Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  To my mother

  Frances Graves Nuelle

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  1

  EVERYTHING was a mess, especially in the dark. By the time he’d negotiated the boot-, book-, whip-, and curry-comb-strewn hallway to the bathroom, and groped gingerly around all kinds of bottles for the light, twelve-year-old Henry Karlson was wide awake. It was then he heard the gentle slap of the back screen door being closed by a human hand, and so, instead of flipping the switch, he went to the window and peered out. His brother John, fifteen, was standing in the moonlit driveway, where he had no business. Henry glanced quickly over his shoulder, toward the dark doorway and the other rooms, but his mother did not appear, as she usually seemed to when someone had no business. He looked out again; John was gone.

  Probably in search of buried treasure, Henry thought, although he had reluctantly given up his belief in that years before. Even now, however, all mysteries seemed to him rooted in buried treasure; not the gold of pirates in rural Illinois, perhaps, but maybe that of bank robbers from the Depression. Certain arrowheads were known to be priceless, and sometimes just lying on the ground, waiting. And he’d heard that people occasionally found oil in their backyards. Henry shuffled back to his room, the sunporch converted for him when mother moved to a room of her own. Peter, two years older than John, spoke in his sleep, mumbling, “Quiet.” After pushing the cat put of the warm hollow she’d made in his pillow, Henry climbed in and snuggled down. There actually was wealth on the farm, he knew, horseflesh that might sell for thousands and thousands of dollars, but it all belonged to mother. He fell into a deep sleep of prosperous dreams, in which it all belonged to him.

  The scenes of the farm were not as fantastic to John as he’d hoped they would be. The barn, its neat white trim picked out by moonlight, still looked obstinately like the barn, and the nocturnal knockings of the horses within were familiar, flat, and uninteresting. He could make of the manure pile no shapes or ghouls. It looked exactly like the manure pile that bulked so large in his daily activities. The air, though, clear and now cool, bearing the sweet, alluring scent of clover, invigorated him, and when he rounded the corner of the orchard, the way the pasture lay thick as fur fitted his sense of what this adventure, this first night abroad, ever, should be.

  The farm buildings sat on a hill embraced by the wide curve of a large creek. The two barns on one side and the white house and old orchard on the other formed a rectangle bisected by the gravel driveway. Fanning away from the central compound were fenced paddocks, stands of trees, and outbuildings for the storage of machinery. A couple housed straight stalls for horse shows and winter use. John had lived nowhere but the farm, and the nights he had spent away, at horse shows or with relatives, were so few that each remained discrete and pristine in his memory. Visits to cousins, one family in Cleveland and the other in Baltimore, had been arrestingly exotic: lawns instead of fields, afternoons among teeming strangers at giant public swimming pools, late nights of jokes, giggles, and the danger of lighting matches under the bedclothes. Once, with his cousin Fred, he had sneaked out the bedroom window, then tiptoed around the house to spy on the grownups. Most exotic of all, there had been no horses.

  An undulating apron of ground spread green-black and silver to the woods below. Mares and foals, feeling safety in the peace of the weather, were scattered over the lower third of the hillside, lying down or resting in the hammocks of their own joints. From where John stood, they all looked black, but when a head turned or a leg moved, bright white floated on the moonlight. This was more like it. The idea of night rambles about the farm had seemed spectacularly deviant to him, as if his daily resentments gestated something criminal, but now, actually out here, with his body clattering inside his clothes and his quietest cough like slamming doors, he felt delightfully orphaned and mute, about to discover something, anything, even though there was nothing he didn’t know already about the farm.

  He stepped through dew and cottony dandelions, slid his fingers along moist fenceboards. For a moment he lay down, first with his nose against the soil, then on his back, flat, as if the sky were a stone that pressed him down. Even with the moon at half, there were stars and stars. He thought of Buddy, a rather pretentious older cousin who’d once had a telescope and set about looking for all the constellations in the northern summer sky. A telescope, a flashlight, and a star map. Buddy was very methodical. John narrowed his eyes and the moon receded, making of the night sky a tunnel pricked with diamonds. He veered toward sleep, shook his head, and stood up.

  He came to the creek, where he had learned to swim (five strokes, walk across the gravel bar, seven more strokes, turn around). Every summer the four children exhausted its possibilities by the last weeks of school, but now, as John stood on the slippery bank, drawn there by the dappling of light through the trees, he drew in his breath, as if something were about to happen. By day you could see the gravel streambed through two or three feet of clear water. Water spiders skated and dragonflies hovered and minnows skittered in your peripheral vision. By night (off to his left, and then to his right, bullfrogs splashed into the water) the pool was black; he could not see at all, but this betokened everything rather than nothing. He squatted down and stuck his hand in, half expecting to pull out a dripping wad of life itself. The water was cold and fine, delicious to his skin. John laughed aloud and at once forgave the farm for being so familiar. Anything seemed possible at night. In the water at his feet, for example, he sensed not just minnows and frogs, but bass and trout and crawdads and river clams and water snakes (he stepped back). In the woods surrounding there were surely mice, rabbits, and moles, but why not woodchucks and badgers, opossums and raccoons, even deer? Among the leafy limbs and hollows of the trees (boxelder, white ash, sugar maple, walnut, white and red and pin oak, elm and hickory, sycamore and poplar) there must be orioles and woodpeckers and bluebirds and jays and cardinals as well as sparrows, wrens, and robins. Owls and bats would be gazing upon him right this very moment. He paused, listening, and shivered blissfully. For an instant he could see it all, the densely inhabited earth and the thick stars, ready and waiting to be catalogued.

  Often he yearned for other boys, the sort of mysterious other boys that his mother and probably his father would not approve of, who would follow him, but also answer his questions. Nighttime boys. His brothers were too young and too old. And too well-known. They would balk at his leadership with the blindness of blood kinship, even though it was he who had recently dilated, like the pupil of an eye, in order to see everything. It was better to be alone, though. He imagined himself with the science teacher on the first day of school (he, unlike the rest of the family, loved school), jars arrayed before them, himself modest, rather silent, the science teacher awed and garrulous. Mary Louise O’Connor would be sitting in the first row, shy but admiring, dark and trembly voiced, but certainly admiring, as he described the clever and occasionally perilous ways in which he had secured so many and such rare specimens. The science teacher would encourage him to be a biologist. Mary Louise O’Connor would simply encourage him. Ah. He could imagine never sleeping again, instead reveling nightly in his own memories and plans. All at once he seemed to himself so full that with the simple resource of thought he would never be bored again.

  He followed the creek to the lower end of the gelding pasture and climbed the fence corner. He imagined himself doing this every night, doubling his life, sharpening his night vision. There would be so many nights. He trudged up the path, speaking softly as he passed among the quiet geldings, sometimes putting his hand on a rump or a sh
oulder, as he had been trained to do, so that he wouldn’t startle a timid or sleeping equine. It was a long grassy slope, slightly dished, loud with the sawing of insects and cool with dew. He untied the gate, lifted it so that it wouldn’t scrape, tied it again. Between the house and the barn were the cars.

  All day there was somebody or other around the cars, precluding experimentation. Father drove an old Pontiac that didn’t interest John, but mother’s Datsun, small, yellow, fairly new, he thought the perfect personal vehicle. He hesitated, then opened the driver’s door tenderly and sat down in the car. After a moment, he let out the parking brake. The Datsun, in neutral, rolled backward about five feet, down the gentle incline beside the barn where it was parked. A boy at school, Tommy Murphy (lately known as Tom), was reputed to have rolled his family’s Mercury silently down his driveway, and then, out of earshot of the house, to have driven away four times, and once a hundred miles, to St. Louis. The keys were in the ignition, but John didn’t touch them. Mother’s amber crystal key bob swung with the movement of the car, then turned slowly, reflecting the pale light. John pushed out the clutch and tried shifting: first, second, third, fourth, then he engaged the parking brake again. At night no one was ever around the cars. He smiled.

  The sleeping house was warmer than the outdoors, as if filled with breath. Jeepers, the Border collie, stood up to greet him when he stepped through the door, but at once curled up on the boot pile again. Floorboards creaked. The kitchen linoleum under his bare feet rasped with grit, but he made it to the stairs, then to the second floor. Only Henry’s room stood between him and his bed. He peered in. Half uncovered, pressing his pillow to his side, Henry snored pacifically. John grinned, safe as safe could be.

  By 7 A.M. Axel Karlson was standing in the middle of his neighbor Harold Miller’s soybean field. He would never have told anyone, but the thing he liked best about the acreage, which he was about to buy, was the view it afforded of his family compound. What he liked least (the long road frontage that would demand impregnable fences and constant inspection) was entirely outweighed by this feature, although Axel would enjoy the perspective not more than once a year. Once in five, he thought, would be enough if the perspective was his own. It was for this luxury that he, an abstemious man whose loafers were resoled every other year and whose best suit still had shaped shoulders, worked ten hours a day, six days a week. With forty horses and the land to support them, plus four children and the insurance to secure them, all of his generous salary was consumed, and, periodically, principal drained off his investments. He was not, he supposed, a man in control of his own life, and yet, straddling one of Miller’s soybean rows, he was grinning.

  Most of the time Axel felt as though his eyes were windows and he himself a little boy jumping up to see out of them. He had the full battery and more of adult accomplishments: a vice-presidency in a small company brought him prestige; he was sufficiently educated, and to some degree knowledgeable about literature, music, and sports; in any discussion of politics or farming, two of his primary interests, his thoughtful opinions flowed forth in grownup, masculine, self-assured tones. Miller no doubt considered him not just an opponent equal to himself, but perhaps somewhat hard, a sharp bargainer (as befitted a gentleman farmer who planted hay for many expensive horses and didn’t have to watch the hog market). Axel and his wife were middle-aged, experienced adults, yet his mental image of the two of them had not changed in the two decades of their marriage: a boy in gray knee pants and a girl in an organdy party dress, holding hands in front of a big oak door, each with a handsomely wrapped birthday present and the expectation of cake, candy, and the pop of balloons.

  As a matter of fact, though they no longer shared anything, what with his failed interest in the horses and her fourteen-year-old conversion to Catholicism, it was in this image that he continued to love his wife. Expectation was as tangible in her still as on the day they’d met, in a crowded elevator at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. She was talking to a friend in her lovely, ever lovely contralto. He’d stumbled and stepped on her foot. “Excuse me,” he’d said, and she had turned to him, uttering one eager syllable, “Yes?”

  She had not yet come out of the house, though the children could be seen going from barn to barn, but he imagined her among them, always being called or needed or queried. Axel loved her ubiquity. Every object in their establishment was marked with some form of her name: Kate Karlson, K. M. K., Mrs. A. O. Karlson, Katie McGinnis, my book. A letter addressed to him was an oddity, almost a subject of resentment on her part. “Well!” she would say. “This one’s for your father!” and sometimes, when the handwriting was very mysterious, he would tell her to open it, feeling much more pleasure in her interest than interest in the letter itself.

  Axel bent down and broke off one of Miller’s crisp and extremely green leaves. “Hello,” he said to her invisible presence in the distant compound. “I have plans for you.” None of his plans ever worked out, of course, and yet he was a happy man, stupidly happy, he often thought, and had been for years. He was a giant who paced an unending circle about his little farm, viewing it from every angle in all weathers, and he was a little boy, who, whenever he did catch a glimpse out of those six-foot windows, could hardly believe what he saw.

  Peter Karlson was too tall, and though about to be a senior in high school, growing taller. He managed to forget this in excitement as he hung the saddle over his new mount’s stall door, but he remembered it again when he returned with the bridle to find his saddle (a Stuebben much bedizened with suede) down in the dirt. MacDougal, fifteen years old himself, appeared to have his own opinions about saddles as about much else.

  No one had ridden MacDougal in about two years, so Peter approached the horse crooning, the saddle on his arm. MacDougal laid his perfectly formed black ears against his skull and pulled against Peter’s quick grip on the halter. Peter followed easily, still crooning, smiling. MacDougal switched his tail, pretending he was about to kick, but then began to back around the roomy stall instead, easily avoiding water buckets and feed pan, dragging Peter’s shined brown boots through the customary defecation spot. It was an effective evasion, this backing in circles, because Peter could not jerk the horse’s head to one side and throw him off balance. John paused in the aisle with his own mount, already tacked up. Freeway was the other truly beautiful horse on the farm, a chestnut Thoroughbred of mother’s own breeding who had turned out, unlike most of mother’s horses, to be fairly tall as well as solid-boned. He had been bred for John and was the only animal on the place that John was fond of. “Go away,” said Peter. “An audience just encourages him.”

  “Life itself encourages him.” John puffed his chest in mock pomposity.

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “You shouldn’t let her make you . . .”

  “She’s not making me; I asked her.”

  “Then you’re the one who’s crazy.”

  “He’s got to be ridden.”

  “So you say.” John strolled away; Freeway, gleaming and docile, strolled too. He looked to Peter like the incarnation of pleasure and success.

  MacDougal hesitated. Peter sprang at the horse with speed born of long practice, and tossed the saddle over him. At once MacDougal became immobile, until Peter tried to tighten the girth, whereupon the horse leaned on him, pressing him against the stall door. Peter unlatched it and led him into the morning sunlight. MacDougal, having outwitted himself, now took the bit cooperatively. Feeling no triumph, Peter did not smile; this, like all Peter’s victories, was diluted by growth, the tragedy of his life. Even as he mounted, he knew that in equestrian skill and tact he had just grown into mother’s favorite horse, but in size he had already grown out of him. He lengthened his stirrups. They dangled below the horse’s belly. Peter sighed.

  It was almost eight; mother was about to appear. The Karlson children and the other students, all girls, were hurrying to mount or to warm up in the ring beside the barn. Their horses shone in the bright air
, manes and tails feathery with combing, hocks and bellies brushed more than assiduously by riders who were themselves properly capped and booted, wearing crisp shirts and striped belts. One knew without looking that all tack was well soaped and all strap ends neatly confined in keepers. The horses passed and repassed one another, beautiful thin-skinned equines in rich shades of mahogany and brown. There was not much chatter. Were one’s heels sufficiently down? Was the chin thrust forward again, the shoulders hunched? One or two equestrians gyrated their lower backs, striving to attain, in the next minute or so, that special elusive fluidity. Mother was about to appear; in fact, with a slam of the screen door, here she came.

  Henry, the only rider without the inward look of self-perusal, slumped in the saddle, his left leg thrown casually over the pommel, tickling Mr. Sandman’s ear tips with his crop. He was about to give up the whole glittering matinal cotillion. Henry saw in oats and sweetfeed roasts that he would never enjoy, and in hay bales, baked potatoes with sour cream eternally unconsumed. He knew the probable value of every animal and vegetable on the farm. He never joined in the cherry fight that annually denuded the three producing cherry trees, and his favorite fantasy was that of selling every board and bale they owned. Or rather, that mother owned. Henry was very exact about ownership. He perceived in the pastorale about him waste, only waste, and this summer he intended to give it up. Meanwhile, mother came up behind him and jabbed her clipboard into the small of his back. Henry did not lose his balance, but simply swung his leg over, found the stirrup, and trotted away. Kate Karlson thought her habitual thought: that with a little discipline he would be the best of them all.

  “The horse,” said Kate when her students were drawn up in a line, “is always falling down and catching himself at the last moment. He is a delicate animal for whom it is difficult to carry, push, or pull weight. Having a rider makes it more likely that, when the horse begins to fall, he will not be able to catch himself, and when the rider rides badly, the horse is subject to frequent little strains. A tendon here, a joint there, a blood vessel somewhere else, all these things are overexerted and injured when a rider leans to one side, or slumps, Henry, or presses the animal beyond the exercise good for him.”