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

Angélique made a face at him, but old Mrs. Chevalier had been touched on a sore point, and she let out such a stream of fiery patois that Emil fled from the kitchen and mounted his mare.

Opening the pasture gate from the saddle, Emil rode across the field to the clearing where the thresher stood, driven by a stationary engine and fed from the header boxes. As Amédée was not on the engine, Emil rode on to the wheat field, where he recognized, on the header, the slight, wiry figure of his friend, coatless, his white shirt puffed out by the wind, his straw hat stuck jauntily on the side of his head. The six big workhorses that drew, or rather pushed, the header, went abreast at a rapid walk, and as they were still green at the work they required a good deal of management on Amédée’s part; especially when they turned the corners, where they divided, three and three, and then swung round into line again with a movement that looked as complicated as a wheel of artillery. Emil felt a new thrill of admiration for his friend, and with it the old pang of envy at the way in which Amédée could do with his might what his hand found to do, and feel that, whatever it was, it was the most important thing in the world. “I’ll have to bring Alexandra up to see this thing work,” Emil thought; “it’s splendid!”

When he saw Emil, Amédée waved to him and called to one of his twenty cousins to take the reins. Stepping off the header without stopping it, he ran up to Emil who had dismounted. “Come along,” he called. “I have to go over to the engine for a minute. I gotta green man running it, and I gotta to keep an eye on him.”

Emil thought the lad was unnaturally flushed and more excited than even the cares of managing a big farm at a critical time warranted. As they passed behind a last year’s stack, Amédée clutched at his right side and sank down for a moment on the straw.

“Ouch! I got an awful pain in me, Emil. Something’s the matter with my insides, for sure.”

Emil felt his fiery cheek. “You ought to go straight to bed, ’Médée, and telephone for the doctor; that’s what you ought to do.”

Amédée staggered up with a gesture of despair. “How can I? I got no time to be sick. Three thousand dollars’ worth of new machinery to manage, and the wheat so ripe it will begin to shatter next week. My wheat’s short, but it’s gotta grand full berries. What’s he slowing down for? We haven’t got header boxes enough to feed the thresher, I guess.”

Amédée started hotfoot across the stubble, leaning a little to the right as he ran, and waved to the engineer not to stop the engine.

Emil saw that this was no time to talk about his own affairs. He mounted his mare and rode on to Sainte-Agnes, to bid his friends there goodbye. He went first to see Raoul Marcel, and found him innocently practising the “Gloria” for the big confirmation service on Sunday while he polished the mirrors of his father’s saloon.

As Emil rode homewards at three o’clock in the afternoon, he saw Amédée staggering out of the wheat field, supported by two of his cousins. Emil stopped and helped them put the boy to bed.

When Frank Shabata came in from work at five o’clock that evening, old Moses Marcel, Raoul’s father, telephoned him that Amédée had had a seizure in the wheat field, and that Doctor Paradis was going to operate on him as soon as the Hanover doctor got there to help. Frank dropped a word of this at the table, bolted his supper, and rode off to Sainte-Agnes, where there would be sympathetic discussion of Amédée’s case at Marcel’s saloon.

As soon as Frank was gone, Marie telephoned Alexandra. It was a comfort to hear her friend’s voice. Yes, Alexandra knew what there was to be known about Amédée. Emil had been there when they carried him out of the field, and had stayed with him until the doctors operated for appendicitis at five o’clock. They were afraid it was too late to do much good; it should have been done three days ago. Amédée was in a very bad way. Emil had just come home, worn out and sick himself. She had given him some brandy and put him to bed.

Marie hung up the receiver. Poor Amédée’s illness had taken on a new meaning to her, now that she knew Emil had been with him. And it might so easily have been the other way⁠—Emil who was ill and Amédée who was sad! Marie looked about the dusky sitting room. She had seldom felt so utterly lonely. If Emil was asleep, there was not even a chance of his coming; and she could not go to Alexandra for sympathy. She meant to tell Alexandra everything, as soon as Emil went away. Then whatever was left between them would be honest.

But she could not stay in the house this evening. Where should she go? She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening air was heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer. Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their milky stalks, the air about them was saturated with their breath. The sky was still red in the west and the evening star hung directly over the Bergsons’ windmill. Marie crossed the fence at the wheat field corner, and walked slowly along the path that led to Alexandra’s. She could not help feeling hurt that Emil had not come to tell her about Amédée. It seemed to her most unnatural that he should not have come. If she were in trouble, certainly he was the