by Annie Proulx
Yogetsky as a reader. He takes USA Today and magazines of the type with stories in them about dentists who become fur trappers His, garden is fenced in with sheep wire. The tops of tin cans hung on the fence and stutter in the wind. There’s his flagpole.
2
We raised apples. Baldwins. Tolman Sweets, Duchess, Snow Apple, Russet and Sheep’s Nose. The big growers were pushing the McIntosh and the Delicious. I was nervy and sick, but I had to help my father string barbwire around the orchard and down through the woods. A quick, sloppy job. The deer would come in late June, the young deer, and eat the new tender leaves, still crumpled and folded on the Baldwin seedlings. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. Nervy, Aunt said. Growing too fast. The Baldwins, torn and stripped, grew crooked.
The McIntosh apple ruined us. My father ruined us.
He said, “Children, it’s a hard way to go to make money on sugar, but there’s a good dollar in the Baldwin apple.” And sold the maples for timber. And bought five hundred Baldwin seedlings. Your Baldwin apple is a dull, cloudy maroon color. It’s got somewhat of a tender rootstock.
People wanted a shiny, red apple. Our fruit went to the juice mills. Now it’s the other way around. All those old kinds we couldn’t give away. Black Twig. Pinkham Pie. They pay plenty for them now.
Once your sugar bush is gone, it’s gone for fifty years or forever.
My father sold pieces of the woodlot. Then pieces of pasture. Pieces of this, pieces of that. None of the Baldwins made it through a hard winter just before the war.
Aunt bites off the end of a raveling thread instead of using scissors.
Dad could make a nice stone wall, but he’d be off on something else before it got to any length. He preferred barbwire, get it over with. Still, he had a feel for stonework, for the chisel, without the dogged concentration you need for that work. He was silly. His excited ways, his easy enthusiasm made Aunt say he was a fool. I never heard anybody laugh like he did, a seesawing, gasping laugh like he was drowning for air. It was the brother that died young that had all the sense, says Aunt.
He let the farm drip through his fingers like water until only an anxious dampness was left in our palms. And his friend Diamond used to pick up first me, then Bootie, my sister, sliding his old dirty paws up between our legs, putting his tobacco-stained mouth at our narrow necks.
“He don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Dad said, “quit your cryin’.”
Dad told us. “The farmer’s up against it.”
You know where the golf course is, the Meadowlark condominiums, them sloping meadows along the river? He sold that land for twenty an acre. Giving it away, even then. I told this to Yogetsky and he moaned, hit his forehead with the heel of his hand, said, “Jesus Christ.”
We were up against it. There wasn’t the money to find out what was wrong with me, hey, just all kinds of homemade junk. Bootie and I took boiled carrots to school in our lunch pails; the cow’s hooves made a thick sucking noise when we drove her across the marshy place and that sound made me feel I didn’t have a chance. You get used to it.
The grand name for the farm, the hundreds of no-good trees in the orchard, the heavy, tearing rolls of barbwire strung through the woods were all for nothing.
3
What can I tell you about the Moon-Azures?
They own the original old Clew homestead with its crooked doorframes and worn stairs. Dr. and Mrs. Moon-Azure from Basiltower, Maryland. I was born in that house.
The Moon-Azures come up from Maryland every June and go back in August. They scrape nine layers of paint off the paneling in the parlor, point out to us the things they do to better the place. They clear out the dump, get a backhoe in to cut a wide driveway. They get somebody to sand the floors. They buy a horse. Dr. Moon-Azure’s hands get roughed up when he works on the stone wall. He holds them out and says admiringly. “Look at those hands.” A faint smell comes from his clothes, the familiar brown odor of the old house. His wall buckles with the first frost heaves.
The Moon-Azures have weekend guests. We see the cars go by, out-of-state license plates on Mercedes and Saabs. When the wind is right we can hear their toneless voices knocking together like sticks of wood, tot, tot-tot, tot. The horse gets out and is killed on the road.
Nobody knows what kind of doctor he is. They go to him when some woman from Massachusetts backs over the edge of the gravel pit. Somebody drives to Moon-Azure’s and asks him to come, but he won’t. “I don’t practice,” he says. “Call the ambulance.” He offers them the use of his phone.
They walk a good deal. You drive somewhere and here come the Moon-Azures, stumbling through the fireweed, their hands full of wilted branches.
Tolman at the garage says Moon-Azure’s a semiretired psychiatrist, but Aunt thinks he’s a heart surgeon who lost his nerve in the middle of an operation. He’s got good teeth.
Moon-Azure says, “I’ll never get used to the way you people let these fine old places run down.” He’s found the pile of broken slates that came off the old roof. It’s been a tin roof since around 1925.
With Mrs. Moon-Azure it’s information. What direction is west, when to pick blackberries, oh, kerosene lamps burn kerosene oil? She thought, gasoline. Like to see her try it. In the winter when they’re in Florida, the porcupines get into the house, leave calling cards on the floor. “Look,” she says, “bunny rabbits.” She writes it all down. “My book on country living,” she laughs.
She says “maple surple” for a joke.
“How’s the hay coming along?” says Moon-Azure.
Once they come on a Saturday morning, smiling, ask Reba to clean house for them, but she says, “No.” A teacup rings hard on the saucer.
They ask Marie Beaubien. They pay her more for wiping their tables and making their beds than any man gets running a chain saw.
“How’s the hay coming, Lucien?” says Moon-Azure.
“Good,” says Beaubien.
We could of used the money.
Marie Beaubien tells us, “White telephones, one in every room, and a bathroom all pale blue tiles painted with orchids. They got copper pans cost a hundred dollars for each one and more of them than you can count. Antique baskets hanging all over the walls, carpets everywhere.”
It’s not my taste.
My taste is simpler.
I like to see bare floor boards.
From the first the Moon-Azures are crazy for old deeds and maps of the farm, they trace Clew genealogy as though they bought our ancestors with the land. They like to think the Clews were farmers. He says, “Mason, looks like a good year for hay.”
How the hell would I know?
They go down to the town clerk’s office and dig up information on the ear notch patterns Clews used 150 years ago to mark their sheep, try to find out if the early Clews did anything. One time they ask us to write down the kinds of apples. The orchards, black rows of heart-rotted trees, belong to them.
But all of their fascination is with the ancestor Clews: living Clews exist, like the Beaubiens, to be used. Dead Clews belong to the property and the property belongs to the Moon-Azures.
The Moon-Azures hire Lucien to clear out the brush and set up fallen stones. When I take Reba and Aunt for a ride up the road sometimes on the weekends you can see the Moon-Azures and their guests walking away from the cemetery, heads a little down as if they are thinking, not sic transit gloria mundi, but this is mine.
They post all of the land with big white signs stapled on plywood squares and nailed to posts every hundred feet. They set fence everywhere, along the road, up the drive, around the house, through the woods, all split-rail fence. Not an inch of barbwire. But up in the woods the line of trees shows scars like twisted mouths from the wire we strung to keep the deer out of the orchards.
The Moon-Azures are after us, after the Beaubiens, even after Yogetsky for help with things, getting their car going, clearing out the clogged spring, finding their red-haired dog. They need to know how things happened, what
things happened. Every year they go back to the city at the end of the summer. Then that changes.
Mrs. Beaubien polishes her spoon with the paper napkin and sifts sugar into her coffee. “The doctor is retired,” she says. “They’re goin’ to stay up here until Christmas, then go off somewhere hot, then come back up here after mud season. Same thing every year from now on.”
Aunt says, “Must be nice to have the jingle in your pockets to just run up and down between the nice weather.”
“I never known one of them people to stick it out very long,” says Mrs. Beaubien. “Wait till they have to scrape the ice off their own windshield. Lucien don’t go up there for that, you bet.”
I think, bet he will.
The Moon-Azures keep on walking. What else do they have to do after the first black frosts? In the shortening days their friends don’t come to visit, and they have only each other to hear their startled exclamations that fallen leaves have a bitter odor, that the hardening earth throws up rods of cloudy ice. They come at us with their clumsy conversation, wasting our time. Beaubien and his son bring them wood and stack it, the autumn shrivels into November.
A week before Thanksgiving here comes Mrs. Moon-Azure again, walking down the field. She knocks on the window, peers in at Aunt. Cockleburs hang on her ankles. Her clothes are the color of oatmeal. Her eyes are grey. The refrigerator switches on as she starts to speak, and she has to repeat herself in a louder voice. “I said, I hear you have some remarkable photographs!”
“Well, they’re interesting to us,” says Aunt. She has flour on her hands, and dusts it off, slapping her palms against her thighs. She shows some of the pictures, standing them up on edge saying, “Mr. Galloon Heyscape doing the Irish clog, Denman Thompson’s oxen, the radio of the two sweethearts, Kiley Druge and his crazy daughter.”
“These are important photographs,” says Mrs. Moon-Azure in the same way she said, “You ran over my horse,” to Clyde Cuckhorn. We see how much she wants them.
Hey, too bad.
“I wonder they don’t come right out and ask if we’ll sell them,” says Aunt after she’s gone. “She’d give anything to get her mitts on these pictures. No, these are Clew family photographs, taken by a very gifted hired man, and here they stay.”
Leonard Prittle, our hired man, took his pictures from under a large black cloak cast off by my great-grandmother, says Aunt.
How does she know.
What Aunt is afraid of is that the Moon-Azures will pass the pictures around among their weekend guests, that they will find their way into books and newspapers, and we will someday see our grandfather’s corpse in his homemade coffin resting on two sawhorses, flattened out on the pages of some magazine and labeled with a cruel caption.
4
Maybe Dad never imagined himself doing anything but selling off the land and dreaming useless apple thoughts, but in the worst of it he got a job. And this was a time when there wasn’t any jobs, and he wasn’t looking for one. It wasn’t even stonework.
Dad’s friend, Diamond Ward, was one of those hard grey men who ate deer meat in every season and could fix whatever was broken again and again until nothing was left of the original machine but its function. Diamond was in the Grange, knew what was going on, and he was one of the first in the county to get a job through the Rural Electrification Act. He got my father in with him. The Ironworks County Electric Power Cooperative. Replaced now by Northern Nuclear. We got the alarm in the kitchen that’s supposed to go off if there’s an accident down there, everybody evacuate in a hurry.
Where to?
The two of them drove around all day in a dark green truck with a painted circle on the side enclosing the letters ICEPC and three bolts of electricity. Everybody called it “The Icepick.” Diamond chewed tobacco, and the door on his side was stained brown. Bootie would get in the closet when she heard Diamond coming up the drive.
The kite’s paper is gone, burned up in the seasons of August heat under the cracking barn roof.
There was something in my father that had to blow up whatever he did. He got a certain amount of pleasure seeing himself as The Lone Apple-Grower up against a gang of McIntosh men. Now came a chance to be The One Bringing Light to the Farm. He could fool and laugh with people as much as he wanted.
He’d say, “A five-dollar deposit, the price of a pair of shoes, and we’ll put the ’lectricity in. You’ll hear the radio, hear Amos and Andy.” He’d imitate Amos, laugh. “Get rid of them sad irons, use them for doorstops. Lights? Get twict the work done because you’ll be able to see the both ends of the cow. Hawhaw.”
He got up a mock funeral at the Grange, spent weeks laughing and talking it up. The men carried a coffin around the hall, then took it out and buried it. It was full of oil lamps and blackened chimneys.
Hey, I’m telling you, this is within our lifetime.
Television wasn’t invented until 1938.
He’d list the things electricity was going to do away with. No more stinking privies. No more strained, watery eyes from reading by lamplight. No more lonely evenings for widowers who could turn on a radio and hear plays and music. No more families dead from food poisoning when Ma could keep the potato salad in a chilly white refrigerator. No more heating sad irons on a blazing stove in August. The kids would stay on the farm.
He’d look at somebody with his round, clear eyes, he’d say, “If you put a light on every farm, you put a light in every heart.” He never missed a day in four years, until the afternoon Diamond got killed trying to get a kite out of the lines.
Dad always left the house at five in the morning, carrying his lunch in a humped black lunchbox. A thermos bottle of coffee fit inside the top, held in place by a metal clasp. He and Diamond set poles and strung line to canted, ancient barns and to houses settled down on their foundations like old dogs sleeping on porch steps.
He got the idea they ought to carry a radio around in the truck. A farmer did his own wiring in those days, then called up The Icepick and said he was ready. Sometimes they had a washing machine hid under some burlap bags all set up to go as a birthday present for the wife. But usually just a couple of ceiling fixtures, outlets.
Before they turned on the power. Dad got his radio out of the truck, rubbed it up a little if it was dusty. He’d plug it in. There stood the farmer and his wife and the children, all staring at it.
“This is goin’ to change your life,” Dad would say.
He’d go to the window and signal Diamond to turn on the juice. As the static-rich sound of a braying announcer or a foxtrot poured into the room, he watched the faces of the family, watched their mouths opening a little as if to swallow the sound. The farmer would shake his hand, the wife would dab at her watery, strained eyes and say. “It’s a miracle.” It was as if my father had personally given them this wonder. Yet you could tell they despised him, too for making things easy.
I never saw how anybody could rejoice over the harsh light that came out of them clear nippled bulbs.
After Diamond was killed Dad decided to go into the appliance business. That’s what I do out in the barn. I was never able to do anything heavy. We still sell a few washers and electric stoves. Reba helps me get them onto the truck. There’s not much in appliances now. It’s all sound systems and computers. You can buy your washing machines anywhere.
At noon in summer, if they weren’t too far away. Dad and Diamond would come back to the farm, drive up into the field and park the truck under the trees. They took the full hour. They had their favorite place. They’d spread out an old canvas tarp in the shade. There was a spring up there. There was a slab of flat rock. Sometimes Bootie or I would bring them up their dinner. We’d skirt wide around Diamond, he’d make mocking kissing sounds with his stained wet mouth.
Dad would laugh, “Haw.”
Sometimes Diamond was asleep with his shirt over his face so the flies wouldn’t bother him, and Dad would be on his knees, tapping away at the rock with the chisel and the stone hammer
for something to do. Bootie and I could hear the tok, tok-tok when we walked up the track. He was chiseling in the rock, chiseling out a big bas-relief of himself wearing his lineman’s gear. We’d play a kind of hopscotch on his grand design.
“Look, Dad,” said Bootie, “I’m standin’ on the eyes.”
In the winter Dad and Diamond sat in the truck with the engine running.
The old family plot, not used for eighty years or so, is up in back of the house. Diamond Ward is buried down in the Baptist cemetery in Ironworks. A Lamb of God Call’d Home, His Soul No More Shall Roam. Hey, we’ve seen that verse a hundred times.
His eyes reflected a knowledge of his terrible mistake, my father told us. “He looked straight at me, his mouth opened and I seen what I thought was blood, this dark trickle, come out. But it was tobacco juice. He was dead there on the pole, lookin’ at me. I was the last thing he saw.”
After Diamond was killed, Bootie and I played at the best game we ever invented. We played it over and over for about two years. Bootie thought up the idea of the molasses.
It wasn’t so much a game as a play, and not so much a play as acting out an event that gave us a sharp satisfaction. We’d get some molasses in a cup and go out to the barn where we had our things arranged. Pieced-out binder twine sagged between the ladder to the hayloft and a crossbeam. We argued about who would play Diamond first.
Bootie took her turn.
I’d say, “I’m Dad.”
Bootie would say. “I’m Diamond.” She would twist her face, hitch at her corduroy pants, kick at the floor.
“Hey, Diamond.” I’d say. “there’s a kite in the lines.”
We’d look up into the dry twittering gloom. A kite hung there, as alert and expectant as a wounded bird.
“I’ll get the goddamn thing out of our lines,” said Diamond, taking up a long narrow stick. He climbed slowly, the stick hitting against the utility pole, tok, tok-tok. At the top Diamond turned and faced the kite.
“Be careful.” I said.
The stick extended toward the kite, touched it.
