A Farmer

by Jim Harrison

  Joseph remembered when a new fifty-cent oilcloth for their supper table was an event. He and Arlice would stand by the table and admire the small squares of roses printed on it. He also remembered that his mother waited until after supper, when everyone was seated quietly in the living room, to open her package from Montgomery Ward that contained a new iron skillet. They all jumped around laughing when the parcel also contained a new nightgown his father had added to the order. Perhaps the bitterest memory was the two months when the radio broke and they had no means to fix it. Everyone walked around pretending it didn't exist, that something other than a radio sat on the dresser. Finally the neighbor boy who was always being called upon to poke at their machinery traced the problem to a twenty-cent tube that was burned out and easily replaced. He was amazed at their stupidity in such matters.

  In his fever Joseph had made a tentative decision to begin farming again. He knew it might dissipate but his resolve increased with good memories of the years immediately before the Depression. After the blight and drought there had been four years of bumper crops and a general feeling of ease and relief. It meant new dresses after harvest for his mother and the girls, and often a new fishing pole for Joseph. He was overwhelmed on his twelfth birthday when Dr. Evans had dropped off an Ithaca twenty-gauge shotgun. It meant that he no longer had to try to pot grouse on the ground with his old .22; he could shoot them on the wing like his father and the doctor though his father much preferred the meat hunter's favorite, the rabbit. During the bleakest fall the doctor and his father had killed two large deer. The antlers still hung in the granary. They ate themselves silly on the venison and in the week that followed the children were often allowed a glass of the foul-tasting but potent homemade wine. Joseph laughed when he thought that his father's homemade wine had forever ruined wine drinking for him. He and Orin had once drunk it in great gulps from a jug only to spend hours out in the woodlot vomiting in secrecy.

  He heard Rosealee come through the pump shed and into the kitchen. Then his light was on and he raised an arm across his eyes.

  “I hate your geese. One bit my leg. What do you want for supper?” She was flushed and her knees were muddy.

  “There's some soup. I got to take a bath first.” He swung his legs from the bed and the weakness returned.

  “Look, I'll take your classes tomorrow. You rest, or you can wait and call me in the morning.” She slipped the overall straps from her shoulders. Joseph grabbed at her when she leaned for her skirt. “Take your bath first. You must have been dreaming about someone else.” She rather liked it on the odd occasion Joseph was ill. At one time she had dreamed of being a nurse; as a girl every Sunday morning she had nursed her father back from his monumental hangovers. But then in her teens he had managed to get a bleeding ulcer and neglected to see a doctor; she could not nurse him back and he died a few days before she graduated from high school.

  Joseph lazed in his bath thinking how both poverty and wealth were mischievous: Keats was poor and Byron rich and neither had the edge. Walt Whitman whom Joseph revered was neither poor nor rich if you could believe what the man said and that seemed to give him an edge over writers who thought about it all the time. The week before on Friday Joseph had read from Leaves of Grass and Robert had objected on the grounds that Whitman was “sentimental.” Joseph had called him a goddamn fool and nitwit who read only science fiction bullshit. The students had loved this show of temper and Robert had walked angrily out of the schoolhouse. Then Catherine interjected that everyone couldn't like the same writers and he had replied that some were dumb and some were bright. The squabble had anyway ruined the afternoon for poetry so Joseph administered a geometry quiz that drove him silly with its tediousness. Only Daniel scored a hundred percent and as always he copied the answers directly from the book.

  “Your soup stinks.” Rosealee was standing at the door. The soup was made out of cabbage and venison marrow bones and could be smelled through the steam rising from the tub.

  “Tough shit. Don't eat it. Why don't you get in the tub?” He reached for her and she slammed the door.

  His day and a half of fever had sharpened his interest in Rosealee. He frequently dreamed of her anyway but his sickness had cast the dreams in a pleasanter more sexual light. Conversely his thoughts of Catherine turned sour and he wondered how he could have been so stupid as to get involved with her. Life was so sudden in its impositions. First Mother was well and then she was going to die. One day his father had fished and on the afternoon of the next day he was pulled from the river dead. The first morning of school the fall before a pretty girl in a yellow skirt had stared at him with her hazel eyes and when she turned to introduce herself to the class her skirt pulled upward and he saw her legs were lovely. Her speech was southern but not trashy. She read books and announced to him she loved classical music. They often chatted after school and he was delighted that so bright a student would grace his last year for he already knew the school would close and he had no intention of teaching in town. She was slender and her hair was dark brown. When a farm girl was bright she did not presume to make it known other than by shyly turning in good work. Catherine, however, was outspoken. She could even hit a Softball and shoot baskets with the boys who were all smitten by her though none dared ask her out. After their October day passed Joseph realized that he had been thinking about making love to her since the first day of school. But as winter lengthened her instabilities became more obvious; she grew fretful and restless after the novelty of country life wore thin. The Christmas vacation had brightened her again but this new energy soon dissipated and she became more demanding of Joseph, even to the point of discussing marriage which he refused to think about. He could not imagine her camping by the ocean with him. She had no interest in his fishing or hunting; no interest in rivers and lakes and oceans.

  They sat through the evening on the front porch. May had been cold and rainy but now in the middle of the month it had finally become warm and maple pods dropped from the trees like pale green grasshoppers. Mint sprouted in the ditch along the road and the first of the lilacs began to appear. Joseph's mother lay back in the porch swing, too weak to move herself. Only her eyes, which were clear blue and liquid, moved. She had not spoken for over an hour. Joseph felt choked, constricted. He suspected that it was the last time they'd sit on the porch together. He held his hands over his face peeking through the cracks in his fingers at the honeysuckle with its overwhelming odor. A car passed on the gravel road with stones rattling around under its fenders. The car beeped. Joseph did not look up to see which neighbor it was.

  “I'm tired,” his mother announced.

  “I'll carry you in.” Joseph stood and moved to the side of the swing.

  “I mean tired of this,” she waved at her body. “It's worse than having a baby every day.” She smiled at the thought. “I'm not alive for months now. Your father never taught me to shoot a gun.” She smiled again at the thought.

  “I'll call the doctor and see what he thinks.”

  “I know what he thinks. Take me in now.”

  They paused, hearing their first whippoorwill of the year. The whippoorwill reminded Joseph of trout fishing which he had done none of this spring because of his mother's illness.

  Later, after he had carried his mother into the house and given her her pills he called the doctor. Her eyes were squeezed tight with pain and Joseph became wordlessly angry. He often found himself wandering around the house or barnyard muttering goddamn god. The doctor was agreeable to meeting him at the tavern so he told his mother he'd be back in an hour. She stared at him in the doorway. Then waved him away.

  The last of the light disappeared on the way to the tavern. It was still warm and bugs splattered against the windshield. He stopped for a moment in the swamp and after a wary pause the peepers were deafening. He was embarrassed because his thoughts drifted from his mother's pain to trout fishing. The cancer had been diagnosed after Christmas and considering that she was in her m
id-seventies the doctor predicted she would last only three months or so. His sisters all came for long visits until he was as sick of them as his mother was of the cancer. He finally asked them to stop coming until what he called the “final days.” Arlice even came way out from New York. They had spent a good week talking and drinking.

  The doctor's car was the only one in the parking lot and he stood when Joseph entered.

  “She's bad?”

  “Terrible. I thought you said she'd die by now.”

  “I'm not God.”

  Joseph laughed. The doctor was famous for his brusqueness and lost many patients to the newer doctors who were more tactful with their fat, sedentary patients. The doctor retained only the farm farmilies who tended to call him when they were truly ill.

  The bartender brought them a succession of bourbons and glasses of beer, returning to the radio at the end of the bar where he listened to the Detroit Tigers game. He had been listening to the Tigers games since Joseph was a little boy, it seemed.

  “We should be fishing tonight. George got a four-pound brown on the Pine the other night. Mayflies are thick.”

  “Sure,” Joseph said, “I could set fire to the house, then go fishing. I thought of drowning her the other night. I sometimes wake up and can hear her weeping.”

  “It's gone on long enough.” The doctor looked at Joseph for a hint of recognition. He got it immediately. And that released them to talk of trout and the number of drumming grouse they had heard which would mean a good season in October.

  Back at the house the doctor told him to stay in the kitchen. He disappeared into the bedroom with his bag, then reappeared within a few minutes looking pale and distracted. Then Joseph went in and kissed his mother good-bye. Her face was lax, the eyes already closed.

  “Thank you.” Joseph said returning to the kitchen.

  “Call in the morning.” The doctor finished his drink and they shook hands.

  Joseph spent the night seated beside her bed. He turned off all the lights in the house and took a bottle and glass into the bedroom. Three times during the night he felt her forehead as it gradually cooled toward room temperature. The night was dark and moonless and he couldn't see her on the bed until toward morning when the wind came up followed by a brief thunderstorm. Then he could see her during the flashes of lightning and even the frogs grew quiet in the thunder that followed. He felt irritated that he had waited so long to force the issue. There were no miracles in such cases. Now she only looked as if she were sleeping the sleep she had deserved months before. Throughout the night his grief changed to intermittent anger, relaxed into fine memories, became swollen and overwhelming, subsiding near dawn into bleak self-pity, an emotion he had never allowed himself. After his leg had been ruined Joseph's father had taught him never to pity himself. Such pity only further weakened a person, made one vulnerable to an essentially pitiless world. Thus no one in the family ever complained of anything except in the most extreme circumstance. His father who had been a hard drinker might loudly announce a hangover at breakfast but the statement was full of vigor and some humor. He often referred to himself as dumbass. When a horse crushed his toes so that the nails came off he was silent. He hobbled along as Joseph had hobbled since his eighth year, arrogant but full of laughter.

  At dawn Joseph spent some time wondering if he should draw the sheet up over her face. He cooked himself three eggs and forgot to eat them. The rooster crowed incessantly. He laughed when he remembered a rooster years ago that crowed through the night and his father had been so irritated he had chased it around in the dark without catching it. He had come back in and got Joseph's .22 and asked him to hold the flashlight so he could shoot the bastard. They had fried chicken for breakfast and were very happy, fried chicken being a treat reserved for Sundays and special occasions.

  As it became daylight Joseph thought of calling his sisters but decided to wait. He planned to say “she's dead” and hang up except with Arlice in New York whom he would ask not to come unless she truly wanted to. There was no point in her coming over a thousand miles to see a dead body. Joseph drew the sheet up over her face. Her hair was a rich brown with only a little gray. The hair looked the same but her face had begun to darken.

  Joseph called the doctor.

  “You didn't have to call so early,” the doctor said.

  At one time from a distance you would see a man behind a single-bladed plow and a team of horses. Behind the man a boy stumbled along the un-even furrow picking up earthworms. When the boy filled a can with worms he would dump the contents of the can into a larger pail in the middle of the field. In the pail the worms had a bedding of soil, damp peat moss, and coffee grounds to keep them vigorous. At the end of the day after the horses were un-harnessed, rubbed, and fed, the father and the boy would look at the worms and try to decide if they had enough for a three-day fishing trip they planned after the spring plowing.

  “Do we have enough, Yoey?"

  “Maybe almost.” The boy stuck his hand deep in the pail.

  Then they would walk in to supper. Sometimes the father would offer his arm as if flexing his muscle and the boy would hang onto the arm like a monkey until they crossed the barnyard and reached the house. Then the boy would drop to his feet and scoot in the back door through the pump shed and announce to his waiting mother and sisters, “Dad wants his supper.”

  One late afternoon Joseph heard a car and watched through the kitchen window as Rosealee got out and walked resolutely toward the house. He was mystified. She bore no cakes, pies, or casseroles and her face looked cloudy. He had seen her only a few hours before at school and she seemed happy enough then.

  “I know,” she said, looking stricken. Her face squeezed in pain and she began to weep.

  “Know what?” But Joseph knew.

  “Catherine. Why?”

  Joseph looked down at his fishing tackle spread on the table. He fondled a fly called a Paramachene Belle. He loved its name though he never had taken any good fish with it. His brain began to whirl with false excuses.

  “How do you know?” he asked lamely.

  She sat down across from him as if collapsing. Her weeping was dry and intense. Joseph's thoughts turned to funerals where people's grief was so deep they seemed to wail rather than weep.

  “I thought we had got so much better after that night.” She faced him directly and his eyes lowered again to his fishing flies. She handed him a note. It was a sympathy card for his mother's death from Catherine and he cringed at the phrase “I know I can make you happy.” Rosealee was helping him acknowledge the cards. Joseph's eyes closed and he saw Rosealee's back raising his weight, her spine twisting the better to get at him.

  “We are better. She's just a silly kid.” His voice was tight and “kid” emerged so weak as to be barely susceptible.

  “Then why are you fucking a kid? Why are you doing it? Aren't I enough? I've given my life to you.”

  “I figured I had some catching up to do, you know? I mean I haven't made love much in my life.” The tightness was gone now and he felt his face flush with blood. He wanted to slip through one of the black cracks in the linoleum, into some sort of gap in existence far from either Catherine or Rosealee.

  “Oh god. You sat here thinking and messed up your life and now I pay for it.” She began crying again. “I'm not going to get another chance.”

  Joseph studied another fly intently. He wanted desperately to get rid of the ozone in the air and searched in panic for a single idea that might lift them both out of this horror.

  “Oh goddamn you I hope you die.” Rosealee tipped the kitchen table over in his lap, scattering the hundreds of trout flies on him and on the floor around his chair. She ran out of the house and he followed stumbling through the pump shed. He reached the car just as she turned around and was heading out of the driveway. Joseph waved but then had to dodge to avoid being run over.

  He walked out back and fed the geese. They waddled toward him honking as he threw
the corn. He felt giddy and was overwhelmed by the same emotions he had felt when he had lost Rosealee to Orin at fourteen. He suddenly wanted to strangle Catherine or, better yet, strangle himself. The mosquitoes from the pond clouded around his head and he did not have the presence of mind to brush them away. He wanted to somehow make his life simple again but was brought up sharply by the idea that it had never been very simple; he had merely neglected to do any of the things that most people occupy themselves with—marriage, children, bringing up a family, farming on your own. He had a simply gone through the easy motions of teaching and, other than that, read, hunted, and fished, mostly by himself. He had strung Rosealee along until it was too late for her to have the other child she wanted. And he had sat and talked with his mother for ten years about the past which she had begun to live in the day her husband died. The three geese looked up at him, with the last of the evening sun glowing off their white breasts. They honked and Joseph threw the rest of the corn.

  Back in the kitchen he knelt and began gathering and sorting his trout flies. He stood in terror. Being that close to the floor took him back to when he was very young. The kitchen was the same and beneath the table top he saw the old iron stove and the woodbox in a new way, and the black iron body of the milk separator that he used to press his cheek against on hot days because the iron stayed cool. He squeezed his hands forgetting that they held the flies and several buried their points into his palms but, luckily, none past the barb. He took his flyrod from the corner and walked out through the pump shed and across the barnyard and through the gate. He was at the far end of the pasture near the fence that bordered the state land before it occurred to him that he had forgotten the brace he needed for long walking. He sat down on the rock pile and tears began to come but he pushed them back by swearing. His leg began to hurt from the pounding he had given it in his witless striding across the pasture. He lay down in the grass and closed his eyes, hearing a whippoorwill, then a nighthawk whirring just above him. The mosquitoes were dense around him so he got up and walked slowly back toward the house. It seemed that he had lost all of the spirit that he had maintained so steadily for so many years, that he had become a sack of willess meat and guts and bone like everyone else he scorned.