Fruits of the Earth (34 page)

Since, however, Nicoll did not despair of ultimately winning Abe back to his abandoned leadership, he was glad, in spring, of an opportunity to render Abe a great service.

The two great floods through which the district had lived were those of 1910 and 1919. People derived a comforting thought from the interval that had elapsed between them. But Nicoll and a few others, more clear-sighted, were well aware that the flood of 1919 had been caused only by the neglected state of the ditches. They saw with concern that, in spite of all their complaints, nothing had been done in 1920. When the flood of 1921 arrived, disastrous in its sequel, they were ready with their “I told you so.” The flood was less in volume than normal; but its effect was worse than that of either of the great floods.

If Abe had been cooperating with his district, Nicoll and others said, the disaster would have been avoided. He would, in 1920, have organized a volunteer crew to do what had to be done. True, nobody needed to stir a finger unless paid by the municipality; and that was the answer Nicoll had received from every one he had approached; though Nicoll knew what should be done, he lacked that compelling element which forced others to fall in line, be it against their will and inclination. Abe would have furnished ten or sixteen horses; and the rest would have followed.

The flood came late; it covered the fields to a depth of only a few inches; Abe's yard remained dry. But very little of the water ran out. The ditches filled; and in them as well as the fields the flood stood stagnant. Slowly it disappeared; the weather having turned hot, most of it simply evaporated, leaving an alkaline slime behind. This slime ultimately dried into a whitish, hygroscopic incrustation which liquefied nightly by imbibing the dew, thus preventing the ground from drying.

It was a general condition: a new Egyptian plague afflicting the district and a large part of the province. There was a panic. The drought of the previous year, combined with
the decline in the value of farm products, had prepared the minds of the people to expect the worst. The old superstition–or was it observation?–that disastrous years run in threes was revived. Farmers cast about in their minds for ways and means of weathering evil times. One single product commanded a price above the normal: hay.

In Spalding District and east and west of it the greater part of the land was wild prairie. Nobody had ever worried about hay; since less than half the land was cultivated, every settler had more wild land to cut from than he owned. So far, nobody had even known that there were ways of securing the exclusive right of cutting grass on a given area.

But this spring the flood had hardly disappeared when people came from south of the Line, from twenty, thirty miles away, and inquired, often in a secretive and circuitous manner, which were the best meadows; and, having received ungrudging information, they disappeared and were, for the time being, not seen again. Nicoll, happening to drop in at the municipal office at Somerville, was asked by the secretary why the settlers of Spalding District allowed the best hay lands to pass into the hands of outsiders. He learned that these outsiders had secured haying permits from province and Crown which gave them the exclusive right to cut on such areas as were designated in their permits. For these they had paid certain fees. Incidentally, Nicoll received one item of news which he promptly communicated to Abe.

This was that Wheeldon had taken out a permit for the section west of Abe's land. Abe frowned. Within the district, that section was, by prescription, considered almost as part of his farm.

Money was scarce; Nicoll himself was in a bad plight. Abe saw it all at a glance and promptly went to Somerville.

On the way, he thought the situation over with the utmost care. If this was going to be a wet year, and though there might be little rain, the soil was bound to be wet for at least part of the summer–meadowlands might be inaccessible to horses and such heavy machinery as was used in haying. There was one section, however, even more than a section, south of his farm, which had a gravelly subsoil, forming part of the slight ridge on which his own land lay; it was higher than the rest of the district. In dry years, therefore, the grass was thin and short. Every trip into that meadow involved such loss of time for him as was required to travel four miles, to Nicoll's Corner and back again, for there was no other bridge to cross the ditch. In an exceptionally wet season, however, it would prove his salvation.

At Somerville he found that the section in question was available. He wrote a cheque and secured a permit from the Crown.

When he met Nicoll, he said, “I'll let you have what you need on shares.”

“All right,” Nicoll said. He still felt hurt by the way in which Abe restricted their intercourse to business; but there had been years when they had never exchanged a word.

Seeding time came and went, and no work was done in the district. Gumbo clay cannot be ploughed till the clods are dry enough to crumble; but wherever one stepped on the soil, one slipped; the crust was an alkaline smear. Even Abe did nothing till the second half of May had arrived. In Nicoll's fallow water stood in the furrows; the ridges looked like brown sugar melting in the flood. It was the same with all the fields along the road to town; the road itself, though graded up to a height of two or three feet above the prairie, was deeply rutted; and the ruts remained full of water. In front of Hilmer's, the
grade had been washed out in 1919; and there remained a bad hole. Baker drove his van with four horses, at six and a half dollars a day. The ditches held the water like irrigation ditches–a curse instead of a blessing. People talked of suing province or municipality for their losses.

Meanwhile, a perhaps trifling occurrence disturbed Abe at Easter which came on 27th March that year; the roads, though still frozen, were almost bare of snow. On Thursday before the festival Abe was taking a cream-can to town; and, thinking of his children, he arranged to get there about four o'clock.

As soon as he issued from his gate, he began, according to his habit, to scan the horizon; and he was at once aware of something moving on the road from town. At once also, like the prairie dweller he had become, he followed that moving point with his eyes.

Suddenly he noticed that the car–for nothing but a car could have moved so fast–had come to a stop, half-way between town and Hilmer's Corner. No settler had ever squatted down there; not even good grass grew in that alkaline marsh.

Then his attention was claimed by an unexpected snowdrift remaining in the trail. His horses were high-strung and restive and plunged in passing through. One of the traces broke; and in order to affect a temporary repair, Abe had to descend to the road.

When he resumed his seat, he swept the horizon again, searching for the spot he had seen; but a point at rest is not so easily found as a point in motion. His horses fell into a trot at the very moment when the point began to move once more. There was no doubt any longer about its being a car. North of Hilmer's, it dipped steeply down into the hole, slowed, and rose again. Then it became more distinct; and the two vehicles
would have met at Nicoll's Corner had not Abe held his hackneys back: they were not entirely broken to cars. The car was slowing down and came to a stop on the culvert south of the corner. Some person who was with the driver alighted on the far side and stood a moment, talking or waiting. Then the car moved on.

Abe had just reached Nicoll's wind-break when, to his amazement, he recognized in the person who had alighted his own daughter Frances. Waves of anger and passion ran through him. Was the school-house thrusting itself across his path? For the car had turned east; it was McCrae's.

Abe turned at Nicoll's gate and waited. When the girl reached him, she had just subdued the worst of a furious blush. “Hello,” she said briefly and climbed to her father's side, the fact that he had waited becoming a summons. The cream-can being in her way, she had an excuse for turning her back to her father.

A hundred impulses urged Abe to angry speech; but he touched his horses with the whip in silence. When they had entered the yard, Abe drove to the small gate and tied the lead horse. Frances made at once for the house. “Wait for me in the living-room!” Abe said grimly. When he followed her, he saw Ruth coming down from upstairs.

“How did you come to be in that man's car?” he asked.

Frances, plump, dimpled, with large blue eyes in a flushed face, winced at the sound of his voice. But she raised her glance to meet his with an almost hostile stare. “School was dismissed at three. He happened to pass and offered the ride. Why shouldn't I take it?”

“Why did the car stop so long on the road?”

“Stop? Where?”

“On the road. North of town.”

“Oh, that! Engine trouble. How should I know?”

Abe stood and lowered down on the girl. Behind him, Ruth filled the door, silent, straight-lipped. All sorts of things passed through his mind: he did not know the girl very well; he doubted whether Ruth knew her. McCrae had a most unsavoury reputation; though he employed him, he objected to contact between him and members of his household. Yet he thought of a remark of his brother-in-law's: “A suspicion cast on a girl's character does not remain without its effect on the girl.”

“Listen here,” he said with an effort to speak evenly. “No matter what happens, you don't accept favours from that man. If I ever see you with him again, that's the end of your school days. You understand?”

“I understand you,” Frances said, callous, sullen, defiant.

Abe scowled; but after a moment's hesitation he turned, passing Ruth in the door, left the house, and drove to town.

Again and again when Nicoll had told him of the goings-on in the school, he had said to himself that he would not interfere; the thing was none of his business; he was living in isolation;
his
daughter, the only one left, would never attend any dance organized by the gang.

But he lived in the district after all; these people of the gang were his neighbours. No one can live in isolation unless his neighbours allow him to do so; and not only him but his to boot.

Would the day come when he would be forced to interfere?

THE LURE OF THE TOWN

O
n the 30th April, a Saturday, Abe happened to overhear part of a conversation between Jim and Ruth.

He was in the shed behind the house, putting on his hip-boots; and the door to the kitchen stood ajar. Abe was on the point of closing it when he heard the first words and refrained.

“Why,” Ruth was saying, “has your recommendation been refused?”

This referred to the final high-school examinations on which Jim was to write in June. At the time, no candidate could write on any examination without the teacher's recommendation. In the final year, this recommendation referred only to the character of the candidate; but neither Ruth nor Abe knew that. In the lower grades the certificate of the school was accepted for certain subjects; and the recommendation referred partly to the work done in the class.

“I don't know,” Jim replied evasively.

“How did you make out in the Easter tests?”

“None too well.”

“Jim,” his mother pleaded, “I want you so to do well at school.”

“I know, mother. But it's all such nonsense. And without that recommendation I can't write.”

“You are over twenty, Jim. I'll apply to the department again. They have given credit for work on the farm before.”

“Not for the final year.”

“How do you know? Then it means another year.”

“Mother,” the boy exclaimed, “what's the use? I want to be a mechanic. I don't need any standing for that. I simply can't get along at school. Duncan and Ferris offer me a hundred a month. I'd take it for a while. But I'll tell you. There's a chap by name of Cope who's going to open a high-class garage at Somerville. He offers me a partnership if I can come in with two thousand dollars. I could borrow the money.”

“I'll
give
it to you the moment you finish high school.”

“What's the use!” Jim cried in desperation.

“I shall never give my consent to your leaving school before you are through. I insisted on that in Marion's case. Make up your mind that I shall insist on it with you.”

At this moment she noticed that the door was open and closed it.

Abe had heard enough and watched. The conversation had the result that Jim went back to school on Monday.

All about, boys were leaving the land. Their education was bringing them in contact with what appeared to them to be a world wider than that of the farm. Abe hardly knew whether he would hold Jim if he could. There was good stuff in the boy; he was old enough to know what he wanted.

Yet the thought was weariness. What was to become of the farm? What had all the work been for if Jim refused to take it up where his father must leave it? He might just as well have
“mined” the soil and taken from it what it would give. Instead, he had built house and barns and acquired two square miles of land, to be divided among his descendants!

On Tuesday, 17th May, Abe took the seeder out on the fallow; even now he had to leave many places untouched because they were too wet. There was no work for more than a single man.

He was on the long narrow strip east of the pasture, when, about eleven o'clock, he saw Jim coming home, afoot. But not before twelve did he leave the field. Impersonally he wondered what might have happened. At half-past twelve, the usual hour, he entered the house.

Jim, visibly nervous, was sitting in the kitchen, a strange figure of dejection for a boy six feet tall. Ruth's eyes were red.

Abe went to the wash-basin, stripped off his smock, pushed his shirt-sleeves up, and prepared with great deliberation for his ablutions. While he slowly cleaned hands, arms, face, and head, Ruth was going about between kitchen and dining-room. The fact that Abe accepted his son's presence without comment had something profoundly disquieting.