“Well, Roelf.”
“I am going away. I couldn’t stay.”
She nodded. “Where?”
“Away. Chicago maybe.” He was terribly moved, so he made his tone casual. “They came home last night. I have got some books that belong to you.” He made as though to open the suitcase.
“No, no! Keep them.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Roelf.” She took the boy’s dark head in her two hands and, standing on tiptoe, kissed him. He turned to go. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” She had a few dollars—in quarters, dimes, half dollars—perhaps ten dollars in all—hidden away in a canister on the shelf. She reached for it. But when she came back with the box in her hand he was gone.
IX
Dirk was eight; Little Sobig DeJong, in a suit made of bean-sacking sewed together by his mother. A brown blond boy with mosquito bites on his legs and his legs never still. Nothing of the dreamer about this lad. The one-room schoolhouse of Selina’s day had been replaced by a two-story brick structure, very fine, of which High Prairie was vastly proud. The rusty iron stove had been dethroned by a central heater. Dirk went to school from October until June. Pervus protested that this was foolish. The boy could be of great help in the fields from the beginning of April to the first of November, but Selina fought savagely for his schooling, and won.
“Reading and writing and figgering is what a farmer is got to know,” Pervus argued. “The rest is all foolishness. Constantinople is the capital of Turkey he studies last night and uses good oil in the lamp. What good does it do a truck farmer when he knows Constantinople is the capital of Turkey? That don’t help him raise turnips.”