Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

“Alec, nobody could ever say you didn’t have his interests at heart.”

“The boy graduated high school and he couldn’t meet the train on time with the dray. He run the projector fine if I was there to watch him but as soon as I left he burned the film on the bulb, or didn’t thread it right, or ripped it to ribbons. All he wanted to do was hang around the garage with us. The boy finished school and all he wanted to do was pass his father tools. He’d have been content to pass me tools the rest of his life if I’d have let him.”

“He done a beautiful job with the garden though. He made you a beautiful garden, Alec.”

Briefly, Monkman’s face lit with pleasure at the praise of his son. “By Jesus, yes,” he agreed. “Earl could garden. That’s what gave me the idea for the farm. A grown man can’t be a gardener but he can be a farmer, can’t he? What’s a farm but a big fuck of a garden? Make him a farmer, I thought.”

He had determined to see it done. A farmer needed a farm, so Alec had bought one; the farm he still owned and Marker rented. It had been a weedy half-section the bank had foreclosed on early in the thirties and since then had installed a series of improvident tenants on. When Alec had made them an offer the bankers had been quick to accept and rid themselves of a load of care and trouble. Alec bought cheap, the way he seemed to get whatever he wanted now that his luck had changed. He had to take a mortgage on the theatre but that didn’t cause him to lose any sleep. Cattle and grain prices were strong and Alec believed that the farm could pay for itself. Along with the 320 acres of land came an assortment of ramshackle, second-hand implements and a small house that was in decline but still reasonably comfortable. Only one thing more was necessary. In the spring Monkman engaged a hired man named Dover to help work the place and teach Earl farming. Nevertheless, when he proposed his plan to Earl, his son had resisted.

“I don’t know if I want to be a farmer.”

“Of course you don’t – until you give her a whirl, give her a try. That’s all I’m asking – that you try.”

“What if you need me here in town?”

“What would I need you for? Stutz and I will manage. What I want to see is you managing too, on your own.”

All he wanted was his son to learn self-reliance, that was what was behind the exiling of Earl. He explained it to him at length, so that the boy would know why he demanded it of him.

“The time has come for you to show you can stand on your own two feet. Dover’s going to take you to the farm and see you stick to it. Don’t come making your way back to town every couple of days because you’re homesick, either. Maybe I’ll just put it to you this way. Don’t bother showing your face around here again until you’ve raised a crop. I mean it, Earl. If somebody has to come to town for groceries, or fuel, or parts, or whatever, let it be Dover. By September we’ll have you weaned of this nonsense and a man. I think me and Mr. Stutz ought to stay clear, too. No visits until you’ve finished your work, done the job you’ve been put out there to do. But the day you’ve got a crop ready to cut, send us word, Earl, and we’ll be there to admire what you done with bells on, me and Mr. Stutz. None gladder to offer you congratulations and shake your hand. That’s going to be my dessert the end of summer, to see the crop my boy raised.”

There were times when the temptation had been very great to disregard his own rules, jump in the truck, and pay Earl a visit. He missed the boy a good deal, missed his presence in the house, found himself still glancing over his shoulder to locate him when he stepped back to survey a piece of work finished in the garage. However, he curbed his desire and relied on what Dover would report when the hired man made his trips to town. The difficulty was Dover wasn’t much of a talker. This was the result of having lived most of his life as a hired man in the midst of families he longed to be a part of, yet upon whom he had no right to lay any claims of affection. It had been a queer twilight sort of existence and it had taught him that what was not his to receive, was not his to give either. He grew to be a frighteningly detached and disinterested man. A lank sixty year old who became drier and sparer with every passing season that brought him nearer to the end of his working days, he volunteered nothing to anybody. An employer had once characterized him as the sort of fellow who wouldn’t warn you if you were about to step backwards off a cliff because it wasn’t any of his business, what you wanted to do. “Mind your own business,” was Dover’s practical motto. In his travels over the years, in and out of dozens of farmhouses, Dover had encountered his share of peculiar situations and peculiar types. He had learned to pretend, along with the rest of the family, that whatever was going on was perfectly normal and usual. Living alone on the farm with the boy caused him no grief. He was a quiet, polite, clean boy. If Monkman wanted to ask questions he would answer them but he wouldn’t draw conclusions for him.

“So how’s my boy? You turning him into a farmer?”

“Getting there, getting there,” Dover would allow, sliding his eyes from one thing to another in the shop, never looking Monkman directly in the face.

“And Earl’s working? He’s working hard?” Laughing, “Tell him if he isn’t, he’ll have to dig the toe of my boot out of his arse.”

“No complaints there,” Dover had said slowly, “but the boy seems to have work and weather confused. Seems to think that just hard work’ll allow him to take his crop off a month earlier than anybody else. I tell him it doesn’t quite work that way, you can’t trick the seasons. I tell him save your hurry for what can be hurried, growing can’t. But he doesn’t listen to me when I give him the facts.”

“Oh, he just wants to prove himself,” Alec had said, feeling a flutter of gratification. “Wants to show his old man what he can do.”

“Pity the horses then,” Dover had remarked dryly.

“How’s that, ‘Pity the horses’?”

If it hadn’t been for the sake of the beasts, Dover wouldn’t have complained. “He’s been driving the horses too hard, won’t give them their rest. Yesterday night he didn’t come in for supper. I held it until nine and then I went out to the field to see if he’d had an accident. He was still working. I took the horses away on him, unhitched them from the harrows and took the lines out of his hands. He didn’t want to give them up even though they were played-out, stumbling. I said to him, ‘Work yourself as you please, but these poor dumb creatures aren’t volunteers. They need rest and feed.’ ”

“That was the thing to do,” Alec had hurriedly approved, “that was right. You got to remember he’s a town boy and it’s all new to him. It’s just that he doesn’t know horses, hasn’t had the experience. Now Earl, he’d be the last boy to ever willingly mistreat an animal; he was born with a heart of gold. It was all ignorance on his part with the horses, I’m sure.”

After that, Dover had kept his peace until the end of July when he suggested to his employer that Earl might benefit from a visit home. “Maybe you ought to ask your boy home for a Sunday dinner. He don’t seem to care for my cooking and he can’t keep working the way he’s been if he don’t eat. I can’t seem to force hardly anything into him.”

“It won’t be long now,” Alec had said. “In a couple of more weeks the crop’ll be ready and I’ll give him a dinner he won’t soon forget. The boy and I had an agreement. A little rough cooking’s not going to harm him. Tell him to eat what’s on his plate.”

In the third week of August the hired man arrived in town with the news that the crop was ready to cut. For days Alec had been anxiously awaiting the announcement, knowing the time was drawing near. He felt a great spill of relief. His gentle boy had done it. They both had weathered it. Now it was over.