Fruits of the Earth (20 page)

Straight on, over barley stubble, till they reached Abe's east line. Again Old Sire took the fence; and they were on the
prairie. In five minutes they made Nicoll's Corner. Then south over the culvert.

Everything seemed quiet and peaceful. The sun seemed to stand still over the plain, his heatless rays bronzed even here. Chaff and dust from many threshing fields had spread over all this world.

Ahead, at Hilmer's Corner, there was a congestion. North of the bridge stood a wagon or two; between the road and Hilmer's yard half a dozen horses were grazing. From the yard, an old woman stared dully at the man who came tearing along. Beyond, one wagon on the bridge; three, four farther on. To the west, a car in the ditch.

A moment later, Abe saw it all. Pole and neck-yoke of the wagon on the bridge were trailing; the horses had been unhitched. Beyond, Bill's empty wagon barred the road. The load north of the bridge was Nawosad's; and as Abe vaulted to the ground, the Ukrainian stepped aside. Abe ran past him.

On the culvert, a group of men were crouching or kneeling to the right of the wagon. The first was Anderson; on the far side was Hilmer, looking strangely stern. Between them, Dr. Vanbruik, on his knees, bending over the motionless body of Abe's child which lay between the wheels, for it had not been moved. Below the bare ribs of the chest was a horrible depression, discoloured; even the doctor averted his eyes as he applied the stethoscope.

Abe felt, saw, heard nothing. Yet he asked a question.

Without looking up, Dr. Vanbruik shrugged a shoulder.

Mechanically Abe repeated his question. “Dead, you say?”

The doctor gave him a brief, direct look and bent down again.

Abe, feeling the ground giving way beneath him, walked blindly on to the end of the culvert, staggered through the
ditch, took a few steps over the open prairie, and fell forward on his face….

An hour later, Charlie's body was taken home in Bill's wagon. The lads from the field who had arrived followed on horseback. The load which the boy was to have taken to town was pushed to the side of the road. At a word from the doctor, Anderson had returned to town to fetch Mrs. Vanbruik. At Nicoll's Corner his car caught up with the procession and passed it in silence.

In the yard, they were met by Ruth, Mary Vanbruik, and the three children. The girls were crying; Jim stood pale and silent, awed by the fact that never again would he tease Charlie, nor Charlie him.

Ruth did not cry; but her face was tragically set and hollow when Anderson carried the body past her, up the steps, through the hall, and into the great living-room of the house where he placed it on the chesterfield. Nobody was in a condition to say anything. Nobody even asked how the thing had happened till many days later.

In the field, Nicoll took charge. Abe sat about as though his mind were affected. Dr. Vanbruik went to Somerville to attend to the formalities. Old Mrs. Crane was sent for to lay the body out.

Mary Vanbruik stayed with Ruth. All neighbours who had not already been working for Abe came to help, even Wheeldon; and it was from the threshing field that the doctor finally pieced the story together.

Charlie and Bill had been approaching Hilmer's culvert at the same time, Charlie from the north, Bill from the south, with Bill a trifle nearer to it than Charlie. But the culvert could be crossed by only one wagon at a time; and the boy, seeing that Bill, with his empty wagon had the advantage over him,
had, half in jest, urged his horses into a brisker pace, swinging the loose ends of their lines over their backs. Bill, wishing to let the boy win the race, had held his horses in. But at both ends of the culvert the many haulings had worn away the earth; so that a vehicle going at any speed was bound to hit the timbers of the bridge with a jolt; and the horses, knowing that, with the boy urging them on, had taken the incline at a bound. When the jolt came, the child had been thrown up into the air; and, the wagon below him being retarded, he had lost his seat and fallen between horses and wagon. Bill, from the far end of the culvert, had been yelling frantically, “Whoa, whoa, there!” And the horses, knowing his voice and seeing him blocking the road, had stopped; but not till the front wheels had passed over Charlie's body, just below the ribs.

Death, Dr. Vanbruik said when he had been called by Hilmer, had been instantaneous.

PART TWO

THE DISTRICT

THE PRAIRIE

T
he years went by.

Abe had been stunned; but it did not show in his work. It was true that he pursued it in a grim and cheerless way, unaffected by the things stirring every one else to his depths: the events of the war.

For a while he had been inclined to do as Ruth had wished him to do: to give everything up and to go away; it was Ruth who had kept him from following the impulse. Then he had voiced an intention of withdrawing at least from his public duties; that step, Dr. Vanbruik had dissuaded him from taking. At last, as if driven by a force which lashed him on, he had resumed his work at a pace which appalled his neighbours. He had bought a threshing machine and added more labour to the load he was carrying already; but he had soon found that the thresherman's trade and the farmer's business were incompatible. While he threshed others' crops, his own fall-ploughing remained undone; in spring, the work was gone through in a rush; nothing was done as it should have been done. In the third year of the war, he showed a return of his old shrewdness by selling his outfit at peak price and realizing a profit.

Incidentally he had begun to read. One of the things which make up the fundamental web of life–that background of life which no so-called progress can change–had bidden him halt on his way; and as he realized that, his old preoccupations had suddenly seemed futile. When all a man's gifts have been bent on the realization of material and realizable ends, the time is bound to come, unless he fails, when he will turn his spiritual powers against himself and scoff at his own achievements.

If, at one time, he had thought that machines were going to bring the millennium, he came to see now that the machine itself is nothing; what is needed is the mechanical mentality; and that he did not have. The use of machines might “pay” in a money sense; it did not pay in terms of human life. The thing done is nothing: the doing everything. He began to formulate such things to himself; he tried to find how he felt about things and to put that feeling into words.

He also listened more patiently to others, trying to get their point of view. He became intimate with his brother-in-law. Often he went to town to talk to him though he never stayed long. Perhaps it was partly because Mary and Ruth had found a way of getting along with each other.

Every time a new contingent went overseas from the municipality, Abe saw them off, not with a speech as might have been expected from the reeve; but a look here, a pressure of the hand there were worth more than a speech. Throughout the municipality there were people now who, when Abe was attacked–as he often was, for he carried things with a high hand–rallied to his defence and silenced his opponents.

Between Ruth and Abe a new relationship had sprung up. It arose from the mutual recognition of the right of every human being to live his own life. Ruth encouraged Abe in the
very things which she had once opposed, proposing innovations and improvements in house and farm; and Abe recognized this yielding of her spirit to his or to what she still thought was his. Abe gave her a free hand with regard to the children. Marion, the older girl, was, in 1917, sent to the high school at Somerville where she boarded out, of course; Jim and Frances were still attending the district school; but already it was understood that Jim was to join Marion if at last he passed his entrance to high-school examinations. He was a year older than Marion but behind her in school.

As for the children, Abe felt lost. At first, after Charlie's death, he had borne them an outright grudge because they lived when the boy was dead. In 1915, he had one day come upon the three as they were playing on the lawn east of the house. He had given no more than a glance; but it had produced an utter silence. As Abe passed on, Jim and Frances had resumed their game; but Marion, twelve years old, had withdrawn behind the old house to cry. A distant bond had established itself between him and this older girl: she resembled Charlie. “When his ambitions were realized…” Abe had thought in the past. They were realized; but there was still much to think about, though it was of a different kind these days.

The farm? It had lost its right to exist. Yet Abe enlisted Jim's help in spring and fall. Since Hilmer, Shilloe, and Nawosad had in a modest way become prosperous; since Hartley had turned agent, selling brooms and brushes now; since Bill Crane and others, lured by a soldier's pay and a separation allowance, had enlisted, while conscription had claimed the younger men, outside help could simply not be had any longer. Immigration had ceased; and that was the reason why the old house had never been moved. Now even
Horanski had filed a “cancellation claim” on the school quarter where Blaine had squatted down years ago.

Blaine and Horanski had come to a mutually profitable arrangement, for Blaine was willing to pay for the lot on which his cottage stood. The current year, 1918, was the last which Horanski was to spend on Abe's farm. Yet Abe gave the problem little thought. The children, he felt, would drift away; for whom should he go on working on that large scale on which he had worked in the past? He would retrench.

He had other things to think of. Often, strangers wondered when they saw him; occasionally Ruth shook her head.

He would stand at a corner of his huge house and look closely at brick and mortar. It was five years since the house had been built. Five years only! Yet already little sand grains embedded in the mortar were crumbling away; already the edges of the bricks were being rounded by a process of weathering. When he bent and looked closely at the ground, near the wall, he saw a thin layer of red dust mixed with those sand grains. The weathering process would go on and on; and what would come of it? Dr. Vanbruik told him of the clay mounds covering the sites of ancient Babylonian cities, loaning him a book or two on excavations. The moment a work of man was finished, nature set to work to take it down again. A queer thought, that. And so with everything, with his machines, his field, his pool; they were all on the way of being levelled to the soil again. What would happen when the supply of iron ores was exhausted? For that supply had its limits. This great mechanical age was bound to come to an end; and the resources of the planet would be scattered all over its surface.

Abe looked about and seemed to see for the first time. There were his wind-breaks, tall, rustling trees, full-grown:
poplars interspersed with spruces, maturing. They would age and decay and die; already some showed black knots of disease; others, their bark having burst, grew huge buttresses resembling proud flesh. They would die and decay; unless they reseeded themselves as they seemed to do; then they would spread and conquer his fields and the prairie, converting it into a forest-clad plain. Yet, if that prairie were capable of bearing a forest, would not the forest have invaded it long ago?

Even the prairie was engaged in a process which would do away with it. Abe looked at the ditches running full of a muddy flood; and his mind lost itself in the mysteries of cosmic change.

Sometimes, on his way from Somerville, when he came from a meeting of the council, or from having taken Marion back to school–his mind seemed to hover over the landscape as in flight.

There was the Somerville Line which parsed through the village of Morley, hesitating on its way, forming something like the node in the stem of a plant, to run on again, to the west. Man's work!

North of that line
–
in the past it had been the same south of it–stretched the flat prairie, unique in America. The exceedingly slight slope with which it drained northeast to the river was hardly perceptible; it amounted to less than a foot in a mile. To the casual glance, it seemed flat as a table-top. No native irregularity, whether of soil accumulation or plant growth, broke its monotony. Whatever relieved the sky-line was man's work. The only native growth was the long, slender prairie grass which, in a summer breeze, gave the surface of the soil the appearance of a sheet of watered silk.

Once the buffalo had roamed here, supplying the eye with contours to rest on; they had been replaced by these
scattered homes of man. A phenomenon characteristic of this prairie, though not restricted to it, lent it some interest: the frequency of mirages. Often a distant strip of land was lifted above the horizon like a low-flung cloud; a town or a group of farmsteads, ordinarily hidden behind the intervening shoulder of the world, stood up clearly against the whitish sky which only overhead shaded off into a pale blue. The strip of featureless air between the mirage and the solid earth below was of that silvery, polished whiteness which we see otherwise only in the distant mirror of a smooth sheet of water.

On this prairie, near things often seemed to be distant–a haystack no more than a quarter of a mile away loomed gigantic as though separated from the eye by two or three miles. Far things, especially such as in themselves loomed high–the huge storage granaries along the railways, for instance–seemed near. In certain states of the atmosphere, the layered air worked like a lens: roofs five, six miles away showed details of construction as though magnified by the glass.

Far in the west, a low swinging line indicated the series of hills which, geologists tell us, once formed the shore of the lake whose bottom has become the prairie. Occasionally, though rarely–mostly prior to one of the major storms of the summer season–these hills, too, seemed lifted and drawn nearer, but without the silvery strip below which was characteristic of the mirages on the unbroken prairie.

In the particular section where Abe's life as chronicled here unfolded itself, a traveller might, at the time, have gone in an east-west direction for a hundred miles without finding the slightest change in the essentials of the landscape. Two railway lines had been built, both branching from the international trunk line which ran roughly north-south, parallel to the highway. Both turned west in almost straight lines,
twenty-five miles apart, till, at the foot of the western hills, they joined in a loop. Both were strung with towns at intervals of ten or twelve miles. From a distance, all looked alike, their salient features consisting in the tall, spire-like elevators which dominate western landscapes everywhere; below them clustered a few stores, a few dozen dwellings, and such groups or lines of trees as the aesthetic sense of their inhabitants had impelled them to plant.