Postcards

by Annie Proulx

  ‘You’ll put up with scratch suppers if we got to do outside work. I can’t kill and pluck chickens and lug potatoes and apples and then come in and make a big dinner. Can’t you get one of your brother’s boys there, Ernest or Norman, to help?’ She knew he could not.

  ‘Be nice if I could slack off on the milkin’ just because I got to haul wood. Goddamn it, I need a good dinner and I expect you to fix it for me.’ Now he was shouting. ‘And no, I can’t get Ott’s boys to help. First place, Norman’s only eleven and got about as much strength as wet hay. Ernie’s already helpin’ Ott and Ott says he puts about as much into it as he would into takin’ poison.’

  She’d like to see him take poison, he knew it.

  There was the threshing sound of a car coming up the lane. Jewell went to the window.

  ‘Might of known she’d be along; it’s old Mrs. Nipple and Ronnie.’

  ‘Be out in the barn,’ said Mink, hitching at his overalls. The argument had brought up his color, and Jewell had a flash of how he’d been when he was young, the milky skin under the shirt, the blue flashing eyes and the fine hair. The vigor of him, the swaggering way he walked and hitched at his overalls to free his private parts from the chafing cloth.

  He and Dub went out the door to the woodshed, moving like a matched team. The porch door hissed. Mrs. Nipple’s heavy fingers crooked around the door edge.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, Mrs. Nipple, come on in and Ronnie too,’ shouted Jewell, putting on water for tea. The old lady had burned her mouth with hot coffee as a baby and never touched it again, let her tea stand until it went tepid. ‘Thought we might be seein’ you pretty soon.’ Mrs. Nipple had an instinct for discovering trouble as keen as the wild goose’s need to take flight in the shortening days. She was sensitive to the faintest janglings of discord from miles away.

  ‘After what she had been through,’ Jewell once told Mernelle in a dark tone, ‘she probably knows what ain’t right in Cuba.’

  ‘What’s she been through, then?’ asked Mernelle.

  ‘Nothin’ I can tell you until you’re a grown woman. You wouldn’t understand it.’

  ‘I’ll understand it,’ whined Mernelle, ‘so tell me.’

  ‘Not likely,’ said Jewell.

  ‘Ronnie’s gone out to the barn to talk to Loyal and them,’ said Mrs. Nipple sidling through the door, taking in the broken window, the potato peelings in the sink, the woodshed door half open, Jewell’s twisted smile. She smelled the rage, the smoke, sensed some departure. In Mink’s chair she felt the warmth of the seat even through her heavy brown skirt. Nobody had to tell her something had happened. She knew Mink had gone out to the barn when he saw her coming.

  The old lady had the look of a hen who had laid a thousand eggs, from her frizzled white hair permed at Corinne Claunch’s Home Beauty Parlor, to her bright moist eye, plump breast, thrusting rear end that no corset could ever bend in and the bowed legs set so far out on her pelvis that when she walked it was like a rocking chair rocking. Dub had snickered to Loyal once that the space between her thighs had to be three hands across, that she could sit on the back of a Clydesdale like a slotted clothes-pin on the line.

  She sighed, touched a needle of glass on the oilcloth. ‘Seems like there’s trouble everywhere,’ she said, building up a platform for the news Jewell must tell. ‘It’s a nuisance you have to bring your own paper bags to the stores, and just last month Ronnie got a letter from the milk truck, said they are consolidating the route. Can’t come up to the farm no more. If we want to sell them cream we got to lug it down to the roadside. He’s been doing it, but it’s pretty irksome work, takes a good deal of time. I suppose he’ll lose heavy on it. Don’t know how they expect us to manage. Then my niece Ida’s sister-in-law, you remember Ida, she stayed with us when Toot was still alive, helped me in the garden all one summer, picked berries, apples, I don’t know what, helped Toot and Ronnie with the hay. She was the one got stung by yellow jackets had a nest under a pumpkin. Well, now she’s livin’ over in Shoreham, I hear from her that her sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Renfrew, runs the U-Auta lunchroom in Barton, her husband’s at the War in the Air Force, and she been arrested. I have never ate there and I don’t believe I ever will. She shot this feller, Jim somebody, worked for the electric light over there, with his own shotgun. Seems he come sneakin’ around, peepin’ in the windows to see what she was doin’ and he saw plenty. She got this cook in to help her run the lunchroom, a colored fellow from South America, she didn’t say what his name was, but Mrs. Charles Renfrew was seen by the electric company man kissin’ the cook, and in he comes with the shotgun. See, he was sweet on her himself. She’s a good-lookin’ woman, they say. She gets the shotgun away from him and shoots him. And he died. When they arrested her she admitted it all, but said everything was an accident. Got six children, the youngest one isn’t but four. Them poor little children. It was all in the paper. Terrible, ain’t it.’ She waited for Jewell to begin. Few things could be worse than Mrs. Charles Renfrew’s multiple crimes laid out in public view, and she’d told the story to give Jewell a chance to whittle her own troubles down to size. She leaned forward.

  Jewell slid the cup of tea over to her, the string dangling over the edge of the cup. ‘We had a little surprise here last night. Loyal comes in for supper, stands up in the middle of it and says that Billy and him is goin’ out west. They left last night. Kind of took us by surprise, but that’s the way the kids are these days.’

  ‘Is that right,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘Takes my breath away. Ronnie will be upset. Him and Loyal was tight as ticks.’ There was something awry, she thought, told straight out like that, no details of who had said what. She knew there was something deeper. Mink must have been crazy mad. The way Jewell told it now it didn’t seem like the kind of story that would gather with time, but instead would retract, condense, turn into one of those things that nobody talked about, and in a year or so it would all be forgotten. There were plenty of those stories. She knew one or two herself. It was all serious business. She never understood why Ronnie liked Loyal, no standout, even in the crowd of Bloods with their knack for doing the wrong thing, except for his strength and his sinewy hunger for work. But one man couldn’t bring that farm up again, it had too much against it. Look how it had gone down since the grandfather’s time when it was tight-fenced for the convenience of trotting horses and fine merinos, only three cows then for family butter and cheese on the place. She liked Jewell well enough, but the woman was a dirty housekeeper, letting the men in with their barn clothes on, letting the dust and spiders take over, and too proud for milk room work.

  ‘Well, Billy was smarting to get out, and I can’t say I blame her. But I’m surprised Loyal would go. He’s a country boy from the word go. She’ll find you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. It won’t be easy to milk all them cows, just Mink and Dub. Dub’s still here or is he off somewhere again?’ Her voice so custard smooth now it would cure a sore throat.

  ‘Been here pretty steady since his accident. But you know how he is. The two of them can’t do it all. Not run this farm, just the two of them. We’ll have to hire somebody to come in, I imagine.’

  ‘You won’t find nobody. Ronnie tried all last winter, this spring and summer, and I guess he got to know everybody for twenty mile around that could hold a pitchfork, and I’ll tell you, the best he could find was school kids and hundred-year-old grandpas with wooden legs and canes. Some places they’re takin’ on girls. How about Mernelle? She could milk, maybe. She’s comin’ on what, twelve or thirteen now? She get the curse yet? I used to milk when I was eight. Or you could milk while she takes over the house. Some say it makes the cows restless when a woman’s got the curse milks ’em. I never noticed it myself.’ The old lady sucked at her tea.

  ‘No ma’am. I don’t work to the barn and my girl don’t work to the barn. Barns is men’s work. If they can’t handle it they can hire. I give two boys to the barn, th
at’s enough. Mink’s already set me and Mernelle up to take on what seems like half his outside work.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that with the help so hard to get and the boys off to the War they’s quite a few of the farms for sale. And the way the cream prices moves around. Course it’s good now, with the War, but it could go down again. I notice that the Darter farm is been sold. The three boys is in the service, the other one’s in the shipyards, the girl’s gone into nurse’s training, and Clyde says, “I don’t know why we’re hangin’ around here when we could be makin’ good money instead of killin’ ourself.” They say he went over to Bath, Maine where the other boy is, they learnt him how to weld and he’s got a high-payin’ job now. They say she got one, too, and between what they get from the wages and what they got from sellin’ the farm to a teacher from Pennsylvania who’s just comin’ up for summers, they are fixed up good. Seems funny that Loyal and Billy would go off so sudden like that. He didn’t say nothin’ to Ronnie. Ronnie and him was plannin’ to go goose huntin’ one day this week. That’s the main reason we come by, so’s Ronnie and Loyal could set their time. I says they ought to try and get some of them hen hawks that have been takin’ my hens and now there’s a turkey gone. I don’t know as a hen hawk could lift a turkey, but I suppose they could eat it where they brought it low. But maybe it was a fox took the turkey. I don’t know how Ronnie’ll get along without Loyal, they was that close. You’ll find it quite a chore without Loyal. A worker.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll figure somethin’ out. But I don’t know what. One thing, I’m not goin’ in any barn and neither is Mernelle.’

  3

  Down the Road

  HE MADE GOOD TIME, heading north for the end of the lake. He had his little roll of money, country money, dollar bills oily and limp from passage through the hands of mechanics, farmhands, loggers. He had enough gas ration stamps to get him somewhere. It wasn’t like anybody was after him. He didn’t think they’d ever be after him. That wall was built good, he thought. If the foxes didn’t dig in under. If nobody went up there. Who in hell would go up there? Nobody would go up there.

  The roads had hardened in the autumn cold and there wasn’t much traffic. Good hunting weather. A few cars, a log truck coming out of the dark woods, leaving a double-curve of cleated mud where it turned onto the hardtop. Must of gotten stuck in some soft spot. He had forty-seven dollars, enough to take him some distance. If the car would hold up. It was in pretty good shape, a ’36 Chevy Coach, except for the back of the seat that had broke and had to be braced from behind with a wooden crosspiece. The heater only put out a trickle, less warmth than a bat’s breath, but the defroster did well enough. The battery was old, and the Coach was a bitch to start on a cold morning, about as simple as getting port wine out of a cow’s left hind teat. The tires still had tread. He’d nurse them along. If it broke down bad he could get work. Walk onto any farm and get work. What bothered him was the gas stamps. He only had enough for twenty gallons. That could just get him across New York state. He’d have to get it any way he could.

  He didn’t think where he was going, just heading out. It seemed to him there didn’t have to be a direction, just a random traveling away from the farm. It wasn’t the idea that he could go anywhere, but the idea that he had to go somewhere, and it didn’t make any difference where. No spark had ever ignited his mind for the study of spiders or rocks, for the meshing of watch gears, or the shudder of paper pouring out of the black presses, for mapping the high arctic or singing tenor. The farm had had answers for any question, but no questions had ever come up.

  West, that was the direction. That was where Billy thought there was something. Not another farm. She wanted a place with madhouses, some kind of War work, good money in the factories if she could find a job that didn’t bust her nails, save some dough for a start, go out Saturday night, hair curled, parted in the middle and pulled back by two red barrettes set with rhinestones. She wanted to sing. She sang pretty good when she got the chance. Go up to the Club 52 packed with guys from the base. Like Anita O’Day, cool, smart, standing there in front of the microphone, holding it with one hand, a red chiffon scarf dripping down from her hand, her voice running through the room like water over rock. Clear, but a little sarcastic.

  He was supposed to get a job. The money was good, she said, dollar an hour and better. Guys were pulling down fifty, sixty bucks a week in the aircraft plants. He’d drive west, but keep to the border. Those cities she’d named, South Bend, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, those were the places. What Billy would have wanted, but his mind kept jumping away from whatever had happened. The gas would be a problem.

  The road ran along the railroad tracks up near the lake. That was another way; he could ride the rails. He’d never done it, but plenty had. Dub had, even dumb Dub had bummed around, riding the boxcars in the times he went off his nut and drifted out and away. He’d come back a mess, stinking, lugging an old feed sack of trash, his hair stiff with dirt.

  ‘Presents. Got you a present, Ma,’ he’d say, pulling out the junk. Once it was about thirty pie pans, the edges gummed with baked-on apple and cherry syrup. Once five little bales of cotton about six inches high, the tags saying ‘A Gift from New Orleans, Cotton Capital of the World.’ Another time the best he could do was half a BURMA SHAVE sign. All it said was BURMA. He tried to tell them it came from the real Burma. And the time he brought back about fifty pounds of red dirt from somewhere down south, he didn’t even know where.

  ‘It’s all like this, all red dirt down there. Red as blood. Red roads, the wind blows red, bottom of the houses red, gardens, farms red. But the taters and turnips is the same color as ours. I don’t get it. Because there is red taters in this world. But not in the land of the red dirt.’ He dumped the soil in one of Jewell’s flower beds where he could look at it now and then and be reminded of the place it came from.

  A light appeared and reappeared in the darkness behind him, gradually growing larger in the rearview. Loyal heard the whistle blow for a crossing, somewhere behind him, he thought, but when he steered around the long corner before the bridge, the train was there, its light sweeping along the rails, the iron shuddering past a few feet from him.

  The worst was the time Dub had come back honed down to his bones, the scabs on his face like black islands and his left arm amputated except for a stub like a seal’s flipper. Mink and Jewell, all stiff in their best clothes driving down to get him, first time Mink had ever been out of the state. Dub called it that, ‘my flipper,’ trying to make a joke but sounding loony and sick. ‘Could of been worse,’ he said, tipping a crazy wink at Loyal. He’d only gone off once since then, no farther than Providence, Rhode Island, and hitching on the road, not riding the rods. There was a kind of school in Rhode Island he said, a place to learn tricks of getting things done with half your parts missing. They could fix you up with artificial arms and hands and legs made out of pulleys and aluminum. A new kind of plastic fingers that worked so good you could play the one-man band with them. But when he came back he was the same. Didn’t want to talk about it. Some VA place for servicemen, farmers had to get along the best they could. It was just a question anyway of how far you got before you were crippled up one way or another. A lot of people didn’t make it past the time they were kids. Look at Mink, pitchfork tines through his thigh when he was five years old, two car wrecks, the tractor rollover, the time the brood sow got him down and half tore off his ear, but he was still there, gimping around, strong as a log chain, getting the work done. Tuf Nut. The old son of a bitch.

  Miles into New York state he pulled the car into a field behind a row of chokecherry trees. The broken seat back could come in handy, he thought, pulling out the brace and letting it flop down into a kind of narrow bed. But as he twisted near deep his chest seized up again, a blunt stake slammed into a place under his larynx, and with it a choking breathlessness. He sat up, dozing and waking in starts, the rest of the night.

  No station came in clearly on the
radio, not even the jabber of French and accordions, riding along the edges of the Adirondack conifer forests, spruce and miles of skeletal larch like grey woods static, sometimes a tangle of deer legs and phosphorescent eyes in the road ahead of him, far enough ahead that he had time to tap the brakes while he laid on the horn and watched them go, worrying about the brake lines, the worn drums. He passed houses not much bigger than toolsheds, threads of smoke floating out of the cobblestone chimneys, passed boarded-up log cabins, signposts saying ‘Crow’s Nest,’ ‘Camp Idle-Our’, ‘The Retreat,’ ‘Skeeter Gulch,’ ‘Dun Roamin.’ Bridges, water racing away, the gravel road punched with potholes, all the roads nothing more than notches through the tight-packed trees, roads that took their curves and twists from the St. Lawrence River thirty miles to the north. The strangeness of the country, its emptiness, steadied his breathing. There was nothing here of him, no weight of event or duty or family. Somber land, wet as the inside of a bucket in the rain. The gas gauge needle tipped down and he kept his eye out for a gas pump. The farther away he got the better it seemed he could breathe.