Fruits of the Earth (26 page)

The world was falling to pieces. Nobody in the district had ever been debarred from voting on such a score. Many a time, no doubt, many a one, if that was the law, had been technically in default. Every one, probably; he, Abe, never. This thing dishonoured. He had tried to cast a vote to which he was not entitled. He had held office in district and municipality and was not entitled to either. Things had
gone on because nobody had happened to object. Nobody ever did object when the voter was a bona-fide settler. The letter of the law was disregarded to uphold its spirit; now the letter of the law was invoked to thwart its spirit. He, Abe Spalding, who had made this district–for how many settlers would have held out unless he had helped them: unless he had given them work; unless, on occasion, he had given them food or feed?–
he
was being deprived of his vote; and it was done according to the letter of the law! Then the law itself was evil!

He realized that none of his impulses would change the situation; that situation was without remedy. For the second time in his life he stood face to face with an unalterable fact. The first time the hand of God had advanced the fact; this time it was the hand of man!

Mentally, as he stood there, he shook himself free of all bonds of office. Never again would he meddle in public affairs!

Yet, if, five minutes ago, he had been a tree in the forest, he was now a tree at the root of which the axe had been laid!

All this time–it was less than a minute since Nicoll had ceased speaking–the others in the room had been staring at him, two of them as profoundly shaken as himself; the third one triumphant. In Abe's face, not a muscle had moved. But Nicoll realized what this meant to the district. In his breast cried a voice, “Go on, Abe! For God's sake, go on! What are you waiting for?” Blaine's head swayed and trembled.

Wheeldon's lips were twisted in a thin smile, not altogether of triumph. He realized that he had released in that imperturbable giant more than he had known to exist in his depth. He had not meant to bring him to the ground; he had meant merely to indent his armour.

Without a word, without a sound, without a flicker of eye, brow, or facial muscle, yet white-lipped, Abe veered, retraced his steps to the door, and went out, allowing the door to slam behind his back.

Outside, the crowd had been laughing; for since John Elliot's coming Henry Topp had found his match; the two had been “performing” for the crowd. At Abe's sight, a silence fell; the lane opened; and without glancing right or left, Abe passed on to his cutter.

There, Ruth rose and shook herself free of the rugs.

“Never mind,” Abe said gently. “Sit down. We are going home.”

“I haven't voted.”

“You can't vote. Stay where you are. I have been disqualified.”

Ruth sank back, her knees giving way beneath her.

Abe reached for the lines and clicked his tongue before he had entered the sleigh. The horses, stall-fed, jumped forward. He stepped in and hit the seat with a heavy thud.

One single laugh was heard behind–Henry Topp's….

At midnight, Abe drove to town with two letters. One was addressed to Stanley Nicoll; the other to Mr. Silcox, secretary of the municipality of Somerville. They contained his resignations as a trustee of Spalding School District and as reeve of the municipality respectively. To the latter, Ruth's cheque for the amount of his arrears in taxes was attached; to the former, the stub of the cheque-book recording the payment.

Never again! Never again! But what?

JIM

C
onsolidation was carried in Spalding District by a majority of one; in spite of the fact that Nicoll–who never mentioned it till many years later when even Abe could laugh over it–had voted against the measure, by way of protest against the method used to defeat Abe Spalding.

The manner in which Abe took his defeat was quite independent of the outcome of the poll. He might have contested the result; for Nicoll, who made it a point to inquire, found that no less than three others had voted without being entitled to do so, for the very reason for which Abe had been debarred. It also became known that Henry Topp had changed sides on the promise of his appointment as van-driver for the district; Wheeldon, had he been challenged, so Nicoll suspected, would have lost his vote because it was he who had made that promise to Henry. Nicoll told Abe; but Abe refused to make use of the information.

Nor would he reconsider his resignation as reeve. Rogers and others no sooner heard of it than they came to see him; he listened to what they had to say: never before had the council been in greater need of his level-headedness and
honesty; never had his ward been in greater need of his championship; for that very spring, the heaviest snowfalls of the season coming in April, the ditches refused to function. When Abe had heard them, he said one single word, “No,” and turned his back.

Nicoll thought it worth his while to take at least the sting out of Abe's defeat by speaking to him alone. He intercepted him on his way back from town. When Abe crossed the culvert, he stepped right into the road so as to force him to stop. Abe frowned as he drew in.

“Listen here, Abe,” Nicoll said. “There'll be an election. We shall have one trustee on the consolidated board. Will you stand?”

“Haven't you realized yet that I was disqualified?”

“That was mere chance. You are in good standing again. Surely, Abe, you are not going to bear us all a grudge because Wheeldon–”

“Wheeldon was within his rights. There is nothing to be said.”

“If you decline, he is going to be on that board himself. We want you. I could promise you an almost unanimous vote.”

Abe clicked his tongue. “I have washed my hands of it.”

“Abe,” Nicoll pleaded, striding along by the side of the sleigh, one hand on the back of the seat, “if men like you refuse, politics is bound to be the dirty game it is. It isn't democratic–”

“Democratic!” Abe sneered with darkening brow. “I'll tell you what your precious democracy is. A system devised to keep the man who stands out from the common crowd down to the common level. That is all.”

And, Nicoll falling back, he drove on more quickly.

Although it had been nearly dark, Abe had seen a hurt expression in Nicoll's face which haunted him without softening
him. For the moment it made his mood all the more savage. “Why can't they leave me alone?”

At the house, it was different. In speaking to Ruth, Abe's tone was more than usually considerate. Yet he promptly arranged for the repayment of her loan to him; he sold half a dozen Percheron colts, a score of steers, and a few milch cows. Abe having no help but Jim's, the measure was dictated by considerations other than financial.

He would have time now! Time for his family and for–what?

Meanwhile the lateness of the spring began to worry the district. Snow lay deep again; and it was the third week of April before the thaw recommenced. As is common in such years, the weather softened with a heavy rain shot with sleet. The flood which should have subsided by 1st May was just coming down by that date; and since the stages of successive thaws were omitted, it was unusually abundant, especially since the flow in the ditches was sluggish. Culverts and bridges were dislodged; and Abe witnessed, for the first time, a distinct current over his fields. In the barns, the beasts could not lie down. Only house, granaries, and hen-house remained dry. Abe reaped the benefit of double-walled foundations now; not a drop of water entered his cellar.

Often, while this second great flood lasted, he went in his big hip-boots to the gate of his yard to look on from a distance while the other settlers worked on the bridges with teams of sixteen horses, drawing them back into place and anchoring them. In previous years he would have organized the work; he had taught them in the past how to do it. Nobody would have dreamt of presenting the municipality with a bill for work done; and the council, on the other hand, would have been powerfully urged to prevent a recurrence of such an event.

Well, let them work out their own salvation now! Abe did not go near them. He took his spy-glass and watched them from the gap in his wind-break; and when things went wrong, the culvert floating off again after it had been dragged into place, he did not laugh; he merely grunted.

Seeding time came, and Abe fetched Jim. Together they ploughed.

Meanwhile curious, seismic movements shook the grain markets. Government control of the price of wheat had been continued; and all the speculative impulses let loose by the cessation of hostilities were directed towards the other grains, oats, barley, flax. Flax was selling around five dollars a bushel, three hundred per cent of the normal price. The very lateness of the spring favoured flax as a crop for the district. But seed rose to seven and eight dollars a bushel. Farmers had no money; the municipality had to help. Rogers was filling the vacancy left by Abe's resignation; and he headed a committee to deal with the situation, the outcome being that every farmer was to receive a small allotment of seed flax, according to the acreage under cultivation of his farm, the price to be a lien on the crop.

Abe would have been entitled to a considerable fraction of the seed set aside for his ward. But he declined. He did not wish to have further credit dealings with the municipality. But when Jim, who, having been in town for many months, seemed suddenly to have grown up, attacked his father's policy, Abe defended it on purely economic grounds. Flax was selling at an abnormal price, true; but last year no more than the normal acreage had been devoted to it. This year that acreage would be enormously increased. That was the way, he explained to Jim–a hit-or-miss way, wasteful and cruel–in which abnormal market conditions corrected themselves. The increased acreage brought a glut; the glut a disastrous drop in
price. Even three dollars a bushel, with abnormal seed-prices, abnormal wages, and a yield of eight bushels to the acre, would mean a loss to the farmer. The price would fall even lower.

Sound reasoning–for normal times. But Abe was merely justifying his disinclination, not only to take seed on credit, but to go with the crowd. He had five hundred acres ready. He seeded wheat.

Jim was almost as tall as his father, though of course not of his massive and powerful build. Reports from Somerville High School had denounced him as mischievous. It is not uncommon to call that mischief in a boy which is the premature and inconvenient manifestation of propensities in which valuable gifts are foreshadowed. When Abe had taken Jim to task, half indulgently, the boy had admitted that he had tampered with such apparatus as was used in the teaching of science. He assured his father he had meant no harm; he had been curious to see how this apparatus worked. Abe, while not absolving him, had accepted his word. On another occasion Abe received a letter from the principal, complaining that Jim was disrespectful. Jim explained that, during a lesson in physics, he had expressed his disbelief in a fact asserted by the pedagogue. “It slipped out of me.” Abe asked for details. The fact in question was that a bullet shot from a gun in an absolutely horizontal direction would touch absolutely level ground at precisely the same moment as a bullet merely dropped from the height of the muzzle of that gun. By his impulsive exclamation Jim had, according to Dr. Vanbruik, merely shown the true scientific spirit which refuses to accept facts of observation without verifying them. Abe refused to punish the boy and, in a note to the principal, told him of his decision. In this he was confirmed by Jim's protestation that physics was his favourite subject at school.

Jim was a born mechanic. When Abe saw him adjusting his disk-harrow and asked where he had learned that, Jim told him that he had spent most of his leisure time at Duncan and Ferris's implement shop.

“Do you mean to say working?”

Jim grinned and pulled out a roll of bills. “I made fifty dollars last month putting seeders together.”

Abe nodded.

“Say, daddy,” Jim asked, “can I do with this as I please?”

“It's your money.”

Yet, personally, Jim was clumsy; his voice was hoarse.

One day, coming home at noon, they found Ruth “in a taking.” It was washing day; something had gone wrong with the electric machine; she was using a rubbing board to get at least part of the work done. Jim promptly went into the basement. Within ten minutes he returned. “I've fixed that for you, mother; it was a short.”

Abe knew what that meant; but he could not have effected the repair. Yet he disliked Jim's syncopation of speech. Since Charlie's death he had not used a slang word.

Jim worked on the farm for three weeks; Abe did not ask for more. By himself he seeded stubble to barley; he was not going to look for outside help; by the middle of June he started work on his fallows.

Throughout the spring Marion had not been home; it was her second year in high school, and there were Saturday lessons and reviews; when school closed, she and Jim went to Morley by train, and their aunt brought them out in her car.

Mary had not yet left when Abe came home in the dusk of the longest day of the year. Brother and sister met near the car in the outer yard.

“Abe,” Mary said, “why don't you drop in as you used to do?”

“I've been busy. I have no help.”

“But you've been in town. You've been at the store.”

“I haven't been fit for company. You've brought the children?”

“Yes, I don't know where Jim is. Marion's at the house.”

“Get in. I'll crank the car. Don't worry. We'll see.”

The car swinging out, Abe looked gloomily after it. He went to the back of the house where the cellar of the old house, now covered with planks, was slowly caving in; Abe had never found time to fill the hole.

At that moment Jim issued from the new barn, depositing two pails at its door and bringing another to the house. “Hello, dad,” he sang. “I've done your milking. That spotty one, isn't she a corker?”