The Prairie Wife
hospital. And just at dusk on the third day after that his young master
was walking down the dark hall. As he passed his sister's door, there
she stood all in white, quietly brushing her hair, as plain as day to
his eyes. And with that the master rushed down-stairs to his mother
asking how Sheila had got back from the hospital. And his old mother,
being slow of movement, started for Sheila's room. But before she so
much as reached the foot of the stairs a neighbor woman came running in,
wiping her eyes with her shawl-end and saying, "Poor Sheila died this
minute over t' the hospital!" I can't tell it as Terry told it, and I
don't know whether he himself believed in it or not, but the huge bulk
of Olie Larson sat there bathed in a fine sweat, with his eyes fixed on
the stove front. He was by no means happy, and yet he seemed unable to
tear himself away, just as Gimlets and I used to sit chained to the spot
while Grandfather Heppelwhite continued to intone the dolorous history
of the "Babes in the Woods" until our ultimate and inevitable collapse
into tears!
So Percy, who is not without his spirit of ragging, told several
whoppers, which he later confessed came from the Society of Psychical
Research records. And I huskily recounted Uncle Carlton's story of the
neurasthenic lady patient who went into a doctor's office and there
beheld a skull standing on his polished rosewood desk. Then, as she sat
staring at it, this skull started to move slowly toward her. It later
turned out to be only a plaster-of-Paris paper weight, and a mouse had
got inside it and found a piece of cracker there--and a cracker, I had
to explain to Percy, was the name under which a biscuit usually
masqueraded in America. That mouse, in its efforts to get the last of
that cracker, had, of course, shifted the skull along the polished wood.
This reminded Dinky-Dunk of the three medical students who had tried to
frighten their landlady's daughter by smuggling an arm from the
dissecting room and hiding it under the girl's pillow. Dinky-Dunk even
solemnly avowed that the three men were college chums of his. They
waited to hear the girl's scream, but as there was nothing but silence
they finally stole into the room. And there they saw the girl sitting on
the floor, holding the arm in her hands. As she sat there she was
mumbling to herself and eating one end of it! Of course the poor thing
had gone stark staring mad.
Olie groaned audibly at this and wiped his forehead with his
coat-sleeve. But before he could get away Terry started to tell of the
four-bottle Irish sea captain who was sober only when at sea and one
night in port stumbled up to bed three sheets in the wind. When he had
navigated into what he thought was his own room he was astounded to find
a man already in bed there, and even drunker than he was himself, too
drunk, in fact, to move. And even the candles had been left burning.
But the old captain climbed over next to the wall, clothes and all, and
would have been fast asleep in two minutes if two stout old ladies
hadn't come in and started to cry and say a prayer or two at the side of
the bed. Thereupon the old captain, muddled as he was, quietly but
inquisitively reached over and touched the man beside him. _And that man
was cold as ice!_ The captain gave one howl and made for the door. But
the old ladies went first, and they all rolled down the stairs one after
the other and the three of them up and ran like the wind. "And niver
wanst did they stop," declared the brogue-mouthing Terry, "till they
lept flat against the sea-wall!"
Olie, who had moved away to the far end of the table, got up at this
point and went to the door and looked out. He sighed lugubriously as he
stared into the darkness of the night. The outer gloom, apparently, was
too much for him, as he came slowly and reluctantly back to his chair at
the far end of the table and it was plain to see that he was as
frightened as a five-year-old child. The men, I suppose, would have
badgered him until midnight, for Terry had begun a story of a negro
who'd been sent to rob a grave and found the dead man not quite dead.
But I declared that we'd had enough of horrors and declined to hear
anything more about either ghosts or deaders. I was, in fact, getting
just a wee bit creepy along the nerve-ends myself. And Babe whimpered a
little in his cradle and brought us all suddenly back from the Wendigo
Age to the time of the kerosene lamp. "Fra' witches and warlocks," I
solemnly intoned, "fra' wurricoos and evil speerits, and fra' a' ferly
things that wheep and gang bump in the nicht, Guid Lord deliver us!" And
that incantation, I feel sure, cleared the air for both my own
sprite-threatened offspring and for the simple-minded Olie himself,
although Dinky-Dunk explained that my Scotch was rather worse than the
stories.
But it was this morning after breakfast that I learned from Olga why she
never cared to eat mushrooms. And all day long her story has been
hanging between me and the sun, like a cloud. Not that there is
anything so wonderful about the story itself, outside of its naked
tragedy. But I think it was more the way that huge placid-eyed girl told
it, with her broken English and her occasional pauses to grope after the
right word. Or perhaps it was because it came as such a grim reality
after the trifling grotesqueries of the night before. At any rate, as I
heard it this morning it seemed as terrible as anything in Tolstoi's
_Heart of Darkness_, and more than once sent my thoughts back to the
sorrows of the house of OEdipus. It startled me a little, too, for I
never thought to catch an echo of Greek tragedy out of the full soft
lips of a Finnish girl who was helping me wash my breakfast dishes.
It began as I was deciding on my dinner menu, and looked to see if all
our mushrooms had been used up. That prompted me to ask the girl why she
never ate them. I could see a barricaded look come into her eyes but she
merely shrugged and said that sometimes they were poison and killed
people. I told her that this was absurd and that any one with ordinary
intelligence soon got to know a meadow mushroom when he saw one. But
sometimes, Olga insisted, they were death cups. If you ate a death cup
you died, and nothing could save you. I tried to convince her that this
was just a peasant superstition, but she announced that she had seen
death cups, many of them, and had seen people who had been killed by
them. And then brokenly, and with many heavy gestures of hesitation, she
told me the story.
Nearly seventy miles northwest of us, up near her old home, so she said,
a Pole named Andrei Przenikowski and his wife used to live. They had one
son, whose name was Jozef. They were poor, always poor, and could never
succeed. So when Jozef was fifteen years old he went to the coast to
make his fortune. And the old father and mother had a hard time of it,
for old Andrei found it no easy thing to get about, having had his feet
frozen years before. He stumped around like a hen with frost-bitten
claws, Olga said, and his wife, old as she was, had to help him in the
fields. One whole winter, he told Olga's father, they had lived on
turnips. But season after season dragged on, and still they existed, God
knows how. Of Jozef they never heard again. But with Jozef himself it
was a different story. The boy went up to Alaska, before the days of the
Klondike strike. There he worked in the fisheries, and in the lumber
camps, and still later he joined a mining outfit. Then he went in to the
Yukon.
That was twelve years after he had first left home. He was a strong man
by this time and spoke English very well. And the next year he struck
luck, and washed up a great deal of gold, thousands of dollars' worth of
gold. But he saved it all, for he had never forgotten the old folks on
their little farm. So he gathered up his money and went down to Seattle,
and then crossed to Vancouver. From there he made his way back to his
old home, dressed like a man of the world and wearing a big gold watch
and chain and a gold ring. And when he walked in on the old folks they
failed to recognize him--and that Jozef thought the finest of jokes. He
filled the little sod-covered shack with his laughter, for he was happy.
He knew that for the rest of their days their troubles had all ended. So
he walked about and made plans, but still he did not tell them who he
was. It was so good a joke that he intended to make the most of it. But
he said that he had news of their Jozef, who was not so badly off for a
ne'er-do-well. Before he left the next day, he promised, they should be
told about their boy. And he laughed again and slapped his pocketful of
gold and the two old folks sat blinking at him in awe, until he
announced that he was hungry and confided to them that his friend Jozef
had once told him there were wonderful mushrooms round-about at that
season of the year.
Andrei and his wife talked together in the cow-shed, before the old man
hobbled out to gather the mushrooms. Poverty and suffering had made them
hard and the sight of this stranger with so much gold was too much for
them. So it was a plate full of death cups which Andrei's wife cooked
for the brown-faced stranger with the loud laugh. And they stood about
and watched him eat them. Then he died, as Andrei knew he must die. But
the old woman hid in the cow-shed until it was over, for it took some
time. Together then the old couple searched the dead man's bags and his
pockets. They found papers and certain marks on his body. They knew then
that they had murdered their own son. The old man hobbled all the way to
the nearest village, where he sent a letter to Olga's father and bought
a clothes-line to take home. The journey took him an entire day. With
that clothes-line Andrei Przenikowski and his wife hanged themselves,
from one of the rafters in the cow-shed.
Olga said that she was only five years old then, but she remembered
driving over with the others, after the letter had come to her father's
place. She can still remember seeing the two old bodies hanging side by
side and twisting slowly about in the wind. And she saw what was left of
the mushrooms. She says she can never forget it and dreams of it quite
often. And Olga is not what you would call emotional. She told me, as
she dried her hands and hung up the dish-pan, that she can still see her
people staring down at what was left of that plate of poisoned death
cups, which had turned quite black, almost as black as the dead man she
saw them lift up on the dirty bed.
_Monday the Twelfth_
Yesterday was Sunday and Olga in her best bib and tucker sat out in the
sun with Dinky-Dink. She seemed perfectly happy merely to hold him. I
looked out, to make sure he was all right, for a few days before Olga
had nearly given me heart failure by balancing my boy on one huge hand,
as though he were a mutton-chop, so that the adoring Olie might see him
kick. As I stood watching Olga crooning above Buddy Boy, Percy rode up.
Then he came over and joined Olga, who carefully lifted up the veil
covering Dinky-Dink's face, and showed him off to the somewhat
intimidated Percy. Percy poked a finger at him, and made absurd noises,
and felt his legs as Olga directed and then sat down in front of Olga.
They talked there for a long time, quite oblivious of everything about
them. At least Percy talked, for Olga's replies seemed mostly
monosyllabic. But she kept bathing him in that mystic moonlight stare
of hers and sometimes she showed her teeth in a slow and wistful sort of
smile. Percy clattered on, quite unconscious that I was standing in the
doorway staring at him. They seemed to be great pals. And I've been
wondering what they talked about.
_Wednesday the Fourteenth_