A Farmer

by Jim Harrison

  The flirtation had really begun with the first day of school. But then Joseph had always flirted, then refused to do anything about it for the obvious reason that a serious flirtation could only end in marriage in these parts. There wasn't much fooling around. People paired off, whether young or old, and finally married. Everyone knew that someday Joseph and Rosealee would marry though it appeared Joseph was spending a half dozen years making up his mind. Never in his twenty years of teaching, though, had he made love to a student.

  So Catherine had said she would bring the horse over Saturday and Joseph had insisted she do so by noon as he had planned to go grouse hunting after doing the chores that always piled up for Saturday mornings. He had sworn all morning because it was unseasonably warm which made the hard walking of grouse hunting even more difficult. He liked it best in the forties and fifties, not in a hot swamp when even the mosquitoes came out again for Indian summer.

  Catherine showed up after lunch full of apologies. He showed her the stall he had prepared for her horse, which was a fine chestnut gelding. Oddly he had seen her only in an over-the-knee-skirt and she looked very sexual in her tight riding jeans. He showed her around the barn and was uncomfortable looking at the flex of her butt as she climbed into the mow. At the top of the ladder she turned around, looked down, and noticed his discomfort. She was so much more vivacious and sophisticated than any of his students had ever been. She was from the outside world and this clearly interested him no matter how dangerous the situation was. Deep inside he excused himself in advance. After all it was his last year.

  They walked out the back door of the barn discussing payments for hay and oats. Her face was mildly flushed and she loosened and retied her hair into its ponytail. She slipped off her boots and stuck her toes in the pond. Joseph dumbly sat down beside her.

  “God it's warm for October,” she said. “You know I just loved that Keats poem you read yesterday.” She knew Keats was Joseph's favorite. On Friday afternoons they heard poetry whether they wanted to or not. The entire five upper grades. Through the partition you could hear all the younger ones shrieking and Rosealee's cries for order. Sometimes Joseph would go in and cow them with a look. Now he verged on saying “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” but he caught himself and said jesus christ instead.

  “What?” She looked at him. He looked down at the water and her feet.

  “I think we should make love,” he said. His voice was matter-of-fact though his head felt hollow.

  They re-entered the barn and spread the old cattle blanket on the loose hay behind the stanchions. She quickly shed her clothes and they were just as quickly finished. Joseph lay back and wanted a cigarette but he never smoked in the barn. She began chatting about Keats again, then about her horse who had been watching them with no particular curiosity. Maybe he had seen this all before Joseph thought. She stood and cooed at her horse offering him a handful of oats. Joseph stood behind her with his hands on her buttocks. She turned and smiled at him, then knelt down.

  It was mid-afternoon before he dropped Catherine off on his way grouse hunting. The major was out in the yard and they chatted diffidently about hunting and the weather and Catherine's horse. Catherine said good-bye and sauntered into the house as if tired from a long ride.

  “She's a smart girl,” Joseph said.

  “I'm proud of her. She's been moved around so much but she's turning out fine.” The major lit his pipe. “Would you like a drink?”

  “I would but I want to hunt until dark.” They shook hands and Joseph dragged his leg to the car.

  The hunt took place in a trance that occasionally lapsed into panic. Once while taking a rest he walked off and left his gun propped against a stump. He was embarrassed as he retrieved it even though alone. He walked very slowly and missed several birds because he was distracted. After each missed shot he would yell shit. He came to his favorite place, a hillock in a grove of oaks overlooking a creek, and threw himself down meaning to nap. He shielded his eyes from the sun but his hand smelled of the light touch of the perfume she wore. He was thirsty and walked down to the creek to drink. Three grouse flushed in the clearing across the creek but he had left his gun on the hill. He watched their graceful curving flight into the swamp and yelled shit again, this time with all of the power of his lungs.

  Back up on the hill he sat for an hour and thought how unfair it was. Though in his early forties he had made love to only a few women and with the exception of Rosealee they had been disappointing. One of them, a whore in Grand Rapids, had even laughed at his leg. The others had been furtive contacts with the mothers of students and a single drunken encounter with the wife of a friend. With Rosealee it was sweet and pleasant, precisely what he imagined it would be like to be married to someone you deeply cared for.

  But Catherine when she sat beside him on the drive to her house turned him into a lunatic making him think of the hundreds of novels he had read, written he always believed by liars because he had never until Catherine experienced anything remotely similar except in his imagination. It more closely resembled a fit than anything else. He laughed at the thought and smelled his hands but the scent of the grass and ferns where he lay had covered her odor. He thought with sadness that he had made love to this girl more in an afternoon than he usually made love to Rosealee in a week. Perhaps to release him from any natural guilt Catherine had assured him as she dressed that she had taken lovers before. She really enjoyed herself she said. He felt merely stupid on the cattle blanket which scratched his bare sweating back. How can she be so naked and nonchalant, her breasts rising chafed and pink from the rough blanket, turning, bending to pick up her underpants. He reached for her again but she had to get home she said because her mother wasn't feeling well and she had to drive to town for groceries. Sitting on the hill he felt young and stupid. And then sad that he had not until this afternoon found out that on very rare occasions life will offer up something as full and wonderful as anything the imagination can muster.

  Joseph had always spent a great deal of time trying to think analytically about his main preoccupations, which were fishing and hunting. As the years passed he found he had less and less interest in the mere act of acquiring fish and game. For instance he no longer shot ducks. Not only were they easy but they were simply too fascinating to watch on the beaver pond way back in the center of the state tract. If you spent a long time on your stalk you could get close enough to watch them for hours. It was much more difficult with Canada geese, surely the wariest of all birds. But the ducks, most commonly mallards, mergansers, teal, or blue bills, would complacently swim and speak their odd language. Joseph experimented in alarming them. Sometimes it required only an upraised hand wagging from cover but if they were feeding avidly enough you could stand and shout before they would flush. The geese always kept several scouts on the periphery of their feeding area to alert them to any danger.

  On the Sunday morning after his meeting with Catherine he sat by the pond for a couple of hours watching the birds, and the peacefulness of sitting so long amid this beauty drew him to questions that seem essential to everyone. An idea that fixed him to one spot was that life was a death dance and that he had quickly passed through the spring and summer of his life and was halfway through the fall. He had to do a better job on the fall because everyone on earth knew what the winter was like. The ocean creatures he read of illustrated the point so bleakly. To devour and be devoured. But their sure instincts kept them alive as long as possible, as did those of the wild ducks before him, or the geese. Even the brook trout, the simplest of the trout family, were mindful of the waterbirds, the kingfisher and heron, that fed on them.

  One afternoon he had been lucky enough to see a Cooper's hawk swoop down through the trees and kill a blue-winged teal. The other ducks escaped in a wild flock circling the pond twice while the Cooper's hawk stood shrouding its prey with its wings. Joseph watched it feed on the teal's breast then fly off to a large dead oak to preen. It was far t
oo spectacular to be disturbing. Once in town he had seen a car turn a corner and strike a lady pedestrian. He could still see the shocked, twisted look on her face. A couple of hours later a few ducks circled the pond hesitantly. Soon they had all returned to their feeding.

  For Joseph there were presentiments of the troubles to come even before he had begun his affair with Catherine. He had left half the apples unpicked and for the first time didn't want any school children in the orchard. What little heart he had left for teaching was gone before the end of September; he met each morning feeling a certain dread mixed with lassitude. He spent far less time in the tavern playing cards and far more time reading about distant places. All of the strictures, habits, the rules of order for both work and pleasure seemed to be rending at even the strong points.

  October grouse season had always been the high point of his sporting year along with late May and early June and the heavy mayfly hatches of trout fishing. He would rush home from school leaving Rosealee to lock up, change his clothes, and hunt with old Dr. Evans until the fall light disappeared. He would hunt all day Saturday after the chores were done and on Sunday from dawn to dark. But this year the doctor had decided to give up hunting—his legs would no longer take the strenuous walking. The doctor had presented Joseph with his fine Parker shotgun in August: Joseph had coveted the expensive gun for years, the beautifully grained whorl of its walnut stock and the fine engraving of a pointing dog along the breech. But when the season began this time everything conspired against him: the weather was cold and wet, making his leg ache more than ordinary, then the weather changed into an over-warm and humid Indian summer, and grouse were near the bottom of their seven-year population cycle, though woodcock were plentiful.

  It was a male woodcock that pinpointed a certain loss of nerve. After sunup one Sunday he walked along the west fence border of the farm, back toward the corner where the creek and swamp joined the state property. It was a splendid morning with white frost on the pasture; clear, cold, with the ferns finally dead and the walking easy. He approached a blackberry swale and for a moment pretended he was gesturing his old bird dog, a springer spaniel, into the blackberries to flush the birds. But the dog was long dead. Joseph stood there and stared at a weak sun climbing over the swamp. A woodcock flushed at his feet toward the sun and he lost it for a moment but then it dipped below the treetop and he dropped the bird easily. He walked over and picked up the bird but it fluttered in the tall canary grass, still alive. He caught it and began to wring its neck but the woodcock's large brown eyes followed his movements. He turned the bird around but the bird twisted its neck toward Joseph still staring at him with a glint of the morning sun shining off its retinas. Joseph closed his own eyes and snapped its spine near the neck. He shoved the bird into the game bag in his vest but he was trembling.

  Joseph sat down on a pile of old fence posts and thought about the woodcock. How could he become so nervous after thirty years of hunting? He had never looked into a bird's eyes before and it had at least temporarily unnerved him. He tried to ignore how nearly human the eyes looked, but he couldn't rid his mind totally of the idea: eyes are what we hold most in common in terms of similarity to other beasts. He always cringed when he hooked a fish in the eye. When they slaughtered both cattle and pigs the eyes stayed open in death. But it was more than that; the woodcock was warm, palpable, it quivered, and its eyes did not blink under his gaze.

  By mid-morning he had bagged two grouse but had missed several woodcock. He sat on a stump near the creek and slowly ate his sandwich, wondering if he had missed the woodcock on purpose. They were normally far easier to shoot than grouse. Did it mean, too, that one more pleasure was to be denied him on his already severely atrophied list of enthusiasms? He had sensed that the energies that fed his interests had somehow diminished but he believed these energies would recover and persist. Only it wasn't happening and the near frenzy that had occurred with Catherine the week before was the first “new” thing to enter his life in a long time. Sitting there on the stump with the sun warming his back and drying the dew from his pant cuffs he felt bovine, immovable; he numbered his passions: he had loved Rosealee for thirty years, he had hunted and fished for thirty-five years and worked hard on the farm nearly that long, almost assuming manhood at eight when he learned to walk again, and he had taught twenty-three years though that was more menial habit than passion. You had to count reading about subjects that were least in touch with his own life. But these simple things had truly filled his life and he knew them so intimately that an edge of panic entered him on considering that they might simply blow away like clouds. He could not comprehend it; the earth looked the same and this October day was not unlike a hundred other October days. He looked at the odd way his heels wore off his boots because of his walk. Even the stump was a familiar chair. Should he blame the woodcock's eyes or Catherine's body or his own fatuous brain for losing control? He looked at the fence which was in disrepair and again felt guilty about the apples. How many blankets had his mother quilted for his marriage to Rosealee? Why did he drink more and read less, and why did his favorite books bore him? He knew in some oblique way that he was no longer his father's son. He despaired that forty-three was too late for new conclusions, but he knew this was a lie. One of the doctor's favorite speeches when he was drunk was how grief made people lazy, torpid. Joseph wanted to believe that that was only the doctor's profession, that the doctor was vaguely buggy from seeing so much death. But it was too easy to remember the necessary deaths of so many of the farm animals he had been close to, how even the execution of an awful, cantankerous rooster had touched him.

  On the way back to the house he shot another grouse. The grouse flushed toward him and flew low over some sumac. He made a difficult shot and that warmed him somewhat. Now there was enough for dinner. Rosealee was coming for dinner and he looked forward to their comforting though pointless conversations on whether he should begin farming full-time next year. They had accumulated a stack of equipment catalogs but the catalogs were far less interesting to Joseph than books on the ocean. He was startled by an urge to throw the woodcock into the weeds in order not to have to look at it again. But he hadn't fallen apart that much. To waste game was the ultimate crime: he despised hunters who shot crows for what they called “sport” or under the assumption that crows fed on duck eggs. Crows stayed on the farm the year round and after decades of studying their habits Joseph believed the crow to be the sole bird with any wit.

  The unnerving incident followed him around throughout the season and the more he tried to erase the image of the woodcock the more insistent its presence became. He looked into the eyes of a dead grouse and felt nothing. The doctor thought of grouse as small gray chickens that flushed wildly and flew at fifty miles an hour. But they were without much character; if a chicken fed on wintergreen, chokecherries, wild grape, it would taste as good as a grouse. Grouse were splendid dinners wandering around in the forest waiting to be gathered and eaten. Now Joseph removed woodcock from this food category and allowed them to join the highest strata, that of the owls and hawks, the raptors, harriers, and Falconiformes. This made hunting much more difficult and his average bag dropped to the level he owned as a neophyte; he could no longer “point shoot” on instinct at the flush but had to wait an extra split second to make sure it was the gray flush of a grouse rather than the golden brown of the woodcock. His mother no longer asked him, how many, Yoey? when he came in from the hunting, noticing the irritation in his voice when he replied.

  One evening at the tavern the game warden confided in Joseph that he had seen a coyote in the country. Coyotes were assumed to have totally disappeared, moving north where they were safe from the irate farmers who blamed them for all sorts of impossible predations. The game warden had followed the coyote with his hound and pinpointed what he thought was the general location of the den for Joseph.

  He was excited about the presence of the coyote, and that night he set about devising certain str
atagems on just how he might approach the animal. Perhaps he would build a blind but that was rather obvious. He remembered that he and Orin had once called a fox upwind of their hiding place by using a predator call, a wooden whistle that purportedly imitated the noise of a dying rabbit. He got out of bed and searched among his hunting things, an assortment of old shotgun shells, licenses, an inoperable pistol, a kit for carving your own gun stock. It wasn't there. It had to be in Orin's trunk. He walked out to the kitchen and dialed Rosealee.

  “Rosealee this is me. Can you look in Orin's hunting trunk and see if there's a wooden whistle? Not a duck call but it looks like one. It makes a shriek.”

  “Joseph! It's two o'clock in the morning.” She sounded vexed.

  “Please just check.” He did not care what time it was. He drummed his fingers and lit a cigarette. There was a hideous squeal on the phone and he nearly dropped the receiver.

  “Is that it?” she giggled.

  “Bring it to school, OK? I love you.”

  “I love you, Joseph.”

  The next morning Rosealee gave him the whistle with a quizzical look. He fondled it in his sportcoat pocket and at midafternoon during a biology test absentmindedly blew on the whistle and startled the students.

  “How many of you know what this is?” He was embarrassed and tried a cover-up. “None of you? Well it's a predator call.” He blew on it again, this time on purpose. “When an animal is in distress it gives off a call out of pain and desperation. Dogs whine and snarl. A hooked fish emits signals and in the ocean this attracts sharks and barracuda. Out west if a fawn bleats it might draw a mountain lion. Human beings scream. This whistle imitates a dying rabbit and with it I hope to see some fox and hawks at close range.”