PLOWING ON SUNDAY
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LIMITED
TORONTO
PLOWING
ON SUNDAY
_By_ STERLING NORTH
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1934
_Copyright, 1934, by_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved--no part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.
_Set up and electrotyped._
_Published October, 1934._
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NORWOOD PRESS LINOTYPE, INC.
NORWOOD, MASS., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER PAGE
I 3
II 19
III 37
IV 54
BOOK TWO
V 73
VI 92
VII 111
BOOK THREE
VIII 131
IX 159
X 185
XI 202
BOOK FOUR
XII 215
XIII 225
XIV 239
BOOK FIVE
XV 255
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I
1
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.
2
Stud Brailsford was a breeder famed throughout southern Wisconsin.
He had a Poland China boar, a Jersey bull, and a Percheron stallion
which were the talk of the countryside. He had cornfed sows which
looked like minor blimps wallowing in his pig yards and scratching
their ample backs against mail-order scratching posts which turned
like screws twisting sinuous curls of soothing grease upward
to salve the noble porcine flanks; soft-eyed Jersey cows whose
pedigrees compared favorably with that of any reigning monarch;
Shetland ponies, Shropshire sheep, and a small herd of goats.
On the little pond which lay like a blue mirror in a hollow between
the hills a quarter of a mile north of the house he had tame geese,
three varieties of tame ducks, as well as wild mallards, pintails,
redheads, and canvasbacks brought home wounded from the fall duck
hunting, clipped and kept to propagate more of their species. Wild
Canadian geese he also had whose honking overhead in the short
flights they essayed about the farm had all the fierce challenge of
their kind, all the longing for distant marshes, and the fire of
spring.
For spring was upon the land--
Spring had come rushing up the Mississippi valley out of the
warm Gulf states, out of the bayous and river bottoms bringing
the fragrance of wet earth and leaf mold, the sweet smell of sap
running in the maples, the acrid smells of dung and marshland.
At Rock Island, Illinois, spring, and the wild fowl, had turned
off the main stream to follow the Rock River valley up through
Rockford, Beloit, Janesville, until at last with a final onslaught
they had taken Lake Koshkonong and the farms and oak woods along
its shores.
Overnight wildflowers bloomed on the hills, buttercups, anemones,
dog violets, real violets, and the gaudy dandelions which children
held beneath each other's chins to discover with great certainty
who did and who did not like butter. Pickerel began to run up the
creeks and back into the marshy bays of the lake; the little
streams were flooded, and furry buds no larger than the ears of
mice began to show on the black, gnarled branches of the oak trees.
And spring to Stanley Brailsford meant plowing.
"Hi up there, Bess!" he shouted. "Get a move on, Jinny."
He guided the plow with one hand for a moment, using the other
to slap the reins sharply across the sweating flanks of the team
of mares. He turned them with an expert grace at the end of the
furrow, went down along the fencerow and around the outer edge of
the field.
A dozen white chickens, two or three bold robins, and Shep, the
mischievous young farm dog followed the furrow in an absurd parade.
The birds were greedy for the pink angle-worms, fat, purple
night-crawlers, and succulent grubs. The dog delighted in making
the chickens leap six feet into the air with playful passes at
their proud white tails.
"Get along you lazy hunks of horseflesh," Stud told the team.
"Pretty near time we had this twenty planted. What you horses going
to eat next winter, sawdust?"
He stopped for a moment to wipe his forehead with his red bandana
pulled from the voluminous depths of his overalls pocket, gazed
back over the neatly pleated acres of moist, black soil to the
meadow beyond, and to the sandy beach of the big lake beyond that.
A pickerel splashed in the shallow water.
"Holy Moses, that must've weighed twenty pounds," Stud told the dog.
Even the fish were frisky today. Shep was frisky and so was Stud.
Ulysses S. Grant was acting like a wild boar, Napoleon more like
a Texas longhorn than a Jersey, while Admiral Dewey, the Shetland
pony stallion was the worst of the lot.
The Admiral had a habit of biting bigger horses' legs, then leaping
about, prancing and whinnying. Stud knew it was a bad policy to let
a stallion run loose in the pasture but he couldn't find it in his
heart to shut the little rascal in the barn. The Admiral and Mrs.
Dewey were the happiest married couple he had ever seen. They had
been running together for five years now. Five pony colts had made
Mrs. Dewey look a bit matronly, but the little Stallion was still a
holy terror.
"Sarah's a bit like Mrs. Dewey," thought the man. "Quiet, and good
and sort of sweet. But me, I'm like the Admiral."
The dinner bell cut across his thoughts with its distant hollow
clangor, now full and near as the breeze brought it directly to his
ears, now remote and thin as the wind veered. The horses pricked
up their ears and stamped impatiently, Stud, whistling loudly
and merrily, unsnapped the tugs and clucked. Released from their
dragging burden the team trotted over the soft earth at such a pace
that Stud Brailsford had to break into a run; and the three of
them, the two beasts and the man, came into the barnyard in a whirl
of leaping, screeching chickens, hissing ganders, and the hearty
hallo of Early Ann.
3
On the broad kitchen stoop Brailsford scraped the black dirt from
his shoes, then, whistling, went in to wash. Sarah hurried to prime
the cistern pump which wheezed and creaked as it gushed forth a
clear stream of clean-smelling rain water. He scrubbed face and
hands with a coarse yellow soap, dried himself vigorously on the
crash roller-towel, ran the family comb through his curls, and
hesitated for a second to look at himself in the uneven glass of
the old walnut-framed mirror.
What he saw evidently pleased him: clear blue eyes which could
laugh or be very angry, wrinkles at the outer corners more from
smiling than from squinting into the sun, a two-days' growth
of heavy black stubble over cheeks both ruddy and tan, a good,
straight English nose which went oddly but well with the slightly
spoiled, pouting mouth; good teeth, a high forehead which bulged
at the temples, but was in no way out of proportion to the leonine
head with its mass of graying curls. He pulled at his jowls
tentatively. No use shaving until Sunday morning.
"Thought you rang the dinner bell, Sarah," he said smilingly as
the hot, somewhat harassed woman shuttled back and forth from the
roaring cook stove to the kitchen table. "Guess we'll have time for
a tune."
He crossed the wide, low-ceilinged room to the graphophone on
the big desk under the north window, pushed aside mail-order
catalogues, the ten-pound family Bible and back numbers of farm
magazines, gave the little crank a dozen turns, and from a homemade
box studded with big wooden pegs drew a heavy cylinder record.
"Edison record," the huge tin horn painted like a tiger lily
bragged in a cracked barytone. "For I Picked a Lemon in the Garden
of Love Where They Say Only Peaches Grow...."
"You play that just to tease me," the woman said. She spoke softly
and indulgently as a mother might speak to a mischievous child.
Early Ann came in with an armload of smoothly split oak and hickory
which she dumped into the wood box. Her strong round arms looked
very capable for the task and there was something delightful
about the disarray of her blond curls and the little beads of
perspiration on her forehead. Her movements were effortless and
unstudied.
Stanley found himself perplexed. Where had he seen the girl before,
years ago? There was a momentary flash of moonlight and willow
trees, but the vision evaded him. He gave up the puzzling problem
as Gus, the hired man, came in from the barns.
"It's hawg cholera this time all right," announced the
excruciatingly ugly man. "I don't doubt every one of them Poland
Chinas'll be dead by next Sunday."
"That ain't hog cholera, and you know it," said Stud.
"Well, if it ain't it ought to be," said Gus, slouching into his
chair at the table. "I'm plumb sick of them hawgs."
"They're good hogs," Stud said. "What's the matter with 'em?"
"Matter!" said Gus. "There's plenty the matter. You treat 'em
better than you treat your hired help, that's what's the matter.
I'll probably be sittin' up all night with that sow holding a hoof
and takin' her temperature."
"It's better company than you usually keep nights," said Stud.
"There you go again," Gus complained, "always accusing me of being
out nights. You know as well as I do that I ain't courted a girl in
twenty years."
"And with all the girls from Brailsford Junction to the Fort raring
around like mares in heat every time they get sight of you."
"Hush, Stanley," said Sarah, "don't forget Early Ann."
"She'll just have to get used to us, Sarah," Stanley said. "She'll
have to get used to the way we talk around here."
"Ain't we going to eat sometime today?" Gus asked. "I thought I
heard the dinner bell."
"There, the duck's just done," said Sarah. She slipped it deftly
onto the willow-ware platter.
"Duck on a Saturday?" asked Stud with mild surprise. He viewed
the sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, the great bowl of gravy,
baked apples, bread-and-butter pickles, the pile of hot homemade
bread in thick slices, the apple and gooseberry pies and large
graniteware pot of coffee with something like lust.
"Duck on a week-day?"
"You know Peter came home today. He.... Oh, Stanley, he's quit
school! He said he couldn't stand it another day."
"And so we kill the fatted calf," said Stanley quietly. "Well, why
doesn't he come to dinner? What's keeping him?"
"He's upstairs changing into his overalls. You might as well begin."
She stopped half way between the stove and table as Stud began the
blessing. She cast her eyes down as the words ran on.... "God is
great and God is good, and we thank Him for this food...." She saw
the wide pine boards of the kitchen, worn white and smooth from
years of scrubbing. Then she shut her eyes and said a little prayer
of her own for Peter and for Stanley Brailsford.
4
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.