The Renchler Farm stood three miles out of Centralia on a dip of state
road that led in a quick, slick ribbon the three hundred and twenty
miles across two states.
Two acres of it had been Winslow Renchler’s inheritance of his father’s
small estate.
The house stood to the fore of those original seven acres. In the
years since her marriage, and to Rebekka’s just pride, those acres
had been added to by fifty-eight. The last buy-in had been a coveted
acre-and-a-half of old man Algahr’s. For years, the Renchler holdings
had curved around that plot like a greedy finger. When approached,
Algahr, who at ninety had exactly the face of a white, two-weeks-old
kitten, tooted around with his thin, high little voice and refused to
consider. When he died, a sole relative in the form of a heretofore
unknown nephew turned up from Shreveport, Louisiana, and sold it
quickly to Rebekka for less than half of what she had been wont to
annually offer old man Algahr. The catch was that the young scalawag
demanded cash transaction. Even with the advantage to her of cash
terms, Rebekka, whose acquisitions were all on mortgage basis, found
the raising of two hundred and forty dollars no small matter.
Finally it was negotiated with Ephraim Howey, then candidate for
Governor on a Republican ticket and whose stock-farm two miles along
toward Middleton was by way of becoming a matter of state pride.
That gave to the Renchler farm a fine, unbroken acreage of flat land.
You could stand on the verandah of the house exactly as if you stood on
the deck of a steamer, with the surrounding country flowing out from
you in ripples toward the horizon.
Gradually, with the years, as Winslow’s initial and feeble hold upon
the affairs of the farm relaxed and Rebekka took firmer and firmer
clutch, High Ridge came to be known as the Model Farm. For no more
technical reason, perhaps, than the geometric outlay of its uniformly
painted buildings and silos and the well-kept stone hedges, most of
them with their top row of boulders whitewashed.
Rebekka’s eyes and mouth were grim with the purpose of living up to
that appellation. It led her, in breathing space between meeting
mortgages, to cast covetous eyes toward installations of machinery and
modern devices which were ultimately to justify the term, “model farm.”
The Renchler place, with its perfectly square white frame house, its
recent addition of wide side verandah, its front of closed shutters and
green front door that nobody ever used, stood on a rectangular knoll
that was entirely surrounded by sixteen handsome maple trees. In time,
with its flock of outlying buildings painted a uniform green and white,
its regimental silos, its heated and electrically-lighted barns, its
plow-horses of enormous heft, fatted cattle, flowing loam of fields,
it was to become second only, as a matter of local pride, to the Howey
place, which after all was more of a hobby than an enterprise.
There were those who thought that Rebekka, in her concentration upon
the singleness of her purpose, in the sure-footed, deep-throated,
high-busted, and wide-hipped kind of magnificence, was too terrific
with enterprise.
There was something about a woman—even at the dawn of a day when a
suffragette was something that could happen in your own family—stalking
about her house at dawn to the clanking of her keys and the swinging
of her lantern; mingling in the open cattle-marts with men who never
so much as doffed a cap or shifted quid when she swung up in flaring
knee-boots, with her skirts crowded up into them, and, at season,
standing atop a threshing-machine shouting orders, her skirts again,
for want of knickerbockers, lashed in the uninterrupted winds against
her great body-curves; well, there was something about it—a woman and
all that—there was something about it went against many a grain.
It was common say about Rebekka that she could get more than a third
again as much work out of her men as anyone in the county, because they
were ashamed of an endurance that might not match up with her mighty
one.
There was something too ignominious about so minor a discomfort as
a cold, or a tooth- or an earache to be mentioned in the eupeptic
presence of Rebekka.
It was not that she was unsympathetic. There was a shelf in a
tool-house on her place filled with rows of arnicas, headache powders,
antiseptics, and various first-aids, which she personally administered,
calm and unblanched at the flow of blood, sure and firm at the winding
of gauze. Once a boy-around-the-place had tripped against a scythe
during haying time and cut his head in such fashion that a flap of
the flesh hung down over his face in a great dripping mask, blinding
and terrifying him so that he ran screaming through the fields to the
house. Winslow, seated on the side verandah, scooping a very special
brand of tobacco from a can into a rubberized pocket-pouch as the
wretched boy ran up, reeled sidewise from his rocking-chair into a
swoon that threatened, because of its duration, to be more a part of
the emergency than the wounded boy himself.
It was Rebekka who held the flap of flesh in place and kept the blood
stanched until a doctor arrived to sew it, giving orders the while
about the resuscitation of Winslow, who lay like a board.
After it was all over, Winslow, feeling foolish, would have preferred
to sit on the verandah until his legs got rid of some of their tendency
to wobble. But there was Rebekka, back at her interrupted chore of
the setting-out of hundreds of tiny asparagus-plants in frames under
glass, and so with bluster, to likewise prove his fitness, Winslow, who
detested the smell of lime phosphate, went down-cellar for a bag of it
to sprinkle along a border of new-turned earth.
As a matter of fact, Rebekka’s legs were wobbling, too. She wanted to
cry. She wanted Winslow to come and insist that she go indoors and
lie down. She wanted “Doctor Dan” to offer her a quaff of spirits of
ammonia, as he had the kitchen-maid and even old Jeff.
He did nothing of the sort.
It would have embarrassed Winslow to show the slightest concern for
her. It was not until she was in bed that night that Rebekka let
herself have a chill. A long, luxurious one that rattled her teeth and
the bed springs.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]