So Big

by Edna Ferber

From the wagons on either side heads were lifted. “Where’s your man?” demanded the defeated driver, glaring.

  “Here,” replied Selina; put her hand on Dirk’s head.

  The other, preparing to drive on, received this with incredulity. He assumed the existence of a husband in the neighbourhood—at Chris Spanknoebel’s probably, or talking prices with a friend at another wagon when he should be here attending to his own. In the absence of this, her natural protector, he relieved his disgruntled feelings as he gathered up the reins. “Woman ain’t got no business here in Haymarket, anyway. Better you’re home night time in your kitchen where you belong.”

  This admonition, so glibly mouthed by so many people in the past few days, now was uttered once too often. Selina’s nerves snapped. A surprised German truck farmer found himself being harangued from the driver’s seat of a vegetable wagon by an irate and fluent woman in a mashed black hat.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, you great stupid! What good does it do a woman to stay home in her kitchen if she’s going to starve there, and her boy with her! Staying home in my kitchen won’t earn me any money. I’m here to sell the vegetables I helped raise and I’m going to do it. Get out of my way, you. Go along about your business or I’ll report you to Mike, the street policeman.”

  Now she clambered over the wagon wheel to unhitch the tired horses. It is impossible to tell what interpretation the dumfounded northsider put upon her movements. Certainly he had nothing to fear from this small gaunt creature with the blazing eyes. Nevertheless as he gathered up his reins terror was writ large on his rubicund face.

  “ Teufel! What a woman!” Was off in a clatter of wheels and hoofs on the cobblestones.

  Selina unharnessed swiftly. “You stay here, Dirk, with Pom. Mother’ll be back in a minute.” She marched down the street driving the horses to the barns where, for twenty-five cents, the animals were to be housed in more comfort than their owner. She returned to find Dirk deep in conversation with two young women in red shirtwaists, plaid skirts that swept the ground, and sailor hats tipped at a saucy angle over pyramidal pompadours.

  “I can’t make any sense out of it, can you, Elsie? Sounds like Dirt to me, but nobody’s going to name a kid that, are they? Stands to reason.”

  “Oh, come on. Your name’ll be mud first thing you know. Here it’s after nine already and not a——” she turned and saw Selina’s white face.

  “There’s my mother,” said Dirk, triumphantly, pointing. The three women looked at each other. Two saw the pathetic hat and the dowdy clothes, and knew. One saw the red shirtwaists and the loose red lips, and knew.

  “We was just talking to the kid,” said the girl who had been puzzled by Dirk’s name. Her tone was defensive. “Just asking him his name, and like that.”

  “His name is Dirk,” said Selina, mildly. “It’s a Dutch name—Holland, you know. We’re from out High Prairie way, south. Dirk DeJong. I’m Mrs. DeJong.”

  “Yeh?” said the other girl. “I’m Elsie. Elsie from Chelsea, that’s me. Come on, Mabel. Stand gabbin’ all night.” She was blonde and shrill. The other was older, dark-haired. There was about her a paradoxical wholesomeness.

  Mabel, the older one, looked at Selina sharply. From the next wagon came loud snores issuing from beneath the seat. From down the line where a lantern swung from the tailboard of a cart came the rattle of dice. “What you doing down here, anyway?”

  “I’m here to sell my stuff to-morrow morning. Vegetables. From the farm.”

  Mabel looked around. Hers was not a quick mind. “Where’s your man?”

  “My husband died a week ago.” Selina was making up their bed for the night. From beneath the seat she took a sack of hay, tight-packed, shook out its contents, spread them evenly on the floor of the wagon, at the front, first having unhinged the seat and clapped it against the wagon side as a headboard. Over the hay she spread empty sacking. She shook out her shawl, which would serve as cover. The girl Mabel beheld these preparations. Her dull eyes showed a gleam of interest which deepened to horror.

  “Say, you ain’t never going to sleep out here, are you? You and the kid. Like that!”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, for——” She stared, turned to go, came back. From her belt that dipped so stylishly in the front hung an arsenal of jangling metal articles—purse, pencil, mirror, comb—a chatelaine, they called it. She opened the purse now and took from it a silver dollar. This she tendered Selina, almost roughly. “Here. Get the kid a decent roost for the night. You and the kid, see.”

  Selina stared at the shining round dollar; at Mabel’s face. The quick sting of tears came to her eyes. She shook her head, smiled. “We don’t mind sleeping out here. Thank you just the same—Mabel.”

  The girl put her dollar plumply back into her purse. “Well, takes all kinds, I always say. I thought I had a bum deal but, say, alongside of what you got I ain’t got it so worse. Place to sleep in, anyways, even if it is—well, good-night. Listen to that Elsie, hollering for me. I’m comin’! Shut up!”

  You heard the two on their way up the street, arm in arm, laughing.

  “Come Dirk.”

  “Are we going to sleep here!” He was delighted.

  “Right here, all snug in the hay, like campers.”

  The boy lay down, wriggling, laughing. “Like gypsies. Ain’t it, Mom?”

  “ ‘Isn’t it,’ Dirk—not ‘ain’t it’.” The school teacher.

  She lay down beside him. The boy seemed terribly wide awake. “I liked the Mabel one best, didn’t you? She was the nicest, h’m?”

  “Oh, much the nicest,” said Selina, and put one arm around him and drew him to her, close. And suddenly he was asleep, deeply. The street became quieter. The talking and laughter ceased. The lights were dim at Chris Spanknoebel’s. Now and then the clatter of wheels and horses’ hoofs proclaimed a late comer seeking a place, but the sound was not near by, for this block and those to east and west were filled by now. These men had been up at four that morning, must be up before four the next.

  The night was cool, but not cold. Overhead you saw the wide strip of sky between the brick buildings on either side of the street. Two men came along singing. “Shut up!” growled a voice from a wagon along the curb. The singers subsided. It must be ten o’clock and after, Selina thought. She had with her Pervus’s nickel watch, but it was too dark to see its face, and she did not want to risk a match. Measured footsteps that passed and repassed at regular intervals. The night policeman.

  She lay looking up at the sky. There were no tears in her eyes. She was past tears. She thought, “Here I am, Selina Peake, sleeping in a wagon, in the straw, like a bitch with my puppy snuggled beside me. I was going to be like Jo in Louisa Alcott’s book. On my feet are boots and on my body a dyed dress. How terribly long it is going to be until morning. . . . I must try to sleep. . . . I must try to sleep . . .”

  She did sleep, miraculously. The September stars twinkled brightly down on them. As she lay there, the child in her arms, asleep, peace came to the haggard face, relaxed the tired limbs. Much like another woman who had lain in the straw with her child in her arms almost two thousand years before.

  11

  It would be enchanting to be able to record that Selina, next day, had phenomenal success, disposing of her carefully bunched wares to great advantage, driving smartly off up Halsted Street toward High Prairie with a goodly profit jingling in her scuffed leather purse. The truth is that she had a day so devastating, so catastrophic, as would have discouraged most men and certainly any woman less desperate and determined.

  She had awakened, not to daylight, but to the three o’clock blackness. The street was already astir. Selina brushed her skirt to rid it of the clinging hay, tidied herself as best she could. Leaving Dirk still asleep, she called Pom from beneath the wagon to act as sentinel at the dashboard, and crossed the street to Chris Spanknoebel’s. She knew Chris, and he her. He would let her wash at the faucet at the rear of the eating hou
se. She would buy hot coffee for herself and Dirk to warm and revivify them. They would eat the sandwiches left from the night before.

  Chris himself, a pot-paunched Austrian, blond, benevolent, was standing behind his bar, wiping the slab with a large moist cloth. With the other hand he swept the surface with a rubber-tipped board about the size of a shingle. This contrivance gathered up such beads of moisture as might be left by the cloth. Two sweeps of it rendered the counter dry and shining. Later Chris allowed Dirk to wield this rubber-tipped contrivance—a most satisfactory thing to do, leaving one with a feeling of perfect achievement.

  Spanknoebel seemed never to sleep, yet his colour was ruddy, his blue eyes clear. The last truckster coming in at night for a beer or a cup of coffee and a sandwich was greeted by Chris, white-aproned, pink-cheeked, wide awake, swabbing the bar’s shining surface with the thirsty cloth, swishing it with the sly rubber-tipped board. “Well, how goes it all the while?” said Chris. The earliest morning trader found Chris in a fresh white apron crackling with starch and ironing. He would swab the bar with a gesture of welcome, of greeting. “Well, how goes it all the while?”

  As Selina entered the long room now there was something heartening, reassuring about Chris’s clean white apron, his ruddy colour, the very sweep of his shirt-sleeved arm as it encompassed the bar-slab. From the kitchen at the rear came the sounds of sizzling and frying, and the gracious scent of coffee and of frying pork and potatoes. Already the market men were seated at the tables eating huge and hurried breakfasts: hunks of ham; eggs in pairs; potatoes cut in great cubes; cups of steaming coffee and chunks of bread that they plastered liberally with butter.

  Selina approached Chris. His round face loomed out through the smoke like the sun in a fog. “Well, how goes it all the while?” Then he recognized her. “ Um Gottes!—why, it’s Mis’ DeJong!” He wiped his great hand on a convenient towel, extended it in sympathy to the widow. “I heerd,” he said, “I heerd.” His inarticulateness made his words doubly effective.

  “I’ve come in with the load, Mr. Spanknoebel. The boy and I. He’s still asleep in the wagon. May I bring him over here to clean him up a little before breakfast?”

  “Sure! Sure!” A sudden suspicion struck him. “You ain’t slept in the wagon, Mis’ DeJong! Um Gottes!——”

  “Yes. It wasn’t bad. The boy slept the night through. I slept, too, quite a little.”

  “Why you didn’t come here! Why——” At the look in Selina’s face he knew then. “For nothing you and the boy could sleep here.”

  “I knew that! That’s why.”

  “Don’t talk dumb, Mrs. DeJong. Half the time the rooms is vacant. You and the boy chust as well—twenty cents, then, and pay me when you got it. But any way you don’t come in reg’lar with the load, do you? That ain’t for womans.”

  “There’s no one to do it for me, except Jan. And he’s worse than nobody. Just through September and October. After that, maybe——” Her voice trailed off. It is hard to be hopeful at three in the morning, before breakfast.

  She went to the little wash room at the rear, felt better immediately she had washed vigorously, combed her hair. She returned to the wagon to find a panic stricken Dirk sure of nothing but that he had been deserted by his mother. Fifteen minutes later the two were seated at a table on which was spread what Chris Spanknoebel considered an adequate breakfast. A heartening enough beginning for the day, and a deceptive.

  The Haymarket buyers did not want to purchase its vegetables from Selina DeJong. It wasn’t used to buying of women, but to selling to them. Peddlers and small grocers swarmed in at four—Greeks, Italians, Jews. They bought shrewdly, craftily, often dishonestly. They sold their wares to the housewives. Their tricks were many. They would change a box of tomatoes while your back was turned; filch a head of cauliflower. There was little system or organization.

  Take Luigi. Luigi peddled on the north side. He called his wares through the alleys and side streets of Chicago, adding his raucous voice to the din of an inchoate city. A swarthy face had Luigi, a swift brilliant smile, a crafty eye. The Haymarket called him Loogy. When prices did not please Luigi he pretended not to understand. Then the Haymarket would yell, undeceived, “Heh, Loogy, what de mattah! Spika da Engleesh!” They knew him.

  Selina had taken the covers off her vegetables. They were revealed crisp, fresh, colourful. But Selina knew they must be sold now, quickly. When the leaves began to wilt, when the edges of the cauliflower heads curled ever so slightly, turned brown and limp, their value decreased by half, even though the heads themselves remained white and firm.

  Down the street came the buyers—little black-eyed swarthy men; plump, shirt-sleeved, greasy men; shrewd, tobacco-chewing men in overalls. Stolid red Dutch faces, sunburned. Lean dark foreign faces. Shouting, clatter, turmoil.

  “Heh! Get your horse outta here! What the hell!”

  “How much for the whole barrel?”

  “Got any beans? No, don’t want no cauliflower. Beans!”

  “Tough!”

  “Well, keep ’em. I don’t want ’em.”

  “Quarter for the sack.”

  “G’wan, them ain’t five-pound heads. Bet they don’t come four pounds to a head.”

  “Who says they don’t!”

  “Gimme five bushels them.”

  Food for Chicago’s millions. In and out of the wagons. Under horses’ hoofs. Bare-footed children, baskets on their arms, snatching bits of fallen vegetables from the cobbles. Gutter Annie, a shawl pinned across her pendulous breasts, scavengering a potato there, an onion fallen to the street, scraps of fruit and green stuff in the ditch. Big Kate buying carrots, parsley, turnips, beets, all slightly wilted and cheap, which she would tie into bunches with her bit of string and sell to the real grocers for soup greens.

  The day broke warm. The sun rose red. It would be a humid September day such as frequently came in the autumn to this lake region. Garden stuff would have to move quickly this morning. Afternoon would find it worthless.

  Selina stationed herself by her wagon. She saw the familiar faces of a half dozen or more High Prairie neighbours. These called to her, or came over briefly to her wagon, eyeing her wares with a calculating glance. “How you making out, Mis’ DeJong? Well, you got a good load there. Move it along quick this morning. It’s going to be hot I betcha.” Their tone was kindly, but disapproving, too. Their look said, “No place for a woman. No place for a woman.”

  The peddlers looked at her bunched bouquets, glanced at her, passed her by. It was not unkindness that prompted them, but a certain shyness, a fear of the unaccustomed. They saw her pale fine face with its great sombre eyes; the slight figure in the decent black dress; the slim brown hands clasped so anxiously together. Her wares were tempting but they passed her by with the instinct that the ignorant have against that which is unusual.

  By nine o’clock trading began to fall off. In a panic Selina realized that the sales she had made amounted to little more than two dollars. If she stayed there until noon she might double that, but no more. In desperation she harnessed the horses, threaded her way out of the swarming street, and made for South Water Street farther east. Here was the commission houses. The district was jammed with laden carts and wagons exactly as the Haymarket had been, but trading was done on a different scale. She knew that Pervus had sometimes left his entire load with an established dealer here, to be sold on commission. She remembered the name—Talcott—though she did not know the exact location.

  “Where we going now, Mom?” The boy had been almost incredibly patient and good. He had accepted his bewildering new surroundings with the adaptability of childhood. He had revelled richly in Chris Spanknoebel’s generous breakfast. He had thought the four dusty artificial palms that graced Chris’s back room luxuriantly tropical. He had been fascinated by the kitchen with its long glowing range, its great tables for slicing, paring, cutting. He liked the ruddy cheer of it, the bustle, the mouth-watering smells. At the wagon he had stoo
d sturdily next his mother, had busied himself vastly assisting her in her few pitiful sales; had plucked wilted leaves, brought forward the freshest and crispest vegetables. But now she saw that he was drooping a little as were her wares, with the heat and the absence from accustomed soil. “Where we going now, Mom?”

  “To another street, Sobig——”

  “Dirk!”

  “—Dirk, where there’s a man who’ll buy all our stuff at once—maybe. Won’t that be fine! Then we’ll go home. You help mother find his name over the store. Talcott—T-a-l-c-o-double t.”

  South Water Street was changing with the city’s growth. Yankee names they used to be—Flint—Keen—Rusk—Lane. Now you saw Cuneo—Meleges—Garibaldi—Campagna. There it was: William Talcott. Fruits and Vegetables.

  William Talcott, standing in the cool doorway of his great deep shedlike store, was the antithesis of the feverish crowded street which he so calmly surveyed. He had dealt for forty years in provender. His was the unruffled demeanour of a man who knows the world must have what he has to sell. Every week-day morning at six his dim shaded cavern of a store was packed with sacks, crates, boxes, barrels from which peeped ruffles and sprigs of green; flashes of scarlet, plum-colour, orange. He bought the best only; sold at high prices. He had known Pervus, and Pervus’s father before him, and had adjudged them honest, admirable men. But of their garden truck he had small opinion. The Great Lakes boats brought him choice Michigan peaches and grapes; refrigerator cars brought him the products of California’s soil in a day when out-of-season food was a rare luxury. He wore neat pepper-and-salt pants and vest; shirt sleeves a startling white in that blue-shirted overalled world; a massive gold watch chain spanning his middle; square-toed boots; a straw fedora set well back; a pretty good cigar, unlighted, in his mouth. Shrewd blue eyes he had; sparse hair much the colour of his suit. Like a lean laconic god he stood in his doorway niche while toilers offered for his inspection the fruits of the earth.

  “Nope. Can’t use that lot, Jake. Runty. H’m. Wa-a-al, guess you’d better take them farther up the street, Tunis. Edges look kind of brown. Wilty.”