Thirty Acres, page 27
Whatever made him suggest staying on in the States? Why had he said anything at all? He had been tricked by words again, though he had always suspected their treachery. They had trapped him in their snare.
Why not just leave? Leave next week or even tomorrow!
No! It would be better to wait a few days for that letter from Etienne that was bound to come soon. His pension money was sure to be in it this time.
How could people of his race – how could his son – bear to go on living in this country, which didn’t belong to them, where everything was hostile, or, in other words, different? Why didn’t they go back to that fertile ribbon stretched out between the might furrow of the St. Lawrence and the Laurentian ridge?
“Why, of course, Ephrem … On the other hand, I’m just wondering … just wondering if it’s a good idea for me to stay on down here.”
“Well!” said Ephrem, who was now thinking of something else.
“I tell you what, son,” said Euchariste, taking heart. “I’m kind of worried about the farm and about Etienne. He’s still pretty young. Not forty yet. When I said that about working, I meant I might make a few dollars so I wouldn’t have to ask for money to go back to Canada. But maybe I’d better go back right away. Because, the way I see it …”
But this time his son looked up at him suddenly.
“Well, I’ll be damned! What’s the big idea?”
“Listen, Ephrem, I was thinking…. The way I see it …”
“So you’re putting the skids under us? John Corrigan went to all kinds of trouble to do me a favour and found you a job, a swell job. Now you don’t want to take it!”
“Why, see here, Ephrem! It ain’t that I don’t want to take it …”
“Jesus Christ! That’ll look fine. I guess you think it’s a cinch to get a job, specially a job like that one. Why, you don’t speak a word of English.”
“So you think I ought to stay?” said Euchariste rather abashed.
“You should have made up your mind in the first place, Pa,” came the unsympathetic answer.
“Oh! All right, all right! I just wanted to talk it over with you.”
He said no more but felt almost on the verge of tears.
Back home the seeding was probably long since over. Above the soil, broken up by the frosts and the harrow, the green shoots of oats and clover were beginning to show.
Ephrem said nothing, but he was quite obviously annoyed.
Euchariste Moisan wanted to put all this out of his mind and he made a great effort to call up the cyclorama of his house and fields. He closed his eyes, and suddenly it all appeared to him in such sharp detail that he felt he need only open them again to see the familiar countryside that had been the background of his whole existence. At his feet a field of rich black earth, crossed by the creek with its fringe of haw trees. A little further off stood the solitary old elm beneath which the animals took shelter. And away over there in the distance were the farm-house and the outbuildings, grouped together like a family under the arch of the two big beech trees.
He could feel the warm sunlight shining through his eye-lids.
He opened his eyes again; but all he could see was the dismal prospect of the little house across the street, with its pretentious façade badly in need of a coat of paint and its hard unfriendly exterior.
Unconsciously he stretched out his old hands and spread his fingers to the sun’s caress.
“Nice day Ephrem.”
“Yeah! It’s swell!”
How the sun must be beating down on the fields back home, falling in a gentle life-giving flood of light and heat on the avid young shoots.
On a Monday evening three days later, Ephrem took him along to the place where he was to go to work. Euchariste was introduced to the foreman, in English of course.
Then his son said: “This is Mr. William Pratt, Pa; he’s your boss.”
“Fine. Now would he be related to the Prattes of Saint-Alphonse? You know, the one who married …”
“Well, Mr. Moisan, I hope …,” began the foreman, and went on jabbering away in English.
“Don’t he speak French neither?”
“Well, pas beaucoup, un petit peu. Mon mère, il était du Canada.”
Euchariste said nothing more. He felt quite giddy, just as he had on his journey. As on that occasion, he instinctively looked around for something real, something solid and familiar to cling to.
Every evening at a quarter to six Euchariste set off for the city garage, where he shut himself in until six in the morning.
Fortunately it stayed light for a long time; it was early July and the evening glow seemed endless in the western sky.
But when it did get dark he felt strangely ill at ease, though he had never before known what it was to be afraid.
Before he started he had understood that there were to be two watchmen. But his companion, a rather surly Irishman, slipped away towards nine o’clock every evening and only showed up again in the morning half an hour before they went off duty. He found this very peculiar.
“You know, Ephrem, you ought to tell Mr. Corrigan about it; I think that fellow’s cheating him.”
Ephrem stared at him, dumbfounded by so much simplicity.
“This is the States you’re in, Pa. That means: Mind Your Own Business! You shouldn’t get mixed up in other people’s affairs.”
“Yeah, but it ain’t honest to get paid for doing nothing. To my way of thinking, if Mr. Corrigan …”
“If you want to get yourself bounced out, it wasn’t much use my taking all that trouble to get you a job!”
What frightened him most at first was the idea that he might fall asleep and fail in his duty as a watchman even for a single moment. The first few nights he didn’t dare sit down, he was so afraid he might suddenly begin to feel drowsy, or, worse still, that Mr. Corrigan himself might look in to see that he wasn’t neglecting his job. Sometimes he did doze a bit, overcome by the heavy July nights when the glow from the city dimmed the light from the stars and it was so hot that the air you breathed was like a sickening lukewarm fluid. But before he had time to lose consciousness completely, a slight creak somewhere would make him sit up with a start.
Then he would peer with frightened suspicion into the huge garage where the monster trucks were herded. And every morning at daybreak he was surprised to see how moderate it was in extent, for at night in the darkness it yawned open like a boundless cavern.
Near the entrance was a small office with a desk, a spittoon and a greasy sofa. He finally plucked up enough courage to move in there and he felt better when he knew there was a glass door between him and the trucks. He spent the nights peacefully smoking his pipe.
One night when he was sweeping the floor he picked up a newspaper. It was a copy of the American edition of La Presse, left behind by some driver or other. Though he had never been much of a reader, he pounced on it eagerly.
And every Tuesday he had only to look to find the paper that some unknown providence seemed always to have left specially for him.
It lasted him a whole week. He devoured every bit of it, line by line, from the first page to the last. But it wasn’t the main news articles that interested him most, not the ones with four-column headlines of which the city editor in the office back in Montreal had been so proud. Euchariste Moisan with his weakened eyesight passed over the murders and the political feuds. He would begin by slowly reading the headlines and the subtitles to make sure that there was nothing there that interested him. He could come back to those parts later when had used up all the rest. Then he would turn to the inside pages and comb every nook and corner where they sandwich in the news of least importance.
What he was really looking for were familiar names, especially those from Saint-Jacques and Labernadie. There was a special section for parish correspondents, but they only wrote about American centres. He remembered this page in the local newspaper he used to subscribe to back home. The name of the patron saint of each parish was used as the heading and underneath was set forth that “Miss Délima Saint-Georges has come to visit for three days with her father Mr. Osias Saint-Georges of Saint-Anthime;” that “Mr. and Mrs. Adelard Legendre, who farm at L’Enfant-Jésus-de-Bagot, have given birth to a son christened Joseph-Ludovic-Moïse;” “that they have started rebuilding the school-house in the Pince-Bec concession” – all those trivial news items that cheer or worry or distress the little closed rural communities huddled round the church-spires that are strung out along the mighty river of French Canada.
If he looked very carefully, he sometimes managed to come across the names of villages near his own home, generally in connection with some accident like the violent death of a young farmer gored by a bull or a fire in the local convent. And at the time of the annual retreat for the clergy he was able to follow the movements of all the local priests.
Every Friday he was given his fifteen-dollars pay by his companion, the Irishman, who handed it over without saying a word. It wasn’t a great deal of money, especially in a country where they paid such fabulous salaries. But the foreman had explained it all to him at the start.
“You see, Moisan, it’s the boss got you this job. He was supposed to take on a night mechanic at thirty-five a week. But he fixed it so you could have the work, though there was plenty of men after it. If any person asks you about it, you just say you’re a mechanic and you’re getting thirty-five a week.”
“Sure! I wish you’d thank Mr. Corrigan for me. It’s mighty nice of him. You’ll tell him that, won’t you?”
“All right! All right! But if they ever ask you don’t forget.”
Fifteen dollars a week in nice new crisp bills! It was a lot of money for a farmer, but from the very beginning Ephrem got him to hand over ten dollars a week for his board.
“You’ll be a rich man with the five bucks that leaves you. But I’ve got a wife and kids.”
And sometimes round Thursday he would borrow another dollar or two from his father, but he always forgot to pay him back.
For the factories had fewer and fewer orders; Ephrem was only working two days a week now and at that his pay had been cut.
Summer was drawing to a close.
Every evening and, of course, on Sundays, too, Euchariste set off carrying his lunch-pail containing his midnight snack.
When he got back in the morning he went to bed. But he didn’t sleep much. You don’t sleep a great deal when you’re getting old.
FIVE
Old Moisan had few distractions. Especially now that he worked at night, he didn’t see very many people. Occasionally, during the summer, one or other of Ephrem’s friends would stop in on his way by for a brief chat. And for a while Mr. Léger came quite regularly; he even brought his wife along sometimes. They talked about home.
But towards the end of summer the days began to close in; Ephrem still showed up from time to time, but no one else now ever came to keep him company. As the depression got worse and worse, people seemed to want to barricade themselves in their homes. They hadn’t enough money to do much entertaining and tried to hide their poverty, believing they were worse off than their neighbours and not wishing to make a spectacle of themselves. What was the good of meeting your friends if you could no longer talk about marvellous business deals and astounding profits and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars? Everybody’s existence was clouded by straitened circumstances and it killed their boastfulness and their pride in the American way of life.
A fog of depression lay heavily over everything, like the black pall of smoke which formerly hung over the cities. The most strident voices were now more subdued. People no longer told stories about smart successful business transactions, about clever schemes that would make you rich in a year, about new lines of business that, when they were opened up, would attract swarms of customers. For the first time in the memory of any American, everybody lived in the present and worried about unsold stocks of merchandise that cluttered up the warehouses, about whirring machines that fell silent one after the other, about factory chimneys that, at the rate of at least one a week, stopped belching smoke. It was as if this nation, hitherto so young in mind and heart, had been suddenly struck with old age.
Someone even said to Euchariste: “You’re lucky, Moisan, you’ve got a good steady job!”
By comparison with this depression that poisoned the life of White Falls, Euchariste’s own existence seemed more tolerable. When, on occasional Sunday afternoons, he met other French-Canadians, especially the older ones, he no longer hesitated to talk about home. From this distance and stripped of the uncertainties of weather and the seasons, farming seemed to wear a halo of stability.
He was fond of saying: “Back home in Canada it don’t matter if the factories close, because there ain’t no factories. It don’t matter if the companies cut wages, because there ain’t none. When we seed a field in hay, we harvest hay, sometimes there’s a bit more and sometimes there’s a bit less, but you always have enough to get by.”
Some of the old men agreed with him.
“That’s right, there’s no depression back on the farm.”
But the young ones looked thoughtful and said nothing.
Then one day he got another letter from Etienne.
“Times are pretty hard right now, Pa.”
The refrain was a familiar one. Even in very good years he had always sung that tune himself when he grumbled about conditions.
“Napoléon is still living with us; he can’t find work. That makes a lot of people to feed, because there are six of them now. His wife was sick again and this time it was twins. I think they ought to go back to the city, because it says in the papers they’re going to give money to the out-of-works there. Of course, us poor farmers won’t get nothing.
“The Touchette’s farm is going to be sold up because they owe too much on it. It’s the same with the Gélinas.
“My hay….”
That’s right, it was Etienne’s hay now.
“My hay from last year is still in the barn. I don’t know where we’re going to put this year’s. It would have been better to sell it like I said. It may sound crazy, but eggs is down to thirteen cents a dozen. There’s no money in it. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And Marie-Louise is costing a lot in doctor’s bills and medicine.”
So that’s how things were; even the land no longer supported her children. And yet at first he had felt pleased for a moment at the idea that without him everything was going so badly. But then he remembered that, as far as the hay was concerned, it was he who had obstinately advised Etienne not to sell it.
The land was failing her own; the eternal earth-mother would no longer feed her sons.
Things were in a fine state nowadays. To be sure, the land could provide enough food, shelter and warmth. But people had to go and improve things and modernize everything, and all these changes, all these novelties, were the ruin of the farmer; he had to spend such a lot to operate his equipment, to keep up the strain of his pedigree stock, and to repair all the fancy new buildings.
The whole depression was the best possible proof of the falsity of this dangerous idea of “progress.” As far as he, Euchariste, was concerned, the proper course was clear. What people would have to do was to go back to the sensible way of the past, give up all this machinery, and live on a thirty-acre strip of farm, content to expect nothing but what it could provide.
That was what he was going to do when he got back home. When he got back? But how old and helpless he felt.
When he got back? When would that be? He couldn’t think of leaving Ephrem in the lurch for the moment.
“Money’s pretty scarce, Pa,” his son kept complaining. “Couldn’t you help us out a bit more? I can easy pay you back when things pick up again. You don’t need it. You’ve plenty of cash; you’re well fixed.”
And once again Euchariste hesitated to make a clean breast of things; he hadn’t the courage to expose his own shame and his own failure.
“I think I’d do better to hang on to any cash I might have. You never know. But if it’s any help, I’ll stay on the job here till things get better. A couple of months or even a year if I have to. I don’t mind giving you all I make. You need it worse than Etienne back on the farm.”
For he hadn’t shown him Etienne’s letter.
So every night he set off for the garage and shut himself up until morning among all those mechanical monsters crouching like wild animals in a cage.
Gradually, without his knowing how or why, he began to lose hope. It seemed to him that his Laurentian homeland was getting further and further away every day and was becoming a province in the realm of the unattainable. He felt that each one of the hours he had lived through since he left was an infinity, an eternity he could never hope to retrace.
The fine weather was over. The autumn rains had come again, those cold and endless October downpours that mark the end of another cycle and the temporary divorce of sun and earth during which the farmer is useless.
In June, enjoying the first hot weather, he kept saying: “Dandy weather for the hay.”
When in July it didn’t rain for two weeks, he reflected: “If it don’t rain in a few days the oats won’t be so good.”
And after a series of rain-storms in August: “If it keeps up this way for another week the potatoes will rot for sure.”
But now that autumn had returned, there was nothing in his past life that found an echo in his thoughts.
What use was the farm to him now, his thirty-acre strip of good land, since none of it belonged to him any more? If he ever did go back, it would be to live apart from the land and outside it before finding a last resting-place beneath it.
