Fruits of the Earth

 

THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

General Editor: David Staines

 

ADVISORY BOARD

Alice Munro

W.H. New

Guy Vanderhaeghe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Author’s Note

PART ONE: ABE SPALDING

The Homestead

The Idyll

First Neighbours

Husband and Wife

The School

The Great Flood

Election

The District

The Child

The Crop

Success

The Bridge

PART TWO: THE DISTRICT

The Prairie

The Changing District

Abe’s Household

The Campaign

The Poll

Jim

The New School

Marion

Changes

The Christmas Dinner

The School-House

The Lure of the Town

Distress

Haying

Ruth

The Conflict

Abe

Map of Spalding District

Map of Somerville Road

Afterword

By Frederick Philip Grove

About the Author

Copyright

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When Joseph Conrad in 1917 reissued Nostromo, he accompanied it by an author’s note the first two paragraphs of which so exactly fit the case of the present book that I cannot refrain from reprinting them here, substituting the present title for Nostromo and Jane Atkinson for Typhoon. Jane Atkinson is an unpublished novel which, at the time of its completion, I considered the last volume of what I have come to call my (still largely unpublished) Prairie Series.

“Fruits of the Earth is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the completion [Conrad says ‘publication’] of Jane Atkinson.

“I don’t mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the Prairie Series it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.

“This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for Fruits of the Earth came to me in the shape” [here I leave Conrad’s text] of certain hints dropped by a real-estate dealer with whom I was driving along over the prairie, regarding the history of a certain farm which we were passing.

This farm was such as to suggest a race of giants who had founded it; but on inquiry I found that it was held by tenants who tilled a bare ten per cent of its acreage. In a barn built for half a hundred horses they kept a team of two sorry nags; and they inhabited no more than two or three rooms of the outwardly palatial house.

I have since found many more farms like that in Manitoba; and in every case I have investigated their history. Slowly, the composite impression gained grew into a compelling urge; and the result was the present story.

F.P.G.

PART ONE

ABE SPALDING

THE HOMESTEAD

When, in the summer of 1900, Abe Spalding arrived in the village of Morley, in the municipality of Somerville, Manitoba, he had been travelling in the caboose of a freight train containing a car with four horses and sundry implements and household goods which belonged to him. He came from the old Spalding homestead in Brant County, Ontario.

He had visited the open prairie a year before and, after careful investigation, filed a claim on the south-west quarter of section five in the township beginning four miles north of Morley. He had had good and valid reasons for choosing that particular location. The neighbourhood as such he had fixed on because his twin sister Mary, who a few years ago had married a doctor by name of Vanbruik, and who up to 1897 had lived in the county seat, was at present, for somewhat obscure reasons, domiciled in this very village of Morley, where her husband, having sold his practice, was conducting the business of a general merchant. The particular quarter section on which Abe Spalding had filed seemed, to the casual observer, to offer no advantage over any other that was available; but he had found that, while the water which covered the district in the spring of the year stood for months on other parts, this quarter, and the whole section to which it belonged, as well as the sections north and south of it, dried several weeks in advance of the rest of the prairie. Further, he had been informed that the province was on the point of drawing two gigantic ditches through the district, one of them being surveyed to pass exactly along the south line of section five. These ditches were not primarily designed to drain a seemingly irreclaimable swamp, but rather to relieve an older settlement farther west, around the town of Torquay; but, while they were not meant to drain the land which he had chosen, he had shrewdly seen that they could not help improving matters. With his mind’s eye he looked upon the district from a point in time twenty years later; and he seemed to see a prosperous settlement there. The soil was excellent, and there was no fundamental farming problem except that of drainage. Lastly, he was not the first settler to make the venture; the two quarters composing the north half of the section had been taken up a decade ago. The men who owned them, it was true, had not been able to make a success; they had left after having wasted their substance and energy, but not before they had received their patents, which they held on the chance that the land might in time become worth a few dollars per acre. A third settler, a bachelor by name of Hall, was actually in residence on the quarter adjoining Abe’s claim to the west.

Abe came from a small Ontario farm of eighty acres, half of which, on account of rock and sharp declivities in its formation, could not be tilled. He was possessed by “land hunger” and he dreamt of a time when he would buy up the abandoned farms from which all buildings had been removed; and, who knows, perhaps even the quarter where Hall was squatting in his sod-hut. In his boldest moments he saw himself prosperous on so great a holding and even reaching out north; for the section there adjoining was No. 8, held, as part of the purchase price paid by the Dominion for the rights of sovereignty in the west, by that ancient institution, the Hudson’s Bay Company. In any other place, where his land would have been surrounded by crown land, any one might have limited Abe’s expansion by settling next to him; for no settler could acquire more than a hundred and sixty acres by “homesteading.” Here, all things going well, Abe might hope one day to possess two square miles; for the Hudson’s Bay Company held its lands only in order to sell them. Abe was a man of economic vision.

As the lumbering freight train banged and clattered to a stop near the little station, in what was euphemistically called “the yard”–distinguished by nothing but a spur of the track running past a loading platform to the three grain elevators along its southern edge–Abe alighted from the caboose and stood for a moment irresolutely by its side. The conductor had told him that the car containing his chattels was going to be shunted to the loading platform, where it would be ready in an hour or so. Abe was not anxious to go to his sister’s house; but his impulsive and impatient temperament made him desirous, above all, to get over that interval of waiting without being too conscious of his wasting time.

He swung about and strode swiftly across to the station, where a few idlers were lounging. Emerging on the east-west road, he found himself at the west end of the village, which had nothing in its aspect that could be called urban. The buildings of Main Street were aligned on one side of this road into which three short by-streets debouched from the north; to the south, the growth of the settlement was arrested by the right-of-way, no buildings but the grain elevators having been erected beyond it. Like the whole landscape, Main Street was treeless; and only the side-streets were shaded by tall cottonwoods which seemed to lose themselves, to the north, in what resembled a natural bluff–a deceptive semblance, for all trees had been planted. Main Street, with its single row of buildings, hardly deserved the name of a street, just as the agglomeration of houses hardly deserved the name of a village; it formed a mere node in the road running, in a straight line, from Somerville in the east to Ivy in the west, a distance of twenty-two miles.

Just beyond the first side-street rose the one building which gave the street a measure of distinction: a store unusual for a small prairie town by reason of its dimensions as well as of the solidity of its red-brick structure; it might have stood in the streets of any small city. The whole of its long, two-storied façade consisted of large show-windows filled with a miscellaneous and effectively arranged exhibit of what could be bought inside, the assortment including everything from farm implements and furniture to groceries and tobacco.

Behind the store, facing west, on the first side-street, stood the one residence which, like the store, had an air approaching dignity.