So Big Edna Ferber (most romantic novels txt) 📖

The Reverend Dekker appeared late Sunday afternoon on his way to evening service. A dour dominie, the Reverend Dekker, and one whose talents were anachronistic. He would have been invaluable in the days when New York was New Amsterdam. But the second and third generations of High Prairie Dutch were beginning to chafe under his old-world regime. A hard blue eye, had the Reverend Dekker, and a fanatic one.

“What is this talk I hear, Mrs. DeJong, that you are going to the Haymarket with the garden stuff, a woman alone?”

“Dirk goes with me.”

“You don’t know what you are doing, Mrs. DeJong. The Haymarket is no place for a decent woman. As for the boy! There is card-playing, drinking⁠—all manner of wickedness⁠—daughters of Jezebel on the street, going among the wagons.”

“Really!” said Selina. It sounded thrilling, after twelve years on the farm.

“You must not go.”

“The vegetables are rotting in the ground. And Dirk and I must live.”

“Remember the two sparrows. ‘One of them shall not fall on the ground without’ —⁠Matthew 10:29.”

“I don’t see,” replied Selina, simply, “what good that does the sparrow, once it’s fallen.”

By Monday afternoon the parlour curtains of every High Prairie farmhouse that faced the Halsted road were agitated as though by a brisk wind between the hours of three and five, when the market wagons were to be seen moving toward Chicago. Klaas Pool at dinner that noon had spoken of Selina’s contemplated trip with a mingling of pity and disapproval.

“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”

Mrs. Klaas Pool (they still spoke of her as the Widow Paarlenberg) smiled her slippery crooked smile. “What could you expect! Look how she’s always acted.”

Klaas did not follow this. He was busy with his own train of thought. “It don’t seem hardly possible. Time she come here school teacher I drove her out and she was like a little robin or what, set up on the seat. She says, I remember like yesterday, cabbages was beautiful. I bet she learned different by this time.”

But she hadn’t. So little had Selina learned in these past eleven years that now, having loaded the wagon in the yard she surveyed it with more sparkle in her eye than High Prairie would have approved in a widow of little more than a week. They had picked and bunched only the best of the late crop⁠—the firmest reddest radishes, the roundest juiciest beets; the carrots that tapered a good seven inches from base to tip; kraut cabbages of the drumhead variety that were flawless green balls; firm juicy spears of cucumber; cauliflower (of her own planting; Pervus had opposed it) that looked like a bride’s bouquet. Selina stepped back now and regarded this riot of crimson and green, of white and gold and purple.

“Aren’t they beautiful! Dirk, aren’t they beautiful!”

Dirk, capering in his excitement at the prospect of the trip before him, shook his head impatiently. “What? I don’t see anything beautiful. What’s beautiful?”

Selina flung out her arms. “The⁠—the whole wagon load. The cabbages.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Dirk. “Let’s go, Mother. Aren’t we going now? You said as soon as the load was on.”

“Oh, Sobig, you’re just exactly like your⁠—” She stopped.

“Like my what?”

“We’ll go now, son. There’s cold meat for your supper, Jan, and potatoes all sliced for frying and half an apple pie left from noon. Wash your dishes⁠—don’t leave them cluttering around the kitchen. You ought to get in the rest of the squash and pumpkins by evening. Maybe I can sell the lot instead of taking them in by the load. I’ll see a commission man. Take less, if I have to.”

She had dressed the boy in his homemade suit cut down from one of his father’s. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat which he hated. Selina had made him an overcoat of stout bean-sacking and this she tucked under the wagon seat, together with an old black fascinator, for though the September afternoon was white-hot she knew that the evenings were likely to be chilly, once the sun, a great crimson Chinese balloon, had burned itself out in a blaze of flame across the prairie horizon. Selina herself, in a full-skirted black-stuff dress, mounted the wagon agilely, took up the reins, looked down at the boy seated beside her, clucked to the horses. Jan Steen gave vent to a final outraged bellow.

“Never in my life did I hear of such a thing!”

Selina turned the horses’ heads toward the city. “You’d be surprised, Jan, to know of all the things you’re going to hear of some day that you’ve never heard of before.” Still, when twenty years had passed and the Ford, the phonograph, the radio, and the rural mail delivery had dumped the world at Jan’s plodding feet he liked to tell of that momentous day when Selina DeJong had driven off to market like a man with a wagon load of hand-scrubbed garden truck and the boy Dirk perched beside her on the seat.

If, then, you had been travelling the Halsted road, you would have seen a decrepit wagon, vegetable-laden, driven by a too-thin woman, sallow, bright-eyed, in a shapeless black dress, a battered black felt hat that looked like a man’s old “fedora” and probably was. Her hair was unbecomingly strained away from the face with its high cheek bones, so that unless you were really observant you failed to notice the exquisite little nose or the really fine eyes so unnaturally large now in the anxious face. On the seat beside her you would have seen a farm boy of nine or thereabouts⁠—a brown freckle-faced lad in a comically homemade suit of clothes and a straw hat with a broken and flopping brim which he was forever jerking off only to have it set firmly on again by the woman who seemed to fear the effects of the hot afternoon sun on his close-cropped head. But in the brief intervals when the hat was off you must have noted how the boy’s eyes were