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

horse, but had never retracted. It was no quality of meanness in him. Pervus merely was like that.

But the west sixteen! That had been Selina’s most heroic achievement. Her plan, spoken of to Pervus in the first month of her marriage, had taken years to mature; even now was but a partial triumph. She had even descended to nagging.

“Why don’t we put in asparagus?”

“Asparagus!” considered something of a luxury, and rarely included in the High Prairie truck farmer’s products. “And wait three years for a crop!”

“Yes, but then we’d have it. And a plantation’s good for ten years, once it’s started.”

“Plantation! What is that? An asparagus plantation? Asparagus I’ve always heard of in beds.”

“That’s the old idea. I’ve been reading up on it. The new way is to plant asparagus in rows, the way you would rhubarb or corn. Plant six feet apart, and four acres anyway.”

He was not even sufficiently interested to be amused. “Yeh, four acres where? In the clay land, maybe.” He did laugh then, if the short bitter sound he made could be construed as indicating mirth. “Out of a book.”

“In the clay land,” Selina urged, crisply. “And out of a book. Every farmer in High Prairie raises cabbage, turnips, carrots, beets, beans, onions, and they’re better quality than ours. That west sixteen isn’t bringing you anything, so what difference does it make if I am wrong! Let me put my own money into it, I’ve thought it all out, Pervus. Please. We’ll under-drain the clay soil. Just five or six acres, to start. We’ll manure it heavily⁠—as much as we can afford⁠—and then for two years we’ll plant potatoes there. We’ll put in our asparagus plants the third spring⁠—one-year-old seedlings. I’ll promise to keep it weeded⁠—Dirk and I. He’ll be a big boy by that time.”

“How much manure?”

“Oh, twenty to forty tons to the acre⁠—”

He shook his head in slow Dutch opposition.

“⁠—but if you’ll let me use humus I won’t need that much. Let me try it, Pervus. Let me try.”

In the end she had her way, partly because Pervus was too occupied with his own endless work to oppose her; and partly because he was, in his undemonstrative way, still in love with his vivacious, nimble-witted, high-spirited wife, though to her frantic goadings and proddings he was as phlegmatically oblivious as an elephant to a pin prick. Year in, year out, he maintained his slow-plodding gait, content to do as his father had done before him; content to let the rest of High Prairie pass him on the road. He rarely showed temper. Selina often wished he would. Sometimes, in a sort of hysteria of hopelessness, she would rush at him, ruffle up his thick coarse hair, now beginning to be threaded with gray; shake his great impassive shoulders.

“Pervus! Pervus! if you’d only get mad⁠—real mad! Fly into a rage. Break things! Beat me! Sell the farm! Run away!” She didn’t mean it, of course. It was the vital and constructive force in her resenting his apathy, his acceptance of things as they were.

“What is that for dumb talk?” He would regard her solemnly through a haze of smoke, his pipe making a maddening putt-putt of sleepy content.

Though she worked as hard as any woman in High Prairie, had as little, dressed as badly, he still regarded her as a luxury; an exquisite toy which, in a moment of madness, he had taken for himself. “Little Lina”⁠—tolerantly, fondly. You would have thought that he spoiled her, pampered her. Perhaps he even thought he did.

When she spoke of modern farming, of books on vegetable gardening, he came very near to angry impatience, though his amusement at the idea saved him from it. College agricultural courses he designated as foolishness. Of Linnaeus he had never heard. Burbank was, for him, nonexistent, and he thought head-lettuce a silly fad. Selina sometimes talked of raising this last named green as a salad, with marketing value. Everyone knew that regular lettuce was leaf lettuce which you ate with vinegar and a sprinkling of sugar, or with hot bacon and fat sopping its wilted leaves.

He said, too, she spoiled the boy. Back of this may have been a lurking jealousy. “Always the boy; always the boy,” he would mutter when Selina planned for the child; shielded him; took his part (sometimes unjustly). “You will make a softy of him with your always babying.” So from time to time he undertook to harden Dirk. The result was generally disastrous. In one case the process terminated in what was perilously near to tragedy. It was during the midsummer school vacation. Dirk was eight. The woody slopes about High Prairie and the sand hills beyond were covered with the rich blue of huckleberries. They were dead ripe. One shower would spoil them. Geertje and Jozina Pool were going huckleberrying and had consented to take Dirk⁠—a concession, for he was only eight and considered, at their advanced age, a tagger. But the last of the tomatoes on the DeJong place were also ripe and ready for picking. They hung, firm, juicy scarlet globes, prime for the Chicago market. Pervus meant to haul them to town that day. And this was work in which the boy could help. To Dirk’s, “Can I go berrying? The huckleberries are ripe. Geert and Jozina are going,” his father shook a negative head.

“Yes, well tomatoes are ripe, too, and that comes before huckleberries. There’s the whole patch to clean up this afternoon by four.”

Selina looked up, glanced at Pervus’s face, at the boy’s, said nothing. The look said, “He’s a child. Let him go, Pervus.”

Dirk flushed with disappointment. They were at breakfast. It was barely daybreak. He looked down at his plate, his lip quivered, his long lashes lay heavy on his cheeks. Pervus got up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a hard day ahead of him. “Time I was your age, Sobig, I would think it was an easy day when all