Fruits of the Earth (25 page)

Wheeldon had risen and stood waiting. Abe looked at him without completing his sentence.

“Mr. Chairman,” Wheeldon said pugnaciously, “there is a motion before the meeting. It is customary to put such a motion to the vote.”

Abe frowned. Was the intention to muzzle him? “Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the motion. All in favour–Against–”

But the show of hands left a doubt. “The secretary will count hands.”

Nicoll rose and went through the aisles. There were nine votes against the motion. “In favour–” Eleven in favour. Which meant that eleven had withheld their votes.

“Carried,” Abe said. “There will be a poll. I repeat, it seems to me we came here to discuss the question at issue–”

Again Wheeldon was on his feet. “I move we adjourn.”

Henry Topp seconded this motion; and it was carried.

Abe rose. “Just a moment.” He bent down to Nicoll. As he straightened, nobody could have told that the course the meeting had taken affected him in the least. “The poll will, according to law, be held in this school, on April the second, one week from to-day, between the hours of nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. Mr. Nicoll will act as returning officer; Mr. Blaine as clerk. The meeting is adjourned.” And, without stopping to speak to any one, he went out, backed his cutter away from the fence, behind the long rows of vehicles slanting into the ditch. There he sat, waiting for Ruth who was speaking to one or two of the women. Their roles had been exchanged.

THE POLL

D
uring the week, Abe left his farm only twice, on Friday and Sunday, to fetch Marion and Jim from Somerville and to take them back. Apart from that, he prepared for the spring work.

Most people felt that the meeting had been used to settle the old score of envy. Spalding had gained by what appeared to be a defeat. To the new settlers, the old score meant nothing. Abe was a picturesque figure personifying such as was possible in the west.

Abe was ready to sink his personal wish in the general will. So far, democracy was a reality to him. Nor was he going to weaken what he felt to have been a moral victory; he would look on in silence. He was now convinced that his side would carry the day; Wheeldon had miscalculated. He had always claimed that Abe carried things with a high hand; if it was true, which Abe would not have admitted, Wheeldon had shown himself an apt pupil: what could have been more high-handed than the way in which he had imposed his will on the meeting? What drove Wheeldon to this revenge? That he had been unsuccessful in his attempt to bribe him; and that he was so small of stature!

If Abe did nothing, Wheeldon did a great deal. From his gate Abe saw the old car on the road to town, travelling at a furious rate, dangerous while there was snow on the ground; or it was standing in front of one of the farmsteads, outlined against the windy, white sky.

The poll opened on Tuesday at nine o'clock. Nicoll was at the desk, ballot-box and all the paraphernalia of a formal election before him. Beside him sat Blaine, his bearded head trembling over his papers. Not a person appeared before one in the afternoon; then, as is usual in rural elections, the whole vote was polled in an hour.

Wheeldon was the first to enter. He presented a certificate signed by the secretary of the municipality stating that he was entitled to be present in the polling room and to scrutinize such electors as might appear. A similar certificate, he said, had been mailed to Mr. Spalding.

Nicoll was puzzled. Every person entitled to vote was known to him. There could be no reason for challenging votes. His own honesty, he thought, was unquestioned. Such things were done in provincial or federal, perhaps even municipal elections where unknown people might appear. But in a school vote? However, it was perfectly legal; all rules applying to municipal elections also applied to a poll taken in a school district. If the machinery of the law was to be set in motion to no purpose, he, Nicoll, could not object.

To no purpose? A purpose there was. Nicoll felt vaguely disturbed.

Outside, there was a confused noise of voices. The electors were gathering in the school yard. It was a mild day; the road to town was soft though snow still remained in the ditches. For another ten minutes nobody entered. Wheeldon was sitting in one of the school seats.

Then Stanley opened the door. Nicoll looked up and saw that at least a majority of the ratepayers and their wives were assembled. They were improving the occasion by turning it into a social affair. Perhaps only Abe was not yet present; him Nicoll would have seen on his way, through the window. He handed Stanley a ballot paper and pointed to the cloakroom in which he was to mark it.

Nicoll's musing proceeded. Abe had never fraternized; neither had he ever canvassed before. “Elect me or not; you know your interests.” This time, however, Abe had condescended to argue.

Nicoll did not understand why Abe opposed the new order. There was that irrationality of all human decisions which arise from our nature and which,
ex post facto,
we prop and strengthen by arguments and reasons from which they do not spring. Even material interests count for little where something deeper is at stake. Abe was maintaining two children in town; yet he opposed a scheme designed to throw a not inconsiderable fraction of the expense on the public purse. Nicoll had known Abe too long to believe that he took his stand for selfish reasons. No matter what Wheeldon and others said, he had never decided a question involving others on the basis of private considerations.

As the voting proceeded, Nicoll looked from time to time at Wheeldon. Did Wheeldon act from purely interested motives? Not one of his children was of high-school age. But Wheeldon, though naturalized in Canada, remained at heart a citizen of the United States, and considering the ways of the country of his birth the best in the world, felt it incumbent upon him to keep alive the tradition or fiction that the Yankee is more progressive than any one else on earth. Change seemed progress to him. Wheeldon opposed Abe on principle. To
outsiders, Abe looked like an imperturbable mass in repose; he had begun to move slowly and deliberately; when he spoke and acted, it seemed as though words and actions were based on things deeper than the impulses which caused others to speak or act. This gave him that appearance of an assumed superiority antagonizing those who themselves laid claim to a measure of superiority over others. Abe had a way of looking at Wheeldon as if he were lowering down on one whom it was scarcely worth his while to annihilate; though Nicoll knew that such was largely unintentional.

Wheeldon's presence in the polling room had a purpose; and it was directed against Abe. Though Abe and Nicoll were, for the first time, irreconcilably aligned on opposite sides, Nicoll trembled at the thought that Abe might go down to defeat.

The voting proceeded briskly. Whenever one elector left the building another entered. All smiled or frowned at Wheeldon's presence.

Blaine, his glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose, his leonine head quivering over the poll book, searched for the name of the voter and, with a trembling hand, checked it off. During these intervals, such a drowsy silence fell over the room that it was almost possible to understand what was being said outside.

By two o'clock, four-fifths of the votes were polled. Nobody had left the school yard; everybody seemed to be waiting for a climax to come. Outside the yard, half a score of sleighs and cutters stood aligned; the horses, with blankets under the harness or robes thrown over it, stood motionless in the snow, their heads hanging low.

Nicoll sat, looking out through the windows. Across the corner lay his own yard, surrounded by a wind-break of poplars, bare of leaves. Black boughs and twigs traced an
irregular lattice-work against the ever whitish sky. Here and there a branch was strung with swollen, bulbous knots. Fifteen years ago Abe had warned him against cottonwoods, the popular tree for planting on the prairie. “Quick to grow; but they don't last.” He had been right, of course. Down to the nature of the wind-breaks, the district bore the imprint of Abe's mind.

Yet, Nicoll and Abe were aligned on opposite sides!

Suddenly the room was stirred by the touch of drama. Looking out through the windows, Nicoll felt his muscles tightening. Blaine raised his trembling head. Wheeldon twisted himself around in his seat.

At the corner, Abe was swinging up on the culvert, its timbers resounding under the hoofs of his horses. In his long, low cutter he was sitting by the side of his wife. He was driving briskly, touching his black hackneys with the whip as they slowed on the culvert which was bare of snow. He sat motionless, impressive, in an old raccoon coat and a wedge-shaped cap of muskrat. Both were bare of fur in places; but on Abe they looked like royal attire. His smooth-shaven face, deeply lined, stern and inexorable, was like a red, weathered mask.

Ruth, in the squirrel coat which he had given her long ago and which had had to be widened from year to year, massive though she was, looked dwarfed by his side.

Somehow it was known in the district that Ruth would vote against her husband; her appearance, as two dozen pairs of eyes scanned the pair, confirmed that rumour. There were those in the crowd who, in Abe's place, would have left their wives at home; and some accorded him a grudging respect because he could give the other side its due. Two or three, in their hearts, cried out, “Damn him!” For the mere fact that he had not joined the crowd an hour ago but came at his own
time and pleasure, driving briskly up to cast his vote, and, no doubt, intending to leave as briskly, for he did not enter the row of vehicles but, having passed the school, turned in the margin of the road and stopped behind the sleighs, in the ditch–that mere fact marked him off from the rest of the settlers;
he
was no mixer;
he
followed a lonely path–worst of crimes in western Canada.

In the schoolroom, an enormous and incomprehensible tension took hold of Nicoll. From the moment Abe had come within sight, the stream of voters had ceased. The few who had not yet cast their votes waited to give Abe the precedence. Irrationally, Nicoll had a foreboding: something hovered over the building which was catastrophic.

Outside, Abe, heavily and slowly alighting, was seen to exchange a word with his wife, presumably offering to let her go first. But she shook her head, and he handed her the lines, turning away. The crowd looked on in silence, half sullen, half expectant; a few had a welcoming smile on their lips. As Abe entered through the gate by the flagpole, he nodded. A lane opened to the door. He went on without stopping.

In the room, the air of tension became enormously intensified by the fact that Wheeldon rose as the doorknob turned.

Abe went straight on through the central aisle, taking notice of Wheeldon's presence only by the slightest raising of one brow. He nodded to Nicoll and Blaine and reached for a ballot paper.

At this, Wheeldon took a step forward. “Mr. Returning Officer, I object to Mr. Spalding's voting.”

Abe frowned. Nicoll and Blaine looked up, startled. Was this man out of his sense? Challenge Abe Spalding?

“Do you mean to say–”

“I challenge his right to vote. You know your duty. Tender the oath.”

Nicoll shrugged his shoulders and turned to Blaine. “A Bible around?”

Blaine was so excited that, in trying to open a lower drawer of the desk, he went down on his knees. A moment later, Nicoll placed a worn copy of the Bible on the edge of the desk-top.

Abe stood motionless. Wheeldon had the right to challenge any voter. In tendering the oath, Nicoll was doing no more than his duty. Abe had only the vaguest idea of the wording of that oath. He knew he could be asked to swear that he was the man named in the voter's list. But not even Wheeldon could possibly doubt that.

Nicoll opened a copy of the Public Schools Act at the page where the various schedules were printed. He looked up, confused, “You know–”

“I know. Go ahead.”

Nicoll read slowly, Abe speaking after him, word for word, with only the person changed from the second to the first. Blaine was filling in a blank form of Abe's signature.

“I swear I am the person named or purported to be named in the list of ratepayers shown to me.

“That I am a natural born subject of His Majesty and of the full age of twenty-one years.

“That I have not voted before at this election.

“That I have not directly or indirectly received any reward or gift; nor do I expect to receive any reward or gift for the vote which I tender at this election.

“That I have not received anything, nor has anything been promised to me, directly or indirectly, either to induce me to vote at this election, or for loss of time, travelling
expenses, hire of team, or any other service connected with this election.

“And that I have not, directly or indirectly, paid or promised anything to any person to induce him either to vote or to refrain from voting at this election.”

The atmosphere, during these proceedings, was that of an unbearable anxiety on one side of the desk; of scorn on the other; as though Abe, by the tone of his voice, were saying, “When is this farce to end?” Yet, when he repeated the last paragraph, a thought flitted through his mind: “That's what he expected I could not swear to.”

But there was one short paragraph left; and Nicoll read it.

The thunderbolt fell; Abe's voice ceasing repeating the words.

That paragraph, as read, bore the wording, “And that you are not indebted to the municipality in respect of taxes other than taxes for the current year. So help you God.”

Abe's voice droned on, “And that I am not indebted to the municipality in respect of taxes–” And then it ceased.

A storm of impulses raced through Abe's mind. As if he were reaching out into the universe for a cosmic weapon to strike his opponent down. He would write a cheque for the amount, overdrawing his account at the bank; he would give an order on his brother-in-law; he would step into the road and ask Ruth for the loan of the money….