by Edna Ferber
“When I was your age I made every stitch you wore.”
“Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain’t the farm. I got all I can do to tend to the house, without sewing.”
“I did it. I did the housework and the sewin’ and cookin’, an’ besides–-“
“A swell lot of housekeepin’ you did. You don’t need to tell me.”
The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown el together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-tencent store on the wrong side of State Street.
They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in the stifling air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as they went.
They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their hurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-by delicatessen.
Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another day. What day was it? L’see now. Yesterday was—yesterday. A little feeling of panic came over him. He couldn’t remember what yesterday had been. He counted back laboriously and decided that today must be Thursday. Not that it made any difference.
They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago’s crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie’s husband. Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he clumped down the main street of Commercial—if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and opinion—he said nothing.
Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shoveled coal. He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shoveling and scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odor of his pipe. It gave him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.
“You been monkeying with that furnace again!” Bella would scold. “If you want something to do, why don’t you plant a garden in the back yard and grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm.”
His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to gardening— he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.
On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful tiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He talked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy man. He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.
“Well, now,” he would say, “you take this year’s wheat crop, with about 917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that’s what’s going to win the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that’s what I say.”
“Ya-as, it is!” the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is that Farmer Ben was right.
Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave her many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping.
“Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting if I take her along. Ma’s going with me.”
He loved the feel of Pearlie’s small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. He called her “little feller,” and fed her forbidden dainties. His big brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender offices. He was playing a sort of game with himself, pretending this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature railway.
They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.
Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike’s letters were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the Armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike’s return, Ben tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole being revolted at the thought.
He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-third, spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the overdressed, scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld’s heart.
The lack of exercise and manual labor began to tell on Ben. He did not grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city pave-ments. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as a water-crazed traveler in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully.
South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he stumbled upon it and, standing there, felt at home in Chicago for the first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in overalls and carrying whips in their hands—wagon whips, actually. He hadn’t seen men like that since he had left the farm. The sight of them sent a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly.
At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar things for which they had been starving.
He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages glowed like jade.
And the men! He hadn’t dreamed there were men like that in this big, shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men in overalls—worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men, jovial, good-natured, with clear eyes, and having about them some of the revivifying freshness and wholesomeness of the products they handled.
Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and garlic and of the earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt strangely at peace.
It was a busy st
reet. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid a hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to greet him friendlily. “H’are you!” they said genially. “H’are you this morning!”
He was marketwise enough to know that some of these busy people were commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain blue skirt and a small black hat.
A funny job for a woman. What weren’t they mixing into nowadays!
He turned sidewise in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one of the men—a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in a white apron—laughed and said: “Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving a bargain with you, I quit. It can’t be did!”
Even then he didn’t know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so surprising.
He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he acted automatically. He stood before her. “You’re Emma Byers, ain’t you?”
She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: “Why, Ben!” she said quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand—that capable, reassuring hand—and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers.
“Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?” He tried to be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been dealing and smiled.
“What am I doing here, Joe?”
Joe grinned, waggishly. “Nothin’; only beatin’ every man on the street at his own game, and makin’ so much money that–-“
But she stopped him there. “I guess I’ll do my own explaining.” She turned to Ben again. “And what are you doing here in Chicago?”
Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. “Me? Well, I’m—we’re living here, I s’pose. Livin’ here.”
She glanced at him sharply. “Left the farm, Ben?”
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute.” She concluded her business with Joe; finished it briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a wren—a businesslike little wren—a very early wren that is highly versed in the worm-catching way.
At her next utterance he was startled but game.
“Have you had your lunch?”
“Why, no; I–-“
“I’ve been down here since seven, and I’m starved. Let’s go and have a bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee and a sandwich, anyway.”
Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was listening quietly and advising him.
She interrogated him gently. But something of his old masterfulness came back to him. “No, I want to know about you first. I can’t get the rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin’ and all.”
So she told him briefly. She was in the commission business. Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know that here was a woman of established commercial position.
“But how does it happen you’re keepin’ it up, Emma, all this time? Why, you must be anyway—it ain’t that you look it—but–-” He floundered, stopped.
She laughed. “That’s all right, Ben. I couldn’t fool you on that. And I’m working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I’m not going to rust out. I want to wear out.” Then, at an unspoken question in his eyes: “He’s dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first, when the children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn’t know anything else. It came natural to me. That’s all.”
So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for deception. When he had finished:
“Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm.”
“I can’t. She—I can’t.”
She leaned forward, earnestly. “You go back to the farm.”
He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. “I can’t.”
“You can’t stay here. It’s killing you. It’s poisoning you. Did you ever hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you’re poisoning yourself. You’ll die of it. You’ve got another twenty years of work in you. What’s ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn’t a bigger job in the world than that.”
For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go, his shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered.
“Emma—I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the way it turned out—but I always wanted to–-“
She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright brown eyes were on him. “I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn’t to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn’t a bigger man-size job in the world. It’s where you belong.”
Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And so they parted, the two.
He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one.
So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the right streetcar at last and got off at his own corner at seven o’clock, or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.
But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. High-pitched voices. Bella’s above all the rest, of course, but there was Minnie’s too, and Gus’s growl, and Pearlie’s treble, and the boy Ed’s and–-
At the other voice his hand trembled so that the knob rattled in the door, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike’s.
He must have just arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in progress. Dike’s knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older.
All this Ben saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy’s two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying, “Hello, Pop.”
Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and marveling, and asking questions.
“He come in to—what’s that place, Dike?—Hoboken—yesterday only. An’ he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can’t you read our letters, Dike, that you didn’t know we was here now? And then he’s only got an hour more. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now,
demobilized. He came out to Minnie’s on a chance. Ain’t he big!”
But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped way of uttering his words:
“Say, Pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they’s a little dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I never seen nothin’ like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they’d think it was the Germans comin’ back. But they’re smart at that. I picked up a lot of new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds—womenfolks and men about eighty years old— runnin’ everything on the farm. They had to. I learned somethin’ off them about farmin’.”
“Forget the farm,” said Minnie.
“Yeh,” echoed Gus, “forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out at the works for four-fifty a day, and six when you learn it right.”
Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. “What d’you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all–-“
Bella laughed jovially. “F’r heaven’s sakes, Dike, wake up! We’re livin’ here. This is our place. We ain’t rubes no more.”
Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered mother.
“But I been countin’ on the farm,” he said miserably. “I just been livin’ on the idea of comin’ back to it. Why, I–- The streets here, they’re all narrow and choked up. I been countin’ on the farm. I want to go back and be a farmer. I want–-“
And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld—the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.
“That’s all right, Dike,” he said. “You’re going back. So’m I. I’ve got another twenty years of work in me. We’re going back to the farm.”
