O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (ebook reader with internet browser .TXT) 📕

raising the new kind of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do. Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because father had more brains. Our people were better people than these in the old country. We ought to do more than they do, and see further ahead. Yes, mother, I’m going to clear the table now.”

Alexandra rose. The boys went to the stable to see to the stock, and they were gone a long while. When they came back Lou played on his dragharmonika and Oscar sat figuring at his father’s secretary all evening. They said nothing more about Alexandra’s project, but she felt sure now that they would consent to it. Just before bedtime Oscar went out for a pail of water. When he did not come back, Alexandra threw a shawl over her head and ran down the path to the windmill. She found him sitting there with his head in his hands, and she sat down beside him.

“Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, Oscar,” she whispered. She waited a moment, but he did not stir. “I won’t say any more about it, if you’d rather not. What makes you so discouraged?”

“I dread signing my name to them pieces of paper,” he said slowly. “All the time I was a boy we had a mortgage hanging over us.”

“Then don’t sign one. I don’t want you to, if you feel that way.”

Oscar shook his head. “No, I can see there’s a chance that way. I’ve thought a good while there might be. We’re in so deep now, we might as well go deeper. But it’s hard work pulling out of debt. Like pulling a threshing machine out of the mud; breaks your back. Me and Lou’s worked hard, and I can’t see it’s got us ahead much.”

“Nobody knows about that as well as I do, Oscar. That’s why I want to try an easier way. I don’t want you to have to grub for every dollar.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. Maybe it’ll come out right. But signing papers is signing papers. There ain’t no maybe about that.” He took his pail and trudged up the path to the house.

Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.

Part II Neighboring Fields I

It is sixteen years since John Bergson died. His wife now lies beside him, and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams across the wheat fields. Could he rise from beneath it, he would not know the country under which he has been asleep. The shaggy coat of the prairie, which they lifted to make him a bed, has vanished forever. From the Norwegian graveyard one looks out over a vast checkerboard, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light and dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white roads, which always run at right angles. From the graveyard gate one can count a dozen gayly painted farmhouses; the gilded weather vanes on the big red barns wink at each other across the green and brown and yellow fields. The light steel windmills tremble throughout their frames and tug at their moorings, as they vibrate in the wind that often blows from one week’s end to another across that high, active, resolute stretch of country.

The Divide is now thickly populated. The rich soil yields heavy harvests; the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make labor easy for men and beasts. There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness. The wheat-cutting sometimes goes on all night as well as all day, and in good seasons there are scarcely men and horses enough to do the harvesting. The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.

One June morning a young man stood at the gate of the Norwegian graveyard, sharpening his scythe in strokes unconsciously timed to the tune he was whistling. He wore a flannel cap and duck trousers, and