Updike John - Of the Farm

I laughed again; there has never been anybody for making me laugh like my mother. “Still, I don’t want to be a local scandal. You have to live your life here.”

“Oh, Joey, I think you think we’re all foolish back here. They met Joan. They could see she wasn’t right for you.”

“Wasn’t she right?” I felt, steering the car down the road, in a precarious place; I felt a blessing trying, very delicately, to break through to me.

My mother’s voice was impatient. “Of course not. This one’s more your style. The Hofstetters always had high-stepping women.”

This was too harsh, dismissed too lightly my first, my tender and deep, my silent and inward wife. Joan was sealed in me like an illusion too painful to disavow.

“Well,” I said, “we don’t want to disappoint the Hofstetters.”

“You know what I mean. Blood must flow. You have a streak of your father in you, you tend to be too obliging. You were becoming something very tame before I brought us to the farm. That’s why I did it. That’s what you went back to when you married Joan. Joan was like Olinger. Respectable. Ni-ice.”

Her sneered pronunciation hurt me. “Now Mother, you’re just talking. And you’re running out of breath.”

“That isn’t all I’m running out of.”

“What’s the matter?”

There was a strange quality to her pauses, an unspoken re-gathering after each utterance. “Just keep your eye on the road. Your job, for instance. I never forgave Joan for letting you waste yourself on that ridiculous job. Consulting!”

“She never told me not to quit.”

“That wasn’t enough. It was her place to tell you to quit. She never got out from behind those proud blue eyes to look at you, Joey.”

“That’s not true.” But I felt my pulse racing and a selfish joy lifting from this smothered combat. My mother screamed. It was not a full scream but a prolonged whimper such as a dog emits when its forepaws are squeezed. I was making the left turn off the highway onto our road, so a second or two passed before I dared turn my head to look at her. It was she yet not she. Her face, especially about the eye sockets, was swollen, as if straining to contain an impact delivered from within; she folded her fat arms across her chest and, eyelids lowered, bore down. The planes of her face, like those of a cloud, eluded perspective. The space between her eyebrows was damp.

“What shall I do?”

“Keep going. I’ve had these before.”

“That was a frightening noise you made.”

This criticism seemed to catch her as she was about to make another, for her lips clamped upon a quick high grunt, and in silence her face surrendered to that terrible infusion of fullness, which smoothed her wrinkles away.

“My God, Mother!”

Now, a wave having broken, she breathed, eyes still closed, in sharp shallow gasps that parted her lips, as if alert to be kissed. I took my foot from the accelerator and moved it to the brake. She opened her eyes; they were merciless, expressionless. “Don’t stop. Get me onto my land.”

“Well that’s silly, if you need a doctor.”

She said quickly. “My pills are there.” She seemed to listen, to judge she had time for a playful apology. “There’s been too much excitement these last two days. I lead a quiet life.”

I let the car get moving again. The smaller field, still shaggy, skimmed by us. The sweep of the field I had mowed came into view. As we passed the pear tree, she screamed again, a louder but lower noise, almost a moan. I felt flattered that she permitted herself this outcry, having suppressed, out of respect for my innocence, the first two.

“Is it in the heart?” I asked.

She answered, “The arms and the chest muscles more. I suppose when it reaches the heart I won’t be here to tell it.” I drove in across the lawn and stopped by the back porch. The dogs barked but otherwise the place seemed deserted; the pump and the split privet bush looked like trespassers frozen by fright at our appearance.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so, but I can’t open the door.”

I thought she meant that the handle of the Citroen was strange to her. Then I saw that she was making no attempt to move her arms. I went around and let her out. She permitted me to touch her, to put my hand under her elbow. Though her feet seemed firm on the grass, she remained hunched and hesitated before stepping away from the support of the car. “The dogs will need a run,” she said. Their yapping was frantic; perhaps for them our conjunction formed a new creature worrisomely compounded of smells and outlines they trusted. As we slowly moved around the front of the car, the puppy upset the dry water pan and one of the adult dogs, in leaping and falling, raked the wire mesh with his claws.

No one was in the house. The breakfast dishes, which we had been too hurried to clear from the table, were soaking in steel-colored water from which the suds had evaporated. The silently running electric clock, the glistening presents I had sent from far cities, the preoccupied photographs continued their vigil uninterrupted. We were ghosts from a sphere that never impinged upon theirs.

“Peggy? Peggy! Richard!”

There was no answer. My mother said, “Let me go now, Joey. I’ll go upstairs and lie down. Thank you for taking me to church.”

“Can you make it by yourself?”

“If I don’t, you’ll hear me fall.”

And this was how, with our old-fashioned mutual courtesy and fear of touching one another, we managed. She went up alone, her right arm lifted enough to keep her hat in place, while I waited below until her shuffling footsteps crossed diagonally above me. I called out, “O.K.?”

Her answer, which I hardly heard, seemed to be, “Never better!”

I shouted, “I’ll go find Peggy!” Would my mother take this as a desertion? I meant it to be a rescue. That I myself could not rescue her had become suddenly clear. As I ran across the lawn my stomach grovelled with that conviction, remembered from childhood, of unworthiness, of guilt, of the world being an important, gala parade that I had somehow missed and that, as I raced through the darkening streets of Olinger, I could dimly overhear but could not find.

I did not know which way to run. Weeds thrust everywhere; the malevolent idleness of Sunday lay on everything. The farm seemed no longer a lush and fabled haven remote from the highways but a wild place fifteen minutes from Alton, an unpoliced emptiness attracting slumdwellers, a vacuum pulling into itself madmen and rapists. My son—for it was as such that Richard figured in the mental shorthand of panic—was in my mind as a pitiable witness, more pitied by me, more clearly pictured in his helpless bright-eyed onlooking, than his mother, my wife, the actual victim, the mangled nude. I ran to the mailbox and looked down the road. It was empty, making a thin S in its retreat up the rise to Schoelkopf’s mailbox. Above it hung the reddish dust of a car’s recent passing. I turned toward the great field and prepared to run into it when behind me a voice found my name.

“Joey!”

It was Richard, coming out from behind the barn. He had been hidden by the blind curve. He was wearing his new sunglasses and his face without his eyes looked pale and uncertain, a little hippy’s, his mouth miniature and sarcastic. He turned and shouted into the air, “It’s them!”

“Where’s your mother?”

“Picking blackberries.” As we trotted down the road to the tobacco shed foundation, he told me, “A car went by full of men and we crouched down in the bushes.” The heavy sky was here and there wearing thin, so that colorless small shadows bounced at our feet.

Peggy, bare-shouldered in her bikini, was up to her hips in brambles, serenely reaching toward those thickest and best berries closest to the sun-crumbled stucco of the old wall. She seemed a doe of my species, grazing immune in a thicket. My impression of her beloved body immersed in thorns was qualified by the discovery that, though she wore above her waist only the little polka-dot bra, her bottom half was sheathed in the blue stretch pants that imitated dungarees; in this centaurine costume she seemed more naturally, more practically resolved to give herself—my city wife, my habituée of foyers and automatic elevators—to the farm. “I did a very stupid thing,” she told me. “A car went by a while ago with a lot of sinister men and I hid in what I think must be poison ivy.”