Chapter Two

The Renchler Farm stood three miles out of Centralia on a dip of state road that led in a quick, slick ribbon the three hundred and twenty miles across two states.

Two acres of it had been Winslow Renchler’s inheritance of his father’s small estate.

The house stood to the fore of those original seven acres. In the years since her marriage, and to Rebekka’s just pride, those acres had been added to by fifty-eight. The last buy-in had been a coveted acre-and-a-half of old man Algahr’s. For years, the Renchler holdings had curved around that plot like a greedy finger. When approached, Algahr, who at ninety had exactly the face of a white, two-weeks-old kitten, tooted around with his thin, high little voice and refused to consider. When he died, a sole relative in the form of a heretofore unknown nephew turned up from Shreveport, Louisiana, and sold it quickly to Rebekka for less than half of what she had been wont to annually offer old man Algahr. The catch was that the young scalawag demanded cash transaction. Even with the advantage to her of cash terms, Rebekka, whose acquisitions were all on mortgage basis, found the raising of two hundred and forty dollars no small matter.

Finally it was negotiated with Ephraim Howey, then candidate for Governor on a Republican ticket and whose stock-farm two miles along toward Middleton was by way of becoming a matter of state pride.

That gave to the Renchler farm a fine, unbroken acreage of flat land. You could stand on the verandah of the house exactly as if you stood on the deck of a steamer, with the surrounding country flowing out from you in ripples toward the horizon.

Gradually, with the years, as Winslow’s initial and feeble hold upon the affairs of the farm relaxed and Rebekka took firmer and firmer clutch, High Ridge came to be known as the Model Farm. For no more technical reason, perhaps, than the geometric outlay of its uniformly painted buildings and silos and the well-kept stone hedges, most of them with their top row of boulders whitewashed.

Rebekka’s eyes and mouth were grim with the purpose of living up to that appellation. It led her, in breathing space between meeting mortgages, to cast covetous eyes toward installations of machinery and modern devices which were ultimately to justify the term, “model farm.”

The Renchler place, with its perfectly square white frame house, its recent addition of wide side verandah, its front of closed shutters and green front door that nobody ever used, stood on a rectangular knoll that was entirely surrounded by sixteen handsome maple trees. In time, with its flock of outlying buildings painted a uniform green and white, its regimental silos, its heated and electrically-lighted barns, its plow-horses of enormous heft, fatted cattle, flowing loam of fields, it was to become second only, as a matter of local pride, to the Howey place, which after all was more of a hobby than an enterprise.

There were those who thought that Rebekka, in her concentration upon the singleness of her purpose, in the sure-footed, deep-throated, high-busted, and wide-hipped kind of magnificence, was too terrific with enterprise.

There was something about a woman—even at the dawn of a day when a suffragette was something that could happen in your own family—stalking about her house at dawn to the clanking of her keys and the swinging of her lantern; mingling in the open cattle-marts with men who never so much as doffed a cap or shifted quid when she swung up in flaring knee-boots, with her skirts crowded up into them, and, at season, standing atop a threshing-machine shouting orders, her skirts again, for want of knickerbockers, lashed in the uninterrupted winds against her great body-curves; well, there was something about it—a woman and all that—there was something about it went against many a grain.

It was common say about Rebekka that she could get more than a third again as much work out of her men as anyone in the county, because they were ashamed of an endurance that might not match up with her mighty one.

There was something too ignominious about so minor a discomfort as a cold, or a tooth- or an earache to be mentioned in the eupeptic presence of Rebekka.

It was not that she was unsympathetic. There was a shelf in a tool-house on her place filled with rows of arnicas, headache powders, antiseptics, and various first-aids, which she personally administered, calm and unblanched at the flow of blood, sure and firm at the winding of gauze. Once a boy-around-the-place had tripped against a scythe during haying time and cut his head in such fashion that a flap of the flesh hung down over his face in a great dripping mask, blinding and terrifying him so that he ran screaming through the fields to the house. Winslow, seated on the side verandah, scooping a very special brand of tobacco from a can into a rubberized pocket-pouch as the wretched boy ran up, reeled sidewise from his rocking-chair into a swoon that threatened, because of its duration, to be more a part of the emergency than the wounded boy himself.

It was Rebekka who held the flap of flesh in place and kept the blood stanched until a doctor arrived to sew it, giving orders the while about the resuscitation of Winslow, who lay like a board.

After it was all over, Winslow, feeling foolish, would have preferred to sit on the verandah until his legs got rid of some of their tendency to wobble. But there was Rebekka, back at her interrupted chore of the setting-out of hundreds of tiny asparagus-plants in frames under glass, and so with bluster, to likewise prove his fitness, Winslow, who detested the smell of lime phosphate, went down-cellar for a bag of it to sprinkle along a border of new-turned earth.

As a matter of fact, Rebekka’s legs were wobbling, too. She wanted to cry. She wanted Winslow to come and insist that she go indoors and lie down. She wanted “Doctor Dan” to offer her a quaff of spirits of ammonia, as he had the kitchen-maid and even old Jeff.

He did nothing of the sort.

It would have embarrassed Winslow to show the slightest concern for her. It was not until she was in bed that night that Rebekka let herself have a chill. A long, luxurious one that rattled her teeth and the bed springs.