Читать книгу The Mad Carews - Martha Ostenso - Страница 7

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The year bore once more to its close and Elsa’s mother tacked strips of old garments at the top and at the bottom of doors to keep out the blowing cold, and at night placed old grain sacks, pieces of carpet, anything, at the threshold. There was nothing so real on the prairie as winter, nothing so memorable. Elsa’s mother made cough syrup out of onions and brown sugar, a mixture more loathsome than castor oil. Reef was home for the holidays, a strangely different Reef, who sat late into the night with his feet in the oven of the kitchen stove, a heavy book on his knees. He had been glad to see them all, of course, had talked to them for hours about his life in the city, had told them again and again how good it was to be back home with them. And yet, it seemed to Elsa, he was almost a stranger among them. Perhaps it was simply that he had suddenly become a man, with a man’s ways and a man’s thoughts. Elsa would sit a little apart from him in the kitchen at night and look at him, almost shyly, knowing that another world had already begun to claim him, another life than the life they lived in Elder’s Hollow. It made you feel a little sad to think of it, and glad, too—glad for Reef!

A fresh fall of snow, and New Year’s came, feathery white, a world of rounded contours. Among the cottonwoods beside the house, long blue shadows lay, and between them, where the sunlight was soft, the snow was the color of ripe peaches. Elsa looked from her window past the miraculous cottonwood grove, polychromed by winter; looked south to where the Carew house stood in its spell. Florence Carew was being married there today, with well-to-do farmers present, and townspeople, and people from the city. Elsa’s mother and father had talked about the marriage at the breakfast table that morning. “The Carews have got more than a toe-hold here now,” her mother had said. “And why shouldn’t they!” her father had retorted. “You’re as suspicious as a cat with a piece of meat. Quit your growling!” Elsa’s mother was afraid of something, always. Now it was Florence Carew’s marriage to Mahlon Breen that made her afraid. Perhaps her father was afraid, too, for all his bluster and his making fun of her mother. Elsa had no fear of the Carews so long as she did not have to go alone to the big house and offer their women woolen stockings, and show her legs. She could close her eyes now and see Florence Carew in her wedding dress—ivory velvet, Fanny Ipsmiller had said it was going to be. Ivory velvet—so many v’s! So soft. But Florence was marrying a hard man, a man who must be old, too, a man who was pale, and tall, and carried a cane, although he didn’t lean on it. Elsa had often seen him on the street in Sundower. And Bayliss would be there, looking like the school picture of Sir Galahad standing beside his horse. And Peter Carew would be there, too, laughing so that all the house could hear him.

Elsa turned from the window, frowning, sucking at her under lip. “But, anyhow, I don’t like the Carews. It was because they didn’t pay enough for the land that Reef lost his ... I hate them ... for their fat legs and the way they ride their horses. I hate Bayliss, most of all ... stepping on your foot when you couldn’t say anything about it because of company.”

On the last Saturday night before Reef went back to the city, Elsa went with him to skate on the creek in the Hollow. From the house they had seen the bonfires that the skaters who had come down from Sundower had kindled on the ice. There would be others there from the Hollow, too. The Magnusson girls, perhaps, and Lily and Clarice Fletcher, the Whitney boys, and young Nels Lundquist. With Reef beside her Elsa would go among them proudly and without fear. The Whitney boys would know enough to keep their distance. She could even have faced the Carews, but the Carews, of course, had their own pond for skating, near the house. It was enough for them that they should have to go to school with the children in the Hollow. And yet, while they were still some distance from the creek, Elsa was sure she saw Bayliss Carew and his sister, Ada, glide past in the light from one of the fires. She hoped it was not so. Bayliss would want to talk to Reef and she would be left to herself. It was while Reef was helping her with her skates that Bayliss skated down upon them suddenly and caught Reef by the shoulders. “Hello, Reef, old boy!”—“Hello, Bay!” Elsa looked up and saw Bayliss’ face shining in the light from the fire. Then she sat tugging at her straps while Reef stood up and talked to him about his work and about the city and about the wedding at New Year’s. And Elsa listened, pretending not to listen, thinking fiercely to herself, “There’s no call for Bayliss Carew to be so friendly to Reef. He’s just doing it—to be nice. We don’t need it. He doesn’t have to be nice to us. Reef doesn’t need it, either. If I was Reef, I’d be so nice to him it’d kill him. Reef ought to use some of the big words he uses when he’s talking to me. Why doesn’t he? I would. I’d be so nice——”

Bayliss was speaking to her now. She looked up and saw him leaning over her, his head bared in mock gallantry, his face almost on a level with her own. “Am I going to have the honor of the first skate?” he asked her in his grand manner. She got up slowly, looking at Reef. “Go ahead, Else. I’ll wait for you,” Reef urged. Elsa felt dizzy, hot and angry, all at once. Reef would be cross if she said no. Besides, it would look as if she was afraid, or shy. She held her hands toward Bayliss and felt herself suddenly swept out upon the ice, away from the light of the fire, and upward along the creek in the pale starlight. Shadows swayed past them, and voices, clear voices talking and laughing and calling to each other along the creek. A short distance ahead of them two figures paused under the naked branches of an overhanging willow. They were two faint shadows against the starlit snow. They became one shadow for a moment and then Elsa heard a girl’s laugh. It was Lily Fletcher’s laugh she heard, Lily Fletcher laughing in a strained way because some one had kissed her there under the naked branches of the willow.

“Let’s go back now,” Elsa said suddenly. It was the first word she had spoken since she had left Reef. Bayliss had not spoken. “You’re afraid of the kissing-tree,” he said then. Elsa caught her under lip between her teeth to keep from replying to that. She was too angry to speak. She could feel her cheeks flame suddenly against the cold air. She swung about and started down the creek without a word. When they were back again in the light of the fire, they found Reef waiting where they had left him. Elsa glided toward him and seized his arm with both hands. Bayliss laughed as he stood before Reef. “She’s not so bad for a little girl, Reef,” he said. “She’ll be a good skater when she grows up.” Doing his best to act the man again, Elsa thought, now that he’s with Reef. She lifted her face and wrinkled her nose a little, disdaining to smile. And now Reef was looking down at her and laughing, too.

“Where have you been, Bayliss?” It was Ada who spoke, coming toward them from the other side of the creek and confronting Bayliss with a face that was icy, tight-lipped. “Oh, hello, Reef! Hello, El-sa!” she greeted them with her shallow smile. “I didn’t know you were down. Take me for a skate, Bay. It’ll soon be time to go home.”

Elsa and Reef stood and watched them go off together. “Another Carew woman looking after another Carew man,” Reef said with a slow chuckle. “They sure start early. Come on, Else, let’s skate around and see who’s here.”

Elsa saw how Time possessed the earth, turning it to its own uses; how it released its seasons that they might flow over it, in colors and depths and long, undying murmurs. New Aprils came, and the fields opened, dark and sweet, under that tide; unflagging Junes with their serene inevitability of growth unshadowed still by a foreknown death; Octobers that stole into the earth with their sad, patient doubt; and the white sleep—all under that tide of the seasons.

She saw, too, that human creatures were one with the earth in this, that Time turned them as well to its own purposes. A certain August had swept by, since when Old-World names that had lain for generations in the soft colors of romance had become livid under bursting night-flares and the reflected light of smoldering ruins. Never a night now but Uncle Fred went up to Sundower for more news of fallen cities and hurtling legions and sunken ships on the seas. Table talk was of events that always led beyond the ken of Elsa’s father and her Uncle Fred. Steve Bowers, who had worked his land with all the zeal of his heart and the strength of his body that his children might attain to a fuller life than his own, stood still now and waited, it seemed, even though he went doggedly each day to his work in the fields. Into the eyes of Elsa’s mother, eyes that had been straining ever forward to some brighter future, had come a troubled look, bewilderment. Reef, after two years in the law school in the city, was home now, throwing his energies once more into the patch of land in the Hollow, poring over his books at night, nursing a blind hope that he might yet win freedom from the few starved acres that enslaved his father. Elsa herself clung still to her dreams of a life that was not of the Hollow, clung to them fiercely though they seemed to pale at the sound of her father’s voice muttering over his paper, “We’ll be into it yet—maybe before another year.” Or Uncle Fred: “Yeah, and before that!” And her mother, complaining in a monotone as she went about her work, “And our own boys, maybe, singin’ an’ dyin’—singin’ an’ dyin’—on the other side of the world!”

Elsa observed, too, that in all that district the Carews alone seemed able to live as if nothing in the outer world could possibly be of interest to them so long as there was peace within their own. She had seen very little of them. Michael, married now to Nellie Block, the minister’s daughter, was helping with the management of the great farm, and Bayliss was away at college in the city. Joel, the youngest of the three boys, would be the next to go. Florence, the wife of Mahlon Breen, went to the city twice a year to buy clothes. Ada had been sent to boarding school. Peter Carew it seemed, was always riding off by himself, no one knew where, and returning, very often, only when his wife and Miss Hildreth brought him back. People said that Peter spent too much time among those Bohemians south of Hurley and even Elsa’s father had begun to fear that no good would come of it. To Elsa, however, it seemed only fitting that Peter Carew should go riding away by himself, whatever they might have to say of him. For her, at least, he would never be one of the Carews. He was scarcely of this world, indeed. Had he not come close to her once when she was wading in the creek, and talked to her, and gone off laughing at what she had said, and had he not ridden away and away and floated up among the blue-white clouds that had hung above her in the sky that day? She hated the Carews, but Peter was of another world. She had spoken her mind to that effect one night at the table after she had told them something she had heard about Peter that day at school. Her father had paused and looked at her a full minute in silence. “Don’t let your schooling put any wrong ideas into that head of yours, my girl,” he had said then. “The Carews are no good.”