Child Labour
Children are forced to fend for themselves before they are barely out of their childhood. Some are compelled to work due to poverty, others due to being orphaned. Agnes elucidates, "Everyone with a mouth to be fed had to earn his or her keep-children without a mother met that reality earlier. Nobody found it extraordinary, the least Fabienne and me. Her two older brothers worked on the farm." Fabienne does not go to school; she spends her time grazing her cattle. She and her siblings must toil or starve because they do not have parents who can provide for their physiological needs.
Jean
Jean's family loses hope for his survival. Agnes and other family members accept that Jean's death is approaching. Agnes narrates, "My brother, Jean, was dying. He had not been well enough to do heavy farmwork since he returned from a German labor camp six years earlier…he lay in bed all day long, staring at the ceiling when he wasn't coughing up blood." These symptoms surmise that Jean is not healthy. His married sisters visit him often. They come to bid him goodbye because they have no hope for his survival.
Farming
Agnes delights in chicken farming and gardening. She explains, “I have a vegetable garden, which I started in our backyard, and raise chickens, two dozen at any time. I was hoping to add to my charges some goats, but the two kids I acquired had a habit of chewing the wooden fence and running away.” Agnes’s life in saint Remy influences her to engage in small-scale farming. She grew up with Fabienne, who loves tending to goats. She wants to replicate her childhood experiences in America, where she is referred to as “a French bride.”
