Читать книгу The Yellow Briar - Patrick Slater - Страница 9

1 IRISH EYES

Out in the Ontario countryside, the late spring is a pleasing and soul-mellowing season of the year. It commences once the seeding is done and lasts until the chattering mower starts to mishandle its pitman shaft. In those sweet-smelling, warm, soft, juicy days of early June, the fields everywhere are bursting with fresh young life. After the dry fodder of a long winter, the cattle have had time to purge themselves with the rich, lush grasses; and their skins have been softened, and the dirty wartles on their flanks have been loosened by the warm spring rains. The air is as soaked with delicious hope as the meadows with the dew.

It is for such an inviting scene that the silent and wary thrush deserts the South; and it is the rapture of it filling his breast that turns him into the saucy and intimately friendly robin who insists on nesting in the most obvious places about my kitchen stoop. Plain for me to understand, he tells me the time is now at hand to “Cheer up! D’ye hear? Let joy be unconfined.”

Perhaps you think the mellow tones of the late autumn should make a stronger appeal to an old fellow like me. Faith no! Sure an Irish heart is always youthful. Before we grow old, we live in hope of things here: when we are grown old, we live in hope of things hereafter. The weight of years that burden the flesh presses lightly on the spirit of an old Irishman.

In this northern clime, harvest-time has always seemed to me a sere and gloomy season. I have seldom seen men come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves — and never in a barley harvest. The nights commence settling down early, and come upon us with an abrupt suddenness. The air bites a bit in the early mornings; and, here and there, the furtive rime marks the midnight prowlings of the frost king, who already plans to reassert his sovereign rights. If the crops have been poor, the scanty contents of the barns distress us; and, if Nature has been over-bountiful, the prices offered are more distressing still. The farmer’s is a gambler’s job. Old Mother Earth rolls the bones for him. In the spring, he has laid his wager, and his hope hangs high.

It is pleasant to watch the young gambol on the hillside pastures and punch the swollen udders of their dams. It is sweet to smell the pungent, homely earth in its creative mood. It is refreshing to feel the mild sunshine strike down, casual-like, filtering through a screen of opalescent emerald. This is the season for loafing a bit about an Ontario farm; and, in the afternoon that now concerns us, I beg to advise that, as for me and my household, we were busy loafing. The hired man was going through the slow motions of mending the orchard fence. His stomach must have stood the cooking we were getting better than mine, because he was whistling some tune about the murmur of a waterfall. I had been down to the lower hundred salting the young cattle. They looked to be doing fine.

About the old lawn and in the fence-corners, the stinking burdocks were sticking their miserable snouts up in the air — and looking healthy. It is a caution the things that require fixing about a farm; and continue requiring it. I got the axe from the wood-shed, and set about sinking its sharp blade well below the crowns of those burdocks with a view to destroying them utterly and in orderly detail. I have carried on a personal warfare against them on this farm, on and off, for over seventy years. Making rhymes was everyone’s foible at times, in the early days; and a red-headed hired boy once cracked a good one at my expense:

On Mono’s hills, the farmer grubs along,

And, like the Indian, chants a dismal song.

On rainy days, out you see him stalk

To tomahawk the healthy young burdock.

The young man’s Christian name was Wendell — we called him Pepper-top for short. He was discharged before his time was up — not because of the poetry, but because of grey cooties. He went into the milling business and in after years became a director of a chartered bank.

Several times, after absences of years, I have returned to reduce to complete subjection the burdocks on this farm. And it was all to do again. But, lately and right under my nose, they seem to be getting a little ahead of the old man. And this struck me as pitiable in a way. After my battles against her weeds and grasses crowding in upon me, Nature seemed to say: “Ah, ah, old thing! We’ve got you on the run at last.” Even the fields — my beautiful grain-fields — have become mere hay and pasture lands; and I have fallen to the low estate of a lean-necked, grass-land farmer. Father in Heaven, what have I done to deserve this? The soil of this farm has been a lifelong sweetheart of mine; and the glint of a ploughshare polished with use once helped me in my courting.

Scalping burdocks is a good job for an old man — if he will stick at it. All it requires is patience; and there is plenty of time for thinking. What a job it was, thought I, for a seedy old bachelor like me to get an orderly woman to stick at house-keeping on a farm. How could it be otherwise — so cold and draughty in the winter-time? Now here was the widow Wilkie. I did not like her sloppy porridge, or her sniffling ways. But she put up with my dog in the kitchen; so I put up with her on the farm. Well, anyway, I was master of a home of my own — such as it was — which was more than many the father of a large family could ever boast.

I glanced over my shoulder. Unbeknownst to me, a long, slim, low-hung car had come up the lane and was making a silent stop within a few feet of where I was kneeling. A coloured man in chocolate uniform sat at the wheel. There was a detached air of well-groomed luxuriousness about the vehicle. Now I know quite a bit about motor cars myself. I was the first person in this district to own one. I bought a touring car, brand new; and, on Sunday for years, when the roads were in good condition, I drove it regularly to Mass. At other times, I hitched up the buggy. I do not drive my car now; but I have it in the barn, jacked up to save the tires. The copper on the radiator is as bright as it ever was, and there is not a scratch anywhere to be seen. And then, for years, there has been an orgy of car-buying among the neighbouring farmers, who have been busy motoring themselves out of the well-to-do class.

But, compared with the cars hereabouts, the motor with the saffron driver was a buxom queen bee to a humble little worker.

“Jiminy crickets!” said I to myself. “Some class!”

I felt a stiffening in my joints in the rising. Then I walked over toward the tipsy old picket-fence.

His nibs in the leggings hopped around to open the door, and out of the paunch of the vehicle stepped a young woman who fluttered over toward me. Not that I could say she was a young person, right off, at first. The way women dress nowadays, It is next to impossible to tell, off-hand, how old they are — unless they are over forty.

“Are you Mr. Patrick Slater?” she inquired; and her voice was low and pleasing.

I dislike a woman who uses her nose as a sounding-board.

“Yes,” I said. “I am old Paddy Slater.”

Then I found myself chatting with a very lovely young girl whose blue-grey eyes were soft and friendly. She stood as straight as a whip; and she looked me square in the face. I had seen those eyes many a time before. Her mouth was pleasant and sweet. Her clothes every day would be the same as Sunday, with the neatness of the pretty girl — so comely and smiling.

I do not mention her name; because, as they say in the army: “No names, no pack-drill.” My young friend may happen to read this, and she might not like it.

It seems her father is a surgeon, practicing in Baltimore or some place down there. Her mother, who died at the time of the child’s birth, had been a Canadian girl from near Estevan in southern Saskatchewan, who went south, quite young, to train as a nurse. And those Canadian girls that train for nurses? Well, you know what nurses are! Of course, they are wholesome, capable young persons; but I notice they wear nifty little affairs on their heads; and they wear them, I figure, so that they can set their caps for likely young doctors, who are starting up in good practice.

Anyway, the big car had crossed the border at Niagara Falls en route to Montreal and points farther east. The young lady had a notion to go fifty miles north from the lake to see what sort of place it was among the hills that her mother’s family had come from. And youth nowadays must be served — even if a bit impatiently. Some person in the neighbourhood had referred to me as a historical landmark from which to take her bearings.

Yes, I told her, I had known her mother’s family. I remembered her great-great-grandmother as a robust young woman. In fact, her people had lived in this very house — not in the weather-beaten old place as it now is, but in the days of its youth and glory. I had come to work on the farm as a little lad fresh out from Ireland; and, on and off, I have lived on the place ever since. It is the only real home I ever had.

I took her around to see a yellow briar-bush planted many years ago by a little girl who wore hoop skirts on Sundays. The little gardener, I told her, had been her mother’s mother. As good luck had it, the season being early, the yellow rosebush was a mass of waxy blossoms and unfolding buds.

Of course, she was tremendously interested; but the big car seemed to get a little impatient.

“And where were these folk of mine buried?” she inquired.

I told her she would notice the little graveyard as they drove out to the pike. It now stood, deserted-like, in the corner of a pasture field; but at one time its stones had nestled around a Methodist meeting-house.

“But if you go in, be careful of those sheer stockings,” said I, “because we don’t take much care of these little burial places up this way.”

She asked me if she might take some of the yellow roses. I cut off a bundle of the branches with my jack-knife, and wrapped a sheet of newspaper about the prickly stems.

“Put them on the old woman’s grave,” I suggested, “but don’t shake them, because the petals blow and scatter. Your old kinswoman, I must warn you, was a very orderly person.”

“Yes,” she said to me, “you seize the flower, its bloom is shed.”

“Anyhow,” I replied, “briar blossoms never feel the ugliness of age.”

The girl lifted up her quiet eyes to the limestone hills whence has come the strength of my farm.

“Doesn’t that mean,” she asked me, “that they must die in the beauty of their youth?”

“Then they are beloved of the gods,” said I.

And we walked back toward the car.

“And for goodness sake, don’t leave the Globe newspaper there,” I cautioned her, “because that old Irish lady of yours had no use at all — at all — for George Brown’s paper or the Reform Party.

The big car slipped down the lane as noiselessly as the shadow of a passing cloud. I chuckled at the thought of the fit the old relative would have thrown had any young female of the connection appeared before her in the sheer, curve-showing nakedness of the well-groomed young lady of Baltimore who was taking flowers down to place on her grave. But, of course, the old body has been sleeping these many years in a peaceful twilight beneath the clover and the daisies. Not, mark you, that I think shifting customs and styles have any effect on the unchanging heart of women. A bit of rouge and plucked eyebrows seem no more artificial to me than bustles were and the swish of ladies’ skirts across the grass.

I was startled by the visit of that strange young girl to the old Ontario farm. In the span of my lifetime, I got to thinking, I had seen the huge pocket of British territory that nestles within the arms of the Great Lakes — a fertile land larger in extent than the republic of France — cleared of its hardwood forests and turned into fruitful farm-lands. The hard-working men and women from the British Isles who did this great job were lovers of the soil and they hungered for homes of their own. From their firesides I have seen great waves of young life go out in search of fame and an easier fortune. One would travel beyond Greenland’s icy mountains and farther than India’s coral strand to find a locality in which a father has not told his son how hard “the old man” made a fellow work on the farm back in Ontario. And I have lived long enough to know that farm homes of the Scottish and Irish pioneers will pass into the hands of other races and breeds of men whose children have remained lovers of the soil.

I have thought several times since of the quiet-spoken, hard-working women, out of whose decent lives that young girl had come; and, every time I think of them, I feel inclined to dodge around and have a look at that simple, old-fashioned, yellow rose-bush. It has stood out there, these many years, untended and unprotected in a wind-swept place; it has learned to suffer and endure – and it still endures. It keeps itself neat and tidy, because Nature mends by subtle art the ravages of time. Apparently the old bush has always been well content with its location and station in life. There is no evidence that it has ever tried to spread out or encroach upon its neighbours. It is well equipped to protect its rights and dignity, and to prevent others from encroaching upon it. At ordinary times, it is a trim, healthy sort of a shrub, and retiring in its nature; but, when it shows its soul, the whole bush bursts suddenly into a magnificence of bloom.

There were like qualities in the hearts of the Irish women who were pioneering in the timber-lands of Upper Canada when Victoria began her long reign. In 1838, a young girl set up the first housekeeping on this farm. Her family were originally adherents of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and had settled as small farmers in County Armagh at the time Cromwell put the curse on Ireland. And I think, sometimes, that perhaps old Ireland also put a curse on them that settled within the pale. There was bred in their children’s children a hard, silent, stubborn pride that became pitiable as all Ireland fell upon evil days at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.

A high birth-rate and young folk who hung around home, instead of whistling themselves over the hills and far away, added greatly to the woes of the cabins and cottages of old Ireland,

… that mournful nation

With charmin’ pisintry upon a fruitful sod,

Fightin’ like devils for conciliation

And hatin’ each other for the love of God.

The result was rack-renting and the splitting up of small landholdings. Owing to its over-abundance, farm labour in that fertile land became less efficient than anywhere else in Europe.

The Irish Protestant families that pioneered in the backwoods of Upper Canada in the thirties were driven out of Ireland by forces as cruel and inexorable as were the troops of bloody Cromwell. Their womenfolk had learned in Ireland to skimp and suffer, and still endure; but they had endured there in a grim and haughty silence. I never met one of them, in the early days, whose grandfather had not apparently been the proud possessor of an entailed estate — I suppose of four acres and a cow. These landed gentry had dined on potatoes and hake, one day; but, to keep up the family standing, they varied to hake and potatoes the next. As for the rest of us in Ireland, we lived in those days on potatoes and point. You get that? The children stood around the table at mealtime, eating potatoes — boiled with the jackets on. To get a flavour, they pointed the tatties at the bit of salt herring their father ate. Nineteen years was the average life-span in rural Ireland; and only one soul of five passed the age of forty.

Coming to Canada, these women continued to suffer and endure as their menfolk cut homesteads on these stony hillsides — but there was a touch of hope thrown in. And where there is hope, there is joy. One of the finest things Canada ever did was to put a kindly twinkle into the blue-grey eyes of these proud, poverty-stricken Irish women.

Their tongues may have been tart at times, bur they wore their knuckles to the bone in the service of their love. The Scottish Presbyterians may have been the salt of the earth in Upper Canada; but the Irish women gave it sweetness and light. These mothers of Methodist families were quiet, tidy, capable women; and it was a pleasure to watch one of them making ready an evening meal. They were wholesome-minded because they were home-lovers and were busy home-making. And, among women, it is the home-keeping hearts that are happiest. The mother of a family was proud of her station as such; and, as a result, she was content to relax and drift quietly into the matron class. Her Irish eyes were smiling. One was not startled those days by seeing the worn eyes of an old woman looking out from a face made up to recall a youth that had fled. Has not every age of a woman’s life a natural beauty of its own?

The bodies of these Irish women may have been stiff-necked with a curious family pride that had nothing much to justify it; but that very pride fortified their unconquerable wills, and helped to keep their menfolk respectable. There was constant in their hearts a depth of love and loyalty; and, like my old yellow briar, it burst into bloom at times.

… for her price is above rubies.

She seeketh wool and flax and worketh

willingly with her hands….

She stretcheth forth her hands to the poor;

yea, she reacheth forth her hand to the needy….

She looketh well to the ways of her

household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.

Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain; but a

woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.

THE WORDS OF KING LEMUEL