The Troll Garden and Selected Stories
Willa Cather
The Troll Garden
and
Selected Stories
by Willa Cather
Introduction by Rita Mae Brown
BANTAM BOOKS
NEW YORK - TORONTO - LONDON - SYDNEY - AUCKLAND
THE TROLL GARDEN AND SELECTED STORIES
A Bantam Classic Book / November 1990
Cover art "Stone City, Iowa" by Grant Wood;
courtesy of Joselyn Art Museum
All rights reserved.
Introduction copyright (c) 1990 by Rita Mae Brown.
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ISBN 0-553-21385-7
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
OPM 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction by Rita Mae Brown vii
Selected Stories
On the Divide 1
Eric Hermannson's Soul 15
The Enchanted Bluff 40
The Bohemian Girl 51
The Troll Garden
Flavia and Her Artists 99
The Sculptor's Funeral 128
"A Death in the Desert" 144
The Garden Lodge 167
The Marriage of Phaedra 180
A Wagner Matinee 199
Paul's Case 208
Selected Stories
On the Divide
Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood
Canute's shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level
Nebraska plain of long rust-red grass that undulated constantly
in the wind. To the west the ground was broken and rough, and a
narrow strip of timber wound along the turbid, muddy little
stream that had scarcely ambition enough to crawl over its black
bottom. If it had not been for the few stunted cottonwoods and
elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot himself
years ago. The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if
there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they
seem irresistibly drawn toward it.
As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of
any kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of
Rattlesnake Creek there was not a human being within twenty
miles. It was built of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped
with mud and plaster. The roof was covered with earth and was
supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of a round
arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in
that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the
log across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished. There
were two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition
made of ash saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw
basket work. In one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and
broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks and poles. it
was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of dark bed
clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal proportions.
There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few cracked dirty
dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin washbasin. Under
the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken, some whole,
all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and
some ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark
cloth, apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a
red silk handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung
a wolf and a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty
or forty snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time
it opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
windowsills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps
sitting on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were
men praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very
rude and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always
grave and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were
always smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split
for kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his
work highly.
It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled
into his shanty carrying a basket of. cobs, and after filling the
stove, sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over
the fire, staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray
sky. He knew by heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the
miles of red shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He
knew it in all the deceitful loveliness of
its early summer, in all
the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all
the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and
sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the
grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it
stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of
hell.
He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet
heavily as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the
window into the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in
the straw before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning
to spill themselves, and the snow flakes were settling down over
the white leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed
even the sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, trampling
heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on
the Divide and he knew what that meant. Men fear the winters of
the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North Seas fear
the still dark cold of the polar twilight. His eyes fell upon his
gun, and he took it down from the wall and looked it over. He sat
down on the edge of his bed and held the barrel towards his face,
letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid his finger on the
trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither passion nor
despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man who is
considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching into the
cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol. Lifting it
to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the tin
basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and
tried to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar
that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it
under his rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the
cracked, splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short
laugh he threw it down on the bed, and pulling on his old
black hat, he went out, striking off across the level.
It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin
once in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and
plowing and sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot
winds and the frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are
very common things on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in
the hot wind season. Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over
the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the blood in men's veins as
they do the sap in the corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch
creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear, then the
coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the
wick. It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found
swinging to his own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after
they have become too careless and discouraged to shave themselves
keep their razors to cut their throats with.
It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very
happy, but the present one came too late in life. It is useless
for men that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for
forty years to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and
naked as the sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their
youth fishing in the Northern seas to be content with following a
plow, and men that have served in the Austrian army hate hard work
and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains, and long for
marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids.
After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him
to change the habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring
with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
squandered in other lands and among other peoples.
Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness
did not take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He
had always taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do,
but after his first year of solitary life he settled down to it
steadily. He exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol,
because its effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man and
with a terrible amount of resistant force, and it took a great
deal of alcohol even to move him. After nine years of drinking,
the quantities he could take would seem fabulous to an ordinary
drinking man. He never let it interfere with his work, he
generally drank at night and on Sundays. Every night, as soon as
his chores were done, he began to drink. While he was able to sit
up he would play on his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills
with his jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie
down on his bed and stare out of the window until he went to sleep.
He drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but
to forget the awful loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton
made a sad blunder when he put mountains in hell. Mountains
postulate faith and aspiration. All mountain peoples are
religious. It was the cities of the plains that, because of their
utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice, were
cursed of God.
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man.
Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes
maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was
none of these, but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him
through all the hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant's bed all
the horrors of this world and every other were laid bare to his
chilled senses. He was a man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in
silence and bitterness. The skull and the serpent were always
before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of eternal hate.
When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors
came, Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice.
But he was not a social man by nature and had not the power of
drawing out the social side of other people. His new neighbors
rather feared him because of his great strength and size, his
silence and his lowering brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he
was mad, mad from the eternal treachery of the plains, which every
spring stretch green and rustle with the promises of Eden, showing
long grassy lagoons full of clear water and cattle whose hoofs are
stained with wild roses. Before autumn the lagoons are dried up,
and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it blisters and cracks
open.
So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that
settled about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told
awful stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.
They said that one ni
ght, when he went out to see to his horses
just before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten
planks of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a
fiery young stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and
the nervous horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the
blood trickling down into his eyes from a scalp wound in his head,
he roused himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet
stoical courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms
about the horse's hind legs and held them against his breast with
crushing embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night
he lay there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim
Peterson went over the next morning at four o'clock to go with him
to the Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its
fore knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story
the Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that
they feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.
One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made
a great change in Canute's life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of
the time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too
garrulous to be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and
Lena, their pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil. So
it came about that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole
oftener than he took it alone, After a while the report spread that
he was going to marry Yensen's daughter, and the Norwegian girls
began to tease Lena about the great bear she was going to keep
house for. No one could quite see how the affair had come about,
for Canute's tactics of courtship were somewhat peculiar. He
apparently never spoke to her at all: he would sit for hours with
Mary chattering on one side of him and Ole drinking on the other
and watch Lena at her work. She teased him, and threw flour in his
face and put vinegar in his coffee, but he took her rough jokes
with silent wonder, never even smiling. He took her to church
occasionally, but the most watchful and curious people never
saw him speak to her. He would sit staring at her while she
giggled and flirted with the other men.
Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry.
She came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to
startle Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances,
and all the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few
weeks Lena's head was completely turned, and she gave her father no
rest until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing
board. From the time she came home on her first visit she began to
treat Canute with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid
gloves, had her clothes made by the dress maker, and assumed airs
and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially
detest her. She generally brought with her a young man from town
who waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even
introduce him to Canute.
The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one
of them down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except
that he drank more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully
than ever, He lay around in his den and no one knew what he felt or
thought, but little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at
Lena in church one Sunday when she was there with the town man,
said that he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena's life or
the town chap's either; and Jim's wheat was so wondrously worthless
that the statement was an exceedingly strong one.
Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly
like the town man I s as possible. They had cost him half a millet
crop; for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they
