Fruits of the Earth (3 page)

At the end of his back-furrow he stopped and hesitated. Should he let it go and put up his tent, so as to have shelter for the night? If he was to have a meal, he must get ready for cooking.

No. He reversed the plough for another furrow; and once he was committed to more than one round, he stayed with the work till it was too dark to see. He was here to conquer. Conquer he would! Before long he had opened ten furrows; the sun was down; and still he went on. A slight mist formed close to the ground, and he had the peculiar feeling as though he were ploughing over an appreciable fraction of the curvature of the globe; for whenever he turned at the north end of his furrow, he could no longer see his wagon, as though it were hidden behind the shoulder of the earth.

By the time he left off it was after ten and quite dark. He had gone sixteen rounds. He unhitched and unharnessed near the wagon, fed his horses a modicum of oats poured on the ground, staked them out, and supped on bread and raw bacon. Then he rolled up in a blanket under the wagon, with the tent for a groundsheet, and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.

THE IDYLL

A
year had gone by. Again Abe Spalding was in town, driving a team of rangy bronchos hitched to a topless buggy. He had taken a can of cream to the station, to be shipped to the city. Every motion of his betrayed hurry. Having dispatched the can, he drove to the Vanbruik store and, among the many other teams that were slanting back into the road, tied his horses to the rail of steel piping which ran along the sidewalk in front of the windows.

As he entered the swing-door, clad in a dark-coloured suit of combination overalls–jacket and trousers in one–and began to make his way through the crowd–for the store was flourishing and attracted custom by special Saturday sales, one of which was in progress–the manager of the establishment espied him from his vantage-point on the mezzanine landing of the flight of stairs leading to the upper story where furniture, rugs, and similar goods were displayed.

This manager, Mr. Diamond, was a smart young man of good build and appearance, well dressed, with a dash of metropolitan refinement, his blue-serge trousers being sharply
creased, his linen spotless, his face freshly shaved to the quick. That he went about in shirt-sleeves seemed done, not to spare his coat or to make him comfortable, but to put himself on a level with the crowd. He was a shrewd business man, willing to give liberal discounts for the sake of a quick turnover; yet hard to deal with when a note given in payment was not redeemed in time or when a long-term credit was asked for. To such pleas the doctor was less inaccessible; he had been known to take over a debt owing to the store, accepting a personal note and allowing it to be forgotten. Mr. Diamond's motto was “Cash and Carry” though with such as worried more over their debts than their bills receivable he urged the convenience of a charge-account. To travelling salesmen he said, “We discount our bills.” He would not have been out of place in a large city store; but this rural establishment he might own one day.

As he caught sight of Abe, he came running down the stairs. That Abe was singled out for personal attention may have been due to the fact that he was the owner's brother-in-law; but it was sufficiently explained by the consideration that he had one of the largest and most reliable monthly accounts, which he settled with “cream cheques.”

Mr. Diamond flashed a gold-filled smile. “Anything for you, Abe?”

“Yes,” Abe replied and produced a slip of paper on which Ruth had written out a list of her needs. “Have these put into my buggy. The bronchos, right at the door.” The better customers' horses were known to the clerks as well as the customers themselves.

“I'll have it attended to at once.” And Mr. Diamond held up a finger to one of the white-frocked clerks.

“The doctor at the store?” Abe asked.

“I don't think so. He'll be at the house.”

But the manager led the way to look about, for the store was too large to be swept by a glance. Abe's physical superiority reduced the other man to a mere satellite. He himself looked like a fact of nature.

They made the round without finding the doctor. Abe stood irresolute. In the course of the year he had learned not to resent his brother-in-law's ways any longer. But now he half blamed his sister for the fact that she and Ruth did not pull together.

“I am going to the post office,” he said at last. “I won't be back. I am in a hurry.” He always was.

“No need.” Mr. Diamond nodded. “You'll find your things in the box.”

Abe passed through a door and went briskly along the sidewalk fronting a second, much smaller store conducted by a tiny, square-bodied Jew. Crossing the second street, the far corner of which was occupied by a hardware store, he reached, a few hundred yards beyond, a white frame building in which the post office was housed.

Like every place accessible to the Saturday crowd, the public room was filled with people who stood about conversing, the weekly trip to town being made quite as much for the sake of the social intercourse it afforded as for the purpose of trading. All these men came from south of “the Line.” It would have been easy for Abe to strike up acquaintances and to have himself admitted to the general conversation about the weather, the prospects of the crops, and provincial or municipal politics. But he merely nodded; and, under a general cessation of the buzzing talk, a few of those present silently and casually returned his nod. As if to expedite matters, they stepped aside and opened a lane for him to pass on to the wicket.

The reason for this reception was that Abe had not
only made no advances but had even met such advances as were made to him with an attitude of reserve. He was considered proud; and he did look down on people satisfied with a success which secured a mere living. His goal was farther removed than theirs, and the very fact that he had so far realized few of his ambitions made him the more reticent; he was not going to allow himself to be judged by what he had done rather than by what he intended to do.

Having received from the aged postmaster that bundle of circulars which constituted his weekly mail, he left as briskly as he had entered.

He went to his sister's house, where Mary met him at the door.

“You'll stay for a while? I'll make a cup of tea?”

“I just want to see Charles for a moment.”

“He's in the study.” Mary looked queerly at her brother. When she had so much wished to have him in the district, he kept aloof!

The study was a small room opposite the dining-room. In contrast to the rest of the house its floor was bare; the general impression it made was that of an untidy litter. Its walls were lined with unstained bookshelves made by a local carpenter; the furniture consisted of a table strewn with papers, a roll-top desk, and two Morris chairs in one of which the doctor was sitting, a book in his hand; the seat of the other was encumbered with pamphlets and letters.

As Abe entered, Dr. Vanbruik looked at him over his glasses, dropped the hand holding the book, bent forward to sweep the encumbrances of the other chair to the floor, and said unsmilingly: “Sit down, Abe.”

If the doctor's whole physique was small, his face was diminutive. It looked contracted, as if its owner lived in a
perpetual concentration of thought. His dark clothes, though old, still bore traces of having been well tailored; but the creases at shoulders, elbows, and knees were worn in beyond the possibility of being removed by pressing. He had his right foot drawn up on his left knee and, with his free hand, was nursing its ankle.

As Abe sat down, there was a moment's silence.

“Hall's ready to sell,” Abe said at last. “He's entitled to prove up if he gets the buildings he needs.”

The doctor nodded. “You know my views. The farmer who isn't satisfied to be a farmer makes a mistake. You want to be a landowner on a large scale. You'll find you can't get the help you will need. At least you won't be able to hold it.”

Abe gave a short laugh. “Machines.”

“Well, we might thresh it all out again. It would lead nowhere.”

“What I want to know is this,” Abe said. “I could put up the buildings for Hall; or I could buy them and haul them out. But it's illegal for him to pledge the place before he has his patent. You have known him in a business way. Is he going to do what he promises when I can't force him?”

“No. You want his farm. If he owes you money when he proves up, he will sell to the man who offers cash, if he can find him.”

“I offer him eight hundred dollars.”

“Don't pay a cent till he turns his title over.”

“He must have that house, worth three hundred dollars. And meanwhile he must live.”

“Get more work out of him.”

“That's your advice, is it?”

“If you must have more land, that's the way to go about it. As for Hall, I wouldn't trust him across the road.”

Abe rose. “That's what I wanted to know. I must be going.”

As he passed through the living-room, Mary stopped her brother. “You won't stay? Not for half an hour?”

“I can't. Work's waiting.”

“It's Saturday. Other farmers have time.”

“They!”

“How's the baby?”

“All right as far as I know.”

“Ruth?”

“The same.”

Mary stood and looked at him. Abe laughed, patted her back, bent down to kiss her, and turned to the door.

As he backed out of the row of vehicles in front of the store he looked at his watch. He had acquired the trick of timing himself on his drives. When the trail was dry, he tried to beat his own record, cutting off seconds from the time required.

He was sitting bolt upright and held his lines tight; the wheels bounded over the road. It took him twenty-four minutes to cover the four miles to the turn west. Having made the turn, he used the whip, just flicking the horses' rumps.

As he approached his claim he looked about. What he had achieved in a year might justify pride. There was a two-roomed shack, built like a shed. East of it lay a pile of poplar boles, hauled from the river, a distance of twenty-five miles, in winter; there was a year's fuel left, well-seasoned now. Along the west edge of the yard stood a frame stable large enough to house six horses and four cows, but too small right now. The yard was fenced with woven wire; and a strip thirty-two feet wide, inside the fence, was ploughed and kept black, to be planted with four rows of trees next spring. South of the stable loomed two large haystacks, cut of the wild prairie grass west of Hall's. North of the barn there was a huge water pool, forty
by a hundred feet, fifteen feet deep. The whole south line, too, was fenced; with barbed wire only, it was true; but the posts were of imported cedar; and along the other lines posts and coils of wire were laid out, the posts all pointed, ready to be driven into the ground with a wooden maul after the next soaking rain. North of the yard lay the field, forty acres of good wheat. The remaining hundred-odd acres were all broken; black as velvet they stretched away as far as one could see. That being so, Abe needed more land; with more land he would need help; a good thing that so far he had a thriftless neighbour willing to work for wages rather than to attend to his own claim.

Abe had lived through one spring flood. For three weeks in April Ruth had never left the square plot about the shack where he had piled the earth dug from the pool, thus securing the house from being invaded by water and doing away with the eyesore of the raw clay at the same time; he himself had had to don rubber hip-boots to cross his yard. But the flood had run out in time for seeding. One trouble was that the water had spread the seeds of foul weeds all over his land. Where the prairie remained unbroken, the grass had held its own, apart from small patches where skunk-tail had gained a foothold. But on the breaking where his crop was seeded, a damnable mixture of charlock, thistle, and tumbling mustard had sprung up with the wheat. These pests the water had brought from the older settlements to the west, in the famous Torquay district, south-east of Grand Pré Plains where, so they said, farming was already becoming a problem.

One other change Abe noted as he drove into his yard. South-west, seven miles away as the crow flies, a new grain elevator was being constructed, at a flag station called Bays, after the oldest settler south of the Somerville Line. That building,
with glistening planks still unpainted, was a reminder that the country was being settled; land was going to rise in value; it was time to secure one's share of the prairie; no longer did a half section seem such a bountiful slice of the universe to build a mansion on.

As he drove to the house, Abe looked again at his watch. He had made the trip in thirty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds, cutting twenty-five seconds off his last record.

Ruth, in a long, dark print dress, was standing in the door, a smile on her pretty face and a child a few months old in her arms. She was not exactly small; but she was getting plump; and the plumper she grew the less tall she seemed.

Abe answered her smile by a nod, alighted, and at once carried the box with her groceries and empty cream can into the house. Then, from old habit, he glanced at the sun; and without a word, he took the baby, helped the young woman to a seat in the buggy, and, returning the child to her keeping, reached for the lines to drive to the stable.

In front of the open slide-doors he unhitched, allowing the horses to go to the huge trough of corrugated iron which reached through the yard-fence into the field beyond. Between trough and pool stood the pump, which he worked vigorously for five minutes. When the bronchos had drunk their fill, he entered the stable and stuffed their mangers with hay; having tied them, he slipped the harness off their backs. Next, he filled the mangers and feed-boxes of the remaining stalls and finally went to the door where he stood for several minutes, one hand raised to its frame, shouting at the top of his voice, “Come on–come on–come on!”