Eris

Breaking ground for a new kitchen garden that afternoon, Odell found the soil so infested with quack-root, horse-radish, and parsnip that he gave it up and told Lister that they’d fence the place as cheaply as possible and turn the hogs on it.

Lister hooked up a horse and drove away to hunt for locust posts and wire. Odell dragged his plow to the wagon shed, stabled the fat gray horse, walked slowly back toward the wood shed. There was a dead apple tree he could fell while waiting.

It was very still there in the April sunshine. All signs of rain were gone. The wind had died out. Save for the hum of bees in crocus and snow-drop, and except for the white c**k’s clarion from the runs, no sound broke the blue silence of an April afternoon.

Odell looked up at the window of his wife’s bed-room. The white-capped nurse was seated there, her head turned as though intent upon something taking place within the room. She did not stir. After a while Odell picked up his spading fork and wiped the tines.

Yes, every kind of bad luck was coming at once; drouth, bull-calves, wind to waste fertiliser, doctors’ bills, expenses for a nurse, for Mrs. Hagan, for posts and wire,—and the land riddled with quack and horse-radish....

He’d about broken even, so far, during the last twenty years. All these years he’d marked time, doggedly, plugging away. Because, after all, there had been nothing else to do. He could not stop. To sell meant merely to begin again somewhere else, plug away, break about even year after year, die plugging. That was what general farming meant in White Hills when there were wages to pay. He could have made money with sons to help him.... Life was a tread-mill. What his cattle took from the land they gave back; nothing more. He was tired of the tread-mill. A squirrel in a cage travelled no further and got as far....

Odell drove his spading fork into the ground, sifted out fragments of horse-radish roots, kicked them under the fence into the dusty road beyond.

Dr. Wand’s roadster stood out there by the front gate. Behind it waited Dr. Benson’s driver in the new limousine car. Odell had not felt he could afford any kind of car,—not even a tractor. These danged doctors....

As he stood with one foot resting on his spading fork, gazing gloomily at the two cars, Dr. Benson, fat, ruddy and seventy, came out of the house with his satchel.