Fruits of the Earth (12 page)

“All right, boss.”

“Look sharp now.”

In the polling room the voting proceeded smoothly.

At a quarter to five a car arrived in front of the store, stopping in the middle of the street. A small, stout man with a pointed, grey beard alighted. This was Mr. Silcox, municipal secretary, respected by every one. The crowd, now quiet enough, opened a lane to let him pass.

The doctor looked up when Mr. Silcox entered. “The trouble seems to be over, Silcox.”

Silcox nodded but remained at the door. Behind him, Searle looked in, raising three fingers to Davis. Ninety-nine votes had been polled. Davis felt sure of forty-five. It was a matter of five votes to him.

But no more electors appeared. A drowsy silence settled on the room, accentuated by the sizzling of the gasoline lamp. In street and store, people stood about in whispering groups. The result? That would be announced next day at Somerville, at the hour of noon….

Davis and Nicoll went to hear the announcement. Nicoll brought the news to Morley where Abe met him at the post office. One of the ninety-nine votes had been rejected, having a cross against each of the names. The remainder were divided evenly between the two candidates. Mr. Silcox who had the casting vote had declared Abraham David Spalding elected.

Late in the afternoon, Abe entered the Vanbruik store in company with his brother-in-law. At sight of them a number of farmers who had come to town to hear the news broke into cheers.

The doctor, with dry humour, turned to a young man and asked, “Whom are you cheering for?”

A blank look came into the face of the rustic. “I don't know.”

“Well…who's elected?”

“I don't know. Davis, I guess.”

The doctor laughed in his mirthless way, saying to Abe, “That's the sort of people you are going to represent.”

THE DISTRICT

W
ith his election to the council Abe became the undisputed leader of his district. Yet it did not make him popular among those who were temperamentally opposed to him.

In the spring of 1911, as soon as seeding was finished, the long-expected road work began, with Abe as road-boss. It was late in the year; for, while in 1910 the flood had arrived with unheard-of suddenness, subsiding as quickly, it came this year in successive steps of unusual slowness, taking three weeks to run out. Again there were rains; but they did not start till the bulk of the winter's snow was gone. Yet well into the month of May these rains kept turning into snow. It was June before people had time for anything but farm work; and the road work was repeatedly interrupted by the necessity of using such dry spells as there were for haying.

Abe found the additional drain on his time which his duties as a councillor involved almost more of a burden than he could bear; for he was consciously working up to a grand climax in his farming operations. In 1910 he had had six hundred acres under wheat; his crop had been of more than
twelve thousand bushels; yet his margin of profit had been small. He found that the greater the acreage, the higher the cost of tillage per acre. It would be the same this year; but he still felt convinced that only by increasing his acreage could he reach a point where his total return would once more show a disproportionate profit. In the course of years of planning he had evolved a scheme whereby, once his land was broken–as it would be this summer–he would fallow a certain part of his land every year for a given number of years; and periodically there would be one year in every twelve when no fallow was needed. On such a year he counted for the realization of his bolder dreams; and it would come for the first time in 1912. Whenever he thought of it, he was visited by fears. Not all years yielded equally well; it depended on the sort of season it happened to be. To work for eleven years in hopes of getting the proper return for his labour in the twelfth was plainly in the nature of gambling. If that twelfth year was a year of subnormal yield, it would prove disastrous. In order to put in a wheat crop of twelve hundred acres, he would either have to have a considerable reserve of capital or to strain his credit to the breaking point. Yet he had been lucky so far; he must count on his luck to continue. Only once had he been really straitened: when he had suddenly seen himself forced to buy land before he was ready. Such a contingency could not repeat itself: he had all the land he could get. Besides, he had lived through even that crisis and come out on top. But there was so much more at stake now. He strained every muscle; he effected every possible economy in order to be prepared for that great year when his whole acreage would be under crop.

So, when the crews began to work on the road, starting at the north end, two miles from Nicoll's Corner, he found it
impossible to be here and there, supervising, and to attend to his own farm as well; supervision was needed everywhere. His bronchos were never turned out on pasture; they stood ready at all times, harnessed and bridled. The road work had to be pressed forward at an unusual rate. It was hard to get enough teams. Abe fairly begged Nicoll and Stanley to put four horses each on shovels. Hilmer, Shilloe, Nawosad, and the younger Topp boys were “holding scrapers” they guided the handles of the drag-shovels as the teamsters drove them up from the newly-opened ditch. Hartley, with a two-horse team, did the ploughing, loosening the soil for the scrapers. None of these had the four horses necessary to operate a drag. Remained Wheeldon with two teams, and Nicoll and Bill Stanley with one each. Five men without horses could have looked after twice as many teams.

The spring of 1910 had given conclusive proof that the road was needed. If there had been a grade, the flood would not have cut them off. Abe, of course, needed the road more than any one else. He did more hauling than the rest of them together. So, when he appeared in his buggy and found the crews resting, he looked more like a taskmaster to them than the benefactor who had won them that road and the chance of making money at the expense of the county. They resented it that Abe had taken Henry Topp away by offering him five dollars a day to operate his tractor.

Hartley and Wheeldon did not hesitate voicing such sentiments when Abe was not present. “He's got an easy job talking! Sitting in his buggy collecting mileage.”

But Nicoll who acted as foreman spoke up. “That's where you're wrong. Abe won't collect a cent for mileage. He wants the road.”

“Right, mister,” Hartley said. “He wants the road; and we are to build it for him.”

“As to that, he pays half the tax-bill of the whole district.”

Wheeldon and Hartley gave more trouble than the rest together. Wheeldon wanted the money even more urgently than Hartley; he was ambitious; Hartley was satisfied not to go hungry from day to day. But even Wheeldon threatened to quit unless more frequent rests were called than Nicoll thought necessary. Hartley did leave once. But when Abe engaged an outsider to replace him, he abandoned that policy.

Yet these two trouble-makers found allies and abettors in the two younger Topp brothers, especially Slim who, in the afternoon when the heat grew oppressive, groaned and swore as though completely exhausted. But when Nicoll told him to take an hour off, with corresponding loss of pay, he laughed, danced a jig, and shouted, “Hi! Look here, you fellows!” And, catching his drag by handle and clevis, he lifted it stalking in huge strides after the fidgety team, and threw it down again when he reached the bottom of the ditch.

The net result was that the district defined itself into three groups, one of which was formed by Abe alone. There was, first, the Nicoll-Stanley group, consisting of these two who saw Abe more or less as he was: autocratic, intolerant of opposition, but absolutely fair and concerned with nothing but the welfare of the district. Hilmer and the Ukrainians belonged to this group; they regarded him as superior in knowledge as well as in power and wealth. The group opposed to them was led by Wheeldon. Behind him trailed Hartley and the three Topp brothers, more perhaps, at least in the case of David and Slim, from a desire for mischief than from any reasoned opposition to Abe.

This grouping showed itself most distinctly when, on Sunday afternoon, or when a rain had stopped the work, both
groups met at Nicoll's Corner. There, great discussions were held these days. The culvert took the place of a sort of community hall. Sometimes even old man Blaine came over on his bicycle which he laid down in the grass by the roadside. When he appeared, there would be a sudden silence; and he knew they had been talking of him. As elsewhere in rural districts of the west, the teacher was the most common topic of discussion. The school is the one institution over which the district has immediate and absolute control; and every ratepayer thinks himself entitled to a share in the running of it which is in inverse proportion to his qualifications. Nobody denied any longer that the children were making progress; the inspector's reports were brilliant. Yet when Blaine had filed on the school quarter, murmurs had been renewed. Did he presume himself so secure of his tenure? Was he counting on remaining for the rest of his days? Did he think, because Spalding supported him, nobody could dislodge him? In winter Abe had hauled his cottage from Arkwright, a diminutive building with three tiny rooms and a corner porch. Even Nicoll had thought this step incautious; but Abe had allayed his fears. “We are just as independent as ever. Blaine's getting up in years. He wants a roof over his head, that's all. When we don't want him any longer, he'll retire.” Wheeldon was all the more allusive these days since Abe had taken occasion to point out that, not being a British subject, he had no say in matters of the school.

With rare exceptions Abe kept away from these meetings; he had no time; he was not “a mixer.” When he happened to pass while a meeting was in progress, however, a feeling almost of envy came over him:
he
was everlastingly living in the future; that future might never come;
he
could not stop to look about;
he
must plan and calculate. Life was slipping by, unlived.

He, too, was aware when, that summer, he passed the spot for the first time, that a silence fell at his approach. Like Blaine he divined that they had been talking of him. At the culvert he drew his horses in; but the animation had dropped out of the conversation which turned to the weather and the crops.

Democracy had been the topic.

“Democracy!” Hartley had sneered. “If this district isn't run by one single man, I'd like to see one that is.”

Nicoll had answered: “Democracy means putting the right man in the right place. That's what we've got our vote for; not to interfere with every detail. Look at the school. It's the best school for many miles around. I'll be the first to oppose Abe when he can't show me that he's right. But to put him down
because
he's right is silly, not democratic.”

“Yeah!” Wheeldon had exclaimed. “But I'd like to see him drive a team on the road.”

“There's another point,” Nicoll had replied. “We've been wanting that road for years. We put Abe on the council, and we get it. We don't get the frills which Davis promised: concrete bridges and a culvert for every farm. Ask any one on the council. For the first time there's system in the road-building of the municipality. Trunk roads are built; nobody gets a little private drive-way for himself. I don't blame Abe for not working on the road. I can hardly afford it myself. And I've only eighty acres under crop and four horses to provide with hay.”

On another occasion, rain having stopped work in the early afternoon, Abe used the unexpected leisure to go to town. As he passed the culvert, the conversation did not stop. Old man Blaine was present though the mud had prevented him from using his bicycle. The conversation had taken a quasi-scientific turn.

“Say,” Henry Topp exclaimed, “how can a man walk faster than a train?”

His brothers laughed. Nawosad and Shilloe bent their heads to listen. Only Hilmer was absent.

Stanley, sitting at the far end of the culvert, portly yet alert, his single elbow resting on his knee, said quietly, “He can't.”

“I've seen it. By gosh and by gum, I've seen it! Perhaps I should say jump, not walk.”

“No,” Nicoll said, “Nonsense!”

The whole group, comprising ten men, exclusive of Abe, was in that relaxed, lazy state of mind and body which, in the country, is induced by the fact that an event beyond man's control has decreed a holiday. Not even the Sunday brings such utter relaxation of tensions; for the Sunday is, after all, part of an established routine. The relaxation is all the greater when this rain happens to come on a Saturday.

“Well,” Henry went on, “they were shunting a freight train in the yard at Morley. The train was moving quite fast. And there was a fellow walking on top of a box-car, in the same direction in which the train was moving; and when he came to the end of the car, he went right on and jumped to the one in front.”

Nicoll, reclining on a plank at the edge of the ditch, raised himself to a position of attention. “You're joshing.”

“By golly, no. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Stanley laughed. “What next? He jumped from one car to another. That's nothing. Four or five feet. But the car was moving, you say. How do you explain that?”

Blaine, sitting nearest the road, was whittling a weedstalk with his pocket knife. “I've seen that myself,” he said. “I could do it. You could do it. Nothing mysterious about it.”

“Well, explain,” Henry challenged. “Now show your science.”

“Science”–this with the emphasis of authority–“never explains.”

“What's the use of science if it doesn't explain?” Nicoll asked. “I thought that's what science was for.”

“Science gathers facts and puts them in order. Then they become law.”

“Now you're talking!” said Henry. “Laws have to be obeyed. If you've got a law, you've got an explanation. If any one asks me why I pay taxes, I say because it's the law that I should if I can. Out with your law!”