3stalwarts by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

as her brain dulled with the labor she kept wondering whether a man would continue to feel like Gil when his girl began to lose her looks. After a while, she even began to forget that. There was just the work.
    They stopped at noon, and ate, and came out again into the heat, the flies following them from the cabin and then going in again, but a new swarm met them in the lot. The leaves were already wilting on the cut branches.
    It was like that, day after day. At sunset Lana stopped to hunt the cow and milk her. She had dropped off in her milk and only gave a quart at night.
    Then Lana started their supper. She gathered a few green ears from the cornfield, stripped the kernels out, crushed them in a bowl, and cooked them in the milk. The milk tasted of cherry and wild onion. All the time, as she worked in the kitchen, she could hear the strokes of Gil’s axe.
    He came in at dark all soaked with sweat and they went down to the creek together where a pool was, and stripped and washed side by side.
    Each night, to Lana, that marked the beginning of life again. She felt tired afterwards, her back ached, but she was clean; and while she ate, the natural uses of her body gradually returned. And the sight of Gil naked, knee deep in the slow flow of the creek, was still the one exciting thing she had to see. Even when she looked up at the peacock’s feather in the dark, his lean white shape came between it and her eyes. One did not see the burned hands and face in the dark, only the whiteness.
    They could begin to talk a little. They talked about a certain tree that had been hard in falling, or the way the mare was swelling in her neck from the flies. Gil would then go out with some of their precious salt in a cup and mix it with water and swab the mare’s shoulder, while Lana was clearing up. When he came in again, they would be wordless, and would wait only for a term of decency before going up to bed.
    All day, her place to him might be taken by anything with hands and arms and the knowledge to cook. When they lay down together, she was Lana Martin, who had been Lana Borst, once, long ago.

4. Muster Day
    When he came in from work on Tuesday evening, Gil took his rifle down from the pegs over the door.
    “Where’s the sweet oil?” he said to Lana.
    “Sweet oil? You’d better look on that shelf in the woodshed. Maybe I stuck it up there somewhere. It started to smell bad.”
    Without a word he went out to the shed, where she could hear him stirring round with a heavy hand and muttering to himself. But he came back after a moment, carrying the earthenware saucer.
    “It does smell kind of bad,” he said, and sat down near her, with the saucer on the hearth between his feet and a filthy bit of woolen rag in his hand. “George Weaver’s a particular man on muster. You wouldn’t think he was, to look at him. You wouldn’t think,” he went on, glancing at her slyly, “looking at him and me, that he was a sargint over me, would you?”
    Lana refused to meet his eye. But she said, “I think George Weaver would make a better sergeant than you, Gil. You get up your mad too easy. The way you was getting ready to because I’d moved out your smelly old oil.”
    “Mad! Listen, Lana, you just ought to hear him curse and swear on muster day.”
    “He wouldn’t do that to me.”
    “Who’s talking about you anyway?” He had run the scourer down the barrel with the rag wrapped round it, and now he was examining the result with the rag held close to his nose. There wasn’t any rust. He let the ramrod fall and patted her head.
    “Don’t do that,” cried Lana, wriggling off from him. “You’ll have me smelling just like a gun.”
    But he had taken to wiping the barrel. “I wouldn’t mind it if you did.”
    “Gil!” she cried. “You wouldn’t talk that way to me before we married!”
    “You wouldn’t have been dragging out my sweet oil on me, before we got married. Ain’t it a dandy rifle, though?” He held it in