Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

I would also clear the field of rocks; it was at times rocky as a beach, stones rising to the surface from a quarrylike underworld. I collected them in a loader either to repatch the fish hatchery or to sell at the seed shop. The ones they sold at the seed shop were from China. All the way from China! Everything from China, even the rocks! It was not an expression yet, like coals to Newcastle — like rocks to Dellacrosse— but it would be soon, said my father, as it was the confounding truth.

In this manner, most often masked and winged, I spent the summer days. Running twenty feet ahead of my dad as he rode the reconfigured thresher, I would run and dip and swoosh and in theory scare off rabbits as well. Mice darted, snakes did their undulating gumshoe. With my dad in the mornings I had worked up a song: “Squirrels and mice and moles better scurry / when I am a hawk in a hurry / when I am a hawk in a hurry with some fringe on top.” Even Miles Davis had liked this tune.

My father worried that I might be getting too good at this task and scaring off all the real predators that would help keep the rodent population down.

“Hey, that’s life in the the-ay-ter!” I said. The whole soundtrack to Oklahoma played in my head. The sun burned. There was a bright golden haze on all meadows. The sky shone as blue as forget-me-nots, and often the smudged thumbprint of a morning moon hung suspended above. The air before noon was soft, with the coppery smell of dirt. We would mostly work early, and then evenings, when things (me, the lettuce) were cooler. Midday I spent resting and reading, drinking cold lemonade and Coke out of Ball jars that had lost their tops. Sometimes in the afternoon there were thunderstorms so sky-crackingly violent it was like life on another planet entirely. The storms seemed different from the ones of my childhood. These were sky-wide and tree toppling, moving across the state with the fury of marauders — pelting rain and wind that could switch the current of a creek — and then afterward, total calm in the air, sparkle and breeze, as if nothing had happened at all.

Although I avoided most community picnics — I had never liked sitting on the ground with a paper plate while flies bit your legs, or sitting squeezed in at an old picnic table on a bench that gave you splinters — on the Fourth of July I went with my parents to the county baseball field to watch the fireworks. As this was the first fireworks display since 9/11, the county had rented a metal detector and we all had to walk through, the daylilies, in Packer green and gold, in bloom to either side of us.

“As if Al Qaeda has ever even heard of Dellacrosse,” said my father once we were seated. “I guess absolutely everyone wants to be on the map. No matter what map it is.”

“It’s a form of terrorism not to bomb this town,” I said. My father gave me a look.

“Keep your voices down, you two,” said my mother. She had brought snacks of lemon frosting sandwiched between graham crackers, a favorite of my childhood, and when we were seated she passed the little Tupperware box back and forth to my father and me.

Once the sun set completely, its murky rose stretched taffylike across the horizon, the air grew cooler, and the show began. Like the operation of a rocket ship, the fireworks were staged to burst at designated points across the sky. Peonies and chrysanthemums bloomed forth from spasms and explosions. Were we having fun? Dripping sparkle sizzled and dissipated, then resumed; the deathly silence before each burst began to fill me with dread. Screeches, whistles, booms: the barium green and copper blue held too many intimations of war. We were a glum trio, my parents and I, our necks nonetheless arced and our heads dropped back onto the flattened hoods of our sweatshirts, watching all this lit-up drizzle. Our snack was gone. We had eaten the whole container’s worth.

Would it have been so bad to have remained a colony of England? I wondered fiercely with every bang. Would it have been so terrible if every dessert was called a pudding even if it was a cake, to grow up saying “in hospital,” to lose a few articles, to spell gray with an e , to resprinkle the r ’s, to have an idle king, an idle queen, and put all the car steering wheels on the right? Well, perhaps the steering wheels would be worth fighting for. Perhaps our Founding Fathers had had an intimation of that one.

“There was a lot of smallpox in the eighteenth century,” I said on the way home, squeezed between my parents in the front of the truck.

“There sure was,” said my dad. “But they started the inoculations around the time of the war, I think.”

“Well, we can celebrate that, at least,” said my mother. “Sometimes I think it might not have been so awful to be English.”

“Oh, my God — I was just thinking the same thing!”

“Tories in the lorry!” exclaimed my dad.

“Well, how awful could it be? England looks great in pictures. You went there on your honeymoon!”

“We would have been colonists,” said my dad.

“So? Would we have had to wear big scarlet C s around our necks?”

My father leaned past me to say to my mother, “You send a kid to college, and look what you get.”

“Corinne Carlten wears a big gold C around willingly ,” I said.

“How is Corinne these days?” asked my mother.

“I really wouldn’t know,” I said, and then fell silent. Every exchange with my parents ended up in some boring place I didn’t want to be.

“And how about Krystal Bunberry, since her dad got sick and all.”

“Dunno,” I said. “She was nice to send that toilet paper, though!”

“If we were still English,” said my father, “we’d be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road — pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.”

“I don’t like all the words in our national anthem,” my mother said. She had given up on me and my friends as a topic of conversation. “ ‘Bombs bursting in air.’ What kind of song is that to sing? When sung in large crowds, everyone takes a deep breath and it sounds like ‘bombs bursting in hair .’ ”

“Hush,” said my father.

Then we all looked out at the road. The high crucifixes of phone and electric poles, in line on either side, multiplied and shrinking in the distance almost to a vanishing point, made me think of the final scene of Spartacus.

“Think the corn’s knee high?” asked my mom, and soon our truck lights swung and shone onto our own driveway and we were home.

——

I watched movies that I rented from Farm & Fleet. They weren’t very good; Farm & Fleet was new to it, and the selection was small, though we never actually used the phrase slim pickins at our house; it would have been bad luck. Like placing your pocketbook on the floor or your hat on the bed. But I was watching a lot of Jennifer Aniston movies and documentaries about Brazil and Argentina. I would return them the very next day. Sometimes I would drive around, taking the long way back. It was lovely summer weather, and the shoulders of the county trunks were bruised blue with chicory, then snowy with Queen Anne’s lace, for a while mixing, making a kind of weed gingham along the roadsides. Prairie grass flowers had been replanted in places and in others had never left: meadow rose, Turk’s cap, lady slipper, laurel.

My mother had taken slightly to her bed. Mrs. Miniver she wasn’t. The plants in her mirrored flowerbeds had crept out into the lawn itself, which was soon waist high in weeds, fuzzy and humid, which for ten days in mid-July revealed themselves to be not just sneezeweed but nightshade and phlox. A field of purple. A riot of violet — balloon flowers, foxglove, and sage. It was a weird and beautiful joke that her flower garden had never looked this good before. The hollyhocks stood bright and straight and as high as the windows, with only the slightest of lists. Ghettos of echinacea appeared, and fuchsia-hued tobacco and yarrow, as if it had all made a deliberate decision to do so. Only the unpruned hydrangeas missed her and had begun early their self-cannibalizing tinge to green; lit to the gills with chlorophyll, barren and virginal both, their branches drooped into the dirt with robust pustules of cream and lime. Only in their bowed and defeated eating of the soil did my mother’s absence show. Ordinarily she would never have allowed this.