Irrelevantly, he said, “I’ve only wanted you to be happy.”
She watched the white line of hair against his wrinkled neck. “What kind of happy?” Her voice was good-natured in spite of her words. “Your kind?”
“We’ve gone over it so many times.” His voice was sharp with exasperation as he kept his eyes on the tapping pencil. “I know what you’re going to say. You’ve never felt alive out here. But what about Paul? It’s good for him.” He swung around and looked at her. “Come here.”
She made no move. “You’re sending Paul away to school. You told him, but you didn’t tell me. Just like that–you decide to send him away.”
“Listen,” he said, “you always knew this was coming. Paul’s eight years old now. You always knew he’d have to go away to school. I told him this morning because I’d just made up my mind. That’s all there was to it.” Again he motioned her to his side. “This does us no good. Come here.”
“What’s the use, Athanase? You never want to talk to me about anything any more. I might as well be Julienne.”
A faint sparkle appeared in his eyes as he shook his head. “You ought to look at yourself in the glass before you say things like that.”
She moved toward him half-grudgingly and sat on the edge of the desk, one leg stretched down so that the toe of her slipper touched the floor. He looked at the line from hip to thigh and then down to the slim ankle. When he laid his hand on her thigh she gave no response.
“You’ve been drinking,” he said.
“I was cold.”
“You were never cold in your life.” He waited for her to take the challenge as she once would have done. A remark like that in the old days might have led to anything, for she had a childlike frankness, a complete readiness to admit desire whenever she felt it, even to talk about it and build it up with words. Now she made no response. Why? Had his own neglect killed the magic that had once been between them? Or had it simply grown old, like himself?
“You shouldn’t drink before lunch,” he said. “You know better than that.”
She shrugged her graceful shoulders. “Listen, Athanase–at school Paul will be unhappy. A boy his age away at school!”
“I don’t want him spoiled. Besides, you know perfectly well he can’t continue as he’s going. The school here–Good God, do you think he can grow up in that?”
“Around here he won’t get spoiled. Nothing spoils if it’s kept on ice all the time.”
He gave her a sharp look. There were tears in her eyes.
“Take me away from here, Athanase!”
He patted her knee. “Is it as bad as all that?”
“I’m dead here. If I spoke French I’d still be Irish and that would make Saint-Marc still treat me like a foreigner. Anyway, I’d always be alone because I’m your wife. None of them have ever forgiven me for marrying you, after your…” She stopped, slipped from the desk and moved back to the window with the lazy, rhythmical movement that was as much a product of an earthy gentleness, almost of a strangely individual innocence, as the deliberately sexual movement it appeared to be. She pressed her forehead against the glass and watched an ox-cart move sluggishly down the road.
“No one in Saint-Marc would dare interfere with us, and you know it,” he said.
“Aren’t you forgetting Marius?”
“Oh! So it’s him again!”
“He doesn’t ever forget things.” She waited a moment, then went on. “He was here a fortnight ago.”
Athanase’s head rose and he stared at her back. “You’ve waited a long time to tell me.”
Kathleen turned from the window and looked at him, her voice still languid. “He didn’t want you to know. I don’t know why. He didn’t say anything much. Julienne told me he spent the night at the presbytery with Father Beaubien after he left here.”
“What did he want with him?” Athanase snapped, clearly exasperated. “Did he imagine Father Beaubien could help him dodge the draft?”
“Maybe I ought to tell you the rest of it. Father Beaubien came here too, last week. He asked a lot of questions.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know exactly. But I think he knows about the factory. I guess Marius must have told him, but I don’t know how Marius knew about it. Do you?”
“My God!” he shouted. “Every time a dog breaks wind in this place the whole parish knows it!”
She moved easily back to the centre of the room as he opened drawers in his desk and shut them again to vent his anger. “Don’t get yourself so excited,” she said. “It’s bad for your blood pressure.”
“My pressure’s all right. I could still do a ten-mile walk if I felt like it. Listen…” He gestured as though to draw her attention back. “What did Father Beaubien say about the factory?”
“Say?” She laughed. “Do any of them ever say anything straight out to me? He just hinted around. I don’t even know for sure if he meant the factory. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Are you sure?”
She shrugged and turned her back. “How could I? What do I know about it? Or anything else? You certainly haven’t told me much. But he doesn’t like us, all the same. It gives me the creeps, the way he doesn’t.”
“Never mind that. If he makes trouble, by God, he’ll be sorry. Who does he think he is? My grandfather”–he jerked upright, his moustache bristling–“horsewhipped a priest once.”
She looked at him reflectively. “You’ll get into trouble talking that way. It’s bad luck, saying things like that about your own priest.”
He wondered if he had ever felt more exasperated. All his discussions with Kathleen roamed about irrelevantly inside a full circle and ended exactly where they started. “You talk about luck as if it were a human being,” he said. “You’re just superstitious. That’s the only hold your religion has on you.”
She made no reply, her mind distracted by the sight of Paul in the yard playing with one of the puppies from the barn. She returned to the window to watch him with a sudden, alive interest. Athanase kept his eyes on her profile. It was a strange situation in which he found himself. He saw the pride in her face as she watched Paul’s movements. They seldom talked much to each other in his presence, she and the boy, but apparently they had no need of words for their communication. Anything Paul did was all right with her. She let him leave his clothes and toys all over the place and willingly picked up after him. She let him bring the barn cats and dogs into the house and only laughed when their fleas were transferred to him. She was certainly spoiling the boy. Paul was a compartment in her life which she took for granted the way she took everything for granted, except her presence in Saint-Marc.
“You know,” she said, turning back from the window, “maybe you’re right.”
He had forgotten what they had last been talking about. Maybe he was right about what? The small clock on the desk ticked loudly, its sound mingled with the deeper clacking of the grandfather’s clock in the hall. Outside in the yard the puppy barked with excitement. Suddenly a smile appeared at the corners of Athanase’s lips and twitched wider into his face. Their eyes met and held. The bond between them was illusive, but at that instant each was aware of its strength beyond the outline of definitions.
Kathleen dropped her eyes to her skirt as though recognizing for the first time that it was untidy. She began to press its folds into pleats, slowly, evenly. As he watched her his long fingers stroked his chin. To be able to stir this woman again, to excite the sparkle that had once intoxicated him, to see her take pleasure in being alive–could he do it? Probably not. His mistakes with her had been too many. That undying passion of his for trying to change people and make them over was an incredible weakness. He couldn’t even make it work on himself.
As if playing for time, he said, “You really are lonely here, aren’t you, my dear?”
She broke from the look in his eyes and turned to watch Paul again as he raced with the dog around the corner of the house.
“Kathleen,” he said, “I think we’ll take a house in town next winter.”
She shook her head without turning around. “No. I’ve heard you talk before.”
“This time I mean it.” He got up and stood beside her at the window, one arm around her waist. Her body was soft and pliable under his fingers, yet supple with latent strength. Then he took his arm away. “If you can bear to stay here through the summer,” he said, “we can move into Montreal in the fall–when Paul goes away to school.”
Still she did not believe him, but stood quite still trying to calculate his expression.
“Next Monday when I go back to Ottawa you’re to come along with me as far as Montreal,” he said. “You can spend the whole week in town and I’ll meet you there on my way back. After all, why not? It’s spring. You need a holiday. But see to it”–he pointed his long index finger at her nose, smiling–“that you have a house for us by the end of the week. I’ll leave that up to you.”
Her face expressed a mixture of incredulity, hope and caution. The total effect was of a child afraid of being disappointed. Athanase had never permitted her a decision of her own since they were married. She had no idea how much he might be worth, for all she ever saw in the way of money was the allowance he gave her regularly.
“After all,” he said, as though reading her thoughts, “you can’t depend upon me forever. You’re grown up now.”
He waited for her smile but it did not come. He was disappointed. “What’s the matter with you today?” he said, remembering the mobile face of the girl he had married. “Aren’t you pleased?”
“I just can’t believe it, that’s all.” But belief was slowly beginning to dawn in her eyes. She touched his hand. “You’re doing this for me, Athanase?”
“Maybe. But I should have done it long ago.”
“You really want to live in Montreal?”
He was embarrassed. “I love you, Kathleen.”
She flung both arms about his neck and he felt them firmly straining, and his body frail in their grasp, as she yielded herself against him in a way that once had maddened him with excitement. Her lips were soft on his cheeks as she kissed him. Then she released him and left the room, almost running in her eagerness.
“I’ll tell Julienne I’m going away next week,” her voice came back. “Even if I still can’t believe it.”
Athanase went back to his desk and then remembered that Blanchard had wanted to talk to him today about the planting. It would not be a real discussion; Blanchard would tell him what he had decided to do, grumble about the weather, gossip a little, and that would be all. Blanchard had been working for twenty-five years on the Tallard land. Some day he would let him have one of the upper fields as a reward for his loyalty. The price would be very small; just enough to keep everyone from thinking that Blanchard had got it for nothing.
He felt bold today, bold and decisive, and he enjoyed the sensation of power it gave him. As he went out to the hall to get his hat and coat he reflected on what seemed to him the supreme irony of human life. A man had to come near the end of it before he acquired enough experience and wisdom to qualify him to begin the process of living. He grinned to himself. Father Beaubien had a point there. If life was not a long preparation for dying, what sense could be made of it?
TEN
In the scullery at the back of the house Athanase came upon Paul. “What are you doing here?” he said. “I thought you were outside.”
“I was just looking for Napoléon’s ball.”
“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.”
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