Updike John: Of the Farm

“The leaves go in threes and are shiny.”

She looked down. “Oh God, yes. It’ll be all over my belly.”

“You can use the yellow soap again. You better come up to the house anyway. My mother’s had some kind of an attack.”

“Joey, no. How bad?”

“I can’t tell. Maybe you can tell.”

Richard asked me, “Have you telephoned the police for the ambulance yet?”

I told him, “I wouldn’t know who to call. I have no idea how you get an ambulance out here.”

Peggy said, “Stop scaring yourselves.” Yet as she said it, her face, small amid her loose tangled hair, showed enough fright to keep her one of us. With care she removed her body from the brambles, holding high a colander half-full of berries. Richard hurried ahead up the road; I knew how he felt. There was a parade he was afraid of missing and afraid of catching. Peggy walked beside me and without breaking stride submitted to my caress when, hidden from the eyes of the house by the barn, I touched first the damp base of her neck and followed her spine with my fingers and went beyond to where the curve curved under into the crotch of her pants. I felt this long living line as a description of love stretched thin—as in those new paintings whose artists, returning to nature from the realm of abstraction, render a sky an impossible earth-red which nevertheless answers to our eyes as sky.

PEGGY WENT UP to my mother, was with her a time, and came down saying she was in bed and seemed subdued but amiable. She had taken her pills and gotten into bed and the sense of suffocation was diminishing, though the pain in her arm was spreading to her entire left side. She and Peggy had agreed I should call the doctor, though he was probably at church. He was a Mennonite. Peggy sent Richard upstairs with the blackberries, and I went to the phone, which sat on the sill of the window that looked toward the barn. There was a quarter-column of Graafs in the phone book but only one doctor. His phone didn’t answer. While listening to it ring, I studied the barn, whose appearance, without the ungainly overhang, had something dreadful about it, and it came to me that the barn had been my parents, and my father was gone. Where the overhang had been I could look through to a piece of meadow and a stand of sumac with a few leaves prematurely turned red, as if individually poisoned. The phone didn’t answer. Above me, Richard laughed, and my mother’s voice musically picked its way along the edge of some flirting assertion. Peggy, brushing her hair back from her face, set about making lunch. The dogs were barking.

I went outside and took their leashes, with the augmenting lengths of clothesline, from the nail on the porch post, where they hung near the measuring cup we drank from. I went into the pen and as the dogs leaped and swivelled around me clipped the leashes to their collars. The puppy could run free. The two bigger dogs, noses down, ears flattened, pulled me through the orchard. Their shoulder fur was fluffed with the joy of being out and when they pulled against their collars too hard they hacked and coughed. My hand, wrapped around with rope, burned with pressure; along the row of sunflowers they caught a scent and pulled so hard I had to run or let go. In the garden, the low-spreading dark leaves of the strawberry rows were being smothered by the taller growths of milkweed, burdock, and plantain. The earth Peggy had turned had faded and reconstituted its crust. The tugging dogs, all eager muscle, pulled me across the road to the fascinating new world, bared spoor and burrows, of the field I had mowed.

Drying stripes of dead grass diagrammed the pattern I had pursued. The stubble was dotted, in abundance, with flowers that had evaded the cutter or had been born yesterday; flowers , I thought, the first advertisements , and wondered if I could use the thought in my work. The puppy startled a butterfly into two butterflies, itself and its shadow.

Our shadows had a noontide smallness. Shapelessly being burned away, the clouds had the persistence of a dull ache, and collectively seemed a ruined strategy, a confusedly ebbing life. I wanted to return and feared the dogs would drag me to the end of the farm. But when, just beyond the crown of the big field, from which the silver tip of the Alton courthouse could be glimpsed in winter, I brought them to a halt, they obediently turned and, as if picking up the scent of the homeward leg of my mother’s routine walks with them, took me along the hedgerow of sumac and ailanthus, and along the lower edge of the field, past the tobacco shed foundation, across the road, and into our yard. Bustling happily, pretending to resist, they submitted to the pen. The skirts of fur at their hind legs were loaded with burs and the small green seeds shaped like rounded arrowheads. I looked down and saw that nature had also used me; the cuffs of my trousers were also seed-bearing.

Inside the house, Richard was reading and Peggy, having made sandwiches of Lebanon balony, was heating mushroom soup. The table was set for three. “How is she?”

Richard said, “She said the blackberries were very good and she didn’t want any lunch.” The book he was reading was my Wodehouse novel.

Peggy asked, “Do you want to try the doctor again before we eat?”

“Are you sure she wants the doctor?”

“She said so. Why wouldn’t she?”

“It seems unlike her.”

Peggy’s eyes, watching her hands pour milk, lifted. Her glance was offended; I remembered my mother’s unexpected remark about men excusing themselves from women’s pain. “Go up and ask her,” Peggy said.

Climbing the stairs, still in my suit, I felt a stiffness in my side coat pocket and pulled out the folded church program. It had been my father’s habit to fold the program and stick it in his pocket rather than throw it away. He had been reluctant to throw anything away, an ineffectual tenderness that had exasperated me as a boy. I laid the obsolete program on the stack of magazines that still awaited disposal on the window-sill at the head of the stairs.

“Mother?”

She was asleep, half-propped up on two pillows, one bare arm lying on top of the blanket. Her hair, seen from above, seemed entirely white, and her hand, lying palm-up beside the colander of berries—Peggy had picked too many green—had the loose-clenched chunkiness of a child’s. Sleep deepened the lines running from the wings of her nose to the corners of her mouth and had drawn parallel secondary creases down through the flesh of her cheeks, where no wrinkles had been before. I saw her, now, as an old woman. Always before she had appeared to me as a heavier version of the swift young mother outsprinting my father from the barn. I had felt this woman within her and had felt that she was withheld from me as a punishment. In sleep my mother had slipped from my recognition and blame and had entered, unconsciously, a far territory, the arctic of the old. The underside of her curiously smooth arm was silvery in the light that at the window strained gold from the wilt-rimmed leaves of the geraniums standing potted on the sill. I realized that my mother must water and tend and “keep” these plants, in this room where she said she never slept, and I felt all around me, throughout the farm, a thousand such details of nurture about to sink into the earth with her. Death seemed something minor, a defect she had overlooked in purchasing these acres, a negligible flaw grown huge. She made a tranquil snoring noise; her limp hand fidgeted; I removed the quarter-full colander from the danger of spilling. I bent over my mother’s form as once on a beach I had examined the wobbly outline my children had traced around my body as I lay stretched on the sand. My shape had seemed grotesquely small, emptied of life’s vibrations.