Читать книгу Grain - Robert James Campbell Stead - Страница 3

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The eleventh of April, 1896, is not generally known to be a date of special significance, yet it was on that day, or, to be more exact, that night, that the hero of this narrative made his entry into a not over-hospitable world. Perhaps the term hero, with its suggestion of high enterprise, sits inappropriately upon the chief character of a somewhat commonplace tale; there was in Gander Stake little of that quality which is associated with the clash of righteous steel or the impact of noble purposes. Yet that he was without heroic fibre I will not admit, and you who bear with me through these pages shall judge whether or not the word is wholly unwarranted.

His advent in the Stake family and in the little farm settlement of which it was a unit, was not, of course, quite unexpected. Perhaps his eight-year-old brother, Jackson junior, a thin, dark-eyed, silent boy, who found himself suddenly the recipient of a night's entertainment at the neighboring farmhouse of Fraser Fyfe, was the only one in the immediate circle to be taken entirely by surprise. But, even with the added interest of the unforeseen, Jackie refused to be deeply stirred by the latest family acquisition. He regarded the little, puckered, wrinkled morsel shyly and without comment, but with an inward sense of depression which sent him presently to the fields in search of venturesome spring gophers.

To Mrs. Stake and her husband the impending event had been an occasion for serious consideration and concern. It was eight years since Jackie's arrival, but time had not entirely dulled the memory of that experience.

"You'll have a good doctor this time," Jackson had comforted his wife and himself together. "Doctor Freeman is well spoken of in the neighborhood."

Susie Stake clenched her fingers under the blankets in foreboding. "Good enough, I guess—if he gets here in time. So was Doctor Blain a good doctor, but he didn't get here.... Mrs. Martin——"

Jackson's great, hard hand found hers and pressed it in a passion of inarticulate sympathy. Mrs. Martin, at the age of twenty-four, had been rewarded for her contribution to the State—the third in as many years—with a bed under six feet of frozen clay. The incident was too recent to be disregarded. Susie Stake herself had stood in the snow by that open grave, and wondered.

"It'll be spring," Jackson had argued, "an' the roads'll be open. Jackie was in January, an' a howlin' blizzard."

Gander's arrival had been under more happy circumstances. The snows of winter were gone, or nearly so, on the eleventh of April, and although the streams were full of ice-cold water, and a bridge on the most impassable of them had gone down with the current, trifles like these were no deterrent to Dr. Freeman. He came on horseback, swimming the streams that could not be waded, and drenched to the skin. For all his haste Gander preceded him by twenty minutes, and, before the doctor's arrival, had already sent his first lusty announcement into the world.

Dr. Freeman pronounced all well, and shared with Jackson Stake a pot of strong tea and thick slabs of bread and butter. He loitered for an hour, probably to justify the ten dollar fee which he would collect from Jackson in the fall—if the crops were good. Then he straddled his horse for home, and nature once more was left to take her course.

There is no means of knowing at exactly what date young Gander began making appraisals of his new environment. His immediate interests were few and he concentrated upon them with imperious determination. His disappointments he expressed in wails of incredible volume, and his approvals he gurgled with equal if less lusty enthusiasm. He had not asked for admission into the world; he had not at all been consulted about a matter in which he, plainly, was most concerned; but, now that he was in the world, he proposed that it should serve him.

Gander was utterly selfish. If he thought of his older brother at all it probably was with contempt and hostility, feelings which were reciprocated by young Jackson. If he thought of his father at all he no doubt regarded him as an enormous, shaggy, but not dangerous animal, given at times to grotesque antics apparently intended to be humorous, and an unseemly curiosity concerning his—Gander's—toes, hair, and absence of teeth. The suspension bridge of scalp across a chasm in his little skull was a matter of concern to this great animal, who had once or twice stroked his rough fingers gingerly across the gap, as though they might fall in. His mother he took for granted. She supplied him with all the needs of his little life—food, warmth, and attention, and upon occasion he would reward her with an amiable gurgle, quite without value on any market in the world, and yet unpurchasable by anything those markets have to offer.

If he took note of his surroundings beyond the wooden cradle in which he lay, the arms in which he was lifted, the rounded founts from which he drew his nutriment, he must have marvelled at the habitation which Fate had selected for his home. To him at first it would seem very big, although his mother found it inconveniently small, and filled with equipment of amazing variety and interest.

A huge bed occupied one corner of the room, and, next to his cradle, was the most important article of furniture. Here his father and mother slept. The bed could be screened off by means of a curtain, with gaudy figures on it, which could be stretched along a wire. This Gander held to be a wholly esthetic device for the display of the gaudy figures already mentioned, which at a later age he took to represent angels, and, still later, goblins. There was a stove, where a fire crackled cheerfully, and a kettle sang most amiably, puffing a vigorous white cloud out from its headless neck. When he was old enough to reach it he attempted to stem that cloud with his little hand—an experiment he was in no hurry to repeat. His mother rubbed baking soda upon the burn and encouraged him to play drummer-boy with his uninjured member by means of an iron ladle and a sonorous tin wash-pan.

The roof overhead was of boards—elm boards, as Gander learned when he was older—supported on rafters of peeled poplar poles. Over these was a layer of tarpaper, and, over that, poplar shingles nailed to the elm boards. Long before Gander's time the shingles had cupped with the weather, curling up at their discolored edges, and releasing small round knots which left small round holes in the space they once had occupied. When one of these holes coincided with a similar hole in the elm board below, or straddled the gaunt cracks which now gaped between the strips of lumber shrinking with the kitchen's heat, the fragile tarpaper soon gave way. Through the apertures thus provided Gander observed many a starry heaven, winter and summer, although his mother had a thrifty habit of stuffing the major openings with old rags upon the approach of frosty weather.

Frosty weather! Then, too, was something to observe. With an unreasoning disregard for the fitness of things, the early settlers always made use of shingle nails half an inch too long for the boards into which they were driven. It was the only shingle nail they knew, and that every nail should protrude through the board, splintering off a fragment at its end, they accepted as inevitable, very much as they accepted early sunrise in summer, and late sunrise in winter. In frosty weather each of these nail-ends became a condensing point for the household vapors, and a thousand little globules of ice formed in rows between the poplar rafters, dripping a little when the heat from the stove overpowered the cold at the other end of the nail, and recovering their losses through the long, crackling night.

"Have to strip those rafters an' cover 'em with buildin' paper, sometime," Jackson Stake remarked to his wife every winter.

"Yes," Susie Stake agreed. "Sometime."

The walls were of logs—round, poplar logs, the spaces between them chinked and plastered. The logs, like the boards of the roof, had undergone a drying and shrinking process which left the chinks and plaster hanging loosely between, like idle brake-shoes on a wheel. A well-directed poke with any rough instrument would sometimes dislodge a chink altogether, and afford a loop-hole through which young adventurers might watch for Indians. But this was a dangerous pastime, as Gander discovered when he had been caught at it and rewarded with one of his father's infrequent thrashings.

The floor, too, was of poplar boards, with the inevitable cracks between them. The Stake family residence, it seemed, consisted largely of cracks. Jackson himself had hauled the logs in the winter of '85, the first winter after he had filed on the homestead. Jackson's quarter was in brush country, not far from a lake, and although his own land provided no timber worth while, there were poplar and elm, and some oak, on the rougher Government lands that abruptly broke into deep ravines plunging down into the valley. Some of these logs he hauled to the portable mill at the head of the lake and had them sawn into boards and shingles.

Had Jackson Stake homesteaded on the open prairie further south his first house would, no doubt, have been of sods, with a sod roof covered with yellow clay that baked itself impervious under the hot sun; not so esthetic a building material as logs and plaster, but less subject to cracks. But the young settler carried from the wooded East in which he had been born a sort of superstitious fear of the prairie.

"That open country looks sleek enough, but so does a bald head," he remarked to his neighbor, Fraser Fyfe. "I like to see a few bristles stickin' through, if only to encourage cultivation."

Jackson's own sandy hair stood in thick curls about his big head, and he scuffled it with his fingers as he talked. There was a cheerful virility about him, and when he had promised Susan Harden a frame house with lathed and plastered walls and an upstairs she had said yes, not for the house, but for himself. But that was before he left the East, when he and his hopes were young. Gander was driving a four-horse team before the ribs of his father's frame house at last rose stark against the prairie sky.

The boards of the floor had knots, like the shingles of the roof, but not so many of them fell out. Susie Stake's regular scrubbings kept the floor from drying up, and the knots held their ground. Indeed, as the wear of the softer lumber went on about them, they more than held their ground; they rose in little hummocks and elevations over the surrounding plain. When the table was set for company, as happened once in a blue moon, care had to be taken to set all the legs on the hill-tops, or all in the valleys beneath. "A teetering table," said Jackson Stake, "is mighty hard on manners, an' ours can't stand no unnecessary provocation."

As soon as he could walk Gander was allowed to visit the wide, wide world on his own account. He had already explored most of the farmyard by a process of propulsions which was neither creeping nor crawling, but a combination of both. Anchoring himself on his hands he would draw his right knee up to his wrists, then heave forward, dragging the left leg inert. From the standpoint of gracefulness it left something to be desired, but as a means of locomotion it was simple and effective. It enabled him to explore the stables, and, upon a certain great occasion, to make the acquaintance of the family pig. Young Jackson, who retrieved him, told at school that he didn't know which was which, but that was an exaggeration.

In course of time Gander made the discovery that both legs might be used in travel, and from then on he assumed an upright position, with intermittent relapses to the horizontal. As his effective range increased he roved further and further afield, pursuing gophers and butterflies, and proving all things by the child's simple test of thrusting them into his mouth. He was fond of food in all its forms, but he disliked water, unless mixed with earth to the consistency of mud, when he found it very agreeable. He protested regularly against being put to sleep in the little box-bed which succeeded his cradle, but he loved to lie in the grass under the afternoon sun, and he gave his father and mother more than one uneasy hour by his protracted naps in distant corners of the farm.

He was fond of horses. He wandered among their feet at the peril of his life, but without mishap from that source. He was the foster-child of the family collie, Queenie, in whom he confided all his troubles, and who was usually the first to locate him when he wandered too far from home. He hated geese, having had a disastrous encounter with that masculine bully of the farmyard from whom he was afterwards to derive his appellation; but he admired the turkey-gobbler, who strutted around with his great tail spread until it scraped along the earth and his bulging blood-red neck threatening instant apoplexy. He had discovered that when this gentleman's vanity was at its height sticks might be thrown at him, from a distance, with reasonable impunity. Ducks he loved. He would sit by the duck pond for hours watching them turn tail up as they grubbed among the grassy roots, or filtering juicy morsels out of the water through their broad, chattery bills. With hens he had little concern. He regarded them somewhat as a small boy regards girls, as objects of slight interest and no possible importance. He liked his mother, tolerated his father, and hated his brother Jackson. But he loved Queenie.

It was when he was three years old that an incident occurred which annoyed him somewhat, and which needs to be told. A man with a black coat and a funny collar buttoned behind arrived that day at the Stake homestead, in time for dinner. That the event was of unusual importance Gander knew by the production of his mother's only white tablecloth, by the killing of one of the hens which thronged the kitchen door, and, in particular, by the wholly unwarranted scrubbing to which he himself had been subjected. He afterwards recalled that the hen had been killed before the arrival of the stranger, which suggested collusion on the part of his mother, but that point had escaped him at the moment.

The stranger spoke to him pleasantly, but Gander maintained a haughty aloofness. He had suspicions. He observed that the visitor's vest went right up to his collar, and he surmised that he was without a shirt, but he kept this deduction quite to himself. Had he known to what indignities he was to be subjected it might have been a different story, but for the moment the discomfort of a clean wash and clean clothes was balanced by the prospect of hen with dumplings, and one must take the bitter with the sweet in life, mustn't he? Through some error his mother referred to the savory stew before her as chicken. Gander was about to mouth a prompt correction when he was brought up short by one of those telepathic despatches which mothers were able to broadcast long before the discovery of radio. He lapsed into a bewildered silence. Obviously strange doings were afoot.

It was Jackson Stake's practice to ask a blessing before meals—a commendable hang-over from his Puritan ancestry. The exact purport of this ceremony Gander had never been able to learn, as his father always confided in his plate, rattling the words off in a great hurry, as though in fear of being caught at it. It was Gander's belief that the purpose of the blessing was to give everyone an equal start—a purpose which he thwarted as often as possible by surreptitious plunderings in his potatoes and gravy. To-day the stranger was asked to say the blessing, which he did in a quite audible voice. Gander caught enough of his words to gather that they involved, in some way, the Stake family; they were not mentioned by name, but by suggestion or allusion so obvious that even Gander could not be misled. He watched his father closely and was somewhat disappointed to find when the long blessing was finished that relationships remained quite cordial.

The meal was a trying one for Gander. He had coveted intensely one of the "chicken's" drum-sticks, but the first went to the stranger, and the second, in defiance of all precedent, to his father! Gander expostulated against this outrage, and although his mother sought to convince him that the neck was a particularly choice morsel, he gulped his dinner through a mist of indignant tears.

Matters improved when the meal was finished. The visitor read from a book, and even sang, an exercise in which the boy joined lustily. Suddenly he found himself quite the centre of interest. His father and mother were standing, with Gander between them, and the stranger in front. They were answering a number of questions, somewhat hesitatingly, Gander thought, and in a low voice, as though in fear of being overheard. Then, quite without warning, the stranger splashed a few drops of water on his head.

Gander's first impulse was belligerent, but the stranger spoke to him so pleasantly that it was impossible to impute hostile intent, so he let the incident pass with a dignified rebuke.

"I ain't dirty," he said. "I got washed before dinner, dang it all!"

The "dang it all" was his own mature and triumphant climax, borrowed from his father's vocabulary, and absolutely unused until that very moment. Gander prided himself upon having carried it off rather well. In the hubbub which followed his remark he failed to catch the fact that he had been christened William Harden.

And not one of them knew that his name was to be Gander!