Updike John - Of the Farm

Richard’s voice became insouciant. “I would, as a matter of fact.”

“Absolutely not.”

If Peggy had been less quick to speak, my mother might not have argued. “Why,” she said, “Sammy Schoelkopf was riding tractor when he was half Richard’s age and not one-tenth as smart.”

“Yes, and he cut off Mitzi’s legs,” I said.

“When I went camping with my father,” Richard said, “he let me steer the power boat on the lake.”

“Absolutely not,” Peggy repeated.

“Mother knows best, Richard,” my mother said to the boy. To me she said, testing the pull of her hook, “Don’t you want to to put on a hat and walk the bounds with us? I’m afraid you’ll get sunstroke.”

“Mother, I want to maw. I’ll mow until lunch.” I would mow and my mother would get to know Peggy: this was our bargain. I demanded of the three others that they mingle without involving me. I feared I might lose myself amid their confused apprehensions of one another and I hoped, as my mother’s hurt gaze left me and Peggy’s lips went prim, that irritation with me would tend to unite them. They moved away, walking warily on the stubble; Peggy wore sandals that left the sides of her feet exposed, and my mother, head bowed, was inspecting my work for errors, for ruined nests, butchered birds. Richard began to run in circles like the dogs, chasing the wisps of milkweed flax that alternated with cabbage butterflies in the air. I noted with pride that both women were tall, sizeable. It seemed a sign of some wealth that I could afford to snub them, and this prosperity enriched my triumph of floating between the steady wheels that reduced all unruly flowers to the contour of a cropped field.

After five or six circuits I saw them emerge from the woods, tinted specks, and bob toward the house along the horizon of the slope of land that descended to the foundations of the abandoned tobacco shed. Bouncing dogs, jogging child, plodding women: my tractor’s long slow turning as I watched them gave me the illusion of pulling the string of them tight.

Toward noon the sky, as if fainting, began to entertain mirages of translucent bluish clouds. A beginning breeze caused the sweat to dry with cooling rapidity on one side of my body. The green hay turned greasy in tone as cloudlets, one by one, dipped it in shadow, and the sky behind the woods acquired the sullen solid pitch that wallpapers long hidden behind a sofa reveal to the movers. Two dwindled rectangular armies of uncut grass, separated by twenty tractor-widths, still stood against me when Richard came up the road and called me to lunch.

At the corner of the field across the road, the little upper field, there was a tall old pear tree shaped like a ragged fountain. It had many rotten and useless limbs and concentrated its fruit-bearing on the surviving boughs; the crowded pears, though not yet ripe, were dropping abundantly. I parked the tractor in the tree’s shade, on grass saturated with wormy, spicy fruit.

Richard and I walked down the road together. My father’s dungarees felt stiff around my stride, my tingling palms were gray from gripping the baked rubber wheel, my vision felt sandy—all comfortable sensations, proof, as my real work never gives me, of work done. I asked Richard, “How was the walk?”

“Interesting. We saw a woodchuck and some kind of rare thrush. Your mother knows the names of everything.”

“Just like you know all the Yankees.”

“Yeah, but that’s in the newspapers.”

“There is that difference. I think my mother has some nature books you could ask her about if you want to.”

“O.K.”

“I could never match the pictures up with the real things, exactly. The ideal versus the real.”

“That’s an ancient philosophical problem.”

“Or else just lousy pictures.”

“This morning I was reading in that anthology about a mutie, that’s short for mutant. There’s been an atomic war—”

“Again?”

“It’s a different story. This time, lots of people survive, but the radiation mixes up the genetics and most of the babies are born freaks, that’s why they’re called mutants. Most are mistakes, but some are improvements, people with four hands, and so on. It sounds silly—”

“No.”

“The story is about a boy with a gigantic I.Q. who when he’s eighteen months old reads the dictionary through to learn the language.”

“But then can he match the words to the real things?”

Richard took my joke seriously. “I haven’t finished the story yet, it’s eighty-seven pages long.” We walked a few silent steps in the dust. He said, “My father has a high I.Q.”

“How did your mother like the walk?”

“O.K., I guess. She told me not to throw rocks and your mother said it was all right as long as I didn’t throw them at anything living.”

“Did your mother and my mother fight?”

“Huh?”

“Do you think they’re getting along?”

“When we came back to the house your mother told my mother she better wash her feet with yellow soap or she’d have poison ivy.”

“That doesn’t sound exactly like a fight.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

We still had a minute together, crossing the lawn to the back porch. I told him, “This afternoon I’ll try to find my old softball bat and we can hit some fungoes. I used to hit a tennis ball against the barn and then try to catch it before it hit the ground. If it bounced once, it was a single, and so on.”

“You can make up lots of games to play by yourself if you have to.”

“I had to. I almost never had a playmate here.”

“What about Charlie?”

“Not counting my own children.”

“Frankly, I’d rather help you mow,” Richard said.

“We’ll discuss it.”

We reached the pump. How beautiful water is! Nothing, not the slaking of lust or the sighting of land, appeases a deeper creature in us than does the satisfaction of thirst. I drank from the tin measuring cup that my mother had carelessly left on the bench one day and that under the consecration of time had become a fixture here. Its calibrated sides became at my lips the walls of a cave where my breath rustled and cold well water swayed. Against my shut lids the blue sky pressed as red; I would gladly have drowned. My gratitude to the elements went indoors and embraced the women making lunch in the kitchen. Peggy’s pigtails had come down; her hair hung loose. Her bare feet, freshly washed, left damp prints on the floor. My mother had become, in the kinship of housework, a docile, stupider sister. She set the placemats around while Peggy arranged, with naked quick hands, slices of cheese and Lebanon balony on an oval blue platter. The platter was one of a set my mother had assembled, plate by plate, at Tuesday Ladies’ Nights at the Olinger movie house before the war. My mother’s house was strange in that things lasted forever here; a dish was never broken. I felt her wince as Peggy smartly slapped plates and glasses on our placemats.

My mother cleared her throat and said, “When I worked in the parachute factory, there was a redheaded girl worked next to me who could cut and tie three to my one. When the D-Day invasion came, we were told to join hands and pray, and holding her hand was like holding a bird; you know the way a bird’s heart beats and they feel so dry and feverish. No wonder she could stitch like that. It quite frightened me.”

Peggy laughed. “Maybe you frightened her .”

My mother swung her shoulders and lifted her eyebrows, the way my grandfather would do when parried. “To tell the truth, I believe I did. I don’t think until she met me she had ever known people could fumble so. She once told me, now that I remember, that she thought I was a refugee. When she first saw me, she thought I was a foreigner, and had been surprised I spoke English so well.”