So Big by Edna Ferber (read books for money .txt) 📕

Selina, holding the letter in her hand, imagined.

It was in the third year of Selina’s marriage that she first went into the fields to work. Pervus had protested miserably, though the vegetables were spoiling in the ground.

“Let them rot,” he said. “Better the stuff rots in the ground. DeJong women folks they never worked in the fields. Not even in Holland. Not my mother or my grandmother. It isn’t for women.”

Selina had regained health and vigour after two years of wretchedness. She felt steel-strong and even hopeful again, sure sign of physical well-being. Long before now she had realized that this time must inevitably come. So she answered briskly, “Nonsense, Pervus. Working in the field’s no harder than washing or ironing or scrubbing or standing over a hot stove in August. Women’s work! Housework’s the hardest work in the world. That’s why men won’t do it.”

She would often take the boy Dirk with her into the fields, placing him on a heap of empty sacks in the shade. He invariably crawled off this lowly throne to dig and burrow in the warm black dirt. He even made as though to help his mother, pulling at the rooted things with futile fingers, and sitting back with a bump when a shallow root did unexpectedly yield to his tugging.

“Look! He’s a farmer already,” Pervus would say.

But within Selina something would cry, “No! No!”

During May, June, and July Pervus worked not only from morning until night, but by moonlight as well, and Selina worked with him. Often their sleep was a matter of three hours only, or four.

So two years went⁠—three years⁠—four. In the fourth year of Selina’s marriage she suffered the loss of her one woman friend in all High Prairie. Maartje Pool died in childbirth, as was so often the case in this region where a Gampish midwife acted as obstetrician. The child, too, had not lived. Death had not been kind to Maartje Pool. It had brought neither peace nor youth to her face, as it so often does. Selina, looking down at the strangely still figure that had been so active, so bustling, realized that for the first time in the years she had known her she was seeing Maartje Pool at rest. It seemed incredible that she could lie there, the infant in her arms, while the house was filled with people and there were chairs to be handed, space to be cleared, food to be cooked and served. Sitting there with the other High Prairie women Selina had a hideous feeling that Maartje would suddenly rise up and take things in charge; rub and scratch with capable fingers the spatters of dried mud on Klaas Pool’s black trousers (he had been in the yard to see to the horses); quiet the loud wailing of Geertje and Jozina; pass her gnarled hand over Roelf’s wide-staring tearless eyes; wipe the film of dust from the parlour table that had never known a speck during her regime.

“You can’t run far enough,” Maartje had said. “Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”

Well, she had run far enough this time.

Roelf was sixteen now, Geertje twelve, Jozina eleven. What would this household do now, Selina wondered, without the woman who had been so faithful a slave to it? Who would keep the pigtails⁠—no longer giggling⁠—in clean ginghams and decent square-toed shoes? Who, when Klaas broke out in rumbling Dutch wrath against what he termed Roelf’s “dumb” ways, would say, “Og, Pool, leave the boy alone once. He does nothing.” Who would keep Klaas himself in order; cook his meals, wash his clothes, iron his shirts, take pride in the great ruddy childlike giant?

Klaas answered these questions just nine months later by marrying the Widow Paarlenberg. High Prairie was rocked with surprise. For months this marriage was the talk of the district. They had gone to Niagara Falls on a wedding trip; Pool’s place was going to have this improvement and that; no, they were going to move to the Widow Paarlenberg’s large farmhouse (they would always call her that); no, Pool was putting in a bathroom with a bathtub and running water; no, they were going to buy the Stikker place between Pool’s and Paarlenberg’s and make one farm of it, the largest in all High Prairie, Low Prairie, or New Haarlem. Well, no fool like an old fool.

So insatiable was High Prairie’s curiosity that every scrap of fresh news was swallowed at a gulp. When the word went round of Roelf’s flight from the farm, no one knew where, it served only as sauce to the great dish of gossip.

Selina had known. Pervus was away at the market when Roelf had knocked at the farmhouse door one night at eight, had turned the knob and entered, as usual. But there was nothing of the usual about his appearance. He wore his best suit⁠—his first suit of store clothes, bought at the time of his mother’s funeral. It never had fitted him; now was grotesquely small for him. He had shot up amazingly in the last eight or nine months. Yet there was nothing of the ridiculous about him as he stood before her now, tall, lean, dark. He put down his cheap yellow suitcase.

“Well, Roelf.”

“I am going away. I couldn’t stay.”

She nodded. “Where?”

“Away. Chicago maybe.” He was terribly moved, so he made his tone casual. “They came home last night. I have got some books that belong to you.” He made as though to open the suitcase.

“No, no! Keep them.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Roelf.” She took the boy’s dark head in her two hands and, standing on tiptoe, kissed him. He turned to go. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” She had a few dollars⁠—in quarters, dimes, half dollars⁠—perhaps ten dollars in all⁠—hidden away in a canister on the shelf. She reached for it. But when she came back with the box in her hand he was gone.

Dirk was eight;