Old Jules by Mari Sandoz

Author:Mari Sandoz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9359-5
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2005-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

During the fall Jules's father died. He had come in complaining of dizziness. In a few hours he was dead. Jules seemed to remember only the natural antagonism between them — that this father had refused to send him more money — and nothing of the fine old Swiss that he was, the father who had wanted so much to be proud of this eldest, to be loved by him as he was by his people in Neuchâtel.

Mary's father died too, leaving her mother and the sister, Susette, alone in Schaffhausen on the Rhine. They should come to America, Jules said. Mary wrote to them how it was here. They prepared to sail in April.

The mild, dry winter seemed long and cold to Mary, who had spent the last few years in Arkansas and St. Louis. She carried home a huge pile of wood, mostly on her head, and built up hot fires and then sat before them knitting new heels and toes to Jules's socks, or making blue-sprigged baby clothes from the dress she wore to the dance at the Minten barn.

Often Jules and his friends sat about the kitchen as she worked; sometimes they sang, now and then in German. Then she joined them and was happier. But usually they laughed and talked in French, looking at her, maybe, saying things she could not understand — perhaps that she was only German or getting very big. Often she slipped away into the unheated bedroom and stayed there until she was wooden with cold. But Jules's friends were glad enough to eat her well-cooked meals, to throw ashes over her neat floor. By this time Mary had given up trying to get Jules to spit into a can or a box of sand. When he left the house she wiped up the great nauseating splotches and a deep, dark anger against him grew within her.

But at last a thaw came. Thin rivulets of snow water trickled for an hour or so and were soaked up by the hungry, warming earth. A greenish-brown mist hung about the cottonwoods across the river. Gray April wept her dripping days away in mist that beaded every bush and tree, but there was no rain, not enough moisture to start the grass. Mary knew that they might raise nothing at all this year, have nothing to eat, but somehow she could n't stir out of her heaviness even for that. Soon her mother and sister would be with her, her own people, with news from the Old Country.

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