Who has seen the wind, p.23
Who Has Seen the Wind, page 23
“She’s gotta be did. I ain’t fussy about it.” He started for the pens again.
“Ab!”
“You’ll git a great kick outa them cats!” he called back over his shoulder.
“You can’t kill my runty pig!”
“Don’t tickle me none. Gotta be did.”
“Ab — please! Tell Uncle Sean you did, but don’t!”
“I gotta,” said Ab stubbornly. “I’m gonna.”
“All right, Ab!” Brian drew a deep breath. “Go right ahead and kill that goddam pig!”
Ab stopped so quickly he teetered. He turned. “As the twig is bent, so the tree groweth! I sure hate tuh think what’s gonna happen to you if I ever hear you talkin’ like that agin!”
“Hit that pig with that goddam hammer, and you’ll really hear me cuss!” Brian surprised himself with his fluency. In two canting strides Ab reached him, and upended him where he stood by the stock trough. When he had let Brian go, the boy saw that the chicken coop, the hog pens, and the barn were spangled. “That ain’t a patch on what you’ll git if I ever hear them words outa you agin!”
What difference now? thought Brian. “Two million five hundred thousand goddams!” he called out.
It surprised him that Ab could run as fast as he did with his game leg; even with the rocker arrangement, Ab had greater speed than Brian by virtue of his longer legs, but he lacked manoeuvrability. The two covered the yard, one corner of the south pasture, and part of the garden. There they stopped, one at each end of a row of raspberry bushes. Brian could see Ab trembling in the morning heat; the whole garden was steeping hot and still, oppressively so.
Annie came from the house with a slop-pail in each hand. Along a feathered row of carrots to his left, Brian saw a strutting Rhode Island Red rooster with his head jerking as though yanked along by an invisible string.
“I’ll give you ten to come get what you got comin’!” shrieked Ab.
“Catch me!” called Brian.
They took up the chase again and ended it one at each end of a beet row. Brian could hear Ab puffing and realized with some surprise that he had been enjoying himself. He didn’t care if they stayed in the garden all day. Perhaps they would have if Sean had not come out. Annie had got him.
“’Bout time you took a look at this here kid!” Ab called to him.
“What the hell’s he belly-achin’ about now?” Sean inquired of the beet row.
“Swearin’ an’ cursin’ like a Irish thrasher — that’s all!”
“Now — the boy wouldn’t do a thing like —”
“Oh, yes he would, an’ he did, an’ he’s gonna agin! Next time it’ll be eatin’ tobaccah an’ goin’ to billerd halls!”
“I can hardly wait,” promised Brian, “if you kill that pig.”
“I told you!” cried Ab to Sean. “I’ve told you you’d be sorry fer leadin’
yer ungodly an’ sinful —”
“Who’s sayin’ I had a goddam thing to do with this at all —”
“There you go agin!”
“Don’t come any closer,” Brian warned his uncle, but Sean did not stop. He began to swear, with a slight hardness to his “r’s” and a touch of the lilt that was in Sean’s own voice. Sean stopped in the middle of the beet row, his mouth a round, dark hole of surprise in the middle of his red moustaches.
“Holy —”
“Cut her out!” shrilled Ab. “Ain’t yuh done enough without makin’ her worse!”
“What coz dis trobble?” asked Annie.
“He don’t want me to knock the runt on the head.”
“Does he want him to die slow?” asked Sean. “It’s a favour we’re doin’ him.”
“Killing a thing’s no favour!”
“Leave him to me,” said Sean.
“Mother will be glad to hear the new words I’ve —”
“God —”
“Hold her!”
“— bless the vegetable garden and the small child that’s in it!” Sean finished up.
“You get baby t’ing for bow-tell,” said Annie.
“I will not! I’ll be good and —”
“Oh, yes, you will,” contradicted Ab. “You git that there nipple so’s the kid kin feed the pig hisself.”
Brian found that his Uncle Sean’s hand was as heavy as Ab’s.
In the days that followed he spent more and more time with Annie; both Ab and Sean preserved silence in his presence. Ab’s was a sad, accusing one; Sean’s, ominous. As prairie people often refer to a certain year as the hail year, or the rust year, Sean was heard to mutter several times about the “goddam gall bladder year;” he did not do so in Ab’s hearing.
And in his closer association with Annie, Brian came to know the depth of her fondness for Ab; she showed the boy the cow-hide chest in her room, where she had laid away pillow-slips and table-runners and dish-cloths all stitched bright with flowers: crocuses, buffalo beans, tiger lilies and flax flowers. Annie’s conversations were simple ones, consisting largely of the same question rephrased again and again. “You t’ink Ab marry sometimes?” “You t’ink Ab like to be my Hoseban’?” Brian, filled with gratitude for what she had done in saving his runt pig, assured her that Ab had love in his heart.
Two weeks and five catalogue horses after the pig episode, Brian sat in the evening silence of the kitchen with his eyes on Annie bent over needlework. Ab was reading his Prairie Farm Review; Sean was puffing in his chair. Brian turned a page of the catalogue to the Optical Department ad. He looked for a minute at the clear-eyed woman in spectacles, surrounded by glasses of various styles; he thought of Ike with his thick-lensed spectacles. With a sudden flash of insight that sometimes comes to children, like summer lightning winking up the prairie’s rim, he knew why Ab had never asked Annie to marry him.
The next morning he said to Annie when they were alone in the kitchen:
“You got me my runty pig, Annie. I’m going to help you.”
“Me — I don’ need halp.”
“With Ab — you got to have glasses, Annie.”
“But — I can’t read some.”
“Not for reading — to fix up your eye.”
“Feex my eye?”
“Sure — all we got to do is write away to —”
The kitchen door screen banged as Ab entered, a black cloud of flies about his head and shoulders. He greeted Annie, but not Brian, put a handful of oatmeal into the jug he carried, dippered it full of water, then went out.
Brian sent Annie’s letter away the next day, and each time that he thought of the glasses after that, it was as if he had a stomach full of grasshoppers. The glasses did not come, however; Brian stood in the shelter of the windbreak and read to her the letter that came in their place. Annie must go to Regina to have her eyes tested. She told him that she could not go; Brian explained that if she told Sean she had a stomach-ache and must see a doctor, it could be arranged. He himself had once managed a difficult arithmetic exam that way.
Dr. Svarich in the town, Sean told them, was just as good as any Regina doctor when it came to stomach-aches. Annie would then have been content to forget the whole matter, but Sean would not listen to her. He left the house to get the car.
Brian went into town with them.
Sean told Annie that he would take the eggs in to the store and get some gopher poison he needed while she saw Dr. Svarich. He looked at her as she stood in the middle of Main Street, undecided. “What the hell’s keepin’ you?” he asked.
Annie started down the street in her long and lumbering canter. She stood before the square, white Bank building. Inside, she went past Mr. Abercrombie’s office and to the paying teller’s window.
“I wont feevty dollar now.”
“Make a withdrawal slip out, please.”
“I don’ know — you make,” Annie said to the teller.
He made.
They met Sean just as he came from the Royal Hotel. Anybody knew they didn’t sell gopher poison in there, thought Brian.
“An’ what has Svarich told you?” asked Sean.
“I take holy-day,” said Annie. “T’ree day holy-day.”
Sean cursed helplessly as he and Brian drove to the O’Connal house to visit the grandmother and Bobbie; he continued to curse on the way back to the farm.
In Annie’s absence, Sean himself did the cooking. He knew three dishes: fried eggs, oatmeal, and tapioca. He used one utensil: the fryingpan. Ab, who in his doleful way had appreciated Annie’s cooking, several times called attention to the indigestibility and monotony of Sean’s cooking. Sean chose at first to ignore the criticism; the fourth time he addressed himself to the stove damper, saying that it was not his fault the “goddam cook took it into her goddam head to take a goddam holiday for no goddam reason at all.” Ab finished his tapioca on the back stoop.
Both Sean and Ab were not too certain that Brian had not had something to do with Annie’s leaving. The boy found them often looking at him intently, and upon one occasion Sean appeared on the point of saying something to him, but seemed to change his mind. Brian knew when he wasn’t appreciated; homesick for his mother and brother and father, he turned more and more to the runt pig for companionship.
With Sean and Ab he went into town to meet Annie the day that she returned; he stood excitedly on the station platform, scarcely able to contain himself when he heard the train whoop far off to the prairie stillness. Ab said:
“She’s passin’ Magnus Petersen’s now.” Later. “There she is — beyond the roundhouse!” His shrill voice carried a note of excitement too.
The train was sliding its cow-catcher along the tracks, and in the coaches slipping past, people faced each other solemnly; up by the engine the train let two tinging sighs from beneath itself. It stopped. Brian began to feel himself drifting sideways.
Annie got down two cars away; sunlight stabbed out from her new glasses. Brian ran to her.
Ab came up.
He came the closest then to swearing that he had ever done since he had stepped out of the Odd Fellows’ Hall eight years before.
“Christmas!”
Annie’s right eye was perfectly straight behind the powerful lens of her glasses.
On the way to the farm Ab was silent, and in the days that followed, he observed a strange coolness toward Annie; it was as though she had been stricken with some terribly contagious disease as deadly as the sleeping sickness that had gone through the horses in the district the previous summer. And Brian, who had persuaded her to go away and get the glasses, felt that he was responsible for Ab’s attitude.
An evening after Annie’s return, he went out to the barn in search of Ab; as he stepped inside he heard the sing-songing of milk into the pail; then he saw Ab at Noreen.
“Ab.”
“Yeah?”
“Ab — what do you think of Annie’s — glasses?”
The milk continued to hum “some-fun” “some-fun.” “Fixed her up fine,” said Ab.
“You going to marry Annie?”
“I was.” “Fun-fun-fun,” said the milk as he stripped Noreen. The cow sneezed twice. “I ain’t now.”
“Why, Ab?”
“Jist ain’t. All there is to her.”
“But — why, Ab?”
“I dunno,” said Ab. The milk took up its drumming again.
By the back porch where the runt pig lived in its apple-box home, Brian looked down. It would always be a runt, he decided, a shivery runt. It had no twist to its tail; it never would have. The world was a funny place. He loved his runt pig that wasn’t any good for anything. Ab was fussy about Noreen, the snuffiest cow in the herd, with her wheezing and sneezing and coughing. Before Annie’s eye had been straightened he had —
Brian knew then. He ran to the house to tell Annie.
TWENTY-THREE
* * *
Country was much stiller than town was; the clear fall afternoons lay over the farmyard like something measured out; the sounds could not have been more distinct if they had been dropped down a deep well. From the blacksmith shop where Ab repaired a fork came a tang-tang. A bee droomed lazily. Annie sang in her kitchen. Duke and Empress still hitched to the rack that Ab had left standing half-filled with manure, tossed their heads again and again at the flies; as they did, the traces, the halter shanks made impatient, little clinking sounds. Tang — tang — ting — tang — tang, went Ab’s hammer on the anvil.
“We have hord a joyful sohnd
Jesus seves! Jesus seves!
Spread t’ glednoss oll arohnd;
Jesus seves! Jesus seves!”
Annie was happy. After harvest she and Ab would be married. Sean was giving them the upstairs of the house for their own. Soon there would be eight or nine threshers to cook for.
If he were in town now, thought Brian, as he stood on the back stoop, he could be playing around with Fat or Ike or Pinky, not hanging around with nothing to do. He wished he were Bobbie; a farm was all right only for a while. He stared discontentedly at the team harnessed to the rack, standing there with the lines looped about the post, waiting for someone to drive them. High on Duke’s shoulder a patch of hide shrugged itself — like with Ike’s face; Empress stamped one foot. Some time, without anyone standing beside him, decided Brian, he was going to drive them alone. He would like to drive Duke and Empress hitched up to the big, grey rack bowing in its middle. He began to walk toward the horses.
It was an old rack, unbelievably hay-wired; pieces of board were missing from its floor; one hind corner hung low. He put his hands on one side and lifted himself up to stand with legs apart. Joe Pivott had let him drive in town, he remembered, as he looked down on the horses’ rumps. He loosened the reins and held them between his thumb and forefinger as he had seen Ab and Joe do. His Uncle Sean was nowhere around; Ab was still in the blacksmith shop. He tried a tentative cluck with his tongue.
Duke, a high-strung horse just broken the spring before, lunged into his collar; Empress followed. Majestically swaying, the rack creaked into motion. Brian slapped the reins at the horses’ rumps. He would drive them just around the yard a little; it wouldn’t hurt anything. He was driving them all alone, he thought with excitement.
With their broad hindquarters tilting regularly, their heads tossing again and again at the flies, the horses moved toward the barn. Brian slapped the reins again. Duke jumped nervously ahead and fell back just as Empress leaped; both of them were trotting with their heads up and fighting at the bits. They were going somewhat faster than Joe Pivott’s horses, thought Brian. He pulled on the reins; but the shoulders and rumps continued to rise and fall — faster if anything. The barn loomed.
He pulled on one rein hard; the horses responded immediately, veering to the left in a full gallop. As the wheels rubbed against the floor of the rack, they gave out an alarming, scraping sound; the rack tipped sickeningly, spilling part of its load of manure, righted itself, hung over on the other side to tilt off more manure, then settled down to bounce and slap under Brian with such violence that he had to clutch at the front for balance. With one hand he tried to pull back on the reins, but was forced to let them go that he might hold the rack for greater security. The horses galloped free of all restraint, running blind, the rack clattering behind them, the haystack, water wagon, windmill, hog pens, chicken coop, blacksmith shop, and outhouses sailing past.
Jounced to his knees Brian crawled to the side, clutching the edge where blurring ground slipped dizzying by. The rack canted. He’d have to jump. The rack tilted again, and he felt himself going; in the long, hung moment just before he was jolted loose, he saw Ab’s grasshopper figure leave the blacksmith shop and come dipping over the yard.
Brian landed in long grass, sprawling with his arms out as though to welcome the dirt that shoved itself abruptly into his face. He was not hurt. As he sat up he saw Ab vault to the side of the rack he had headed off at the gate. The rack hit the set post of the gate, glancing as it did, then like a horse loosed into pasture after oats, it threw up its hind end; the years-old and rotten reach broke, clung for a moment, held by hay-wire. And then the rack was out on the road, no longer a broken-backed thing, but a square-fronted two-wheeled chariot drawn by horses with manes flying while Ab stood in wild dignity, sawing them from side to side in a vain effort to stop them.
Ab returned a half an hour later with the team still hitched to the front half of the rack. He walked beside them, talking to them and leaning back against the lines; the horses’ sides gleamed dark with sweat and strung with foam; Ab himself breathed heavily. Watching the return, through the kitchen window, Brian was thankful that Sean was not around. He watched Ab talk with Annie, who had gone out to meet him, and then with a flutter of anxiousness, he saw Annie leave Ab and walk toward the house.
It wasn’t his fault. He supposed he shouldn’t have tried to drive the horses, but how was he to know they would run away?
“Ab want to see you.”
Brian went out with Annie.
“What you tryin’ tuh pull off here!” Ab’s voice thinned even more with anger.
Annie’s broad face held a look of shocked disapproval.
“You know better’n tuh fiddle with them horses! We needed that there rack fer thrashin’ — gonna take a copple a weeks tuh git that team quieted down!”
“I don’t know,” said Brian. “I just thought I’d like to drive —”
“You thought! Christmas! — that’s the trouble — you don’t think! Ever sence you come out here she’s bin one thing after another!”
“I’m sorry, Ab. I didn’t know they’d run a —”
“Sorry! That’s gonna do a lotta good now — ain’t it!”
“Dat woz bad t’ing,” said Annie sadly. “You coz Ab trobble — mebbe got hort.”
“Wisht he’d bust his head wide open!” said Ab with a vehemence unusual with him. “Mebbe learn him tuh — tuh —” He expelled his breath with a whoosh.
Brian felt as though he was going to cry. He hadn’t meant to hurt anything. How was he to know what was going to happen? He felt Annie’s hand gentle on his shoulder; he pushed it aside.
