Читать книгу The Smoking Flax - Robert James Campbell Stead - Страница 8

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By midday the granary wore a very different appearance. The floor had come through the ordeal of soap and water with mixed emotions, but now, convinced that no harm was intended, and that this was only the strange way of these strange people, it smiled back pleasantly upon Cal and Reed as they sorted their few belongings into position. The cushions from the Ford would continue to be their bed; set on the corner of the floor, and equipped with mattress, blankets, and pillows, they looked tempting enough for a noon-day nap, not to speak of nights after heavy labor in the fields. The suitcases were opened; Cal’s mirror and shaving set hung from nails in the wall; the gun straddled over the door, and the cartridges sat on a little shelf which Cal had built; even the spare tire with the blow-out, hanging by the window, helped to lend a furnished air to the place. A table and chairs would come in time; they were luxuries, not necessities. Outside, Cal had moved the grindstone so that it stood parallel with the granary, and not in reckless disregard of any definite angle to it; had built little brackets on which he hoisted the binder knives that had been found lying in the grass nearby; had moved four sections of drag harrows from the side around to the back and had stood them up on edge with some show of symmetry, and had carried a log which leaned against the granary for no particular purpose except in fulfillment of fate to the general log pile, where its fate could more conveniently be fulfilled. Inside and out the granary proclaimed that a soul had moved in to possess a body just comfortably started on its way to disintegration.

It was noon before they knew it, filled with that peculiar lightness of heart which has to do with the making of a place in which to live. The jingle of trace chains and the heavy stamping of work horses were their first reminder that the morning was gone. The farm-yard shook itself awake, discarded its air of sunny indolence, and suddenly became a scene of bustling activity. Twelve great horses, arranged in three teams of four, each harnessed abreast, sweeping in from the fields, now crowded aggressively about the long wooden water trough in the centre of the yard—(if an area so undefined as Jackson Stake’s farm-yard can be said to have a centre. Just where the yard began or ended no one knew or cared). A lanky young man with a gait apparently acquired in the supporting of his overalls moved a lever and presently from overhead came the rush of air in the blades of the windmill and the slow “clank ... clank” of the connecting-rod as it operated the pump.

“Grit, old Jim is checked up,” said the young man with the gait to a head suddenly thrust through a space in the shouldering mass of horse-flesh. The head was crowned with a straw hat which, either through age or misadventure, had lost the greater part of its brim; underneath the remnant a pair of deep eyes twinkled slowly as though lit by unseen fires of humor far within, and an expanse of cheek and chin gave root-hold to a stubby whisker well laden with dust and sand. The head made its way amid the heaving backs to a great bay who, with nostrils high in air, was snorting his protest above the busy drinking of his companions. A hand, no doubt associated with the head, unhooked the check-line, and the bay, feeling release, plunged his eager muzzle deep into the water.

“Got to check ’im, Gander,” said the head. “He won’t do nothin’but flirt with this Mollie-mare if he ain’t checked up short. Fact. When I think o’him, an’then o’you, I says to myself, ‘ Old bay, you’re almost human.’”

“Come, Dinty, I ain’t no flirt,” said the man addressed as Gander. “You know that. Ain’t in my line.” But his voice suggested that the charge was not distasteful.

“Can I help?” said Cal, who had approached unheard above the clamor of the horses. “I am the new hired man. My name is Cal Beach.”

The two others turned toward him and regarded him for a moment in silence. While they were thus engaged a third figure, a youth of eighteen or thereabout, emerged from the mass. All three regarded him.

“Well, welcome to our city,” said the man who answered alternately to the names of Grit and Dinty. “You’re the new hired man. I’m the old hired man. It’s the business of the old hired man to boss the new hired man, eh, Gander?”

Gander was non-committal. “Didn’t know Dad was figurin’on hirin’any more help,” he remarked. “However, he’s the doctor. What can you do?”

“Not so very much, I am afraid. I can drive a Ford——”

“‘ An’it takes a good man to do that,’” Grit chanted from a popular song.

“—and horses a little, and I’m middling strong, and—I’ve been through university.”

The words were not out before he realized how inapt they were. “Hang it!” he thought, “that isn’t what I meant. I meant to let them know that I wasn’t a dub, that I had sense, that I could pick up things if they gave me a chance.”

“Sounds all right, all but the last,” said Gander. “Don’t know as what they learn you in the university’ll help much. A man on a farm don’ need no D.D.’s, or whatever it is, after his name. What he wants is horsepower an’savvy. Well, we’ll see. Go down to the barn an’throw some hay in the mangers.”

“Savvy,” thought Cal. “That was the word. Means the same thing—or should ... But does it?”

Reed was at his heels as he entered the barn. The building was of poplar logs, with a loft overhead, and gables boarded perpendicularly with shiplap. Mangers ran along each end, and were cross-sectioned by short partitions which divided the space into stalls, each wide enough for two horses. From the ends of these short partitions stout posts supported the loft and gave anchorage for wooden harness pegs. Small stones and gravel to the depth of several inches, impacted under the hoofs of many horses, made a floor almost as hard as rock.

Cal and Reed had barely time to fill the mangers from the hay shed when the horses were down upon them. As each came in, nodding his head and clanking his harness prodigiously, he walked straight to his stall and made an immediate inspection of the oat box nailed to the corner of the manger. Finding it empty his nostrils went up in annoyance, but a moment later, evidently on the theory that half a loaf is better than no bread, he plunged into the fragrant hay.

“Hello, who’s the kid?” said Gander, encountering the boy in the doorway. “Another hired man?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Reed, sir.”

“Reed what?”

“Reed Beach.”

Gander stroked the back of his long neck meditatively. “You don’mean he’s your daddy?” he said, indicating Cal with a jerk of his head.

“He’s my Daddy X.”

Gander seemed to mouth a remark, but swallowed it. Then:

“An’have you been through university, too?” Cal, from his work between two horses, heard the words, and they struck home nastily. But his heart bounced at the boy’s prompt rejoinder:

“Not yet, but I’m going to. Have you?”

“Why, no; can’t say as I have,” said Gander, and his hand dropped from his long neck and gave Reed’s hair a not unfriendly tousle. “All the horses got oats?” he demanded, in a voice intended to reach Grit Wilson. “Well, c’mon an’eat. C’mon, Cal.”

The youth of eighteen or so had preceded them to the house. Humped over a bench beside the water barrel he was engaged in splashy and noisy ablutions.

“That’ll do, Ham,” said Wilson, crowding him away from the bench very much as the horses had crowded each other at the water trough. “You ain’t titivatin’to go over to Double F’s at this time o’day.”

Wilson inspected the granite-ware basin, half full of dirty water, as though debating whether the fluid would serve one more turn. Evidently he decided against it. With a sweep of his arm he sprayed the water over the yard.

“You don’need washin’,” said Gander to Cal and Reed, who were standing waiting their turn. “Go on in.”

“Oh, we’d rather wash, if we may,” said Cal.

“Sure, you may. No law agin it,” Gander agreed. “Go ahead.”

Cal washed. The coarseness of the basin and of a huge bar of laundry soap was compensated by the fresh rain water and the warm spring sunshine. When he had washed someone shoved the towel into his hand. It was of heavy duck, made down from a grain sack, and showed many evidences of use and abuse. Through eyes smarting with the strong soap he tried to locate a spot less soiled than the average. When he turned to empty his basin he found Gander burrowing in it.

A side of biscuit tin nailed to the wall made a passable mirror, and a wire comb chained nearby completed the toilet equipment.

“C’mon,” said Gander again. “Don’keep the ol’lady waitin’. She’s a bit skittish.”

Inside, a long table, covered with oilcloth that had once been white but through which black smudges of wear were now showing at the creases and corners, stood in the middle of the floor. Chairs were set about it and the men moved straight to their places, much, as Cal again thought, as did the horses in the stable.

Cal and Reed hung back. “Sit down, anywhere,” said Jackson Stake. “No formal’ties. Now dig in.”

They “dug in“—into boiled potatoes and mashed turnips and fried pork and hot, strong tea and bread thick and white and flaky and butter smooth and yellow and delicious. Mrs. Stake had a large family to feed, and she fed them, as her husband said, without formalities, but she fed them well. She herself did not join them, but waited on the table, reloading bread plates, refilling potato bowls and tea-cups as the ravages of the moment demanded. Then, at the first sign of a pause, came great helpings of rice-and-raisin pudding dumped from a mighty spoon into plates just cleared of meat and potatoes.

“We’re a bit rough an’ready,” she apologized to Cal as she loaded his plate. “’Specially since Minnie left I don’get time to wash any more dishes than I jus’can’t help. You’re a city man an’I reckon you’ve been places where they give you a heap more tablecloth an’a heap less to eat. More puddin’, Son?” to Reed. “Fill up. It’s a long time till supper.”

The men consumed amazingly big meals in an amazingly short time; and as each cleared his plate he got up and went out. Presently Cal noted that only he and Reed remained. Mrs. Stake swept the soiled dishes from a corner of the table and sat down with her own well-laden plate.

“Ever worked on a farm?” she demanded, presently.

“No. This will be my first attempt. I expect to find it a great life.”

“Don’over-expect yourself. It’s a great life, all right, if you don’ have to live it. That’s why everybody’s leavin’the farm for the city.”

“But they’re not,” Cal ventured to correct her. “For example, I’ve just left the city for the farm.”

“That’s so,” she said, looking at him curiously, as though she were examining some kind of specimen. Then, after a pause, “That’s so. Perhaps I don’see it quite straight, thinkin’so much o’Minnie. You don’know her, of course. Well, she’s my daughter—my only daughter, twenty-one in June, an’I set a heap by her. When I was raisin’the kids, slavin’all day an’danderin’’round half the night with squawlin’babies, I useta say, ‘ Wait till Minnie grows up.’Minnie was the youngest, excep’Hamilton, an’she was my only girl, an’I sort o’ set an extra store on her, as you might say. I suppose mothers have a sort o’sympathy for their girls that they don’have for their boys; they know what’s ahead of ’em. Well, I useta keep up those times with promisin’myself that when Minnie grew up her an’me’d sort o’hit it off together. But would she stay on the farm? Not for the soul or sake o’her. She’s thumpin’one o’them writin’machines in a lawyer’s office in Plainville—though wha’they have to write about so much in Plainville beats me—an’I’m still scrapin’the pots an’pans.”

Something suspiciously like moisture gathered in the old woman’s eyes and sent her reaching for the corner of her apron. “Land’s sakes, you’re long eaters!” she suddenly exclaimed. “The men’ll be wantin’ your help with the teams, though if you’re just from the city I reckon they won’be missin’much. But you may as well jump in at once, as they say, an’get your feet wet. Away wi’ye!” She waved them out of the house.

“It’s not that she wanted to hurry us off to work,” Cal summed it up to himself. “She had shown a little more of her heart than she intended—to a stranger. And not a bad heart at that, or I’m mistaken.... I wonder about this Minnie.”

Jackson Stake met him in the yard. “Can you handle horses?” he demanded.

“I’ve driven a team,” Cal answered, recalling a weekend when he had taken Reed to the country, and had functioned on the reins of two downhearted nags then placed at his disposal. But a fine spirit of confidence was bubbling within him. It was the climate, the air, the sunshine, the big spaces, the big horses, the big meal, or something. Perhaps Minnie. At any rate he was beginning to understand why the only thing a Westerner feels apologetic about is having to apologize for anything. “Sure, I can drive a team,” he asserted.

“You should, at forty dollars a month,” the farmer remarked drily. “But I suspec’what you have in mind is an Ontario team. Two horses. A team here is four horses—sometimes six. Can you drive four horses?”

“I never have,” Cal confessed.

“Well, it don’come without learnin’. It takes a bit of eddication to run a farm—you’ll find that, an’you may’s well start at the bottom. Suppose you go along with Gander this afternoon an’keep your eyes an’ ears open. I’ll know by tomorrow how drunk I was when I hired you.”

Something about the twinkle in the old man’s eyes set Cal wondering just which had been playing with the other. Perhaps Jackson Stake really wanted another man and had dropped into his by-play on purpose. Well—

Gander’s four horses were lined up like Company on Parade, and Gander was busy snapping the reins to the bits and affectionately cuffing the muzzles curled up at him as he went by.

“Will you show me how to do that?” Cal asked. “Let me get the system of it in my head. I’ll savvy if you give me a chance.”

Gander turned a not unfriendly look upon him. “Now you’re shoutin’,” he said. “It’s easy; see—” He showed how the reins were connected; showed him the order in what looked like a chaos of harness. Perhaps it was because Professor Sterndale, Doctor of Philosophy, had a neck like Gander’s that he leaped into Cal’s mind at the moment. Or perhaps it was Gander’s quiet, confident, efficient manner that summoned Sterndale up from memory. “Funny business,” Cal thought; “Old Sterndale, Ph. D., and Gander Stake occupying the same brain cell in my lumber room. Doctor of Philosophy and horse engineer. Teachers, both of ’em.” And then, the momentum of a new thought carrying him off his balance, he took a mental stagger under the question whether or not Gander Stake was the greater teacher of the two.... Certainly, for the moment at least, the more important.

Gander chirped to his team and they were on their way, the idle traces, flung over the horses’broad backs, jingling pleasantly as they went. Their road lay along a narrow lane between two sagging wire fences, with black, moist fields, ploughed and seeded, on either side. Innumerable blackbirds fluttered along the sagging wires. From the early sown field to the left the first faint flush of green peeked up between the serried ridges made by the drill. A hot sun poured down from a sky of polished steel, cloudless save for two tufts of wool dangling airily in the northeast.

“She’s been handin’us a line o’good weather, I’ll say,” Gander remarked, by way of conversation. “That’s one thing about a farmer; he can’t make his conditions. He’s got to take the weather God sends him, an’make the best of it. We’re ploughin’now for oats; Grit and Ham ploughin’, an’me followin’wi’the seeder. Sixty acres yet to plough for oats; then forty more for barley. Double F was saying,—that’s him lives over on the next farm to the west—as he has a hundred acres in oats now, but I bet he ain’t. Double F always has more acres at seedtime than when the bushels are counted from the thresher. Giddap, Jim! What you trippin’over?”

The great bay on the right answered with a shuffle of his body as much as to say, “Sorry; excuse me this time,” and switched his tail at an imaginary fly.

“Why do you call him Double F?” Cal inquired. “You seem to have some funny names.”

“Oh, I dunno. His name’s Fraser Fyfe, so we cut it down to Double F. School teacher here, Annie Frolic—you’ll be goin’to her, Reed, once you get settled—says it means very loud, but I don’see no connection. Ham’s a bit soft on Double F’s daughter Elsie; that’s what Grit was kiddin’him about at noon, you remember, when he was washin’. Nice girl, though. Her an’Minnie useta be back an’forth a lot. Ham’s name is Hamilton, of course, but he jus’gets Ham, excep’from Mother. ‘ Hamburger Stake,’we call him sometimes, for fun. An’Grit; I guess that’s his real name; dunno; sometimes I call ’im Dinty Moore. Looks a bit like ’im, I’ll say.”

Cal felt a delicacy about asking an explanation of Gander’s own appellation, and Gander offered none, evidently quite overlooking the need of it. It was not entirely associated with his lean, flexible neck. When he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen years, his voice, in going through those contortions peculiar to the voices of boys of about that age, had shown a tendency to break out in a goose-like honk. To Gander’s great embarrassment these honks would come at the most inopportune moments and wholly without notice, so that the most casual statement, begun in a tame and respectable note, ended in something suggestive of a wild goose piping to its mate. Some one called him Gander, and Gander stuck; it had stuck so long and so well that he had almost forgotten he had a christened name, William, perfectly good and only slightly used.

They had passed out of the lane into an unfenced field. Directly before them, with its tongue deep in the damp soil, was a two-wheeled implement which Cal supposed to be the seeder. It resembled a long trough with a cart wheel at either end, a quantity of short lengths of garden hose suspended underneath, and a series of steel discs resting on the ground. Gander dexterously swung his two “off” horses across the tongue. Then he was at their heads, hitching the neck-yoke; then he was at their heels, hitching the traces, while Cal dog-trotted about after him, arriving at each scene of operations just after Gander had finished.

Gander carried the reins around behind the implement and started his team with a word, and Cal and Reed followed, watching the operations with great interest. The discs began to turn, scooping little, narrow trenches in the soil; into these trenches, through the rubber hose, kernels of oats began to fall, and to be immediately buried by a series of short chains dragging behind. It was very interesting. Presently Reed discovered, at the top of the hose, a little machine grinding the kernels down from the trough, almost as though it were counting them. It was tremendously interesting.

The field was a mile long, and it was accomplished without a word, save Gander’s voice occasionally raised in admonition of his horses. The heat of the sun was tempered with a cool breeze which caught up particles of dust from the machine, so that it seemed to be trailing a miniature, low-hanging cloud. At the end of the field the horses turned, almost of their own accord, and would have started back had not Gander stopped them with a tension on the reins.

“Nothin’to it,” he remarked; “nothin’to it. Old Jim there knows the job as well as I do. All you got to do is watch that you’re almost touching your last row, without overlappin’it. If you overlap it’s a waste o’seed an’time; if you don’touch it means a strip not sowed. Nobody’ll know about it now, but the whole neighborhood’ll know in a month from now, when the crop comes up, an’they’ll say to me, ‘ Gander, you must o’been borie-eyed when you sowed your oats,’an’ I’ll have to say, ‘ Not me. It was that D. D. of ours, his eddication havin’been neglected in his youth.’Try it,” and he thrust the reins into Cal’s hand. “Watch your main wheel there; it should run right in the track we made comin’down, an’keep an eye now an’again that the grain is workin’through all the tubes; sometimes they get plugged up. Go to it!”

And so the day went on. By four in the afternoon Reed tired of following the seeder up and down as, like a mighty shuttle, it wove a web a mile wide from fringe to fringe, and went back to the farmyard, where he interested himself in a long and critical inspection of the old fanning mill. About the same time Gander pronounced his commendation upon Cal. “You’re doin’O. K.,” he said. “Take a round by yourself an’lend me some tobacco.”

Cal handed over his pouch, and pressed on in high spirits. It was plain that his adaptability had made an impression upon Gander. “Funny world,” he mused to himself, as he thought of Gander. “Not a bad scout, though, and that D. D. talk of his is just fun. Still, it’s plain he thinks himself the best man of the two. And, damn it, he is—that’s the joke of it. Well, he won’t be, before long. I’ll pick this up in no time. Oh boy, feel that air! I know I’m going to have lungs like a bellows before fall.”

Tired, hungry, happy, Cal turned with his team to the farm-yard at the close of the day. Mrs. Stake could not pile his plate too high at supper, and when the chores were done, he and Reed were ready for bed.

“No story tonight, Reed,” he said. “Too big a day, and too much to think about. Say your verse and let us roll in.” And Reed, climbing on his knee for a goodnight caress, said, “Gee, but it’s great to be a farmer. When I grow up I’m going to be a farmer, with a lot of big horses, and a granary, and a fanning mill, and everything.”

Presently, up from the cushions of the old Ford came the measured breathing of two tired farmers sleeping the sleep of labor and contentment, while the last red rays of sunset faded out of the west and the still hush of night settled over the fields and prairies.