by Jim Harrison
FARMER
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
Brown Dog
The Big Seven
CHILDREN’S LITURATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems
After Ikkyū & Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JIM HARRISON
FARMER
Copyright © 1976 by Jim Harrison
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Jamie & Norma
Farmer
Imagine a late June evening in 1956 in a seacoast town—say Eureka, California, or Coos Bay, Oregon. Or a warm humid evening in Key Largo or the Sea Islands that are pine-green jewels in the Atlantic south along the coast from Savannah. Imagine that you are in a restaurant and about to order a drink and some seafood. A couple enters. Eyes are raised because to the perceptive the couple are not really ordinary tourists. The woman is attractive, dark complected, ever so vaguely Indian. She is shy and hesitant but cheerful and glances around the restaurant expectantly. She must be in her early forties and has a look of extreme health. To any woman who sews, her clothes would look neatly tailored though simple and made on her own sewing machine. She walks close to the man and hesitates in deference as he chooses a table without the manager's help.
The man walks stiffly with a cane and aims his bad leg as he walks, though this is not important to our identification process. He wears a short-sleeved summer shirt but his tanned arms which are abnormally large and knotted with muscle show the tan only to his elbows and there are three inches of paler skin above them before the sleeves begin. And under the open collar there is a V of pale skin below a neck weathered like old shoe leather. His hair is trimmed short and very close around the ears with a slight cowlick at the back.
The man looks around the restaurant with a wide-faced stare and the indication of a smile. The waitress responds to his order with a shotglass of whiskey and a bottle of beer, a mixed drink for the woman. His speech and gestures gradually become more animated, then he intermittently seems to hope that no one is watching. They laugh and are tentative with a plate of oysters. The man scratches his head, messing his hair. She smiles and reaches across the table, nervously brushing his hair back into place with her palm. He closely examines an oyster shell, rubbing its rough outside surface with curiosity. There is a sense of power in his hands which is magnified by their holding something so slight as an oyster shell. Front to back in the shirt he is thick, chesty with the look of a man approaching middle age who has worked long and hard as a hod carrier or block layer. His face is open and alive. The waitress likes them and returns to their table more than necessary to take advantage of their easy friendliness. The man asks her questions about the ocean that she can't answer. He twists in his seat craning his neck for a look at the water out the dark window. The man eats two desserts and the woman is jovial and talkative, finally comfortable in strange surroundings. They become nervous again deciding what to leave the waitress for a tip. The man peers into a change purse but then opts for a dollar bill and the woman raises her eyes and smiles. After all, they are on vacation.
When they pay their bill the manager thinks the man might be a carpenter but isn't sure. The prescient ones in the restaurant who have eaten much more slowly than the couple have made up their minds. It is a farmer and his wife. And likely from the midwest, as the farmers from the west, ranchers, tend to dress more extravagantly, and those from the east with enough money to travel wear more fashionable clothing.
Out on the boardwalk, though, the couple relaxes and acts oddly like honeymooners. The man gets the tip of his cane caught in the space between the slats of wood. She laughs. They lean against a railing in the breeze smelling the heavy salt low-tide smell. They walk down the steps and across the narrow beach. She holds back as he steps close enough to get the soles of his shoes wet. He pokes at the ocean with his cane, staring at it with the raptness he felt for the northern lights as a child.
Ground ivy, glecoma hederaceae, or called gill-over-the-ground: it spread from the pump shed attached to the kitchen out to the barnyard where it disappeared under cow and horse hooves and the frenetic scratching of chickens. There was dew on it now and a yellowish pall from the early June sun barely coming up from behind the orchard. The weed smelled vaguely of dishwater or the slop pail for the pigs. Even earthworms wouldn't live beneath it. Salt or fuel oil would kill the weed, but then nothing else would grow. It was a fact of life.
Joseph looked down at his shoes and the weeds, at his left foot twisted askew. In summer he liked best the first few hours after dawn when the air was still fresh and moist. On hot days he would bathe in the pond at noon, then go down into the cool root cellar and read on a cot beneath a single bare lightbulb. It was a dark and pleasant place with its crates of potatoes, onions, carrots, apples; hung with twine from the ceiling were the last of the bacon sides and hams left over from fall and winter. Sometimes he would read about politics in the news-magazines, but more often than not he tired of politics and would spend his hours reading about the ocean, general works on marine biology, or popular history books dealing with wars and the Orient. He had never seen an ocean, been to war or to the Orient. He lived on his family's farm and taught at the country school a half mile down the gravel road that passed the house. He figured that some day fairly soon he would see the ocean but the Orient was totally out of the question.
Since last autumn Joseph had been laying the farm to rest, but not with anything as dramatic as a rite or funeral—o
nly a slow and gradual disassembling. The Sunday before his sisters had come to pick over what they wanted from the house; their husbands had wandered aimlessly around the barn, barnyard, toolshed, trying to scavenge something of interest. But they all lived in the city and to them wrenches and garden tools took favor over such valuables as a scythe, harness, corn picker, manure spreader, hay rake. The husbands were aware that Joseph had locked the best of everything in the granary. Arlice, the only absent sister and his twin, lived far away in New York City. To her he had shipped the old trunks with their faded Stockholm decals, bound with straps of tarnished brass, a slight dusty juniper smell inside. The other sisters with eyes for antiques asked “where are the trunks?” to which he replied simply “Arlice.”
Frank, Charlotte's husband, had gathered the largest pile of odds and ends and on a trial run had found it clearly impossible to fit all of his booty into the car with his three thuggish children. Frank had been a twenty-year man, a sergeant in the Army, and now kept busy as a plant guard in an auto factory in Flint. He and Charlotte drank great quantities of beer. Marie and Shirley were churchgoers and did not approve of the way Charlotte and her husband drank. Joseph enjoyed watching Frank braying, swearing, kicking everything in sight.
Far off in the corner of the field he could see his neighbor begin to cultivate the corn which was still small and pale in mid-June. Joseph had leased the forty-acre field for a pittance, seeing no point in letting it lie fallow for a year. The neighbor, thinking he sensed weakness, offered a small purchase price which Joseph refused—he would need the land in another year. His neighbor was a pleasant though utterly venal man who worked his wife and sons to exhaustion farming five hundred acres. That was what you needed now to make a good living. His own family had stumbled along for half a century on an eighty, only fifty of which was tillable. The other thirty was woodlot and swamp, three small ponds connected by a creek that continued on into a forest that abutted the property. The forest was owned by the state and was made up of some ten sections, over six thousand acres of mixed second- and third-growth conifers, and groves of maple and ash and oak, and ravines and swales, with a large swamp and marsh directly in its center. When Joseph was a child there was still a bear in the swamp but someone had shot it for reasons buried in time. Joseph walked to the woodshed and with his cane nudged an old cowskin rug that hung over the door. In the distance the tractor roared—the simple bastard even cultivated at top speed.
But Joseph was mindful that in another year he would also be on a tractor. Three hundred acres of either soybeans or corn—he hadn't made up his mind. It was only a matter of moving three miles up the road past the schoolhouse to Rosealee's. He pressed his forehead against the cowskin and did not try to resist the image of his student, Catherine, whose body had graced the rug with suppleness and an implacable felinity that would trouble his sleep for years to come. But now he would only have to contend with her in dreams. He had been amused sitting on the stone in the middle of the barnyard on Sunday watching his sisters and their husbands. Though he was forty-three he was their “little brother” someone who had stayed home, a recluse nearly, who relieved the sisters of their burden of guilt over their mother, whom Joseph had lived with until her death last month. Their husbands considered him a bit strange, a hick; they were affable but guarded with Joseph.
His sisters saddened him. They sat at the picnic table leafing through old photo albums. The dead were always a problem when one leafed through such photographs, something Joseph never did; but his sisters could not resist the albums, though he noticed they tended to skip certain pages by rote. The dead were irresistible, another planet so near but invisible to earth, whose gravity turned and colored the steps of the living. The two children who came before all of them, Carl Jr. and Dorthea dead before the First World War of something mysterious called diphtheria, a word that haunted childhood. Then the father a mere decade ago in 1946 and whom they all with gullibility wanted to believe was “alive” somewhere. Then the mother whose luck ran true only in that she died of causes deemed by all as natural in her seventy-sixth year. Not clipped off earth in surprise as the others, goldenrod before the scythe.
He had drunk too much on Sunday. A nephew he favored had brought Joseph bottles of beer and finally a pint of good whiskey, a present from his oldest sister Shirley, as he sat on his rock in the barnyard. The nephew had lost an eye in an accident and Joseph supposed that gave them some sort of kinship. They hunted and fished together and the boy had once asked Joseph if he could move north from Lansing where he lived with his parents and stay with Joseph and his grandmother. Shirley, Marie, Charlotte had now and then approached the rock where he sat but beyond the usual pleasantries there was nothing to talk about. Joseph and Arlice had been the last of the children and were far enough away, seven years from Charlotte, to represent a different generation. Besides, Joseph and Arlice as twins comprised a secret society that no one entered, not even the most insistent parent or lover.
Late in the afternoon he briefly entered a state where he understood nothing. They had all been young and now they were suddenly old. Thirty years ago they played Softball in this yard with their relatives from Chicago, wonderful jolly Swedes who drank too much and brought presents. The corn was high and they ate herring and chicken. Carl was angry—the sow had died for inexplicable reasons—and Joseph and Arlice hid in the well pit where they found a blue racer snake that had fallen in. After Carl's anger had subsided Arlice and Joseph had revived the snake in the horse trough. Then they stood holding the lantern as Carl dug a deep hole and buried the sow. It was such a waste of meat but it might be diseased.
Most farms held few animals that weren't distinctly functional. The game was played too close to the chest to allow for useless mouths. The girls had always had favorites among the pigs so they stayed inside during butchering, though everyone helped during the long evenings of making sausage. Joseph too had been troubled by the problem when young, though he shielded it with a show of arrogance. If a sow had ten piglets in early April within a few weeks you could be sure you would like one the best, usually the runt of the litter. When he was ten his uncle Gustav who worked for the railroad bought Joseph a horse at the auction. The horse was largely a joke in the township; not much larger than a pony, it was obstinate and tried to bite everyone not bringing food. Even Joseph was never sure and was sometimes bucked off for no apparent reason. The horse gave both Arlice and Charlotte nasty bites and his parents wanted to get rid of it but they deferred to Joseph's affection for the animal. The problem was solved for them when the horse got into the alfalfa one night and died of impaction from the rich legume. And there was a succession of not very efficient dogs; their main purpose was to bring the cows in on command and keep stray dogs away from the animals. Joseph's favorite, a smallish mongrel, could climb the ladder to the mow and hide out in the fort with him. The dog loved to nip the butts of the pigs when they protruded from the slats of the pen. It made the sow angry and she would charge squealing at the dog who knew he was protected by the fence.
As he drained the last of the whiskey it had occurred to Joseph that even the rock he sat on gave him cause for reverie: it had seemed so large when they were children and used it to climb onto the pony; now it had shriveled, was sinking into the ground, and Joseph leaned hard on his cane, flushed with vertigo. Then Rosealee drove into the yard to say hello to his sisters and he squinted his eyes against the late afternoon sun. She was disappointed that he had forbidden her to tell the sisters of the planned marriage but he didn't want the emotional mess that would have come from the announcement. Joseph wanted Rosealee in the car and halfway from northern Michigan to the ocean before they would stop in some anonymous place and be married by a justice of peace. Then she could call who she liked on the phone.
Against the blurred periphery of the setting sun he had watched them talk and they became ageless—it could have been June in 1936 instead of 1956; Shirley, Marie, Charlotte, Rosealee—only Arli
ce was missing but he invented a shadow for her in the dim light next to the lilacs. When Rosealee approached, Joseph had found himself in a rare public act of affection: he lifted her hand and kissed it. She was taken aback, then gazed at him with longing. How could he have so nearly destroyed their love like some madman burning a barn or shooting his animals? He felt that if he had not been sitting on the rock he would have disappeared from the agony of the year. But he knew that the nature of his life wouldn't permit so simple a departure barring suicide—that the pivotal year that had begun so easily with the grace of last October would not slip unhaltingly into the past as had so many of the years before.
Joseph liked the long cool sunny autumn days when even the shadows on earth were clean and specific. The barn created a larger darker barn and the tines of the rusty hay rake were magnified across the surface of the weeds. The first hard frost had flattened the rank foliage in the garden revealing the plump acorn and summer squash, the leftover cucumbers and tomatoes rotting. The geese and chickens owned their running scratching shadows, and Catherine's horse had a brother gelding flat and rippling to the ground as it moved for shoots of grass. Standing with one foot inside the shadow of the boulder near the fence Joseph waved his long arms toward the geese who spooked at the shadow. The oldest approached and honked fretfully at him as if to bawl him out. She was long past the eating stage and spent her days chiding the other birds and chasing any barn cats that entered her field of vision.
The shame of it was that Catherine was his student. It had started on a warm October day when she had brought her horse over to store for the winter. He had agreed to board the horse after she told him that her father would make her get rid of it unless she could board it cheap. She was a senior and extremely sassy and bright. She enlivened many dreary days, for which he was grateful. Her father was a retired Army major who had just moved his wife and daughter north the summer before. Joseph liked him immediately. So well in fact that he had introduced him to some good fishing spots. Trout fishing was the major's passion, to the exclusion of his gibbering alcoholic wife. The major felt a tenderness toward his daughter, though, and Joseph felt uncomfortable at the idea that Catherine might tell him about Joseph.
