The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"

The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He
clapped little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly
as to kill himself at all, I should say!"

"Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died
on him, didn't they?"

"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were
plenty of bogs left in the world, weren't there?"

"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any
good?" Eric asked, in astonishment.

"Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's
hogs. He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--
think of that, now!" Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and
quite embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and
hands at the tin basin. While he was parting his wet hair at the
kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The
boy dropped his comb. "Gracious, there's Mother. We must have
talked too long." He hurried out to the shed, slipped on his
overalls, and disappeared with the milking pails.

Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black
hair shining from the application of a wet brush.

"Good morning, Mother. Can't I make the fire for you?"

"No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and
I like to manage the kitchen stove myself" Mrs. Ericson paused with
a shovel full of ashes in her hand. "I expect you will be wanting
to see your brothers as soon as possible. I'll take you up to
Anders' place this morning. He's threshing, and most of our boys
are over there."

"Will Olaf be there?"

Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between
shovels. "No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn.
He got six thousand bushel this year. He's going to town today to
get men to finish roofing his barn."

"So Olaf is building a new barn?" Nils asked absently.

"Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You'll likely be
here for the barn-raising. He's going to have a supper and a dance
as soon as everybody's done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in
good humour. I tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a head
for politics."

"Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?"

Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up
about the cobs. "Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda
and her brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises
on it, and puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them."

Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The
door of the back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind
her, buttoning up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to
her gaily, and she twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set
far apart over her wide cheekbones.

"There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra
handful; I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong," said Mrs.
Ericson, as she went out to the shed.

Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the coffee
grinder between her knees and ground so hard that her two braids
bobbed and her face flushed under its broad spattering of
freckles. He noticed on her middle finger something that had not
been there last night, and that had evidently been put on for
company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set garnet stone. As her
hand went round and round he touched the ring with the tip of his
finger, smiling.

Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson
had disappeared. "My Cousin Clara gave me that," she whispered
bashfully. "She's Cousin Olaf's wife."

III

Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called
her--was moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning.
Her husband had left for the county town before his wife was out of
bed--her lateness in rising was one of the many things the Ericson
family had against her. Clara seldom came downstairs before eight
o'clock, and this morning she was even later, for she had dressed
with unusual care. She put on, however, only a tightfitting black
dress, which people thereabouts thought very plain. She was a
tall, dark woman of thirty, with a rather sallow complexion and a
touch of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where the blood seemed to
burn under her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly above her low
forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue lights in
it. Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes
were long and heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a
strain of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery
determination and sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was
never altogether amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or,
when she was animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in
profile, for then one saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head
and delicate ears, and felt at once that here was a very positive,
if not an altogether pleasing, personality.

The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon
her aunt, Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty.
When Clara was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life
had been spent in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara,
like many self-willed and discontented persons, was really very
apt, without knowing it, to do as other people told her, and to let
her destiny be decided for her by intelligences much below her own.
It was her Aunt Johanna who had humoured and spoiled her in her
girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who
had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match
she would be likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna
Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country.
She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was
so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her
niece because of her talent, because of her good looks and
masterful ways, but most of all because of her selfishness.

Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular
triumph. She was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she
found a sufficiently exciting career in managing Clara's house, in
keeping it above the criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf
to keep him from finding fault with his wife, and in concealing
from every one Clara's domestic infelicities. While Clara slept of
a morning, Johanna Vavrika was bustling about, seeing that Olaf and
the men had their breakfast, and that the cleaning or the butter-
making or the washing was properly begun by the two girls in the
kitchen. Then, at about eight o'clock, she would take Clara's
coffee up to her, and chat with her while she drank it, telling her
what was going on in the house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said
that her daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it was
if Johanna did not tell her every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised
and pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The one thing
she hated in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way
in which Clara could come it over people. It enraged her that the
affairs of her son's big, barnlike house went on as well as they
did, and she used to feel that in this world we have to wait
overlong to see the guilty punished. "Suppose Johanna Vavrika died
or got sick?" the old lady used to say to Olaf. "Your wife
wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth." Olaf
only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did
not die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was
looking poorly, she was never ill. She seldom left the house,
and she slept in a little room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by
night or day, could come prying about there to find fault without
her knowing it. Her one weakness was that she was an incurable
talker, and she sometimes made trouble without meaning to.

This morning Clara was tying a wine-coloured ribbon about
her throat when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting
the tray on a sewing table, she began to make Clara's bed,
chattering the while in Bohemian.

"Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I'm
going down presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He
asked for prune preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out
of them, and to bring some prunes and honey and cloves from
town."

Clara poured her coffee. "Ugh! I don't see how men can eat
so much sweet stuff. In the morning, too!"

Her aunt chuckled knowingly. "Bait a bear with honey, as we
say in the old country."

"Was he cross?" her niece asked indifferently.

"Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He's never cross if
you know how to take him. I never knew a man to make so little
fuss about bills. I gave him a list of things to get a yard
long, and he didn't say a word; just folded it up and put it in
his pocket."

"I can well believe he didn't say a word," Clara remarked
with a shrug. "Some day he'll forget how to talk."

"Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature.
He knows when to keep quiet. That's why he's got such influence
in politics. The people have confidence in him." Johanna beat up
a pillow and held it under her fat chin while she slipped on the
case. Her niece laughed.

"Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if
we held our tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman
threw me again last Saturday and turned my foot? She's been
talking to Olaf."

Johanna fell into great confusion. "Oh, but, my precious,
the old lady asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't
give an excuse. Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing
up something with that motor of hers."

When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to
dust the parlour. Since there was not much there to dust, this did
not take very long. Olaf had built the house new for her before
their marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had been short-
lived. It went, indeed, little beyond a bathtub and her piano.
They had disagreed about almost even, other article of furniture,
and Clara had said she would rather have her house empty than full
of things she didn't want. The house was set in a hillside, and
the west windows of the parlour looked out above the kitchen yard
thirty feet below. The east windows opened directly into the front
yard. At one of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting, heard a
low whistle. She did not turn at once, but listened intently as
she drew her cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there
it was:

I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls.

She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his
hat in his hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room
he leaned against the wire screen. "Aren't you at all surprised to
see me, Clara Vavrika?"

"No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned
Olaf last night that you were here."

Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. "Telephoned? That must
have been while Eric and I were out walking. Isn't she
enterprising? Lift this screen, won't you?"

Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the
window-sill. As he stepped into the room she said: "You didn't
think you were going to get ahead of your mother, did you?"

He threw his hat on the piano. "Oh, I do sometimes. You see,
I'm ahead of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field.
But, as we were leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place
beside the road and sank up to the hubs. While they were going for
the horses to pull her out, I cut away behind the stacks and
escaped." Nils chuckled. Clara's dull eyes lit up as she looked
at him admiringly.

"You've got them guessing already. 1 don't know what your
mother said to Olaf over the telephone, but be came back looking as
if he'd seen a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful
hour--ten o'clock, I should think. He sat out on the porch in the
dark like a graven image. It had been one of his talkative days,
too." They both laughed, easily and lightly, like people who have
laughed a great deal together; but they remained standing.

"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts,
too, over in the threshing field. What's the matter with them
all?"

Clara gave him a quick, searching look. "Well, for one thing,
they've always been afraid you have the other will."

Nils looked interested. "The other will?"

"Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but
they never knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old
house to pieces looking for it. They always suspected that he
carried on a clandestine correspondence with you, for the one thing
he would do was to get his own mail himself. So they thought he
might have sent the new will to you for safekeeping. The old one,
leaving everything to your mother, was made long before you went
away, and it's understood among them that it cuts you out--that she
will leave all the property to the others. Your father made the
second will to prevent that. I've been hoping you had it. It
would be such fun to spring it on them." Clara laughed mirthfully,
a thing she did not often do now.

Nils shook his head reprovingly. "Come, now, you're malicious."

"No, I'm not. But I'd like something to happen to stir them
all up, just for once. There never was such a family for having
nothing ever happen to them but dinner and threshing. I'd almost
be willing to die, just to have a funeral. You wouldn't
stand it for three weeks."

Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with
the finger of one hand. "I wouldn't? My dear young lady, how do
you know what I can stand? You wouldn't wait to find out."

Clara flushed darkly and frowned. "I didn't believe you would
ever come back--" she said defiantly.

"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went
away. However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back
to be a skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother mill be
here with a search warrant pretty soon." He swung round and faced
her, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. "Come, you ought
to be glad to see me, if you want something to happen. I'm
something, even without a will. We can have a little fun, can't
we? I think we can!"

She echoed him, "I think we can!" They both laughed and their
eyes sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when
she had put the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.

"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I
didn't know I was so proud of her. A regular pile driver. How
about little pigtails, down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square
thing by those children?"

Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks
like the square thing, now that he's a public man!" She glanced
drolly at Nils. "But he makes a good commission out of it. On
Sundays they all get together here and figure. He lets Peter and
Anders put in big bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays
them out of the estate. They are always having what they call
accountings. Olaf gets something out of it, too. I don't know
just how they do it, but it's entirely a family matter, as they
say. And when the Ericsons say that--" Clara lifted her eyebrows.

Just then the angry honk-honk of an approaching motor
sounded from down the road. Their eyes met and they began to
laugh. They laughed as children do when they can not contain
themselves, and can not explain the cause of their mirth to grown
people, but share it perfectly together. When Clara Vavrika sat
down at the piano after he was gone, she felt that she had laughed
away a dozen years. She practised as if the house were burning
over her head.

When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat
of the motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she
made no comment upon his truancy until she had turned her car and
was retracing her revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big
pasture. Then she remarked dryly:

"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while
you are here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men
without getting herself talked about. She was a good deal talked
about before he married her."

"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.

Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don't seem
to have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek
enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way.
He says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and
then he'd lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks
in this district. But when you find a man under his wife's thumb
you can always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere."

Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him
a good deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"

Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in
her own name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She
will have a good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't
marry again. But I don't consider a saloonkeeper's money as good
as other people's money,"

Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don't let your
prejudices carry you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a
mighty decent sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him."

Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily. "Oh, I know you always stood
up for them! But hanging around there when you were a boy never
did you any good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there.
There weren't so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell
you. She knew enough to grab her chance."

Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go
there, Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took
the trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this
country for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working
yourselves to death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full
of babies and washing and flies. oh, it was all right--I understand
that; but you are young only once, and I happened to be young then.
Now, Vavrika's was always jolly. He played the violin, and I used
to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to
sing Bohemian songs. She always had a big supper for us--herrings
and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and preserves.
Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could tell
lots of good stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of
the table, now. I don't know what I'd have done when I was a kid
if it hadn't been for the Vavrikas, really."

"And all the time he was taking money that other people had
worked hard in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.

"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People
ought to get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old
Joe."

"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."

As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place,
Mrs. Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his
way from town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his
brother, who was waiting on the porch.

Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement.
His head was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at
a distance, tried to remember what his brother looked like, he
could recall only his heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils,
and pale blue eyes, set far apart. Olaf's features were
rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and
flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years
as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of
its very stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at
him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
ever say what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had
always felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding
stickiness of wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf
the most difficult of his brothers.

"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"

"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this
country better than I used to."

"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.

"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm
about ready to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big
head ("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading
me to slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned
in a day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.

"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant
to antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing
it. "Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big
success, as you fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious.
I won't want much. A little land, and some cattle, maybe."

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to
ask Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't
have a business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he
hadn't more pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather
trunk to show for himself, and to present himself as the only
failure in the family. He did not ask one of these questions, but
he made them all felt distinctly.

"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when
he can butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a
word. I suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife
all the time. But I guess she has her innings." He chuckled, and
Olaf looked up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing
why, like little Eric. He's another cheerful dog."

"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let
his mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I
was hoping you'd take him away somewhere and put him into business.

If he don't do any good among strangers, he never will." This was
a long speech for Olaf, and as he finished it he climbed into his
buggy.

Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he
thought. "Hits from behind you every time. What a whale of a
man!" He turned and went round to the kitchen, where his mother
was scolding little Eric for letting the gasoline get low.

IV

Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf
and Mrs. Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a
little Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the
county, ten level miles north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see
her father almost every day. Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in
the back yard of his saloon. The garden between the two buildings
was inclosed by a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in
summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry
bushes under his little cherry tree. At one of these tables Nils
Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three days after his
return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and Nils was
lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his half-
emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden.
Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the
house, under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there
long ago. Nils rose.

"Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been
gossiping all afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies."

She shook her head. "No, I never come out here any more. Olaf
doesn't like it. I must live up to my position, you know."

"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as
you used to? He has tamed you! Who keeps up these
flower-beds?"

"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the
Bohemian papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open.
What have you two been doing?"

"Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my
travels. I find I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."

Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white
moth that was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. "I
suppose you will never tell me about all those things."

"Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly.
What's the matter with our talking here?" He pointed persuasively
with his hat to the bushes and the green table, where the flies
were singing lazily above the empty beer glasses.

Clara shook her head weakly. "No, it wouldn't do. Besides,
I am going now."

"I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?"

Clara looked back and laughed. "You might try and see. I can
leave you if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with
Norman."

Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big
Joe, six feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped
him on the shoulder. "Not a Goddamn a your money go in my drawer,
you hear? Only next time you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty."
Joe wagged his fingers in imitation of the flute player's position.

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