking moment, she realized that the people she had been secretly hating only a minute before—and envying, too, only a minute before that—the very people themselves had driven up and come to a halt immediately below the doorway in which she lay.

With the deep hurt that the day had brought her still burning in her heart, she did not know whether to hate them the more for surprising her thus with their coming, or to let all other feeling dissolve into envy as she looked down upon them. The horse was a golden brown, with a taffy-colored mane and a taffy-colored tail braided and snugly rolled under in a pug; he stood flicking his hoofs, and they were the color of the yellowing piano keys at the minister’s house, in Sundower. The buggy—she remembered the name of it, because Reef had told her and had shown her a picture of one like it in the mail-order catalogue—was a victoria, rubber tired and glittering splendidly in the sunlight. The top of the buggy was down and Elsa could see that one of the Carew boys sat within, besides the two women she had seen at first. The boy, who must have been about Reef’s age, was sitting between the two women, a book open upon his knees. He did not look up even when the carriage came to a full stop. The women sat in their places for a moment, looking toward the house, then looked at each other oddly, their faces seeming to stretch and flatten. Presently the older of the two, the one who had been driving, spoke sharply to the boy and tapped him on the arm with her white silk-gloved hand. He looked up indolently, yawned and closed his book, and put it behind him. Then with a droll, curled-up smile of red, plump lips, he got to his feet and stretched, blinking and smiling in the sunlight. The women waited without speaking, with an air of great forbearance.

Elsa watched, her eyes screwed up into a tangle of lashes, long and light, while the boy got down from the victoria. Then he stood up smartly, in the manner of a young soldier, Elsa thought, and swept his round straw hat from his head. Elsa could not be sure whether he was quite serious or merely acting a part for his own amusement when he pressed his hat against his blouse, flung out his other arm, and made a low bow toward the women in the carriage. The women got up and the boy extended his hand to each as she descended. Once safe on the ground, they both looked far away with a smile of pleasure and faint secrecy. The boy took charge of the horse then and led it to the narrow square of shade beside the chicken-coop.

A feeling of strange uneasiness took possession of Elsa as she saw her mother come to the door of the house and look out. She was fingering the base of her throat nervously as if she felt not quite at ease in her brown calico dress with its flounce and the curly white leaves printed in it. It was her best dress and she always wore it in time of sickness, for the doctor’s sake, and against the coming of visitors. But how could the two Carew women know that? They moved over the pebbles in their high heels—Elsa could just see those heels under the drag of their skirts—as if the wearing of good clothes was a small concern in their important lives.

The boy, waiting beside the horse, glanced up and saw her; stared—and looked sternly away. But whether that sternness was again mere make-believe, Elsa could not tell. Across the field that lay close by and along the road, came a man enveloped in sun and shading his eyes with his hand as he came. That was Uncle Fred, coming to see if there might not be something for him to do, now that Reef was unable. Elsa’s father had had to go to the far side of the place, at the very edge of the hollow, and would not be back before it was time for supper. Elsa herself would have to go down and help now. She hated to go, with that boy there. But the Carew women had gone indoors, lifting their skirts carefully on the steps so that a mite of lace showed underneath. Uncle Fred had come through the fence and was talking to the boy now, pointing to the little pasture north of the barn where the horse might be allowed to run free. Elsa waited until the boy had started off with Uncle Fred leading the horse. Then she got up and pulled her apron straight and looked down to see whether her feet were clean.