Ruby & Roland: A Novel - Hardcover

Sullivan, Faith

 
9781571311320: Ruby & Roland: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1571311327 ISBN 13: 9781571311320
Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

From the author of Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse and The Cape Ann comes a new tale of resilient womanhood in Harvester, Minnesota.

Growing up in early twentieth-century Illinois, Ruby Drake is a happy child. But one winter’s night, her beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. Her new path eventually takes her to Harvester, where she is lucky enough to find work on the welcoming Schoonover farm. Kind Emma, forward-thinking Henry, and their hired men—ambitious Dennis and reserved Jake—soon become a second family to the orphaned teenager.

At a historical moment when young women are expected to be focused on courtship and marriage, the industrious, bright Ruby searches for opportunities to expand her horizons at every step. Mastering her responsibilities on the farm. Learning to smoke cigarettes. Borrowing books from the local lending library, reading devotedly and expansively: mythology, romance, poetry. And falling in love with her married neighbor, Roland: “the most beautiful man—maybe in the world.” But when Ruby is asked to care for Roland’s wife in the wake of tragedy, she is torn between duty and passion, between what has been her lot and what could be.

Jane Eyre set in Faith Sullivan’s “reliably inviting world” (Wall Street Journal), Ruby & Roland is a story of relationships—friendship, romance, and the families we are born with and create—and of one woman’s journey of selfhood on the prairie.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Faith Sullivan is the author of many novels, including Gardenias, The Cape Ann, What a Woman Must Do, and, most recently, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse. A “demon gardener, flea marketer, and feeder of birds,” she is also an indefatigable champion of literary culture and her fellow writers, and has visited with hundreds of book clubs. Born and raised in southern Minnesota, she spent twenty-some years in New York and Los Angeles, but now lives in Minneapolis with her husband.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter Three

Around five o’clock, the train pulled into a station so like the one in Salisbury, I would have thought we’d traveled in a circle had “Harvester” not been printed on the side of the gray building.

On the platform, a lone woman stood waiting. The brim of her straw hat fluttered in the prairie wind. Drawing the sleeve of her dress across her brow, she wiped away perspiration. Advancing, she greeted me. She was Emma Schoonover, she said, and I was to call her Emma. She had not expected a pretty girl, she went on. Was I pretty?

From the tone of Emma Schoonover’s words, pretty was something she had not bargained for nor desired. She quickly bethought herself, however, and cast me a flickering smile. She was brusque without being cold. I believe “harried” is the word I want. September was after all an extremely busy time on a farm. This I knew from living in two farm towns before coming here.

As we waited for my small trunk to be lowered from the train and carried by the depot clerk to the woman’s buggy, I glanced sidelong, trying not to gawk. Emma was perhaps forty and comely without being beautiful, or so I thought at the time. Possibly farm life had robbed her of earlier beauty.

“Up since four a.m.” she explained, as if I’d inquired. “Big breakfast for the threshers.” Eggs, steak, homemade bread and gravy, pies, egg coffee.

Her spine as straight as a ruler, Emma held the reins loosely but with authority. As we rode out of town, I admired the endless prairie sky, blue as a delphinium.

Emma Schoonover spoke little on the remainder of the drive to the Schoonover farm west of Harvester. She did tell me that Mr. Schoonover was “Henry,” and asked if I knew how to milk a cow, which I did not.

“I can gather eggs, though.”

Driving along, raising a feather boa of dust behind us, we passed first the Protestant and then the Catholic cemeteries on our right, both beautifully planted with trees and flowering bushes. And so many bodies planted as well! Headstones were thick on the ground.

The earliest days on the farming frontier had been perilous, and they were not long past. Men and women died of exposure, disease, suicide, farm accidents, and half a dozen other causes. The blizzard of ’88, I would learn, took hundreds. The loneliness of the wide, mostly empty prairie found a way to claim folks.

Beyond the cemeteries, the buggy turned in at a tree-lined and graveled drive leading to an impressive white clapboard house with a broad front porch, nicely turned columns supporting its slanting roof. The yard lying immediately before was a haphazardly mowed swath of grass sloping down to the road we’d traveled, Cemetery Road.

A big dog of unknown breed and mottled coat―tan, brown, white―came flying down the drive with a great hoo-ha of greeting, barking us all the way to the back gate. “Big lummox,” Emma said with fondness as she drew the buggy up. “Name’s Teddy, after Roosevelt.”

The front door, I’d discover, was rarely used. Even guests and commercial travelers came to the back. The graved farmyard around us was girded by a cow barn; a horse barn; a pig sty; and a machine shed, all of them painted a rich red. Beyond the machine shed stood corn cribs and silos. A small village of structures. Canny and prosperous, these people were hardworking, too.

Parked around the yard were several wagons, their horses let out to pasture till their owners claimed them at the end of the day. “Threshing hands,” Emma said. Nearby farmers and their hands came to help with the overwhelming task of threshing the grain; when the crew finished here, they and Henry and his hired men would move on to the next farm in the rotation. If dry weather continued, the grain on all the farms would soon be ready for storage and sale.

“Dennis will carry your trunk in later,” Emma told me. “One of our hired men,” she explained.

Off to the right of the screened back porch was a big chicken coop. And, to the right of that, a garden, fenced with chicken wire. As Emma and I stepped down, softly clucking chickens greeted us, preoccupied with pecking for seeds and grain in the grass and dirt. They were like old women intent upon their knitting but murmuring to one another. Outside the screeching gate, but not ten yards distant from the back door, stood a watering trough and a windmill clacking with the incessant prairie wind.

Lost in dreams, perhaps, our somnolent buggy horses stood idly nickering as I followed my employer through the gate, across a short brick walk, up three steps, and into the screened porch, which smelled of sour milk. Another thing I was to learn: on a farm, even the most scrupulously clean back porch smells of sour milk. I don’t know why, but you get used to it. At the other end of the porch was a screen door leading to the four-hole outhouse. One hole for Emma, one for Henry, and two for the help, which included me of course. In those days, the outhouse was something you grew up with, its reek one more thing you got used to, along with iridescent-green-winged flies buzzing continually in warm weather.

Raising an arm and pointing, Emma said, “Over there, past the garden, is the storm cellar.” It seemed a long way to dash in the event of a tornado. She went on, “We keep last year’s apples and carrots and potatoes in there. Also some butter, milk, and ice from the lake.”

Inside the house, Emma carried my hat, carpetbag, and gloves to the parlor. When she left to unhitch the horses, I took the opportunity to look around the big kitchen, which was clean and tidy. In two corners, spiral ribbons of flypaper hung from the ceiling, lightly speckled with corpses. These ribbons were not so heavy laden as the ones I’d seen in the Salisbury depot. Emma probably renewed them often during warm months.

Returning to the house, Emma seized a vast apron from hooks behind the kitchen door, thrusting it at me and grabbing another for herself. “Set the table,” she said, “while I get the chicken frying.” She nodded toward a tall cupboard where dishes were stacked. “There’ll be eight places. You and I’ll eat after.” From shelves beside the woodstove, she pulled a huge and weighty iron spider with both hands, heaving it onto the stove.

Because the Schoonover farm didn’t claim a summer kitchen (most in these parts didn’t) this one was “hotter than a desperado’s pistol,” as Mrs. Bullfinch back in Beardsley would have said. Seeing me wipe my brow on my sleeve, Emma told me, “They want hot meat, even in this weather.” Shaking her head, she poured liquid lard into the spider. “They won’t be in from the field for at least another hour, but we have to be ready. Soon as they wash up out back, they want food.”

I began setting plates and utensils on the long pine table, nervous about what was to come. What kind of men were these? Crude? Loud? Disrespectful? Emma’s remark that she hadn’t been expecting a pretty girl made me wonder.

***

The men were dusty with wheat chaff. Though they’d washed their faces and hands and made a pass at brushing off the worst, the dust was in their ears, their hair, and the creases of their clothing, and they were too hungry to care. Hunger subdued their voices until they’d filled their bellies, and it robbed them of interest in a new hired girl.

As they trooped from the kitchen after the final cup of coffee, laughing and chiding one another, they did cast sidelong glances at me as I carried away the remains of their meal. Several nodded. The next evening, when I’d been accepted as truly the new hired girl, they would introduce themselves.

Following supper, the men returned to the field where they worked until no light remained. Then the visitors...

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Verlag
Milkweed Editions
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1571311327
ISBN 13 
9781571311320
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland

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