Читать книгу Spiffy Henshaw - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 7

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The day continued warm—too warm almost for early June—and toward mid-afternoon the sun took on a lead-colored hue. The still air became oppressive and Spiffy stopped for a moment to mop his perspiring face.

His aunt Kate, watching him from the kitchen window, shook her head pityingly and hurried out to him. “Arnold,” she said softly, “I ain’t a-goin’ to let you slave at that any longer. It’s a burnin’ shame, that’s what it is, to make a boy your age do such hard work the whole live-long day. And such a day!”

Spiffy turned his head away and looked toward Bridgeboro. Like a great mist the humidity was rising out of the valley and slowly up the hill to them. He pointed to it. “You can see for yourself, Aunt Kate,” he said wearily. “It does look as if it were going to rain before night, just like Uncle Bill said.”

“I don’t care what your Uncle Bill said,” she whispered. “You’ve got enough chopped to last us for a week or more and if the rest of it gets wet it can dry out ’fore then, can’t it? ’Nother thing, Arnold, I’m gettin’ right tired of your uncle making out he’s always tired so that he don’t have to work. I have to work and you have to work and go to school too and even now he’s inside sleeping away because he says he can’t stand the heat!

“Just as if any of us can stand it when it comes to that! But the difference between him and you and me is that we have to stand it!” She reached in her dress pocket and pulled out a coin and offered it to the boy. “Here, take this and see a movie, Arnold. You’ll cool off for a change as well as him!”

Spiffy could not keep the tears back. There had been very few movie shows that he had attended since his parents died. He knew his aunt worked hard with her sewing and that every penny counted while his uncle would not work. It was hard to refuse the money but he shook his head. “You’ll have to do without something else if you give it to me,” he said. “’Nother thing, what about Mr. Temple and the rent?”

“You can imagine, Arnold,” she answered. “He’s always so nice about it, Mr. Temple is, but your uncle has tried him to the limit—it’s four months or more he owes and Mr. Temple said he’ll have to take steps or somethin’ like that.”

“Does that mean we’ll be put out?”

Mrs. Riker nodded. “But don’t worry, Arnold. I think he knows we have nothin’ to do with it. He heard you choppin’, Mr. Temple did, and he looked out at you and said to me what a fine, ambitious boy you were, workin’ so hard on such a terrible day.

“I guess your uncle took the hint because after Mr. Temple went he started goin’ on about rich men and such. Anyway, he got himself so worked up he had to take a nap. A queer man, Mr. Riker is,” she said musingly. “He ain’t got no use for folks what he owes money to.”

Spiffy leaned up against the cottage in sheer fatigue. His face looked worn and white. “Maybe I could go and speak to Mr. Temple so he wouldn’t put us out,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe I could ask him to let me do some work so’s we could pay him that way.”

“And encourage your uncle in more laziness?” she asked him. “You’ll do nothin’ o’ the kind, Arnold. Just run along now and get out o’ sight before he wakes up. I want to have a talk with him when you’re not around, anyway. I’ll tell him I sent you on an errand to Bridgeboro ’cause I was too tired to go.”

The movies would have been incentive enough for any boy and it is not to be denied that Spiffy was moved by so tempting an offer. But he had something else in mind. His plans concerned the immediate present and he felt sure that if they worked out everything else would too.

He smiled gratefully at the woman who had tried to make up for his uncle’s treatment of him. Never once had she ever thrown up to him what she was doing so that he might sleep and eat after a fashion. It all flashed across his mind as he saw her outstretched hand with the quarter offered to him. He took it, humbly.

“Maybe I won’t have to use it, Aunt Kate,” he said mysteriously. “I’ll only take it in case it storms and I have to ride home on the bus. Anyway, I’m not going to the movies—that’s settled. I got to find out somethin’ in Bridgeboro and I won’t have time maybe.”

Mrs. Riker shook her head. “Don’t be foolish, Arnold,” she said in a tone of warning. “If you’re thinking about Mr. Temple—please don’t! Your uncle won’t never work if he finds it out and it’ll make me . . .”

“Not that I say I’m going to Mr. Temple’s,” Spiffy interposed, “but do you say it wouldn’t help you if I spoke to him and told him how Uncle Bill treats us and how he won’t work and all?”

Mrs. Riker conceded that it would. “If you just went and said that, it would be all right, Arnold,” she said. “He’d know then that you and I were honest and that we wasn’t upholdin’ your uncle in makin’ him wait for his money.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Spiffy.

At that juncture a sound, like the falling of some heavy object inside the cottage, made itself heard to them. Plainly startled, Mrs. Riker pushed Spiffy around the side of the tiny building and out of sight of any windows. “Run, Arnold,” she said timorously, “it’s him, I bet, like as not. Get out o’ sight, quick as you can!”

Spiffy lost no time in slinking along through the high weeds surrounding the Riker cottage. It had always annoyed him—this jungle growth, but now he was glad that his uncle had complacently allowed it free rein even up to their very windows. It hid him sufficiently until he reached the road.

When he emerged onto the hot pavement a small, ramshackle Ford drew up and stopped not two feet from him. Its lone occupant spied him instantly and hailed him in gruff, impatient tones. “Say, your uncle in?” he snapped, getting out a small black book.

Spiffy nodded.

“He better be!” the man said. “What’s he think I am, anyway?”

Spiffy shrugged his shoulders and ran pell-mell down the road. He knew from past experiences who the man was and the nature of his business at the Riker cottage. He was just another collector, a little more impatient than the rest.

Spiffy breathed more freely when he rounded the curve of the highway into lower North Bridgeboro. No longer could he see his uncle’s house standing almost precariously on that ridiculous little knoll. It often seemed to him that he lived on two hills really. Certainly they got the full benefit of the elements there, without shade or protection of any kind.

And so when he came within the city limits and on to the sidewalks he slowed down a little, thankful to feel the shade-cooled flagging under his worn soles. The river too seemed to send a little breeze just at that point. He hated leaving it for the hot unshaded spaces of Main Street.

For a moment he stopped and wondered what new argument his uncle would give the gruff collector. Then his eyes strayed toward the river. The tide was on the ebb and several rowboats were on their way downstream. Familiar voices again echoed in the still, humid air. Spiffy peered through the trees and made out the two scout canoes being swiftly paddled on their homeward way. It gave him the loneliest feeling that he had ever experienced in his life and he turned away from the scene with a little ache in his heart.

In the distant east some thunder rumbled ominously. He looked up to see a great mass of black clouds moving toward the sun.