Thirty Acres by Ringuet

Author:Ringuet [Ringuet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-379-9
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1989-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

AUTUMN

ONE

While for some the future, right to the end of their days, remains subject to the sudden storms of human caprice and ordinary chance, Euchariste Moisan could look with complete satisfaction on his road through life. It stretched straight behind and straight before him, across the rolling fields of the years; in one direction it lay bright with the memory of bountiful harvests, and in the other heavy with the promise of even larger herds. It was a quiet road, marked with the deep ruts of habit; there were occasional dips or clouded puddles, many shady patches and a few lengthy sun-baked stretches. It was a long peaceful road, a trifle monotonous, perhaps, but it ran as true as a well-turned furrow; it rose gently towards the horizon and there one day, sometime in the future, it would break off sharply at the top of the hill under a cloudless sky.

He knew this because he had learned it from the land. As his roots did not go deep and he was at the mercy of the winds and the seasons, his part in life was passive; he had to submit to events as they arose and profit by them when he could. For he was dimly aware that all these ups and downs were merely the fleeting expressions of a single face. Storms? A frown. Winter? A nap. And underneath all this there was always the earth, ever a virgin and yet each year bearing fruit. This made him feel certain of enduring in that succession of generations which marks the years for men of the soil. People who live in towns are always restless and moving about in the midst of shifting and transitory surroundings, which they themselves build up and pull down and build up again, and so the lives they live are precarious and fleeting.

Like his uncle, his father and his grandfather, like all his relatives, he was satisfied with the quiet happiness of people who never question their existence; who understand the futility of any gesture which has no practical purpose, of any thought that does not lead to action.

He was fond of saying: “Let the land guide you, son; it won’t take you far, but anyway you’ll know where you’re headed.” Or else: “There are two things in the world know a lot more than we do: the priest and the land.”

And so Euchariste Moisan, firmly rooted to his thirty-acre strip of Laurentian farm-land, plodded on towards old age and the tranquil end of a peasant, sure in the knowledge that when he was gone there would always be a Moisan working the land – always. At least one.

Oguinase had taken the only path that can raise a man above earthly existence. Until he was ordained, his brief vacations brought him back to the farm for a few days every summer. On these occasions the whole house took on a sort of sacerdotal air, very like that of a presbytery, where women, following the rules of the Church, had to keep in the background.

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