Read Ebook: God's Green Country: A Novel of Canadian Rural Life by Chapman Ethel M

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Ebook has 791 lines and 67210 words, and 16 pages

"There's always that chance."

"There is anywhere. What do you mean?"

"Just that nine women out of ten in these parts don't have time to bring up their children; that if they were given half the care you give the milk critters the young ones would have a better chance to start with. The air may be good enough in the fields, but it's no elixir after it's been shut up all day in a house so badly heated that you have to keep the windows down tight to keep things from freezing. Did you ever see where they slept in there? A little room off the kitchen just big enough for a bed and the window frozen down from summer to summer. I told Brown the danger, but he reckoned he got enough fresh air out doors all day, and if his wife had a cough it was no place for her in a draught. Besides, he said, she was prowling around so late at night sewing for the kids that the little time she was in bed didn't matter much. Now he's afraid he's caught it from her, but he hasn't. He's in too healthy a shape to catch anything. It's different with a woman, spent with the children coming and the long hours and the work that you couldn't hire a girl to do. I'm not so sure of the children being safe; they're none too strong to start with."

The young man resented this.

"Ain't you pretty hard on Brown?" he demanded. "You won't find a harder workin' or a kinder man to his family anywhere; nor a woman more contented or that took more pride in her home than she did. I don't like to hear him talked about as if he was to blame for this. Nor she wouldn't."

The doctor's eyes wandered up to the window with its patched, starched curtains, and row of tomato cans holding weary-looking geraniums. There were new coverings of wall-paper around the tins--a pitiful reminder of a woman's struggle to keep her house to the last.

"No, she wouldn't," he agreed quietly. "She thought the sun rose and set on Jim and the kids.... And I'm not blaming him. He thought this driving and saving now was going to make things easier later on, and he just got the habit and couldn't stop. What you all need around here is a little more physiological common sense. How's Hazel?"

The question seemed ill-timed.

"First rate," the husband answered. "She's over there."

The doctor looked over to the girl who a year ago had left the smoke of the town for the haven of the green country. The plume in her chiffon hat sagged a little; her wedding dress hung a bit limp, her face seemed noticeably pale through the tan. Altogether, to his professional eye, she didn't look as well as when she left the town.

In the house the service was beginning. Through the open door in the strained quiet of the drowsy afternoon, the voice of the minister came steadily in the melancholy cadence of the old text:

"Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."

In his dumb, helpless way the father tried to comfort the oldest little girl, the only one of the children who could know anything of the meaning of their loss. He was no callous materialist. He was suffering the full agony of his first great sorrow and he couldn't see why it had been sent to him.

At the gate the doctor gripped the minister's hand warmly. "That was a fine sermon," he said. "Never heard better for a time like this. Ye didn't talk as though you were glad of the chance to warn us of the agony of hell. 'Man is of few days and full of trouble.' ... It's a great text. Now some day," the doctor was neither amused or irreverent, "some Sunday, can't you preach from it again, and tell 'em how to stretch the time out and make it happier? I could give you some facts. Bless your heart, man, it would be the most opportune sermon you ever preached in your life. If you were in a city church you'd be fighting sweat shops and child labor. You've got them here, just a little more hidden from the public."

When it was all over, Billy trudged off up the road after his mother, trudged because he was stiff and sore from the day's experiences, also because his feet hurt. His Sunday shoes had been too big for him once, but they pinched his feet terribly since he started to go barefoot. They were hard, sturdy, unyielding little cases. Billy hated to go to Sunday school on account of them--but he always took them off on his way home. He asked his mother if he could now, but she paid no attention. She was walking very fast, looking straight ahead of her. At last he caught her skirt and she stopped quickly, bent down and put her arms tight around him, drawing in her breath in sharp little gasps. He was afraid she was going to cry. He had never seen her cry, and it frightened him.

"What's the matter?" he asked, drawing away.

"Nothing. Just take them off, sonny, and how'd you like to go across the fields now and bring the cows? I'm a little anxious about Dolly."

Fears for Dolly were not ungrounded. Following the instinct of her kind, the aristocratic little Jersey had slipped away by herself on this particular afternoon. Billy found the rest of the cows waiting at the bars, lowing to be milked after a day on the heavy spring pasture. It was only necessary to let them into the lane and they started off home in a bobbing file. To find the missing cow was another proposition.

Billy knew the magnitude of the task, and planned his course with the ingenuity of a general. He would climb the hill first and inspect the cedar thickets; then he would come down through the gully where the rocks and thorns and hazel bushes made strange hiding places. If she wasn't there he would have to inspect the fence into the neighbor's woods. The pasture was rough and thickety, but he knew every foot of the ground--he had covered it on similar occasions before, and if he suffered some anxiety as to whether he could locate the cow before dark, there was also a pleasant little thrill of adventure in the undertaking.

But Dolly wasn't among the cedars, and she hadn't found a shelter in the valley. The shadows were creeping out long and misty when Billy, with an unsteady feeling under his belt, turned his scrutiny to the line fence. Sure enough, there was a spot where the dead bush topping the ridge of piled up stones was trampled and broken. The high-strung little heifer had taken a dangerous climb to find a sanctuary worthy of her great moment. Beyond the break in the fence there wasn't a clue to the direction she had taken--nothing but solid, damp woods, and it was getting dark. Then over the fields came two slow, familiar calls from the dinner bell. A warm flood of relief came over Billy; his mother was telling him to come home--maybe his father had come back and would hunt the cow.

Dan hadn't come home yet. He was just driving into the yard when Billy came up. Besides, he had spent the afternoon in a rather noisy hang-out in town and was in no humor for hunting stray cattle.

"Chores all done?" he asked in the edged voice that the family had learned to listen for. Billy had never thought of chores. He remembered them now with a feeling of guilt. At the same time his quick senses observed the quietness of the pigs in the pen, the horses crunching their hay in the stable. "Seems as if mother's done them," he replied. "I went from the funeral to get the cows. Dolly's missing."

"You mean to say you went off all afternoon when you knew that heifer needed watchin'? And you haven't found her yet? Well, just git right back and stay till you do find her. Never mind about your mother callin' you. You ain't dealin' with your mother now. What I'm telling' you is not to show yourself back here till you find that cow, if it takes you till daylight."

If the task of finding a hiding cow in the woods at night had seemed impossible before, it was the last thing Billy hoped for now, as he stumbled rapidly back over the humpy path through the stubble field, blinding, angry tears burning his eyes and a child's bitter vengeance surging up inside of him and finding an outlet in strange, mad little curses. At the edge of the woods the feeling began to cool in a new sensation. Billy wouldn't have admitted what it was, but the place was so still and dark and far away from everywhere, that the breaking of a dry twig under his feet set his pulses beating wildly. There were weird stories afloat in the neighborhood that the wood was a dark haunt of tramps, and ever since old Enoch, the half-witted brother of a neighbor, had wandered off and gotten lost in the heart of it and only his pitiful crying had brought the men with their lanterns, school children had avoided it as the abode of all things lunatic and uncanny.

But Billy couldn't avoid it now. With hands clenched and legs stiffened and cold he began his lone patrol, rustling the dead leaves as little as possible and stopping to listen every few seconds, as he groped deeper into the blackness. Once he called "Dolly," but the hoarse, strained voice came whispering back from behind a hundred tree trunks. He didn't move till they had finished. Once he stumbled against a rotten log, and a cat leaped almost from under his feet and shot in long lopes off into the bracken. Instinctively Billy broke off a dead limb--he had heard of ugly encounters with bush cats in the hungry season, and the consciousness that his presence of mind hadn't entirely left him brought new courage. For the first time since he entered the wood he really remembered what he was there for. The blood began to circulate in his shaking limbs, and he found himself peering into the blackness and listening--not for "sounds" this time, but for Dolly.

Years after, in a wood in Flanders, on a night mercifully blacker than this, moving like a shadow among the willows, keeping his eyes raised from the pitiful staring eyes on the ground around him, and calling softly in a voice scarcely above the warm, scented wind off the field, his memory played him a strange trick. A shutter in his brain seemed to click, revealing for an instant an old picture, as though this experience had happened to him before somewhere. Was the thing "getting" him as he had seen it get others? With a new terror in his drawn face he put his hand to his head and whispered, "Oh, God, not that!" Then over his bleared consciousness came a tinkling like a little bell, and a voice, clear, sweet and confident: "Billy, boy, it's all right. I'm here." And the tears came with a flood of relief and comfort, just as they had done years before when he stood in the woods of the old swamp farm, hearing her call and the tinkling of her milk pail. She had come to help him.

So are the hardest experiences made bearable by such a love, and the bitterest tragedies averted even through its memory.

It was a strong, free "Whoo-oo," that the boy sent ringing through the woods now. It started a dozen little creatures scuttling back to their holes--and right beside him a crackling of dead underbrush, the sound of a short, quick trot, a low bellow either of fear or warning, then not five yards away from him, with lowered head and eyes blazing in the darkness stood the Jersey heifer.

Billy knew that for the moment the gentle, domesticated little beast was as dangerous as any of the wild cattle of the plains. A few minutes before he would have been paralyzed at the vague shape in the darkness with its blazing eyes and low, threatening guttural sounds. Now, with the confidence inspired by his mother's nearness, came a self mastery and a happy feeling of competence. He advanced steadily, ready to dart behind a tree if the cow showed any real sign of attack, calmly enough repeating, "Steady, Dolly; so, Boss." Evidently the cow recognized and trusted him; he had petted her all her life; also he was not coming near her calf. She had hidden it in a spot quite safe from intrusion. Sure of that she was not averse to being friendly. There was nothing to do but to try to make her comfortable where she was for the night; that was why his mother had brought the milk-pail. With a knowledge acquired of experience she learned that the calf had fed itself; that meant that it was all right. Glowing like prospectors who have found a yellow vein and marked the place, they made their way out of the wood.

Down in the hollow a light twinkled in the kitchen window; it was nearly midnight and Billy found himself stumbling over the rough pasture field half asleep and decidedly out of temper.

"My, but I hate this place," he stormed bitterly. "Soon's I'm big enough to get away it won't see much more of me, I can tell you."

His mother was silent. She never used the evasive "You must not say such things." Perhaps the most eloquent part of her life was its quietness. Just now Billy felt his conscience twinge under it. Her patience was teaching him early to overcome the selfishness of youth. He knew that always hers was the greater suffering, but she never complained; so a bit sheepishly he added: "And I suppose that's just when I might be able to save you and Jean some. But I could make lots of money then; we'd be independent; we could all go together."

"Oh, no, sonny, we couldn't do that. Things will be different. There'll be a way for you and Jean. We'll find one somehow. Maybe your father'll see things differently after a while. I think that'll be a fine calf of Dolly's; likely almost a cream coat with black points and big soft, black eyes, like a young deer's."

"I think she was a fool to trail it away in there as if she thought we'd kill it. I'd have been gooder'n gold to it at home. It was just a chance that we found her at all, and I'm sure no one wants to go prowlin' around the swamp at this time of the night."

Then she told him what she knew of nature's primitive laws handed down from Dolly's wild ancestors--how the wild birds protect their young from preying enemies and why the old turkey hen, tame for generations, always tried to hide her nest. She also told him of whatever beautiful things she knew to look and listen for in the woods at night, simple, wonderful lore that her father had given her on their walks through the woods to salt the cattle on Sundays. Before Billy had finished his bread and milk and crawled into bed he had resolved to explore that wood again. He wasn't afraid of it now; it was a real outdoor theatre.

But long after he was asleep his mother lay awake on the lounge downstairs, listening to the heavy breathing in the next room and thinking. It had troubled her a good deal lately, this night thinking, always looking back and wondering just how present situations had come about. Life had sprung up around her so happily in her beautiful old home. Only to live and laugh and be happy--that was all that was expected of her, and if it didn't seem enough, if she had visions, mysterious inward stirrings of something creative crying for expression, she generally kept them to herself. At last she suggested it timidly--she wanted to go to school, she wanted to do something. She didn't know just what. How could she when she had never had a chance to see what there was to be done? But her father had laughed and petted her and said he guessed he could keep his only little girl. It was a pretty hard lookout if a man couldn't protect his one pet lamb from being buffetted about in the world, fighting for a living with men, and losing their respect and her own womanliness by working at a man's job. And he added with unconcealed disappointment that it wasn't like her to want such a thing when she could have the protection of her father's home.

She didn't realize then, of course, how miserably inadequate such a protection might be, but the argument silenced her. She felt keenly ashamed of herself--sort of in a class with the long-spurred hen cropping up every year, a menace to the social life and economic purpose of the flock. They seemed to think she wanted to "go into the world" for the mere joy of adventure or the hope of notoriety, either of which would almost have frightened her to death. But the uncontrollable little voice inside wouldn't be quiet. It still cried out to create something, to be a part of the scheme that makes the world go round.

Then Dan came, Dan with his handsome face and buoyant, indomitable swing, a fine animal--and the time-old instinct leapt into a flame. There had never been anyone else, because there hadn't been anyone else in the neighborhood, and she had never been out of it, and this seemed just what she had been waiting for. She wasn't introspective, and she didn't stop to analyze this feeling, of course. Apart from the tumultuous sway of it there were secret visions which she would not for worlds have revealed to anyone, but which brought her the only reassurance, "This is real"--a train of little white figures to hold close for a while, then to send out into the world to do the things she had wanted to do. They would be just like Dan, of course, but they would be guided by the spark she had kept smouldering in her dreams for them.

Now that the dream had failed it never occurred to her that she had made a mistake. Dan was still her man; she couldn't have imagined things otherwise, only she wondered what she could do, working single-handed and against odds, to give the children a chance. What if, in the fight ahead of her, she should go out as she had seen several of her neighbors go, coming up to the battle spent and tired out, trying desperately to hang on, then suddenly letting go because the overstrained vitality just snapped? Staring into the darkness she whispered over and over, "Oh, God, I can't--not yet."

Summer had passed with the anxiety and toil of harvest, and the cheering presence of numberless bird colonies, living out the romances and cares of their family history in the meadow of the Swamp Farm. The sumachs in the fence corners were turning crimson before a plan that had long been evolving in Mary's mind took definite direction. Dan had gone on a two days' trip for one of his agencies. It might be the only opportunity she would have for secrecy. Nothing had ever before driven her to such drastic measures, but never before had she had so much at stake. She felt distinctly guilty as she evaded Billy's few searching questions and looked away from the troubled appeal in Jean's brimming eyes. For the first time in their lives she was leaving them; no wonder they had misgivings. She was almost frightened herself, at this new thing that could drive her to practise such deception.

That was before Jean was born, and Dan had brought her in to the lawyer's office. He had sold a town lot that her father had given her, and superficial as it might seem, it had been necessary for her to come to the lawyer's office to put her name to the deed, and sign another paper applying the proceeds against the mortgage on the Swamp Farm. It was the first time Mary had put her name to any legal document except her marriage certificate, and she wished now that she had known more about what these papers meant with their dazzling red seals and nothing clear about them except the dotted line for her name.

She had another town lot, though. That was what had brought her out on such a questionable adventure to-day. Dan had sold it too, but when he came home with arrangements all made to take her to town the next day to sign the papers again, she gave him the biggest surprise of his married life by saying she didn't want to sell; she wanted to keep that lot--her father had given it to her.

And then Dan dropped his indulgent, protective attitude quite suddenly. He asked her "what in hell" she expected to do with the lot, then. Did she think she could look after it herself? She knew about as much about business as a squaw. How was any woman to look after her interests in legal affairs where even a man had to keep his eyes open? And who would be expected to take care of such things for her if not her husband? He also enlarged upon a business man's attitude toward women who cared to mix up in such things instead of keeping their place. Altogether he was very much annoyed over this unexpected check in his affairs. It was extremely humiliating to have to tell Harding that his wife, for sentimental reasons, didn't want the lot sold; besides he needed the money. He had no doubt about getting it ultimately, of course. Several plans might be worked to that end, one of the most feasible being to take Billy out of school because there were no funds forthcoming to hire help. But even under the pressure of this, Mary was risking his further displeasure, and taking a venture that would have seemed madness to her a year ago.

The world seemed swimming around her when she entered the lawyer's office, nervously tucking back the damp hair from her forehead, and painfully conscious of the years-old cut of her dress, the road-dust on her shoes, and her absolute ignorance of what to do. If the lawyer was surprised he didn't show it. His practice was not very pressing in the sleepy little town, and he could afford time to put his clients at ease before proceeding to business.

"You mean," he repeated when she had explained her errand, "that you have changed your mind about the lot; that you would like to see Harding this afternoon?"

She assented with inward panic at the thought of it. "Or would I need to see him? You couldn't just--telephone him or something? I should be getting back, and I wanted to--it seems foolish--but I thought I would like to make my will."

"I see. And you think if you had the lot turned into cash it would be easier to leave it as you want to? I'll just ask Harding to come around. You feel that you know what the lot's worth?"

"Why, I hadn't thought much about that. Father paid five hundred for it, I think."

"That was a long time ago. A dollar doesn't go as far now. Do you remember just what Harding offered Mr. Withers this spring?"

"Six hundred."

The lawyer's mouth hardened a little. He had heard the offer made in his office, and had suspected that Dan wanted to reserve a few hundred for immediate use.

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