by Jane Smiley
“I told you,” remarked Peter.
“It wasn’t my fault,” said John aloud to himself. “It was too hot.”
But he started to cry, anyway, not because he had done a cruelty, and one that defied his entire equestrian upbringing, but because the new mistrust between himself and his horse was so sad.
Just then, something happened that had happened once or twice before. In the midst of the grief that he should be feeling, and actually did feel, he thought the words “So what?”; not seriously, not as if he believed them, but with the same curiosity he might experience in trying on an outrageously flowered shirt. After thinking those words, he stopped crying and sat up. Strewn tragically around him, emphasized by the piercing blue of twilight and the clarity of his own washed sight, were all his uncompleted projects: the guitar he knew six chords on, the basketball he had browbeaten out of his father last Christmas (sometime soon someone would ask, “Say, whatever happened to that basketball you thought you wanted so badly last Christmas?”), stamps and coins, rocks and dried flowers. Genetic Determination of Coat Color in the Domestic Equine, Birds of North America, Stalking the Wild Asparagus. A camel’s hair brush, nineteen sheets of rice paper, and a book entitled Teach Yourself Chinese, Level One. A one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, one third completed (there were pieces on the floor that should have been picked up months ago). The science fair project, on the nutritive content of alfalfa, that never got to the science fair. His division of the circumference of a circle by the diameter. He’d intended to carry pi out to a hundred figures, just to see them. He’d achieved sixteen. He started to cry again, but gladly, too gladly, as if the “so what” had offended him. He cried himself to sleep, not without thinking, “I’m crying myself to sleep.”
He awoke in the same blue that was so revealing of his failures, with the same cool breeze animating his possessions. He got up to take off his clothes and realized by the swell of light outside his window and then the absence of activity downstairs that it was morning. In not more than half an hour, Margaret would be waking them and issuing reminders: “No feed for the yearlings today, vet’s coming to worm. Blah. Blah.”
He was not hungry, and felt drained of his usual morning self-confidence. The room lightened. John hoisted himself out of bed and went to the window. The sun was up and blazed along the whole horizon. Low clouds, like rolling smoke, hung above the conflagration, and in the glare, summer trees stood seared and leafless; the barns and fences looked black, as if charred. He knew that it was only the sunrise, and yet did not know it; knew that the vermilion smeared over his arms and no doubt face was refracted light, and yet did not know. He knew that he could take refuge in sounds: chickens, horses, bluejays, swishing tree limbs, and yet doubted it. He uttered no word, held tight to the window ledge, and waited.
The fire receded, collapsed, became the distant sun. Trees burgeoned. Fences and window trim again glittered white. The old mother cat came trotting down the driveway with a barn swallow between her jaws and the entire cataclysm gathered into the rumpled wing of a dying bird. “Everybody up,” called Margaret, “fly baths today!” John pushed the hair out of his face and sighed, deciding to do as his mother told him, to be innocent and good.
3
THE days had fallen into their summer routine. The children were out of bed by six, mounted by eight, mounted again by ten, though more informally upon the greener, less conditioned horses. They broke for lunch at noon, cleaned stalls during the heat of the day, and rode briefly again after three-thirty. On the margins of these major activities, they were also to clean, oil, tack together, splice, glue, tie up, and find dirty, squeaky, broken, frayed, and lost equipment, as well as keep up with their individual responsibilities: Margaret inspected the horses and doctored minor injuries; Peter took care of the three stallions; John watched over the yearlings and two-year-olds; Henry fed the geese, the dog, and the cats, and hunted out chicken eggs (ideally before they’d begun to rot). There were saddles and bridles to soap, boots and breeches and blankets and buckets and feed pans to be taken care of, rooms to be cleaned, and housework to share. Mother liked tea and cinnamon toast brought to her in the morning. She also liked them to pursue their equestrian education with their minds as well as their bodies: to learn rules and theories of different styles of riding and stable management, to know something about the anatomy and nutrition and psychology of the horse, to be able to converse about the history and uses of equines generally. The relationship of Grévy’s zebra and Man O’ War should not be outside their ken, so she left riding books, vet books, archeological books everywhere.
On Sundays they went to Mass at a smallish country church, then came home to do all their chores except riding. On Sundays, Kate felt, one rested by redoubling one’s efforts at keeping the place up and the horses well cared for. Sometimes, too, Kate used Sunday to rehash their mistakes of the previous week, advancing her opinion that if they just thought about things hard enough they would not make the same ones in the week to come.
With Peter and MacDougal, this method did not seem to be working at all. Each day, with the firmest resolutions to be calm and helpful, Kate would lose her temper and get sarcastic, and each day, with the firmest resolutions to recall everything he had learned (before she reminded him of it) Peter would climb aboard his horse and turn blank. Toward the end of every lesson the vacuum in him would fill with anger, even though he was not normally an angry person and had prayed himself to sleep the night before in an effort to avert this.
A by-product of the daily conflict, and one that Kate was not too busy to notice, was that the other students were improving slightly; more importantly, however, they were exerting themselves intently. Each one had the furtive, troubled look of a man in a sudden thunderstorm, anxious not to attract the lightning of her scorn.
It got so that everything about her eldest son offended her: his new boots that were already half an inch too short, his hair that was already half an inch too long, the stiff set of his back, the limp dangling of his legs, the way his hands, which had until now been so light and responsive, unconsciously clutched at the reins, so that MacDougal bobbed and squealed in protest. His frustration and helpless anger toward the end of every lesson annoyed her, but it was his diffidence (the way he glanced at her for continual aid and encouragement, the way he flinched at the sound of her voice) that made her want to rage at him. She took this hard nut of anger with her into her den every afternoon, but came to no conclusions. Her best child and her best horse had come together, and apparently to the destruction rather than the realization of her hopes. People from the East, from the Team, would be around this summer, and she would have nothing to show them, after all.
Outside of lesson time, Peter began doing jobs he would normally have pretended to forget. One day, he washed the cars, though casually, as if only working, not trying to please anyone. Another day he cleaned up his room without being asked, and when it was mentioned in Kate’s hearing, made sure to say that he had been looking for his bootjack, although the family owned so many bootjacks that one more or less meant nothing. He cared for the three stallions assiduously, grooming them every day. Then, at breakfast one day, he volunteered to get out the tractor and shovel and clean the rows of visitors’ stalls in the gelding paddock. John, who would be involved in the operation, looked up in surprise, but said nothing. He had his own virtue to establish. Kate said, “That should have been done before now,” but they could tell she was taken aback. She hadn’t mentioned it yet herself this summer.
It was a hot job, but not too onerous. John was to loosen the dried muck with a pitchfork, then Peter was to run the tines of the tractor shovel under it, scoop it out, and carry it to the manure pile. Each stall took about ten minutes, and there were thirty stalls. Once the whole was done each summer, it did not have to be done again, and one more huge, looming project was out of the way. Furthermore, because mother was elsewhere, watching other children, they could take lots of breaks and joke ar
ound. When they were actually out there, though, booted, gloved, and equipped, John suspected that Peter was going to be so desirous of virtue that he’d insist there be no fooling around at all. What he didn’t expect was that after five stalls Peter would offer to let him drive the tractor.
“It’s hot up here,” he told John.
“So, it’s hot everywhere.” Now that the offer had been made, John was reluctant, although he loved the tractor, a ’36 John Deere Axel had picked up at a farm auction.
“Don’t you want to?”
“Yeah, I want to.”
“Well, then.”
“She’ll kill me.”
“I’ll tell her I got you to.”
“She’ll kill you.”
“You’re fifteen. You ought to be practicing. Anyway, she’ll never know.”
“O.K.” He drew his agreement out doubtfully, as if preparing for an I-told-you-so, but once atop the machine he couldn’t help twisting around on the seat in his elation and bouncing up and down.
“Watch what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“O.K.” Peter stepped back, out of the stall, and John let down the shovel, as slowly and smoothly as possible, then he eased the gears into first, and relieved the pressure of his foot on the clutch. It popped, and the tractor jumped forward, digging the tines of the shovel into the dirt. “Be careful!” called the older boy, but it hadn’t been that bad, and John could tell that Peter wasn’t really annoyed. He scooped out the muck, lifted the shovel, and backed up. Then he made a left turn, and drove blandly over to the manure pile, where he tipped the shovel and the dirt fell with a satisfying thump right on the spot he’d intended. He turned the rig around. Peter had begun the next stall.
John loved it. There was a wonderful rhythm to it, as if he were a giant, eating very slowly. For a while, four stalls in a row, he had no hesitations, jerks, or mistakes. Peter said, “You want me to take a turn?”
“Not unless you want to.”
“I don’t.”
They worked without talking, because of the noise of the tractor, but John felt almost as if they were conversing, so smooth was their cooperation, so satisfied was he with himself and his job and Peter for trusting him to drive. He fell into pleasant fantasies about driving a car, his own car, anywhere he would choose.
At last they took a break, sitting down in the shade of one of the clean stalls and drinking from the water jar Peter had filled. Peter stretched out his legs. “Seventeen down, thirteen to go.”
“What time is it, do you think?”
“Midafternoon, I guess.”
“Seems like it’s going pretty fast.”
“Yeah. I hate to drive that tractor.”
“Not me. I don’t think this is such a bad job, really. Not like it was when we had to do it with shovels and wheelbarrows.”
“Margaret should have learned to drive the tractor.”
“She’s always been kind of a dope about machines.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Peter sighed.
“No, look. If you know how, and practice, then it’s fun. I mean, you can only get so much fun out of picking up every little speck of dirt with your pitchfork. No matter what you do, it’s got to get boring. And I suppose the tractor would get boring too, but there’s just that many more things to learn to do, so it wouldn’t get as boring as fast, don’t you think? I think that’s the thing, you know. To do something that has so many little details about it that you couldn’t really master them all, no matter how much time you’ve got.”
“But how do you know that? I mean, before you really get so far into it that you can’t get out?”
“You can always get out.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Sure it is. If you can’t then you’re a weakling, but you don’t have to be one. You just have to make up your mind. It seems to me that’s the best thing about being grown up. You just have to make up your mind, not everybody else’s too.” John spoke enthusiastically.
“Yeah, that’s easy to say, but look at somebody like Mr. Blake. I’ll bet he doesn’t like teaching science. I’ll bet he’d like to go back to school, or make more money or something. Or better still, look at nuns. They can’t just make up their minds.”
“They can up to a certain point, then that’s just it, they’re supposed to make up their minds right then and there.”
Peter took a drink from the jar. “Do you think having the vocation is the kind of thing with so many details that you’d never really master them all?”
“I think they’d like you to think that.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Have you?” asked John.
“What?”
“Had the vocation?”
“Nah, I guess not.”
“Me, neither. Not since first grade, anyway.”
“First grade?”
“I thought Father Simon was pretty neat.”
“He was, actually. Right out of the seminary they’re still pretty good.”
John and Peter had never been close. John, in fact, had never felt close to any of the others, and he would not have said that they felt particular kinship with each other. There were somehow too many of them, and they had had to share too many things and too many spaces. Right now, however, it occurred to him how much he liked talking to Peter: so much that he would have spoken about it, except for fraternal reserve and, perhaps, something in Peter that he might have embarrassed. Peter sat with his back against the fence, his knees high, his elbows resting on them, and his hands dangling. John arranged himself in imitation of the older boy, smiling, thinking what a kind person and superior older brother Peter had always been, never like the older brothers of his friends, who insulted, rejected, and beat up on their siblings as a matter of course. To have such a brother as Peter suddenly seemed lucky, and not to have attained a greater measure of intimacy, impossible. He said, “Thanks for letting me drive the tractor.”
“You’re welcome.” Very simple. John thought, with respect, that there was something about Peter that was very simple. “Let’s get back to work.”
The job should have been easier and more fun after the break, but it was not. For no reason, things had shifted slightly, out of the realm of smooth coordination and into the realm of little mistakes. Even the gears on the tractor, which had clicked precisely all afternoon, now clashed sometimes and had to be double clutched. John glanced at Peter for signs of a similar perception, but there were none. In fact, Peter, like the tractor, had begun to work less efficiently, and to lapse into his customary state of abstraction. John wondered if he would have perceived this subtle change in the tone of a piece of work a week or a day before, and he congratulated himself. It was as if he had suddenly gotten smarter. He felt exuberant, and bounced slightly on the wide spring seat of his favorite vehicle.
Feeding time came and went. They could hear Margaret and Henry slam the doors, turn the spigots, and bang the buckets that gave notice of the end of the day. The boys had done a lot of work—twenty-seven of thirty stalls, and only the small pony stalls left. John still hadn’t relinquished the tractor and mother still hadn’t appeared. He felt as if he had grown three years in driving expertise since lunchtime. “Hey!” he shouted to Peter. “Let me try taking that bit without emptying this first. It would be faster!” Peter nodded, and stepped back, at the same time turning away from the scoop shovel to look toward the main barn. John’s gaze followed his brother’s for a second, but mother wasn’t coming. When he turned back to what he was doing, it was to see the shovel, which he had already begun to lower, drop quickly, too quickly, and just inches from Peter’s averted head. The most frightening thing was that Peter could have been hit (and possibly killed? how heavy was the shovel? how fast was it descending?) without John’s seeing, in that second when his eyes so innocently turned away. Of itself, his hand slammed down the lever and the shovel jerked upward. Peter jumped, and bits of dried muck fluttered aroun
d him. “Say! What are you doing?”
“Nothing! You’re standing too close!” Peter stepped out of the way, and John breathed hard for a second. He was shaking. After an embarrassingly long time (or it would have been had Peter been paying attention) he lowered the shovel very, very slowly, and scooped up the dirt his brother had loosened. The worst thing was that he could never say what he had seen, never diffuse that moment of pure carelessness on his part by speaking of it or making a joke of it. He cleaned out the last stall perfunctorily, and started to jump down. “Be careful!” said Peter. “I don’t think the emergency brake’s on.” Innocent, unharmed. John pulled on the brake as tight as it possibly could go. “What’s the matter with you?” said Peter, but John didn’t answer. “Dinner!” shouted Henry, appearing around the corner of the main barn. John dusted his hands on his pants and got down off the tractor as if he had every right in the world to be there.
Father, who’d concocted this year’s mixture of alfalfa, clover, and timothy, who’d seen to its planting and watched it lovingly for these three months, stayed home for the ten days of haymaking until the high, hot barn was filled with sweet bales. All the lesson horses were put out to pasture, and Louis, who came every year, but whom the children had never spoken to, appeared on his ancient tractor to mow and bale the crop.
Axel made breakfast: pancakes and thick sausages, squeezed orange juice, honey, jam, butter; apples and oatmeal cookies for later. Through the screen came the undulating sound of Louis as he spiraled the back field. Margaret could see him when she came out, stuck far away to the side of a green hill, wiping his face with the pinpoint of a red bandanna, and liable, it seemed to her, to tip over, but he never did. Louis knew every hollow in every field for miles around.
