“I can’t help it, Pa, there’s no work round here. My carpentering doesn’t even bring me in enough to eat. And farming’s worse still. I’m going to Quebec, where I can get three dollars a day right at the start.”

  Here was another one going off to answer the call of the city, dazzled by the winking lights of the electric signs, by easy money easily earned and easily spent. Napoléon had chosen the daily round of factory life with its humdrum safe security.

  He meant to leave, as the farm could no longer support those who worked it, the very people who had faith in it. Not that it had lost its fertility; it was more prodigal and generous than ever, though this very abundance had become a source of poverty. Prices were slowly subsiding under the curse of a succession of rich fat harvests. What was the good of reaping a hundred-fold if the buyer had only to wait until the farmer, in his anxiety to empty his overflowing barns to make room for the new crop outside, was ready to sell at prices that sank lower and lower?

  There were now nine members of Etienne’s family on the Moisan farm; and, in addition, there were Euchariste, Marie-Louise, Napoléon and his wife, the latter already pregnant. The farm was more than able to feed these thirteen mouths. But they needed money and still more money to clothe these thirteen bodies and provide shoes, both big and little, for these thirteen pairs of feet.

  But seeing the prices meat, vegetables, eggs, and butter fetched, they might just as well be eaten on the spot. The farm could no longer produce enough to satisfy all the new human needs. Besides clothing and boots and shoes, there was gasoline for the engine and spare parts for the farm implements. All too often a horse or a cow fell sick and you can’t always do without the veterinary; sometimes people were ill too, and brews and herb remedies won’t always cure them.

  Marie-Louise was taking a long time to get married, particularly to Etienne’s way of thinking, and he was always making sarcastic allusions to the matter.

  “What’s the trouble, Marie-Louise? Can’t you find a man to suit you? If it goes on like this you’ll start running to seed and end up an old maid.”

  “You leave her alone, Etienne,” said Euchariste. “She’s only nineteen; there’s no hurry.”

  But during these years prospective husbands were in no hurry either. She wasn’t bad-looking, though her face was covered in freckles and she had a slight squint – what the country people politely called “loving eyes.” She had a gentle expression like her mother, whose placid manner and quick smile she inherited.

  It annoyed Euchariste that his daughter was not more sought after. But at the same time he was glad to have her there at home with him. When she went off none of his family would be left. He would still be living in his own house, but in the home of another – the home of his son Etienne.

  It was bad enough that he hardly knew where he was, there had been so many changes about the farm. He could hardly recognize anything any more. Not even Etienne, who was less and less willing to give in to his father’s wishes and decisions. Not even his grandchildren, who merely thought of him as their grand father, not as the master of the house, the fields and the stock, which is what he would have liked. Even the animals were different. Etienne had sold Brillant, and Rougette had to be finished off when she broke her leg. Inspectors had been sent by the government to examine the herd and perfectly healthy-looking cows, that Euchariste was proud to own, had been listed as diseased and slaughtered. Of course, they had received compensation and with the money Etienne bought pedigreed stock, black and white Holsteins, whose heavy dignified gait made Euchariste think rather longingly of his lively little Canadian cows.

  Even the methods of working the farm had changed and each innovation seemed to Moisan to separate man from the soil and break that healthy contact that made for husky men and a friendly fertile earth. Gasoline engines had come in and replaced the horses, but they ruined the pastures with the fumes from their exhaust. Farmers were being urged on every side to give up mixed cultivation with its handy routine. Young upstarts, who had had lots to do with books but nothing or hardly anything with the land, tried to teach the old farmers their business.

  The old farmers! How few of them were left. One by one those of his generation were dropping off. It started with the sicklier ones, who soon found their way to the cemetery. And now hardly a month went by without Euchariste hearing of the death of one of his boyhood companions.

  “It’s terrible how young folks are when they die nowadays. Look at Willie Daviau.”

  “But listen, Pa; Willie Daviau wasn’t so young. He must have been going on sixty-one or sixty-two!”

  “Yeah, he was only sixty-two. He would have been sixty-three this fall. When I was a youngster people lived till eighty-five and ninety.”

  He was quite convinced of this and forgot that of the generation preceding his he had only known the survivors. So he nursed this common illusion regarding the longevity of earlier years. He hadn’t seen the children of those times decimated by epidemics of croup or their elders struck down by typhus and small-pox in such numbers that they had to be buried in a common grave.

  What annoyed him and his cronies was that he couldn’t keep track of the younger generation. If someone mentioned Amanda Paquette, he couldn’t think who she was until somebody helped him out with: “Why, sure, Pa! You know – Ti-Bleu Grothé’s daughter who married a Paquette from Labernadie.”

  Times had certainly changed; and the older he got the more attractive and pleasant the past seemed to him. He had now begun to talk about “the good old days,” naïvely believing that the world had been young and green when he was so himself; and, in the same way, he attributed his decline and all his troubles to the age that witnessed his melancholy decrepitude. He never realized that his uncle had taken a similar view of things and his uncle’s father before him and that in fifty years’ time the same thing would happen to his sons and in a hundred to their sons too. In the same way he watched feelings that had been his appear in others, without understanding what it meant. He had been eager to take over the thirty-acre strip from Uncle Ephrem and now Etienne was just as anxious to get his hands on it and supplant its ageing master, who could no longer work it to the best advantage. But that seemed an outrage to Euchariste Moisan now.

  This bred a hidden enmity between father and son, which flared up every time anything had to be decided; the very fact that this antagonism was ordinarily suppressed made it all the more bitter. Euchariste stubbornly opposed his son’s methodical usurpation. He had reached the stage where he no longer dared complain of the least ache or pain or the most natural fatigue, for Etienne never failed to remark condescendingly, “Why don’t you stop working, Pa, and take a rest? If you keep on this way, you’ll kill yourself.”

  Take a rest! With times getting so hard!

  The evenings brought him some peace of mind, because then he could be with Etienne’s children, his grandchildren. In their company he didn’t mind forgetting he was head of the family and boss of the farm; he was content to be just a grandfather. Though he wouldn’t allow anyone else to think of him as an old man at sixty, he took a quiet delight in making himself seem older than his age for the benefit of the latest batch of youngsters.

  “Grandpa, tell us a story.”

  “All right! … Once upon a time, when I was no bigger than you are, Bernard …”

  He told them stories of bygone days he had heard from his elders, all the old tales of adventure from the heroic age of the shanty-men and the lumber-camps: the “Flying Canoe,” the “Banshee of the Saint-Maurice,” the exploits of Jos Montferrand who, to point out his house to a bully who had come to fight him, just lifted his plough up by the handles. And then there was Felix Poutré, the Patriot, who escaped from Colborne’s prisons by pretending to be mad. That brought him straight to the glorious days of the Rebellion of ′37 and to its heroes, some of whom he had actually known. And the children’s eyes lost their sleepy look when he told them for the hundredth time how, when he was seven years old, he saw Louis-Joseph Papineau.

  “Yes, children, you can take it from me, things wouldn’t be the way they are if the Patriots had won in ′37. We French-Canadians would be our own bosses and farmers’ boys wouldn’t have to go off to the States to make a living.”

  But he never mentioned the name of Ephrem, his favourite son.

  “We wouldn’t have the English sitting on our necks all the time and French-Canadians would stay good French-Canadians like in the old days.”

  Though he couldn’t have explained it, this summed up his innermost feelings, all his horror of the changes that had come about little by little and that left him completely bewildered. People no longer measured in leagues but in miles; money was reckoned in dollars and cents instead of in shillings and pence. Etienne and those of his generation were always using English words they picked up from city people and tourists. Even the newspapers and particularly the catalogues of the big Toronto mail-order houses were crammed with foreign expressions that were speedily incorporated into the impoverished speech of townspeople and countryfolk alike. Their games were affected too. They had started a baseball team in the village and all the special terms used were, of course, in English. Every Sunday afternoon you could hear the umpire, who couldn’t even say “Good morning” in English, yelling “Strike two,” “Ball one,” and “Safe” with all the swank he could muster.

  Like everybody else, Euchariste sometimes went to watch the matches played against neighbouring villages. On fine summer Sundays they all turned up by car or truck and, while the youngsters aped American baseball stars to the best of their ability, the old people exchanged the week’s meagre news and hankered after the past. Perched on the fence surrounding the field, like a row of swallows on the telegraph wires, the young girls in their print dresses from Dupuis Frères flirted shyly with the tourists, who sometimes stopped their cars for a moment along the side of the road under the dusty beech trees.

  It was a far cry from those Sundays of long ago, with the quiet empty afternoons spent on the veranda. The coming of the automobile had changed all that. There was one in every cart-shed now. The less prosperous farmers ran an old jalopy picked up on a second-hand lot, while in families where the sons were allowed to show off as much as they liked there were more pretentious cars. Every Sunday in summer the whole family would climb in, while the eldest son took his place sitting bolt upright behind the steering-wheel. In this way it took no longer to drive from one parish to the next than it used to take to go and visit a neighbour.

  “Say, look who’s here!”

  Euchariste leaned over to see who it was. Under the haw trees, which the caterpillars had covered with their grey tents, a car had drawn up.

  “Well! Hullo…. How are you?”

  “Pretty fair, ’Charis. How are you?”

  “Doing fine. How are the folks? They all well?”

  “Thanks. They’re fine.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Oh! Nothing special.”

  Conversation lagged. In days gone by they would have swapped news about their farms and about the haying, which had just begun. What was the use now? What was the use of finding out what they all knew, of asking about work that was the same everywhere: the ploughing, harrowing, seeding, reaping and harvesting of their disastrous riches?

  “Say, ’Charis, is it true you …”

  There was a shout from the crowd of onlookers, thrilled by a spectacular play of the home team.

  “What happened?” asked one of the old men.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Is it true, ’Charis, your boy down in the States got married?”

  “Why, sure. He wrote us about it a while back.”

  “He must be getting on all right.”

  “Looks like it.”

  What Euchariste did not mention was that Ephrem had married an Irish-American girl at White Falls. Wasn’t it bad enough that events had proved him wrong and Ephrem right? His son had been successful ever since his desertion, while the farm had betrayed those who gave it their confidence. It wounded the farmer in him more than anything else could that the farm hadn’t placed a curse on Ephrem. He had refrained from doing so himself as he was sure his son would come back repentant.

  “They’re better off in the States than we are here,” said young Bertrand, who was in mourning for his wife and wore a heart-shaped patch of black cloth on his left sleeve.

  “No wonder,” replied Moisan with sudden bitterness. “It was bound to happen with all these fine modern inventions: gasoline engines, machinery, imported stock. That’s not all, neither; farmers think they’ve got to live like city folk now. Young fellows these days have to have an automobile to go and see their girls; and every cent they earn goes to buy clothes and things good enough for a millionaire.

  The older men had gathered in a little knot round Moisan. Then some of the younger ones came up with their light-coloured felt hats cocked over one eye to see what was going on and what they were saying. But at the first good play and the first cheer from the crowd they went back to the game.

  “What’s old Moisan talking about now?”

  “Oh! Just kicking for a change!”

  Just then Toussaint Sansregret strode up in all his majesty. Everybody knew him and with good reason.

  His shaggy mane of greying hair was worn brushed well up from his forehead. His neck was imprisoned in a very high starched collar, circled by a bright red tie with a paste horseshoe stick-pin. This was surmounted by a thinnish face with two deep furrows on either side of his mouth. He inevitably looked a lot like Laurier, the idol of the French-Canadian Liberals; and to heighten this resemblance as much as he could, he copied the characteristic dress and even the carriage of the dead leader.

  “Why, hullo, Toussaint! What’s new?”

  “Nothing special. Just odds and ends.”

  But as he said this he assumed the expression of a man who knows a great deal. He wanted to be coaxed. They all knew this and, to tease him, nobody said anything. He waited a bit and then, in his disappointment, blurted out the news.

  “It’s nothing special. It’s just I heard they’re really going to divide up the parish this time.”

  “You must be crazy!”

  “Yeah. They’re going to split the parish in two and build a church over by the butter-factory.”

  “God Almighty! That’s something!”

  But they all looked thoughtful, particularly those who lived in the part that was going to be made into a new parish.

  The old church of Saint-Jacques had been standing for some time now and the debt had all been paid off by a series of levies, collections and church-fairs; the only thing left to settle was the cost of a new heating system. But the building of a new church and presbytery meant an outlay of at least thirty-thousand dollars for temporary buildings; the hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar stone church and the forty-thousand-dollar presbytery would come later. It all depended on the priest of the new parish. If the Bishop appointed an enthusiastic builder they were in for a bad time. Of course, there would have to be churchwardens and he, Euchariste Moisan, was certain to be elected. But he knew how useless it was to oppose the will of the priest once he had made up his mind to run his parishioners into debt for the sake of putting up something big and imposing.

  “Where did you get those fool ideas?” he asked Toussaint.

  The latter was offended and drew himself up to his full height and thrust out his neck above his tight collar.

  “Fool ideas! Well … I promised not to tell, but seeing that’s the way you take it … It’s the notary told me and he’s off to town today to see the Bishop about it. What have you got to say to that?”

  Without drawing attention to himself, Euchariste slipped away from the group and strolled off towards the road.

  As soon as he had passed the first house in the village he turned towards the notary’s place and quickened his step. He might as well deposit the thirty dollars the dealer had given him for his eggs; it would be a good excuse! He could see about the note the priest had signed for, his loan another time.

  The notary’s car was at the door. So he was just in time. He rang the bell. The notary himself came and opened the door with his hat on; there were two travelling bags standing in the middle of the hall.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Oh! It’s you, ’Charis …”

  “I’d have liked to see you a minute on business; it’s about some money …”

  But instead of asking him in politely, as he usually did, the notary cut him short.

  “I’m awfully sorry, ’Charis, but you see I’m just leaving. I’ve got to catch the train. And I can hardly make it now.”

  “Yeah … well, I’d like to fix this up right away. And I wanted to ask you something.”

  But the notary was obviously in a hurry.

  “Don’t you see I can’t today? Come back next Sunday.”

  “Oh! All right,” said Moisan, scratching his head under his hat. “All right, I’ll come back. But still I’d have liked to leave the money with you. You never can tell. But when it’s with you …”

  “Just to do you a favour then,” said the notary after a moment’s hesitation. “Come in, but we’ll have to hustle. I’ll make out a receipt.”

  A ray of sun shone through the wide-open window onto the polished floor. The shouts of the baseball fans could be heard coming from a long way off, muffled by the distance. Moisan crushed the thick pile of the carpet gently with his foot; he had never seen such a fine house.

  As usual, when Moisan was in close proximity to the money he had tucked away in the big safe, he experienced a moment’s perfect happiness; and such moments had been infrequent of late.

  “Well, here’s your receipt.”

  And before Euchariste had time to ask any questions about the current rumours the notary jumped into his car, which darted off with a roar like that of an uncaged animal and with all its chromium fittings shining in the sun.

  The week went by, day after day, like so many other weeks: out of bed in the morning, work, breakfast, work, dinner, work, supper, work and then back to bed again. The day after: out of bed in the morning, work, breakfast, work, dinner … And the day after that; out of bed in the morning, work, breakfast …

 

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