Updike John - Of the Farm

I asked, “How do I look?”

“Pale and flushed.”

“I can’t look both. It’s going to rain and I want to finish the big field at least. Let me have some pride of accomplishment. All I need is a hat of Daddy’s.”

“He never wore a hat. I’m surprised you’ve forgotten.”

“I can mow,” Richard said.

“There’s an idea,” my mother said. “Let the boy take a few turns. Show him how and you can watch from under the pear tree.”

“Absolutely not,” Peggy said.

“Oh come on, Mom. Let me. I’ll be careful.”

“Mother,” I said, “now don’t tease. You’ve got him all excited.”

“I’m not teasing. If I could learn to run it when I was fifty Richard can learn now. If he can ride a bicycle in New York traffic he can do this.”

I said, “A bicycle stops when you stop. A tractor demands a whole new set of reflexes.”

“Oh please please please .” Richard began to jiggle like a boiling pot and in his face as he looked up toward Peggy there flashed a timid eagerness that reminded me of his father.

“It’s cruel of you,” Peggy said to my mother, “even to suggest it. It’s out of the question.”

My mother’s mouth flinched, making the quick noise of gaiety that she raised against the unexpected. “All the country boys by his age are old hands.”

“He’s not a country boy,” I told her, interposing.

My mother turned to me gratefully and attempted to twist the matter upwards, into sheer fancy, and away. “How can Richard manage my people sanctuary if he can’t drive a tractor?”

Peggy cut in. “He’s not going to manage anything for you. He’s not going to be another Joey.” It was a reflex, ruthless and needless.

My mother, slashed, her subtlety crushed, said weakly, “Dear Peggy, one Joey is enough for me.”

I said, “It’s even enough for me.”

Neither of the women laughed, and neither of them looked at me.

Richard had been listening without understanding that his fate was quite settled. He tugged at the lower half of Peggy’s suit. “Just a lesson, Mother; just Lesson One, Leçon Première ?” He was harking back to an educational television program they used to watch together in the days before me.

She squatted to him, her flesh spreading, the cavity between her breasts moist, and, encircling his waist with her long arms, said, “You may sit in the seat and work the levers, if the motor’s turned off. But first I want you to go down to the house with your grandmother and help her take the groceries in.”

“That’s a good idea,” my mother said. With held breath I felt the congestion in my chest loosen as the human clot around me broke. Richard got into the car and my mother drove it down to the house. I called after them for a hat. Peggy resumed hoeing. I touched the handle to still it. She said, “I’m sorry. She got me mad.”

“Can’t be helped. You pulled it out beautifully in the end.”

“I’m still mad.”

“Be mad at me.”

“I am, partly.”

“Why?”

“You don’t stand up to anything. You let us slug it out and then try to make peace.”

“I was on your side.”

“I didn’t feel it.”

“It wasn’t my mother’s idea for him to ride the tractor, it was his.”

“She encouraged it. It’s an insane idea.”

I thought “insane” excessive. “As she says, the boys around here do it.”

“Insane.”

“Tell me something. Did McCabe sleep with you after the divorce?”

Peggy stared and her dusty hand, in brushing back her hair, diagonally smirched her forehead. “Why do you ask?”

“Richard said, very happily, that his father spent the night a couple times.”

When Peggy does not smile, the left side of her mouth tugs down with an automatic wryness. “He was safe. I knew him, and I thought it might do us both good.”

“I’m sure it did.”

She dismissed whatever was in my eyes with a shrug. “That piece of paper doesn’t end everything.”

“I know that. I know that very well. You seem to forget what a good position I’m in to know that.”

“Well then don’t look at me that way.”

“I’m not trying to look at you any way. I see you as very beautiful, as having more beauty really than you need, and any waste makes me sad.”

“All right then. I didn’t want to go to waste.”

“But at the same time you were seeing other men.”

“Not then. This was soon after the divorce. It was years ago, Joey.”

“Then why does Richard remember it so clearly?”

She looked down the line of the hoe-handle toward its idle teeth, and the fact that she was lying seemed declared by the comet-shaped smirch on her brow.

“It’s funny,” I said, “that I don’t mind the others but do mind poor old McCabe, whom I kind of liked.”

“The others aren’t real to you,” she said and, sensing that this explanation was tactless, added, “Or to me either now,” and offered to kiss me. I accepted the offer; her lips felt like a pat of tepid dust. She put her arms, the same long pale-haired arms that had encircled Richard, on my shoulders, and told me, “Listen. This was all before you existed for me, it’s like worrying about what happened before you were born. Don’t you feel that I love you?”

I tried to be precise. “I feel you as a loving woman and I happen to be next to you in bed.”

“No,” she said, “that makes me a whore and it’s really you, only you that lets me be a loving woman, because you know how to accept love, it’s something your mother taught you. It’s wonderful.”

“It’s a weakling’s talent,” I seemed obliged to say.

Richard was walking up the road with a hat. It was a hat belonging not to my father but to my mother, a wide coolie hat of plaited straw secured beneath the chin by a ribbon that was reinforced with butcher’s cord. They laughed, Richard and Peggy, when I put it on. My fool’s costume was complete. Richard and I went across the road to the stubbly field and I let him climb into the tractor saddle and showed him, ignition off, how the pedals and levers worked. He looked like a king solemnly enthroned against the nimbose sky and appeared satisfied. The lesson over, he went to the garden patch and joined his mother. He punched her stomach and I watched them pretend to box. Above them, on the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence. I mounted the tractor and resumed mowing. The chicory and goldenrod had curled their petals, had shrivelled under the threat of rain. A last piece of afternoon sun broke through the clouds and projected on the ground my grotesque shadow, my head a large globe. Within the hat there was a perpetual shade and the rustle of shelter. I moved the tractor into fourth gear and raced the weather. Once, the left wheel dropped into a groundhog hole and the lurch nearly tossed me off. As I attacked my rectangles, my phalanxes of standing grass, a scouting buzzard below the clouds motionlessly rode the wind. Now a drop struck my forearm, and another tapped my hat. One standing section had been reduced to a long triangle and the other to a wavering hourglass-shape. I steered for the apex of the triangle, and back again along the hypotenuse, and back again. A heavy drop struck the gray hood and steamed. Another. Richard ran down the red road, but Peggy stayed on the garden ridge hoeing. The rain, having announced itself, hesitated, held off; I finished the triangle and went to the hourglass. A ragged, rapidly drifting wisp of smoky nimbus travelled at the base of advancing rolls of inverted gray. And now the rain, having taken one last breath, sighed and subsided into the earth, gently at first, like the blasts of a lady’s atomizer, then with such steady relaxed force, pattering on my hat, soaking my thighs, that the closed flowers bobbed beneath the drumming and the grass, whipped, gleamed. I pushed the slipping tractor up one sloping side of the remaining phalanx, across the flat end, and down the other, until the waist of the hourglass vanished, and I was left with two triangles a few swaths wide. Turning the last time, I was astonished to see, at the far rim of the field, along the road, someone, Peggy, standing there in the storm watching me finish. She was holding her hoe and as I drew close I saw her red hair flattened against her skull and streaming straight around her face, which to endure the hail of sensation on her skin had assumed, lids stretched, cheeks puckered as if to smile, the imperviousness of the dead. She did not smile when, rattling onto the road at a rutted place below her, I called out, accusing her of insanity. She acknowledged me only by following the tractor, eyes downcast, like a nearly naked slave in processional chains, her shining feet picking their way carefully through the livid mud and the stones the rain was polishing to a sudden sharpness. I was so stirred by her faithful waiting, by the thought of her body beaten through and through by rain for my sake, that I expected, once the shelter of the overhang was reached, to leap from the tractor and embrace her, to press her into the chaff and dried dung, which would adhere blackly to her wet white skin. But the overhang was gone and while I was fitting the tractor back into its narrow stable Peggy continued across the lawn into the house, walked slowly across the stretch of grass where I had once seen my mother outrace my father from the barn. The afternoon had ended.