The man from Oregon

The Brownlie woman and her children were at supper, eating in their usual depressing silence. Kendall left the table and plunged into the sunset glamor of the out-of-doors. The small yard gate, weighted with a wired stone, slammed behind him. He paused and looked out over the canyon, drawing a deep breath at its beauty.

“A landscape in a dream,” thought Kendall. But from infinite distance to the dream’s very edge, encroached the dun, incredibly level plains. And that forlorn and hideous little house from which he was fleeing! It squatted there, a toad on the brink of this wonder.

He straightened his shoulders, thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his new riding breeches and swung off on the road leading out of the horse pasture. A spare, graying man, wearing eyeglasses and an expression of worry. He had the nervous and kindly face of a schoolmaster, which, in fact, he was. He must, he decided, get away from this place for a few days. He had been tempted to clear out entirely, but he had paid a month’s board in advance and couldn’t afford to lose the remaining three weeks.

His convalescent, city-worn nerves had craved the open. The remnants of his savings and of his vacation, which illness had not consumed, he had come to spend on this ranch in the Southwest. He had hoped, when planning the trip, that the region possessed at least some tinge of that charm so lavishly depicted in western novels and moving pictures. Of course, he admitted to himself, he had known it wouldn’t really be like that. But to have it turn out so humdrum, so devoid of color ... It was all like a grim, practical joke at his expense; coming to this forlorn place run by a hag of a woman.

Kendall came to a pause at the big gate that opened into the pasture and stood with his arms on the top rail. He felt himself prey to piercing melancholy, and started walking quickly back to the house. He would see the woman and arrange to go on the thirty mile drive to Tulia in the morning. He would stay in the town a day or two, get his mail, buy a stock of papers and magazines and, thus fortified, return, and try to live out the rest of his month. With an inward sigh, he relinquished the last vestige of his dream of cowboys, roundups and romance.

The ever-changing beauty of the canyon had more than offset coarse food and a hard bed; the pure air admirably fitted the doctor’s prescription; yet it was no antidote to this atmosphere of human hopelessness. He had wished to be among the plains people of romance; and instead he was daily confronted with their tragedy as epitomized in Mrs. Brownlie and her children. Her strident voice assailed him before he had reached the yard: “Here you, Andy! Run out them hogs--they’re rooten’ in the garden! Ain’t I told you to keep watchin’ out?”

Andy, the youngest of the three boys, leaped into action: a scrawny, small figure in blue overalls.

With the help of two dogs there followed a commotion of shouting, barking and squealing; and the invasion was put to rout.

The incident was typical, thought Kendall, of the harassing inefficiency of the place: the fences had been unrepaired for so long that an endless driving out of the hogs had come to be the accepted means of restricting them. The cattle and a cultivated field east of the house, known as “the feed patch” were the dominant points of interest in the lives of these people; and so completely did the care of these drain their strength that they appeared hardly conscious that there could be other demands in life.

As Kendall opened the gate, the little girl, Lily, was sitting on the porch steps nibbling half-heartedly at the last bit of her supper--a biscuit soaked in molasses. The brown molasses streaked her small, delicately pretty face, and she brushed back yellow curls with sticky fingers. Lily was the only member of the family on whom the curse of toil had not fallen; her problem was a superfluity of leisure and a dearth of playmates. The mother’s consistent, fierce refusals to allow the child to help about the house, even when she cried to do so, were to Kendall a much-pondered anomaly. It must be that in the shrunken woman--with whom it was difficult to connect even a tradition of beauty--some memory, some realization had kept alive and created this complex which made her exclude Lily from even the lightest of manual work.

“No, you cain’t peel them potatoes,” the mother would say; “it’ll spoil your hands.” And: “Don’t let me ketch you weedin’ in that garden again--you’re tanned enough a’ready!”

But Lily was not tanned. The few freckles across her snub nose only served to accentuate the transparency of her delicate little face.

She was kept perpetually “dressed up.” Kendall noted the daintiness of her blue linen frock, white socks and kid slippers; incongruous in this environment. She responded dimly to the friendly smile he gave her.

He walked to the back of the house and stood in the doorway of the hot kitchen which was filled with the hum of swarming flies and the clatter of dish washing. “I’d like to go to Tulia tomorrow, Mrs. Brownlie. Could you let me have the team?”

She looked up from her dishpan vaguely. “I reckon.” Her voice was flat and lifeless.

“Could you spare it for two days?”

“I reckon so,” she said as before, going on with her work.

She hung the dishpan on a nail behind the stove and dragged from the closet a barrel churn. The thing was heavy, unwieldy; and Kendall stepped forward to take it. “Wouldn’t you like it outside where it’s cooler?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” she said indifferently. He set it on the ground and placed a chair for her. When she had poured in the cream and was swinging the churn by its handle, Kendall seated himself on the doorstep and watched her.

His mind reviewed the half-heeded gossip he had heard from the man who had brought him out from town: “Worthless cuss, Emmet Brownlie was,” Hastings had said. “’Bout as good dead as livin’, I reckon. Helluva time the woman’s had a-raisin’ them four younguns an’ runnin’ the ranch. She done nigh all the work about the place till the boys got old enough to he’p her. Ploughin’ ain’t nothin’ to her! Why, I’ve saw her rope an’ tie a steer quick as any man--an’ her not bigger’n a minute neither. She cain’t quite make it when it comes to bulldoggin’ ’em, though.”

Small wonder such feats had left her body warped and spent of resiliency! Yet it was not the woman’s physical aspect alone that made her charmless; she was soddenly unresponsive, with a queer blank look, as of something dead, in her eyes. She directed the activities of her sons with a passionless harshness; even her scolding was mechanical. Only in her adamantine determination that Lily should not work, did she show feeling; a fierceness entirely disproportionate to the decision she clung to. Yet Kendall had never seen her caress the child or even glance at her tenderly.

Emmet came toward them from the sheds carrying the full milk pails. He was sixteen, with a loose-hung body and dull, accepting eyes.

“Takes after his father,” Hastings had told Kendall.

The boy went into the kitchen and when he came out, his mother spoke without glancing at him: “Keep up the roans tonight. Mr. Kendall’s goin’ to Tulia to-morrer.”

“All right,” said Emmet, and slouched back to the barn.

The butter had “come”; and the woman ladled it out and put it away with despatch. Then, emerging from the kitchen, she made for the wire fence with her loping stride, and began to take down the wash she had that morning strung there to dry. The coarser garments, overalls, shirts and aprons, bordered two sides of the yard, while Lily’s dainty little dresses had a space to themselves near the front gate. As the woman’s bent figure moved along the fence in the fading light, stacking the garments in her arms, she looked like a gnome fantastically overshadowed by a huge burden.

Kendall rose and, to escape the sight of her, walked to the windmill. The stars had come out in a deepening sky. He could see the dark figures of the boys moving about the sheds; they were throwing bundles of hay over the fence to the horses in a lot. One of them was whistling--Oscar, of course. The small figure of Andy, the eight-year-old, approached Kendall on his way to the house.

“Hello, there,” called Kendall, with forced cheeriness. The child turned his head slightly, made an indistinguishable murmur, and padded by in the dusk. It was uncanny for even children to be so queer and unapproachable. They never played like real children; perhaps they didn’t know how. They were all too busy to play, except Lily. Poor Lily! Her lonely, time-swamped childhood was as tragic as the overwork of her growing brothers. And the mother’s attitude toward her lent that mother a tinge of mystery.