Corvus by Harold Johnson

Author:Harold Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771870924
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Published: 2015-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

47

SUPPER WAS LATE. IT WAS ALREADY quite dark. The last guests had just arrived, three women from the university. Peter took his place at the head of the long dining table. “If you’d been any later, there might not have been any crabapple cider left.”

“It’s very good.” Richard lifted a heavy glass toward the women. It was filled with golden cider. And it was very good; there was a distinct rich sweetness beneath the sharp tart taste of the recently pressed crabapples.

“Everything you are going to eat over the next several days has been grown here at Tarasoff Farm.” It sounded like Peter had made this speech many times before.

Katherine took Richard’s hand under the table and squeezed it.

He liked that, liked that Katherine was happy.

There were eighteen people at the table, all dressed similarly in clothes for work, with no attempt at fashion. They ranged in age from a teenage boy who ate in a frenzy, his plate piled high — Richard guessed the boy was a resident — to the very old Peter, eighty and maybe even older than that. The woman at Peter’s left seemed to go out of her way to take care of him. She might have been his daughter, Richard wasn’t sure. Maybe she was his wife.

“Each of you have your own reasons for being here. Some have come to learn about soil, some have come to learn history, others have come just for a holiday . . . ” The teenaged boy stopped eating, put down his fork, and paid attention to Peter’s opening statement.

“There has been a Tarasoff on this land since 1899. My great grandmother pulled the plough that first broke the prairie soil. We have to forgive them, they simply didn’t know any better. In their day, the Saskatchewan River flowed full and they dug their homes into the riverbank. So I can say we were cave dwellers. My ancestors were cavemen and cavewomen.” A thin smile showed on the old man’s face. “In the early years we farmed not too much different than everyone else. The prairie was broken, the buffalo bones were picked and sold. Then in the time of my grandfather and my father, about 1980 or so, they changed and became what was then known as organic farmers, which simply meant that they rejected the use of chemicals, quit using pesticides and herbicides, and farmed the soil.” He stopped for a taste of the apple cider.

“It was that decision that saved this place. That is the reason Tarasoff Farm is an oasis in the middle of a desert. Our neighbours, like most of the other farmers, quit thinking about the soil. The earth to them was simply a platform that they put seeds into and sprayed fertilizer over. They farmed the chemicals, not the soil. They got away with it for a long time, then the soil got sick. Most of them still didn’t figure it out. They thought the soil was blowing away because of the drought.

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