Updike John - Of the Farm

Now the tractor was kept in one of the stables, where the sunless air tasted of dung dust. My mother groped in the manger for the oil can and lubricated the tractor’s joints with a hollow popping sound like mechanical suckling. I pried up the door of its bonnet and fed it gas. The gasoline, leaping lavender from the spout, turned through some alchemy of shadow brownish-gold inside the tank, and the can, as its liquid contents unravelled, fought my grip like a singing reel. My mother no longer trusted her strength to perform this operation. But it was she who started the motor. She set one foot on the running board, grabbed the cracked rubber wheel, and startlingly swung her heavy body up into the iron saddle. I, in the style of my father, when confronted with the delicate puzzle of a fading battery and a guesswork choke and an erratic fuel pump, tended to flood the motor. But my mother had developed a prehensile tact with the machine, and soon the antique engine crackled into life and roared with a violence that hurled swallows into the blue rectangle of sky which had been placed, now that the overhang was down, right at the stable door.

Pleased, she yielded her seat to me. The metal felt warm. I rehearsed the pattern of pedals, moved the fuel lever to a middle notch, let up on the clutch, and lurched monstrously into the open. My mother screamed and I yanked the lever that lifted the cumbersome cutter off the stones; it wagged and clanked behind me as I swayed onto the lawn.

Peggy and Richard stood on the porch to see me go by, a one-man parade, an aging actor with half-gray hair and a soft city body absurdly being carried away by a juvenile role. They seemed quite abandoned by my success; I waved, and would have stopped, but my control of the machine was not yet instinctive and I might have stalled. Effortlessly strong, pulling a tugging hemisphere of space behind me, I went up the slant of lawn, across the rough walk, into the road, past the mailbox, toward the upper field. The great wheels revolved so slowly that, looking down, I could see the individual teeth of the treads swinging upward like the blank heads of an advancing army. I had not grown up with tractors, so they seemed marvellous to me. As their rickety little engines are plunged by parabolic gear ratios into a deep well of power, their power crests in an absolute tenderness, in the sensation of enthronement atop an immense obligingness.

In the field, I engaged and lowered the cutter. The tractor, hugging at every jog the uneven earth, accepted whatever direction I suggested to it and herbivorously moved toward distant lakes of Queen Anne’s lace. Hay tapped the edges of metal by my feet. Mashing and creaking settled into my ears and became shades of silence; the covered cutter dragged behind the tractor laid down a mowed wake like a width of cloth. Swallows, gathering in the fleeing insects, flicked around me, as gulls escort a ship. The field was vast, yet the very slowness of my progress—my mother had taught me to favor the third gear, though my father used to mow in fourth, bouncing and skidding dangerously—subdued it, guaranteed that, once I had reached the remote line of weed trees, sumac and ailanthus, that divided the big field from the far field, I would, as steadily, return. My mother’s method, when she mowed, was to embrace the field, tracing its borders and then on a slow square spiral closing in until one small central patch was left, a triangle of standing grass or an hourglass that became two triangles before vanishing. Mine was to slice, in one ecstatic straight thrust, up the middle and then to narrow the two halves, whittling now at one and now the other, entertaining myself with flanking maneuvers acres wide and piecemeal mop-ups. I imitated war, she love. In the end, our mowed fields looked the same, except that my mother’s would have more scraggly spots where she had lifted the cutter over a detected pheasant’s nest or had spared an especially vivid patch of wildflowers.

Black-eyed susans, daisy fleabane, chicory, goldenrod, butter-and-eggs each flower of which was like a tiny dancer leaping, legs together—all these scudded past the tractor wheels. Stretched scatterings of flowers moved in a piece, like the heavens, constellated by my wheels’ revolution, on my right; and lay as drying fodder on my left. Midges existed in stationary clouds that, though agitated by my interruption, did not follow me, but resumed their mid-air parliament. Crickets sprang crackling away from the slow-turning wheels; butterflies loped and bobbed above the flattened grass as the hands of a mute concubine might examine, flutteringly, the corpse of her giant lover. The sun grew higher. The metal hood acquired a nimbus of heat waves that visually warped each stalk. The tractor body was flecked with foam and I, rocked back and forth on the iron seat shaped like a woman’s hips, alone in nature, as hidden under the glaring sky as at midnight, excited by destruction, weightless, discovered in myself a swelling which I idly permitted to stand, thinking of Peggy. My wife is a field.

A SPECK OF EASTER-PINK, my mother, appeared on the road as I was turning on the far side of the field. I continued along the edge I was mowing, heading toward her. It was near noon. The hair on the top of my head felt like hay, and I began to sneeze, suddenly, unstoppably; every cubic inch of atmosphere seemed transparently crammed with pollen and, my vision choked, I nearly chewed up two quail who exploded into the air beneath my wheels. I had not noticed at first that Peggy and Richard were with my mother, and the dogs, running in wide delighted circles. I pulled up among them and shut off the ignition. My mother said, “You poor child, has it been this bad all morning?”

“Has what been bad?”

“Your hay fever.”

“It just started when I saw you.”

“When you saw us?” She turned to Peggy and said, “He says it’s psychosomatic.”

Peggy had brought me lemonade, in one of those old-fashioned canning jars with a wire handle fixed to the glass. In taking it from her, I made our fingertips touch, but saw no change in her expression, which was cheerful and guarded. She wore white shorts and a yellow sleeveless blouse darkened where the hems rubbed her perspiring skin. When I lowered the lemonade jar from my mouth, she licked, in a flicker of empathy that seemed to betray nervousness, her own upper lip, which was mustached with moisture. She did not respond to my mother’s remark, but instead seemed intent upon me, as if trying to remember where we had met.

I asked her, “What have you been doing all morning? Is it time for lunch?”

My mother said, “You’ve been up here only an hour. We did the breakfast dishes and now we’re taking the dogs for that walk around the farm we talked about. Do you want to come along?”

“I have to mow.”

“You’ve done a lot. What gear are you using, Joey?”

“Third.”

“Are you watching for birds’ nests?”

“I haven’t seen any.”

“I saw you scare two quail coming in. How many rocks have you hit?”

“I did tick one up toward the corner.”

“That big one. Daddy always took a piece out of it; you’d think it would be level with the ground by now.”

Richard said, “Tractors are slow, aren’t they?”

In my mother’s face I saw that she was going to attempt something fanciful. She told Richard, “That’s because they’re like dying people, they have their feet in the ground instead of on top.” She was trying to sink into me the hook of her approaching death.

Richard’s face went empty; I was annoyed with my mother for confusing him. “Would you like to drive it?” There was more to my asking this unfortunate question than an impulse of rebuke, of vengeance toward my mother. I think of myself as a weak man; one form my weakness takes is to want other people to know what they can and cannot have. I can tolerate only to a limited degree the pressure of the unspoken. Whereas my mother is infinitely at home in the realm of implication, where everything can be revised, or disowned.