A Farmer

by Jim Harrison

  “Maybe I should find somebody else. But I got six years into you.” She attempted a smile.

  “Likewise. We should make up our minds.”

  “I already have. Six years ago. You're a bit slow.”

  He smiled. They had talked like this for years beginning shortly after Orin's death. Things had been improving the past few weeks but Joseph supposed it was because Catherine had gone to Atlanta for the holidays with her parents. He was getting some rest. It embarrassed Joseph that he used his thoughts about Catherine to excite him before his perfunctory lovemaking with Rosealee. He had never had the opportunity to explore his thinking on human sexuality very deeply. Arlice had mischievously sent him a book by Henry Miller and a book by D. H. Lawrence as a present. He had read blatantly dirty books before but they didn't impress him. Miller and Lawrence however wrote beautifully about sex and Joseph felt melancholy about his age after he read these censored books. He had missed so much in life. He felt he should have dragged his weary leg around the earth instead of staying on the farm grieving over his dead father and his mother whose health had begun to fail.

  “What will change if we marry? I don't want to live with Orin's mother and you don't want to move from that fine house into ours.”

  “Of course I do. I'd move in tomorrow. Robert could live upstairs or maybe even stay with mother.”

  Rosealee knew that the slightest mention of Robert, her son by Orin, irritated Joseph though he saw Robert daily in school. It was incomprehensible to Joseph that Robert so closely resembled his father physically, yet so utterly lacked Orin's boldness and humor. Robert lived in some sort of post-pubescent trance, always vaguely pained, yawning, sulking, whining.

  “I said Robert would stay with mother.”

  Joseph wasn't attentive. He was studying the bones of a fish advertised as “pompano.” The bones were disappointingly similar to trout bones. Someday he would see the bones of a whale and the teeth of a shark. That would be better than cultivating corn twelve hours a day in the hot sun. Or taking care of cattle which were milk and shit machines and drove him crazy with their obtuseness. Pigs were smarter. What would a shark do to a swimming pig? At the movies he had sat through a short subject about sharks twice, returning the next evening to sit through a boring movie to see the sharks again.

  One day Rosealee asked him if he still liked her at all. During the late fall and early winter, they had been spending at least two evenings a week together, if only correcting papers, listening to the radio, or simply talking. But as his mother's illness advanced he had had less taste for any company except Catherine's, so he was startled at Rosealee's question thinking she might know something. They made love quickly and Rosealee left the house looking not all that much happier. She wasn't fooled.

  On the verge of sleep, it seemed strange to Joseph that he had known Rosealee for thirty years. I was thirteen and Dad and I were mushrooming after fishing. We saw a small shack near the state land and stopped to talk to a man who looked dark as a Mexican. He lived so close to the swamp there were mosquitoes in broad daylight but he didn't seem to mind much. We sat on a log talking. It was a freshly peeled white pine log with amber-colored beads of resin coming out the cracks. He was cutting pulp for the paper mill and had the pulp lease for some state land. He called Rosealee Rosealee make us some lemonade and soon enough out came a girl with three glasses of lemonade. The girl was brown and pretty and about thirteen years old. She wouldn't say hello and Dad and the man laughed when she ran back in the house. I was embarrassed for no reason and stopped hearing them talk. We gave the man some fish. He didn't want morel mushrooms because he had already picked a lot with Rosealee who had threaded them and hung them up to dry. Thanks for the brook trout. Dad gave him six large ones and he said no, four is enough my old lady ran off years ago there is just us.

  So that fall Rosealee came to school and became friends with Arlice and was around a lot. I let her ride my horse. And Mother gave her clothes the other girls outgrew and sometimes she made dresses for her because she didn't have much of anything and Mother pretended they were old dresses. Rosealee would cart over a whole bunch of jams and jellies she made from wild raspberries, blackberries, huckleberries, chokecherries. She was young but knew how to cook. She read our books and magazines because they only got Michigan Farmer which no one but Dad read. If you have to do it all the time you don't want to read about it. The girls all bitched because they had to hay but I worked too with only one good leg and the bad one hurt a lot then. Now it doesn't hurt. Some kids at school said Rosealee was part Mexican because she could get a tan from the sun even in winter but Rosealee said to Arlice that she thought her mother might be part Indian or her father said part Cree. He met her up in Minnesota though she was from Montana but she didn't like Michigan and took off with another man when Rosealee was three and couldn't remember. But Rosealee had a strange necklace in a little box that Arlice said was magic. I had a box full of arrowheads I picked up behind the plow but Rosealee just blushed when she saw them because she was tired of being teased by everyone. I beat up two guys in eighth grade for calling her squawface mostly because Arlice coaxed me to. Then Dad had to come to school to talk to the teacher with me and the other parents because the guy's neck was wrenched. Afterward on the way home Dad said you have to forget name calling because everyone does it and he used to be called dumb Swede and all Swedes were called dumb Swede by some people.

  When they were fourteen Arlice and Rosealee thought they were grown up and started wearing bathing suits when they swam except once when we rode way back in the state land and swam in a beaver pond. When I dove down the water was so clear but I didn't find where the muskrats entered their house. The girls watched and I promised not to look if they wanted to swim so they giggled and came on in. Rosealee's butt was quite white so her coloring was mostly tan. That was the first time other than child's play which is silly, the first time I was really interested in girls and their sex. But they were the ones making the big deal out of it that day. Then suddenly we all talked about it and Arlice and Rosealee said they weren't going to go alt the way until they were sixteen. I wanted to hide my head and think about it but then out of nowhere I said that I had done it at the fair when we all slept in the cattle barns, but I had only almost done it. They took me a lot more seriously then and when they kept asking questions I only said you'll find out soon enough. Then the only time I touched Rosealee until Orin died so many years after, in fact a week after Orin died, was one night when Mother and Dad had a pinochle and polka party and we snuck some whiskey. Arlice was necking with her boyfriend and I necked with Rosealee but she kept her pants on to be safe. Then she started going out with Orin and that was that right up until the war when he was a pilot in Europe. They married just before the war then Orin was gone for four years. I was best man at the wedding. Orin came home and farmed some and then he was called to the Korean War and crashed into the China Sea.

  Maybe Catherine is what she is to me because I've known Rosealee too long and there are no surprises. Or she chose Orin first because I had a bad leg and had to be a school-teacher. I don't think so. Orin was a great person. A better bird shot than me though I was best at fishing. Orin was always poaching deer which Dad didn't like though he was happy when Orin dropped off a bloody package of fresh venison. Fried with onions. Dad doesn't know that Orin is dead because he died first a few days after V-J Day. I doubt the dead know each other. Does Keats know Fanny in death? I know Catherine is a secret conniver and ultimately no good but who said a woman, a girl, has to be good for you to like her and want her? Also she flat out screws like a lunatic. Maybe I'll make love to Rosealee those ways and see what she does. Maybe she and Orin did it all those ways and she won't want to because it will make her sad. I'll try anyway.

  I want to see a shark. I always wanted to see Keats's grave but I'd rather see a shark and the ocean. I'm tired of looking at photos of the ocean. Or The Blue Lagoon with Jean Simmons on that deserted island out in
the Pacific, swimming around in clear blue water just living on fish and coconuts. Rosealee's thing is as tight as Catherine's forever who cares. Their breasts are the same though Rosealee's belly is nicer and so is her skin. Sometimes Catherine moves so much I don't last long. Rosealee likes to eat grouse and venison and Catherine thinks it's stupid and brutal to go hunting so I told her to shut her mouth when she doesn't know what she's talking about. Mother will die.

  The thought of his mother's death brought Joseph wide awake. It was the first year of his life that he had had trouble sleeping and both his mother and Catherine were the causes. My god the mind is strange. And too much whiskey with little sleep doesn't help. Maybe there are ghosts after all though they surely have human forms.

  In mid-December they had three days of wind, bitter cold, and drifts mounting up against the north sides of the house and barn. Then in the middle of the night it was suddenly so silent he awoke. Half of a moon made the field outside the window bright and clear. A large dog stood in the middle of the field. It looked toward Joseph's darkened window then slowly began walking toward the house. It disappeared in the hedge, then he heard scratching at the door of the pump shed. Then a long circular howl. He hurried downstairs and turned on the yard light. But it was the dog he had owned as a child thirty years before, given him to console him after the accident. Then one night the dog had disappeared, probably shot as a stray. But now it stood on the edge of light on a drift and they stared at each other. Then it vanished. Joseph ran out into the snow in his bare feet calling the dog's name. He tripped and fell on his face in the deep snow. Perhaps he was sleepwalking. He returned to the house and started a fire in the kitchen stove. He filled a pitcher with cold water, took out a bottle of whiskey, and listened to country music until dawn. As the bottle's volume dropped he had intermittent fits of weeping.

  Joseph spent New Year's Day in the granary trying to revive some old harness that had been neglected for the ten years since his father's death. The harness was stiff and moldy and the silver fittings tarnished black. He was in a violently bad mood from the night before. He and Rosealee had gone to the annual New Year's party at the tavern and had stayed until closing which on New Year's Eve was four a.m. rather than two like the rest of the year. Rosealee continued the quarrel over farming: Orin's mother had offered her savings to get them started. She was very old and had no use for the money which Rosealee would get when the old lady died anyway. But Joseph had been boozily adamant and when she continued to push he had yelled at her and the tavern had fallen silent, the polka band stopping in alarm. Joseph had hobbled out to the porch during the pause and had stood there in the sub-zero air breathing deeply. The doctor had followed him out and talked idly with him about fishing. Then Rosealee appeared weeping and shivering without a coat and the doctor had bawdily suggested that she must truly be in heat to put up with such a bastard. That changed the mood and they walked back into the party. Joseph insisted that Rosealee dance with everyone which she rarely did because of his bad leg. Joseph and the doctor were so intent on planning a fishing trip to Canada for the coming summer that they scarcely noticed the arrival of the new year.

  Joseph fed the pot-bellied stove split wood, and stood occasionally to watch the blustering wind blow snow across the barnyard. It was bitterly cold and the snow was dry, forcing itself in flour-soft drifts against the barn. Too cold and windy to rabbit hunt or ice fish. And the neat's-foot wasn't bringing back the harness which had cracked from neglect. He would have to soak it in a large quantity of oil but it would never be serviceable again for anything but decoration. He remembered Tom and Butch, the last team they owned before his father's death. They were a pretty well-matched pair of Shire-Belgian crosses, bay colored and weighing about a ton apiece. They had won the pulling contest at the fair two years in a row and before the accident plans had been made to campaign them at other fairs. Joseph's eyes blurred with grief when he thought of the teams his father had owned. There had been a glorious brood mare named Belle when Joseph was eight and was convalescing from his injury. Belle would let him lie along her back while she wandered around the pasture or went down to the creek to drink. Joseph would chew on an oat sprig and forget about his pain, held aloft by her great broad back and sweet horsey smell. His mother feared further injury but his father sensed that it was the sole thing that made Joseph happy. He would ride around for hours like that, even through summer rains that made Belle's back slick. Then he would hold gently to her mane. Once he rode through suppertime and his father had walked out to get him in the far corner of the pasture. His father carried him back in the dusk and he wept because he saw his father was weeping.

  Joseph was startled by a knock on the granary door. Catherine pushed in followed by blowing snow. She had on a new fur-trimmed parka.

  “Here I am!” She put her arms around him then quickly took off her coat. “How's my horse?”

  “About as good as a horse can be in winter.” Joseph was glad to return from the past though he had decided that he and Catherine had to stop fooling around.

  “How was your Christmas? Look what I brought you.” She drew a small crockery jug from the large pocket of her coat. “It's twenty years old. I had Daddy get it.”

  Joseph held the jug reading the label. “Sour mash bourbon,” he said aloud.

  “Taste it.” She sat on the arm of the chair and kissed his ear.

  “Not now. I'm too hungover. You want to see the horse?”

  “Not now. I'm too sexed up,” she said mockingly. “Look at my lovely new underthings.” She had unbuttoned her blouse revealing a pale blue bra.

  “Wait a minute.” Joseph's resolve was disappearing. He uncorked the jug and poured some whiskey into a coffee cup.

  “Look at these. I knew you'd like blue,” She had slid down her jeans so he could see the blue panties. She giggled and turned so he could see the backside.

  Joseph drank deeply and sighed. There was really no point in making her unhappy today. He lifted the cattle skin blanket off the wall of the grain bin and spread it near the stove to protect them from the cement floor. He found that his hands were trembling. He turned off the lamp and the room was dim in the pale wintry light though there was a flicker of red through the grate of the stove door. He knew his mother would leave the house. She'd been feeling ill and had an appointment for tomorrow. He suddenly felt old and very melancholy taking off his clothes while watching the snow furl in clouds across the yard. Catherine's tracks were nearly covered and the windshield of her father's Jeep was white.

  He stuffed some more wood into the stove noticing that the shadows had lengthened and the kitchen light in the house was on. His mother would be fixing supper. Catherine was dozing, curled up to the stove as close as possible without burning herself on its iron legs. Their odors mingled with the wood smell and the musty cattle blanket. He poured himself a small drink. He meant to slow his drinking. It had lately gotten out of hand for the first time since his father's death.

  “Time to get up.” He nudged Catherine with his toe. She yawned deeply and stretched. He impulsively turned on the light, to see her better after two weeks of privation. He felt now that he needed at least a month to break it off. He wanted to indulge himself. It was so much like the novels and he wanted to totally enter the reality of it before he came to his senses.

  “I heard you got fired,” she said as she dressed.

  “Not exactly. This is the last year for the school.” He was bored by the subject and she noticed his diffidence.

  “Let's get married in June and just take off.” She put on her coat and hugged him. “I hope the Jeep isn't stuck.”

  Joseph had begun to lose interest in deer hunting soon after his father died and well before he had ceased killing ducks. Again, the prey was too easy for him after so many years spent walking and riding on horse-back through the several thousand acres of state land. He had come to know precisely the habits of the deer in every season. Deer were much more predictable than mo
st hunters thought. If you figured out where and how they moved it was only a matter of getting downwind of their path. Despite their caution they came irrevocably into the rifle sights. So deer hunting had become a form of not very involved trickery as Joseph's skill grew with age.

  Animals in general had fascinated him all his life. When young he had fed the pigs ham and was rather startled when they ate it with the same vigor as the potato peelings, corn, or other garbage. He felt embarrassed about tricking the pigs. And the quiet way that a playful calf became in months a heavy somnolent feeding machine soon to be milked or slaughtered for beef. The mare easily mated with the stallion, her son of three years back. Animals were so clearly just themselves, much more so than humans. He liked the idea that man was the only mammal that thought of himself as part of a species. The porpoises he dreamed of seeing seemed most like humans in this sense of self-awareness. There was even some evidence that some porpoises committed suicide.

  Joseph could trace to the minute when he had decided to stop hunting deer. A single day in February had clinched his attitude. For several nights he thought he had heard hounds baying from the forest followed by the harsh barking of other dogs. Then a storm came dropping a half foot of new snow and interrupting an unseasonal thaw with new drifts. On the following Saturday morning Joseph walked through the swamp to the place he knew the deer yarded for protection in the winter. He found seven carcasses spread through the swamp, some chewed over and three with only their throats torn open. A small clearing was scarred with dog and deer prints and frozen blood. He felt angry with the dogs, most of whom had become feral with neglect. Often they were joined by neighbor dogs that returned in an instant to more ancient instincts for the kill. The hound must have been the redbone that had come up missing the previous fall. A coon hunter had stopped by the farm several times to make inquiries. Joseph liked the man, a factory worker from Lansing, because he rarely shot a raccoon but called off his hounds after the animal had been treed.