Produced by Andrew Sly, Stephen Hope and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
God's Green Country
A NOVEL OF CANADIAN RURAL LIFE
By ETHEL M. CHAPMAN
THE RYERSON PRESS TORONTO 1922
To
The Memory of a Friend
whose Vision Saw an Arcadia
for Every Field of the Green Country
and
whose Brief Years of Sympathy and Service
were Given to Make it Real for
One Spot in Rural Ontario
CONTENTS
Chapter I. 18
Chapter II. 34
Chapter III. 44
Chapter IV. 57
Chapter V. 72
Chapter VI. 92
Chapter VII. 107
Chapter VIII. 114
Chapter IX. 132
Chapter X. 152
Chapter XI. 178
Chapter XII. 193
Chapter XIII. 211
Chapter XIV. 220
Chapter XV. 230
Chapter XVI. 245
Chapter XVII. 252
Chapter XVIII. 262
Chapter XIX. 281
God's Green Country
CHAPTER I.
"_Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in their nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the West--
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free._"
--_Mrs. Browning._
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."
"I thought perhaps you could get Jonas to help with the potatoes
to-morrow. He isn't working."
"Oh, you did, did you? An' while you were thinkin' so active, did you
think where the money was comin' from to pay Jonas? I've throwed away
enough good money hirin' men. It don't ever occur to you, I suppose,
thet we've a boy of our own thet's never done much to pay for his
keep yet? He's got to take holt now."
"But he needs to be at school so badly, just now," she ventured
timidly. "The teacher called to-day to say she felt sure he'd pass
this summer if he could get to school regularly from now on."
"Well, you can tell the teacher for me, thet we ain't makin' no
professor out o' Bill. When I was ten year old I was harrowin' an
drivin' team, doin' a man's work. There was no school for me except
what I got in the winters. Spite o' that, though, I ain't such a fool
as you take me for. I can see as far into a mill stone as them that
picks it, an' I ain't more'n usual blind just now. You think what's
good enough fer me ain't good enough fer Bill. You don't care how
hard I work so's he can get to school an' learn enough tomfoolery to
get him a job thet he can clear out to, about the time he's able to
be some help. But you jest ain't dealin' with the right man. You've
molly-coddled that young one long enough now. To-morrow he starts
his career with _me_, an' he'll maybe think he's struck fire an'
brimstone before the day's over."
It wasn't a case for argument. The children were beginning to look up
apprehensively, and Mary called them to come to bed. In the darkness
of the kitchen when she was getting down the lamp, Billy waited to
whisper: "He didn't say I could go to school, did he?"
It was hard to look into the wistful, searching face and say "No." It
was harder when Billy turned away quickly and kept his face averted
while he got the little tin basin to wash his feet. His mother's
hard, gentle hand rested for a moment on his shoulder and dropped
away discouraged at the quivering of the resolute little back. Her
whole body ached to take him in her arms. He really wasn't much more
than a baby yet, but such expressions were denied her in the
never-ending struggle to keep her emotions dammed back. Only the
anxiety of love, the eagerness of service were busy in a thousand
ways from the first stirrings of daylight until long after the family
were asleep.
As she hung up the key of the clock Dan came in. At the entrance to
the darkness of the little bedroom off the kitchen he stopped,
slipping a brace over his shoulder, and looking back with a hard
little glitter in his eyes inquired:
"C'n you git that fellow up to catch the horses by five o'clock? ....
'Cause if you can't I _kin_."
Another of the thousand bitter details!
In the morning Mary kindled the fire and busied herself about the
kitchen as long as she dared before climbing the narrow stairs to
Billy's room. Then she hesitated. There was something so blue and
drawn about the closed eyelids; already his hands were bent and
calloused like a man's.
"An' him not much more'n a baby," she murmured. It seemed nothing
short of cruel to disturb him. Perhaps he would waken himself if she
just kept looking at him.
But Billy didn't waken. Once he twitched nervously, but a boy
consumed with the weakening fever of growth doesn't waken easily
after working the length of a man's day, with "chores" afterwards. He
had to be shaken several times before the slow, painful process
began. It started somewhere in his dimmest consciousness, and
gradually sent a long, slow quiver down through his healthy little
muscles and back again, emerging in a gulping breath that seemed to
shake his eyes open. Ordinarily he would have closed them again, but
this morning the bewildering memory of something dreadful hanging
over him brought him to, suddenly.
It wasn't so bad once he got up. The smarting soon left his eyes, and
the stiffness began to go out of his legs. They ached, of course,
from the heels up, but that was from trying to keep up to the colts
on the harrow yesterday. Then his mother had a berry turnover waiting
for him to start out on. She had been telling him that, he
remembered, while she tried to get him awake. So he took the halters
in one hand and the turnover in the other and started out for the
horses in a very philosophical frame of mind, considering everything.
The dew on the grass was cool to his bare feet; the robins in the
bushes as he passed didn't seem to expect anyone so early, so from
their reckless chattering he learned the location of many a new nest.
He marked the places so he could show them to Jean. On the hill in
the pasture, where the sun was just coming up like a yellow half
ball, the young cattle stood out like pieces cut out of black paper
and pasted on; they looked funny when they moved. Then it was good to
get up on old Nell's broad grey back, and feel the shake of the
friendly muscles under him. Altogether, if some miracle could have
given him a father who would occasionally see eye-to-eye with him on
things agricultural and personal, Billy would almost have played
hookey from school for a life like this.
The forenoon seemed to be going uneventfully enough. Dan's rather
threatening admonition when they began the planting had been to "look
sharp now" and not keep the horses standing, and Billy had determined
to keep ahead of them at the sacrifice of any minor details. He had
been shown just how far apart to drop the pieces, but when you see
the furrow reaching up behind you like an unfriendly snake, and no
escape before the end of the row; when the handle of the pail is
cutting into the flesh of your arm and the bags of seed are rods down
the field, there is a powerful temptation to make what you have go as
far as possible. Suddenly the horses stopped and Dan came around to
examine the planting.
"Hev you dropped 'em all as far apart as this?" he asked. "I might
'a' knowed I couldn't trust you. Never saw the time yet that you
wasn't a durn sight more bother than help. Well, you c'n just stake
off these rows, an' when we're through plantin' you c'n dig 'em up
with the hoe, an' plant 'em right. Mebby that'll learn you a little
more than goin' to school fer a while."
Just when the neighbors' dinner bells began to call the men from the
farther fields, Dan again called across the headland: "You'd better
go to the barn an' get some more seed. Save the prize Carmens here
fer the last rows an' mind to shut the gate after you or the sow'll
be in."
Billy hitched old Nell to the stone-boat, shut the gate after him and
went for the seed. When he came back the gate was still closed, but
Tibby and her family were demolishing the last of the prize Carmens.
When she found she had to leave, she made straight for the vulnerable
spot in the stump fence that had given her entrance. Billy drove the
pigs ahead of him and went after some rails. On the way he heard his
mother ring the dinner-bell, saw, from many a furtive glance back,
his father stop at the littered remains of the prize Carmens, look
all around and start on to the barn. The most Billy could hope for
was that his wrath might have cooled a little before he would have to
meet him. By the time he had blocked the hole in the fence and
brought Nell up to the stable his father had gone to the house, so he
climbed up and put down the hay, dampened old Nell's oats as usual,
so she wouldn't choke on them, and with his little heart palpitating
till he could hardly swallow, approached the house.
The savory steam of stewed chicken came out from the kitchen. When
the meat supply ran low in the spring his mother killed off the old
hens. She always made hot biscuits to break into the gravy and had
the grandest pot pies ever to tide a fellow over a time like this. If
they had it for dinner when he was at school she saved a drumstick
and the gizzard for him. He was almost forgetting his soul's anxiety
in the urgent pressure of his animal wants.
Mary knew something of what had happened. In fact Dan had informed
her without softening the details. Still, in spite of the morning's
"aggrevations," he was eating his dinner with satisfactory relish
when Billy came in. She met Billy at the door to ask cheerfully:
"How'd you get along?"
"Fine," Billy answered with a disconcerting unsteadiness under the
attempt.
"Well, just get washed now, and have your dinner while it's hot. I
have some nice pot pie here."
But this was a little too much for Dan. To be ignored so brazenly in
the face of the storm he had been brewing with inward satisfaction,
to be treated as though he were no more than a figurehead in his own
house! He had often declared that there was a secret understanding,
a conspiracy against him in his own family, and it was time to show
where he stood now.
"You hain't got no pot-pie fer him," he interrupted. "He'll git his
belly full o' something else 'sides pie when I'm through here."
All at once Billy's fortitude gave way. Perhaps because he was tired
and hungry, his flesh quailed before the coming ordeal. "I didn't
leave the gate open," he cried, wild terror in his eyes. "The pigs
got in through the fence. I found the place."
"You consarned little liar! You fool away the whole morning, spoil
the whole patch with yer lazy tricks, thinkin' I wouldn't see 'em,
then let the stock in to eat up the seed I've paid fer. I'll just
waken you up so's I'll warrant you'll think twice before you try the
like again."
The rawhide was coming down from its hook; it had been kept in the
house ever since Billy could remember.
"Now, Dan," Mary pleaded with her hand on his arm--a gentleness of
touch that always irritated him into a frenzy, "you aren't fit to
punish him now ... and he did his best."
"You dictatin' too, hey!" he stormed, pushing her off. "No wonder the
young un's no good with your eternal coddlin' an' interferin'. Stand
out the way there."
But the mother-tigress instinct was roused in its helpless way.
Still she clung to his arm. Only Billy seemed to have come to any
self-control.
"Don't, mummy," he ordered calmly; "I c'n stand it."
The nerve, the audacity of the proud little figure angered Dan more
because it shamed him. If the boy had been a foot taller his father
would have been cowed by the quiet reproach in the steady brown eyes,
but Billy was only such a little handful of bones--something like a
bird when you cover it with your hand and find it all feathers and
skeleton and crushable, so he suffered the full punishment--the
sickening, lithe, cutting, kind of blows that we have shivered to
hear dealt to colts out in the far recesses of the green country,
away from the danger of official interference. He emerged ridged,
welted, white and tearless, with an ugly red streak across one cheek
that somehow Dan wished wasn't there. It made the rest of his face
look so white and pinched and old for its years.
Potato planting had been suspended for the day. Without excuse or
errand Dan had driven off to town. Straggling buggies began driving
down the road--people, neighbors most of them, all dressed up like
they went to church on Sundays, the sun shining pleasantly on the
horses' sleek backs and glittering over the bright parts of the
harness. Billy climbed up to the vantage point of the gate post, and
looked up the road eagerly, as many another boy has watched for a
circus parade. Yes, it was coming just over the hill--he could see
the bright black top of it--the hearse. He remembered that this was
the day of Mrs. Brown's funeral, and he had heard his mother say she
ought to go; maybe he could go with her.
He had been at old Mr. Hopkin's funeral when he was quite small and
had enjoyed it immensely. It had seemed just like a story to watch
the people all moving around so still as if they expected something;
to see the black box with its silver handles and the flowers all
piled on top--he had wanted his mother to lift him up to see in, but
she didn't. Mr. Hopkins' family were all there, fine, rich-looking
men and women with their hair beginning to turn grey and children of
their own almost grown up. And the people had sung "The Lord's my
Shepherd, I'll not want." It was just fine. You could almost see old
Mr. Hopkins going down the green pastures with his long staff, just
like he came out to salt the sheep, only not so bent over, and maybe
with a long gown on like the charts showed at Sunday school. He would
likely have found Mrs. Hopkins, who had died two years before, and
they would sit under the trees and both be happier than they had been
in all their lives. One of the daughters had said, "He never was the
same since Ma died," and Billy's faith never questioned the goodness
of the angels in taking him to her. Altogether there was nothing sad
about it, except that everyone would miss old Mr. Hopkins for a
while.
But this funeral to-day would be different. There were children at
Brown's--some of them just babies. Mrs. Brown couldn't be much older
than his mother. People said she had consumption, and when Billy had
called to ask hands to the threshing last fall he had seen her at the
pump, and she looked so white and thin she had almost frightened him.
When he asked if he could carry the water for her she couldn't
answer--just leaned on the pump and coughed and coughed. He had seen
her helping her husband plant potatoes once too. She hadn't looked so
bad then, but that was a year ago. Well, she would be through now. He
had heard his grandmother say once that there were "a thousand things
worse than death." Maybe it was true. He climbed stiffly down from
the gate post and walked reflectively to the house.
Long before the hour, the Brown house was filled with people; others
gathered in little knots about the yard. Men exchanged views of the
crop prospects, and occasionally when the drone of the bees in the
lilacs and the creak of the buggies in the lane ceased for a moment,
a remark like "That sod field ought to go fifty bushel to the acre,"
sounded irrelevantly across the yard. The women talked only of the
deceased--when she had taken the turn, how she had said good-bye to
the children the last night and sent them off to bed with a smile,
then gone completely out of her mind in the bitterness of it--and how
hard it was going to be for Jim. He was just getting ready to build a
barn too; a pile of gravel a few yards from the back door was
evidence of its progress--it seemed hard, just when they were getting
along so well. And he had done all for her that a man could do. He
had even had her to the sanitarium; but it was no use--once you got
consumption there was just one thing to wait for. They reviewed the
lives and deaths of her ancestors to see where she had inherited it,
but could find no trace of the trouble for three generations back.
She had always been so smart and strong, too. Why, when she was first
married she could do as much as any other two women in the
neighborhood.
The old doctor, friend and terror of the community, stopped to shake
hands with a strong, honest-looking young fellow leaning against the
fence.
"Pretty hard, eh?" he remarked nodding towards the house.
"Sure is. It's a bad thing to let get hold of you. I know from
experience. I worked in the city for a couple of years in a wholesale
house once. Got a notion I didn't like farming, you know, like lots
of other young fellows do--and I believe if I'd stayed there a year
longer, cooped up in a cage breathing the dust and smoke of the
place, I'd never got back at all. But I got out of it in time. I'm
out in the field now ten hours a day. I eat like a horse and I'll bet
you couldn't find a spot on my lungs with the point of a needle. I'm
always glad I was able to bring Hazel out to the farm. She gets tired
of it sometimes, after always being in a store, but I tell her it's
the healthiest place this side of Switzerland--all the fresh air
there is clean off the fields, and the best place in the world to
bring up children."
"Isn't turning out very well for these kids here."
"Losing their mother?--No."
"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."