短篇美文赏析-加利福尼亚的传说
“她在结婚半年后回去看望她的父母，在回来的路上，也就是六月的一个星期六晚上，印第安人抓住了她。此后再也没有人看到过她。亨利疯了。他一直认为她还活着。每当六月来临时，他就认为她去看望她的父母，于是他就等待着她回来。他拿出那封信，我们来看他，他向我们朗读她的来信。在预计她回来的星期六晚上，我们来到这里和他在一起，于是在以后的一年中他就能够平安度过。19年来，每年的六月，我们都这么做。第一年，我们才27岁。”
When I was young, I went looking for gold in California. I never found
enough to make me rich. But I did discover a beautiful part of the country. It
was called “the Stanislau.” The Stanislau was like Heaven on Earth. It had
bright green hills and deep forests where soft winds touched the trees.
Other men, also looking for gold, had reached the Stanislau hills of
California many years before I did. They had built a town in the valley with
sidewalks and stores, banks and schools. They had also built pretty little
houses for their families.
At first, they found a lot of gold in the Stanislau hills. But their good
luck did not last. After a few years, the gold disappeared. By the time I
reached the Stanislau, all the people were gone, too.
Grass now grew in the streets. And the little houses were covered by wild
rose bushes. Only the sound of insects filled the air as I walked through the
empty town that summer day so long ago. Then, I realized I was not alone after
all.
A man was smiling at me as he stood in front of one of the little houses.
This house was not covered by wild rose bushes. A nice little garden in front of
the house was full of blue and yellow flowers. White curtains hung from the
windows and floated in the soft summer wind.
Still smiling, the man opened the door of his house and motioned to me. I
went inside and could not believe my eyes. I had been living for weeks in rough
mining camps with other gold miners. We slept on the hard ground, ate canned
beans from cold metal plates and spent our days in the difficult search for
gold.
Here in this little house, my spirit seemed to come to life again.
I saw a bright rug on the shining wooden floor. Pictures hung all around
the room. And on little tables there were seashells, books and china vases full
of flowers. A woman had made this house into a home.
The pleasure I felt in my heart must have shown on my face. The man read my
thoughts. “Yes,” he smiled, “it is all her work. Everything in this room has
felt the touch of her hand.”
One of the pictures on the wall was not hanging straight. He noticed it and
went to fix it. He stepped back several times to make sure the picture was
really straight. Then he gave it a gentle touch with his hand.
“She always does that,” he explained to me. “It is like the finishing pat a
mother gives her child’s hair after she has brushed it. I have seen her fix all
these things so often that I can do it just the way she does. I don’t know why I
do it. I just do it.”
As he talked, I realized there was something in this room that he wanted me
to discover. I looked around. When my eyes reached a corner of the room near the
fireplace, he broke into a happy laugh and rubbed his hands together.
“That’s it!” he cried out. “You have found it! I knew you would. It is her
picture. I went to a little black shelf that held a small picture of the most
beautiful woman I had ever seen. There was a sweetness and softness in the
woman’s expression that I had never seen before.
The man took the picture from my hands and stared at it. “She was nineteen
on her last birthday. That was the day we were married. When you see her…oh,
just wait until you meet her!”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Oh, she is away,” the man sighed, putting the picture back on the little
black shelf. “She went to visit her parents. They live forty or fifty miles from
here. She has been gone two weeks today.”
“When will she be back?” I asked. “Well, this is Wednesday,” he said
slowly. “She will be back on Saturday, in the evening.”
I felt a sharp sense of regret. “I am sorry, because I will be gone by
then,” I said.
“Gone? No! Why should you go? Don’t go. She will be so sorry. You see, she
likes to have people come and stay with us.”
“No, I really must leave,” I said firmly.
He picked up her picture and held it before my eyes. “Here,” he said. “Now
you tell her to her face that you could have stayed to meet her and you would
not.”
Something made me change my mind as I looked at the picture for a second
time. I decided to stay.
The man told me his name was Henry.
That night, Henry and I talked about many different things, but mainly
about her. The next day passed quietly.
Thursday evening we had a visitor. He was a big, grey-haired miner named
Tom. “I just came for a few minutes to ask when she is coming home,” he
explained. “Is there any news?”
“Oh yes,” the man replied. “I got a letter. Would you like to hear it? He
took a yellowed letter out of his shirt pocket and read it to us. It was full of
loving messages to him and to other people – their close friends and neighbors.
When the man finished reading it, he looked at his friend. “Oh no, you are doing
it again, Tom! You always cry when I read a letter from her. I’m going to tell
her this time!”
“No, you must not do that, Henry,” the grey-haired miner said. “I am
getting old. And any little sorrow makes me cry. I really was hoping she would
be here tonight.”
The next day, Friday, another old miner came to visit. He asked to hear the
letter. The message in it made him cry, too. “We all miss her so much,” he said.
Saturday finally came. I found I was looking at my watch very often. Henry
noticed this. “You don’t think something has happened to her, do you?” he asked
me.
I smiled and said that I was sure she was just fine. But he did not seem
satisfied.
I was glad to see his two friends, Tom and Joe, coming down the road as the
sun began to set. The old miners were carrying guitars. They also brought
flowers and a bottle of whiskey. They put the flowers in vases and began to play
some fast and lively songs on their guitars.
Henry’s friends kept giving him glasses of whiskey, which they made him
drink. When I reached for one of the two glasses left on the table, Tom stopped
my arm. “Drop that glass and take the other one!” he whispered. He gave the
remaining glass of whiskey to Henry just as the clock began to strike
midnight.
Henry emptied the glass. His face grew whiter and whiter. “Boys,” he said,
“I am feeling sick. I want to lie down.”
Henry was asleep almost before the words were out of his mouth.
In a moment, his two friends had picked him up and carried him into the
bedroom. They closed the door and came back. They seemed to be getting ready to
leave. So I said, “Please don’t go gentlemen. She will not know me. I am a
stranger to her.”
They looked at each other. “His wife has been dead for nineteen years,” Tom
said.
“Dead?” I whispered.
“Dead or worse,” he said.
“She went to see her parents about six months after she got married. On her
way back, on a Saturday evening in June, when she was almost here, the Indians
captured her. No one ever saw her again. Henry lost his mind. He thinks she is
still alive. When June comes, he thinks she has gone on her trip to see her
parents. Then he begins to wait for her to come back. He gets out that old
letter. And we come around to visit so he can read it to us.
“On the Saturday night she is supposed to come home, we come here to be
with him. We put a sleeping drug in his drink so he will sleep through the
night. Then he is all right for another year.”
Joe picked up his hat and his guitar. “We have done this every June for
nineteen years,” he said. “The first year there were twenty-seven of us. Now
just the two of us are left.” He opened the door of the pretty little house. And
the two old men disappeared into the darkness of the Stanislau.
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