by Edna Ferber
He said, too, she spoiled the boy. Back of this may have been a lurking jealousy. “Always the boy; always the boy,” he would mutter when Selina planned for the child; shielded him; took his part (sometimes unjustly). “You will make a softy of him with your always babying.” So from time to time he undertook to harden Dirk. The result was generally disastrous. In one case the process terminated in what was perilously near to tragedy. It was during the midsummer school vacation. Dirk was eight. The woody slopes about High Prairie and the sand hills beyond were covered with the rich blue of huckleberries. They were dead ripe. One shower would spoil them. Geertje and Jozina Pool were going huckleberrying and had consented to take Dirk—a concession, for he was only eight and considered, at their advanced age, a tagger. But the last of the tomatoes on the DeJong place were also ripe and ready for picking. They hung, firm, juicy scarlet globes, prime for the Chicago market. Pervus meant to haul them to town that day. And this was work in which the boy could help. To Dirk’s, “Can I go berrying? The huckleberries are ripe. Geert and Jozina are going,” his father shook a negative head.
“Yes, well tomatoes are ripe, too, and that comes before huckleberries. There’s the whole patch to clean up this afternoon by four.” Selina looked up, glanced at Pervus’s face, at the boy’s, said nothing. The look said, “He’s a child. Let him go, Pervus.”
Dirk flushed with disappointment. They were at breakfast. It was barely daybreak. He looked down at his plate, his lip quivered, his long lashes lay heavy on his cheeks. Pervus got up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a hard day ahead of him. “Time I was your age, Sobig, I would think it was an easy day when all I had to do was pick a tomato patch clean.”
Dirk looked up then, quickly. “If I get it all picked can I go?”
“It’s a day’s job.”
“But if I do pick the patch—if I get through early enough—can I go?”
In his mind’s eye Pervus saw the tomato patch, more scarlet than green, so thick hung the fruit upon the bushes. He smiled. “Yes. You pick them tomatoes and you can go. But no throwing into the baskets and getting ’em all softed up.”
Secretly Selina resolved to help him, but she knew that this could not be until afternoon. The berry patches were fully three miles from the DeJong farm. Dirk would have to finish by three o’clock, at the latest, to get there. Selina had her morning full with the housework.
He was in the patch before six; fell to work, feverishly. He picked, heaped the fruit into hillocks. The scarlet patches glowed, blood-red, in the sun. The child worked like a machine, with an economy of gesture calculated to the fraction of an inch. He picked, stooped, heaped the mounds in the sultry heat of the August morning. The sweat stood out on his forehead, darkened his blond hair, slid down his cheeks that were pink, then red, then tinged with a purplish tone beneath the summer tan. When dinner time came he gulped a dozen alarming mouthfuls and was out again in the broiling noonday glare. Selina left her dinner dishes unwashed on the table to help him but Pervus intervened. “The boy’s got to do it alone,” he insisted.
“He’ll never do it, Pervus. He’s only eight.”
“Time I was eight——”
He actually had cleared the patch by three. He went to the well and took a huge draught of water; drank two great dippersful, lipping it down thirstily, like a colt. It was cool and delicious beyond belief. Then he sloshed a third and a fourth dipperful over his hot head and neck, took an empty lard pail for berries and was off down the dusty road and across the fields, running fleetly in spite of the quivering heat waves that seemed to dance between fiery heaven and parched earth. Selina stood in the kitchen doorway a moment, watching him. He looked very small and determined.
He found Geertje and Jozina, surfeited with fruit, berry stained and bramble torn, lolling languidly in Kuyper’s woods. He began to pick the plump blue balls but he ate them listlessly, though thriftily, because that was what he had come for and his father was Dutch. When Geertje and Jozina prepared to leave not an hour after he had come he was ready to go, yet curiously loath to move. His lard pail was half filled. He trotted home laboriously through the late afternoon, feeling giddy and sick, with horrid pains in his head. That night he tossed in delirium, begged not to be made to lie down, came perilously near to death.
Selina’s heart was an engine pumping terror, hate, agony through her veins. Hate for her husband who had done this to the boy.
“You did it! You did it! He’s a baby and you made him work like a man. If anything happens to him! If anything happens to him!——”
“Well, I didn’t think the kid would go for to do it. I didn’t ask him to pick and then go berrying. He said could he and I said yes. If I had said no it would have been wrong, too, maybe.”
“You’re all alike. Look at Roelf Pool! They tried to make a farmer of him, too. And ruined him.”
“What’s the matter with farming? What’s the matter with a farmer? You said farm work was grand work, once.”
“Oh, I did. It is. It could be. It——Oh, what’s the use of talking like that now! Look at him! Don’t, Sobig! Don’t, baby. How hot his head is! Listen! Is that Jan with the doctor? No. No, it isn’t. Mustard plasters. Are you sure that’s the right thing?”
It was before the day of the omnipresent farmhouse telephone and the farmhouse Ford. Jan’s trip to High Prairie village for the doctor and back to the farm meant a delay of hours. But within two days the boy was again about, rather pale, but otherwise seeming none the worse for his experience.
That was Pervus. Thrifty, like his kind, but unlike them in shrewdness. Penny wise, pound foolish; a characteristic that brought him his death. September, usually a succession of golden days and hazy opalescent evenings on the Illinois prairie land, was disastrously cold and rainy that year. Pervus’s great frame was racked by rheumatism. He was forty now, and over, still of magnificent physique, so that to see him suffering gave Selina the pangs of pity that one has at sight of the very strong or the very weak in pain. He drove the weary miles to market three times a week, for September was the last big month of the truck farmer’s season. After that only the hardier plants survived the frosts—the cabbages, beets, turnips, carrots, pumpkins, squash. The roads in places were morasses of mud into which the wheels were likely to sink to the hubs. Once stuck you had often to wait for a friendly passing team to haul you out. Pervus would start early, detour for miles in order to avoid the worst places. Jan was too stupid, too old, too inexpert to be trusted with the Haymarket trading. Selina would watch Pervus drive off down the road in the creaking old market wagon, the green stuff protected by canvas, but Pervus wet before ever he climbed into the seat. There never seemed to be enough waterproof canvas for both.
“Pervus, take it off those sacks and put it over your shoulders.”
“That’s them white globe onions. The last of ’em. I can get a fancy price for them but not if they’re all wetted down.”
“Don’t sleep on the wagon to-night, Pervus. Sleep in. Be sure. It saves in the end. You know the last time you were laid up for a week.”
“It’ll clear. Breaking now over there in the west.”
The clouds did break late in the afternoon; the false sun came out hot and bright. Pervus slept out in the Haymarket, for the night was close and humid. At midnight the lake wind sprang up, cold and treacherous, and with it came the rain again. Pervus was drenched by morning, chilled, thoroughly miserable. A hot cup of coffee at four and another at ten when the rush of trading was over stimulated him but little. When he reached home it was mid-afternoon. Beneath the bronze wrought by the wind and sun of many years the gray-white of sickness shone dully, like silver under enamel. Selina put him to bed against his half-hearted protests. Banked him with hot water jars, a hot iron wrapped in flannel at his feet. But later came fever instead of the expected relief of perspiration. Ill though he was he looked more ruddy and hale than most men in health; but suddenly Selina, startled, saw black lines like gas
hes etched under his eyes, about his mouth, in his cheeks.
In a day when pneumonia was known as lung fever and in a locality that advised closed windows and hot air as a remedy, Pervus’s battle was lost before the doctor’s hooded buggy was seen standing in the yard for long hours through the night. Toward morning the doctor had Jan Steen stable the horse. It was a sultry night, with flashes of heat lightning in the west.
“I should think if you opened the windows,” Selina said to the old High Prairie doctor over and over, emboldened by terror, “it would help him to breathe. He—he’s breathing so—he’s breathing so——” She could not bring herself to say so terribly. The sound of the words wrung her as did the sound of his terrible breathing.
10
Perhaps the most poignant and touching feature of the days that followed was not the sight of this stricken giant, lying majestic and aloof in his unwonted black; nor of the boy Dirk, mystified but elated, too, with the unaccustomed stir and excitement; nor of the shabby little farm that seemed to shrink and dwindle into further insignificance beneath the sudden publicity turned upon it. No; it was the sight of Selina, widowed, but having no time for decent tears. The farm was there; it must be tended. Illness, death, sorrow—the garden must be tended, the vegetables pulled, hauled to market, sold. Upon the garden depended the boy’s future, and hers.
For the first few days following the funeral one or another of the neighbouring farmers drove the DeJong team to market, aided the blundering Jan in the fields. But each had his hands full with his own farm work. On the fifth day Jan Steen had to take the garden truck to Chicago, though not without many misgivings on Selina’s part, all of which were realized when he returned late next day with half the load still on his wagon and a sum of money representing exactly zero in profits. The wilted left-over vegetables were dumped behind the barn to be used later as fertilizer.
“I didn’t do so good this time,” Jan explained, “on account I didn’t get no right place in the market.”
“You started early enough.”
“Well, they kind of crowded me out, like. They see I was a new hand and time I got the animals stabled and come back they had the wagon crowded out, like.”
Selina was standing in the kitchen doorway, Jan in the yard with the team. She turned her face toward the fields. An observant person (Jan Steen was not one of these) would have noted the singularly determined and clear-cut jaw-line of this drably calicoed farm woman.
“I’ll go myself Monday.”
Jan stared. “Go? Go where, Monday?”
“To market.”
At this seeming pleasantry Jan Steen smiled uncertainly, shrugged his shoulders, and was off to the barn. She was always saying things that didn’t make sense. His horror and unbelief were shared by the rest of High Prairie when on Monday Selina literally took the reins in her own slim work-scarred hands.
“To market!” argued Jan as excitedly as his phlegmatic nature would permit. “A woman she don’t go to market. A woman——”
“This woman does.” Selina had risen at three in the morning. Not only that, she had got Jan up, grumbling. Dirk had joined them in the fields at five. Together the three of them had pulled and bunched a wagon load. “Size them,” Selina ordered, as they started to bunch radishes, beets, turnips, carrots. “And don’t let them loose like that. Tie them tight at the heads, like this. Twice around with the string, and through. Make bouquets of them, not bunches. And we’re going to scrub them.”
High Prairie washed its vegetables desultorily; sometimes not at all. Higgledy piggledy, large and small, they were bunched and sold as vegetables, not objets d’art. Generally there was a tan crust of good earth coating them which the housewife could scrub off at her own kitchen sink. What else had housewives to do!
Selina, scrubbing the carrots vigorously under the pump, thought they emerged from their unaccustomed bath looking like clustered spears of pure gold. She knew better, though, than to say this in Jan’s hearing. Jan, by now, was sullen with bewilderment. He refused to believe that she actually intended to carry out her plan. A woman—a High Prairie farmer’s wife—driving to market like a man! Alone at night in the market place—or at best in one of the cheap rooming houses! By Sunday somehow, mysteriously, the news had filtered through the district. High Prairie attended the Dutch Reformed church with a question hot on its tongue and Selina did not attend the morning services. A fine state of things, and she a widow of a week! High Prairie called at the DeJong farm on Sunday afternoon and was told that the widow was over in the wet west sixteen, poking about with the boy Dirk at her heels.
The Reverend Dekker appeared late Sunday afternoon on his way to evening service. A dour dominie, the Reverend Dekker, and one whose talents were anachronistic. He would have been invaluable in the days when New York was New Amsterdam. But the second and third generations of High Prairie Dutch were beginning to chafe under his old-world regime. A hard blue eye, had the Reverend Dekker, and a fanatic one.
“What is this talk I hear, Mrs. DeJong, that you are going to the Haymarket with the garden stuff, a woman alone?”
“Dirk goes with me.”
“You don’t know what you are doing, Mrs. DeJong. The Haymarket is no place for a decent woman. As for the boy! There is card-playing, drinking—all manner of wickedness—daughters of Jezebel on the street, going among the wagons.”
“Really!” said Selena. It sounded thrilling, after twelve years on the farm.
“You must not go.”
“The vegetables are rotting in the ground. And Dirk and I must live.”
“Remember the two sparrows. ‘One of them shall not fall on the ground without’—Matthew X-29.”
“I don’t see,” replied Selina, simply, “what good that does the sparrow, once it’s fallen.”
By Monday afternoon the parlour curtains of every High Prairie farmhouse that faced the Halsted road were agitated as though by a brisk wind between the hours of three and five, when the market wagons were to be seen moving toward Chicago. Klaas Pool at dinner that noon had spoken of Selina’s contemplated trip with a mingling of pity and disapproval.
“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”
Mrs. Klaas Pool (they still spoke of her as the Widow Paarlenberg) smiled her slippery crooked smile. “What could you expect! Look how she’s always acted.”
Klaas did not follow this. He was busy with his own train of thought. “It don’t seem hardly possible. Time she come here school teacher I drove her out and she was like a little robin or what, set up on the seat. She says, I remember like yesterday, cabbages was beautiful. I bet she learned different by this time.”
But she hadn’t. So little had Selina learned in these past eleven years that now, having loaded the wagon in the yard she surveyed it with more sparkle in her eye than High Prairie would have approved in a widow of little more than a week. They had picked and bunched only the best of the late crop—the firmest reddest radishes, the roundest juiciest beets; the carrots that tapered a good seven inches from base to tip; kraut cabbages of the drumhead variety that were flawless green balls; firm juicy spears of cucumber; cauliflower (of her own planting; Pervus had opposed it) that looked like a bride’s bouquet. Selina stepped back now and regarded this riot of crimson and green, of white and gold and purple.
“Aren’t they beautiful! Dirk, aren’t they beautiful!”
Dirk, capering in his excitement at the prospect of the trip before him, shook his head impatiently. “What? I don’t see anything beautiful. What’s beautiful?”
Selina flung out her arms. “The—the whole wagon load. The cabbages.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Dirk. “Let’s go, Mother. Aren’t we going now? You said as soon as the load was on.”
“Oh, Sobig, you’re just exactly like your——” She stopped.
“Like my what?”
“We’ll go now, son. There’s cold meat for your supper, Jan, and potatoes all sliced for fryi
ng and half an apple pie left from noon. Wash your dishes—don’t leave them cluttering around the kitchen. You ought to get in the rest of the squash and pumpkins by evening. Maybe I can sell the lot instead of taking them in by the load. I’ll see a commission man. Take less, if I have to.”
She had dressed the boy in his home-made suit cut down from one of his father’s. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat which he hated. Selina had made him an overcoat of stout bean-sacking and this she tucked under the wagon seat, together with an old black fascinator, for though the September afternoon was white-hot she knew that the evenings were likely to be chilly, once the sun, a great crimson Chinese balloon, had burned itself out in a blaze of flame across the prairie horizon. Selina herself, in a full-skirted black-stuff dress, mounted the wagon agilely, took up the reins, looked down at the boy seated beside her, clucked to the horses. Jan Steen gave vent to a final outraged bellow.
“Never in my life did I hear of such a thing!”
Selina turned the horses’ heads toward the city. “You’d be surprised, Jan, to know of all the things you’re going to hear of some day that you’ve never heard of before.” Still, when twenty years had passed and the Ford, the phonograph, the radio, and the rural mail delivery had dumped the world at Jan’s plodding feet he liked to tell of that momentous day when Selina DeJong had driven off to market like a man with a wagon load of hand-scrubbed garden truck and the boy Dirk perched beside her on the seat.
If, then, you had been travelling the Halsted road, you would have seen a decrepit wagon, vegetable-laden, driven by a too-thin woman, sallow, bright-eyed, in a shapeless black dress, a battered black felt hat that looked like a man’s old “fedora” and probably was. Her hair was unbecomingly strained away from the face with its high cheek bones, so that unless you were really observant you failed to notice the exquisite little nose or the really fine eyes so unnaturally large now in the anxious face. On the seat beside her you would have seen a farm boy of nine or thereabouts—a brown freckle-faced lad in a comically home-made suit of clothes and a straw hat with a broken and flopping brim which he was forever jerking off only to have it set firmly on again by the woman who seemed to fear the effects of the hot afternoon sun on his close-cropped head. But in the brief intervals when the hat was off you must have noted how the boy’s eyes were shining.