Updike John: Of the Farm

“Yes, and you came home sick,” Peggy said.

“It’s caffeine-free,” my mother said, and poured him half a cup. The act of pouring, in comfortable association with the shape and grain of our old dining table, led her to talk; we had always talked, when there had been a family, around food. “I think I began drinking coffee,” she said, “when I was three. I remember sitting in the high chair, right where you’re sitting, Peggy, and having a big black cup set on the tray in front of me. I don’t know what my mother was thinking of, except in those days nobody knew anything about nutrition, and my dad never had milk in the house. He drank a dozen cups a day to the day he died, black, as black as possible, and hotter than any man I ever knew. Right off the stove, he’d swig it down; he was very proud of this ability. It was the sort of thing, Richard, that people used to be proud of.”

Richard put his fingers on the cup and, as if the contact put him in direct touch with my mother, said boldly, “Tell me, Mrs. Robinson, about your farm.”

“What would you like to know about it? I’m sure that Joey”—she paused, finding this name for me strange when spoken to my stepson, yet no more able than I to think of any other—“has told you already more than you want to know.” She looked at me quickly and went on, “Or maybe he hasn’t. He probably never talks about the farm. It’s always depressed him.”

“Your father,” Richard said, “the man who could drink the coffee so hot—did he sell it, or what? I can’t quite fit the elements together.”

My mother folded her arms on the table and leaned forward, a solicitous-appearing gesture developed to soothe her breathing. “My father,” she said, “was like my son—the farm depressed him. His father had made him work too hard on it, and when he was”—she studied me, still searching for my name—“about the age my son is now, he sold it, and moved us all to the town where he ” —she pointed at me—“grew up.”

“What did your father do for a living then?” Richard asked.

“Well, that’s it. He didn’t do anything. He was a man without a vocation, and if you don’t have a vocation the next best thing is to have a farm. He sat in a chair and drank coffee and watched his money go down the drain in the stock market crash.”

“My father says there will never be another stock market crash.”

“Well, I hope not, but like a lot of unfortunate things it probably had its purpose. It improved my dad’s manners, I know, because as long as he had any money he was a pretty ugly customer.”

“Richard,” Peggy said, “is very fond of his father.” She smoothed back her hair. Her remark seemed misjudged to me; she had felt an insinuation in my mother’s words that was not there. My mother had loved her father, and thought that “ugliness” was a rather desirable human attribute. It seemed dense of Peggy not to feel this, and I confess that the way she invariably, in Richard’s presence, rose to defend the man she had divorced five years ago irritated me, as does any response that has degenerated into a reflex. Yet I sympathized with her nervousness, for my mother has a dangerous way of treating children as equals. Years ago, in this kitchen, my son Charlie, who was then two, while parading around the table with a yardstick, accidentally tapped my mother with it. Without a moment’s hesitation she pulled it from his hands and smartly smacked him back. As Joan comforted him, my mother, still holding the yardstick—an orange one stamped with the name of an Alton hardware store—explained that the boy had been “giving her the eye” all morning, and for some time had been planning to “put her to the test.” As primitive worshippers invest the indifferent universe with pointed intentions, so my mother read into the animate world, including infants and dogs, a richness of motive that could hardly be there—though, like believers everywhere, she had a way of making her environment supply corroboration.

“Good for Richard,” she said levelly, and tipped back her head to give Peggy the benefit of the reading half of her bifocals. “And why shouldn’t he be?”

I flinched, guessing that Peggy would make an answer; but Richard, whose eyes had the shininess of the enchanted—the frogs and deer who are really princes—luckily insisted that my mother’s tale continue. “How did you buy back the farm without any money?”

“We sold the house,” my mother said, “the house in town where he ”—me—“was born. After the war. You see, Richard, after the Depression, when everybody lost their money, except for Bing Crosby, there was a war, when everybody, even schoolteachers, made some, if they weren’t killed.”

“Who was Bing Crosby?”

“A very popular singer. That was a joke.”

“I see,” he said, and solemnly smiled. He has the gap between his front teeth that usually goes with freckles, of which he has none, having inherited from his father a smooth and sanguine skin.

“The war was over, and my husband and I had a little saved—he had worked summers and I had been, can you imagine, a parachute cutter—and the farm came onto the market. I went to the old fella who used to give me advice when I asked for it. Before I had Joey, I asked him if I should, because it was supposed to be dangerous for me, and he said, ‘It’s dead blood that doesn’t flow.’ By this he meant, I thought, that a line of blood, a family, must have a child or it is dead. So I had my son, and none of my aunts could believe I could have been so clever. They’d thought I was a freak. Now I wanted my farm, and he told me, ‘There’s a Spanish proverb, “Take what you want, and pay the price.”’ And that’s what I did.”

There was a silence as we estimated the price. Richard asked, “Did your husband like farming?”

No was shouted in me so loud I said, to hush it, “He never farmed.”

“He never farmed,” my mother said. “That’s right. But he bought me a tractor and let me keep the fields mowed. He was a city boy, like you are.”

“What’s the point,” Richard asked, as I had told him to, “of a farm nobody farms?”

I feared we had gone beyond hushing, but my mother unexpectedly seemed pleased with the question, and moved her head still farther forward above her folded arms, to give herself breath for a full answer. “Why,” she said rapidly, “I guess that’s the point, that nobody farms it. Land is like people, it needs a rest. Land is just like a person, except that it never dies, it just gets very tired.”

“Furthermore,” I told Richard, to relieve her laboring voice, “we do farm it somewhat. Sometimes we have the hay baled and sell it. A few years ago we let an Amishman rent the upper field to plant it with corn; we ourselves used to grow vegetables and sell strawberries.”

“Yes,” my mother said, abruptly speaking to Peggy, “we used to make this sophisticated young Harvard man and his refined wife from Boston go out along the road with a board and two trestles and peddle berries to the Sunday traffic!” It startled me to hear how Joan and my earlier self had become part of my mother’s saga of the farm.

“We didn’t mind,” I said, as if to make myself less a myth, and less removed from the wife who had not sold strawberries.

“You used to hate it,” my mother said positively. “You used to be so afraid nobody would stop.” She explained to Peggy, “He doesn’t eat strawberries so he couldn’t understand why anybody would want them.”

“He eats strawberries now,” Peggy told her.

My mother asked me, “Do you?”

“On ice cream,” I said.

“Who was the old fella?” Richard asked.

My mother blinked. “Old fella?”