Читать книгу Plowing On Sunday - Sterling North - Страница 4

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Sarah Brailsford hurried through the April downpour holding her lantern with its shining reflector high above her and picking her way among the puddles which gleamed in the lantern light. Now and then she would stop to listen or would hallo in her sweet, anxious voice, "Stanley! Oh, Stan!"

The lantern cast gigantic shadows behind each boulder, fence-post and clump of hazel bushes as she splashed along between the rushing buggy ruts with an unreasonable panic in her heart. The willow branches from the trees beside the ditch whipped wetly across her face and shoulders. She brushed them aside without stopping and crossed the bridge over the flooded creek.

She lowered her head to fight the mounting wind, and labored up the hill through muddy torrents until she stood at last beneath the giant cottonwood with half the world below her. Then as she rested, panting from her climb, the distant lightning flared and the panic left her.

There lay the lake she had known since she was a child, the marshes, the great banks of peat, the far dark mound covered with oak trees which was Charley's Bluff, the limestone cliff at Lake House Point rising white and majestic above the black, rain-swept waters. The fields and woods and rivers of Wisconsin lay all about her like the walls of home.

She hurried on now, certain that she would find him, knowing that any moment she might hear the clop, clop of the horse's hooves and the creaking of the light spring wagon. And she was not surprised when at the turn of the road she heard his deep, full voice which even now that she had reached her forty-third year could move her. The man was roaring a hymn above the storm.

But she was not prepared for the sight which greeted her eyes when the lightning flashed again. Stud Brailsford was between the thills where the horse should have been, trotting through the rain, singing and hatless. The rain was in his graying curls and running down his face. He looked a giant in the lantern light.

"Stanley! Stanley! what's happened? And who's that in the wagon? You'll both catch your death."

She rushed to meet them crying out her surprise, and before her husband could answer had lifted the lantern to look into the eyes of the drenched girl on the wagon seat, eyes very bright and expectant, curls the color of straw bursting from under a wide-brimmed picture hat from which drooped two dilapidated ostrich plumes. The girl of perhaps eighteen straightened under Sarah's gaze.

"Lightning struck Old Peg," the man explained, "so I played horse for Early Ann."

It's after midnight, Sarah thought. He's come from town with a strange girl, and....

"You must be about tuckered out," she said.

"Me, tuckered?" The big man laughed. "You should have seen me come up Gravel Store Hill."

"He's a good horse," the girl said. Her laughter was deep and unexpected. Her voice strangely rich for one so young.

"Get up in the wagon with the girl and put your coat around her."

Worrying about the child instead of me, thought Sarah climbing over the wheel to the wagon seat. She shared her rain coat with the shivering girl and warmed her with her own body, while Stanley Brailsford, with the strength of a stallion, pulled them both along the road, splashing and singing.

At last the girl ceased to shiver. She tilted her hat and pillowed her head upon the older woman's shoulder. And there she rested until Brailsford cried, "Here we are!"

And so it was that Early Ann Sherman came to the Brailsford farm on Crab Apple Point in the dairy country of southern Wisconsin in April of the year 1913.