Updike John: Of the Farm

“How silly,” she said, and put her hand in mine, and let me pull her up, and stood. In stocking feet she seemed small beside me. Her hands, her hands are slightly large and reddish in the knuckles and fingertips and always come to my imagination as oval in shape. I think I was first attracted to her, first noticed her at that first party, by the way she stood, awkward and grave, with her hands inert at her sides, incurved toward her thighs, like tools not being used; the full length of her arms was displayed, and there was a suggestion, in her refusal to shield her front with a held cigarette or a fending gesture, that she could be taken.

“Good night, Mrs. Robinson,” she said. “Sorry to be so dopey.”

“I think you’re the only one of us with sense,” my mother said. “Good night, Peggy. There’s an extra blanket if you need it in the bureau.” She did not wish me good night, as if I were certain to return.

In our room—my parents’ old room, with a picture of me as a child on the wall—Peggy asked me, “What were you talking about?” In the picture my lips were lightly parted, my chin was pointed, my nose was straight and flat and saddled with freckles. My eyes, my eyes absorbed me, they were so sweetly clear, so completely clairvoyant, so unblaming. We seemed married in their sight. Beneath the picture stood the bedside table, supporting a lamp with a pleated plastic shade partially melted by accidental contact with the bulb, a peacockblue runner, an iron ashtray shaped like an elephant. I visualized in the closed drawer bundled letters, snapshots, report cards, and painstaking checkbook stubs. On a shelf between the legs near the floor rested, neglected, heavy as a casket, the family Bible, leathery and ridged, edged in gold, inherited from my father’s father’s father. Once I had written my name on its genealogy page.

I answered Peggy, “The farm.”

“What about it?”

“Whether we should sell any of it.”

“What did you decide?”

“It had been decided already. She won’t sell.”

“Do you want her to?”

“Not much.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea. This place has always given me hay fever.”

“I thought you were going to say it gave you the creeps.”

“That’s what my father used to say.”

My mother’s voice, with that note of timidity that was more penetrating, from her, than a shout, called me from the foot of the stairs. I had taken off my shirt and put it on again before going down.

“The dogs,” she said. “Could you take what’s left of the sausage to them and set a pan of water on the straw? I hate to be a wheedler, but if it’s me they’ll think I’ve come to give them a run and to tell the truth I think I’ve overindulged.”

“Do you feel funny?”

“Queerly, as Pop would have put it.” I looked at her anxiously; she was standing in the living room, just back from the kitchen doorway, as if in a shallow box. A single dim bulb was burning in the kitchen, over by the stove, and her forehead had the metallic tint of my grandfather’s skin in his last days. Her thick hair, whose dominant gray was mixed with residual black in a blend that tasted bitter to the eye, hung stiffly, a pyramidal mass, about her head. With her hair down she had seemed witchlike to me ever since as a child I would watch her brushing it in the Olinger back yard and pulling it from the brush so that birds might weave her shed strands into their nests; at night, when she brushed her hair in my parents” bedroom, from my bed I could see blue sparks leaping.

I asked, “Should you have any pills?” She moved a few inches forward, and her shoulders seemed strangely creamy in the stronger light. One strap of her nightgown was awry.

“Oh, I have them. Pills in the icebox, pills under my pillow—” She changed her tone. “Don’t worry yourself, just give the dogs their water and take your wife to bed. She may find the night chilly—the old Indian blanket is in the third drawer of Daddy’s bureau. I’ll be all right once I lie down.”

“Should you sleep on the sofa?”

“I always do. I haven’t slept hardly at all upstairs since he—went.”

I tried to smile, and shrugged instead. With the abruptness of pain she turned her back on me. My father had died a summer ago.

I went out into the dark. The porch sandstone was warm and granular on my bare feet, and then the dew was cuttingly cold. The privet bush showed a split face to the moon. Far on my left an owl emitted its matronly exclamation of distaste or mourning, and farther still a trailer truck, with an exasperated hiss, shifted gears on the highway; both sounds came from the same direction, from the almost transparent strip of woods, ours, between our yard and the fields adjoining the road, once the Mennonite’s dairy farm, now a budding housing development. It was among these trees that my mother all winter long scattered on cupping rocks and exposed stumps handfuls of sunflower seed for the birds. It was along this rim of woods that she felt the world’s invasion pressing most.

The dogs seemed glad to see me, though they were fierce with strangers; there had been several biting incidents, and one lawsuit. It must have been that my mother and I smelled subtly alike to them. Or perhaps they sensed my father in me. They were, besides the collie pup—which my mother had taken from the Schoelkopfs rather than let them have him “put away”—two part-chow mongrels from the same litter, their mother’s mother a dog I had known well, Mitzi, my dog, with her tongue spotted black like a pansy, and her shimmering bristling ruff of copper hair as fine as the poll of a dandelion, and her out-of-proportion small and emotional ears, and her dainty-boned hind legs that were severed, one July noon, by the cutter bar of a hired tractor driven by Schoelkopf’s son, while I was off at college. It was after that accident—the dog had to be shot—that my mother bought our third-hand tractor, and learned to run it, and taught my father and me. Eerily silent, as if their pitch of expectation were higher than I could hear, the dogs thrashed against my legs. I set down the sausage platter, reserving in my hand a piece for the pup, which I threw down for him on a separate patch of straw, and took the empty pan, careful to latch the pen door behind me, back to the porch and pumped it full, thus becoming, myself, one more country noise. The rattling squeak of a pump handle will carry, on a warm open night, from farm to farm. Now the owl’s monotone protest was overruled by a whippoorwill. I put the swaying pan (light leaped and slopped; dog-noses recklessly converged) back in the pen, examined the state of the moon, and guessed it to be one night short of full. I stood a moment in the open air feeling time flow, and almost gratefully returned to the closeness of the house.

I switched the remaining kitchen light off. In the living room my mother lay in the dark. I went in to her, though Peggy’s waiting upstairs pulled on my skull. The invisible mementos and objects around me seemed expectant, like the votive rubbish left at a shrine. The smell was not of my youth but of dust. I sat in my grandmother’s rocking chair, which tipped back abruptly under my weight, as if she had hopped out of the way. There was silence.

“The boy,” my mother said, “seems bright.”

“Yes, I think he is.”

“It’s interesting,” she continued, “because the mother doesn’t seem so.”

This blow was delivered in the darkness like a pillow of warmth against my face. I felt myself at the point at which, years ago, in this same room, I had failed Joan. Yet I respected—was captive within—my mother’s sense of truth. My response was weak. “Not?”

“I’m surprised at you,” my mother went on, in a voice whose timbre was deadened by her horizontal position.