A Farmer

by Jim Harrison

  “I'm sorry. I can't say I wish I'd never met your daughter.” Joseph stood and looked out the window. “I'd never met a girl like her but I'm still sorry.” Joseph turned and the major stood. “I can imagine how you feel though I never had a daughter.”

  “As a matter of fact I don't feel anything. It's happened before. I just thought you shouldn't try to marry her. You are more misused yourself than someone who took advantage, I'm not that much of a fool. I always thought a son would be easier to raise but I'm not sure. Anyway I know she wouldn't be happy for long if she married you.”

  “She talked of it and I didn't say anything. She'll get over it easy enough I think.” They stepped out on the porch. The geese came around the corner of the pigpen and began honking. Joseph was clearly relieved.

  “Maybe we can fish some evening?” The major offered his hand and they shook. “I simply wanted to get this cleared up. You probably thought about what might happen if I found out. It was a bad thing to do and our lives are filled with bad things. Only, as a father I have to think who it might have been if you hadn't been the one. Do you know what I mean?”

  Joseph nodded. They walked toward the house but then the major asked if he could look at Catherine's horse. They walked into the barn and the major began talking about beef prices. He was raising some Hereford steers and wanted Joseph's opinion on what auction to buy some more at, or whether Joseph thought a cow-calf operation was a better idea. Joseph said he thought the major would be better off in a small cow-calf operation. He could always borrow a bull for a few weeks and besides it was more interesting. Joseph retrieved the jug from the granary and then went into the house and made sandwiches. The major finally left at midafternoon. He reminded Joseph sadly of Orin; the major had become a career man out of excitement and after two wars he was burned out and had no interest in more ordinary activities. Cattle and fishing were enough, a wife and daughter far too complicated and confusing.

  Before the major left he helped Joseph pick two large bouquets of lilacs. Joseph thought that odd but when the major suggested they spend the rest of the afternoon fishing he said that he had to take flowers to the cemetery.

  “I was an orphan,” the major said, carefully selecting a branch to cut with his jackknife. “But I made it to the Point and I moved up fast because of the war. Rosealee's husband was a pilot, wasn't he?”

  “Yes. He went down in the China Sea they told us. That's who these other flowers are for.” Joseph paused and brushed away a bee. “He was my best friend.” The statement was so stark and matter of fact that Joseph could nearly see Orin beside him. The thickness of the lilacs made a good hiding place when they played cowboys.

  “You people are lucky to be so close and honor the dead this way.” The major waved at the farm. “When I came up here fishing years ago I knew I was going to hide out and fish and die here.”

  “I guess we're a lot luckier than the dead or the evidence says so.” Joseph laughed at the thought. “Sometimes I wonder, don't you? You probably saw enough that this place looks real good. I think it's a fine place, though I don't know any other.”

  The major handed Joseph the flowers. “Catherine said you were going to the ocean this summer but when I asked her which ocean she didn't know. She's so scatterbrained I don't think she belongs in this world.”

  “Maybe I'm addled too because I'm not sure which myself. I made a list of the advantages of each. But probably the Pacific up in Oregon because Florida is too hot.”

  They turned as the doctor drove into the yard. He read their faces from the car and got out affably. “I just pulled some tonsils and I'm going fishing. Hello, Major.” He smiled at Joseph and looked at their bouquets. “Going up to the cemetery? You better wait. I saw Rosealee there when I drove past. How's the wife?” he asked the major.

  “Awful as usual. I found her in town yesterday.” The major smiled. “I make her drive the Jeep so if she hits anything she's less likely to get hurt.”

  “We'll send her away for a dry-out. I'm not interrupting anything am I?”

  Joseph and the major said no in frantic unison and the doctor laughed. “Well I'm glad you didn't shoot him,” he said to the major. “He's a good boy.”

  They all laughed, the major and Joseph nervously. The major went off fishing with the doctor leaving the Jeep in the yard. Joseph stood dumbly with his two bouquets thinking that if Rosealee saw the Jeep she would think Catherine was there. But then he partly wished Catherine were there so he could forget about the cemetery, forget about everything on earth in fact. He put the lilacs in the car and went into the house to wash and dress for Memorial Day.

  There were a half-dozen cars at the small country cemetery. The grounds were kept up by the Swedish Lutheran church but others were buried there too. The Lutheran minister had gladly accepted a Catholic suicide who was refused consecrated ground. The minister considered Catholics to be barbarians in this respect, worse than the Baptists who were so worried about avoiding dancing, drinking, movies, and fornication that they forgot the Lord. The minister always spent Memorial Day afternoon at the cemetery to comfort the bereaved, though he inevitably ended up talking about the weather or the prospects this year for the Detroit Tigers. He saw Joseph pull up and greeted him rather unctuously.

  “A fine day Joseph.”

  “Yup.” Joseph stood there with the two bouquets feeling silly. He had no more to say. He wanted to place the flowers and go home. “See you again some day,” he nodded to the preacher, feeling foolish. He had always driven his mother to church, at least until she was too sick, but he would sit out in the car through the service reading the Sunday paper with resolute thoroughness. The preacher no doubt knew every move he made but Joseph gave less than a shit. Orin's mother was Methodist and Rosealee was nothing but she had endured countless Sundays of nonsense without complaint. Joseph walked toward their plot through an aisle of blooming yellow forsythia and small flowering crab trees. It was hot and he carried his coat. About fifty yards away he could see Rosealee, Orin's mother, and Robert on a blanket. Robert was reading a book.

  Joseph laid the one bouquet between his father's stone and his mother's fresh grave. Her death date had not been added yet but his read CARL JOSEPH LUNDGREN 1882-1946. The stone was a simple slab, unadorned. Arlice wanted a big stone but his mother insisted that that would be immodest. The two children were there with small granite plaques, CARL JR and DORTHEA both dead in 1909, he at four and she at three years, of diphtheria. Joseph lifted the flowers and put them between their two stones. Four and three. What grief on earth. There were small cherubs carved in the corners of the stones. How could anyone bear it and not go mad he thought, CARL JR whom his father never spoke of and DORTHEA also never mentioned. He did not have the guts for it, pure and simple. His eyes watered not for his parents but for the children, and the odor of the forsythia began to sicken him. They died his mother said within a week of one another, Dorthea first, then Carl Jr. It was their first year on the farm and she said no one would think that children could get sick in such a beautiful place. She said his father had broken the front window with his head when Carl Jr. died.

  Joseph walked over to where Orin was buried with his father beside him. Orin's mother got up to greet him as if his gesture outweighed everything he could have done to Rosealee.

  “Hello, Yoey. God bless you.” She took the flowers from him and propped them against Orin's headstone. They hugged as they did once a year before Orin's grave, as if it were the only thing they shared. Rosealee got up then, though Robert continued reading with a petulant look.

  “Hello, Joseph. It's a beautiful day. The doctor was here.” Rosealee looked worn, nearly haggard.

  “When you're willing to talk let me know.” He averted his eyes from her gaze.

  “Maybe we can talk when you get back from Chicago.” She turned and went back to the blanket.

  At home Joseph sat at the table until twilight. On the top of the chest of drawers at the far end of the room
there were pictures of all seven of them by order of birth with Carl Jr. first and Joseph last. Dorthea most closely resembled Arlice but with even more delicate lines while Carl Jr. was thin and lacked Joseph's broad features. The pictures were all taken on or around their third birthdays. The photographer, Lindquist, was a distant cousin and was so taciturn he barely made a living. The photos were somber, without a smile among the seven. Joseph remembered with delight one of Roselee's kindergartners, who looked a little like Carl Jr. The child was the bastard son of the daughter of the grain operator. The daughter had gone off to college in Chicago after the war and had returned with the son. His name was Samuel and he was a Wunderkind. There was talk that his father was a Jew and a college professor. Samuel was the smallest child in school and also the brightest Rosealee had ever taught. He could read well at five and used to gather the others around him and read them stories when Rosealee was busy. One day almost to her alarm he read a long story from an empty notebook making it up as he went along. All of the students were addicted to him and the older boys taught him an obscene song that he sang happily in his pure, thin voice to amuse them. One afternoon he astounded them all by learning his multiplication tables during the half-hour recess after being bribed with a dime to see if he could do it. Rosealee told the superintendent and he sent a man out to test Samuel and the somewhat pompous man discovered that Samuel's IQ was 180, or as high as the test measured. There was a small piece in the newspaper about it but Samuel remained nonchalant. Joseph thought his most endearing talent was not his brain but his propensity for dancing without music. At recess or even when he was walking dreamily around the schoolroom he would regularly break into an involved jig as if listening to some music in his head that no one else could hear. He would make two or three little pointed goat steps then whirl around prancing, blind to his surroundings. Often the other children would clap and cheer, though the performance wasn't for them. Joseph once saw him dancing along the road on the way to school, utterly alone. They were depressed when Samuel didn't show up for school the following year.

  Joseph had often wondered if Keats and Walt Whitman were like Samuel when they were young. He got up from the table and found his Modern Library Keats but it was getting too dark to read and he didn't feel up to having a light on. It saddened him that he had never managed to get his students very interested in Keats or Whitman, or biology or mathematics for that matter. But he knew that he himself had learned by rote and his true interest in these matters had only arrived in his early twenties. Up until then he had thought as his students did that knowledge was a faraway land and not a very interesting one at that, and the description of the land had to be learned as a rite of passage, a necessary though temporary interference in their way from childhood through puberty to adulthood. But to the truly gifted one like Samuel or John Keats, knowledge was as real as a leaf or a mud puddle. They found music to dance to in the most ordinary things. They did not live with distant thoughts of the ocean, or endure countless monotonous days in order to hunt or fish or simply read about hunting and fishing and the Indian and Caribbean and Arctic oceans. Joseph believed that Keats and Whitman and young Samuel somehow lived in the purest reaches of their imaginations and there was a beauty in it that wasn't found in the preoccupations of others; say making a living which turned out to be nothing other than what comes simply and directly to most animals.

  Once a few years back Joseph had been forced to take two summer courses to keep his certificate. He had been mournful about his six weeks in Ann Arbor, a town he loathed on sight with its smelly, polluted Huron River. But a teacher, an old man with long white hair, had made them read a dozen books in six weeks and Joseph's mind fairly reeled, even though he spent much of the time dreaming about the trout fishing he was missing. It was a course in short novels and stories and they read Dostoevski's Notes from Underground, Gogol's The Overcoat, Tolstoi's “The Cossacks,” James Joyce's “The Dead,” Melville's Billy Budd, Faulkner's “The Bear,” and works of [Catherine Anne Porter and Glenway Wescott and Sherwood Anderson.

  Joseph had liked “The Bear” the best but was troubled deeply by the Dostoevski book. How could a man feel that way and not blow his brains out? The professor had chided Joseph by saying that it was not Dostoevski but the character he created who was talking. He liked Sherwood Anderson least because he wrote only about what everyone knows, but the professor insisted that that was precisely why he was good, a point of view that flew over Joseph's head like a migrating teal. The professor frequently called on Joseph to speak but it seemed to Joseph that he was only being used to illustrate the wrong point of view and he grew adamant and silent.

  The pain of his weeks in Ann Arbor was alleviated only by Rosealee's three-day visit. They went to the symphony for the first time and were shocked by the power of the experience which was so unlike listening to the radio. Rosealee said it was as if the music entered your skin, not just your ears, and after that Joseph often listened to classical music late at night on the radio when he had trouble sleeping. One evening they were walking down University Place and saw the professor staring in a bookstore window. They exchanged small talk and went into a bar. Joseph's notions that the professor was a boozer were confirmed and he was irked by the way the man charmed Rosealee by his learned talk. But the conversation turned to birds, which were the professor's avocation, and the following summer he stopped by to see the nesting osprey that Joseph had told him about. They had all had dinner together at this very table. The professor had brought wine in his car trunk but noticing Joseph's distaste had gone back to the car for a bottle of scotch which Joseph thought tasted like Ivory soap. Rosealee was gay, effervescent, but Joseph's mother had been shy at having so educated a man in the house. She relaxed only late in the evening when the professor began singing music hall songs from the twenties in a baritone that was full despite an occasional quavering note.

  Now he turned on the radio but couldn't find any classical music. He recognized only a few pieces. It was totally dark and he began to think about supper but there was nothing much in the refrigerator so he fried some eggs and ate them with some cold beef and horse-radish. Perhaps the doctor and the major might drop in after fishing. What if Catherine stopped by while her father was here? But she would see the Jeep in the yard. Every evening they had sat here to listen to the war news—the girls had all left home by then—and Gabriel Heatter could make a minor triumph comforting as Hitler swept across Europe. Joseph had pinned a map of Europe to the wall so they could trace what they knew of Orin's movements. After the war Orin took him up in a rented Stinson Voyager and quite literally scared the piss out of him by stalling the plane on purpose. He had been angry at the trick for days. Orin lived on adrenaline and had gotten himself into some nasty fights at the tavern out of boredom. He was happy when the Korean War arrived though it certainly lacked the grandness of the other one.

  Joseph took a cup of coffee out to the porch swing and sat there listening to the creaking of its rusty hinges and to the frogs from the swamp that were so relentless that people forgot the noise existed. What a wonderful map of Europe with his own trip planned for 1949 traced across England but then I didn't go because Chevrolet had that Powerglide without a clutch and it was pleasant not to have to thump unsurely at a clutch with my leg. And another one last year when the first became so battered and unstable that Rosealee didn't want to ride in it. I have to get off my dead ass and get her to forgive me or I'm sunk. My mind is going or maybe like the doctor said it is just opening up. He came out when Dad had the flu and I hitched up the horses to see if I could somehow sneak off and do some plowing but I never even got the plow attached. A stray dog came by and the mare hated dogs and I was dragged like a goddamn fool around the barnyard by the team yelling whoa whoa whoa and finally dragged on my stomach until Mother came out and got hold of their halters. Then the doctor had to clean off my stomach and chest which was a mess but Mother looked funny leading the horses back to the barn. I was embarrass
ed and after he wrapped me up I went out and took the harness off. Dad was angry but I said I at least had to give it a try. And only a week later Arlice and Rosealee were standing around in back of the barn and Orin said I bet you a dollar I can ride that goddamn cow so I naturally said I bet you a dollar I can ride it. We both got thrown badly and Orin was knocked out. The cow never trusted me after that and Dad could never figure out why she was nervous when he milked her and I was around. Rosealee and Arlice thought Orin was dead but I said he's just knocked out like in boxing. Orin caught the greased pig at the fair by getting wet and rolling in sand and gravel so it stuck to him. He was the only one who could get any purchase on the animal but he was disqualified for cheating.

  The doctor's car pulled in with bugs already crowding around the headlights. They jumped from the car and for a moment Joseph thought something might be wrong.

  “You missed it tonight, buddy. I saved two for your breakfast but look what Major got.” The major held up a fish but Joseph couldn't see it well. They went into the kitchen and put the fish in the sink. It was a male brown trout with a heavy lower jaw and deep brown and gold colors. The major looked pale and his eyes were glazed with excitement.

  “That's a rare fish, my friend,” Joseph said. He was clearly jealous never having caught a brown that big on fly.

  “I got it just before dark above that log jam. There were so many mayflies I caught fish after fish but when I tightened up on this one I knew I had something.” The major did a little dance around the kitchen and Joseph suddenly was quite happy for him.

  “He was screaming like a pig and I thought he was drowning.” The doctor's face was glowing. “Let's see what he was feeding on.” The doctor deftly opened the stomach with his jackknife.