Читать книгу The Mad Carews - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

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When she emerged a moment later and stood before the wide open doorway of the barn, she paused and glanced to where Uncle Fred was leading the horse toward the pasture, the Carew boy following jauntily behind. Uncle Fred was a strange man. He always made you feel sorry for him, though you never could tell why. There was something in the stoop of his shoulders and the heavy plodding of his feet that made him look shamed. She had seen it in the sidelong glances he had given the victoria when he was taking the horse out of the shafts. Elsa had often seen it. It was a part of Uncle Fred, like the old felt hat he had worn as long as Elsa could remember. He was like her mother about beautiful, costly things, and rich people. The trouble with them both was that they could not play that they were those people and owned those things themselves. Elsa could look at the victoria standing there in the shade and think of it as some sleek live thing that could not bear the sun too long. Then she could laugh about it, remembering that it was only a buggy after all. But Uncle Fred and her mother were different. They didn’t laugh, much.

If it had been Pa, now, Elsa thought, he would have looked at the thing there in the shade, raised his eyebrows and made a funny face so that she would have doubled up with laughing at him. She remembered the time when her teacher, Miss Glide, had come to call on them, wearing a high, yellow pompadour with a “rat” under it. Elsa was sitting beside her mother and Miss Glide was sitting with her back to the kitchen door, facing them. Pa glanced in from the kitchen, and must have seen Miss Glide’s pompadour, for the next thing Elsa knew, there he was standing in the doorway with a loaf of bread on his head. Elsa couldn’t breathe and got so tight all over that she had to rush out of the room. That was Pa’s way. He would laugh and snort that he was a plain man with plain ways and had no use for fancy claptrap. But Elsa knew that he had sent for a leather-bound copy of Emerson once, and when it had arrived there had not been one penny in the house to pay for it and it had had to go back again; and Pa had gone away that night and somebody had driven his horses home early the next morning, with him lying in the back of the wagon.

Uncle Fred and the Carew boy were coming back from the pasture. Elsa started up the pathway to the house, a little annoyed at herself for dreaming there when she might have easily reached the house before they had turned back. She did not want to meet the Carew boy—with her soiled apron, and her bare legs. Her walk broke into a run which she checked suddenly at a call from Uncle Fred.

“Elsa!”

She stood still and waited. After all, who was this Carew boy that she should be frightened—with his clean blouse and his straw hat and his red, plump lips?

“Go in and ask your ma does she want anything done,” Uncle Fred said as he came up, jerking his head toward the house.

At that moment Elsa’s mother herself came out, pushing open the screen door, at the top of which an oilcloth fringe swung out, scattering the flies. She came down into the yard and Elsa saw a patch of red on each of her cheeks and one at the base of her throat, just where those two knobs of bone stuck out. Elsa moved close to her mother’s skirt and buried her face in the brown folds of it until she felt faintly dizzy from the sweet, dry smell of the calico. She wished these people had not come, to distress her mother with their fine clothes and their fine horse and carriage.

“I want a chicken for supper, Fred,” her mother was saying. “I’ve asked them to wait and have supper with us. They want to see Steve, anyhow. You better take one of them young roosters we got from Johnson. And singe it good, too, Fred. Elsa, you go and bring in some kindling. Maybe our young visitor, here, will go with you.”

Elsa felt sudden shyness. It itched at her toes so that those of one foot dug into those of the other; it made her scalp tingle and it screwed up her eyes and made her mouth smile all on one side. The boy approached slowly and took off his round hat. His head was all shiny curls, short and dark brown, and where his hair rose in a little ridge above his forehead the sun struck it and made it flash back copper. Elsa stared at him, forgetting herself now. He had black eyebrows shaped like little minnows, she thought, darting straight inward from the temples, and under them strange eyes. They were like Reef’s moss agate, dark green with black threads of moss in them. His cheeks and lips were red and plushy—like a raspberry. The Carew boy was a raspberry. Elsa giggled a little.

Her mother was moving away, and the protective volume of her skirt with her. “See where Lenny is—and get me in the wood,” she said and went up the pathway to the house.

The Carew boy stood with his hands in his pockets, feet spread apart in manly fashion. He pursed his lips and whistled softly to himself, provokingly, then broke out suddenly.

“Who’s Lenny?”

“He’s my brother, Leon,” Elsa replied fiercely.

“Oh,” the boy commented, picking up a stone and shying it at a weed, “I thought perhaps he was just another girl.”

Elsa felt suddenly hot and tight. Her lashes winked quickly. “Huh!” she said with scorn. “I wore overhalls for two whole summers down in Iowa. I could be wearing them yet only I like dresses better than overhalls.”

The boy smiled indulgently, dryly, in the manner of one who had long since outgrown such discussions. He discreetly waived the point. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Elsa Margaret Hermina Bowers,” she informed him with pride, chin lifting on the first syllable of each name, eyes half closed.

“Gee! How can you remember all that? How old are you?”

Elsa hesitated. “I’m eleven,” she said finally, breathing hard, and, augmenting the lie, “—past.”

The boy frowned, the dark minnows of his brows darting together. “You’re small for your age,” he observed, insufferably grown up. “How old is your brother?”

“I got two brothers.”

“Leon,” the Carew boy prompted at once.

“Oh ... he’s only a kid. He’s eight.”

Their talk was halted suddenly by a call from the house. “Elsa—! Get in the wood now!”

She started off at once, the boy following her.

“We’ll get Lenny, too,” she suggested. “I guess he’s playing over in the pigweed house.”

They came to the pigweed house, a clearing crushed down in the midst of tall, dense pigweeds towering over their heads, lush and soft-leafed, with thick green stems, waxen and cool. The clearing was a pool of shadow, dark green and damp with its floor of crushed large leaves. It smelt of the earth, and stillness, and rains that had come and gone, and long, remote mornings with white, swollen clouds journeying across the blue, high above the waving green fronds of leaves. It smelt of June, and July and August, and all the drowse and timelessness of summer. Elsa’s heart beat quickly as she led her young visitor into her sanctuary.

Leon was there, a nest of a little boy, curled up and sound asleep. His yellow ringlets were deep in the mash of leaves, his chubby grimed palm cupped upward.

Elsa was all tenderness for him. He was so helpless, so little. She hated to wake him. She got down on her knees and lifted his head in her arms.

“Wake up, Lenny! Got to help Elsa get in wood. Company’s come!”

Leon fought her off, rubbing his nose and eyes with both fists. His sister laughed and let him go, secretly proud of his manliness. Leon would endure no show of affection. He got sturdily to his feet and stared with large pupils at the stranger who had come with Elsa.

“What’s your name?” he asked, suddenly awake.

The Carew boy laughed outright, then turned to Elsa.

“I’ve got only one name,” he said, as if he were merely carrying on the conversation from where they had broken off a few moments before. “We never have two names in our family. But they go back a long way, and they mean a lot, so we don’t need more than one. That’s what my father says. My mother—she’s dead now—she didn’t like my name. It’s Bayliss—Bayliss Carew. My great-grandfather’s name was Bayliss—and he came from England on a sailing ship that took eight weeks to cross the ocean. There were pirates then and my great-grandfather’s ship was chased, but it got away—just in time.”

There followed a long silence during which Elsa absorbed the information and wondered why there was nothing in the Bowers history to match a race with pirates. Leon was determined that there should be.

“My mother came from Germany,” he declared. “She crossed the ocean when she was a little girl and the ship was wrecked—and she had to swim to shore. And she was almost drownded—but a dog—a big dog came out and saved her.” He was talking very fast and Elsa could only watch him, fascinated. She felt she should stop him before he went too far, but she shut her lips so tightly that two dimples appeared below the corners of her lower lip.

Bayliss looked from Leon to Elsa, frankly skeptical. “She did not!” he blustered. “How far did she swim?”

Leon threw out his arms and shut his eyes into sharp wrinkles. “Oh ... miles and miles ... a hundred miles, I guess.”

Bayliss was smiling broadly now. “When did the dog come and save her?”

Leon’s imagination halted before the question, or perhaps it was quite lost in the picture he had drawn for Bayliss in the hope of matching the story of the pirate ship. At any rate, he could think of nothing to say. It was Bayliss himself who broke the heavy silence that had come down about them. He thrust his hand suddenly into his pocket and said, “If you guess what I’ve got here, you can have it.”

Leon had begun a yawn but he cut it short in surprise. “A knife!” he exclaimed promptly.

“Nope. Guess again. Three guesses.”

The little boy stared at the pocket, trying to penetrate it with his sharp eyes. Only two more guesses. Elsa herself eyed the pocket.

“A Jew’s harp!” Leon’s shot went wild and Elsa looked her disgust.

Leon swallowed. “Well, a glass alley!”

Bayliss laughed and shook his head. “You can have it anyhow,” he said gently, and drew from his pocket a green enameled frog with red distended eyes which opened its mouth and croaked convincingly and at will.

Both Leon and Elsa regarded it enchanted as it lay in Bayliss’ palm. “Here—take it,” Bayliss said, thrusting it toward Leon. “I’ve got another one at home.”

A curious glance came into Elsa’s eyes. The long lashes intertwined, winking. Suddenly she pushed Bayliss’ hand away. “No,” she said sharply. “He can’t have it. He didn’t guess.”

Leon reached for the toy and Elsa slapped his hand. He made a slow, twisted grimace, stamped his foot and stiffened his body. Bayliss lifted one eyebrow.

“Aw—why can’t he have it? I have another and I can get lots more if I want them.”

“Well—so can we!” Elsa retorted. “Come on, Leon. We got to get the wood in.”

Bayliss scowled, his eyes darkening, his cheeks darkening. He stood there with the toy thrust foolishly out on his palm, his generous impulse thwarted by a girl in a homely dress whose bare legs were much too thin and none too clean. With quick anger he said, “You can not! You’ve got to buy these and you haven’t got the money. I’ve got lots of it in my pockets—and lots more at home!”

Elsa was outdone, for the moment. She groped frantically for something that would startle this young braggart and put him in his place.

“My brother Reef got his hand cut off last night on the windmill!” she finally blurted out.

The effect was sensational. Elsa felt a little dizzy, a little hollow. Bayliss had gone white, sick-looking.

“Which one?” His voice was an awed whisper.

“The right one, of course,” she said. She felt sick now, too, and wanted to cry.

Leon had forgotten the frog.

The three moved out of the green well of shadow; out between the smooth jade stalks of the pigweeds rooted in darkness; out into the brilliant, slow and mighty tide of the prairie sun. Bayliss Carew looked up at the windmill, its vanes hanging in white tatters in the sunlight.