Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  What amazed Margaret was not that he was changeless, although he’d seemed for years unalterably old, but that he changed. One day a different cap, one day a different shirt, each year a different pair of heavy-soled shoes (never work boots). This year he wore white-soled turquoise oxfords, hideous and crazily fashionable. She felt them drop permanently into her memory along with the rest of the summer, as if she were experiencing some final version. “Move it!” said Peter, nudging her teasingly off the back step. Everyone’s spirits were high during haying, though the days were if anything longer than usual. Margaret wondered at this too. All her recent wonder made her feel sticky and slow, but she kept up with the others. The horses were cared for at a run, then the children grabbed their bamboo rakes and Axel rode them on the hood of the Plymouth out to the sun-washed field. Each made a row, counting off parallel falls of grass left by the fork blades, and began to rake.

  Breezes eddied about her bare arms and legs. She saw the house, the barns, the trees and meadows beyond. The morning light spilled freshly over everything, and the fragrance around her rose and rose in transparent billows to the vaulted sky. John and Henry tangled rakes. “Out of my way, punk!” John said, laughing.

  “Who are you calling a punk? Look at this!” Henry laid his rake in the green stubble, then bent down and picked it up, pretending to be a weight lifter. He grunted and heaved convincingly. “My hero!” said John, and smacked him lightly on the head.

  “Heave ho!” called Peter. “Massa’ll have the whip on ya!” It was perfect to shout, wave one’s arms, move expansively, unfearful of scaring horses.

  “Margaret!” called Henry. “I think you’re putting on weight.” Unwary, she looked down at herself. “Yes, Margaret, I think you can easily do without that oatmeal cookie in your pocket.”

  “Eat your heart out.”

  “Oh, Margaret, I’m dying.” He fell into the unraked cushion of grass and wildflowers. “Save me. One oatmeal cookie means the difference between death and my destiny. Think of my poor old mother . . .”

  “Yeah!” cried John. “Think of her!”

  “Think of my leetle seester!”

  Margaret tickled him with her foot. “What do you know about leetle seesters?”

  They never mussed the neatly made ribs of hay, however, and when Margaret stood and turned, these were like tracks rolling away from her toward Louis, who had rounded the dead tree corner and roared slowly up the hill. He bounced, tiny on his chintz-pillowed seat, and worked without stopping. He passed her. The back of his head receded, then his ear, brown and flat against his head like a slice of mushroom, went up the short side of the field and disappeared behind the rise. He used the driver’s wheel not so much to steer as to hold on, and in the midmorning he spread his bandanna over the top of his head. Work, she thought, made use of time so mysteriously. First it was undone, then done, and days were lost, fields denuded, security amassed, and all in present time. Suddenly it was noon; she’d forgotten to eat her apple, and at last had given her cookie to Henry, who shouted, “Lunch!” as soon as he saw father get into the Plymouth.

  The afternoon was long and short, timelessly fatiguing. Margaret felt more normal: her feet resented the stubble, her skin the hayseeds, and her ears the noise, but it was still good to stretch and rake and joke with the boys. She found herself grumbling and making excuses to take breaks, and this in a way relieved her. It hadn’t been right, she decided, to soar above the work, to enjoy its significance as if it were transient. An owl appeared, and perched on the telephone pole at the bottom of the field. A great horned, John said, and it was enormous. The hoots trumpeted over everything, even the sound of Louis’s engine, and it didn’t fly away when they ran down the hill and stood gaping. In its giant darkness, with its talons finger-long, it seemed too large and present to be a mere bird—more like a fire engine or a visiting dignitary, Margaret thought. It ruffled its wings at them, but seemed neither frightened nor earnest. It perched for nearly an hour, then flew over them toward the woods, huge and stately in the light and heat of the late afternoon.

  Mother fed the horses while the children worked into the best, long-shadowed hours. When father came to bring them in for dinner, the boys sprawled across the hood of the Plymouth and bemoaned their fatigue and their blisters. Father eased around standing broodmares and curious yearlings, and Margaret peered closely at their legs. Pastured horses, especially clumsy and exuberant yearlings, often had wire cuts or showed evidence of lameness. She handed her rake to Peter and jumped down for a closer inspection. The yearlings pressed gawkily around her, nibbling her clothing or skin, scratching the bony sides of their heads on her back as she bent over their legs and feet. They squealed and she straightened up, saying, “Stop that!” though of course they were not dogs or children, and had no notion of what she meant. After she had painted their little cuts from the small bottle of gentian violet she’d brought, they followed her up the hill. Thinking something might be up, the broodmares, foals, and two-year-olds straggled along, and she arrived at the gate with a train of leisurely beasts. She started to cry.

  In the morning, they found that Happy Heart had borne a foal, a lovely chestnut filly, with legs like rope and the thick, wavy fur of newborns. The children went out before breakfast to find mother, who was feeling its knees and ankles and watching for signs of defective vision or hearing. There seemed to be none. The mare too was on her feet, apparently healthy, though covered with clotted blood and dried sweat. The filly rolled her eyes at the noise they made and skittered to the far end of the high, dark stall. The mare tossed her head at them, then turned to the foal and scraped her long tongue over its face. Mother stepped up to it, as gently as you please, assuming its trust and therefore receiving it, and guided the sharp little muzzle to the teat. It sucked, but rolled its huge eyes doubtfully at the children. “Perfect,” said mother, “and going to be big, I’ll bet. We’ll call her Happy Holidays.”

  Margaret got a pitchfork, and moving around the foal smoothly, as if in water, she picked up manure and the remains of the afterbirth, then spread new straw, banking it high in the corners and against the walls. For minutes at a time she stood still in the stall talking, making humans familiar and trusted to what would one day be an enormous animal. Foals were nothing new to her; this was, in fact, the second of the season; but a dangerous feeling of importance about it dumped her back into the unbearable excitement of the day before. “You’re number forty-two,” she said in a croon. “Nothing about the number forty-two that’s significant, is there?” The foal twitched her tail and pressed against Happy Heart.

  The day was hot, perfect June again, and the children were talkative in the field, for though the novelty had worn off Louis and the wearing of short pants, they had the pleasure of speculation about the new filly: how big she would be, what she would look like, who, in the end, would get to train and ride her. And there was the pleasure of wagering on the foaling date of the other expectant mare, who’d been bred the day before this one.

  The grass dried in the meadows for nearly a week, then father got out the skeletal John Deere and enlisted the help of Louis’s son Jack and the four eldest Pony Clubbers in loading bales and filling the barn, which was much harder work than raking, although Margaret still liked it. Louis circled all the fields again, this time dragging the baler, and the two crews of children followed, loading bales onto the wagons pulled by father and Jack (who had brought a greasy Farmall of World War II vintage). The work consisted of concentrated walking and lifting, then total relaxation while they rode steeped in hay fragrance to the barn. Heat and sweat and difficult footing up in the loft followed, then the shock of cool breezes when they came down, always this shock, no matter how hot the day really was.

  John bragged to the Pony Club girls that father had picked up the tractor for a hundred dollars, and almost let on that he had driven it one whole afternoon, but prudence stopped him. During the first morning, he half waited for father to offer to let him
at least start up the engine, but the topic didn’t arise, and on reflection John thought that it might not be smart to be found out knowing more than he ought. Anyway, it was the baler that really interested him. He loved to frighten the Pony Clubbers with tales of dogs and toddlers swept up and later tidily returned: squared off, divided into convenient sections, and trussed with yellow twine. There was Louis with his back turned, his foot on the accelerator, his hearing blocked by the noise of the tractor, and here were the revolving, consuming blades, indiscriminate. The girls shuddered, and so did Margaret, who’d heard these stories every haymaking for as long as she could remember. The success of his narration elated John, who then teased the others further by seeming to linger unawares in the path of the oncoming baler. Once, as he jumped out of the way, he threw his straw hat into the feeder. When it came out the other end in pieces, some of the children blanched, as if expecting to see blood. In this mood, they would scream at Jeepers, who liked to trot along in the shade under the hay wagons, and always seemed in danger from the wheels.

  When he was in charge of stacking bales, John could mount castles on his wagon that breasted the uneven ground as if cemented together. Sometimes he would stand tall on the highest bale, with his arms spread, swaying, and Margaret was almost afraid. She was not accustomed to being afraid for John, as she was for Peter (there were early photos of Peter smiling beatifically into space, and her with a look of the most selfless concern for his clothing, his toys, and his peace of mind. Although he was the best of mother and father, and she an assortment of grandfather, Uncle Jerome, and a friend of mother’s pregnancy—who bore much the same relationship to Margaret as a hare to a hare-lip—she envied Peter nothing, not the lips like tendrils nor the opalescent complexion. He was so well-intentioned and innocent and tall that his handsomeness seemed like the mark of a hemophiliac condition to her, and she had always feared for his least daring risks). But John? He was short, vociferous, dark, more of a pest than a concern, in spite of his angers and impulses. She never expected him to stumble into anything, even as a joke. He always eventually plopped down among the bales with the rest of them, and she always reprimanded him: “You shouldn’t tease the Pony Clubbers like that.”

  “They love it.” He poked her in the side. “You too.”

  “Not me.” But she couldn’t help smiling.

  “Say, what book did they write . . . ?”

  “About eight purple college girls. Yeah, yeah. How come you tell the same prehistoric joke every time we ride into the barn?”

  John shrugged. “Hey! Father’s paying us sixty dollars this year. Pony Clubbers twenty-five.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Henry.”

  “You ought to put it toward your new black boots. Mother said . . .”

  “Yeah, right. This guy went into a doctor’s office and he said, ‘Hey, doc, my mother thinks she’s a horse.’ ”

  “Your mother thinks you’re nuts and the rest of the family agree.”

  “Who, me?” John definitely did not want to put this abundance, this sixty dollars, toward his new black boots, although he didn’t yet know what he wanted. He imagined a street of large shop windows, and the light reflecting off them, so that he could not see in without stepping up close. He would inspect one side of the street, then the other, using a whole morning or a day to do it, and then he would begin again. The thing, perhaps, would be hidden behind something else. He would have paused to look at a tool or a game, and a hand from inside the store would reach into the window display, shift a few items around, and there it would be, the thing he wanted, the thing that nestled so certainly into a whole sixty dollars. He imagined the scene clearly, even once dreamt about it, but as the hand reached in, and the thing appeared, and he bent to look more closely, he woke up, still not knowing what it was.

  The ready fashion in which new clothes mixed themselves with the rest of his laundry convinced him that it was not apparel. He did not want a book, since the farm was a wasteland of unexplored books, but, if a book was not it, a book was like it. The colorful cover of a book, the available mystery of a book’s pages, the familiarity of a properly chosen book when it was taken up again and again was very like the thing he wanted. He thought of scientific equipment—jars, nets, traps, maybe even a telescope—to explore the farm as he had planned a few weeks before, but these did not glitter in his thoughts as the thing did.

  He dismissed records at once, though regretfully, because the “phonograph,” as mother called it, was in the living room, stuck into the wall, immobile and public. He dismissed toys at once because he was fifteen and even the word “toy” embarrassed him. There was, however, something in the nature of toys that was also in the nature of the thing; at least, he remembered feeling about certain of them (the model train he’d shared with Peter, for instance, and the wood-burning set) this same assurance that the layers of enjoyment were inexhaustible, and only lack of time and failure of application on his part had doomed the importance of the toy to his life. In their very nature, games implied sharing, and he was anxious that the thing be his alone, to be taken out in private and used secretly, silently. Sixty dollars! It was wonderful and auspicious that nothing he could think of ever having really wanted had cost as much as sixty dollars.

  As they rode in on the next load, John pursued this idea. “Look, Margaret, as much as mother may disagree, life doesn’t just end at the blacktop.”

  “Mother never . . .”

  “Do you realize all the things there are out there?”

  “Of course I do.” She smiled. “I mean, look at all the stuff in your room alone. The basketball, the Chinese stuff you had to have. Remember that ant farm . . .”

  “Why haven’t we learned to ice skate, or ski? That man from New Jersey offered mother eight thousand dollars for Foolish Heart. We could get a sailboat with that and sail on the lake.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Henry. Imagine that in hot weather! There’s this kind of sailboat that’s all made of plastic or something and if it tips over you just push it back up and climb on. Or we could go somewhere. We’ve never been anywhere!”

  “Mother would sell Foolish Heart if she thought it was the best thing to do.”

  “Nowhere! I can’t believe it! The Murphys go to Hawaii every other year, and Mr. Murphy doesn’t make any more than dad.”

  “Who said?”

  “You know what else? We’ve lived on this place all our lives and she’s never taught us a thing about what’s here. We might as well live in the suburbs for all we know about the animals and plants and stuff.”

  “There’s plenty to do already.”

  “Right! Mother doesn’t have the first notion . . .”

  “I won’t listen.”

  John was silent for a while, then said, “Well, nobody rides Foolish Heart very much, and she’s nearly a six-year-old.”

  In the hayloft, he stopped her heart and made her laugh by appearing to fall twenty feet to the corn bin below, then whispering, “Margaret! Margaret!” when she hesitated in horror to look over the edge.

  4

  SOON they were riding again. The vacation from one another did not seem to do Peter and MacDougal any good, but rather to confirm their disagreements. As the first horse show of the summer approached, Kate grew bitter about the failure of her best rider to get along with her best horse. They tantalized her with moments of elegance, then harassed her by fighting each other. One morning the two of them actually fell down in the middle of a jump course, when MacDougal halted on a turn and reared, then Peter pulled them over backward. Even floundering on the ground, MacDougal could not dislodge his rider, whose long legs hugged him like a leather strap, and whose long fingers still strove to handle the reins as tenderly as if they were spider webs.

  For a moment Kate hoped they would kill each other and have it over with, but when Mac was on his feet, with his ears flat to his head and his eyes rolling, she grew fearful that they really might. T
he other students stopped talking. Kate, though she wanted to shout some instruction, knew that nothing could be said, and nothing heard. The horse grunted and arched his neck, straining to take the bit in his teeth and run away. He bucked. Peter kicked him and set his right hand, making him cock his jaw upward and to the right. In such a position there could be no more bucking. There could, however, be the folding of knees, and there was. MacDougal lay down again, and with a large equine groan let his head sink to the grass. Peter, white, his left leg caught under the saddle, closed his eyes. He was suddenly so handsome and resigned that Kate knew there was no rescue she could perform. She stood still. In her peripheral vision she saw Teddy cropping grass. The phone rang in the house. Freeway banged buckets, solitary in the barn, and a breeze carried the fragrance of straw and manure past her into the woods. Peter sighed, opened his eyes, jimmied his leg out from under the horse, and stood up. He loosened MacDougal’s girth, and the horse lifted his head. In a moment the saddle was off, and the horse being led toward the barn as calmly as could be. Kate wanted to scream. Instead, she called to the others, “O.K. Sit-trot without stirrups! Prepare to trot! Trot, please!”

  Peter never spoke about the problem, for he did not share his family’s belief in words. He saw daily evidence that his brothers and sister witnessed details and made associations that he never caught, and his suspicion that he was stupid was reconfirmed. Occasionally, during riding lessons, one of the others would have trouble with a horse, and the solution would make itself known in Peter’s consciousness, but it never occurred to him to mention it. No doubt the result, he thought, of selfishness, his other besetting sin. He prayed nightly to be released from selfishness, stupidity, clumsiness, and growth, and his prayers had no effect that he could see. MacDougal, though they were getting along badly, was one of the few things in his life that didn’t confuse him. On their best days, and even during moments of their worst ones, he felt himself coming to a physical understanding of the horse, so that the horse could not make the smallest evasion or rebellion that surprised him. Equally, he was learning the symptoms of imminent cooperation, and how to control the elation in himself that they produced. MacDougal was perverse and rewarded overconfidence with misbehavior, but he occasionally rewarded humility with unexpected pliancy. Peter, however, hadn’t the lexicon to tell Kate about this silent progress, and MacDougal’s tantrums masked it completely.