The Farmer's Daughter

by Jim Harrison

  The woman was there when they arrived. She was standing in a business suit looking in the door of the greenhouse. Her dad had said her name was Lolly and she was a third cousin by marriage, of Italian parentage, and in the truck-farm business. She had flown into Missoula and rented a car and Sarah noted she was clearly pissed off tiptoeing through the muddy yard on rather short legs. Lolly and her father passionately embraced and Sarah felt oddly pleased for him. He and Peppy had often been at odds but she knew that hadn’t included their sexuality from the night noises.

  When they were introduced Lolly gave Sarah the hyperappraising look a shorter person often gives to a taller but she was smiling. Frank poured himself and Lolly drinks and they disappeared into the bedroom.

  While putting baking potatoes in the oven and mixing the venison meat loaf Sarah was thinking about how puzzled Wallace Stevens’s poems made her feel but then the feeling of solution always gave her something to think about that she had never thought of before. At that point she recalled a troublesome dream from the night before just as it occurred to her that she had to keep expanding her life so that her trauma would grow smaller and smaller. In the dream she was teaching the handsome Mexican cowboy who had trailered the horse up to Lahren’s ranch how to ride. She caught him as he got off and he slid roughly down her body. It was a good feeling in the dream but when she half-awoke she was close to nausea. She had turned on the light and read a Hart Crane poem that sounded good but was incomprehensible. Terry had told her that Hart Crane had committed suicide, an option that she thought about herself, but then Tim had asked her if she ever had a baby to call it Tim even if it was a girl.

  The dinner didn’t go so well for an absurd reason. Lolly said the stewed tomatoes were “wonderful” because Sarah used fresh thyme and plenty of garlic but then Lolly thought the beef in the meat loaf tasted “peculiar.” Sarah told her it was ground venison plus one-third pork and Lolly rushed to the toilet and spit it up. Marcia laughed loudly and Sarah frowned at her. Lolly came back to the table with tears in her eyes and apologized because Bambi was her favorite childhood book and movie. Marcia continued to giggle and ate like a horse. She was a big girl and did the work of a man. Except for the ritual of Sunday dinner their meals were ample and hurried. Marcia was talking about waking up at dawn and seeing a coyote out in the pasture chasing after a ewe with a bad leg.

  “I somersaulted that son of a bitch with my .280 right out my bedroom window,” Marcia said.

  Frank explained what she had said to Lolly who said, “Oh my goodness.”

  To give her father privacy the girls drove up to Tim’s cabin and started a fire in the woodstove. Sarah had drained the pipes for winter but still used the cabin for general solace. She would talk to Tim as if he were in the kitchen making the chicken-fried steaks she loved.

  In the last light of the early November evening Sarah threw out cracked corn for her magpies, a quarrelsome but playful member of the Corvidae family. As a child in the second grade in Ohio she was fascinated with birds and Peppy would take her for walks in wooded acres so she could try to identify them. Peppy didn’t know the names of any birds except “robin” but declared that they were “God’s choir.”

  They went over their trip list and Marcia announced that irritable Noreen, the other member of the hunting club, couldn’t come along because her mom had to start chemo, so she had invited Terry. Marcia hoped Sarah wouldn’t mind and Sarah didn’t say anything because it was a done deal. She just hoped that Terry wouldn’t whine too much about the world in general, a habit that could drive anyone batty. And then Marcia said something that appalled Sarah to the effect that she intended to try to seduce Terry. She blushed which she never did. Sarah said that since she knew that Marcia was infatuated with Terry and since he was also horny as a toad maybe she could bring him to her side with sex. “Why not?” said Sarah, embarrassed.

  When Marcia left Sarah decided to stay at the cabin for the night. Rover was pleased and they sat before the hot woodstove listening to the cold, blustery November wind. She thought of Tim but her mind was insufficient to imagine raising a son or daughter named Tim. Right now the first step, making love to someone, seemed forever out of the question. If anyone could be her patron saint it was Tim. A number of times she had been reminded that Tim would wish her to kill Karl—not, certainly, herself.

  Rover growled but Sarah suspected it was the little bear she had seen her playing with from a distance. The bear was a year and a half and had likely been pushed away by its mother in favor of new cubs. She had heard of dogs and coyotes playing but never a dog and a bear. Rover was so relentlessly mean and protective that she wondered why she had made an exception for a little bear.

  Having read so many stories and novels it unnerved her that she, in essence, was writing her own story day by day. Drifting toward sleep she recalled going with Terry to Priscilla’s birthday party because Giselle had called to say that Priscilla was depressed and drinking too much and needed company. Giselle had a fancy satellite TV hookup a rich boyfriend had given her for her double-wide house trailer. Way up the valley at Sarah’s house their TV reception was hopelessly fuzzy but Frank would sit there on Sunday watching pro football especially if it was the Cleveland Browns. It was Labor Day weekend and Terry was watching U.S. Open tennis and talking about Thomas Wolfe, the novelist. They had both enjoyed Look Homeward, Angel but less so the other novels by Wolfe which Terry pointed out were mostly the writer talking about himself. Sarah began to say something then stopped when the screen showed the New York City skyline which she found totally unimaginable, then she said that not much happened in Wolfe’s life except writing so that’s what he had to write about. Why was it that a big terrible thing had to happen in her otherwise uneventful life? Was it fate or chance? She couldn’t free herself to believe in fate or destiny. Such concepts were for the important and famous people the camera showed at the U.S. Open. In bad novels lots of stuff happened but in the good ones this was far less so. She asked Terry if it upset him to watch tennis when he couldn’t play it, meaning his clubfoot prevented his playing such games. “No, life has set me aside as an observer,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  They left before daylight and reached Livingston in four hours with four more hours to go for their destination whereupon the police closed I-90 because the snowstorm had grown in force and the wind was so high between Livingston and Big Timber that a semi had tipped over. They rather nervously checked into a room at the Murray Hotel that had two double beds. Terry in particular was giddy opening his suitcase and showed the girls six bottles of fine French wine he had swiped from his mother’s cellar. It wasn’t quite noon and they agreed it was a little early for wine. Marcia called her uncle over past Forsyth to say they’d be delayed, and then they abandoned the sack of baloney sandwiches they were going to eat for lunch and went across the street to Martin’s Cafe. After lunch Marcia winked at Sarah so Sarah went off to Sax & Fryer’s to look at the new books for sale and Marcia virtually led Terry back to the hotel. Sarah thought that to be on the safe side she’d give Marcia an hour to manage her seduction.

  It occurred to her that this was a good time to do some research on Meeteetse and hard thinking on how to exterminate Karl. Pop goes the muskmelon, she thought, or she could aim lower since she clearly remembered what the big exit wound of a .30-06 looked like on an elk that Tim shot a half mile from his cabin. The elk was so large it took two trips to get it back to the cabin in the dark on a packhorse, at which point Tim fried up part of the delicious liver with onions. Sarah had read how many people these days were squeamish about hunting but where she lived it was merely a fact of life.

  She spoke at length with the proprietor of the bookstore who was kindly and rather handsome. He knew a lot about the country south of Cody and said the main fact of Meeteetse was the huge Pitchfork Ranch. His cousin cowboyed there. Sarah flushed because this man reminded her of Tim and was not at all repellent. As a future murderer she lost some
caution and asked about the Burkhardt spread because that was Karl’s last name. He said, “Those people are rapscallions,” and she said she was unsure what that meant and he answered, “Real rough people.” The father was a mean old goat, one of the boys was in prison in Deer Lodge for repeated assaults, one was an itinerant musician who had done time for selling coke and meth, and one was fine having left with the mother years ago for Boise. When the man was curious about why she wanted to know Sarah said a friend of hers had gotten mixed up with the musician and it was unpleasant. “I bet it was,” the man said, then he pointed out the public library down the street where she might find solid information about that area of Wyoming. She bought the new novel of a regional writer named Thomas McGuane whom Terry was very fond of but she had found a bit abrasive.

  The snow seemed to be lifting but the fierce wind continued from the northwest so that she raised a hand to protect her eyes while walking to the library. Karl had it coming, that’s for sure, she thought. Shooting him would be a public service. The point was to make certain that she got away with it.

  The library was grand and a librarian helpful and she soon had a stack of books about Wyoming on the table before her but then she drifted. Even so, once in a while she had a microsecond glimmer that she might be insane. Conjoined to this was the brief flash from her unconscious of a physical memory of the hairs of her pubis being uprooted. If there’s a God why can’t we control our minds? she thought. She’d talked to Terry about this and he had read some Oriental literature and quoted, “How can the mind control the mind?” This boggled her. In her weakest moments she found herself wishing she had an actual mother to talk to. Or anyone she could trust like Tim.

  She ended up sitting at the library table for a couple of hours and wished her area had such a library. She even studied topographical maps of the location of the Burkhardt ranch which included two-tracks to get on and make a good departure. She would have to call first to make sure he was there and not on the road playing music. Perhaps for relief her mind flittered away in a comic reverie of the little boy who’d lived next door in Findlay when she was seven. He was homely with buckteeth and people would yell at him when he walked around the neighborhood picking flowers which he would pass to her through the fence between their yards. Sometimes she would press her cheek to the fence and he would kiss it. Maybe that was love at its best she thought.

  On the way back to the hotel the snow had stopped and the wind had subsided. She overheard in front of the post office that the interstate had been reopened which meant that they could reach Marcia’s uncle’s ranch well before midnight. She stood outside their room door listening for signs of life, looking down the dark hall toward the south where a window squared the waning but glistening light off the snow-covered Absaroka Mountains. Her skin prickled with the beauty of it and she walked down the hall seeing the winter sun palpably losing its power. She couldn’t imagine a life without mountains and thought that whatever happens to me I’m lucky to live inside beauty.

  She heard muttering when she knocked on the door and when she opened it Terry was asleep but Marcia was smiling beside him. She laughed and gave Sarah the thumbs-up sign. There was a slight animal smell to the room and Sarah opened the window to the cold air then brewed a pot in the coffeemaker on the dresser. She sat down and pulled a book about the human genome out of her duffel thinking that someday they might find evil in the genes of certain people. She noticed that Terry and Marcia had finished a bottle of wine with the peculiar name of Échézeaux and thought she would take the first stint driving.

  Chapter 9

  Marcia’s uncle Lester woke them in the bunkhouse at five a.m. by hammering at the door and yelling, “Off your ass and on your feet.” He was far more jovial than Marcia’s father and even larger. They had made it to the ranch at ten-thirty in the evening because the snow had given out by Custer which was east of Billings. When they reached Lester’s his wife Lena, who couldn’t speak because of a stroke, served them a pinto-bean-and-short-rib stew and now at short of six in the morning Sarah was looking at a chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, fried eggs, and potatoes. No wonder these people are so big she thought but in truth they were rangy rather than fat.

  Terry had drunk another bottle of wine in the truck and refused to get up. Sarah had pushed him and Marcia off into a small corner bedroom of the bunkhouse to soften the sound effects of love. She slept in a small daybed by the woodstove which she fed several times in the night during which she dreamt of hunting mule deer with Tim and her butt was cold because she had forgotten to put on her blue jeans and was only wearing hunter-orange panties. She questioned what this might mean and decided on nothing.

  Lester drove her and Marcia on a lumpy two-track a couple of miles toward the back of the ranch near a series of small buttes overlooking the Yellowstone River. He dropped them off a mile apart and said he would check on them at noon. Sarah sat down near a juniper bush and watched the landscape to the east slowly reveal itself, the moon set and Venus disappear. The sun rose reddishly and streaks of cirrus clouds meant it would likely be a windy day. She cradled the .30-06 across her knees pleased that she had brought a small space blanket along to sit on, a buffer against the frozen earth. Way to the north she could see Lester’s alfalfa fields and to the east there were thousands of flat acres of wheatland that reminded her of Willa Cather. She meant to visit Nebraska someday because of Cather but she intended to visit a lot of places and had been nowhere to speak of except western Montana. Sitting there glassing the landscape with her binoculars for antelope she felt a sharp pang of loneliness beneath her breastbone. Who did she know? She recalled a few childhood friends from six years ago. Her grandmother who was her piano teacher was insensate in a rest home. Priscilla had drifted away. Terry was pretty much buried alive in his own mind. Marcia had felt the mating call early as do many country girls in Montana where the passage between girl and woman is a short voyage. Her solid friends were the spirit of Tim and books.

  At about nine-thirty she heard a rifle shot off to the northeast and suspected Marcia had scored. Sarah glassed a group of about fifteen antelope running toward the south that unfortunately would not be coming close to her. The wind rose and she backed into the juniper bush for shelter looking down at a jackrabbit skull and part of its skeleton. After a while during which she gutted the animal Marcia was visible heading toward Sarah alternately carrying the antelope for a hundred yards then dragging it a hundred yards. That was true Marcia, Sarah thought. How many fifteen-year-old girls can carry a hundred-pound antelope? She knew that at her family’s request Marcia had shot a young doe favored for its tender and delicious meat, including the liver and heart. Readily available elk and venison were one thing in their area but not antelope.

  Marcia dragged her antelope up the hill to Sarah’s juniper then laughed at herself for doing so because Lester was coming by with the pickup at noon. Marcia backed into the juniper and Sarah could feel the heat of her exertion off her body. Marcia splashed water from her canteen and washed the dry blood off her hands saying that the “girl” had only required a fifty-yard shot. They chatted for a while with Marcia talking comically about Terry and her losing their virginity at the hotel, then Marcia tapped her on the shoulder and pointed. There upwind about two hundred yards to the west a young male antelope was picking its way along a thicket of buck brush at the bottom of a butte. Marcia had Sarah use her shoulder as a rest and Sarah chose a neck shot. The antelope bucked straight up like a horse then landed on its side. “You blew that sucker out of his shoes,” Marcia said. Sarah immediately thought, I shot one mammal and I can shoot another. It was unpleasant when she gutted the animal and the steamy rank-smelling heat of the innards rose against her face in the cold air.

  Chapter 10

  Of course Lolly screamed in the morning when she discovered the antelope hanging in the pump shed off the back door of the house. When Sarah reached home in the middle of the night Frank got up and congratulated her an
d before going to bed Sarah moved the three empty suitcases Lolly had put in the corner of her room. Imagine that bitch using my room for storage, Sarah thought. At Frank’s urging Sarah moved the carcass up to Tim’s, adjusting the propane to forty degrees, a good hanging temperature for both beef and wild game. She’d wait a week before butchering and wrapping it for the freezer. Rover was enthused when she fried up the slices of heart and shared it.

  They had taken an extra day getting home because Terry wanted to see the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers up between Sydney and Williston, a beautiful and historically significant place. Sarah, however, was distracted by the idea that she would have to make a trial run into Karl’s territory. She couldn’t just go in cold and do the deed. There was also a nagging sense that she shouldn’t have identified the idea of shooting Karl with having shot the antelope. She was a good student of history and knew that humans find it altogether too easy to shoot one another, but then sanity fled too easily and when they drove home on Route 2 across the top of Montana and stopped at a diner at Wolf Point there was a trace of Karl’s odor of yogurt, breath mints, and cow shit and she again felt murderous. Only fifteen minutes later out in the parking lot she saw a group of local Anishinabe Indians getting out of an ancient car and thought that of all Americans along with the blacks they were the people with the right to shoot people. She stood there in the cold wind hoping that at some point soon her brain would stop being a shuddering elevator.

  The winter started out difficult but resolved itself in purposeful physical exhaustion. One morning a week before Christmas Lolly had said to her, “If you hang out with horses and dogs you’re going to smell like horses and dogs.” This was at breakfast and Sarah answered, “I like the smell of horses and dogs better than I like the smell of people.” Lolly huffed off into the bedroom and Frank gave Sarah a lecture on civility which she thought was unwarranted. She went on a hard ride in the snow on Lad and Rover caught and ate a whole jackrabbit leaving a big smear of blood on the snow. When she got back to the house she packed up essentials, including frozen packages of antelope, and moved up to Tim’s where she played the piano for hours. She wept briefly then figured weeping wouldn’t help one little bit. She thought of the damage people do to each other, sometimes incalculable, and then there was the damage you could do to yourself by toughening up. While she was playing the piano it occurred to her that the least tough woman in the world, Emily Dickinson, was one of her favorite poets. Despite this she felt she had no choice but to become prematurely older and austere. She would live in this cabin like a cloistered nun and then finally leave town and try to find another life.