Читать книгу Country People - Ruth Suckow - Страница 4

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Some of the best land in the country, people said, was right here in Richland Township. The soil in Wapsipinicon County was a little inclined to be sandy, didn't bring quite the price of the very best Iowa farming-land; but this stretch in here between Richland and "Wapsie" didn't give the farmers much chance for complaint.

This was the road that was later made a highway. It had a slight jog about a mile out of Richland. Tall cottonwoods grew on one side, on the other a tangle of bushes. There was always a kind of mud-hole here, sifted over with leaves and little fluffs from the cottonwoods; a bad place in the road, closed in and shaded.

Beyond this it was all straight going to "Wapsie." The land spread out rich and rolling, in smooth, tilted vistas of square fields, green, yellow, and earth-brown, trees growing in full-leaved clusters down about the banks of the little caved-in creeks in the pastures or standing lone, and slanting, on the crests of the low, rounded hills. In the distance the groves of farms were softened, blurred together; the far-off rising land was swathed in blue, a faint milky tint in which dim figures of trees were swimming.

A pink frame school-house stood on one side of the road. The long grass was trampled this way and that by the children's feet. Over beyond Ed Angell's place lay the Grove, where Sunday-School picnics and Fourth of July celebrations were held—a rich, thick cluster of trees, oaks and hickories, spreading over the hill and down the depressions of the slope, dark green upon the paler green of the short-cropped grass on the hill-side. The road went high and straight until it dipped down into "Wapsie," which lay deep in trees, the red stone tower of the court-house rising out of thick tufts of elms.

The farms were good along this road. A good class of people had settled here, German and English most of them. Men who kept an eye out for land deals noted shrewdly how well the buildings and barbed-wire fences were kept up, the red barns and silos, the prim white houses, square or with an ell, some of them with front yards enclosed in fences, and rose or snowball bushes growing. Most of these farmers—except the LaRues, who lived in a dingy, unpainted house with a bare farm-yard and a hog-pen of trampled, sloughy mud—drove into town in neat "two-seated rigs" with good teams. The cattle feeding in the pastures that sloped down, emerald-green, turfy, almost mossy, to the edges of the creeks were sleek and brown.

Over on the cross-roads there were more woods, and it was hillier. The farm-buildings were poorer, the fences slacker. These were the farms where people from "Wapsie" drove out to buy cheap a chicken, a goose, or a few crates of berries.

The place on the north of the road, beyond LaRue's, was August Kaetterhenry's.

It was a neat, plain farm, two hundred and fifty acres, virtually all under cultivation. The house was set back at what was termed "a nice distance" from the road—a white house with pink trimmings and a narrow porch. The front yard was not fenced in, but August made the boys keep the grass mowed, and it presented a neat appearance. Tall summer lilies, orange with dark spots, grew near the front porch in a spreading patch. On the west of the house stood the wind-break—two rows of elms that were lofty now, rather thin, and close together. The lawn ended at their trunks in a ridge of high grass and feathery weeds that the boys could not keep cut. A barbed-wire fence, caught together in one place by a wooden staple, separated them from the cornfield. The lofty upper branches rustled and moved slightly against the blue sky. In the evening their outlines were blurred and there was a sadness in their dark leafiness, high and motionless.

The wide yard sloped east to the barns and sheds across "the drive." It was worn bare of grass about the buildings and scattered with chicken fluff and droppings. The geese ran squawking across it when teams drove in. The great barn stood at the end of the slope, raised on a high foundation, with an inclined platform of heavy planks that thundered and shook under the horses' hoofs. Everyone about here remembered when August Kaetterhenry had put up this barn. It was painted white, as was the silo, and on the peak of the roof were two cupolas with slatted sides, and lightning-rods that glittered intermittently upon the blueness of the sky. On the side toward the road was painted in large black letters slowly getting weather-dimmed:

August Kaetterhenry

1907

It was one of the best barns in the country there when it was put up. All of Kaetterhenry's buildings were good. The old barn had been made over by his brother-in-law, Hans Stille, into a granary and milk-house, painted white, too, the ground always slippery and muddy about the milk-house, a dribble of yellow ears leaking out from the corn-crib, kernels scattered in front of it, where the chickens were pecking. On the slope nearer the house the windmill stood, with the tank beside it, a bare steel skeleton giving off sudden flashes, the grey-painted wheel turning now fast, now slow, up there in the sky.

"Yes," people said when they drove past, "Kaetterhenry's done pretty good here. Well, he's a worker all right."

They admired the neat, square fields of oats and corn, the high, rolling pasture dotted with white clover, a few wild plum-trees set slanting, delicate and lonely, here and there.

"Yes, sir, he's got a nice farm."