Updike John - Of the Farm

“My goodness,” Peggy said.

“It’s the draft”—I sneezed—“from the window you opened. May I close it?”

“No.”

“O.K. Kill me.” My body tensed with the coming sneeze and, as if wrestling me down, she tightly wrapped her arm around my chest; this minute alteration, her encircling arm, in my chemical condition cleared my senses, which had been drowning.

“So sensitive.” Her voice was dry. “You never should have left your mother’s womb.”

“It was wonderful in there,” I admitted. “Perfect room temperature.” Her silence led me to ask, “Have you been listening?”

“I couldn’t hear. Did you dissect me?”

“What a thing to say.”

“I felt you both thought I was being stupid. I don’t care. I feel better.”

“Good. Don’t stop hugging.”

“Your legs are like ice. What did you talk about?”

“About the farm, mostly. Whether or not I should mow on Sunday. How’s your bleeding?”

“Abundant. I think I’m sympathetic with the rain.”

“You poor girl. You need a baby.”

“I have one. Two, counting Richard.”

“Can’t I please close the window? My mother thinks I’m coming down with a cold.”

“If you must. I’ll suffocate.”

To close the window I left the bed. The small thump of the sash seemed to trigger the night; lightning flashed behind Schoelkopf’s hill, followed by thunder. I got back into bed facing Peggy. Her warmth altered my flesh. She put her oval hand upon me. “My goodness,” she said again.

“Think nothing of it,” I said. “It’s stupid Nature.”

“Shall I do anything?”

“Sweetie, no. You work too hard at being a wife. Just relax. Be yourself.”

Obediently her hand left me. Beneath and beyond us there was a barking of dogs and an answering banging of doors.

“So you laid for a Yalie,” I said. “I’ll be damned.”

I DREAD DREAMING of my children. When I first left them, it never happened. If I fell asleep at all it was into oblivion. Then, as my separation from Joan acquired its own set of habits and became somewhat usual, it happened every night. I could not close my eyes without Ann or Martha coming to me with wide pale faces, with tangled strings to unknot, broken toys to mend, difficult sentences to explain, impossible puzzles to help them with. After my marriage to Peggy the dreams became less frequent. Tonight’s was the first in a week. I was mowing. The tractor stumbled over something; there was a muffled nick. I stopped and dismounted, dreading the discovery of shattered pheasant eggs. The field changed underfoot. I was picking my way through a strange landscape, like a vacant lot, only tufty, like a swamp, and smoldering, like a dump. Something curled up was lying caked with ashen dirt. Abruptly anxious, overswept with pity, I picked it up and examined it and discovered it to be alive. It was a stunted human being, a hunched homunculus, its head sunk on its chest as if shying from a blow. A tiny voice said, “It’s me.” The face beneath the caked dirt was, though shrunk, familiar. Who was it? “Don’t you know me, Daddy? I’m Charlie.” I pressed him against my chest and vowed never to be parted from him.

My mother’s voice was saying my name. Her face followed, enlarging, bending closer. She was wearing a dark green dress and her hair was down.

I asked, “Are you going to church?”

“I think I better,” she said. “I had a poor night.”

It was morning. I realized that Charlie was not in my arms, that he existed in Canada as a healthy, firm-bodied boy. I realized that, from my bare shoulders showing above the blanket, my mother would think Peggy and I had slept naked after making love. Peggy was not in the bed.

“I heard dogs barking,” I said, trying to agree with a statement I couldn’t contradict.

“When there’s a wind, the door they put on the barn when they took away the overhang rattles in a way the dogs don’t like. Are you going to come with me?”

“To church?”

“It would please your father.”

“What about Peggy and Richard?”

“Richard says he didn’t bring the right clothes.”

“What time is it?”

“Quarter of nine. The service is at nine-thirty this month.” The church was half of a split parish; the minister gave each Sunday service twice, at nine-thirty and eleven, at two churches miles apart.

“Where’s Peggy?”

“Outdoors in her Iwo Jima. I haven’t eaten her.”

“Did you ask her to go?”

“She says she’ll go if Richard changes his mind.”

“What about going by yourself?”

“I don’t trust myself with the car, and wouldn’t you like to see if there’s still people out there who remember you?”

“No.”

“To tell the truth I’ve hardly been all summer and I feel guilty about it.”

“Well. I can’t get dressed if you keep standing there.”

“Would you really mind? It’s the last thing like this I’ll try to ask of you.” And I realized that she had expected me to refuse.

But I wanted to go to church and to see, only see, other people, people unrelated to me except through the strange courtesy, paid the universe, of Christian belief. Like, I suppose, my father, the deacon, I needed to test my own existence against the fact of their faces and clean clothes and hushed shoulders, to regather myself in a vacant hour. The congregation this morning was small. In their accustomed front pews sat the Henry brothers, all three of them, a feed merchant and a tractor dealer and a schoolteacher, with their interchangeably plump wives and some surviving children (Jessica, Tom Henry’s eldest daughter, had moved to Santa Fe with her pilot husband; Morris, Willis Henry’s son, had married a Roman Catholic girl and undergone conversion) and even a few grandchildren, in laundered shirts and starched dresses, wriggling and staring. Behind them, after the space of two empty pews, sat a red-necked blond couple that, my mother whispered, had opened a luncheonette toward Galilee. Across the aisle, old Mrs. Rouck, in her timeless black hat with metal berries, shared a pew with the slim Puerto Rican grass widow who lived (my mother whispered) in a trailer parked on the old Gougler place. She sat very erect, a gray veil enclosing her brown profile, while her children bobbed up and down beanlike beside her. I did not know any of the men who took the collection; they were a new type in the county, junior businessmen in correct single-breasted summer suits, engineers, dentists, commuting clerks. I was relieved to see no one, beyond the Henrys and ancient Katie Rouck, who might remember me from the days when I, a sullen sophisticate, came to this church between my parents. Above the altar, there had been a dim mural of the Ascension, stained by the smoke of funeral candles, painted by a travelling artist a half-century ago. Christ’s feet, peeping from beneath the hem of his robe as He discreetly lifted in flight, had been utterly relaxed. Now here hung a pleated cardinal dossal backing a brazen modernist cross, the gift, my mother whispered, of Russell Henry in memory of his parents. The service was perfectly familiar, though years had passed since I had last heard it. The responses came to my lips inevitably. The minister, sleek and very young, ten years younger than I, moved through the forms with a nasal pedantic voice and practiced gestures; as he crossed to the pulpit he revealed that he was very short, a fact hidden in the uncertain perspective of the presbytery.

He took as his text Genesis 2:18. The sermon was rotundly enunciated and quaintly learned; his face and nervous hands seemed pale in the upward light of the lectern. And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. Notice, first, that Adam’s need was a “help meet.” In Hebrew the word is azer , meaning, without connotations of sex, “aid,” “help” such as an apprentice might render a master, or one laborer another. We were, then, men and women, put here not, as some sentimental theologies would have it, to love one another, but to work together. Work is not a consequence of the Fall. When Creation was fresh and unsullied, God set Adam in Eden “to dress it and to keep it.” To keep it, the minister repeated.