So Big · Chapter 11 (1/2)

XI

It would be enchanting to be able to record that Selina, next day, had phenomenal success, disposing of her carefully bunched wares to great advantage, driving smartly off up Halsted Street toward High Prairie with a goodly profit jingling in her scuffed leather purse. The truth is that she had a day so devastating, so catastrophic, as would have discouraged most men and certainly any woman less desperate and determined.

She had awakened, not to daylight, but to the three o’clock blackness. The street was already astir. Selina brushed her skirt to rid it of the clinging hay, tidied herself as best she could. Leaving Dirk still asleep, she called Pom from beneath the wagon to act as sentinel at the dashboard, and crossed the street to Chris Spanknoebel’s. She knew Chris, and he her. He would let her wash at the faucet at the rear of the eating house. She would buy hot coffee for herself and Dirk to warm and revivify them. They would eat the sandwiches left from the night before.

Chris himself, a pot-paunched Austrian, blond, benevolent, was standing behind his bar, wiping the slab with a large moist cloth. With the other hand he swept the surface with a rubber-tipped board about the size of a shingle. This contrivance gathered up such beads of moisture as might be left by the cloth. Two sweeps of it rendered the counter dry and shining. Later Chris allowed Dirk to wield this rubber-tipped contrivance⁠—a most satisfactory thing to do, leaving one with a feeling of perfect achievement.

Spanknoebel seemed never to sleep, yet his colour was ruddy, his blue eyes clear. The last truckster coming in at night for a beer or a cup of coffee and a sandwich was greeted by Chris, white-aproned, pink-cheeked, wide awake, swabbing the bar’s shining surface with the thirsty cloth, swishing it with the sly rubber-tipped board. “Well, how goes it all the while?” said Chris. The earliest morning trader found Chris in a fresh white apron crackling with starch and ironing. He would swab the bar with a gesture of welcome, of greeting. “Well, how goes it all the while?”

As Selina entered the long room now there was something heartening, reassuring about Chris’s clean white apron, his ruddy colour, the very sweep of his shirt-sleeved arm as it encompassed the bar-slab. From the kitchen at the rear came the sounds of sizzling and frying, and the gracious scent of coffee and of frying pork and potatoes. Already the market men were seated at the tables eating huge and hurried breakfasts: hunks of ham; eggs in pairs; potatoes cut in great cubes; cups of steaming coffee and chunks of bread that they plastered liberally with butter.

Selina approached Chris. His round face loomed out through the smoke like the sun in a fog. “Well, how goes it all the while?” Then he recognized her. “Um Gottes!⁠—why, it’s Mis’ DeJong!” He wiped his great hand on a convenient towel, extended it in sympathy to the widow. “I heerd,” he said, “I heerd.” His inarticulateness made his words doubly effective.

“I’ve come in with the load, Mr. Spanknoebel. The boy and I. He’s still asleep in the wagon. May I bring him over here to clean him up a little before breakfast?”

“Sure! Sure!” A sudden suspicion struck him. “You ain’t slept in the wagon, Mis’ DeJong! Um Gottes!⁠—”

“Yes. It wasn’t bad. The boy slept the night through. I slept, too, quite a little.”

“Why you didn’t come here! Why⁠—” At the look in Selina’s face he knew then. “For nothing you and the boy could sleep here.”

“I knew that! That’s why.”

“Don’t talk dumb, Mrs. DeJong. Half the time the rooms is vacant. You and the boy chust as well⁠—twenty cents, then, and pay me when you got it. But anyway you don’t come in reg’lar with the load, do you? That ain’t for womans.”

“There’s no one to do it for me, except Jan. And he’s worse than nobody. Just through September and October. After that, maybe⁠—” Her voice trailed off. It is hard to be hopeful at three in the morning, before breakfast.

She went to the little wash room at the rear, felt better immediately she had washed vigorously, combed her hair. She returned to the wagon to find a panic-stricken Dirk sure of nothing but that he had been deserted by his mother. Fifteen minutes later the two were seated at a table on which was spread what Chris Spanknoebel considered an adequate breakfast. A heartening enough beginning for the day, and a deceptive.

The Haymarket buyers did not want to purchase its vegetables from Selina DeJong. It wasn’t used to buying of women, but to selling to them. Peddlers and small grocers swarmed in at four⁠—Greeks, Italians, Jews. They bought shrewdly, craftily, often dishonestly. They sold their wares to the housewives. Their tricks were many. They would change a box of tomatoes while your back was turned; filch a head of cauliflower. There was little system or organization.

Take Luigi. Luigi peddled on the north side. He called his wares through the alleys and side streets of Chicago, adding his raucous voice to the din of an inchoate city. A swarthy face had Luigi, a swift brilliant smile, a crafty eye. The Haymarket called him Loogy. When prices did not please Luigi he pretended not to understand. Then the Haymarket would yell, undeceived, “Heh, Loogy, what de mattah! Spika da Engleesh!” They knew him.

Selina had taken the covers off her vegetables. They were revealed crisp, fresh, colourful. But Selina knew they must be sold now, quickly. When the leaves began to wilt, when the edges of the cauliflower heads curled ever so slightly, turned brown and limp, their value decreased by half, even though the heads themselves remained white and firm.

Down the street came the buyers⁠—little black-eyed swarthy men; plump, shirt-sleeved, greasy men; shrewd, tobacco-chewing men in overalls. Stolid red Dutch faces, sunburned. Lean dark foreign faces. Shouting, clatter, turmoil.

“Heh! Get your horse outta here! What the hell!”

“How much for the whole barrel?”

“Got any beans? No, don’t want no cauliflower. Beans!”

“Tough!”

“Well, keep ’em. I don’t want ’em.”

“Quarter for the sack.”

“G’wan, them ain’t five-pound heads. Bet they don’t come four pounds to the head.”

“Who says they don’t!”

“Gimme five bushels them.”

Food for Chicago’s millions. In and out of the wagons. Under horses’ hoofs. Barefooted children, baskets on their arms, snatching bits of fallen vegetables from the cobbles. Gutter Annie, a shawl pinned across her pendulous breasts, scavengering a potato there, an onion fallen to the street, scraps of fruit and green stuff in the ditch. Big Kate buying carrots, parsley, turnips, beets, all slightly wilted and cheap, which she would tie into bunches with her bit of string and sell to the real grocers for soup greens.

The day broke warm. The sun rose red. It would be a humid September day such as frequently came in the autumn to this lake region. Garden stuff would have to move quickly this morning. Afternoon would find it worthless.

Selina stationed herself by her wagon. She saw the familiar faces of a half dozen or more High Prairie neighbours. These called to her, or came over briefly to her wagon, eyeing her wares with a calculating glance. “How you making out, Mis’ DeJong? Well, you got a good load there. Move it along quick this morning. It’s going to be hot I betcha.” Their tone was kindly, but disapproving, too. Their look said, “No place for a woman. No place for a woman.”

The peddlers looked at her bunched bouquets, glanced at her, passed her by. It was not unkindness that prompted them, but a certain shyness, a fear of the unaccustomed. They saw her pale fine face with its great sombre eyes; the slight figure in the decent black dress; the slim brown hands clasped so anxiously together. Her wares were tempting but they passed her by with the instinct that the ignorant have against that which is unusual.

By nine o’clock trading began to fall off. In a panic Selina realized that the sales she had made amounted to little more than two dollars. If she stayed there until noon she might double that, but no more. In desperation she harnessed the horses, threaded her way out of the swarming street, and made for South Water Street farther east. Here were the commission houses. The district was jammed with laden carts and wagons exactly as the Haymarket had been, but trading was done on a different scale. She knew that Pervus had sometimes left his entire load with an established dealer here, to be sold on commission. She remembered the name⁠—Talcott⁠—though she did not know the exact location.

“Where we going now, Mom?” The boy had been almost incredibly patient and good. He had accepted his bewildering new surroundings with the adaptability of childhood. He had revelled richly in Chris Spanknoebel’s generous breakfast. He had thought the four dusty artificial palms that graced Chris’s back room luxuriantly tropical. He had been fascinated by the kitchen with its long glowing range, its great tables for slicing, paring, cutting. He liked the ruddy cheer of it, the bustle, the mouth-watering smells. At the wagon he had stood sturdily next his mother, had busied himself vastly assisting her in her few pitiful sales; had plucked wilted leaves, brought forward the freshest and crispest vegetables. But now she saw that he was drooping a little as were her wares, with the heat and the absence from accustomed soil. “Where we going now, Mom?”

“To another street, Sobig⁠—”

“Dirk!”

“⁠—Dirk, where there’s a man who’ll buy all our stuff at once⁠—maybe. Won’t that be fine! Then we’ll go home. You help mother find his name over the store. Talcott⁠—T-a-l-c-o-double t.”

South Water Street was changing with the city’s growth. Yankee names they used to be⁠—Flint⁠—Keen⁠—Rusk⁠—Lane. Now you saw Cuneo⁠—Meleges⁠—Garibaldi⁠—Campagna. There it was: William Talcott. Fruits and Vegetables.

William Talcott, standing in the cool doorway of his great deep shed-like store, was the antithesis of the feverish crowded street which he so calmly surveyed. He had dealt for forty years in provender. His was the unruffled demeanour of a man who knows the world must have what he has to sell. Every weekday morning at six his dim shaded cavern of a store was packed with sacks, crates, boxes, barrels from which peeped ruffles and sprigs of green; flashes of scarlet, plum-colour, orange. He bought the best only; sold at high prices. He had known Pervus, and Pervus’s father before him, and had adjudged them honest, admirable men. But of their garden truck he had small opinion. The Great Lakes boats brought him choice Michigan peaches and grapes; refrigerator cars brought him the products of California’s soil in a day when out-of-season food was a rare luxury. He wore neat pepper-and-salt pants and vest; shirt sleeves a startling white in that blue-shirted overalled world; a massive gold watch chain spanning his middle; square-toed boots; a straw fedora set well back; a pretty good cigar, unlighted, in his mouth. Shrewd blue eyes he had; sparse hair much the colour of his suit. Like a lean laconic god he stood in his doorway niche while toilers offered for his inspection the fruits of the earth.

“Nope. Can’t use that lot, Jake. Runty. H’m. Wa-a-al, guess you’d better take them farther up the street, Tunis. Edges look kind of brown. Wilty.”

Stewards from the best Chicago hotels of that day⁠—the Sherman House, the Auditorium, the Palmer House, the Wellington, the Stratford⁠—came to Will Talcott for their daily supplies. The grocers who catered to the well-to-do north-side families and those in the neighbourhood of fashionable Prairie Avenue on the south bought of him.

Now, in his doorway, he eyed the spare little figure that appeared before him all in rusty black, with its strained anxious face, its great deep-sunk eyes.

“DeJong, eh? Sorry to hear about your loss, ma’am. Pervus was a fine lad. No great shakes at truck farming, though. His widow, h’m? Hm.” Here, he saw, was no dull-witted farm woman; no stolid Dutch woman truckster. He went out to her wagon, tweaked the boy’s brown cheek. “Wa-al now, Mis’ DeJong, you got a right smart lot of garden stuff here and it looks pretty good. Yessir, pretty good. But you’re too late. Ten, pret’ near.”

“Oh, no!” cried Selina. “Oh, no! Not too late!” And at the agony in her voice he looked at her sharply.

“Tell you what, mebbe I can move half of ’em along for you. But stuff don’t keep this weather. Turns wilty and my trade won’t touch it⁠ ⁠… First trip in?”

She wiped her face that was damp and yet cold to the touch. “First⁠—trip in.” Suddenly she was finding it absurdly hard to breathe.

He called from the sidewalk to the men within: “George! Ben! Hustle this stuff in. Half of it. The best. Send you check tomorrow, Mis’ DeJong. Picked a bad day, didn’t you, for your first day?”

“Hot, you mean?”

“Wa-al, hot, yes. But I mean a holiday like this peddlers mostly ain’t buying.”

“Holiday?”

“You knew it was a Jew holiday, didn’t you? Didn’t!⁠—Wa-al, my sakes! Worst day in the year. Jew peddlers all at church today and all the others not peddlers bought in Saturday for two days. Chicken men down the street got empty coops and will have till tomorrow. Yessir. Biggest chicken eaters, Jews are, in the world⁠ ⁠… Hm⁠ ⁠… Better just drive along home and just dump the rest that stuff, my good woman.”

One hand on the seat she prepared to climb up again⁠—did step to the hub. You saw her shabby, absurd side-boots that were so much too big for the slim little feet. “If you’re just buying my stuff because you’re sorry for me⁠—” The Peake pride.

“Don’t do business that way. Can’t afford to, ma’am. My da’ter she’s studying to be a singer. In Italy now, Car’line is, and costs like all get-out. Takes all the money I can scrape together, just about.”

There was a little colour in Selina’s face now. “Italy! Oh, Mr. Talcott!” You’d have thought she had seen it, from her face. She began to thank him, gravely.

“Now, that’s all right, Mis’ DeJong. I notice your stuff’s bunched kind of extry, and all of a size. Fixin’ to do that way right along?”

“Yes. I thought⁠—they looked prettier that way⁠—of course vegetables aren’t supposed to look pretty, I expect⁠—” she stammered, stopped.

“You fix ’em pretty like that and bring ’em in to me first thing, or send ’em. My trade, they like their stuff kind of special. Yessir.”

As she gathered up the reins he stood again in his doorway, cool, remote, his unlighted cigar in his mouth, while hand-trucks rattled past him, barrels and boxes thumped to the sidewalk in front of him, wheels and hoofs and shouts made a great clamour all about him.

“We going home now?” demanded Dirk. “We going home now? I’m hungry.”

“Yes, lamb.” Two dollars in her pocket. All yesterday’s grim toil, and all today’s, and months of labour behind those two days. Two dollars in the pocket of her black calico petticoat. “We’ll get something to eat when we drive out a ways. Some milk and bread and cheese.”

The sun was very hot. She took the boy’s hat off, passed her tender work-calloused hand over the damp hair that clung to his forehead. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” she said. “Like an adventure. Look at all the kind people we’ve met. Mr. Spanknoebel, and Mr. Talcott⁠—”

“And Mabel.”

Startled, “And Mabel.”

She wanted suddenly to kiss him, knew he would hate it with all the boy and all the Holland Dutch in him, and did not.

She made up her mind to drive east and then south. Pervus had sometimes achieved a late sale to outlying grocers. Jan’s face if she came home with half the load still on the wagon! And what of the unpaid bills? She had, perhaps, thirty dollars, all told. She owed four hundred. More than that. There were seedlings that Pervus had bought in April to be paid for at the end of the growing season, in the fall. And now fall was here.