"Sturgeon, Theodore - More Than Human" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

But if anything ...
The dark hours came and grew black and the black hours laboured by.
Her door crashed open and the light blazed. 'He's gone and baby, I've got business with you. Get out here!' Wima's bathrobe swirled against the doorpost as she turned and went away.
Janie pushed back the covers and thumped her feet down. Without understanding quite why, she began to get dressed. She got her good plaid dress and the shoes with two buckles, and the knit pants and the slip with the lace rabbits. There were little rabbits on her socks too, and on the sweater, the buttons were rabbits' fuzzy nubbin tails.
Wima was on the couch, pounding and pounding with her fist. 'You wrecked my cel,' she said, and drank from a square-stemmed glass, 'ebration, so you ought to know what I'm celebrating. You don't know it but I've had a big trouble and I didn't know how to hannel it, and now it's all done for me. And I'll tell you all about it right now, little baby Miss Big Ears. Big Mouth. Smarty. Because your father, I can hannel him any time, but what was I going to do with your big mouth going day and night? That was my trouble, what was I going to do about your big mouth when he got back. Well it's all fixed, he won't be back, the Heinies fixed it up for me.' She waved a yellow sheet. 'Smart girls know that's a telegram, and the telegram says, says here, 'Regret to inform you that your husband.' They shot your father, that's what they regret to say, and now this is the way it's going to be from now on between you and me. Whatever I want to do I do, an' whatever you want to nose into, nose away. Now isn't that fair?'
She turned to be answered but there was no answer. Janie was gone.
Wima knew before she started that there wasn't any use looking, but something made her run to the hall closet and look in the top shelf. There wasn't anything up there but Christmas tree ornaments and they hadn't been touched in three years.
She stood in the middle of the living room, not knowing which way to go. She whispered, 'Janie?'
She put her hands on the sides of her face and lifted her hair away from it. She turned around and around, and asked, 'What's the matter with me?'
Prodd used to say, 'There's this about a farm: when the market's good there's money, and when it's bad there's food.' Actually the principle hardly operated here, for his contact with markets was slight. It was a long haul to town and what if there's a tooth off the hay rake? 'We've still got a workin' majority.' Two off, eight, twelve? 'Then make another pass. No road will go by here, not ever. Place will never get too big, get out of hand.' Even the war passed them by, Prodd being over age and Lone - well, the sheriff was by once and had a look at the half-wit working on Prodd's, and one look was enough.
When Prodd was young the little farmhouse was there, and when he married they built on to it - a little, not a lot, just a room. If the room had ever been used the land wouldn't have been enough. Lone slept in the room of course but that wasn't quite the same thing. That's not what the room was for.
Lone sensed the change before anyone else, even before Mrs Prodd. It was a difference in the nature of one of her silences. It was a treasure-proud silence, and Lone felt it change as a man's kind of pride might change when he turned from a jewel he treasured to a green shoot he treasured. He said nothing and concluded nothing; he just knew.
He went on with his work as before. He worked well; Prodd used to say that whatever anyone might think, that boy was a farmer before his accident. He said it not knowing that his own style of farming was as available to Lone as water from his pump. So was anything else Lone wanted to take.
So the day Prodd came down to the south meadow, where Lone was stepping and turning tirelessly, a very part of his whispering scythe, Lone knew what it was that he wanted to say. He caught Prodd's gaze for half a breath in those disturbing eyes and knew as well that saying it would pain Prodd more than a little.
Understanding was hardly one of his troubles any more, but niceties of expression were. He stopped mowing and went to the forest margin near by and let the scythe-point drop into a rotten stump. It gave him time to rehearse his tongue, still thick and unwieldy after eight years here.
Prodd followed slowly. He was rehearsing too.
Suddenly, Lone found it. 'Been thinking,' he said.
Prodd waited, glad to wait. Lone said,' I should go.' That wasn't quite it. 'Move along,' he said, watching. That was better.
'Ah, Lone. Why?'
Lone looked at him. Because you want me to go.
'Don't you like it here?' said Prodd, not wanting to say that at all.
'Sure.' From Prodd's mind, he caught, Does he know? and his own answered, Of course I know! But Prodd couldn't hear that. Lone said slowly, 'Just time to be moving along.'
'Well.' Prodd kicked a stone. He turned to look at the house and that turned him away from Lone, and that made it easier. 'When we came here, we built Jack's, your room, the room you're using. We call it Jack's room. You know why, you know who Jack is?'
Yes, Lone thought. He said nothing.
'Long as you're ... long as you want to leave anyway, it won't make no difference to you. Jack's our son.' He squeezed his hands together. 'I guess it sounds funny. Jack was the little guy we were so sure about, we built that room with seed money. Jack, he - '
He looked up at the house, at its stub of a built-on wing, and around at the rock-toothed forest rim. '- never got born,' he finished.
'Ah,' said Lone. He'd picked that up from Prodd. It was useful.
'He's coming now, though,' said Prodd in a rush. His face was alight. 'We're a bit old for it, but there's a daddy or two quite a bit older, and mothers too.' Again he looked up at the barn, the house. 'Makes sense in a sort of way, you know, Lone. Now, if he'd been along when we planned it, the place would've been too small when he was growed enough to work it with me, and me with no place else to go. But now, why, I reckon when he's growed we just naturally won't be here any more, and he'll take him a nice little wife and start out just about like we did. So you see it does make a kind of sense?' He seemed to be pleading. Lone made no attempt to understand this.
'Lone, listen to me, I don't want you to feel we're turning you out.'
'Said I was going.' Searching, he found something and amended,' 'Fore you told me.' That, he thought, was very right.
'Look, I got to say something,' said Prodd. 'I heard tell of folk who want kids and can't have 'em, sometimes they just give up trying and take in somebody else's. And sometimes, with a kid in the house, they turn right round and have one of their own after all.'
'Ah,' said Lone.
'So what I mean is, we taken you in, didn't we, and now look.'
Lone did not know what to say. 'Ah' seemed wrong.
'We got a lot to thank you for, is what I mean, so we don't want you to feel we're turning you out.'
'I already said.'
'Good then.' Prodd smiled. He had a lot of wrinkles on his face, mostly from smiling.
'Good,' said Lone. 'About Jack.' He nodded vehemently. 'Good.' He picked up the scythe. When he reached his windrow, he looked after Prodd. Walks slower than he used to, he thought.
Lone's next conscious thought was, Well, that's finished.
What's finished? he asked himself.
He looked around. 'Mowing,' he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been - gone in some way.
Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.
Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?
He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and work. A birthday cake. A clean bed. A sense of ... 'Membership' was not a word he possessed but that was his thought.
No, obliterated time didn't exist in those memories. He moved the stone faster.
Death-cries in the wood. Lonely hunter and its solitary prey. The sap falls and the bear sleeps and the birds fly south, all doing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.
That was where time had passed without his awareness of it. Almost always, before he came here. That was how he had lived.
Why should it come back to him. now, then?
He swept his gaze around the land, as Prodd had done, taking in the house and its imbalancing bulge, and the land, and the woods which held the farm like water in a basin. When I was alone, he thought, time passed me like that. Time passes like that now, so it must be that I am alone again.
And then he knew that he had been alone the whole time. Mrs Prodd hadn't raised him up, not really. She had been raising up her Jack the whole time.