Thirty Acres, page 1
THE AUTHOR
RINGUET, the pseudonym of Philippe Panneton, was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, in 1895. Educated at Laval University and later at the University of Montreal, he graduated from the latter’s medical school in 1920. After three years of postgraduate study in Paris, he returned to Montreal, where he set up his medical practice and later joined the medical faculty of the University of Montreal.
Ringuet’s distinguished career in medicine complemented his deep commitment to literature. His first book, Writing … in the Style of …, was a series of literary parodies of famous writers. His first novel, Thirty Acres, a panoramic portrait of Quebec’s traditional agrarian society in the process of change, won immediate critical acclaim and was translated into Dutch, English, German, and Spanish.
Ringuet’s later fiction often explores the discontent that confronts his characters in their urban settings.
In 1944 Ringuet was a founding member of L’Académie canadienne-française and served as its president from 1947 until 1953. He was appointed Canadian ambassador to Portugal in 1956.
Ringuet died in Lisbon in 1960.
THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY
General Editor: David Staines
ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe
CONTENTS
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Afterword
SPRING
ONE
“We’re getting after the fall ploughing pretty soon, Mr. Branchaud. Just when I was coming away, Uncle said: ‘Tomorrow we’ll have to plough the field at the bottom of the hill.’ If only the rain lets up for a while.”
The two men sat in silence. Their chairs were tilted against the wall, balanced on two legs, and at regular intervals they took their pipes out of their mouths and, leaning over the edge of the veranda, sent a stream of saliva into the weeds. Then they took up their tranquil pose again and stared off into the distance.
Before them stretched the plain, splashed with colour by the first October frosts. Clumps of trees stood out in sharp relief, the black willows, already stripped of their leaves, blending into a pattern with the green beeches. In the distance ran the long belt of woods, the first outpost of the great Laurentian forest: a brilliant symphony in which the low notes were supplied by the dominant greens of the conifers, the high by the scarlet of the Norway maples.
Immediately in front lay the King’s Highway, winding and deserted. The water stagnant in the ruts mirrored the sky in two long parallel blue ribbons. The road ambled off to north and south. Coming from the country, it was in no particular hurry; it curved aside to pass under a friendly old willow tree and made a bend to brush past someone’s front doorstep. It would get there in the end; the later the better.
A buggy drove by, and when the horse passed in front of the house he broke into a smart trot. On the seat sat a courting couple, stiff and rather awkward in their Sunday best. The young man waved his whip in greeting. Branchaud and Moisan took their pipes out of their mouths in acknowledgement.
On the other side of the road the checkerboard pattern of the fields began again and stretched away until it came up against the russet fringe of alders and here, through the gaps, there were glimpses of the steely sheen of the river.
As if riveted to the wide circle of the horizon, and suspended above all this colour, was the pale blue dome of the northern sky.
But neither of the two men was conscious of the face of the earth, the overpainted face of an old woman with the first signs of winter already visible. For it was their arms and not their eyes which linked them to Mother Nature – their thickset arms, that on Sundays seemed to become paralysed and to hang inert beside their chair legs. Only their hands emerged from the sleeves of coarse homespun – rough calloused hands, alike in both men, though they were of different ages. For hands age fast from contact with the handles of the plough or from wielding the pitchfork and the axe. Branchaud had the face of a man of fifty, the body of a man of thirty-five. Euchariste Moisan might have been anywhere between twenty and thirty.
“I guess it’s better land round here than up by Sainte-Adèle.”
“It sure is, Mr. Branchaud. There wasn’t nothing but stones up there. We’d put in the potatoes and when we came to dig them up there’d be nothing but stones – big ones, little ones – and hardly no potatoes at all. It was kind of queer of the old man to go and settle up there. But Father Labelle came round here to where Pa was working on Uncle Ephrem’s farm. I don’t remember so well, because I was only five when we got burnt out. But I know sure enough that it was more of a stone-mine than a gold-mine. Just stones and stones.”
All that he could now remember clearly was the mountain to which their house clung and whose folds bore abundant crops of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, which he ate in handfuls when he went to fetch the cows. What else? To be sure, the creek where the fishing was so difficult with all the bushes in which the line caught, and the flash of a too agile trout slithering down through the branches to fall back into the current. What else? A vague memory of a huge valley with mountains and still more mountains at the other end of it and one in particular with a hump standing out above the others. For a long time he had thought that it was here Christ had been crucified.
But those were the recollections of a child and he was a man now.
“So when the fire took in the barn after five weeks without a drop of rain, there wasn’t much to burn. I got out, but nobody else did, and I don’t know how it was. You see it was night-time, Mr. Branchaud. It all burned up – the barn, the stable, and the house. My poor Pa and my poor Ma too, and Agénor and Marie-Louise. Everything, everybody. But I don’t remember well; I was pretty small.”
“And then your Uncle Ephrem adopted you?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Moisan, who seemed to be thinking of something else.
They spoke slowly and said little, as was their custom, for they were farmers and therefore sparing of words. But today there seemed to be an added hesitation – a groping for the right expression, as is fitting when you are discussing a matter of importance. They avoided looking at one another, each seeming to fear that the other might have too definite an idea of what was in the wind. It was the same idea with both of them – one that had been ripening somewhere outside the mind, as the seed ripens in darkness before it pushes proudly into the light of day as an ear of grain. Years of servitude to the land had made their every necessary gesture precise. But they did not possess precision of the mind, a luxury that is sometimes so hard to live up to.
“So your Uncle Ephrem kind of adopted you,” said the old man again.
Branchaud seemed to hesitate and then took his tobacco pouch out of his pocket with a deliberate gesture.
“You must be getting on for twenty-two now, Euchariste.”
He said the last few words quite simply, as he packed the bowl of his pipe conscientiously with careful thrusts of his thumb; it was done now and he had spoken. At any rate, it was just as if he had; and Moisan caught his meaning, for he saw him raise his hands to his knees. He had to bring the matter up, since that young slowcoach couldn’t seem to make up his mind.
“Twenty-three next spring, Mr. Branchaud…. As long as my aunt, Uncle Ephrem’s wife, was alive, I didn’t hardly notice it. She always treated me like a kid. But now …”
He hesitated a moment and stared fixedly at a black knot-hole in the floor of the gallery.
“But now it’s different. It’s a big house for just Uncle Ephrem and me. And Uncle’s getting old. He’s broke up a lot the last two years. So … that way it makes quite a bit of work for one man all alone, as you might say.”
“Yeah. You’ve got quite a big farm, sure enough. Pretty soon you’ll have to start thinking about …”
He stopped speaking to light his pipe and was lost for a moment in a cloud of bluish smoke. But in Moisan’s ears the words rang: “You’ll have to start thinking about getting married, getting married!” It was like the rhythmic jingle of sleigh-bells on a horse trotting along a winter road.
“About getting a hired man,” the old fellow went on without moving a muscle of his face.
But the very same words were drifting gently through his mind too. Both of them were as aware of the real issue as if the younger man had said: “It’s time for me to get married and it’s your Alphonsine I want,” and as if the other had answered: “Why, sure! You’ve been hanging around Alphonsine long enough. Why don’t you two get married before the spring seeding?”
Moisan would be heir to his Uncle Ephrem, who was a childless widower. In so many months, or so many years – what difference did it make? – the thirty-acre strip of land would still be there. The old Moisan property, rich and fat, generous to those who worked it, had been built up over thousands and thousands of years until the time when the river shrank and left its former shore – that ridge over there – but only after having patiently deposited layer upon layer of heavy alluvial soil.
Moisan was a good catch and they both knew it. But time doesn’t count on the land, which teaches those who depend upon it that hurry doesn’t get them anywhere. Of course, he was fond of Alphonsine. At first he had come to see the Branchauds merely in a friendly way, as any good neighbour, cut off all week by the exacting demands of farm life, which allows no respite, might come to get the news of the people round about, and above all to see how the neighbouring farm was getting on and what it was likely to yield. But
And so old Branchaud had looked favourably on the young man’s attentions to his eldest daughter. From the very first visits he had spoken of it to his wife at night, and tacitly they had hatched the everlasting plot of parents with a marriageable daughter. When the young people were on the veranda together, the members of the family, one after another, would think of something they had to do, so that they could leave them alone. For they were dimly aware that love grows more quickly that way. For months now Euchariste had been coming to the Branchauds’ every Sunday at about two o’clock. They spent the long afternoons, until the time came for each of them to go and milk the cows, sitting side by side and had very little to say to one another after they had exchanged news about the farm and the neighbours. They did not deal in ideas, that paper currency of the mind that is all right for city folk, but in facts, which are metal coins, real gold and silver, and which there is no arguing about.
Sometimes one of Alphonsine’s younger brothers or sisters would come and chat with them for a moment. Talk started up again whenever that happened. If it was one of the boys, Alphonsine was forgotten while they talked of work and mutual friends. If it was a girl, her elder sister fussed over retying her hair-ribbon or pushing back an unruly lock of hair under her hat-brim, while Euchariste tickled the little girl’s neck with a long wisp of hay held between his teeth. But the mother’s voice soon issued from the depths of the kitchen. The child was called away on some pretext or other and the lovers were left alone again, feeling awkward and trying not to look at one another.
Moisan hadn’t answered when Branchaud suggested that he couldn’t remain alone much longer. His gaze wandered over the countryside, patterned with autumn colours, and seemed to be looking for some object to dwell on. From between the islands, covered with a tangle of brushwood, came a wedge-shaped flight of ducks, instinctively fleeing the winter they had never known.
“Quite a shot that,” he said, pointing with his pipe toward the bright steely surface of the river.
“Gosh, yes!”
And then after a moment’s silence: “I guess you haven’t had your gun out yet, ’Charis.”
“Why, no, Mr. Branchaud! There’s no time for it – too much work to do. We work a sight too hard for what it gets us. You just earn enough to get by. No way of saving a single cent these days.”
He was a shrewd one. He had gone off on a wide circle to reach his goal, like a good hunter who only shows himself when he is sure of his shot. In spite of what he said, he must certainly have something saved up. Not in cash perhaps. But his Uncle Ephrem owed him quite a lot for the ten years he had been working on his farm. What did it matter? Although he was careful of his money, old Branchaud meant to do things properly. In the first place he would pay for the wedding – and it would be a real wedding: there would be enough to make the whole town ship drunk and kill off all the relatives with indigestion. But it was time to come to a definite understanding.
“You’re a good lad, ’Charis; you don’t often take too much liquor and you’re a hard worker. I guess I know you pretty well. I ain’t what you’d call rich, but I’ve still got a few dollars saved up. When it comes time for … a show-down, you’ll see I won’t haggle.”
The young man did not move. But he was balancing himself now on the two back legs of his chair and his face had lighted up. Everything else was easy now that the old man had promised to give his daughter a dowry and pay for the wedding. And if it had to happen … it might as well be now as later. For some weeks his desires had been aroused every time Alphonsine went back with him after their courting, along the dusty road, as far as the weeping willow which marked the limits of the Branchaud property. He felt a great urge bubbling up inside himself and longed to take her, right there, without saying a word, under the canopy of branches, just as he had once taken the Fancine girl on the spur of a chance encounter.
It couldn’t go on much longer. Perhaps if she had been willing to yield he might never have married her. It would have meant a few more years of liberty for him. Once he was married he certainly wouldn’t be free any longer to come and go as he wished or, on an occasional Saturday night, to drink whiskey blanc with friends until there was nothing left in the crock or a heavy drunken stupor flung him into a ditch where he stayed, bound by sleep and alcohol, until the icy dawn. But Alphonsine was not like the Fancine girl. She was a good girl who laughed when he took her round the waist with his big clumsy hands; but she kept the rest for her husband, and it was he, Euchariste Moisan, she wanted to marry. Besides, she was a farmer’s daughter and knew that no one will buy something later on if they’ve had it for nothing the first time.
“If it’s that way, Mr. Branchaud, I guess if Alphonsine’s willing we could fix it for the spring, before the seeding.”
“It’s all right with me.”
The old man still drawled out his words without a trace of emotion. But he had begun to tug at his reddish moustache with a nervous gesture.
The kitchen floor creaked under the cautious footsteps of someone moving away from the open window. Old Mrs. Branchaud smiled to herself as she left the cupboard where for some time she had been rummaging about to hear what the men had to say. Branchaud seemed to be gazing at the earth, all decked out in gold and purple for its own wedding in the spring, when the sun would fertilize it once again, after it had waited patiently all through the long winter under a white bridal veil of snow.
“I guess it’s about time to go and fetch the cows,” said Euchariste Moisan.
TWO
There was a fire burning in the Moisans’ kitchen stove. For at nightfall it began to rain, one of those October downpours of cold steady rain that the east wind gathers up to hurl against the windowpanes with a noise like wet sheets flapping on the line. A useless autumn rain like a wicked old fairy arriving late and uninvited, furious because the abundant fruitful rains of June have been there before her; jealous, too, of the late August rains which in a single night can rot the grain left lying in the fields. An autumn rain can do neither good nor ill. It can only drum on the roof, stir up the mud puddles in the road, and tap undecipherable messages on the panes.
Mechanically the clock cut up the hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds. The kettle sang on the stove, and the cat purred underneath it. Beside the stove, and just as sensitive to the cold, old Mélie dozed in her old-fashioned wing chair. The lighted lamp, which hung on the wall near the window to shine on the front steps, just showed up the round ball of her tight cap. Ephrem Moisan swayed gently to and fro in his rocking-chair to the rhythm of the clock. The only patch of light in the room, except for the lamp, was the reflection of his bald head between the two tufts of cottonwool above his ears. He was old and bent with the weight of sixty ploughings and sixty harvests.
There was a whirring sound that lasted for a few moments, and then the clock pretended to strike ten times in succession; but the hammer encountered no resistance, like an interrupted heart-beat. Mélie’s shoulders twitched and the wrinkles stood out on the face she turned suddenly towards the light. Ephrem Moisan’s rocking-chair creaked as he leaned against one arm.
