Thirty Acres, page 11
There was a yell from the children and a loud swishing of wings that filled the room with a roar like that of a waterfall: a swallow had flown in through the open window and was dashing itself in blind terror against the walls. The children got in one another’s way and upset the chairs as they ran after it, but suddenly the bird escaped again through the window.
There was silence once more and the contrast was so great that the whole house seemed uneasy and brooding.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Moisan?” Albert exclaimed.
Alphonsine, pale and rigid, was leaning up against the door-post.
“Was you scared, Ma? Brace up,” said Euchariste.
“Let’s kneel down and say our beads,” she answered. “You know what a bird in the house means. It’s a sign of bad luck … it’s a sign of death.”
“All right. But you do scare easy.”
As a matter of fact, he didn’t feel any too happy himself. They all knelt down; even Albert, to be polite, though he shrugged his shoulders imperceptibly as he did so.
Alphonsine didn’t mention the fact that she saw the bird of ill-omen fly close above her husband’s head.
In spite of the effort they all made to be cheerful, they finished their meal in silence. Then Euchariste and Etienne filled their pipes, while Albert, who was always different from the others, rolled himself a cigarette of strong tobacco. As for Ephrem, he took his cap, which was hanging behind the door, and started to go out.
“Where are you off to?” his father asked. “You’re not going out again tonight?”
“I’m just going to the store for a while to see the fellows.”
“Can’t you stop home once in a while? You’re always going off. Why don’t you stay with your folks for once?”
For some time now Ephrem had been going out more and more often in the evening; almost every night, in fact. His father was beginning to be worried by this flight from the family circle, this habit his son was getting into of spending as much time as possible with the boys, some of whom, as he knew, were evil companions. One of Ephrem’s great friends was Ti-Jos Authier, whose reputation was notorious for thirty miles around and who nearly got arrested once for being mixed up in some sheep-stealing. Then there was a son of Eusèbe Six and “Red” Mercure, a young scamp who was always egging the others on to fresh mischief.
Ephrem was only sixteen; but he was full-grown, deep-chested, rather squat and square-shouldered, with hands like paddles hanging from his muscular arms. This physical maturity made him conceited and, at the same time, gave him a precocious feeling of independence, a veiled obstinacy, behind which one could discern the underhand promptings of others.
He went off more and more frequently in the evenings to the settlement, where the Widow Auger’s store was still running. At first he used to come home early, after a couple of games of checkers and a half-hour or so of loafing about. But one Saturday he came in drunk at two in the morning. His father didn’t say much about it; that sort of thing can happen to anybody and he had not forgotten his own youth, which was not so very remote. But then the boy came home drunk three times in one week and once, after a fight, with an inch long gash in his cheek. Moisan had just found out what everybody knew except himself; his son was becoming the bully of the neighbourhood and picked a quarrel with anybody and everybody when he had too much to drink. Worse than that, he had actually become friendly with some people who lived in the Rang des Pommes, a family with a lot of shameless hussies who were no better than they should be. He tried to be firm with him that evening. But he found himself face to face with a violent and obstinate Ephrem, with hard eyes and clenched fists, changed out of all recognition. He almost felt afraid of his son and left what he had meant to say unsaid. Still, he felt a kind of pride in this strength which others respected in Ephrem, in this fear inspired by his cheeky swagger. Men admired the boy for it and girls turned round with timid looks and inviting eyes when he went by. But his feeling of authority was wounded, all the more because, now that Oguinase occupied a special place outside the family and was in too lofty a position to be compared to any one of them, Ephrem had become his favourite son.
And tonight once more, and once more without any hope of success, he made a feeble attempt to prevent him from going out to join the gang of youths who looked on him as their leader.
“What are you always going to the store for? At your age I stayed at home.”
“Say, Pa, I’m not a kid any more…. You coming along, Albert?”
“No, not tonight; I’m pretty tired.”
“All right, don’t if you don’t want to!”
He went out and they heard him whistling as he walked away.
Over in a corner near the lamp Napoléon whittled away at a piece of soft wood. Whenever he was left to his own resources he would immediately get out the penknife he had been given for New Year’s and carve crude replicas of running animals or cunningly fitted pieces which he assembled into tiny carts. At such times he would sit bent over a bit of willow or birch, with his tongue sticking out of one corner of his mouth and his brown hair of the same shade as that of his mother, whom he so strikingly resembled, thrown back in a mop above his temples. As soon as he had finished what he was doing he would hand it over to one of his brothers or sisters, for he worked for the sheer pleasure of it.
“Say, ’Phonsine, look at that boy of yours whittling again!”
“What are you making, Pitou?” (That was Napoléon’s nickname.)
“A doll for Lucinda,” the child replied, without raising his eyes from his work. “But she ain’t very pretty; my knife’s on the blink.”
“It don’t matter,” said the little girl. “I’ll make her a nice velvet dress.”
“It’s easy to see all she ever thinks about is clothes and dressing up.”
She was a pretty little thing, all pink and white, with the colouring of the Christ Child in his manger. She was big for her age, too, and though only nine almost a woman now.
“Mr. Moisan,” said Albert, who, in spite of the child’s efforts to retain it, had picked up the doll before it was finished. “Do you realize your boy has real gifts as a woodworker?”
“Huh! When it comes to whittling he’s no slowpoke.”
“Do you realize he could earn his living by it later on?”
Moisan pondered for some time without saying anything, and then remarked: “I guess that’s right. He’d make a good farmer, but maybe he’d make a good carpenter too. We’ll wait and see.”
Ephrem had arrived at the Widow Auger’s, where, as usual, everybody hailed him.
“Hey!” said Red. “Thought you weren’t coming over tonight.”
“Christ! Why not? It’s dull enough round here without stopping home all the time.”
The gathering was larger than the ones in those already distant days when Euchariste used to attend – larger, noisier and, above all, more loud-mouthed. Little by little more and more houses had been built at the cross-roads and there was now a real village stretching along the road on either side of the cheese factory, which had become a butter-factory. There was even talk of splitting up the parish of Saint-Jacques and building a church somewhere in the vicinity. There would just be a rectory, first of all, and a temporary church. Some of the old people in the surrounding countryside would probably build houses there when they retired, and the village would grow until it resembled all the others – all the villages stretched out along both sides of the river like the beads on a rosary.
Only one thing had really hardly changed at all: that was the Widow Auger’s store. It had been patched and repainted a few times but was more than ever the centre of community life, the place where people met to exchange gossip about everyday events, a substitute for the public square in a country whose climate compels people to live indoors. Sons followed their fathers to the Widow Auger’s and she still reigned over her domain, though now old and decrepit. But she was beginning to give ground to her daughter-in-law, a Grothé who had married her eldest son Deus. He was the one who had gradually transformed the business. The post-office was still the biggest asset, but ever since someone else had started up a dry-goods and shoe store, the grocery end of things had taken on added importance. It was an American-style grocery, where they sold chiefly cigarettes, soft drinks, patent medicines and postcards; in a little room at the back there was beer and whiskey blanc, which Deus urged the customers to buy, sometimes by word of mouth and, when necessary, by the example he set them.
Someone was telling a story over in a corner.
“He didn’t even try to stop, the bastard! Before I knew it, all there was left was a cloud of dust and my poor old Black howling, with his hind-quarters dragging in the road. It was terrible; I shot him through the head. It sure was awful.”
“Last month they killed two of my hens. At first they used to stop and pay the damage like folks ought to. But nowadays the more there is of them, you might say, the less they care. One of those damned automobiles comes by every day now pretty near. And they tear along like mad too. You ain’t got time to get out of the road before they’re on top of you.”
“Yeah, I broke a wheel on my new buggy! My horse was so scared he went into the ditch.”
“And I see in the papers where it says in a hundred years there won’t be nothing else on the road.”
“You’re crazy, Red! There’s no sense at all buying them contraptions instead of horses. What’ll they do in winter? Can you see one bucking a snow-drift!”
“Sure! After that four days’ rain we had last week, I had to yank out three of them in a row with my horses; they’d got stuck in the boggy patch over in front of our place.”
“That reminds me. We got a letter from Uncle Anthime; he lives in Central Falls, down in the States. Well, do you know what he’s doing now? I bet you can’t guess. He works in a place they call a garage; it’s where they fix automobiles. Seems they pay good wages.”
“Must pay better than here, anyhow,” said Ephrem.
“There you go! Why don’t you go and get a job in one of them garages?”
“Maybe I will too. Think I’m going to stick here and rot all my life?”
“You’ve got no kick. It’s not so bad here after all. Specially if you’re lucky enough to have an old man who’s well fixed.”
“It makes me sick to hear you talk that way! What good does it do me? Anyway, I can tell you he never gives me a damn cent. I’ve had about enough.”
“See here, Ephrem, you’re no worse off than the others in your family,” prompted Red, who saw that his friend was beginning to get excited.
“That’s what you think. Well, take Oguinase; it’s all right for him, he’s going to be a priest. Good clothes, good eats. Lord and master of the parish. He takes the cassock next year. And Etienne, he’s going to get the farm. Where do I come in?”
They all listened, though nobody dared to agree with him openly, as they could not understand how anybody could wish to struggle against the eternal, predestined order of things or how one of their number could strike out on a path other than the one imposed by nature and custom. But still they felt a kind of startled admiration for the rebel, that hotheaded Ephrem Moisan!
As for Euchariste, he understood his son less and less. He felt there was something hidden, something disquieting stirring deep down inside him. And sometimes in the evenings, on those rare evenings when his son stayed at home, he would, without seeming to and without saying a word, watch him as he sat sullenly smoking his pipe in a corner. Obviously something was worrying Ephrem, like a noxious animal crouching in its hole and waiting to spring out into the light of day.
How could Moisan know that this something was his son’s determination to speak his mind one of these days? Ephrem was tired of having to make a fuss every time he wanted to get a few cents out of his father, who couldn’t understand that there was any need to spend money when one had everything one could want: a roof, plenty to eat and, as an added luxury on top of that, a well-filled tobacco-pouch. Of course, when he had to hand out a few dollars for the household, the farm or the animals, Euchariste, though he hesitated a little, would do what was needful and willingly enough too.
But he felt that his children lacked nothing. Quite recently he had bought Ephrem a good Sunday suit, though he hadn’t yet outgrown his old one. And as for Etienne, he never asked for anything; like a true farmer he knew that money is hard to earn; and it wasn’t because he was counting on eventually getting the lion’s share, as Ephrem once said when they had a quarrel. No! Ephrem was the one who was always asking for money, using as an excuse all sorts of vague needs which his father utterly failed to understand.
“What, you want fifty cents again? What did you do with the quarter I gave you last week?”
“Hell! What do you expect me to do with a quarter? When you’re out with folks you have to be polite and pay your shot. Anyway, I do enough work round here.”
And so Ephrem had decided to settle matters once and for all. Every evening he made up his mind to speak, and every evening he avoided doing so on the pretext of waiting for a better opportunity. He lacked the courage, even after fortifying himself with alcohol, for he guessed how indignantly his father would refuse the monstrous request for a regular sum of money, a fixed salary.
Euchariste soon had other things to worry about. Alphonsine, whose “illnesses” had always been so uncomplicated, was really far from well. They had to fetch the doctor a month before her time. He reassured them all but advised her to stay in bed; as if that were easy, with the housework and all the chickens to look after!
It all occurred so suddenly that Oguinase hadn’t even time to get home from college. And before Euchariste had fully realized what was happening, he found himself in the big bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed, where a vaguely outlined form and a waxen bloodless mask were all that was left of his Alphonsine. The children huddled in the doorway, the elder ones sobbing and their small brothers and sisters wondering why they were being kept there at a moment when the warm sunshine called them all out of doors. In a corner of the kitchen the eldest daughter, Malvina, sat rocking a baby girl who had robbed her mother of the last spark of life.
For three days and two nights the house was invaded by relatives and neighbours. Fortunately her death had occurred during the relatively slack period between seed-time and harvest; still, they had to feed the animals as usual and do a number of necessary chores during the day. At night they kept watch beside the body and neighbours came in turn to say a prayer at the bier and spend the rest of the evening sitting round the table, where they were waited on by Malvina, who suddenly found herself mistress of the household. As long as Euchariste and the children had not gone to bed, the mourners kept their voices low and tried to speak in compassionate tones, though from time to time they forgot to do so. Then, little by little, their constraint disappeared as they gradually forgot why they were there. They began to swap stories. Voices rose, though the first laughs were stifled until a round of jokes and broad stories, which everyone tried to cap, released that hysterical laughter which springs from the unhealthy, uneasy tension of a house where death is present.
This would go on until someone said: “Just the same, it ain’t right; with poor ’Phonsine lying there in her coffin. Let’s say our beads.”
And they all knelt in the silence which fell heavily on them like a lid; there were no sounds other than the low drone of the responses, to which Euchariste’s snoring supplied a bass accompaniment from upstairs.
When Oguinase came home for the summer holidays, which were to be the last before he entered the seminary, he was surprised to see how little things had changed. It was now Malvina who reigned in the kitchen and she was helped by Lucinda, now almost eleven, whose blonde prettiness was becoming more noticeable every day. He found that his father was seriously considering the purchase of the Bertrand farm, an abandoned tract of land that had been left to a cousin living in Ontario, who said he would like nothing better than to sell it at almost any price. And yet Moisan hesitated, though the harvest looked pretty good and a dealer from the city had agreed to take all his eggs.
On Sundays, Euchariste wore a black tie.
FIVE
Each year, now that his sons had grown to manhood, Moisan planned on getting rid of Albert; but he kept putting it off from one season to the next. He was doubtless waiting for some event to make up his mind for him, for he was used to things happening that way.
Eight years had gone by since the day the foreigner stopped for the first time in front of the unknown house, which he expected to be the hundredth to turn him away, though actually it was there that work and shelter were waiting for him. He had knocked at the front door, like a visitor or a stranger who has no access to the familiar regions at the back. Then they made him sit alone at the end of the table like a beggar. And it was only when he crossed the threshold of the back door that he began to share the farm-yard and the buildings and the fields and finally the whole farm with the others; for a farm is an entity, which, though possessed by men, in reality possesses them still more completely and ties them down by their hands and feet for life to a given tract of land.
But unlike the others, and though his work seemed to give him a sort of title to this farm, he never made the total surrender of himself to which the land is accustomed; he never gave up his liberty to the Mother of Harvests. And probably that is what kept him looking different from the others through all these years and prevented the sort of intimacy springing up between the Moisans and himself that arises from a common subservience. Between him and the little world he lived in there was merely an alliance, a tacit and reciprocal contract, not domination on the one hand and on the other servile attachment to a mistress.
