O Pioneers!, Willa Cather [simple ebook reader txt] 📗

last three months.” Signa held the lantern so that he could see to buckle the straps. “It don’t seem right that we must all be so miserable. Why do we all have to be punished? Seems to me like good times would never come again.”

Ivar expressed himself in a deep sigh, but said nothing. He stooped and took a sandbur from his toe.

“Ivar,” Signa asked suddenly, “will you tell me why you go barefoot? All the time I lived here in the house I wanted to ask you. Is it for a penance, or what?”

“No, sister. It is for the indulgence of the body. From my youth up I have had a strong, rebellious body, and have been subject to every kind of temptation. Even in age my temptations are prolonged. It was necessary to make some allowances; and the feet, as I understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition for them in the Ten Commandments. The hands, the tongue, the eyes, the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but the feet are free members. I indulge them without harm to anyone, even to trampling in filth when my desires are low. They are quickly cleaned again.”

Signa did not laugh. She looked thoughtful as she followed Ivar out to the wagon shed and held the shafts up for him, while he backed in the mare and buckled the holdbacks. “You have been a good friend to the mistress, Ivar,” she murmured.

“And you, God be with you,” replied Ivar as he clambered into the cart and put the lantern under the oilcloth lap cover. “Now for a ducking, my girl,” he said to the mare, gathering up the reins.

As they emerged from the shed, a stream of water, running off the thatch, struck the mare on the neck. She tossed her head indignantly, then struck out bravely on the soft ground, slipping back again and again as she climbed the hill to the main road. Between the rain and the darkness Ivar could see very little, so he let Emil’s mare have the rein, keeping her head in the right direction. When the ground was level, he turned her out of the dirt road upon the sod, where she was able to trot without slipping.

Before Ivar reached the graveyard, three miles from the house, the storm had spent itself, and the downpour had died into a soft, dripping rain. The sky and the land were a dark smoke color, and seemed to be coming together, like two waves. When Ivar stopped at the gate and swung out his lantern, a white figure rose from beside John Bergson’s white stone.

The old man sprang to the ground and shuffled toward the gate calling, “Mistress, mistress!”

Alexandra hurried to meet him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Tyst! Ivar. There’s nothing to be worried about. I’m sorry if I’ve scared you all. I didn’t notice the storm till it was on me, and I couldn’t walk against it. I’m glad you’ve come. I am so tired I didn’t know how I’d ever get home.”

Ivar swung the lantern up so that it shone in her face. “Gud! You are enough to frighten us, mistress. You look like a drowned woman. How could you do such a thing!”

Groaning and mumbling he led her out of the gate and helped her into the cart, wrapping her in the dry blankets on which he had been sitting.

Alexandra smiled at his solicitude. “Not much use in that, Ivar. You will only shut the wet in. I don’t feel so cold now; but I’m heavy and numb. I’m glad you came.”

Ivar turned the mare and urged her into a sliding trot. Her feet sent back a continual spatter of mud.

Alexandra spoke to the old man as they jogged along through the sullen gray twilight of the storm. “Ivar, I think it has done me good to get cold clear through like this, once. I don’t believe I shall suffer so much any more. When you get so near the dead, they seem more real than the living. Worldly thoughts leave one. Ever since Emil died, I’ve suffered so when it rained. Now that I’ve been out in it with him, I shan’t dread it. After you once get cold clear through, the feeling of the rain on you is sweet. It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can’t see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren’t afraid of them. Maybe it’s like that with the dead. If they feel anything at all, it’s the old things, before they were born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does when they are little.”

“Mistress,” said Ivar reproachfully, “those are bad thoughts. The dead are in Paradise.”

Then he hung his head, for he did not believe that Emil was in Paradise.

When they got home, Signa had a fire burning in the sitting room stove. She undressed Alexandra and gave her a hot footbath, while Ivar made ginger tea in the kitchen. When Alexandra was in bed, wrapped in hot blankets, Ivar came in with his tea and saw that she drank it. Signa asked permission to sleep on the slat lounge outside her door. Alexandra endured their attentions patiently, but she was glad when they put out the lamp and left her. As she lay alone in the dark, it occurred to her for the first time that perhaps she was actually tired of life. All the physical operations of life seemed difficult and painful. She longed to be free from her own body, which ached and was so heavy. And longing itself was heavy: she yearned to be free of that.

As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than for many years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being