Читать книгу Clearing in the West. My Own Story - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 6

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I have a wistful memory of the sunlit populous farmyard, over which fresh yellow straw drifted as the wind blew, and where I could rove at will, without a care or a fear. The white house under the red maples, with bright sumach trees in front, threw back the sunshine in a dazzle that made me wink my eyes, but I loved to look at it. There was something about it that satisfied me. It was so sure and safe.

As I drifted around the farmyard, I liked to sing, swaying and dancing to my own music. Mother had heard Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, before she came to Canada, and although my mother was not a singer, she made us understand the moving power of a great voice.

“Come, arouse you, arouse you,

My brave shepherd boy

To the fields, now and labor away,

The dew is sparkling in the beam,

The kine are thronging to the stream!”

That was all I knew but as I sang it, I could hear that golden voice rising and falling in a rushing, sweeping melody that sang in my veins, and wrung my heart with emotion. I never sang this when anyone could hear me for always it made me cry. . . .

I have heard some of the world’s great singers since then, and felt the magic of good music, but never have I been more transfigured or intoxicated with sweet sounds than when, in my fancy, I heard the voice of Jenny Lind, coming to me out of the long past, and from far across the sea,

“The dew is sparkling in the beam,

The kine are thronging to the stream!”

An Ontario farm, in the early eighties, was a busy place, and every one on our farm, moved briskly. My father often said of my mother that she could keep forty people busy. She certainly could think of things for people to do. Maybe that was one reason for my enjoying the farmyard so much. I loved to sit on the top rail of the fence, and luxuriantly do nothing, when I was well out of the range of her vision. Mother herself worked harder than anyone. She was the first up in the morning and the last one to go to bed at night. Our teams were on the land, and the Monday morning washing on the line well ahead of the neighbors’. I know now these things compensated her for the busy life she led, for everyone has to be proud of something.

But I often wished we could all slow down a bit. I wanted to hear more talk. I wanted to do some of it myself too. It seemed too bad to be always rushing. Early to bed and early to rise! To-morrow always crashing in on the heels of today! I heard Will say he was tired of working on a treadmill. I knew he felt like the horses on the threshing-machine; drawing, and walking round and around in endless circles, always going but never arriving. Lizzie, too, who changed her dress the very minute she came in from school and never stopped until bedtime, had often told me to play all I could, and sleep all I could, for when I was big enough to work there would be plenty of it to do.

Even the twenty-fourth of May which is second only to Christmas, had to have its dole of work done in the morning, or there could be no picnic in the afternoon. I remember rising in the gray dawn with the others, and helping in a feverish potato-planting drive, so we could all go to a picnic at the Sauble at two o’clock.

One morning, Hannah and Jack had to have pens, and were sent out to look for enough eggs to make the purchase. Three dozen were found, and after a casting up of figures—copybook ten cents, pens five cents, with eggs ten cents—it seemed a fair hope that the purchase could be made. Of course, there was always the danger that eggs might go down, in which case Hannah would have to wait the pleasure of the hens for her copybook.

Jack was elected to carry the egg-basket for he was ten, and Hannah was only eight. But at this juncture dissension arose. Jack would not carry an egg-basket. He would do anything but that. Carrying eggs and peddling eggs was not a man’s job, Hannah would have to do it. He did not care if he never got a copybook.

Mother could hardly find words to express her indignation. He should be glad we had eggs to sell. Everyone sold eggs!

Jack set his jaw, and repeated his contention. Hannah, who never wasted words, took the basket and departed. She was half-way to the road before her absence was noted.

This was in the early morning of a rainy day, and both Will and George were in the house, and had heard the discussion. “That lad will never make an Ontario farmer,” George said.

Will was eating his breakfast, and suddenly shoved back his plate. “I know how he feels, though I must say it has hit him early. I am tired of the butter-and-egg business too! It does seem that hard work, early and late, should bring in a little money—real money that would be a pleasure to spend. Now we have to sneak in with a basket of eggs, or a crock of butter, when we want a pair of boots or a new tie. . . . The soil is too gravelly and light to grow a decent crop—and the more stones we pick off, the more come up from below. By raking and harrowing, and coaxing them along, the fields will raise cattle-feed and chicken-feed, but no big crops that can be sold for cash. The County of Grey is on a narrow gauge and always will be.”

Mother was standing beside the stove listening to them.

“What can we do, boys?” she said anxiously. “We’re here and we’ve got to live. Your father cleared every bit of this farm, and we can’t just pick up and leave it, and where would we go, anyway?”

Will got up, and began his preparations for going out; a rainy day had its own activities, the seed wheat had to go through the fanning-mill.

“Mr. Cameron has a book about a trip a man made with a dog, from Fort Garry away West, and it’s a wonderful country, he says; the man’s name is Butler, and he came from Tipperary, near Nenagh too.”

Father suddenly became interested. “Look at that now!” he said.

“But can you believe what you read?” mother asked lapsing into her Dundee accent. “Pen and paper refuse nothing.”

“Mr. Cameron believes it,” Will said. “I was in there the other night with the boys, and he read us about a buffalo hunt that was great. Thousands of buffaloes on a plain a hundred miles wide, and not a tree or a stone.”

Will knew he had quieted every doubt, in mother’s mind, for Mr. Cameron was the Presbyterian minister in Chatsworth and had recently come from Scotland. “And there are letters in the Toronto Globe, written by a man called White, saying there’s room for millions of people in the North-West. . . . and you know what George McDougall said.”

“But the cold is terrible in the North-West,” mother said. “I remember the geography we had in our school at home said, that the haymakers were often frozen in their tents, and the country should be left to the Indians.”

“There’s plenty room for the Indians, too,” said Will. “We’ve no idea of the size of the North-West. . . . Mr. Cameron says the Rebellion of 1870 did one good thing, it brought eastern men out there, and let them see the country with their own eyes. They saw it, and saw its good soil, and now there is a real movement to take up land. I’d like to be going, I certainly want better soil than we have here.”

Thomas White’s letters in the Montreal Gazette and Toronto Globe were handed about and read, and discussed at Breeze’s store and in the tavern. The majority of the farmers were skeptical. No country could be as good as this! It was a scheme of the land agents to get honest men’s money! Men who had the best farms in the community spoke this way, but men, particularly young men, who worked on stony farms listened eagerly. Chilblains and stone bruises made their minds receptive.

In the winter of 1878, our neighborhood had a visitor. Young Michael Lowery, who had been gone two years, came home. He had gone to Manitoulin Island first, and then drifted west to the Red River country, where he had fallen in with freighters, earned good money with them, and with it had outfitted for farming, and settled on a piece of land in southwestern Manitoba, where the railway was already surveyed.

Young Michael had really come back to be married, but for family reasons that purpose was carefully concealed. There was still some doubt that he would be able to get his girl away from her aunt, who was a masterful woman, and knowing her niece’s ability as a housekeeper, did not propose to lose her without a struggle.

He was a handsome young giant and wore a shaganappi coat, heavily beaded and fringed on the seams with doe skin, and a red scarf and toque; and he had with him a box of moccasins and gloves made by the Indians. He had many tales to tell of good hunting, big game, narrow escapes, friendly Indians, and above all in fascination for the dwellers along the Garafraxa, hundreds of acres of land, without a stone, or a bush, waiting to be taken. There were strawberries so plentiful and luscious, that his oxen’s feet were red with them as he ploughed the willing sod, young Michael said; and there were wild plums and cranberries, spilling on the ground, with no one to pick them.

Young Michael must have told his story well, for the quiet waters of our neighborhood were stirred to their depths, and discussions raged in every farmhouse. As a rule the older people scoffed at the idea that any place could be as free from “drawbacks,” as Michael claimed for the North-West. The Hemstock family shook its composite head and said, “Green fields are far away. What about orchards in the North-West? Can apple trees live in that frosty country?” The Hemstocks had a whole acre in fruit trees and a purple grapevine that covered a stone fence. The Charltons on the next farm had had a relative in Minnesota during the trouble with the Sioux and nothing would move them from the security of Grey County.

But the young people kindled to the picture young Michael painted—they could see the sea of grass and the friendly skies above it, and they could feel the intoxication of being the first to plant the seed in that mellow black loam, enriched by a million years of rain and sun.

My bother Will caught the fever and when his chores were done, cleared out every evening across the fields to Robert Lowery’s where young Michael was staying, and did not come in till all hours, maybe ten o’clock.

Echoes of Michael’s comparisons drifted in through Will’s conversation. “Out West they do things in a big way,” Will said. “Fifty acres is the size of a field not a farm. And there are no coppers, Michael said; he hardly knew what they were when he saw them.”

“How do they get on without them?” George asked incredulously.

“They don’t haggle about trifles,” said Will, “a thing is either five cents or ten cents. If it is less than five cents they give it to you.”

“That would save a lot of counting of collections,” mother said, “but it might keep some people from church too. . . . It always makes me feel mean to see people put a cent on the collection plate; especially them that can afford more. To see a woman with a nice braided dolman put a penny on a plate is about as mean a sight as I know.”

“This kind of pocket handkerchief-farming makes people mean—Michael says the people of Grey County would kill a flea for the hide and tallow,” Will remarked.

Strangely enough, my mother was more impressed than my father with Red Michael’s story. She questioned him closely, and unlike some other questioners, listened when he answered. I think Michael liked talking to her.

“We’ll have to go some place, John,” she said one night to my father. “There’s nothing here for our three boys. What can we do with one-hundred-and-fifty stony acres? The boys will be hired-men all their lives, or clerks in a store. That’s not good enough!”

Father was fearful! There were Indians to consider, not only Indians, but mosquitoes. He had seen on the Ottawa what mosquitoes could do to horses; and to people too. No! It was better to leave well enough alone. Had any of us ever gone hungry? And now when we were getting things fixed up pretty well, with the new root-house; and the cook-house shingled, and the lower eighty broken up, and a good school now, with a real teacher, and an inspector coming once a year anyway, and a fine Sunday-school too, and all sorts of advantages. . . .

We all knew mother was agitated as she went around the house, for she banged doors and set down stove-lids noisily. And she kept everyone going at top speed. Even I knew she was in some sort of tribulation of spirit. . . . When everything else was done, the leach had to be watered; and that was one little chore I could do.

The leach was a small barrel of ashes, set up on a trestle, high enough to cover a black iron pan. The barrel had small auger holes bored in the bottom, and the innumerable pails of water poured on the ashes would at last run through in reluctant black drops, and then the leach was said to be running.

The lye thus extracted was used for making soap, and the day the soap was made was a day of high adventure. The operation took place outside in a big black kettle that was never used for anything else. No ordinary day would do; it had to be a clear bright day with no wind, and the moon had to be on the increase or the soap might not set. Over a blazing fire, made in a hole lined with stones, the grease and lye were fused in the old black pot and stirred all the time, from left to right, with a hickory stick. All persons of six or under were excluded from the ceremony, but there was nothing to prevent persons of six or under from climbing out of an upstairs window, reaching the sloping roof of the kitchen, lying flat on the edge and looking down.

There was a fascination in the fiery boiling of this billowy mass, threatening every minute to boil over. My mother, in a sprigged blue print dress, tucked tightly between her knees and her head rolled in a red handkerchief stood on the windward side, stirring with a quick motion. Wooden boxes stood ready to receive the soap when it was done. No one must speak to her or interrupt in any way when the boiling was going on, for there was a moment when the pot must be removed and if that moment were correctly guessed the soap would harden. My mother was the High Priestess of all domestic rites to me, so of course she knew the exact moment. I had no doubt she invented soap-making, and I was very proud of her cleverness, and sorry for the little girls whose mothers couldn’t make soap and so had to use the “boughten” kind.

And there was a real trick in making soap. Even my Aunt Ellen had a failure once, and my Aunt Ellen was a very clever woman, and one of the delights of my childhood. Aunt Ellen lived in the village and we often went to see her. Uncle Abner was a blacksmith, but he only worked in the afternoons. Uncle Abner had blue black curly hair, and big blue eyes, and the longest moustache ever seen. When I sat behind him I could see both ends. People said Uncle Abner was lazy, and really good for nothing, but playing the fiddle at dances. But they did not say that to Aunt Ellen, who adored him. People said she was too proud to admit that she had made a bad bargain. Aunt Ellen said people did not understand Abner. Naturally he liked company—why shouldn’t he? He was the life of the party wherever he went; and when he was out late so many evenings, he just had to sleep in in the mornings. But he could do as much in an afternoon as most men did all day. Uncle Abner made me a little basket from a walnut shell, and a gold wire brooch with my initials. My mother did not quite approve of my Uncle Abner but she qualified her criticism by saying: “For all that, he has a nice way with him.” Uncle Abner was frequently cited in matrimonial arguments along the Garafraxa. Indignant husbands, hard-working and steady, who felt they were being unduly criticized for some slight misdemeanor, wished they were more “like Abner Patton and then they might be appreciated, by gum.”

Young Michael certainly had troubled the waters, with his stories of the far West. All day long, while the work of the farm went on, at high speed, not much was said, but at night the rafters in the kitchen rang with words.

Unfortunately I had to go to bed, but Hannah relayed all to me, with shrewd editorial comment, and long before any decision was reached, told me she was sure we were going. She based this belief on the fiery way mother was working. There was another quilt on the way; and the leach was set up again. Arabella Cresine was coming to sew as soon as she was through with the Charltons.

We began to be sorry for the young people who had to stay forever in Grey County.

I wondered what we would do with the dogs. . . . Aunt Ellen might take them; they had two already, but a dog more or less did not matter. Uncle Abner would like the brown spaniel, but not old Watch, who had no beauty or grace, just a stern sense of duty. All day he watched for hawks and answered the call of the hens. He never left the yard, never played, never had any fun, never wagged his tail and nobody liked him but mother, who said if he were young she wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for him. Nap, the spaniel was a joyous pup, with silky brown hair and creamy white trimmings. He could sit up and beg and bring back sticks, and play ball; would not go after the cows, or chase a hawk, or do anything useful, but he was light of heart and had a welcoming bark for everyone. My father called him “play-boy,” and said it was too bad that the two dogs could not be combined.

He explained all to me one day when I was picking potatoes for him in the field between our house and the road. He said old Watch did not need to be so cross and grim and suspicious, and Nap might easily learn to be useful without losing one bit of his playful ways. People were the same. And then he went on and said that was one reason why Christ was sent to earth—to show people that a Christian might be, indeed must be polite and pleasant, and full of fun and fond of music, and pretty colors and yet serious too and earnest. And he told me to think about this and try to combine the virtues of Watch and the friendliness of Nap, in my own life.

I asked him then if it were wrong for me to mock the aunts.

He stopped his work and looked over toward the house, before he answered; his voice fell, as if he were afraid the wind might carry it.

“Your mother thinks it is,” he said, “she thinks it shows disrespect. I do not think so. They are funny, queer stiff old ladies, set in their ways and right in their own eyes. It’s no harm for you and me to have a laugh over them, a laugh is as good as a meal or an hour’s sleep. But perhaps we had better not offend your mother. We know that would be wrong, we’ll just keep it to ourselves and not be hurting anyone’s feelings.”

“What makes mother like that?” I asked after awhile.

“She’s Scotch,” he said, “they’re very serious people, a little bit stern, but the greatest people in the world for courage and backbone. The Irish are different; not so steadfast or reliable, but very pleasant. Irish people have had so much trouble, they’ve had to sing and dance, and laugh and fight to keep their hearts from breaking.”

“I am glad you are Irish,” I said. I stopped picking and straightened up. It was a lovely autumn day, with a sky as blue as an enamel plate. From the yard came the contented sounds of hens cackling and turkeys gobbling. White clouds, with gray wrinklings idled over our heads. The wind lifting the potato stocks made a dry rustling that subtly spoke of winter, when there would be long dark days, with frozen window panes and stinging winds that made it impossible to play outside. But this day, full of the abundance of harvest was made for joy and singing, and we went on with the digging and sang as we worked:

“Shule, shule, shule, agra

Its time can only aise me woe

Since the lad o’ me heart

From me did part

Schedate, avoureen, schlana.

I’ll dye me petticoat,

I’ll dye it red

And through the world

I’ll beg me bread,

I wish in me heart

That I was dead.

Schedate, avoureen, schlana.”

The words were sad, but not the singers.

Clearing in the West. My Own Story

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