: God's Green Country: A Novel of Canadian Rural Life by Chapman Ethel M - Farm life Canada Fiction

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God's Green Country

Something was wrong--a little more than usual--at the Withers farm.

A spirit of foreboding seemed to hang in the quietness of the untravelled road past the gate, in the clamorous squeaks of the new litter of Tamworths in the barnyard, nosing sleepily into their mother's side. It seemed to come up from the swamp in the spring night's pollen-scented breath, like the air in a little close parlor after an anchor of hyacinths has been carried out on a coffin.

Billy felt the weight in the atmosphere, but he was too young to analyse it. Of all the old human emotions stirring the ten long bitter years of his short life, fear had been the most exercised; and it was fear that troubled him now--fear of his father. Because it had been there always, he had never wondered about it. He knew that somehow, in spite of it all, he would grow up--then he would put the Swamp Farm and all he could forget about it as far away from him as possible. In the meantime, with the merciful forgetfulness of childhood, he enjoyed whatever passing pleasures came between. Just now he was down by the milk-house with little Jean, bending over her pathetic garden of four potato plants and a pansy. Billy had never had a garden for himself. It was too much like playing. Besides, as far back as he could remember he had had quite as much gardening as he wanted, taking care of the "hoed crops." It was good, though, to see Jean take the potato top affectionately in her little cupped hands, proud that she had made it grow. Billy was glad she was a girl, so she could have time for such things. Not that he minded work, of course, he soliloquized. He remembered how he had begged daily to go to help his grandfather before he died.

It was working with his father that was disagreeable. Come to think of it, it was the dread of that more than anything else that was bothering him to-night. In the morning the potato planting started. It wasn't difficult to get help just then, but for some reason of his own Dan Withers had decided to take Billy out of school and "break him in" to farm work, just when he was getting ready to try the entrance, too, and the entrance meant such a long step towards qualifying for a job away from home!

Moreover, Billy liked to go to school. It was so different--to work where the teacher showed you how without calling you a stupid--oh, lots of names--and praised you sometimes. Remembering past experiences working with his father his heart sank. Somehow he was just beginning to wonder why, but not for years yet would he realize the injustice of being brought into the world entirely without his own willing, only to be made the prey of a chain of cruel circumstances. He couldn't even see the reason for each individual tribulation. Only his mother knew that, generally, and because she knew and anticipated for the children, hers was a twofold suffering.

Dan Withers came out to the little sagging wooden porch and lit his pipe. Judging from his physique he might have managed the tillable acres of his Swamp Farm with one hand. Also he was not the caricatured work-driven, grasping type of farmer, bent and wooden-jointed and prematurely old, as a result of his struggle to wrest a living from the elements. He had the build of an athlete without the bearing--a laziness of movement and a slouch of the shoulders that was almost insolent, except when he walked before a crowd. He could command a military spine the instant it seemed worth the effort. When the occasion required it the hard cunning in his little brown eyes could take cover, leaving them as soft and honest as a spaniel's. The coarseness of speech that had become a habit in his own family could, with an effort, give way to a more refined vernacular, as eloquent as it was unnatural. He was not a farmer from choice; farm work irritated him. If some vocational expert could have taken him young enough, and put him on the stage, he might have developed into a master actor. As it was, his gift of address was divided among various implement agencies. The run-down farm was a hopeless sideline that supported the family.

Perhaps because Nature is always working to keep her balance and save the race, Mary Withers was made of an entirely different kind of clay. When she followed her husband out to the porch to-night it was under the strain of preparation for one of the thousand battles which, with her gentle, appealing logic, she tried to fight for her children. Her intercessions were never of any avail, but she was no strategist and she knew no other tactics. Moreover she had never been trained to fight. She had come to Dan with no experience outside the shelter of a rosemary, white-linen home, and he had taken the heart out of her so suddenly and overwhelmingly directly after, that she was not likely to ever take any very radical initiative again.

She brought her mending to the porch with her. It was too dark to sew; but when she had to ask Dan for anything she always felt less nervous if she had something in her hands. It was hard to begin.

"The fall wheat yonder is coming on nicely," she ventured cheerfully.

He pressed the hot tobacco into his pipe a little harder than was necessary.

"Oh, yes," he conceded after some deliberation. "Things'll come along nice enough, if a man slaves from one year's end to the other without any help, like I'm fixed."

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