Updike John - Of the Farm

Richard laughed, perhaps too readily, and to intercede I asked, “Whatever happened to her?”

My mother said, “I used to wonder. I’m afraid nothing good. She had a child and no husband and wasn’t yet nineteen. With a pulse like that she was bound to get into trouble. Just like a hurt starling, it was that rapid.” My mother’s facial expression troubled me, and I realized that she had taken to making pop eyes at the end of a statement, the way old people in Pennsylvania do. In my grandfather this rhetorical condition had been exaggerated by the bulging lenses of post-cataractomy spectacles.

“Soup’s on,” Peggy said, pouring. Steam rolled up the length of her arm and mixed with her hair. She returned the pot to the stove with a click and we settled at the table. The soup was chicken-with-rice.

Seated in my father’s position, I asked Peggy paternally, “Did you see the farm this morning?”

“It’s lovely,” she said, and, turning slightly to include my mother, “I like knowing its boundaries. I had the impression last night it was enormous, but seeing it in daylight it doesn’t seem too big.”

“Just big enough,” my mother said, nodding eagerly, as if to certify Peggy’s remark before it escaped. “Just the right size. I don’t think God meant people to live on less than eighty acres.”

“Statistically, most of them do,” Richard said.

“I know,” my mother told him. “It makes me sad to think of it. I don’t know why I’m so fortunate. I certainly don’t deserve it.” She waited to be contradicted.

“By the year twenty-one hundred,” Richard said, “each person will have about one square yard of land to stand on, including all the deserts and mountain tops.”

“I know ” my mother said, and I inwardly shied from her fervent intonation. “I see it coming. You can see it in Alton, the people are growing corners so they can fit in their little square yards better. People were meant to be round .”

Richard said, “I recently read a story where the people were shaped like cones and the doorways were all triangular.”

“Plato says,” my mother told the boy, “that God made people absolutely round, with four arms and four legs and two heads, and they would roll everywhere with terrific speed. In fact, people were so happy and powerful that God grew jealous and split them in half, with a little difference, so that now everybody keeps looking for their other half. That’s what love is.”

“What was the difference?” Richard asked.

My mother said, “It’s a very little difference.”

“You mean the penis?”

The word had never been used in my childhood—there had been instead, strange to recall, the non-word “animule.” I remember my mother saying, when my father and I were dressing in the morning and she still lay in bed, “My men have such big animules.” I felt her feigned fright was partly sincere, which seemed absurd, since mine was smaller than my thumb, and I never looked at my father’s. Richard had shocked my mother.

She said to him, “Yes.”

“There are psychological differences, too,” Peggy told him.

My mother, who liked to do her own amplifying, said, “I’ve never believed in those. I’m a very coarse customer. I believe only in what I can see or touch.”

“And God,” Richard said.

My mother’s head dipped forward in surprise and, as if to make something useful of the gesture, she took another slice of balony.“God?”

“We discussed it before we came. He ”—me—“said you believed in God.”

“And you don’t?”

Richard looked at us, at Peggy and me, for help, which came, instead, from my mother. She said, “I see and touch God all the time.” The froglike shininess of fascination returned to his eyes as he looked at her. She went on, “If I couldn’t see and touch Him here on the farm, if I lived in New York City, I don’t know if I’d believe or not. You see, that’s why it’s so important that the farm be kept. People will forget that there could be anything except stones and glass and subways.”

“There are lots of farms in Nebraska,” Richard said.

“I don’t live in Nebraska.”

“We saw lots of farms driving up the Turnpike.”

“I don’t care about those farms. I care about my farm.”

The child, with a silent effort that thinned his lips, located the problem correctly, not in a national passing of farmland but in my mother, personally. He returned to his original question, with a difference. “What can you use it for?”

My mother pointed at me while looking at Richard. “He says a golf course is too expensive.”

“Where my father took me there was lots of wild land being kept as a bird sanctuary. But there was a lake in it.”

“We can call this,” my mother said, “a people sanctuary.”

As if to laugh, Richard showed his teeth with the neat frontal gap, but no sound emerged.

“A place,” my mother went on, “where people can come, and be refugees like me, for an hour or two, and let their corners rub off, and try to be round again.”

This cloying ingenuity, holding the boy spellbound with its undertone of desperation, became unbearably pathetic and irritating to me. “Mother,” I said, “you do exaggerate the land shortage. If you’d ever fly in an airplane you’d see how much of it there is. Land is worthless until people make something out of it.”

“Hush,” she said. “Richard and I are planning a people sanctuary. I’ll sell tickets up at the pear tree and he’ll be the warden and mark the diseased people for destruction.”

“What a funny sanctuary,” Peggy said. “Like a concentration camp.”

“Peggy,” my mother said, her eyes suddenly saturated with tears and reflected light, “people must be told when they’re no longer fit to live, they mustn’t be left to guess at it, because it’s something nobody can tell herself.” And she left the table and the kitchen, slamming the screen door, her pink blouse clashing with the green outside.

ALL AFTERNOON the signs of a storm gathered. The translucent clouds developed opaque bellies and were hurried sideways by a rising wind. From my stately tractor I admired, what I had forgotten, how dramatic the clouds in this hill country could be. Diagonal shafts of sun and shadow and vapor streamed earthward from glowing citadels of cumulus spaced as if strategically across the illusory continent above; the spectacle was on the high grand scale of history, so that the elidings and eclipsings and combinings of cloud-types suggested political situations—high thin cirrus playing the aristocrat, a demagogic thunderhead moving at the head of an amorphous gray mob. My mother’s display of temper, or grief, hung heavily on the afternoon. After the door had slammed, Peggy had asked, “Did I say anything?”

“I don’t know, did you?”

“What did I say?”

“Nothing really. You were saying what you thought.”

“Shouldn’t I? It seemed to me she deliberately decided to take it personally.”

“With my mother, everything is personal.”

“If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else I said. She turns it on and off, she uses her temper as a weapon.”

“When you’re as sick as she is you’ll use what weapons you can.”

Richard asked, “Shall I go ask her why she’s mad?”

“You can if you want,” I said, startled and touched by his volunteering. At his age I had felt myself the family peacemaker; indeed this role had ceased only when my father died. “She likes talking to you about the farm.”