A Farmer

by Jim Harrison

  Despite her anger over Joseph's unfaithfulness Rosealee had managed to persuade the seniors to put off their trip to Chicago for a week. They sniped a bit but Daniel sagely remarked that “it's not every day your mother dies.” He had done well on the final exams Rosealee had administered for Joseph in his short but necessary mourning period. Rosealee trusted them on what she called an “honor system” and, besides, she had her own young charges in the other room to attend to. Daniel was very keyed up about the Chicago trip. Now that it was delayed they would get to see the White Sox and the Tigers play instead of the White Sox and the Yankees. They were all terribly excited, none of them having been to Chicago before except Catherine whose nasty blasé attitude irritated everyone except Daniel, who was far beyond noticing such things. All the boys liked to stand around when Catherine shot baskets or played softball in a skirt for any glimpse of a promised land that had been denied to all of them except, they believed, Robert who was always with her. Only the other girls understood Catherine's purposeful wantonness, the way she flung herself around for the boys; she was so obvious she even got on the children's swings one afternoon and laughed as her audience of young bucks gathered for the show trying very hard to be nonchalant.

  Joseph had just got to bed after an exhausting full day's fishing trip with the doctor when the phone rang. He hoped it was Rosealee not Catherine—in his extreme state he couldn't bear the thought of Catherine, especially after the way the doctor had dredged up the past. And he dreaded her plans for Chicago when they at last would be able to make love in a bed.

  “Joe?” The voice barely whispered.

  “Yes. Who is it for Christ's sake?” The whisper startled him.

  “It's me, Ted. You know. At the bar. Look I got to talk quiet. Your brother-in-law from Flint is here with these two other guys. He thinks you took the seniors to Chicago and I heard him talking about your Dad's coins. I think he's going to swipe them. They just got another drink but I'd get ready if I was you.”

  “Thanks, Ted. I will.”

  “Just thought I'd warn you. The guy's an asshole.”

  “I know, Ted. Thanks. Bye now.”

  How comic Joseph thought. Mother a few weeks dead and buried and that fuckhead up here to scavenge, thinking I'm in Chicago. Frank had always wanted those coins. Joseph stood in his underpants scratching his head. Two guys with him. It was like a cowboy movie. Since the first year of World War II when their fortunes had modestly improved his father had tossed coins into a pickle crock in the corner of the dining room; after his father died Joseph continued the custom. There were even some old Swedish coins a cousin had pitched in. Frank saved coins and had a book that stated their worth. Whenever he and Charlotte came north to the farm Frank would eye the coins and sort through the top layer. Joseph had always teased him that the old ones were at the bottom and if the “rainy day” ever came when he needed the money he might let Frank have a peek. Joseph assigned a nephew at family gatherings to keep watch on Frank and the coins and there had been an embarrassing scene when he had been caught pocketing several of them.

  Joseph stood there wondering what to do, then walked to a closet and drew his deer rifle from the case. It was an old slide action .35 Remington with a variable Bushnell scope. He found a half-dozen shells, turned out all the lights, and walked to the barn, still in his underpants. It was a warm still night with the air moist and dew on the grass. There was a three-quarter moon and when he got to the barn he studied the silvery roof of the house in the moonlight and the driveway sheltered by the maples. The driveway was also silver where it emerged from the maples and its hedge of lilac. The lilacs helped keep the snow off the driveway in the winter and now were just bursting into fragrant purple and white blossoms. His mother said that the lilacs were the first thing she had planted when they bought the farm.

  Joseph went into the barn and climbed up into the mow. The steps were painful against his bare feet, especially on his bad leg. He walked across the old hay chaff and unlatched the mow door. He felt oddly distant and pleased that something so crudely actual was going to happen. The only thing he worried about was whether the rifle was properly sighted in but it had worked OK on the dogs. He took his underpants off and wiped the dust from the scope. Then he put them back on and hefted the rifle. He aimed at a tree, at the North Star, and at the Big Dipper. He aimed at the moon and noticed that you could see the unlit part of it through the rifle's scope. He adjusted the scope from 3x to 8x, bringing the moon five times closer to the barn. What a wonderful trick. He racked one shell into the chamber and four more into the breech. The brass was cool and he stuck the extra shell over his ear like a cigarette but it fell to the floor. He searched for the cartridge with his toes but couldn't find it. Five should be enough he thought while the mosquitoes began to find their target as he waited for his. I'm going to get my ass bit off. Then far off down the gravel road he saw the twin lights coming slowly. Then the lights went out as they drew nearer and Joseph laughed at the idea that Frank, like in the movies, had turned off his lights and was driving by moonlight. But when they pulled into the driveway the car lights came back on and Joseph assumed that they thought the house was for sure deserted. The men got out and he could hear their voices across the barnyard but couldn't make out what they were saying. Then Frank talked louder and he could see his short plump figure in the glare of headlights. Joseph sighted down on him and twisted the scope up until his head fairly filled the cross hairs. Frank was saying now rather loudly, you just wait here and if the crock's too heavy I'll call and then we'll get the fuck out of here pronto. Frank laughed. The other two leaned against the hood drinking from beer bottles. As Frank's laugh faded in the still night with the motor ticking and bugs already gathering around the lights, Joseph swung on the left headlight and pressed the trigger as the cross hairs centered it. There was blue flame and the hollow yet crisp explosion and the light went out, its shattering lost in the rifle shot which echoed through the outbuildings and dully against the house. There were screams and then a yell of holy christ as they scrambled to get into the car. Joseph lifted the rifle and racked and fired four more shots in the air. They backed swerving out of the driveway and down the road. Joseph watched them turn the corner a mile away; he was breathing heavily though very happy.

  Back in the house he poured a nightcap and was surprised at how simple it all seemed compared to his other problems. It had been fun enough to partly make up for the abortive fishing earlier in the day. Were it not for Charlotte and the kids he knew he would have been quite happy blowing off Frank's head. But then he was disturbed at the idea of the mess and also the thought of chickens. At one moment they were scratching in the yard and the next moment you killed one for dinner by chopping off its head and the neck would spout blood. Oddly, Joseph could never remember looking back at the head itself immediately after the hatchet fell.

  Joseph's sleep was so profoundly troubled that he spent a good deal of the night restlessly looking around the room with the bedlight on, trying to read. Twice he stared out a back window to make sure none of the outbuildings were on fire; fire had always been the ultimate rural horror, a burning barn could wipe out someone with any possible help far away and useless. First in his dreams there were the innards of the trout and the large gob of wet, partially digested mayflies. But they were cleaning the trout in Chicago and Catherine was hugging the major suggestively while a building burned in the background. Joseph tried to draw their attention to the fire but the doctor was separating the organs of the trout with a surgical knife. Then Joseph decided to sleep with the light on, but the light became the sun in a dream and he was making love in a field beside the ocean with a woman he assumed was Rosealee, but it turned out to be an older version of Catherine and much more lovely than she was now. Then when he slept again, Catherine regained her youth but was less slight, more whorish, and somehow infinitely more exciting, though Arlice was sitting in the room with them talking. Then Joseph was in the plane diving with
Orin and that woke him for good barely after dawn.

  He wondered how it was that dreams could carry a day, whether good or bad. If bad, it was as if a person woke up and their mind fairly ached, and the early morning reality of chores, breakfast, and driving to school lacked the energy to assert itself enough to dispel the dream. But the same was true if the dreams were particularly good, or if they were powerful sexual dreams which Joseph recognized most people had. You could dream about a homely girl and in class the next day she would be cast in a new, strange light though it tended to dissipate as the day grew. And dreams had the power to fool with reality, sometimes in a pathetic way; one dawn he had dressed in a hurry and rushed from the house dreaming that his father was out loading the crates of potatoes on the wagon. But halfway across the snowy barnyard he wondered why it was winter because it had been a warm autumn day in his dream. There was no wagon in the snowy fields and his father had been dead for three years.

  Joseph threw grain to the chickens and geese wondering whom he might give them to. His dreams still held him and he stared vacantly around the barnyard hoping that Catherine would stop by. Why had he been rude to her when it was almost over anyway? Now he could feel the remnants of her dream appearance in the pit of his stomach but he could scarcely call her on the phone. Hello, Major, may I speak to your daughter? He stood smiling until he thought of Rosealee. Jesus. I can't make a mess of it after this many years. Of course I can, just continue the way I'm going now. Full circle in thirty years, only Orin is not here to take her, I'm pushing her away.

  On impulse he walked to the barn and saddled Catherine's horse, riding straight back along the fence toward the state forest. The horse wagged its head at each fence post in mock alarm, then shied at an old plow leaning against a rock pile. Joseph wished that he had used a bit rather than a hackamore for better control. He laughed at how little the horse had been ridden and decided to give both himself and the horse a good workout. He cut across the corner of the pasture to the far gate, the horse knee-high in the timothy and the first purple heads of vetch that formed elongated buds and was sometimes thick enough to make a whole pasture purple. When he got down to open the gate the horse shied again when the gate creaked, pulling the reins from his hand. Oh jesus. The horse backed away as he approached exchanging step for step in a not very funny game. But Joseph used an old trick: he sat down with his back to the horse and whistled. Within a few moments the horse was nuzzling his shoulder and he remounted.

  They entered the fringe of forest where there were hardwoods along a ridge. At one time they collected enough sap from the maples to make syrup for their own use and a little to give away. They used the same huge black pot in which they scalded the pigs when butchering and it took a half day of scrubbing to get the pig smell out of the metal. His father and neighbors sometimes drank too much while watching the sap boil but someone was always alert enough to catch it at the right moment. The kettle was hung from a large tripod made of pine poles.

  On the far side of the ridge the conifers began, mixed with stands of poplar; the sandy soil supported not much more ground cover than brake, fern, and saplings except in the lower swampy areas. They entered a small grassy clearing which was thought of as an Indian graveyard by hearsay. It could have been Ottawa, Ojibwa, or Chippewa. Once he and Orin had decided to do some digging there but his mother, who was superstitious, forbade it. A friend of hers had gone repeatedly to an Indian known only as “Chief” who lived in a shack by the river in town. The Indian claimed to be a faith healer and many women reported relief from arthritis though the very idea disgusted Dr. Evans. He said their cures came from the amount of alcohol in the patent medicine they habitually swilled. But some of the women were Fundamentalist and weren't allowed the whiskey and aspirin treatment he advised for severe arthritic pain.

  Joseph let the horse crop at the grass remembering that Whitman said grass was “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” a line that had always puzzled him. One day in class an otherwise simple pupil suggested that it might mean that the earth is so old someone is buried nearly everywhere. That might be it. But looking down over the horse's nose it was hard to imagine bones deep beneath the surface. Of course it was all unimaginable, and this had been the year that it became far more unimaginable than ever before. He looked up at the clouds and felt ill at ease in the still clearing. I let so many years pass like smoke or just dreams though not even as real as the dreams of last night. But how can I do it differently if I'm not sure what I've done wrong? Of course not, dumbass, you don't get a message like the skywriter at the fair telling you and everyone else what kind of beer to drink. The horse started at a snake wiggling through the grass, and Joseph soothed it by talking. “That's just a snake in an Indian graveyard.” The horse wasn't reassured.

  They continued on along the ridge above the creek then descended into the narrow valley at the end of which was the beaver pond and the beginning of the marsh. He lightly tethered the horse to a log and sat down after taking a drink of the cold water. At the far end of the pond a moulting duck scooted into the cattails to hide. On the far side of the pond along a clay bank there were slide marks where the beaver had dragged in fresh poplar to repair damage done in the spring runoff. This had always been Joseph's favorite place, even in his youth when it had provided the equivalent in the natural world of his fort in the hay mow. But now he was grasping hard for a peace that refused to arrive. He closed his eyes and got only the nude swimming bodies of Rosealee and Arlice for his pains. How hard they had all tried to be casual and adult about their nakedness. Like under the lamplight in Orin's living room when he went mad and demanded to see Rosealee in the light. But she thought finally that it had been wonderful and if it hadn't been for Catherine it would have been wonderful. Why hadn't he listened to Orin ten years before when Orin said night after night Joseph you got to get out of here, you're not really going to farm and there's a whole world out there. Then as the evening progressed his brain whirled with Orin's tales of far-off places and English, French, Italian, and Spanish women. And he said what if Rosealee knew what you've been up to while she sat here waiting, but Orin insisted it was different in wartime when you are away over three years and besides she knew something anyway. The day Orin had left for the Korean War Joseph and Rosealee took him to town for the train and Orin had drawn him aside with little Robert standing there white as a sheet and said you better get out of here before your life is over just spent in these goddamn sticks.

  Joseph threw some pebbles into the pond remembering a time when he couldn't throw a stone all the way across and how pleased he had been when he finally reached the other side. Arlice had said too back in forty-six the first time at Dad's funeral, Joseph you should leave this place. My husband could get you a job on a newspaper or something. Are you just sitting around to see if Rosealee and Orin split up? Maybe he was. But he couldn't take the idea of Arlice's husband getting him a job. You're not staying here because of Mother? She doesn't need you, she has friends and can get along. Orin said that too. So why hadn't he left and why had he let so many years slip away like smoke? But that was easy. It was Rosealee mixed with Father and Mother, then Mother alone. Also taking the seniors to Detroit or Chicago in June and seeing those places as not so much squalid as places where he just wouldn't fit in. And the rituals of fishing and hunting. But even the doctor said Joseph why don't you see the world or at least your own country. The neighbor would feed the cattle. And the doctor had been angry when he backed out on England and bought a Powerglide instead. Goddamn your stupid foot which you use to get out of going places. The doctor said that when he was drunk, then apologized and never said it again.

  The horse had lathered heavily by the time they reached the pond so he waited for the animal to cool before he let it have water. Now the horse drank deeply, lifting its head to stare at a waterbug swimming past its nose. Arlice had struck closest to home when she said if you're so interested in marine biology why don't you go to college and s
tudy it? You haven't even taken a look at the ocean. They used to worry so much about Arlice as if she were some sort of lost, incalculably precious jewel. She had gone to the teachers college in Mount Pleasant then run off with an actor to New York. The actor was in his thirties and had come to the college in a traveling Shakespeare play. What a scandal it had been and in the thirties they never saw her though she wrote she had become a Communist. Even that wasn't so terrible as her father was basically a Populist who read Herbert Croly and Lincoln Steffens and whose hero had been Eugene Debs. Then her actor-husband had disappeared in the Spanish Civil War without any of them having met him. She married again and this man was educated and had become rich after the war. Joseph met him only once and despised him on sight but then later decided he might be fine for Arlice. They had spent two days on the farm one summer and the man scarcely went outside. He was much older than Arlice and puffy looking but very sophisticated. He kept wanting to talk about economics and farm prices. Later he sent Joseph Samuelson's book on economics so that he wouldn't be “lost in history.” But when they had sat around the table that evening arguing with Arlice and Mother sitting there too for a while, he had merely explained to the man that there were no economics in any elaborate sense involved in their farm life, which already with the press of events was quickly dwindling into the past. It was a subsistence or more exactly an “existence” on earth. A man came from Sweden, mostly to escape conscription as thousands did in the eighties and nineties. This particular man came from a family of fishermen near Örnsköldsvik but when he got there and worked in Chicago for three years he didn't like the city, so he took his young wife and two children, the first two of seven, and moved into northern Michigan because it was a beautiful place. They had seen it on an excursion train. They also had taken a train to Wyoming, but that seemed too wild, untamable and not all that long since the Indian wars had ceased. So they came up and bought a small farm for seven hundred dollars just after the century's turn, not to make money but to have a way to live. They had almost folded with the deaths of their first two children. Carl wasn't even a good farmer but he raised his children without any actual hunger or privation.