A Farmer Page 9

  At the gate a car pulled into the yard in the gathering dark and the lights passed above him as he ducked. It wasn't Rosealee. Catherine knocked at the back door then began walking toward the barn. Joseph shrunk himself into a shadow. She must have driven past Rosealee's and, not seeing his car, assumed it was safe to come over. Joseph had no idea why he was hiding. Catherine turned on the light in the stable and leaned against a stanchion and began singing softly. She rubbed her horse's ears and looked around distractedly. She went to the door and called his name, then turned out the lights and left the barn. Joseph began breathing again when she drove out of the yard. For a moment looking through the dirty, fly-spattered barn window he had wanted her but that quickly passed into the absurd notion that he was watching a movie of Catherine and that any minute he himself might answer her call from the house or granary. The heat lightning he had seen in the pasture turned into a light, sprinkling rain, then into a downpour. Joseph sat near the gate on a large rock that they had hauled out of the field after chipping the plow blade. As they had unearthed it the boulder had turned out to be much larger than expected though the horses had had no difficulty with it. Joseph was soaked but it was a warm rain and he began to think the rain was cleansing his thoughts of their confusion and indecision. He knew he should go to Rosealee and ask forgiveness but the sight of Catherine was maddening and he wanted to be with her a few more times before he stopped it. He was gripping the flyrod so hard his hand had become sore.

  In the kitchen Joseph poured himself his first large glass of whiskey after some self-congratulatory weeks of light drinking. He downed it in two gulps and sat waiting for his sureness to return. Maybe he would marry Rosealee, eat a little crow, and begin farming. It was too late for this year but he could get everything ready for the next. He was immediately reminded of what it would be like to sit on a tractor and cultivate two hundred acres of corn or soybeans, not to speak of plowing and disking it in the first place in single operations. What bleakness. A sea of corn was not the sea. Fuck Rosealee. If she wanted him they would at least take a long trip to see the ocean. He poured another drink and it occurred to him he was sopping wet so he shed his clothes and sat there drinking naked. He turned on the radio and heard a country singer wailing about a “cold, cold, heart,” and Joseph saw his heart brittle and frozen in a meat locker. Then the heart became disturbingly airborne behind the lids of his closed eyes. The heart flushed like a blood-red grouse rocketing around the room. He felt if he had any courage he would keep his eyes closed and see what happened to his winged heart. He drank again deeply and some of the whiskey trickled down his chin and onto his chest. He heard a car pull up but he refused to open his eyes. Perhaps it was Rosealee and they could have their Friday night like they always had. There were footsteps in the room. For an idle moment he thought she might see his red heart.

  “Joseph!” It was Catherine again. He might have known when the car drove behind the house where it could be hidden. “What are you doing? Jesus. Are you drunk?”

  “Rosealee knows.” He waited but she said nothing. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Should we make love? I'm sorry. She had to know sooner or later.”

  “Why?” His eyes were still closed.

  “I want to marry you,” she said shyly.

  “Will you cut that marriage shit?” Joseph exploded. His eyes opened as she burst into tears and hugged him. He drew her down on his lap. “I'm not going to marry anyone right now. I love you but I love Rosealee. I'm not sure what to do.” He was stuttering.

  “I won't mention it again.” She stood and quickly slipped out of her clothes. They had never made love in the house before and somewhere in her head maybe she thought that might bring her closer to ownership.

  Joseph was in the tavern by midnight. His lovemaking with Catherine had been dismal and she wept after he demanded that she stop cooing a popular song. And on the couch he was sure he felt the presence of ghosts; his mother gliding soundlessly through the room and his father telling him to slop the hogs. Catherine left in tears forgetting to put on her panties. Joseph poured another whiskey and held the panties up to the light with one hand. They were lovely; pale blue with a slight fringe of lace. He could see the lightbulb clearly through them and he felt silly. Jesus. He longed for a time not eight months back when sex was a regular pleasurable occasion with Rosealee, twice a week at the most. Now he had blown the lid off the well and had even managed to trip in the river while wading and thinking about Catherine's ass. One afternoon she had blown him as he was driving on a log trail in the woods and he had narrowly missed a tree. He smiled, though, when he thought how the superintendent would have reacted to his behavior. A fellow schoolteacher at another country school had been fired for “moral turpitude” but that was with boys. The men in the tavern had made much of the event. Daniel's father had yelled about “Commie cocksucker teachers” until Joseph told him to shut up or get thrashed.

  Joseph joined a pinochle game when one of the partners dropped out. There were two farmers and a burly carpenter who tended to cheat even though they only played for quarters. He was often caught and embarrassed but couldn't resist slipping a card or two. It mystified everyone in the tavern as the carpenter was otherwise honest and hard working. The two fanners were dairymen who had been close to his father.

  “And hello, Yoey,” said one dairyman. “My cards have been shit but we can beat these morons.”

  “Hello, Einar. I'll play if you don't talk politics. And you can't talk about cattle, especially the heifers you keep for fun.”

  They all laughed, bestiality being a rather common joke. Usually they argued about farm prices or Eisenhower, who “got us out of Korea.” The biggest source of argument ever was Truman's firing of MacArthur—there had been fights over that one. Joseph McCarthy had been dismissed as an “Irishman” by all but the Pole, Daniel's father, who revered him.

  “Be the best you ever had. Never met a Swede who hadn't screwed a cow.” Einar was Danish.

  “You guys are so old you can't screw nothing. Deal the cards.” The carpenter was in his twenties and featured himself a stud though it was commonly agreed that his exploits were totally invented.

  “Yoey, when you going to marry Rosealee?” asked Nelse, the other dairyman. He was a shrewd Swede, quite rich in fact. He had been playing pinochle on Friday nights since Joseph could remember. Nelse had tried to help Joseph's father but quickly despaired, advising that Carl go back to the fishing boats like his people.

  “I'll marry her when she gets ten years younger.” More laughter.

  After a few games the dairymen quit and Joseph, now dizzy with his succession of shots and beers, moved to the bar with the carpenter.

  “If I was you I'd be screwing some of them junior and senior girls. Christ if I knew in school what I knew now I'd be screwing all the time.”

  Joseph looked away to hide his flush. Does he know? Probably not. The carpenter was an improbable big mouth whose brain was fixed on sex to the degree that it scarcely existed in his life. He would drive a hundred-fifty miles with some friends to a black whorehouse in Grand Rapids, returning with mythical screws that had been the agreed-upon stories in the car on the way back.

  “Sixteen will get you twenty. You know that.” He meant a sixteen-year-old equaled statutory rape which could net the offender twenty years. Up in this country where girls married as early as fifteen it never happened. Once when depressed with his students Joseph had decided that all country people were essentially hillbillies, no matter the distance to the Mason-Dixon line.

  “I got to take the chance. You can't fuck when you're dead.” The carpenter guffawed and Joseph moved down the bar to get the attention of the tavern owner long enough to get another drink.

  “I'll have a double this time, Ted.”

  “What's wrong with you? Where's Rosie tonight?” All the older men in the area considered Rosealee a great beauty and couldn't comprehend why Joseph wouldn't marry her. “Do
c was in early. He says you was going to fish the Pine tomorrow.”

  Now the power of the whiskey was in Joseph and he felt stupidly sentimental. He played some songs on the jukebox and the bartender looked askance at him because Joseph normally despised the jukebox. Then Joseph got up abruptly, spilling his beer, but his double was in his hand. He was going to stop and apologize to Rosealee.

  Joseph drove into Rosealee's yard and noticed that the kitchen light was on. He pounded on the door and Robert appeared in pajamas.

  “Mother doesn't want to see you,” Robert said primly.

  “Why?” Joseph began to push Robert aside.

  “We both know. Catherine tells me everything. I don't see how you could do this to Mom after all these years.”

  Joseph shoved Robert aside and moved into the kitchen. Though it was nearly two a.m. Rosealee sat at her sewing machine in the corner.

  “Please go away, Joseph. Let me think.” Her face was ashen and she looked at the wall as she spoke.

  “I just wanted to say. . .” Joseph stumbled against a chair.

  “Please go away.” She faced him. “I don't want to see you, Joseph. Maybe next week we can talk it over.”

  Joseph walked into the living room, lay down, and went to sleep.

  It seemed the doctor wanted to go fishing. He shook Joseph. Joseph rolled over in the midst of a dream in which he was being shaken by his father for netting spawning trout. Orin did it Orin did it. There was a gunny sack full. His father said you kill all the mothers of trout and fishing will be bad for years. They ate them anyway. The doctor said Yoey for Christ's sake get up. Rosealee stood there arms folded when he opened his eyes. And Robert in his red jacket; Orin's mother cronelike peering from the corner. He swung his feet to the floor and drank tepid coffee, staring at his shoes, his head an air hammer. Robert walked away and so did Rosealee, looking older.

  “Shame on you, Yoey,” said Orin's mother. The doctor gestured her away and they stumbled out.

  “You weren't at home but all the lights were on so I figured you would be down here.” The doctor was cheery in the mid-morning light. They had meant to leave at dawn. “I overslept too, had a delivery. Let's go get your stuff.” The doctor poked in his case in the back seat and handed Joseph a pill. “Here, take this and you'll survive.”

  They drove toward Tustin, an hour away, where the Pine River swept through a big swamp before entering a country of high clay banks. When they had the whole weekend they would drive farther north to the Manistee near Sharon, or farther yet up near Gaylord where there were three good rivers, the Pigeon, the Sturgeon, and the Black. A few weeks before Joseph had driven to the Pine with his seniors to bird-watch: what the superintendent had urged as “field trips.” But when they reached the spot and Joseph had taken the Audubon packet from the trunk he found that Audubon had sent cards of shorebirds from the southeast. He sat on the trunk looking at beautiful pictures of roseate spoonbills, grebes, egrets, and pelicans while the kids played in the creek. But he had a Peterson Field Guide in the glove compartment and sent them off with it while he dozed in a glade. Robert and Catherine were tired of birds, and Daniel stayed in form by identifying robins as bluebirds. Lisa was a chippy cheerleader type who cracked gum and scarcely could read. A poor overweight girl named Karen rounded out the class. She was painfully shy but excelled at bird-watching. At first Joseph thought she was cheating but one day he walked with her and discovered that she even knew dozens of warblers on sight. She said there was a large swamp behind their barn and she had been doing her Audubon cards since the second grade when Rosealee had first given them to her.

  When they came over a hill and stopped for gas they both noticed a bank of dark clouds on the horizon to the north.

  “Oh pig shit,” said the doctor.

  “We're in trouble.” Joseph's hangover had quickly lifted and he felt energetic. “What was that pill you gave me?”

  “That's for fat sluggish women who want to diet and can't stay out of the icebox. Dexedrine.” The doctor stared at the horizon. “We might get screwed out of our fishing and I've been thinking about it all week. Pisswilly.”

  “We might get there before it breaks,” Joseph said without conviction.

  They continued driving north through country not unlike the state land behind Joseph's farm: the spill from a moraine, glacial detritus which after the first wave of lumbering that scalped the land of its giant white pine had not been able to support anything but poplar, scrub oak, mixed stunted conifers, except in the richer swampy areas. The good farms in the county tended to follow a rather narrow irregular strip the glaciers had missed and their woodlots were dotted with huge beech and maple and the soil was rich. Joseph's father had stupidly chosen a fringe because of its beauty; all the improvident farmers in the county held one thing in common—they squatted on the moraine like hopeless ducks trying to scratch a living off the few inches of top soil that hovered over the pecker sand and gravel like a thin lid. But the rivers that ran swift and clean through this hilly country and the swamps in the valleys promised wonderful trout fishing, and Joseph and the doctor both loved this land the agriculturists thought of as useless.

  They reached the river and were tying on leaders just as the sky unloaded with great streaks of lightning and hollow crackling thunder.

  “Goddamn you,” the doctor shook his fist at the sky.

  “We've been had.” Joseph reflected glumly that if he had been ready an hour earlier and not slept drunkenly on Rosealee's couch they would have picked up on the fine fishing that usually preceded a warm spring storm. He suspected the doctor was thinking the same thing.

  They sat in the car drinking coffee from a thermos into which the doctor had poured several ounces of whiskey. Then he shook the thermos to mix it and poured a little extra whiskey into their tin cups. The fumes upset Joseph's stomach but he felt so jittery and light-headed from the pill he drank anyway. The storm was violent and it was nearly dark in the car; they could hear the treetops thrashing in the wind and lightning would light up their faces, then Joseph would start with the ensuing splitting crack of thunder.

  “The river's going to turn brown. This is a cloudburst,” he said obviously.

  “Don't see why God can't give a fine doctor like me a day off.” He drank and paused. “Rosealee was sure pissed at you this morning. We sat at the dining room table drinking coffee and talking about it and watching you snore like a goddamn ape.” He laughed and drank again. “Then we saw Orin's mother was in the kitchen hearing everything with Robert. When I said you would get over it and Catherine was just bored and horny Robert comes marching out and says that Catherine was a fine girl and you had seduced her. I said OK she's a fine girl but she's been around and you couldn't do it by yourself. Rosealee told Robert to go upstairs but he says no I'm Catherine's friend and I'm sticking up for her. I said Robert you are an ignorant little piss-ant who doesn't know anything about women. Then Orin's mother went in and stared at you like she wanted to cut off your head.”

  “That's terrible,” Joseph interrupted. “I'm sorry you had to walk in on it.”

  “Sure it was awful but I didn't know and I wanted to go fishing.” The doctor began wheezing and cackling at the same time. “Then I got angry and said it was between Rosealee and you, and you were groaning in your sleep as if you could hear all of this horseshit going on. I said big goddamn deal so Catherine was pretty and lonely and from an unhappy family so you made love. Why couldn't people make love without all this viciousness. Then I hugged Rosealee and she began crying and then stopped and you woke up.”

  Joseph put his face in his hands and let his head buzz around this information like a fly between window and screen. “I was a little drunk but I was going to tell Rosealee I was sorry.”

  “Sort of makes you want to cut off your pecker, doesn't it?” He laughed and poured another drink. “But you can't say you're sorry because you're not and Rosealee knows that in her heart. She probably knows when you take the
kids to Chicago you will go into a hotel room and fuck like rabbits or minks so why would she believe you're sorry? You don't know anything about women. They're real smart about these things.”

  “So then what do I do? I started maybe with Catherine because I hadn't known many women other than Rosealee.”

  “Oh bullshit. People don't get love in their heart for a reason. They are open to it or not and when they're open it happens to them. With Rosealee you were open like a target since you were young. And you probably never forgave her for choosing Orin over you which any girl would, not because of your leg but because Orin was flashy and handsome. But also as worthless and unreliable as you are.”

  “I don't get what you mean.” Joseph was startled; he had thought himself a sort of model of reliability and steadfastness. He was also embarrassed because the doctor had struck close about his treatment of Rosealee.

  “Here's what I mean and right on the money.” The doctor lit his pipe and stared at the steamy window. “I mean you sit in that farmhouse with your mother ten years since Carl died and in the middle of which Orin died and Rosealee was presented to you. What do you do with this fine woman? Nothing. You just hold back thinking more or less how life has screwed you to the wall. You agreed in your mind like your mother not to get over Carl. At least Carl laughed a lot and lived and worked hard though he was sort of a stupid shit about farming. Also his daughters. Until you came and after your brother died of diphtheria it was like the daughters didn't exist. With each one he was disappointed and your mother was heartbroken because she couldn't come up with the son he wanted. How do you think the girls felt? Sure he was nice to them but always, even after you came, they knew they weren't boys and knew they somehow failed their daddy who worked so hard and was still poor. It happens all over here. He wasn't the only farmer who marked his daughters as worthless. So when you came and Arlice came at the same time I said Carl you got another daughter and he said shit. Then I said you also got a son in the same batch and I had to be happy for him though at the same time I was angry. He started working hard then anyway. When your brother and also that sister died of disease the grief made him lazy. Grief makes people lazy because they can't understand why they should go on if they're going to die but they should go on harder if they understood it. Your mother died in a great way. She had more guts than you and Carl and me and ten more like us. So when the accident happened to you he blamed himself and became softer then. It was always heartbreaking to us all when he would carry you into the tavern on Saturday and you would be happy and he'd just sit there watching you drag your cast around the room talking to everyone like nothing had happened.”