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.
Nevertheless, Alec allowed none of this relief and excitement to be betrayed to the man who stood drab and still in the garage, waiting for orders as he had all his life.
“Tell Earl that me and Mr. Stutz’ll be out after work,” Alec said. Already he was planning. He would take a bottle with him to the farm so that the three of them, Earl, Dover, and himself could pass it back and forth among them as they looked with satisfaction on the crop and what had been accomplished. The start of the celebration. Had Earl and he ever had a drink, man to man?
Dover shuffled his boots on the oil-stained cement. “Earl’ll expect you sooner,” he said apologetically. “To tell the truth, the boy is a little like the convict standing waiting for the prison gate to open. He’s got it in mind I’ll bring you straight back with me. He kind of made me promise.”
Alec was torn. He wanted to succumb, throw up everything and go to his boy, but it would have ruined the sense of occasion. It would have felt too slapdash and hasty and undignified. Besides, Stutz wasn’t in and he wanted him to share in Earl’s success. The answer he gave Dover was abrupt. “I’ve things to do. Tell Earl we’ll be out after supper.”
When Stutz suggested they break off unloading a box car of coal at six o’clock because if they didn’t, the light would be gone before they reached the farm, Alec balked as he had with Dover. He felt, obscurely, that to abandon the job unfinished would be admission of a weak and shameful lack of control on his part. He insisted they complete the work, sure there was time to spare.
There wasn’t. Mr. Stutz was proved correct. As they pulled out of Connaught it was necessary to switch on the headlights of the truck. In the west the sky was a sheet of cold ash from which was wrung some pale colour – a few streaks of salmon and gold cloud captured between the decisive black line of the horizon and the leaden weight of sombre grey sky above. When Alec and Mr. Stutz finally bumped into the farmyard, the lights behind the clouds had gone out and night had truly fallen, dense, dark, still.
The memory of stillness awakened Alec to the stillness now in Stutz’s kitchen. He realized that neither he nor Stutz had spoken for many minutes. Stutz sat with his hands on his knees, waiting patiently for him to resume speaking. Alec dredged his mind, striving to recall what his last words about Earl had been. Turning him into a farmer, he thought.
He lifted his eyes from the floor to Stutz’s impassive face. “You remember the night we drove out to see Earl’s wheat?” he asked. Somehow it was less of a question than a declaration of preoccupation.
“Yes,” said Stutz, “I do. Same as you.”
It was Dover who had greeted them swinging a kerosene lamp from side to side, sweeping back the night and lighting himself the broadest possible path.
“Where’s Earl?” Alec had immediately demanded, unable any longer to restrain his eagerness.