A Farmer Read online

  Now Joseph thought his head would burst and he began walking in circles around the room averting his eyes from Catherine who had begun to snore softly. “You see I know you're right but I can know what's right and feel paralyzed. I knew last autumn when I was looking for that coyote and sitting there so many hours. I'd been in that same place twenty years before once with Dad rabbit hunting. And I said what have I done those twenty years? I had the feeling I was hiding out and you can't talk yourself out of hiding somewhere. It just came like a flash. Like the coyote took the chicken in a blur but the notion didn't stay long enough to convince me. Like you say I was a cow putting it through my four stomachs.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Catherine was awake. She slipped on her skirt and walked sleepily to the bathroom. She frowned in irritation as if being awakened too early for school.

  “What I mostly meant is that I'm not saying you should marry Rosealee. No. I didn't say that.” The doctor was excited and thunked the bottle against the table to emphasize his words. “No I didn't say that. Only you shouldn't drag out whatever your sense of punishment might be. You might think she's punished you which is false. She is only being alive with an honesty you're not capable of. You are thinking like you're turning a golf ball over and over trying to decide which side is which. My god, Joseph, you have to act some other way than sitting here thinking that life has jilted you. That's what I mean. If you want to marry, marry, and if not say Rosealee I can't marry you. Just do something other than walking around this place pissing your life away brooding.”

  Catherine came from the bathroom and looked out the screen door. “It's going to rain.” She turned to them still without bra or blouse. “Don't pay any attention to me. I know you're having an important talk.” Her nipples were small and reddish brown, almost childlike on her modest breasts. She took a Coke from the refrigerator, slipped on her blouse, and went out on the porch swing and began humming. They both paused to stare at her through the window, perhaps wanting to disbelieve her presence but the porch swing creaked and her humming merged with and amplified the bees.

  “Of course I'm not really all that goddamn smart myself. Old people mostly aren't wise, they're just old. It's like they can say, do a lot, do a lot because you're going to get old and die. They no longer live in the future because there's not much of it left. You said you remembered rabbit hunting in that place with your dad, the place where you looked for the coyote and then twenty years had passed. Right. But I walked around the marsh to that place more than twenty years further back than you and I feel the same way. What happened I wonder. But everyone thinks these thoughts though they don't talk about it much. It's funny but I mostly keep track of the past by remembering what bird dog I owned in what period. And now it's too late to own one at all. I can't ask a high-spirited pointer to sit on its ass and watch me disintegrate.” The doctor laughed at the idea and his laughter released Joseph from his impossible tension.

  “Rosealee said she wanted to talk when I get back from Chicago. That's in three days, you know. If I don't make up my mind by then you can chloroform me and chop off my good leg. Is that a fair bargain?”

  “No. Who wants your goddamn leg?”

  They were cast into silence by Catherine's singing a popular song in a thin but rather good voice. It was a slow mournful song about unhappy love. Joseph would have preferred a jay screaming at the cat again; he remembered painfully the way Arlice and Rosealee were always singing together. They knew dozens of songs and on summer evenings they were sometimes allowed to walk over to the pavilion on a lake that doubled as a dance hall and roller-skating rink. Orin and he would tag along throwing stones at fence posts and birds while the girls sang. They pretended out of embarrassment that they disliked the singing but Joseph secretly thought it wonderful. They would sit down on the dock while the girls skated to the pipe organ music. There was a concession that rented rowboats and they talked to the fishermen coming in in the gathering dark. The organist would vary slow waltzes with zippy jazz tunes and marches and it was absurd the way the music changed the mood as they sat on the dock. Joseph always suspected that Orin wouldn't skate because Joseph wasn't able to but Orin insisted he hated the thought of it. And walking home in the dark the singing was even better with the smell of drying hay, the weed-choked ditches, and frogs croaking. Where the road passed through the swamp they often flushed partridge and it always alarmed them. Why couldn't Orin have chosen Arlice leaving Rosealee for me? It would have been natural.

  The doctor was standing up staring at him. “Where have you been? Back on the couch with her or with someone else?” He was smiling though.

  “I was thinking about the way the girls used to sing all the time.” But he lost touch again for a moment. Arlice didn't like Orin or he might have been willing. So maybe it's her fault but I don't think she wanted me to have nothing. She simply didn't like Orin that way.

  The doctor said good-bye, then on his way out the drive beeped and waved at Catherine on the porch. She waved back and came into the house still humming.

  “I just imagined I was your daughter and the doctor came to tell you I was pregnant.” She giggled. “Only it was too hard to see you as my dad.” She took off her blouse and put it on the table with the Coke bottle.

  “Oh jesus what you dream of. You'll end up in the loony bin.”

  “You're sort of crazy yourself from what I heard.” She sat on his lap and there was a trace of the scent of honeysuckle on her shoulder. “But he's a good doctor and he's helping Mother some. During the Korean War she would just sit around in our apartment brooding like you do and the only way she could get happy was to sit around drinking scotch with the other wives. We didn't see Dad for almost two years and when he got home she was an A-1 drunk. Period. So were some of the other women. That's why I'm never going to drink whiskey. Period.”

  She twisted on the chair, straddling his lap and kissing him.

  “I don't think I want to again.” It was a lie though.

  “Of course if you marry Rosealee we can't be lovers. But I'll probably understand.” She unfastened her skirt and hiked it farther up her waist. “Let's do it this way.”

  “I bet you wouldn't marry me if I asked. You're just using me until you can get out of town.” Joseph was teasing but her face darkened and tears came to her eyes.

  After Catherine left to go home for dinner Joseph had an unpleasant phone call from Karen's father saying she couldn't be allowed to go on the senior trip because he had “heard certain things.” Joseph spent a solid half-hour talking the man out of his decision. Bruce, Karen's father, had been an energetic reprobate until his mid-thirties when he was saved at a revival and became a Nazarene. They had known each other since childhood and Joseph forced himself to be relaxed and devious, even using the Bible to talk about the gossips who “bore false witness” against others out of guilt over their own sin. Joseph couldn't stand the idea that Karen would miss the trip because of him. She had spent the last month or so reading about Chicago and had decided to spend her day and a half in the Field Museum of Natural History and the Aquarium. Joseph had looked forward to joining her.

  Through the years he had made a half-dozen trips to Chicago with the seniors and had always been disappointed when they chose Detroit. He loved the museum and was usually boggled for days afterward and the ball game provided a nice relief to the museum, though Robert and Catherine intended to skip the ball game and see a play. So Joseph overwhelmed Bruce by wit, agreeing that Bruce could come over after they returned and “talk about the Lord Jesus and what He could do for you.” Karen was home free; he was mindful that it might provide the big event of her life, her sole trip out of northern Michigan into the outside world.

  After the phone call he drove over to the lake and filled up with gas to be ready for their early morning departure. There were cars parked outside the pavilion and he could hear the skating music from the gas station, only now it was on record. That was the only difference. H
e was surprised to see Catherine and Robert walk jauntily in with their skates over their shoulders. He ducked behind the gas pump but they were unaware of everything except what they were talking about. The lake was rough in a warm but strong south wind, rare for June when the evenings were usually the stillest of the year.

  He drove the back roads for the hour just before dark and when he passed the log trail going off through the pine barrens from the gravel road he considered having another try at the coyote. But he was exhausted and had left his brace at home, and knew anyway that the coyote would be jittery in such a strong wind. He passed a dozen deserted farms with tangled orchards, the broken windows of the houses forming black holes, and some with the barns leaning and creaking in the wind. It was a naked land, nearly gutted with sand blowing through ferns and brake. It never should have been farmed at all; it was so marginal that the only truly green grass grew up beside the barns in places once owned by manure piles. It was a sad trick played on those who had moved north a half-century before and who hadn't known good land from bad, or were too poor to buy the good. Joseph remembered some of them; the few who were left in the twenties were driven out finally in the thirties. Occasionally the farm houses would be tenanted for a year or so by the bitterly poor, the half-mad retarded sort who hung on the fringe of any farm community existing on the oddest of temporary jobs and the county dole and the guilty concern of neighbors who had somehow held on.

  In his youth these people had been held up by his father as the true unfortunates. Once one of their children, a little girl, had fallen from a rickety flatbed truck in front of their farm and the people had been embarrassed and said, she's fine, when the child was white from pain and her arm badly scraped. The man was thin and his eyes were watery and the wife never looked up from her feet while she held the child waiting for the doctor on the front porch. The other children played on the tire swing and his mother served them all some food and lemonade. Carl gave the man a drink and the man said they had had a string of bad luck. He stared at the radio and Joseph remembered that his wife smiled shyly when Carl turned it on. They had some ham and the man said it was fine ham so they went out to look at the smokehouse. Then they went down into the cellar and Carl gave the man a smoked ham that weighed maybe thirty pounds and said everyone gets down on their luck, once in Chicago when I came to this country I ate bread for two weeks looking for work. Joseph saw them only once more and that was in September when their whole family was picking potatoes for a neighbor, even the small girl with a broken arm in the cold rainy field with her sisters scrambling around putting the potatoes into crates.

  Then the family disappeared and no one knew what happened to them. On that last day when Carl stopped, when they were picking potatoes, Joseph gave one of the daughters who was his age, about ten, his polished Petoskey stone an aunt had given him for Christmas the year before. She had accepted it with a hand muddy from her potato picking. Beneath the mud the hand looked cold and chapped and red.

  Now the wind was blowing even harder and the setting sun cast a yellowish pall over the landscape. There was a horse far out in a pasture, butt to the wind with its tail blowing through its legs along its belly. Horses somehow always hated a strong wind and either lay down or turned their back quarters to it. What had happened to the girl and did she still have the stone? Like Catherine and Robert entering the skating rink—he wondered at the lives people led outside the field of his perceptions.

  He turned toward home and passed a pale green field surrounded by a stump fence. He had demolished such a fence with Carl, pulling the huge white pine stumps with the team of horses toward a central place and burning them on a rainy day so the fire wouldn't spread. The only unpleasant aspect was that there were so many snakes living in the fence; garter snakes, blue racers, and milk snakes. Some lived in the stumps themselves and when the fire was started with kerosene they came sliding out in unbelievable numbers and the horses shied. Joseph and Carl had quickly moved out of the field and into the road to watch the fire. He had never minded snakes but when so many were around it was nightmarish.

  About a mile from home Joseph stopped in front of the last deserted farm before the land became acceptably fertile again. There was a long row of Lombardy poplars along the front of the property and the wind whipped the undersides of their leaves to a silver froth. The sun was huge and red and sinking into the state forest. Joseph smiled remembering that when he was very young he believed the sun sank in the field out behind the barn.

  When he walked into the house the phone was ringing and he swore at the idea that it might be Bruce changing his mind. But it was Rosealee.

  “Hello Joseph. I wanted to wish you a fine time in Chicago. I'll have Robert ready on time.” Her voice began to waver and she breathed deeply. “I love you, Joseph.”

  “I love you, Rosealee.” He cleared his throat but found nothing more to say.

  “Will I see you on Wednesday night?” Then she lost her voice again. “I guess I can't talk now.” It was a barely audible whisper.

  “Wednesday night,” he said. “Can I come now?”

  “No. Please not now. I'm a mess. I love you. Good-bye.”

  When he went to bed a sigh escaped him that was close to a shudder then became a shudder and he had difficulty breathing. In the light cast by the bedlamp the room was unnaturally clear and defined, as were his arms and chest when he looked down at them. Oh god what is happening now? He couldn't be sick because he had to start for Chicago with the kids at dawn. But his stomach felt fine and after the hard breathing his body felt strangely at peace. He got up and turned on the lights and walked around the house. It seemed he was looking at much of the house for the first time, or was in the process of recognizing it from a dream. In the bathroom he looked in the mirror and there was the sense of shock his father always described when he hit a hidden stone point-blank with the plow blade. Jesus that's me. He shaved then to avoid having to do it in the morning, whistling loudly, and sang a hymn because he couldn't remember any other songs. But he sang the hymn as if it were the most maudlin of love songs, stretching the words in inappropriate places. Whatever was happening to him now wasn't at all unpleasant. He decided to test this new mood and rushed to his mother's bedroom. There were a number of photos of Carl on the wall above the dresser that he habitually avoided looking at when he entered the room. One of them showed Carl holding a large pike by the gills and grinning with Joseph beside him in bare feet holding a stringer of bluegills. It was only a photo of “them,” objective. But the wedding picture brought a smile because Carl looked so stiff and terrified next to his mother's calm beauty.

  Back in the dining room he rejected an impulse to have a nightcap. He wanted to see if the mood would maintain itself. In bed he turned off the light and anticipated that he would return to normal in the dark. But maybe he had returned to normal. He searched out the day that Carl lay wet and dead on the river bank with the car overturned down by the pilings of the bridge. A man stood there. He was wet and he said, I pulled him out but he was dead as a mackerel. The doctor was crying and said heart attack over and over. He hugged Joseph and the funeral-home man came and took Carl away. Joseph forced himself through the terrors of the following three days as if he were looking at a movie, but though he breathed more deeply he could still handle it without pushing the images away. His mother's funeral had been so calm and peaceful in contrast, everyone she knew sitting in church with the knowledge of her death already in their heads for six months. Nearly everyone in the church was very old except her children and grandchildren and Rosealee. Even her oldest daughter had gray hair. There were no surprises here, and after they all had dinner at the Grange Hall, which was the custom, Joseph greeted each person and noted their quiet affability. At his father's funeral there had been wailing.

  On the edge of sleep he saw Rosealee whispering to him on the phone and the choking sensation returned to his throat. The ache dissipated as he entered the heady country that exists on the
verge of the first dream but the dream was a memory. Arlice and Rosealee and the fruitpickers near the cattle barns at the fair. The fruitpickers were Mexicans and they had a band made up of guitars, an accordion, and a trumpet. They played in the afternoon for the collection when they passed the hat. The girls loved the music, were drawn up into it, and losing their caution they began to dance. The fruitpickers smiled and the farmers and children gathered in a circle and clapped for them. The dust rose around their legs and though it was hot they danced on and on until Carl came and made them stop. He drifted back into wakefulness, from the dust that encircled them like smoke, as he remembered his jealousy when he thought the men were looking at the girls wrongly. What a time he had trying to sleep after they went swimming in the pond by the marsh with Rosealee drawing on her underpants and then her dress which became damp. It was a mystery because they were invisible. So were sharks because nobody had quite figured them out, like the planets. The kids were never interested in the planets because in any real sense they simply did not believe the planets existed though on tests they went through the motions. Robert reading science fiction all the time believed in planets, even that creatures lived on planets in other galaxies. And flying saucers that were spying on us, perhaps making contact with some people who kept it a secret out of fear. Maybe he was right about that at least. One summer evening after the war he and Orin and Rosealee drank a lot and took little Robert to the free show that was held next to the tavern, a noisy projector casting the movie on a large sheet. Robert and Orin went to sleep on the blanket but the movie was Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton, and Joseph looked at the sea with eagerness. His hand touched Rosealee's and they clasped but he paid no attention. She lay drowsily against his chest her thigh against his and he was abruptly torn from the movie. I'm cold she had said moving closer with lavender rising from her hair. Then her hand touched his lap and recoiled, lay lightly against his chest, and she gave him a light kiss and laughed. He had walked into the tavern then out of shame until he could calm down.