Fruits of the Earth by Frederick Philip Grove Read Free Book Online

join Abe while the horses rested; and they talked; sometimes, as is often the case with farmers, on curious and recondite subjects.
    Thus Wilson, the postmaster at Morley, having suddenly died, leaving his daughter Susie in charge, Nicoll said with seeming irrelevancy and in that light tone with which we touch on things that disquiet us, “Strange thing, death, isn’t it?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Abe replied. He had a definite aim in life: to be the most successful farmer of a district yet to be created; he was a materialist and felt uncomfortable when facing fundamentals.
    â€œI wish we could know!”
    Abe turned and picked up the lines of his team. “Best not to inquire, I guess,” he said, and clicked his tongue.
    When they met again, Nicoll pursued the topic. “I read an article recently,” he said. “The doctor gave it to me.” He meant Dr. Vanbruik, not Dr. Schreiber, the practising physician at Morley. “It said a life after death was impossible unless we had existed from all eternity.”
    Abe’s eyes swept over the landscape beyond his fences. He did not often allow it to do so. Rarely, during the first years of his life on the prairie, had he given the landscape any thought. It had offered a “clear proposition,” unimpeded by bluffs of trees or irregularities in the conformation of the ground; the trees he wanted he had planted where he wantedthem. But when Nicoll spoke as he had done, Abe felt something uncanny in that landscape. Nicoll’s words impressed him as though they were the utterance of that very landscape itself; as though Nicoll were the true son of the prairie, and he, Abe, a mere interloper. Incomprehensibly he was drawn to this man even while resenting the fact that his, Abe’s, brother-in-law should loan him things to read. Abe read nothing but farm papers; and in them only what might enable him to farm more land more efficiently than any one else.
    Again he picked up his lines. But, still standing in his place, he shrugged his shoulders. “What of it? Suppose we come from nothing and go to nothing? While I’m here, what difference does it make?”
    Nicoll gave him a troubled glance.
    â€œGet up, there!” Abe shouted, shaking the lines over the horses’ backs; and as they bent into their collars, he caught up with the plough by running a few steps before he lifted himself to its seat.
    Here and there, in the long strip of pasture, cows were grazing in groups; others were lying down and chewing the cud. To the east, two miles away as the crow flies, a slight indentation of the sky-line marked the spot where Nicoll’s farmstead lay. Shilloe’s buildings were quite invisible. Abe’s own barn was so far the only landmark to be seen from Morley.
    Conquest of that landscape depended on ways and means of speeding up the work. Abe owned three quarter sections now. No doubt the man who held the remaining quarter of the section would turn up one day prepared to sell. Abe would have a square mile then; how could he farm it? Hired men? Bill Crane needed too much supervising right now; when he milked, he did not milk dry; when he fed, he seemed to grudge the hay and yet wasted more than he saved. Why in the world,he had recently asked, did Abe not turn the horses out at night? Even the horses liked it better. “They can’t pick up enough green feed to keep in trim for the work and sleep besides,” Abe had answered. What was the solution? There was only one: power-farming as it was called: machinery would do the work of many horses and many men. But Abe liked the response of living flesh and bone to the spoken word and hated the unintelligent repetition of ununderstood activities which machines demanded. Yet sooner or later he must come to that; he would have to run the farm like a factory; that was the modern trend….
    At noon, when the men went to the yard for dinner, two little boys, four