Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

On the corner I take out the one key to open a relay box. Inside, the bundles of mail have been delivered to me for the last leg of my route. I try not to think about the messages I am delivering. I file the mail into my cart, stand in a forest of telephone poles, streetlights, fire alarms, police call boxes. The square is crawling with dogs.

The dogs find ways through the crowded streets. They don’t stop when children pet them. They ignore each other. They don’t see me. They don’t bark. They keep going.

I was cutting the alfalfa with the H when two A-IOS skimmed over my head low enough for me to feel the heat from the exhaust.

The H is a tractor. It’s red and the first one McCormick streamlined so that the radiator hood looks like a melting ice cube, a charging locomotive, a bullet. The A-10 is an attack aircraft with stubby square wings, a forked tail, and two huge fan-jets stuck on the rear of the fuselage. That day, they were painted five shades of green, a northern European camouflage of pine and lichens. Over the years I’ve watched the patterns and the colors on the planes mutate — the iridescent splashes of tropic jungles to Near Eastern sand studded with yellow rock, a white tundra splotched with brown. The designs advertise the way trouble grazes around the globe. My cows are always spooked by the flybys. I saw them scatter off the rise in the clover field next to the one I was cutting, angling for the electric fence it took me that morning to string.

The jets are pretty quiet to begin with, and the H chugs a bit when I use the power takeoff. The breeze I was heading into stripped the sound away. The jets cracked over my head at the same time the air they pushed in front of them slammed against my back. And then the fans whined. The engines reared back like they were hawking spit. I had been a target. The planes are weapons platforms built to kill tanks. They are slow, haul a huge payload of ordnance, can hang over a battlefield like a kite. The pilots wobbled their wings. I could see the control surfaces, the rudders flex, the flaps and the leading edges extended on the blunt wings. They were on the threshold of stalling. Then they broke apart from each other, one going left, the other right, and banked around the cornfield in front of me, meeting up again at the grove of trees near the section road. Without climbing, they tucked in together, the wing of one notched into the waist of the other, nosed over the horizon heading back to Grissom. I let the clutch out again on the tractor, and the sickle mower, a long wing sweeping off to my right, bit into the alfalfa collapsing it into windrows. I nudged the throttle. The engine gulped and caught up with itself. The first cutting, rich, green, and leafy. I settled back to work. Soon, I felt like I was flying myself, sailing at treetop level.

The first calf since I came back to the farm, I named Amelia. With another chance to farm, I was going to do everything right this time. Mom dug out the herd book they kept when I was a boy, the records skidding to a stop around the time all of us kids were in high school. I remember some of those cows. They clouded the barn. Those winters in high school I came home late and stayed up for the milking in the steaming barn. I sat there in the dark, smoking, the radio tuned to WOWO. The cows, heaps in each stanchion, waited for my father to come into the milk house and turn on the vacuum. The herd book has silhouettes of cows, outlines of heads, all scored over with a grid to map the markings. We’ve always raised Holsteins. The black and white looks best on new grass. I looked at the sketches my mom had made back then. There was Amy with the blob on her shoulder. The crooked man spilling down Apple’s flank. As I looked at the old book, I sat down next to the hutch I had just made for the new calves. I flipped through the spiral book to an unmarked silhouette. The new calf’s tongue wrapped around the woven fence. She was mostly white except for a spray of black dime-sized spots along the ridge of her right hip and dwindling back down her thigh. Ringing her neck, another chain of black islands aimed toward her eye. There was this ocean of pure milk, white between the black markings. And I stared at her for a long time after charting those few patches. I thought Amelia would be a good name. An A since she was Apple’s calf. And an A for Amelia Earhart, the flyer, lost between archipelagos, at sea.

We had just moved to this farm, I was eight, when the plane buried itself in the big field next to the road. The field was planted to corn that year, and the corn had tasseled. A silver F-86 flamed out on takeoff, the pilot ejected, and the plane arched over and swooped down onto our farm. It disintegrated as it plowed up the field, scorching the ground, flattening the corn, and spraying fragments of the airframe along its path. It came to rest in the ditch looking like an exploded cigar, the engine ashy beneath the peeled aluminum skin. The swath it had cut through the corn was a precise vector pointing back to the base. Disking the field this spring I turned over more pieces from the crash, a bit of fused Plexiglas, part of a shock absorber, the casing of a running light. I threw them in the toolbox of the 20 we use to plow and brought the finds back to the shed, to my dad, who keeps all his scrap. The pile in the back corner looks like a reconstruction of a dinosaur, the whole imagined from a few bits. The wingtip, dented and discolored, resting on the floor far away from the main wreckage of bones, implies the missing wing. Dad has suspended a panel of the vertical stabilizer from the beam of the shed. It twists there, unconnected, could prove the rotation of the earth. The first time we went into Peru after the crash I found a plastic model of the jet at the hobby store. I put it together quickly, then with a soldering iron melted off the wings and canopy, trying to sculpt the ruin in the field. For a long while the whole incident felt heroic. The pilot had chosen our farm to ditch into. I reasoned that from the air our dusty road must have looked like an emergency runway. Later I realized that the pilot hadn’t thought twice about it. As he pulled the shield over his face triggering the ejection seat, he believed that no one was down there, his ship would fall into the green uninhabited place on his charts.

Early in the morning, waiting to milk, I’ve always looked up at the night sky. There are no city lights washing out the view. I watch the falling stars and the meteor showers. I can see a few satellites streak by and below them the puttering airliners. I think to myself, a kind of homing beacon. Here I am, here I am, come and get me.

My father has offered money for a tractor tire someone was using for a sandbox. He scavenges. It’s the only way we could farm these eighty acres. We are surrounded by corn this year. To the west and north, the land is owned by an Italian industrialist. To the east and south an insurance company, a thousand acres each. Beyond that, I’m not sure anymore, an incorporated family, rented parcels, more insurance companies. From the air our little grove of trees and the spread of buildings and the strips of grass and small grain stitched together with threads of muddy lanes must look like the center of a dartboard encircled by the alternating eight-row stripes of corn. The bull’s-eye would be Wilbur, our bull, lolling in the pen next to the red barn. We can keep this place because my dad never throws anything away and never buys anything new. “You never know,” he says, “you never know.” Under the old cottonwood trees he has parked the remains of 20s and H’s we’ve cannibalized, and there are all the implements we’ll ever need — the manure spreaders, the balers with crates of twine, the Deere two-row planters and the corn picker that fits like fake glasses and a nose on the brow of the tractor. Wagons with bang boards, disks and harrows, a rusting mower conditioner, even a sulky plow, though Dad says he never liked horses. People pay him to haul the stuff away. Now that I am home he has more time to scout around. I do both the milkings. His knees are shot. He walks like he’s been dropped from altitude, and his legs look shoved up into his body. They fall straight from his shoulders. We make do with this junk we’ve got. They can’t touch us as long as we don’t long for things we don’t need. As long as we don’t desire to live in the outside world.