White Narcissus by Raymond Knister Read Free Book Online Page A

scrutinizing them.
    As they came out of the house after breakfast a team of horses emerged from alders around the bend of the road, with a two-wheeled implement surmounted by a barrel. On this a boy sat as though precariously, for it was perched horizontally, and looked ready to roll off. Two low, chair-like seats under and behind the barrel almost dragged the ground between the wheels.
    “Tobacco-planter,” Arvin told him.
    “Yes, that’s a tobacco-planter!” added Hymerson, as though it were a grim joke.
    “Dad don’t like the tobacco. Won’t grow it. I keep telling him we’re going to lose out, with tobacco the price it is….”
    “I guess, eh! I wouldn’t have the dirty stuff on my place, let alone smoke it, put the dirty stuff in my mouth. Agh! They can have it, them fellows.” He went, with swinging steps and one arm held out, toward the pig-pen, a swill-pail brushing his bulky, stiffened overalls at every step. Arvin grinned, looking from him to Richard Milne.
    He, too, went to the stable, and hitched a team to the rake. When he had gone creaking down the lane Richard followed the older man about while he did the chores, tended to the needs of the stock, and prepared another meal for them. Then they walked over the rolling, wooded farm together. Carson said, as they crossed a hollow along a haphazard rail fence:
    “That’s how he looks after things, that old man. Won’t even keep up the line fence between neighbours. I’ve had about enough of it, never keeping the fences fixed, letting the cattle run – even hogs.”
    Pausing to light a cigar, Milne asked thoughtfully, “Why don’t you make some settlement, say, have it that – if this is Lethen’s end of the line – that the fence should be fixed by him, or, if not, that you will do so at his expense? I should think that some arrangement could be made.” He was tired of the man’s complaints, and still more of his rancorous air of compunction.
    “Oh, that wouldn’t hardly do. Might get to be bad friends with him, that way.” Carson glanced at him in alarm and joggled the two forks on his shoulder.
    “I don’t see the point,” murmured Richard. He knew that Hymerson would talk about his injuries to any listener, and generally comport himself as though in fact a breach existed between the neighbours. At the hayfield which Arvin was raking Carson began to bunch a windrow, but Richard did not accept the hint of the extra fork – let him stand it in the ground and went away.
    He walked across the fields and woods in the general direction of the village. It was a day of the perfected tranquillity which only June can match, and which even in June one feels unmatchable. The clouds in their quietude only gave surcease from warmth and brilliance to the surfeited vegetation and trees, only varied that intense blue which had not yet lost its softness of spring, and which, it seemed, could never take on the greenish bitterness of first snow, the darkness of autumn storm.
    The young man wandered for a time with the sense of well-being and careless optimism tempering more individual feeling, even curious recognition of old landmarks. And the fields were remarkably little changed. Toward the river the banks, the dredged ditches leading into it, the hedges of underbrush, preserved the old contours, and new fencing was in evidence more usually in the fields nearer the fronts of the farms and along the road. The lanes were the same as those down which he had wandered in earliest times to the bush for wild-flowers in spring and nuts in autumn. Richard Milne sat curiously aimless on a weathered, grey rail fence, looking at a rusty disc harrow with a homemade log tongue, to which bark still adhered. A huge, battered, old leather shoe had been nailed to the tongue for a tool-box.
    He was impressed anew with the true reasonableness of farm practice. There was that about it which might appearelsewhere inertia and shiftlessness. If an appliance served its