Fruits of the Earth

by Frederick Philip Grove

  South of Nicoll’s farm, beyond the ditch, a lake was produced resembling the spring flood, a mile and a half long from north to south, and half a mile wide, covering the Topp holdings. It was ten inches deep, with soft mud underneath. The water massed itself on the west side of the road to town which acted as a dam, most of the flood coming from the drainage shed by Abe’s meadow; and slowly the lake backed towards that meadow. The Topp buildings stood in water, their cellars drowned; but neither Slim nor Henry minded it so long as the flood backed into Abe’s hay land. Spalding was, after all, not going to get away with his devil’s luck or whatever it was, be it only his confounded shrewdness or initiative; all his ditching and cross-ditching was not going to help him.

  They could not know that Abe’s heart was anywhere but in his work. In 1912 he had exulted in his victory; that he had worried at the time was forgotten; he saw only the contrast of the past with the present. Now he fought because farm and weather ruled him with a logic of their own.

  And then the amazing thing happened. During the night of the third day the grade which held the water broke. Beginning as a mere trickle, the runnel soon became a washout; the water disappeared from the Topp holdings and flooded Horanski’s and Elliot’s instead. Abe’s hay land lay high and dry while the current played havoc with the road to town.

  It was unnatural; it could not be. Was he possessed of superior powers? Or had he gone by night and opened the road? Mrs. Grappentin said you could weaken a dam by thinking of it. The devil would do the rest.

  Nobody remembered that Abe, in 1899, had simply shown ordinary sagacity in the choice of his location. So long as the ditches had functioned, that sagacity had not been conspicuous; circumstances had restored conditions as they had been before the advent of these ditches. But nobody gave Abe credit for his foresight except Nicoll. Everything, at all times, people said, was in Spalding’s favour. To him that hath shall be given. Had Wheeldon not forestalled him, he would have had the west section; and though Nicoll laughed at such an idea, even Stanley, Wheeldon, and Elliot had an uncanny feeling that to his horses it would not have been inaccessible. “Perhaps not,” Nicoll said. “He would have found a way to drain it in time.”

  Abe gave no thought to such matters. A more oppressing thing held him in its grip: he had worked and slaved: what for? His great house was useless: the three people left in it would have had ample room in the patchwork shack. Soon he and Ruth would be alone, lost in that structure which, from behind the rustling wind-breaks, looked out over that prairie which it had been built to dominate.

  And then dry, settled weather came at last. The crop failure was general; the compensation, peculiar to Abe. Wild hay, for immediate delivery, stood at twenty-five dollars a ton.

  Abe went to town. Opposite Blaine’s cottage there was a gap in the road twenty feet long and four feet deep. The fields beyond looked like the sleek, smooth bottom of a gigantic mud-hole.

  Abe called Rogers over the telephone; and the latter promised to bring his two men at once; they were to board at Nicoll’s.

  Nicoll would come with two boys; in addition, Abe hired McCrae to help in the field; and he made it known that everybody who had a team would find work in hauling the hay to the track in town.

  HAYING

  The weather held. Elsewhere, the wheat harvest began; in Spalding District there was no wheat. Abe had started the cutting of the hay at the southern edge of his meadow. For a few days, another, a Mennonite crew had been working south of it, on the spur of high land that lost itself west of Schweigel’s. For two weeks the work had gone on, and Abe moved north. For the week of 17th August a last strip remained. Roger’s two young Englishmen were delighted at the chance of learning his methods.

  On the afternoon of that first Monday of the second half of August the whole life of the landscape seemed to come to a focus in that meadow, now mamillated with stacks of hay. Nowhere else was any work possible. The haystacks stood uniform over the field, thirty feet wide at the base, tapering to the top, a hundred feet long, their longitudinal axis running from north-west to south-east, in the direction of the prevailing winds. Only the northernmost edge of the field, twenty rods wide, was still bare, the cut hay lying in wind-rows or, farther west, in such swaths as were being gathered up even then by the rakes. These rakes were being operated by Nicoll’s two youngest boys, Bill and Norman, fourteen and fifteen years old.

  The life of the meadow centred at a point directly south of the gap in Abe’s wind-break where a new stack was growing up. Two enormous “bucks,” drawn by two four-horse teams each, swept the wind-rows up and drew the hay to the stack which, so far, looked perilously tall and slender like a spire. At the unfinished end a huge scaffolding of heavy timbers slanted to the top, forming an angle of thirty degrees with the level prairie.

  There, between the last two planks of the scaffold, reaching into the air like horns or jumping board, Abe worked with his fork, putting a semblance of order into the chaotic masses of freshly-cured hay. His movements were slow and deliberate. A glance showed that he was no longer young; a stranger might have placed his age even higher than it was. The methodical sweeps of his arms were performed with that economy of motion and effort which comes with long experience and which counts the cost, in energy as well as time, of every lifting of the fork. Thus, standing up to his knees and often his hips in loose hay, he worked forkful after forkful upwards, the base of the stack taking care of itself.

  His glance did not roam far over the field. Yet there was present to his mental vision the whole area in which the work went on. East of the stack stood two wagons with low boxes, their tongues trailing on the ground. The bucks described ever-widening circles; and the horse-drawn rakes, never resting, swept wind-row after wind-row into place farther west. The work, proceeding in an apparently leisurely way, was surprisingly fast in its results, chiefly because it was so thoroughly organized, though also because the capacity of these bucks was immense: whenever one of them swept up to the stack, and they came in steady succession, two tons of hay were lifted to the top.

  To such as had known Abe in years gone by he looked weary and grey. He wore a khaki-coloured suit of overalls. In his face, the ruddy colour of his skin was overlain by a layer of dust and chaff. At this northern end of the meadow, the grass contained an admixture of skunk-tail the seed of which was annually spread by the flood; and the barbed awns of this grassy weed were sticking in his hair and eyebrows, giving him the hoary appearance of some rustic harvest god.

  In the short intervals of rest he stood leaning on his fork and allowed his small, blue eyes to sweep the horizon, hardly moving his head. The weather was incredibly golden; the light, bronzed.

  Once every ten or fifteen minutes Abe’s full, though silent, attention was claimed by one or other of the bucks which, having scooped up a wind-row of hay, swept into position, south-east of the stack, in line with its axis. There it stopped for a few seconds to give the horses a breathing space before their last, desperate effort in forcing their load over the inclined planks to the top of the scaffold. They came on, at first slowly, merely bending their weights into their collars; then, urged by the drivers, faster and faster; till, when the buck struck the upward slanting planks, they strained every muscle, clamping their feet like grappling-hooks into the yielding soil, while behind them the long chains to which the eveners were fastened rose with the buck which their pull lifted up; and those eveners, finally, quivered high above their rumps, one on each side of the stack. Simultaneously, their drivers became vocal: Nicoll and the Englishmen calling their horses by their names and shouting, “Get up, there! Now! Get up! Get up!” McCrae cursing and swearing while he swung loose lines down on straining rumps and arching backs.

  The buck was hanging in the air, perched on the last projecting planks of the scaffold, holding its load on wide, pointed, wooden prongs set in the huge cross timbers which were the exact length of the width of the stack; and the horses, in order not to let it slide back,
dug their forefeet into the ground while, with their heads, they reached for such stray wisps of hay as littered the ground.

  Abe, meanwhile, had climbed to the top of the stack and, thence, stepped across to a plank below the horns of the scaffold. Having passed under the buck, he tilted the evenly poised machine with a single reach of his powerful arms; and an avalanche of hay poured down the sloping unfinished end of the stack. Then he bent to let the buck pass over his head as the horses backed away and allowed it to slip to the ground. Next they swung around in a huge half circle; the buck was hooked on to the lower timbers of the scaffold; and the latter was pulled back a foot or so. The hooks were reversed, and the buck swung free, these prongs which, on the previous trip, had stood upright now sweeping the ground. Abe stepped back to the stack and worked quietly on, finishing off the top to a thatch.

  As he worked, his consciousness, apart from definite thoughts, was made up of three distinct and separate complexes which yet remained intertwined and blurred in their demarcations.

  One of them was composed of such elements of his immediate surroundings as obtruded on his senses: the hayfield with its crew; the ditch bordering the field to the north, brimful of water; the trail beyond; his farmstead within its wind-break, with the roofs of barns and house out-topping the autumnally dark-green trees and a vista through the gap of the gate to the yard; the illimitable horizon to the west; the district with its roads and its two bridges, one of them of fatal memory, to the east; and the hamlet of Morley. But his consciousness of this landscape also comprised many things unseen: the towns of Somerville and St. Cecile beyond the horizon, joined by the highway to the city sixty miles away. More than that: as it extended in space to things imperceptible to the eye, so it extended in time beyond the present; it comprised the two-roomed and later three-and four-roomed shack in which he had lived for fourteen years till it had been replaced by that palatial structure with its green roof: a possession of no value now, a mere ostentation.

  The second complex concerned itself with the economic situation that had arisen during the last few years. Abe had failed to take advantage of the flax boom; and, therefore, he had escaped the disaster of the slump. For two years he had done no fall-ploughing; and his seeming neglect had turned to his profit. This hay crop represented unheard-of wealth. He had bought steers and heifers by the dozen and the score, to convert the poorer parts of this crop into gold; he would once more live up to the obligation of his wealth and give the district work; he would, in the bank and in sound investments, replace all that the house and the new barn had taken seven years ago, and more….

  The third complex was that concerned with his own personal life and its extension into the life of a family. Over there, in that house, Ruth was alone. Frances, seventeen years old and just promoted into the final high-school grade, had been sent to town in the little buggy which he had bought for his children to drive to school in; for none of the men could be spared. How Ruth spent her days when she was alone Abe had often wondered. But to his household belonged other children: even Charlie who haunted a room in that house as a mere memory now, slowly paling; and Marion who had moved into the city where her husband had bought a partnership in a great law firm; and Jim who preferred the grease and the dirt to the dust and the dirt and was part owner of a prosperous garage at Somerville, selling high-priced cars. Incomprehensibly, there was also Frances, a source of disquietude even to Ruth. Like so many others she had grown out of hand. She did not rebel or disobey; but she lived a life of her own, admitting no one into her confidence. And further, there were the Vanbruiks in town: Abe’s sister Mary, ageing, brave in her loneliness, disappointed of children; and the enigmatic doctor, owner of the most flourishing business outside of the city, yet professing that he could not afford to buy any but the cheapest car: a doctor who had abandoned his practice and to whom many turned when they were in distress.

  All these things were present to Abe. His mind hovered over his life as the marsh-hawk hovers over the prairie lifted to the sky.

  It was between three and four o’clock when the first of the three complexes was invaded by a new element.

  The landscape of the prairie is so vast that a stranger might think a new detail must be of considerable magnitude or striking colour or outline to attract attention. But it is also so simple and unrelieved that he who knows it detects the most insignificant change, especially when it arises along the well-known lines of the roads.

  As Abe proceeded in his work, slowly and deliberately, yet without a break, he became aware that once more something was moving on the road from town, five miles away in a direct line. Every now and then he raised his eyes and looked. A stranger would not have found what attracted Abe’s attention without having it pointed out to him.

  In years long gone by, Abe would have refused to allow such a trifle to intrude on his thought; it would have seemed a fit occupation for such as Hartley or Mrs. Grappentin. It was his disinclination to spy upon his possible neighbours, more perhaps than his disinclination to be spied upon, which had induced him to plant his wind-break all around his yard; south of the Somerville Line, wind-breaks were drawn only north and west of the buildings; for south and east winds were rarely violent and never cold. Abe had excluded all views; even on himself his place had made the impression of a walled castle. Nicoll, Stanley, and Shilloe had followed his plan. The district bore the imprint of his mind.

  Along the road from town a black spot was crawling north. Abe had learned to interpret such things with an unfailing accuracy: it was a buggy coming from town.

  Now Abe had been in the field all day and knew that no buggy had gone to town but his. Strangers visiting the district, salesmen and collectors, did not travel in horse-drawn vehicles. This was a small buggy drawn by a single horse: Frances was coming home.

  Nothing strange about that. Ruth had been in need of supplies from the store and had wished to send Mary a message. The girl, having attended to her errands, was coming home. Nothing strange about that.

  Yet, as the buggy crept north–the pony was ageing–Abe felt disquieted. When it had crossed the ditch at Hilmer’s Corner, horse and vehicle became articulated against the sky, distorted by the mirage. The horse looked like a long, cylindrical body with mere hair-lines for its legs, as a child would draw it with a few strokes of the pencil. Behind it, the box floated on a silver surface, its wheels eclipsed by the eddies set up by the horse in the wavy air.

  The only strange thing about it was that, in the morning, Frances had worn a light dress; and whoever sat on the near side of the buggy now wore dark clothes. Once seen and noted, this seemed sufficient to disquiet Abe. Who was with the girl?

  Abe was still watching the buggy as it approached the washout in the grade when his attention was claimed by a buck which swung into line with the skids of the scaffold. Yet even while, with automatic precision, he dumped the load, he kept an eye on the vehicle as the horse hesitated on the brink and gingerly descended into the gap, completely eclipsed by the mirage. By the time the horses were circling away, the vehicle had reached the bridge at Nicoll’s Corner. Before Abe began to work the newly-dumped load upwards, he stood for a moment leaning on the handle of his fork, up to his hips in hay.

  The buggy turned at the corner, and the mystery resolved itself. Frances was not alone; but the person with her was a woman. At least there was nothing in her companion for gossip to take hold of; for Abe knew that everybody in the district, down to the men and boys in the field, had watched the vehicle as closely as he himself.

  A few minutes later, the woman with Frances revealed her identity by a characteristic motion in readjusting herself on her seat, it was Mary. Quietly Abe went on creating order out of chaos.

  Steadily the slow-trotting horse approached beyond the ditch; again a buck claimed Abe’s attention. As he dumped it, he glanced about. Another half-day would finish their work.

  When the buck departed, Abe could no longer see the buggy; it had disappeared beh
ind the stack. He went on with his work; but when he had finished, he took a few plunging steps upward, steadying himself with his fork, till he could look over the top of the now considerably lengthened stack, straight into his yard, through the gap in the wind-break. The buggy had turned in and was heading for the little gate in the fence of the house-yard. With the back of his hand Abe wiped the sweat off his brow.

  Never before had Mary come in a vehicle not her own, except on that Christmas Day when Marion had tried to elope. But this was summer; the doctor kept a small car which Mary drove. How did she intend to go home? Did she mean to stay overnight? It must have been something of importance which had brought her out. Abe waited till she and Frances had alighted, tying the horse to the gate-post in which there was a ring. Then, on the way to the house, they disappeared behind the wind-break. Abe returned to his work. Had he been on his own side of the full-flowing ditch, he would have gone to the house to inquire; as it was, his gate, twenty rods away, was four miles distant.

  For the rest of the afternoon a certain disquietude did not leave him, not even when, about six o’clock, he saw Mary returning to town, alone, in the buggy. He was restless. More and more frequently he looked about to see whether the next buck was not yet coming, as though to accelerate the work. Not that the speed would have made any difference, for the work would go on till dark in any case. It was just a feeling of impatience with a day which seemed unwilling to end.

  Behind the wind-break, the house stood undisturbed, its dark-red walls showing here and there between the thinning masses of foliage. At times the pleasant picture darkened to his eye till it seemed silent and sinister, holding a secret. Till Mary had departed, the little horse had stood between its shafts, knock-kneed, its head hanging low.

  At last the dark rose like a wave rolling up from the east. The mown grass and the stubble became beaded with dew, its scent intensified. Dusk comes fast on the level prairie, and with a tremendously accentuated contrast against the bright light of day. Horizons are hazy; the sun, perhaps still above the rim of the world, loses its power of orienting such light as remains. It turns into a vermilion disk. Dampness wells up with a chill…And still the work went on.