The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater
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Canadian government might occupy itself to good purpose in giving [Canadians] … a Canadian flag that will have at least the dignity of a registered trade mark.” He goes on to say with some irony: “Canadians were left until a recent date in use of a flag that carried on the fly a grotesque jumble of hieroglyphics, including among others, a dead fish, a live buffalo, an antediluvian ship, a field of grain and a marine sunset.” He goes on to growl that beasts and flowers will not be appropriate for a flag and, prophetic irony of ironies, thinks that the maple leaf will not do because it does not occur in all regions of Canada.
5. The extent to which John Mitchell managed to muddy the waters regarding himself is evidenced by the fact that there are two different years listed for his birth (1880 and 1882), and The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) refers the reader away from John Mitchell, the real person, to Patrick Slater, the fictitious creation, whose given dates are those of John Mitchell.
Out in the Ontario countryside, the late spring is a pleasing and soul-mellowing season of the year. It commences once the seeding is done and lasts until the chattering mower starts to mishandle its pitman shaft. In those sweet-smelling, warm, soft, juicy days of early June, the fields everywhere are bursting with fresh young life. After the dry fodder of a long winter, the cattle have had time to purge themselves with the rich, lush grasses; and their skins have been softened, and the dirty wartles on their flanks have been loosened by the warm spring rains. The air is as soaked with delicious hope as the meadows with the dew.
It is for such an inviting scene that the silent and wary thrush deserts the South; and it is the rapture of it filling his breast that turns him into the saucy and intimately friendly robin who insists on nesting in the most obvious places about my kitchen stoop. Plain for me to understand, he tells me the time is now at hand to “Cheer up! D’ye hear? Let joy be unconfined.”
Perhaps you think the mellow tones of the late autumn should make a stronger appeal to an old fellow like me. Faith no! Sure an Irish heart is always youthful. Before we grow old, we live in hope of things here: when we are grown old, we live in hope of things hereafter. The weight of years that burden the flesh presses lightly on the spirit of an old Irishman.
In this northern clime, harvest-time has always seemed to me a sere and gloomy season. I have seldom seen men come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves — and never in a barley harvest. The nights commence settling down early, and come upon us with an abrupt suddenness. The air bites a bit in the early mornings; and, here and there, the furtive rime marks the midnight prowlings of the frost king, who already plans to reassert his sovereign rights. If the crops have been poor, the scanty contents of the barns distress us; and, if Nature has been over-bountiful, the prices offered are more distressing still. The farmer’s is a gambler’s job. Old Mother Earth rolls the bones for him. In the spring, he has laid his wager, and his hope hangs high.
It is pleasant to watch the young gambol on the hillside pastures and punch the swollen udders of their dams. It is sweet to smell the pungent, homely earth in its creative mood. It is refreshing to feel the mild sunshine strike down, casual-like, filtering through a screen of opalescent emerald. This is the season for loafing a bit about an Ontario farm; and, in the afternoon that now concerns us, I beg to advise that, as for me and my household, we were busy loafing. The hired man was going through the slow motions of mending the orchard fence. His stomach must have stood the cooking we were getting better than mine, because he was whistling some tune about the murmur of a waterfall. I had been down to the lower hundred salting the young cattle. They looked to be doing fine.
About the old lawn and in the fence-corners, the stinking burdocks were sticking their miserable snouts up in the air — and looking healthy. It is a caution the things that require fixing about a farm; and continue requiring it. I got the axe from the wood-shed, and set about sinking its sharp blade well below the crowns of those burdocks with a view to destroying them utterly and in orderly detail. I have carried on a personal warfare against them on this farm, on and off, for over seventy years. Making rhymes was everyone’s foible at times, in the early days; and a red-headed hired boy once cracked a good one at my expense:
On Mono’s hills, the farmer grubs along,
And, like the Indian, chants a dismal song.
On rainy days, out you see him stalk
To tomahawk the healthy young burdock.
The young man’s Christian name was Wendell — we called him Pepper-top for short. He was discharged before his time was up — not because of the poetry, but because of grey cooties. He went into the milling business and in after years became a director of a chartered bank.
Several times, after absences of years, I have returned to reduce to complete subjection the burdocks on this farm. And it was all to do again. But, lately and right under my nose, they seem to be getting a little ahead of the old man. And this struck me as pitiable in a way. After my battles against her weeds and grasses crowding in upon me, Nature seemed to say: “Ah, ah, old thing! We’ve got you on the run at last.” Even the fields — my beautiful grain-fields — have become mere hay and pasture lands; and I have fallen to the low estate of a lean-necked, grass-land farmer. Father in Heaven, what have I done to deserve this? The soil of this farm has been a lifelong sweetheart of mine; and the glint of a ploughshare polished with use once helped me in my courting.
Scalping burdocks is a good job for an old man — if he will stick at it. All it requires is patience; and there is plenty of time for thinking. What a job it was, thought I, for a seedy old bachelor like me to get an orderly woman to stick at house-keeping on a farm. How could it be otherwise — so cold and draughty in the winter-time? Now here was the widow Wilkie. I did not like her sloppy porridge, or her sniffling ways. But she put up with my dog in the kitchen; so I put up with her on the farm. Well, anyway, I was master of a home of my own — such as it was — which was more than many the father of a large family could ever boast.
I glanced over my shoulder. Unbeknownst to me, a long, slim, low-hung car had come up the lane and was making a silent stop within a few feet of where I was kneeling. A coloured man in chocolate uniform sat at the wheel. There was a detached air of well-groomed luxuriousness about the vehicle. Now I know quite a bit about motor cars myself. I was the first person in this district to own one. I bought a touring car, brand new; and, on Sunday for years, when the roads were in good condition, I drove it regularly to Mass. At other times, I hitched up the buggy. I do not drive my car now; but I have it in the barn, jacked up to save the tires. The copper on the radiator is as bright as it ever was, and there is not a scratch anywhere to be seen. And then, for years, there has been an orgy of car-buying among the neighbouring farmers, who have been busy motoring themselves out of the well-to-do class.
But, compared with the cars hereabouts, the motor with the saffron driver was a buxom queen bee to a humble little worker.
“Jiminy crickets!” said I to myself. “Some class!”
I felt a stiffening in my joints in the rising. Then I walked over toward the tipsy old picket-fence.
His nibs in the leggings hopped around to open the door, and out of the paunch of the vehicle stepped a young woman who fluttered over toward me. Not that I could say she was a young person, right off, at first. The way women dress nowadays, It is next to impossible to tell, off-hand, how old they are — unless they are over forty.
“Are you Mr. Patrick Slater?” she inquired; and her voice was low and pleasing.
I dislike a woman who uses her nose as a sounding-board.
“Yes,” I said. “I am old Paddy Slater.”
Then I found myself chatting with a very lovely young girl whose blue-grey eyes were soft and friendly. She stood as straight as a whip; and she looked me square in the face. I had seen those eyes many a time before. Her mouth was pleasant and sweet. Her clothes every day would be the same as Sunday, with the neatness of the pretty girl — so comely and smiling.
I do not mention her name; because, as they say in the army: “No