There's a dog down at Tietjens' that's enough to scare anybody.He looks like a pony, he's so big.""I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over to get it." Which was a lie."I hope it won't get dark before I get there.You were going the other way, weren't you?""Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular.I'll be pleased to keep you company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden masterfulness.
They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one another for years.Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual.The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if they had been whisked away on a magic rug.
Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him.She hated farm life.
She was contemptuous of farmer folk.She loathed cooking and drudgery.The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs.Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs' feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free- lunch counter downstairs.Bella had early made up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life.Whenever she could find an excuse she loitered about the saloon.There she found life and talk and color.Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, butshe always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or with an armful of clean towels.
Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, "I want to marry Bella." He never dared meet the thought.He intended honestly to marry Emma Byers.But this thing was too strong for him.As for Bella, she laughed at him, but she was scared, too.They both fought the thing, she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart.Ben's appeal for Bella was merely that of the magnetic male.She never once thought of his finer qualities.Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring woman.But in the end they married.The neighborhood was rocked with surprise.
Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colors of pretense in order to attract a mate.But Ben Westerveld had been too honest to be anything but himself.He was so honest and fundamentally truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married.He had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing was a ceremony in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult.He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept away in a clean line from her forehead.For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins' bar.
They had three children, a girl and two boys.Ben Westerveld prospered in spite of his wife.As the years went on he added eighty acres here, eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the Mississippi.There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was too expert a farmer to fail.At threshing time the crew looked forward to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, his wife.She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the county.And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her plaint was the same-- "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farmall my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day and night, I'd rather have died.Might as well be dead as rottin' here."Her schoolteacher English had early reverted.Her speech was as slovenly as her dress.She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin coarsened from lack of care and from overeating.And in her children's ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming."You can get away from it," she counseled her daughter, Minnie."Don't you be a rube like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy.And they profited by her ad- vice.Minnie went to work in Commercial when she was seventeen, an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery.At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with roving tendencies.They moved from town to town.He never stuck long at one job.John, the older boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter.Restless, dissatisfied, emptyheaded, he was the despair of his father.He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill and down dale.He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling his mother for money to take him to Commercial.It was before the day of the ubiquitous automobile.Given one of those present adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his career much earlier.As it was, they found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them.He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a rendezvous of his own in town.The fall from the buggy might not have hurt him, but evidently he had been dragged almost a mile before his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood and the reins.
That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife together, but it did not.It only increased her bitterness and her hatred of the locality and the life.
