1948
“Admit it, Seed Man, you voted for Duplessis!”
A boom of laughter drifts up to the attic where Maggie is weighing and counting seeds. Premier Duplessis has just been reelected and there’s a buzz in the store. She dumps a handful of seeds on the scale, straining to hear what’s being said downstairs. “Come on, Seed Man!” one of the farmers teases. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of!”
Maggie abandons counting and crouches at the top of the stairwell to eavesdrop. She’s been working for her father on weekends since she turned twelve two years ago, weighing and packaging seeds in small paper envelopes. It can be a tedious task, especially because the larger seeds have to be counted individually, but she doesn’t mind. She loves being at her father’s store; it’s her favorite place in the world. She plans to work downstairs on the sales floor one day, and then take over when he retires.
His store is called Superior Seeds/Semences Supérieures, and it’s about halfway between Cowansville and Dunham, the small town where they live about fifty-five miles southeast of Montreal. The name on the sign outside the store is written in French and English because her father says that’s the way things work in Quebec if you want to prosper in business. You can’t exclude anyone.
Maggie creeps down a few more stairs to get closer to the action. The store is damp and smells of fertilizer, a scent she adores. Arriving on Saturday mornings, she always inhales deeply and sometimes digs her hands inside the cool dirt where new seeds are germinating in small clay pots, just so the earthy smell will stay on her fingers for the rest of the day. To Maggie, this is where happiness is found.
The store stocks basic things like fertilizers and insecticides, but Maggie’s father prides himself on an impressive selection of rare seeds that can’t be found elsewhere in the area. Vain enough to think of himself as a dispenser of life, he is redeemed by his sheer commitment to his work. He manages to straddle a fine line between ridicule and respect, and the farmers come to him not just for their seeds but also for his expertise in all matters rural and political. On a day like today, his store is as much a gathering place as it is a business. The back wall is lined with row upon row of tiny square drawers, all of them filled with seeds. There are giant barrels of corn, wheat, barley, oats, and tobacco for the farmers. On the floor, there are sacks of sheep manure, Fertosan, bonemeal, RA-PID-GRO. Beside those there is a wooden display rack for the trees and shrubs, as well as gardening tools, lawn sprinklers, and hoses. The shelves are crowded with powder packs and spray cans of DDT, Nico-fume, larvicide, malathion dust, Slug-Em. There is nothing a farmer or a gardener can’t find.
“The day I vote Union Nationale is the day I close down this store,” her father declares, full of bravado, the upturned ends of his moustache seeming to emphasize his point.
Her father has a magnetic way about him. He’s as handsome as a movie star, with his blue eyes and Hollywood moustache. His hair is thinning—always has been, ever since his twenties—but baldness gives him a certain dignified air, somehow enhances his sophistication in her eyes. He wears linen suits during the summer and tweed jackets with fedoras in winter, and he smokes House of Lords cigars that stink up the house with that wonderful fatherly smell. Even his name, Wellington Hughes, sounds impressive.
Wellington thrusts his chin out in his stubborn, prideful way and says, “The man is a gangster and a dictator.” He speaks in fluent French, being a great proponent of bilingualism as a business tool.
Maggie’s father is a very influential man in the farming community, so it’s expected he will support any politician who values, protects, and promotes agriculture the way Duplessis does. But he is also a proud Anglophone. He despises Duplessis and is quite open about it. He believes Duplessis is the one who’s kept the French uneducated and living in the dark ages. He endures his customers’ political views only because they choose to do their business at his shop and he respects their patronage and loyalty. Yet when the name Maurice Duplessis is dropped into the conversation, the color rises up in his usually pale cheeks and his voice goes up an octave or two.
“We know you voted for him, Hughes,” Jacques Blais taunts. He pronounces it Yooz. “You need his farm credits. When we prosper, you prosper, heh?”
“My business would do fine without that egomaniac in power,” Maggie’s father states emphatically.
“Takes one to know one,” Bruno Roy mutters, and all the men break out laughing.
“You Québécois have no loyalty to this country,” her father says, uttering the word “loyalty” with reverence, as though it were the noblest trait a man could possess.
“Maudit Anglais,” Blais jokes, just as the bell jangles over the front door.
The men turn to look and immediately fall silent as Clémentine Phénix enters the store. An unmistakable tension quickly replaces the jovial mood of moments earlier.
“I need some DDT,” she says, filling the store with her husky voice and controversial presence. The way she says “I need” is not so much a request as a challenge.
Maggie’s father goes over to where he keeps the pesticides. He picks up a can of DDT and wordlessly hands it to her. Something passes between them—a cryptic look, a communication—but then he quickly turns and walks away. Maybe it’s nothing more than the old territorial grudge.
The Phénix family lives in a small shack on the cornfield that borders Maggie’s property. This is very much a point of contention with her father. He feels the value of his own land is considerably diminished by its proximity to their impoverished shack. The Phénix kids own the cornfield, but it’s all they’ve got. They earn their living from sweet corn and strawberries in the summer. In the winter, Clémentine’s brother, Gabriel, works in a factory in Montreal. It’s just the three siblings living together now—Clémentine, Gabriel, and Angèle—and Clémentine’s four-year-old daughter, Georgette, from a marriage that ended in divorce. The rest of the family—their parents and two other sisters—were killed in a car accident several years ago.
Clémentine follows Wellington to the front counter, ignoring the snickers from the other customers, which she must be used to by now. Her divorce has made her a pariah in their small Catholic town, where divorce is not only a sin but also illegal. She had to go all the way to Ottawa to get it done, an unforgivable offense in the eyes of the self-righteous townsfolk like Maggie’s mother.
“I need two cans,” Clémentine says, folding her solid brown arms across her chest.
She’s suntanned and freckled, wears no makeup, and lets her long golden braid swing out behind her like a skipping rope. Maggie thinks she’s beautiful, even stripped of all the usual feminine trappings. She somehow manages to be feminine and tomboyish at the same time, her disarmingly pretty face not the least bit undermined by a hard expression, thick, muscular arms, or the unflattering potato-sack dungarees that conceal even the possibility of a figure.
There’s something awe-inspiring about her, Maggie observes, a quiet defiance in how she handles herself with the men. She has none of the usual adornments that give women legitimacy—a husband, children, money—and yet she seems to do whatever needs to be done to manage her family and their livelihood.
“My crop is infested with rootworms,” Clémentine explains. If she’s uncomfortable with everyone’s eyes on her, she doesn’t let on.
Wellington crosses the store again and returns with another can of DDT, looking quite agitated. All of a sudden, the front door swings open and Gabriel Phénix steps inside. He swaggers over to Clémentine as all the farmers turn their attention to him.
Maggie hasn’t seen Gabriel since last summer and her breath catches when he enters. He left for Montreal as a boy last fall—she remembers him running through the field on spindly legs, his shoulders slight, his face round and cherubic—but he’s returned a man. He must be sixteen now. His blond hair is combed into a swirling lick, his gray eyes glint like razor blades, and he’s got the same pronounced cheekbones and full lips as his sister. He’s still thin enough that Maggie can count his ribs through his white cotton T-shirt, but his arms, which have muscle now and a fine thick shape, give his body a man’s breadth and substance. Watching him from her spot near the stairs, she feels something strange inside her body, like the swoosh feeling in her belly when she dives off the high rocks into Selby Lake. Whatever it is about him, she can’t seem to make her eyes look anywhere else.
“You okay?” he asks his sister. Clémentine nods and puts her hand on his chest, a signal for him to hang back and wait for her. He does, with clenched fists and a serious, insolent expression on his face, waiting to pounce in her defense if called upon.
Maggie’s father puts the two cans of DDT into a brown paper bag and rings it up on the cash register.
“I need credit,” Clémentine says.
More snickers.
“Credit?” her father echoes with contempt. Wellington Hughes does not extend credit. It’s his policy. It is the policy, and his policies are like commandments. Thou shalt not extend credit.
“Our season starts in a couple of weeks,” she explains. “I’ll be able to pay you then.”
Maggie wipes a film of sweat from above her lip. She realizes for the first time how hard life must be for the Phénix kids. The truth is she’s never really considered it before, not even when she was friends with their little sister, Angèle. She’s heard her parents talk about them—the divorce and the dead father’s drinking—but she never paid much attention. Today, though, she finds something about their prideful audacity very compelling.
“If I let you take this bag on credit,” her father says in his smooth French, “everyone in town will start coming to me in the off-season and promising to pay when corn season starts.”
Gabriel pushes in front of his sister and unfastens his watch. He drops it on the counter and shoves it toward Maggie’s father. “Here,” he says. “Take my goddamn watch to show we’re good for it. It was my father’s. It’s gold.”
Wellington’s upper lip twitches and he thrusts the watch back at Gabriel. “This isn’t a pawn shop,” he says, scowling.
Gabriel makes no move to take back the watch. After a moment, Maggie’s father suddenly pushes the brown paper bag of DDT across the counter to Clémentine. “Here, then,” he says. “Take it. But don’t come back until you can pay for it.”
“Thank you,” she says, never once lowering her head or her eyes in shame.
Maggie’s father looks disgusted. When Gabriel still makes no move to reclaim his watch, Clémentine grabs it and pulls Gabriel toward the door. On their way out, Gabriel looks directly at Maggie, as though he’s known she’s been here all along. Their eyes lock and her heart accelerates. His expression is defiant, full of hatred. His lips curl into an indolent sneer, and she realizes, with some shock, that the sneer is directed at her.
She notices her father watching her sternly. His warning is understood. Thou shalt not date French boys.