Читать книгу Plowing On Sunday - Sterling North - Страница 7

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Something was troubling young Peter Brailsford, something he couldn't quite get at or understand. He wasn't at all certain why he had run away from school in Brailsford Junction, or why he had come home instead of hooking a freight for Chicago as he had originally planned.

He hated school, and the farm, and most of all himself. He hated all the girls in the world. He was shy in the presence of his father, and sometimes felt a flare of impatience, almost dislike for the older man. He had left the dinner table quietly, slipped on a sweater patched at the elbows, glad to be away from the hired man's teasing, from his mother's over-solicitous love.

He strode across the lawn, leaped the fence, and started up the lane to look for the ponies, wondering in his mind who this new girl could be, thinking of the hot, angry scene in the Principal's office when he had announced that he was quitting, remembering how he had thrown his books into the creek, and jumped on his new red motorcycle, wild to be feeling the wind in his hair.

But even the thought of that happy, rebellious ride on his fine fast motorcycle with its shining nickel headlight and bright red mudguards was not enough to keep his mind from running hot with the vague injustices of the world. He kicked viciously at the tall dandelions and convenient lumps of dirt. Yet he could not have told precisely what it was that angered him, nor why the great peaceful spring had not caught him up as it had the rest of the world to warm his blood.

He'd show them! He'd show everybody! All the stuck-up town kids with their smart ways, all the girls, Stanley, his mother, Gus, everybody!

There was a great deal wrong with the world young Peter thought. Much that could be better. He had never noticed before he went away to high school how his father and the hired man bullied his mother with their laughing banter, nor how cluttered the parlor was with its stuffed birds.

Momentarily he hated every inch of it: the stink of the barnyards, the cruelties of birth and death forever taking place about the farm; Gus the lecherous hired hand whispering to him of secret pleasures,—Gus forever proclaiming his hatred for women yet tearing out the underwear-clad wenches in the mail-order catalogues to hide in his bureau drawer.

Then with the inconsistency of youth in springtime Peter forgot his troubles upon seeing Lake Koshkonong spread out before him, flecked with whitecaps in the sun. He forgot his hatred for school, his contempt for farming. He cut himself a thorn stick and swished it through the deepening grass, whistled "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and with an awkward attempt at the tango whirled and bent and thumped his feet holding his visionary partner with a grace which he imagined would have shamed Vernon Castle.

He clapped for an encore, bowed deeply to the girl, then feeling in his pockets found fish-hooks, sinkers, and dead night crawlers. "I'll go fishing catfish," he thought with excitement. "I'll get me some dead minnies, some rotten liver, and some clams."

Swinging along the lane, throwing stones at sparrows and adventurous woodchucks, he came at last to the back pasture covered with hazel bushes, sumac and thorn-apple trees. He made his way along the cowpaths calling the ponies, looking behind the clumping elderberry bushes until at last he came upon them.

The little Admiral ran up whinnying to nuzzle for the sugar lumps Peter usually carried, and there beyond stood the patient mare guarding her new-born colt, the wickedest-looking little fellow who ever tried to scamper on unsteady legs.

He had been licked as clean as down and his small black hooves were as bright as jewels in the wet grass. The mare regarded him with troubled eyes and every now and again ran her wide nostrils over his flanks tenderly. So this was why the mare hadn't come down to the barnyard that morning! Peter slipped his arms under the warm pony colt to carry him home. The mare patiently followed.