Two Solitudes (15 page)

“Oh, you were.” Athanase bent over and peered behind a flour barrel. “I'm looking for my walking stick. The Irish one with the knobs on it.”

“It's not here, P'pa.”

“How do you know it isn't? Look around for it.”

Paul did so, but he knew the stick was not there. He knew everything about this scullery, for he liked the place better than any other part of the house. It was a huge storeroom, running the full length of the back section of the ell. In the fall after harvest it was filled with barrels of apples and flour, with beets, carrots, potatoes in sacks and dozens of jars of newly made jellies. It smelled drily of a mixture of earth, vegetables, fruit, smoke and kerosene. Hams and sides of cured bacon hung from the rafters, and sometimes in the winter the whole split carcass of a beef was there. The place made Paul feel comfortable. If there was ever a famine like the one they had in Egypt that Father Beaubien had told them about, he could be as safe as a squirrel in the scullery.

“It's not here. It really isn't, P'pa,” Paul said as he emerged from behind an apple barrel.

Athanase grunted. “Well, if the old captain can walk all over the country on one leg, I guess I can walk up to the sugar house on two without any help. Want to come along? Blanchard's up there now, isn't he?”

Paul followed his father out the door and immediately Napoléon leaped at him, barking. They set off toward the ridge behind the farm buildings where the sugar cabin was hidden in the trees of the maple grove. Napoléon ran ahead of them, smelling the ground and then the air alternately.

“Last year after the sugaring, that cabin was left in a bad mess,” Athanase said. “The men shouldn't be so careless. Have you been up there this year?”

“It's all right now, P'pa.”

“Hmm. Well, we'll see.”

Paul was accustomed to the way his father never listened to what he said and never took his word for anything. Captain Yardley always listened to him, and then talked about what he'd said as though it mattered.

They walked through the quadrangle of barns and sheds, past the chicken run and on through a hedge of thorn trees to a path that ran upward beside one of the fields to the ridge where the maple grove stood in magnificent silhouette against the sky. New leaves had not yet clouded its outline and every branch and twig was as sharply drawn as though with a mapping pen. They walked for a quarter of a mile to the upper field and then Paul stopped and pointed to a bowed figure that had detached itself from the farther fence and now was moving across the field toward them. “Look!” he said. “There's Mr. Blanchard.”

Athanase stopped to wait for his manager. The bowed figure grew steadily larger as he came across the ribbed furrows with a lurching, heel-hitting walk. As he drew near he touched his cap. “There ain't any need of you going up to that sugar cabin, Mr. Tallard. I already looked after it.”

“There's not much you leave for me to do around here.”

Blanchard nodded and the expression on his creased face remained the same. He was wearing battered overalls above a pair of old corduroy trousers and a faded red shirt. His clothes seemed to have grown on his squat body. They were not as close to him as his skin, but they were as much a part of him as the hair was part of a bird dog. He waited immobile while Athanase looked over the field. Then after a moment he said, “Everything all right, Mr. Tallard?”

“Looks fine. How are your men this year?”

Blanchard lifted his hands and hooked the thumbs over the belt where it appeared clear of his overalls at the hips. His drooping black moustache was flecked with grey, and his hands and face were the same shade of earth-brown, as though the land might have been his mother. In a way it was, for his ancestors in Normandy had been peasants before William the Bastard conquered England. An impression of well-being, almost of goodness, emanated from Blanchard along with the smell of stable and sweat. He was probably the best farmer in the country; certainly he was almost a satisfied man.

“That Louis Bergeron,” he said slowly, reflectively, “I told you he was no good.”

“I'm afraid you're right.”

“It was you hired him last year, Mr. Tallard.”

“I know.”

“He's the one made the mess out of the sugar house. Stole about four gallons of syrup too, the bastard.”

“Well, we won't hire him again.”

“Better not,” Blanchard said.

They stood silently looking over the land. “What do you think of this upper field?” Athanase said finally.

Blanchard's boot, gummy with moist soil, kicked the side out of a furrow and his eyes dropped automatically to estimate how this section of the field was drying out. “It's good land,” he said.

The field ran along the beginning of the slope for about a quarter of a mile to the top of Yardley's property. At the far end of it stood the cottage where Blanchard lived with his wife and seven children.

“You always liked this upper field. No?”

“Here all the land is good.” There was feeling in
Blanchard's simple statement. He had been born in a back concession among the hills, where farmers broke their backs trying to make potatoes thrive among rocks.

“You've been with me quite a long time,” Athanase went on. “I've been thinking some about it lately.”

Blanchard looked straight ahead and his eyes stayed level, but Athanase could sense the covetous excitement rising in him. Blanchard looked down and kicked another hole in the furrow and deliberately changed the subject. “This new bank in Sainte-Justine, Mr. Tallard. You hear about it?”

“Of course. What about it?”

“Can you trust it, Mr. Tallard?”

Athanase smiled. “It's a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, Joseph.”

“Yeah.” A pause. “That's what they say.” Another pause while he scratched his head. “Well, I guess I do all right the way things are.”

For the past twenty years Athanase had owed Blanchard nearly half his wages. It was the farmer's way of saving money: to be owed by someone he trusted. Nothing could persuade him to go near the notary. He had heard about a notary absconding from a parish on the other side of the river nearly twenty years before. And a bank seemed even less safe. He couldn't believe that clever men would go to the trouble of building a bank and hiring clerks to run it unless they made a profit. And where was the profit to come from, except from the depositors? Blanchard preferred to be owed by Athanase, and he knew what was due him to the last cent.

“Well,” Athanase said, “when do you start the seeding?”

“Maybe Monday, I guess. Father Beaubien blessed the seeds last Sunday.” He looked up at the sky. “It could rain.”

They started walking back toward the house, the two men side by side and Paul and the dog slipping and stumbling through the furrows at the field's edge.

“Do oats go up this year, Mr. Tallard?”

It was an important question and Athanase was supposed to know the answer better than the papers because he was a member of parliament. Every year he was asked such questions, and every year he told the questioners gravely what he and they had read in the newspapers or been told by someone else. “They'll go up all right,” he said. “God help the country, though. It can't stand these war prices!” The last statement he knew was unnecessary. Blanchard would dismiss it as a peculiarity a rich man could afford to have. Had a foreigner like Captain Yardley said it, he would have been considered contemptible. It was all right for Athanase; he was one of themselves.

“How would you like it, Joseph, if you had a piece of land of your own?” Athanase brought the words out casually. “Your oldest boy is about ripe to help you now. A man ought to have some land of his own.”

Blanchard shot a stream of tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth and it hit a stone with a loud smack. “Yeah, I guess he's old enough, Mr. Tallard.”

“You've always liked that upper field. Your own house is on it. Maybe we can fix it up.”

Blanchard rubbed the back of one hand across his eyes.

Athanase affected not to notice the gesture and its cause. “There are going to be some changes in Saint-Marc, but you'd better not repeat what I say.” With the field in prospect, Athanase knew Blanchard would not even repeat the words to his wife. “I might as well see the notary and have him draw up a deed. We'll get it fixed up within the next month.”

Blanchard made no reply and his lined, brown face continued to brood over the land. Athanase felt the communion close between his man and himself. It made the world seem worthwhile on a fine morning like this. Paul sensed that his elders had ceased talking their business. “Can I plant some seeds this year, Mr. Blanchard?” he said.

“Sure. Sure. If your P'pa says you can.”

“You promised I could have a garden of my own.”

“Sure, Paul. Radishes and lettuce. I guess you can't go far wrong on them.”

Paul was disappointed. “I want to grow something hard.”

Blanchard turned to Athanase and gave a heavy wink. “Well, you come along to the barn. Maybe we got something else. Maybe carrots. They'll be longer to grow.”

“Can I see the seeds now?”

“Take him along with you, Joseph,” Athanase said. “You're the one to turn him into a farmer. I can't.”

He watched the boy follow the lumbering gait of Blanchard across the barnyard and into the barn, the puppy frisking behind them. Then he took a deep breath of the fresh air, savouring the smell of manure mixed with the dry, balsamy odour of ten cords of spruce billets piled in the open woodshed. He decided he felt very well indeed today. Kathleen and the doctor exaggerated his blood pressure. The only thing that ever bothered his pressure was the mess in Ottawa and his incurable folly in expecting anything sensible ever to result from politics. Definitely there was no point in an able man wasting his time in parliament unless he was in the cabinet, and he felt he should have been considered for a ministry long ago. The party said he lacked administrative ability. Damn them, Athanase thought. Those men in Ottawa, particularly the English, thought you were impractical unless
you were as dull and pompous as a village notary. What did they know about his ability? He could understand men's characters; he knew how to handle them. All they knew was a succession of facts.

He went into the house and took a stick from the rack, then walked down the river road away from the village, swinging the stick as his long legs moved under him like a pair of animated dividers. When he finally reached the tributary, the toll-bridge attendant, one of the many Bergerons, came out to speak to him. Collecting thirty cents from each vehicle that crossed the bridge was about all the work he was capable of doing.

Athanase left the bridge and began to walk up a bridle path that followed the stream toward the gully. The river was in spate now, swirling high along its banks. It drove so hard it would have rolled a horse under within ten feet of the shore. He plodded upwards, stopping occasionally to rest, until he reached the place where the gully became precipitous. The falls thundered down before him, a permanent cloud of spray hanging over the cauldron where the water boiled below. The slopes were at least a hundred feet on either side at that point. They formed a deep basin where cattle pastured, and the upper slopes were farmed by the Tremblay family. Athanase tried to estimate just where the Tremblay land began. If a dam were built here, Tremblay would have to sell some of his property.

Suddenly the full force of the idea exploded in his mind. All his life he had lived here without so much as dreaming of the possibilities that lay under his own nose, while McQueen had taken a single look at the falls and had seen everything at once. Why could people like himself never see such things unless they were pointed out first by someone else?

Now he could even imagine the factory standing in clean
lines before him, the water backed up by a neat rampart of cement, the dynamos suave with power in the belly of the engine house. The falls continued to thunder in his ears. Power! His own land would be transformed to suit a new age, giving sense to the last ten or so years of his life!

Because his mind was always tuned to the general pattern and never could escape it, the logic of the whole project added its appeal. His earliest Canadian ancestor had come up the Saint Lawrence with Frontenac, not so long after Cartier himself. That Tallard had found nothing but a forest here, but his Norman instinct had smelled out the good land underneath the trees, and his military imagination had been gripped by the invulnerability of this whole river area. With Quebec City like a stopper in the bottle, the English fleet could never touch him here. And fanning out behind the river and the shield of the Appalachians, he and his brother officers had planned the vastest encircling movement in recorded history: a thin chain of forts through Montreal, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, penning the English into the narrow strip of the continent by the Atlantic. That was imagination on the grand scale. If there had been the same imagination at the court of Versailles to back them up, this whole continent could have become French for good.

But the English, working sporadically and generally for money, never planning anything, had inherited the continent by default when the politicians around the French king had decided to write off the Saint Lawrence area as so many acres of snow and ice. After that, the French who were left in Canada had seemed unable to discover any common purpose except to maintain their identity. How they had done it was a miracle. But the purpose had also been like a chain around their necks, making them cautious, conservative, static. Now once again
the English, working sporadically for profit, were appropriating what they wanted in the Saint Lawrence Valley. His own people put toll-bridges across rivers and floated timber down them, but by instinct the English harnessed them to the future. Beyond that the English in Canada never went a step. The production, acquisition and distribution of wealth was about the only purpose they ever seemed able to find.