Thirty Acres, page 16
It was sufficient excuse, though, for all the war profiteers, brass hats, politicians on the make, armament manufacturers and army contractors to set up a howl about cowardice. But when Bourassa agreed to stop campaigning and the Catholic hierarchy, true to its age-old policy, counselled obedience to constituted authority, there was not one left to interpret and explain the feelings of this racial minority that had been dragooned into participation against its will. No one to show how simple the whole question really was.
Rooted in the Laurentian soil, which is the only one they had ever known, without contact for a century and a half now with the distant world of Europe, the peace-loving people of Quebec were not in the least interested in the Great European Madness. The people of Flanders could see their blazing homes, their shattered woods and orchards; Englishmen could feel the presence of hostile battleships just over the horizon; other countries could seize the colonies of an enemy helpless to defend them, but they …
Britain? All the name meant to them was a double conquest: the first one cruel and complete, cutting deep into the living body of the French nation to separate mother and child; the other conquest, which was still going on, was slow and underhand but even more cruel, as it crushed the life out of a little race of farmers and workmen under the weight of economic pressure and kept on snatching away and assimilating their most successful sons.
France? The only France they knew or cared about was the France of another age, the France of the days before she forsook them and became an apostate, the France of Christ and the King. They had nothing in common with the France of today, whose very writings were poisonous. That is what they had been told so it must be true.
They knew nothing at all about the other countries.
What had they in common with those far-away peoples, some of them dominant nations thirsting for murder and loot, and others, quite humble like themselves, probably, but drunk for generations with the wine of patriotism and fed on military glory?
Of course, if they were forced to re-enact their own history and fight again the backwoods campaigns of an Iberville, a Montcalm or a Chénier, it would be easier, and even then …
All they asked was to be left in peace to till their rich fields and cultivate their fruitful, familiar acres; they had no other ambition than to harvest their crops and pasture their stock.
And, in spite of the advice and the pastoral instructions they had received, they felt that the country priests – who were the ones they really knew, as they were of their own flesh and blood and lived side by side with them – were animated by the same likes and dislikes. Their thinly veiled utterances showed that they were ready to protect them, that they watched over them with affection, and that they shared their indifference and their tacit resistance.
The young men from the towns were less fortunate than the farmers’ sons, as their only way of escaping conscription was by deserting. Some of the luckier ones, who were just finishing their studies and who came from well-to-do families, donned the black cassock which put them above the law.
In the woods of the North Country, deserted lumber-camps were full of young men who preferred dangers that were familiar to them – intense cold, hunger and sickness – to that unimaginable and terrifying unknown: war. And this attitude was strengthened when it was rumoured that crafty old England was sending colonial troops to the slaughter and husbanding her own soldiers.
They fled like deer, bear or moose, the bravest denizens of the forest, when a tide of crackling flame sweeps through the woods.
Nobody referred to it again when the storm had passed. No one, or hardly anyone, was missing from the ranks of the farming population. But in country districts, particularly, the gulf yawned wider than ever between the “English” and the “Habitants”: between the Canadians of the greater British Empire and the Canadians of the little nation on the banks of the St. Lawrence, the French-Canadians of Quebec.
The thunder rumbled on in the distance and there were a few flashes of lightning from time to time on the horizon. People went on with their work, forgetting everything except the sky above them and the price of oats and hay.
TWO
As the weather was doubtful they decided to do the threshing in the barn. The tread-mill and the threshing-machine were set up side by side on the threshing-floor. And all day long the two horses, gripping the treads with their shoes, blocked up the barn-door, while the golden dust clung in large sweaty patches to their rumps. Their efforts raised an acrid cloud which caught you by the throat and there was a continuous rumbling sound like thunder. When the men and the horses stopped to rest, you could hear the pigs grunting in the sty beside the barn.
The whole family was there, their faces plastered with grain-dust mixed with moisture and sweat. Euchariste fed the ears onto the beater-drum. Etienne looked after the controls. And the others – Pitou, who had left his carpentering for that day, Orpha and Marie-Louise – dumped the sheaves onto the conveyor-belt. Ephrem stood at the other end and filled the sacks. They had even hired help in the person of “Bizi,” who had been lent them by the Barrettes; he was a poor creature, crippled in mind and body, and no one knew why they kept him on.
“Hold on, Etienne!” shouted Euchariste all of a sudden. “And, Ephrem, you look out for the horses!”
Ephrem jumped up and rushed over towards the tread-mill, which was cracking under their weight. It looked as if Brillant, who had the bad habit of hanging back, had caught a shoe in one of the treads. He had pulled the shoe loose with a sudden jerk and had slipped back onto his team-mate. Then Rougette started pushing with all her might and shoved Brillant against the railing of the gangway, which started to give.
“Whoa, there!” Ephrem yelled, but it was already too late.
The framework, though solid enough, began to yield. With a final heave Rougette upset Brillant, who, with an ear-splitting crash, toppled off the tread-mill in a cloud of dust.
“You can’t do a thing with that mare!” said Etienne, when it was seen that there were no bones broken and the panting animal had scrambled to its feet again and stood up on trembling legs, its flanks heaving like a bellows. “Rougette just won’t work on the tread-mill.”
And it was a fact that the mare, who was so quiet and tractable in all the other farm-work, was more and more obstinate each year when it came to threshing. She would get up onto the tread-mill without balking. But once it was put in motion she would use any excuse to bump into her teammate, and under cover of the noise, when the men were busy with the machinery, she would wickedly take a few sly nips at him.
“We’ll have to put the partition in between them,” said Etienne, wiping the streaming sweat from his forehead.
“Yeah … but she’s liable to go through that too!”
Just the year before they had rigged up a solid bar reinforced with iron to separate the two horses. It had been no use.
“Pa! Pa!” said Orpha gently.
Moisan swung round. Under the overhanging roof which ran along the front of the barn stood two well-dressed men, obviously from the city. What on earth did they want? Moisan was in a bad temper because of the accident with the horses and didn’t bother to put himself out. He merely looked at them questioningly and said: “Well?”
“I’d like to talk to Mr. Raymond,” said one of the men in French, but with a strong English accent.
“Raymond? What Raymond?” Moisan asked grumpily.
He was annoyed enough already, and the idea that he had apparently been taken for Phydime Raymond was not calculated to soothe his feelings. His neighbour kept getting more envious and more quarrelsome and he had been at odds with him for years.
The two men carried on a consultation in English for a few moments. One of them took a note-book out of his pocket and turned over the pages.
“Phydime Raymond,” he said, pronouncing the name with difficulty.
“He don’t live here,” Euchariste answered testily. And added, gesturing over his shoulder: “Next-door neighbour.”
But Ephrem came over and gave them by gestures more specific directions for reaching Raymond’s house.
They all stopped working to watch the strangers walk away and get into the big car which was waiting for them and that did, indeed, drive off in the direction of Raymond’s place.
“What’s it all about?” said Euchariste. “The old bastard must have done something he didn’t ought to.”
But as the men were out of sight now, they went back to work and started fixing the tread-mill. Ephrem didn’t go in with the others.
“Ain’t you ever coming, Ephrem?” his father shouted.
Now what was the matter with him? His son had been glum and secretive again for some time. Euchariste thought for a while that the letter from the Larivières had something to do with it and that once more Ephrem was hankering to go off to the United States. But the weeks went by and there was no mention of the matter.
“The men are going out into the fields with Phydime,” Ephrem remarked.
“What the hell is it to us? Come and get on with the work.”
He would have liked to ask him what he was brooding about. Perhaps he was fed up with having no real place of his own and was thinking of setting up house. But he knew what his son was like; he’d get nothing out of him. And, anyway, he was more than half afraid that if he got an answer it would be an unwelcome one.
And then one evening Ephrem brought the matter up of his own accord.
It was during the quiet spell that intervenes between the last of the threshing and the first of the fall ploughing. After the feverish activity of harvest-time it was nice to be able to loaf around and do odd jobs about the place, in the stable or the work-shop, or to split firewood. The day’s work finished early and then there was plenty of time to sit and smoke on the veranda. There was a nip in the air as daylight waned and down by the river the last of the wild geese were flying past over the bronze fringe of the beech trees. Euchariste started talking about old times that people of the younger generation knew nothing about.
“Farming was mighty hard back in those days when you had to do everything with an axe, a flail, a sickle and a hand-rake. Nowadays all you have to do is sit on the driving-seat of a reaper-binder and ‘Giddap, there!’ And another thing is that harvests are earlier now with this new seed that ripens quicker than the old kinds used to.”
There had been a lot of changes in fifty years; the old-timers would hardly know their way around.
“Why, sure,” said Etienne, getting up to go into the kitchen. “Two men will do where you used to need five before, and even they don’t have to use much elbow-grease!”
Ephrem waited till Etienne closed the door. He sat looking at a red blossom, which had escaped the frost and that grew on a Scarlet Runner that climbed up a post of the veranda, as he said: “It’s that way on this farm too; you don’t need so many people.”
Euchariste pricked up his ears, but he avoided looking at his son for fear he’d stop. To encourage him he merely remarked: “We’ve got a good farm all right, but it’s not so big.”
Now there was going to be a show-down. Ephrem was coming to the point. It made his father feel pleased and just a trifle uneasy. They were going to have to speak out and some things would be hard to say. There was a moment’s silence.
“I’ve been thinking, Pa …”
Another pause.
“That I’ll have to make up my mind one of these days.”
“Well, why not? You’re old enough. You’ll have to decide sooner or later.”
Ephrem wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He looked as if a great weight were off his mind.
“Well, if you’re willing, I guess I know what I’d like to do. I’ve been hanging around long enough now. If I’ve got to do it, I might as well do it now!”
They could really tackle the question now, as at last they understood one another. And Euchariste recalled a very similar encounter he had had with old Branchaud; at that time a few hints had made his meaning quite clear. It would seem as though he was going to have his own way again. He bowed his head and his stout heart beat with a quiet satisfaction; a feeling of relief rose in him and overflowed like the water that floods the deep ditches in springtime.
“I tell you what. I’m not a rich man, but I’ve got a few dollars saved up. I’ll help you out, son.”
“You will!” Ephrem exclaimed.
“Sure I will. The Picard farm’s for sale pretty cheap. If you’d put a little work into it, it would make a mighty good farm.”
But Ephrem looked up in bewilderment.
“A farm? Whatever for?”
“Well, say, that’s a fine question! To live on, of course, with a nice little wife like Edouard’s daughter, Louisette, for instance.”
The silence was so intense that they could hear the wavering chant of the frogs from down in the hollow where the purple loosestrife grew. Now it was Euchariste’s turn to look up and his eyes met those of his son and saw they had grown suddenly hard again.
“What’s all this about Louisette and the Picard farm? You just said you knew I was going off to the States.”
“To the States?”
“Sure, to the States! The Larivières found me a good job in Lowell; that’s where they live now.”
So that is what Ephrem had been thinking about all along. That’s what he had been brooding over for such a long time: going away and leaving them all. A Moisan was going to desert the land and his native Quebec and leave everything that had always been theirs to go off into exile, off to work which had nothing to do with farming, to stay with people who gabbled a foreign language and lived in distant cities where no attention was paid to the message of the skies or to God’s commands. It hurt him more than anything could and particularly because it was Ephrem who was leaving.
For now that Oguinase was no longer his, Ephrem had become his favourite son, though he would have found it difficult to say just why. He never acknowledged this predilection, for, like all simple people, he never in word or gesture betrayed his deeper feelings. He was aware of it only from the warm glow he felt when anyone praised his boy’s strength or even his escapades, that were always manly ones.
He liked him better than his elder brother Etienne, who was a real farmer’s son, though, and close to the soil. For that very reason perhaps. Etienne was only one farmer among many, one Moisan among all the Moisans who farmed for a living. Etienne was just Etienne-à-’Charis, but Ephrem Moisan was always called Ephrem Moisan. Perhaps his friendship for Albert Chabrol, who had gone off to the war, had endowed him with something that made him more a freeman than a serf: an impatient gesture with his hands, a flutter of the eyelids, whenever he spoke of distant, unfamiliar places or things. While your real farmer purses his lips stubbornly at such times, since for him anything that lies beyond his narrow horizon is suspect if not actually hostile.
But Etienne was intuitive enough to sense his father’s preference for his younger brother. The sturdy tree of his nature became covered with a deceptive coating of moss; he assumed a kind of ferret-like vigilance where Ephrem was concerned and followed him around everywhere at his work, pleased when he could quietly correct some blunder or finish a job that Ephrem had left uncompleted. This malicious pleasure became the spice of his existence. To counterbalance the unspoken alliance between his father and his brother, he sought to contract an enduring union with the farm itself, the old Moisan farm, that became more truly his with everything he did, was branded as his by every furrow he traced and closed off more completely from others by every fence he repaired. Each year it became more absolutely his mate and his mistress, his suzerain and his slave.
So it made him jealous when his father took Ephrem’s advice about sowing a piece of land with Indian corn, or cutting down a tree, or selling one of the animals. Even when Moisan bought the chickens with the excuse of giving the girls something to do, he realized that his purpose was to amuse Ephrem, to interest him in the farm which without these trimmings was not enough to keep his mind occupied.
Euchariste walled himself up in a stubborn silence. He seemed to have no interest in anything but the farm animals, though hitherto, in the evenings, he had liked to play with Etienne’s children before they were put to bed and dance them up and down on the end of his foot, while in his husky voice he sang the old children’s songs he had learned from Aunt Mélie. He spun the farm-work out to make it last longer. And then, in the evenings, he sat motionless in his rocking-chair, smoking continuously and trying not to look at Ephrem, who always stayed at home now. The young man felt rather uncomfortable, rather put out by this silence and this domestic excommunication before his departure; it made him think he ought to feel ashamed of himself. There was also something else at the back of his mind. The money he had been saving up for a long time now might just be enough to pay for his trip, but he wondered if his father was going to give him anything more. As a matter of fact, hadn’t he a right to his share of the inheritance? He didn’t dare ask for it, but he ought to get it just the same. Etienne was to have the farm, but what about him? Shouldn’t he get some sort of a salary for all the years he had spent doing this farm-work that didn’t really interest him?
Three days before Ephrem was due to leave, Moisan hitched up the horse and drove into the village. And later, taking advantage of a chance moment when they were alone in the stable together, he handed over a little roll of bank-notes without saying a word.
But that evening at supper-time Euchariste found an excuse to give way to his annoyance.
“Do you know what’s happened? Well, I’ve just found out why those fellows from town came to see Phydime Raymond a few weeks back.”
