Читать книгу The Smoking Flax - Robert James Campbell Stead - Страница 9

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At six the next morning, while Cal, busy with the curry comb and brush, humped over the fetlock of Jim, the big bay, with whom he already had struck up something of a friendship, Jackson Stake entered the stable. He observed the currying process for a moment or two with apparent satisfaction.

“Good enough,” he remarked, when Cal straightened up. “You know, Beach, a horse—any horse worth while—is as vain as a woman. You can make a hit with old Jim jus’combin’his mane an’fetlocks an’sayin’ ‘ Jim, old boy, you’re lookin’your best th’smorning.’Where’s the lad?”

“Not up yet. All in last night, so I let him sleep.”

“Sure. That’s good for him. The missus was askin’. Seems to have taken kind of a shine to him. You know, we lost a boy, as you might say, an’ a woman never gets over that kind o’thing.”

“I’m sorry,” Cal said simply, while Jackson Stake masked his features by worrying a plug of chewing tobacco. Something in his face suggested that the old man himself had not quite got over “that kind o’thing.”

“Yep. She sent me out to say that maybe the boy—what is it you call him? Reed, is it? Family name, I suppose?”

“Well, not exactly. Just a sort of notion I had.”

“Queer name. Well, that don’matter. She thinks he ought to start to school an’said if there was any mendin’or anythin’needed to bring it in an’she’d fix it up right away, so’s he could start th’ smorning.”

Cal thought of the busy woman complaining that she could get no help, “not for the soul or sake o’her,” and of the glimpse of her heart she had given him yesterday, and of the bigger glimpse her husband had given him now.

“Oh, that’s not in the bargain,” he managed to say.

“It is if she says so. You don’know her yet. How’s he fixed?”

“All right. He has one suit in good shape.”

“Well, you better get him up an’take him over to the school th’ smorning. Mile an’a half south, straight down the road. Annie Frolic’s the teacher, an’I guess she’s all right. Don’t know myself much about eddication, excep’I wish I had it. Gander’ll drive the team awhile, an’you can spell ’im off again when you get back.”

Cal found himself framing some words of thanks, but the farmer had moved down the stalls and his voice was raised in loud criticism of Grit Wilson. A shoulder scald on one of Grit’s horses seemed to be the occasion. Cal slipped out quietly to awaken Reed.

The morning sun was pouring through the window in the eastern end of the granary. Its beams fell on the tire with the blow-out and filled the room with a faint but pungent smell of rubber. On the bed in the corner, beneath a heap of blankets, lay the boy. One little foot, protruding from under the rumpled mass, bore its own dark evidence of the previous day’s journeyings in the dusty field; one arm, thrown upwards, fell open-palmed across his forehead, the little finger linked in a flirting curl of hair; two ruddy lips, slightly parted in the sleep of childhood, disclosed the flash of white teeth through their smiles. Cal, leaning over him, paused for a moment in the clutch of a great poignancy; it was at wholly unexpected times like this that some tremendous thing about the boy reached up around his heart and crushed from him just one word—Celesta!... Dim-eyed he saw the little figure through the mists of his dead mother’s tragedy; dim-eyed he followed him down the eight wonderful years of his young life; down to Jackson Stake’s farm and the old Ford cushions in the granary....

“Come, old Indian; time to roll out,” he said, shaking himself free of his mood. “School today! Roll out!”

Breakfast was another hurried meal. All meals in the farmhouse, it seemed, were hurried; ample and hurried. There had been the same splashing in the wash basin by the rain barrel; the same single filing into the table; the same “digging in.” This time it was into porridge and milk, fried potatoes and eggs, white bread and corn syrup. If Mrs. Stake had had a good night’s rest, or no night’s rest, she gave no sign; her pace was exactly what it had been the day before, and the day before that, and would be tomorrow, and the day after that. The same white table in the centre of the floor; the same succession of hungry mouths; yesterday, today, and forever.

The first maze of strangeness having worn off, Cal’s eyes began to note the details of the house. The room in which they sat was large and square, and seemed to occupy half of the ground floor, which was cut through the middle by a stairway enclosed in partitions. Beyond those partitions, through an open door, came a glimpse of what was evidently the fine room of the house; a corner of a stiff, upholstered chair, with dangly crimson furbelows dropping almost to the floor, and an enlarged crayon portrait of some ancestral being hanging on the wall, were all the aperture commanded. The floor of the room in which they sat was covered with linoleum; traces of its gaudy pattern, which had long since disappeared about the table and the stove, still blazed up cheerily from the less trampled corners. The walls and ceiling were of plaster, one time white, but now stained from yellow to grey in token of many a culinary accident on the kitchen range. The door was in the east, a window in the south, another in the west. Red roller blinds, of a substance broadly suggestive of the linoleum under-foot, hung in the windows, their bareness sheathed by cheap cotton curtains which had taken on something of the yellow-grey color of the walls. A poster announcement of the previous year’s Brandon fair and a new calendar from the Plainville Garage, evidently intended to relieve the dullness of the walls, had precisely the opposite effect. The furniture consisted of the long board table in the centre of the room; the steel range with its numerous nickeled parts ruefully awaiting a polishing rub; the wood-box, half filled with split poplar and crowned with a shelf and water-pails; the bright red cream separator in the corner, suggestive of a newly-painted hydrant; a cupboard of shelves papered with ancient copies of the Plainville Progress, and supporting an assortment of dishes and utensils; six chairs, including one without a back, allotted to Reed; a sewing machine; a shelf with an alarm clock, and Hamilton Stake’s bicycle.

The occupants of the room were not less interesting and practical. Jackson Stake, coatless and vestless, and with trousers still precariously clinging to his broken suspenders, occupied the arm chair at the end of the table. His hair, now mostly grey, and thinning out on top, had once been red, and there was still an auburn hue to the pepper-and-salt of his moustache; his eyes were keen and grey under bristly brows; his mouth large and genial; his cheeks swarthy; his neck creased and furrowed; his hands—one would not speak of Jackson Stake’s hands, one would say his fists. His figure favored corpulence and his ample body showed threatening symptoms of overflowing the taut waistline of his blue overalls. He gave the impression of being aimiable and willing to talk had not the more urgent business of breakfast intervened. On his right sat Gander Stake, lanky and swan-like, with a thin face that sunburned yellow instead of red, a tremendously busy Adam’s apple, dark hair plastered to place with water, and eyes that were blue, not grey. He, too, was coatless and vestless, and even while sitting he would give his body an occasional hitch as though to reassure his overalls. Across the table from Gander sat Grit Wilson, also without coat or vest, and with yesterday’s whisker grown one day older and sandier. A parenthesis of wrinkles about his mouth and chin agreeably conceded that for him the first bloom of youth was gone, never to return; but his deep brown eyes had the mischievous twinkle of perennial boyhood.

Then there was Hamilton Stake—”Hamburger Stake,” as he was called in fun—square and fair and sandy like his father, with curly copper hair and a dash of ruddy down across his upper lip. His face was clean and his teeth were white, and he wore a necktie in concession to the burning of his heart for Elsie Fyfe. His unruly locks would comb into no permanent position, although he spent many a clandestine moment in the attempt; his overalls would bag at the knees although he folded them carefully under his mattress every night. A serio-comic smile played about his lips and captivated Cal, now that he saw it clearly. He must cultivate the acquaintance of Hamilton Stake.

Cal was aroused from his inventory-taking by the discovery that, one by one, the objects of it had left the table. Mrs. Stake had poured a second helping of syrup into Reed’s plate and was silently watching him gather it up on thick fragments of bread. Glancing up suddenly Cal startled within her eyes a strange look of hunger.

“I reckon that’s his best suit,” she said, trying to cover her confusion with speech. “It won’last long at school. I useta say to my boys that school suits should be made o’leather. Jackson, in partic’lar, was awful hard on clo’es. ... How old did you say he was?”

“Eight—nine in September.”

Mrs. Stake cleared a corner of the table and her throat simultaneously. It seemed she had a pesky tickle in her throat.

“Spring weather, I blame it on. Always like that in May. ... You mus’be a good boy for Annie Frolic. Do as she bids you, an’work hard at your lessons. It’s the wind, the May wind—Was your sister married long; I mean—”

She stopped, realizing the indelicacy of her question, and in the momentary pause Cal recovered his balance.

“Not long; Reed was the only child,” he equivocated.

“Well, we mus’get him off,” she exclaimed, as, seeking safety in action, she drew Reed on to the floor before her. Her fingers were trifling with his tie; her old knees seemed pressing hungrily against his; her hands were smoothing his riotous hair into some semblance of order....

Cal walked with Reed to school. They went out on the winding trail among the groves of poplar and willow, still sparkling and fragrant with dew, and turned south on the main road. Across a black ploughed field, now faintly tinged with green, lay a cluster of white-washed farm buildings, probably the homestead of Fraser Fyfe. To the left they could see Gander’s four-horse team and seeder, with Gander himself hitching along behind, as he drove his slow shuttle back and forth. Further afield faint spirals of dust against a sky as clear as spring water marked the progress of Grit Wilson and Hamilton Stake.

They swung along cheerily, Reed with his noonday lunch wrapped in the current issue of the Plainville Progress; Cal with his thoughts busy over the favorable turn their prospects had taken. There was occasion for cheerfulness. He had literally motored into a job, and not only a job, but a home for himself and Reed. Over what the old farmer would say when he discovered that the bargain supposed to have been made in Plainville was the creature of Cal’s imagination—provided the old farmer was under any delusion—Cal allowed himself no uneasiness. Sufficient to the day. It was enough that in twenty-four hours he and Reed had become members of the family. It was enough that Reed had captured the heart of the stern and overworked Mrs. Jackson Stake. The fiddling with his neck-tie—Cal was not blind. It was enough that Big Jim had muzzled his shoulder playfully that morning while he curried his mane. It was enough that the sun shone and the birds twittered as they hopped along the barbed wire fences that bordered the road and that the yellow buttercups glimpsed up shyly out of the green grass, and that little dribbles and shreds of a whistled tune fell from Reed’s pursed lips as he jogged along by the side of his “Daddy X.” It was enough.

As they crested a low ridge they caught sight of the school, a rectangular wooden building studded with windows on its northern side, and standing back a short distance from the road. It seemed to have been painted once upon a time, but wind and weather had taken their toll. The door stood open, and when Cal and Reed looked in they could at first distinguish nothing in the comparative gloom. A cool dampness greeted their nostrils. Rows of wooden seats emerged from the darkness, and presently they discerned a young woman at the end of the room, her back to them, her arm raised in the act of writing on the blackboard. If she was aware of their presence she gave no sign, until at length Cal, in his deepest bass, addressed her.

“Good morning, Teacher. How about a new pupil this morning?”

She turned with a start, dropping the chalk to the floor.

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Beach. You will think me very rude. I thought it was some of my children. And is this Reed, whom I have been hearing about?”

“‘ Mr. Beach?’” thought Cal to himself. “‘ Reed, whom I have been hearing about.’Our fame precedes us.”

She took Reed’s hand first, and then Cal’s, and it struck Cal that their welcome seemed to be somewhat in the ratio of their ages. He had a glimpse of blue eyes, with thin, telltale puckers about them; fluffy hair; clean, sharp features, somewhat older than they would care to confess; a spare, light figure, rectangular like the school house and the school grounds and the quarter section which accommodated them. There was chalk dust on her hair and it may have been chalk dust on her face.

“I have always heard that country school teachers are very wonderful,” said Cal, when she seemed waiting for him to speak. “It is all true. How did you know my name, and his?”

There was a light dancing in her eye that was not bad to see. “Oh, that’s easy. You know, we have rural telephones. They are a great invention.”

“Then Mrs. Stake telephoned you?”

“No, she didn’t. I see you are curious. I thought only girls were curious?”

Cal summed her up as a little witch. Very well.

“I offer no apology for being curious—about you,” he said.

There was a light dancing in her eye that was rather good to see.

“How nice!” she chattered. “Then I’ll tell you. Last night, between eight and nine, Hamilton Stake called up Elsie Fyfe for their usual bedtime confab. About the same time I tried to call Elsie, and found the line busy, so I listened in. Oh, don’t be shocked. We all do it, although we don’t all admit it. I wasn’t the only one; I could tell that by the quiet lifting of receivers. You get to know it, with practice. Shall I tell you what the community knows this morning about you and Reed?”

“I am mildly interested,” he admitted, noting that there was really a curve to her throat, in defiance of her general rectangular plan. A rather pleasant curve, it was. And her eyes were full of fun, or something.

“The community knows that you are Cal Beach, that you come from the East, that you’re green as grass, that you’ve been through university, and that Jackson Stake is trying you out and will perhaps keep you on for the season if you attend to your knitting and don’t get an idea that because you’ve been to college you know more than anybody else, meaning in particular Hamilton Stake, Gander Stake, and Grit Wilson, in the order named.”

“All very interesting—and very accurate,” Cal admitted. “What else?”

“The community knows that Reed is eight years old, and your sister’s son, and that he has a funny name, and that Mother Stake had taken quite a shine to him.”

“Our young friend is observant, Miss Frolic. By the way, speaking of funny names—?”

Her eyes narrowed a little under his gaze, but the light in them danced eagerly. “My name is Frawdic, F-r-a-w-d-i-c,” she explained. “An odd name, and it’s easier to listen to their mispronouncing of it than to correct them. And ‘ Frolic’is a rather pleasing appellation, don’t you think?”

“An appropriate one, perhaps,” he bantered.

“Who knows?” she said, and momentarily dropped her eyes.

The children were beginning to gather for school. They came barefooted, and some of them without coats, and swinging over their shoulders bags with their school books and lunches. The visitor was an object of their curiosity, and one or two of the bolder boys edged up close enough to hear the conversation. But Miss Frawdic proved to be something of a diplomatist.

“Here, Harold,” she called to the boy who had come closest. “This is a new pupil. His name is Reed. Take him away and get him started playing with the other boys. Start a ball game. You have twenty minutes yet until school time.”

Harold looked Reed up and down for a moment. “C’mon,” he said. Reed followed, somewhat shyly, but in a few minutes his voice was coming from the ball ground as loud as any.

The teacher was in no hurry to resume her work at the blackboard, and Cal had a feeling that as Gander had managed without him successfully for some twenty-three years he would probably get along for another morning. He waited.

“Oh, I forgot to ask Reed’s other name,” said Miss Frawdic, as though groping for a subject.

“Beach,” said Cal.

“Beach? That’s your name, isn’t it? And he’s your sister’s son?”

The eyes with the shallow furrows about them were now looking into his, quizzically. Cal resented them just a little. He had no intention of being cross-questioned by Annie Frawdic, nor yet of lying to evade her curiosity. “His name is Beach,” he said.

She lapsed into an appropriate silence. But it was for a moment only. Annie Frawdic had no thought of allowing any unpleasantness to develop between herself and the community’s latest acquisition. The shadow in her eyes was as temporary as that of a flying cloud upon the prairies.

“We are so glad to have you,” she rattled. “You know—a university man. We are all such dubs.”

“Oh, not all, I am sure,” said Cal, gallantly.

“Yes, all. You soon get that way. ‘ Like as iron sharpeneth iron,’you know. I know I have grown very dull for lack of a—a—”

“A whetstone,” Cal suggested.

“Exactly—a whetstone. Take care I don’t call you Mr. Whetstone.”

They were progressing.

With a slim toe she described a circle in the dust on the floor. She was waiting for him to speak, so he spoke a platitude:

“It must be wonderful to teach these bright-eyed children; to see them growing up under your guidance, your counsel.”

“It isn’t. It’s a bore, to them and to me. They come to school because they can’t help themselves. I teach them for the same reason.”

Her frankness was engaging. If she had said, “I am teaching school because I have failed to land a husband,” he could not have understood her better. He wondered how far she would go.

“Never give up,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed a trifle, but there was no anger in them. She described another circle with her toe on the floor. As it happened the circles interlinked each other.

“You have been in Plainville?” she queried, presently.

“No.”

“Then you have not seen Minnie?”

“You mean Miss Stake?”

“I hope not,” she said, punning on the name. “Still, it’s a mistake that might be excused.”

Cal did not answer. He remembered the uncanny way in which gossip swept through the community, and he had a mental picture of receivers being silently lifted and greedy ears strained forward to catch what Jackson Stake’s new man had said about Minnie....

“Nine o’clock!” Miss Frawdic exclaimed. “I must call the children.” She extended her hand and took his in a friendly grip. The bones of her thin hand were sharp and firm against his palm.

“I will do the best I can for Reed,” she said.

Cal turned from the door to take Reed in his arms. “Make good, old Indian; make good!” he whispered in his ear, and gave him an affectionate shake. He waved a friendly arm to the children now trooping into the school, and turned up the road to Jackson Stake’s. As he walked he tried to turn the conversation over in his mind. And it always came back to this:

“What was it she said about Minnie? Something about a mistake that might be excused. Funny girl. Strange girl. I mean Annie Frolic. Good name. Well, we shall see.”