Thirty Acres, page 3
These morning attacks of giddiness worried him, though. He had earned a rest. After a few months of quiet in the village with Mélie he would recover his strength and forget his little discomforts.
One morning he came into the kitchen as usual. Old Mélie and Euchariste were there already, surrounded by the strong smell and the thick smoke of boiling lard. His breakfast was waiting for him and so was the rough wooden bench, which ran along beside the table that was covered with white oilcloth, where his place was set with pewter knife and fork and with bowl and cup of enamel ware.
“Pretty cold this morning.”
“Pretty cold,” replied Euchariste, who was warming his hands near the stove.
“It froze again last night, froze hard.”
“Yeah, it froze all right.”
“Looks like it’s going to be a hard winter.”
“Certainly does.”
In silence the two men began eating their strips of bacon and the buckwheat pancakes which Mélie made extra large to fit their appetites. Then she filled their cups with boiling-hot tea. When breakfast was over Uncle Ephrem took out his pipe, while Euchariste chopped up long twists of brown tobacco for the day’s supply on a corner of the table. Suddenly the old man had a fresh seizure and fell heavily into his chair, his hands tightly clenched, his eyes closed, and his breath coming in gasps.
“What’s the trouble, Uncle?” said Euchariste. “Are you sick?”
But the old man’s senses had left him in this general dislocation of the world about him and he did not answer. It was useless for him to close his eyes, for it seemed that some evil power turned him upside down with his head dangling, while the four walls spun round and round and the floor heaved violently. A single thought floated on the surface of his consciousness: the annoyance at being surprised in this way, he who had always boasted of his strength. Mélie lost no time in reading him a lesson.
“There you go; now you’ve gone and got sick! It serves you right; that’ll teach you. Where’s the sense in a man your age working the whole day driving fenceposts like you done yesterday? Look at yourself in the mirror; you don’t hardly look human.”
“Uncle, why don’t you go see the doctor in the village?”
Ephrem still did not answer, but Mélie reacted violently at the word “doctor.”
“Doctor! Doctor! Just let me catch you going to the doctor’s. A cousin of mine had pains all up and down his side; he went to the doctor’s. The fellow told him there wasn’t much wrong with him, and gave him some little bits of pills, and charged him a dollar and a half. But he had bronchitis the rest of his life, just the same, and died of the pleurisy.”
She had that horror of doctors which is common to all country people. When you buy something, you take something away in exchange for the money. But you give the doctor your hard-earned dollars and get nothing tangible in return, except perhaps some miserable little ten-cent bottle.
“I’ll go make you a good hot toddy. Then I’ll go find some milfoil to make you some herb-tea.”
“Hold your tongue, Mélie. Why don’t you go get the priest and the notary while you’re at it? I’m not sick. I never was sick. Do you take me for a namby-pamby like those young fellows you see round nowadays?”
Making a great effort, he pulled himself together and relit his pipe. Then, turning to Euchariste: “Let’s get after the chores. Then you can harness the mare and go to the crossroads for the new collar and the shafts Pitro was fixing. While you’re doing that, I’ll go look at the fences and see if there’s any rails missing.”
The week went slowly by with the days growing shorter and shorter. Morning and evening now they had to light the lantern to go and milk the cows. The deadly breath of the cold November wind shrivelled the weeds along the edges of the ditches; and almost every day there were downpours of rain that forced the cows to take shelter against the fences, where they stood motionless with the water streaming down their flanks and their rumps to the wind. Soon they would have to shut them up in the stable.
The first snow fell, stayed a while on the ground, and then melted.
One evening when he had gone up the hill to cut wood for the winter supply, the old man was late in getting back. It was already dark and time for the chores, and he still had not returned.
“Maybe you’d better go look for your uncle,” said Mélie. “It’s getting dark. Where’s the sense in coming home so late? He’ll be all wore out when he does get in. I’ve a kind of a hunch; suppose he’s had something happen to him.”
“I’ll go, Auntie.”
Euchariste lit his lantern and started out. Ten minutes went by, a quarter of an hour, half an hour. Standing anxiously in the kitchen doorway, Mélie peered into the night, looking for the tiny pale gleam of the lantern.
Then suddenly: “Mélie! Mélie!”
The voice came to her anguished and breathless through a thick wall of darkness; and because of the blackness of the night it seemed to come from every direction, from every corner of the horizon.
Suddenly the glow of the lantern appeared between the pig-sty and the shed, where the road came in from the fields. But the light bobbed up and down in a peculiar way, like a will-o’ the wisp hopping about in one place.
“Holy Father in Heaven!” cried Mélie with the premonition of disaster.
Her old legs shook under her; she wanted to run, but she couldn’t. Then all of a sudden she felt herself lifted up and found she was dashing towards the patch of light, which was still moving towards her, gliding noiselessly, close to the ground.
It was Euchariste coming back with the lantern in one hand, weighed down by the body he was carrying over his shoulder like a sack. He had found Uncle Ephrem on the other side of the creek, lying on the ground near the cool water towards which he had probably tried to drag himself. A few feet away were his axe and a little pile of wood already cut. He must have lain there since one in the afternoon. In all probability a stroke had seized him as he worked, his axe swung high in the air.
“I don’t think he’s dead yet; he was breathing a while back.”
But Mélie wasn’t listening to him. Dry-eyed, she was running about the house in a childish frenzy, pulling the bed about, picking up a lamp she set down at once unlit, smashing dishes in her haste to find some medicine or other on the shelves of the side-board, exclaiming, “Dear God! Dear God!” over and over again in an anguished voice.
But she suddenly stopped short and stood rigid. Euchariste, who had been leaning over the bed, slowly straightened up.
“I guess his troubles are over in this life. He’s with God now.”
A storm of tears burst from under Mélie’s wrinkled eyelids, as from heavy rain clouds. She began to sob, with her head hidden in the folds of her blue apron. She was bent over by the gale of her grief like the old beech trees outside by the autumn winds. Euchariste did not cry, just as he had not done so when he lost his whole family at one blow. He was too young then for tears; now he was too old. His grief was the grief of a man used to struggling against the elements, getting the better of them sometimes, but who feels powerless in the face of death. He stared at the body of his uncle – of his father actually, for he was losing a father this time more truly than he had the first – this body, thrown on the disordered bed, which seemed to have been suddenly lengthened by death.
So the poor old man would never go to live quietly in the village.
He had died pressed close to this farm of his that could not consent to a divorce.
“It’s too bad; poor old fellow!”
He would leave his house, the house his father had built, only to follow the road to the village for the last time, never to return.
A black wooden box; the slow winding procession of carriages following the hearse in the drizzling rain; the church full of people; then the heavy shovelfuls of earth on the coffin, falling with a hollow sound like a sledgehammer, pressing poor Uncle Ephrem down into his grave.
How big and empty the house would be. And the farm, too, with him, Euchariste, all alone on a thirty-acre strip of land. He would have to work hard and get a hired man. There was the corn to put in the silo for fodder, and the turnips. The cellar had to be tidied up. By the way, he’d do that tomorrow. There was less of a hurry for the hen-house, and while he was fixing the cellar Uncle Ephrem could …
Why, no – Uncle Ephrem was dead. Poor old fellow! He didn’t get much rest when he was alive.
And then there was the winter supply of wood which hadn’t been brought in yet.
The neighbours would get a surprise. Davi Touchette and Thomas Badouche, and old Branchaud…. Branchaud! Why, of course! Alphonsine.
Alphonsine!
Old Mélie’s sobs were subsiding now, though her shoulders still shook from time to time as she spread a clean handkerchief on the bedside table, set a crucifix on it, lit a candle, and poured a little holy water into a saucer – into which she dipped a small branch of fir.
Alphonsine! The old man won’t have to make way for him. And he, Euchariste, won’t go to see him on Sundays in the village, except at the cemetery on All Souls’ Day, with Mélie … and with Alphonsine.
Mélie called him to hold the chair while she climbed up on it; with her trembling hand she stopped the pendulum of the clock, which was the proper thing to do. Just exactly what death had done just now to Uncle Ephrem’s heart. And as soon as the ticking, which no one usually noticed, was stilled, silence filled the house with a velvety quietness, like something congealed coming from the dead man himself and spreading out over everything.
Mélie rearranged the bed, stretched out the legs in their proper posture, put her hands for a few moments over the eyes to close them, and tied a big red handkerchief round the head, one of the old man’s own, so that the mouth wouldn’t gape open any more. These duties were hers by right, as is the custom in every country where the dead are entrusted to the women. In birth and in death.
Euchariste turned back towards the bed, attracted, like all human beings, by an experience which doesn’t frighten simple people but which sets them face to face with the ineluctable mystery of all things. With his arms dangling by his side, he let this new idea take shape in his mind: Uncle Ephrem is dead, dead. Uncle Ephrem will never cut wood again, never eat again, never speak again. The house seemed big now….
Alphonsine! …
His thoughts turned back to living things and were borne down the wind towards the waiting animals and towards the patient earth, that was indifferent to the death of the man it nourished and who was now to unite with it.
Furtively Euchariste’s thoughts tried to escape from this room. But at once they came up against a black wall.
Uncle Ephrem is dead.
He became aware again of the dead man’s face. The red handkerchief made him think of a toothache.
Only hope he won’t change too much before the funeral. No, it’s autumn.
Alphonsine! …
If they got married before the spring, it wouldn’t be so bad.
In January perhaps.
He’d have to speak to the priest about it.
Poor old fellow; who’d have thought it!
FOUR
When the service and the burial were over, Euchariste had to go to the rectory to pay the funeral expenses and then to the carpenter’s for the marker, the simplest possible kind: a wooden board which would be set upright at the head of the grave with the dates of birth and death and the name Ephrem Moisan, “who lies here awaiting the Day of Resurrection,” painted in black letters.
“How are you, ’Charis,” said the people he met on the way. “Poor old Moisan; it’s too bad!” The young ones added: “He went off pretty quick, did he?”
“Poor Ephrem,” said the older ones. “He wasn’t so old. Not sixty-five!”
The women who were still clustered together in little groups near the church, where they had attended the funeral service, greeted him from a distance. They were talking of sickness and death, which is the most fruitful subject of conversation among country people of every race and every land. Then they talked about Alphonsine, who was going to fill the empty place at Moisans’. Birth, marriage, sickness, death: the outstanding events of their calm even lives. Above all, death.
They never said: “Such and such a thing happened in 1862,” but rather: “It happened the year after old Mrs. Chartrand’s death,” or, less frequently: “It was two months after the twins were born to Joseph the son of Clophas.” The road leading from the past was measured by the deaths left scattered along the way. As for the future, it was best expressed in terms of the earth or of the heavens, which make or mar earthly harvests. “It’ll rain tomorrow for sure and my wheat ain’t in yet.” “It’ll be a good year for potatoes if the dry weather keeps up.” And there were all the folk-prophecies about the weather, and the deductions based on signs observed by the old people and on laws that have been tested through generations: “It poured cats and dogs on Ascension Day; now we’re in for forty days of it.” “Somebody saw a bear day before yesterday; spring’ll be along any time now.” What is more important in country life than the life and death of kinsfolk, unless it be the life and death of the crops?
When his business was done Euchariste climbed back into the carriage beside Mélie, and the mare set off at a lumbering trot for the farm. A cold wind, harbinger of imminent winter, brought more tears to their eyes than they had shed for Uncle Ephrem. A few hours before they had followed the hearse, through whose glass panels the shining handles of the coffin could be seen; behind them wound a long line of carriages that grew longer as they passed each farm and drew nearer to the village. When the road made a bend Euchariste had only to lean out of his carriage to see how many of them there were, and their unusual number gave him great satisfaction. A Moisan was certainly somebody.
They were going back by the same road now alone. The carriage drove along in the two parallel ruts, hardened by the first frosts, between the weeds and bushes in the ditches, which were of a uniform rust colour. It was four o’clock, and the sun was already about to set behind a bank of low leaden-coloured clouds in a fiery stream of molten metal. High up in the faded blue of the sky a flock of little clouds as curly as newborn lambs hung suspended, and towards the east the waning moon looked like another isolated tuft of cloud.
A little while before, when all the others were with them, the old man’s absence had seemed less real; in any case, he had been with them there, up in front, in that sinister black vehicle, which was the head of a procession whose tail wound to and fro with every whim of the road. Now Euchariste was alone with Mélie; each was the other’s entire family and living kin.
He hadn’t dared consult the parish priest about his marriage. It would hardly have been proper at a moment when the freshly turned earth on the old man’s grave still stood out in a long livid hump. How hard it is to broach a subject sometimes!
He thought of it continually on the days that followed, as he sat near the stove smoking his pipe. Quite as a matter of course he had taken possession of his uncle’s chair as he had taken possession of his property. But all his recent experiences and, above all, the fact that he was now obliged to decide the fate of all sorts of lesser beings on the farm had suddenly aged him. Already certain of his gestures were those of Ephrem Moisan, so much so that Mélie had commented on it.
“Sometimes when I look at you I think it’s Ephrem.” And, indeed, at night, in the dim light, he seemed to assume the same posture and to use the same rhythm when he rocked himself in his chair, and he had the same way of stopping suddenly to spit and then of striking his heel on the floor to start rocking gently again.
He still slept upstairs, though, and the big bedroom remained vacant. He would move in there after the wedding, when Alphonsine had come to live in the house. He wouldn’t have dared to use it in the meantime. Uncle Ephrem’s death was so recent that it didn’t seem real to him yet; it was as if the departed might suddenly come back to recover his authority and his property. Though Euchariste gradually took over the dead man’s possessions, it was done warily, with a kind of anxiety which made his advance a series of furtive nibbles. Each partial encroachment was given time to consolidate itself, as if with too great haste he might run the risk of bringing the old man back to life again.
He wasn’t yet used to ownership. He had the notary’s word for it; he had even seen the papers. Yet, in conversation, he would say “the farm, the barn, the cows” instead of “my farm, my barn, my cows.” It was just as if these possessions had come to him by some devious process which a gesture or an incautious word might interrupt. Sometimes, though, he would lean against a fence he was repairing and repeat aloud, as if for practice: “My farm … my farm … my farm.” But he would look round immediately for fear Uncle Ephrem might have heard him.
A day or so later Mélie told him that somebody was ill at the Faribeaults’, who lived at the other end of the concession. “I guess it must be Amanda; she’s had lung-trouble a long time now, and maybe she’s dying. They’ve sent for the priest to come tomorrow morning.”
It occurred to Euchariste then that the priest would be passing by their house next day. He might stop him, perhaps, and try to speak to him. He’d been promising himself every Sunday to call at the rectory, but this seemed easier. For every Sunday his courage had failed him. He’d make sure of being there when he passed. Oh, of course, not on the way there, when the priest would come by in his surplice, with the bell ringing, his face radiating majesty, his hands crossed over his stole and bearing the Blessed Host. But on the way back … maybe …
Next day he was on the watch beside the highway, seemingly engaged in digging a ditch but in reality keeping a sharp eye on the clump of elms near the road, round which the carriage would first appear. When it came by he knelt down, scarcely daring to look at the priest’s face, to which the Blessed Sacrament lent a halo of awe-inspiring dignity.
