Updike John - Of the Farm

In the room where Richard had slept, the photograph of Joan, voguish and posed, was flattened by daylight into the same plane of remoteness as the one of myself as a child; ten years faded level with thirty under the bright present of this cloudless morning. Downstairs, on the tawny kitchen floorboards scuffed and scored by dog claws, there lay, like a papery golden mat spread before the front door that gazed with its single large pane through the grape arbor toward the meadow, a rhomboid of sun mottled with the slightly shivering shadows of grape leaves. This patch of sun had been here, just this shape, twenty years ago, morning after morning.

Peggy was making pancakes. Richard and my mother sat at the table, the boy eating cereal and my mother drinking coffee. Something in the deliberate way she was holding the cup eclipsed the others for me, though Peggy looked up and grinned and Richard was brightly talking. He was telling the plot of the science fiction story with which he had read himself to sleep. Peggy was wearing pigtails. Her long hair, which becomes red in the summer and chestnut in the winter, which can be a mane or a beehive, a schoolmarmish bun or a drooping Bardotesque bundle, had been knitted into two stout jutting pigtails secured by rubber bands. I wondered if my mother found this hairdo presumptuous or too assertive or condescending. The fragrance of pancakes hung in the air like an untaken gift, and Richard seemed to be talking to himself. “… and there was this one man left in all the world, crawling over these warm cinders, trying to get to the sea.”

Peggy asked me, “ Where did you get those baggy old pants?”

“You’ve cut yourself,” my mother said. There was an evenness in her voice like the gray of the sky on a day before rain.

“I shaved with Daddy’s razor.”

“What a funny thing to do. Why?”

Had I somehow interfered, desecrated a shrine? “It looked too lonely,” I said, “sitting there.”

My mother turned her head and released me from the threat I had felt. Her voice relaxed, swerved. “I should throw it away but I like the color it’s become.”

I walked forward boldly. “Who’s the pretty slave making pancakes?”

“Isn’t she clever? She found a box of mix I had forgotten I had. And they smell so good.”

“My father,” Richard said, “can make terribly thin little ones with just flour and water over a camp fire.”

“He sounds too clever,” my mother said.

I said to Richard, “What’s this story you were telling about warm cinders?”

Peggy called, above a fresh salvo of sizzling, “It sounds like a very morbid story to read just before going to sleep.”

“There’s been atomic war or something,” Richard said, “it never exactly says, and there’s this single man, the last man left on the planet Earth, crawling over the radioactive desert to get somewhere, and then you realize he’s trying to reach the sea. He hears it murmuring.”

“Did you hear,” my mother asked me, “the dogs last night around three o’clock? There must have been a deer in the neighborhood. Or else the Schoelkopfs’ beagle went into heat suddenly.”

“Can that happen so suddenly?” Peggy asked.

I said, “No, I slept right through. I always do, Mother, you know that. I’m a growing boy.”

“Everything wakes me now,” she said. “Even your bed seemed noisy to me last night.”

“Maybe we should buy a muffler for it.”

Peggy said, “Richard, he’s crawling toward the sea.”

“I’m sorry, Richard,” my mother said. “Tell us.”

“He gets to the sea, and lies down in it, and prepares to die with this feeling of great relief, because his idea was if he could die in the sea the cells of his body would keep on living and form the basis for new life, so evolution could begin all over again.”

“I agree with your mother,” my mother said. “That story is too frightening to read at bedtime.”

“Who wants pancakes?” Peggy asked. “They’re getting cold.”

“That’s not the end ,” Richard insisted, and his mother’s voice emerged in his anxious intonation. “The clincher, the really neat thing, comes in the last sentence, when he lies down in the water and looks up and—I forgot to say it was night—and looks up and sees the stars but in totally different patterns from what they are now! You see, all along you thought it was happening in the future when actually it happened aeons and aeons in the past.”

“I don’t understand about the stars,” Peggy said, smartly setting out plates and then dividing the pancakes among us with her efficient naked hands.

“I don’t either, Peggy,” my mother said. “I thought the stars were fixed.”

“Mom, don’t be dumb,” Richard said. “The stars are changing position all the time but so slowly we can’t see it. Some day Arcturus will be the North Star.”

“Don’t be fresh.”

“I wasn’t fresh. What’s fresh about a fact?”

“I remember reading that story,” I said. “What it comes down to is all of us, including the dinosaurs and the bugs and the oak trees, are all descended from that one man. Richard, do you ever at night, just before dropping off, feel yourself terribly huge? Your fingers feel miles thick.”

“I often do,” he said. “It’s uncanny. I’ve read somewhere a rational explanation, I forget where. Maybe in Scientific American? ”

“Well, that’s how that man must have felt lying there in the water dying, don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” Richard said, uneasy that the fantasy of the book, which had seemed solely his, had been appropriated by us others.

“I think it was nice of the man,” my mother said, “to care so much about his descendants. Peggy, these are too good. I’m supposed to go easy on starch.”

“Eat all you can. There’s tons of batter.”

“I’ll bust !” my mother exclaimed, and I had to laugh, for clearly, in her own mind, she was being, ingeniously, murdered.

After breakfast she and I went out to start the tractor. It was by then ten o’clock. Time on the farm always had an elusive elasticity. As a boy, my back sweating and my eyes raw from searching green leaves for spots of red, I would come down through the orchard from the strawberry patch, four full quart boxes balanced on my right arm and two more held in my left hand, after hours of straddling the endless rows of dense secretive leaves, and discover, by the mantel clock (it was still there but had stopped, like the clock in a song my grandfather used to sing, raising his voice on “ Tick. Tock ” and lowering it on the premonitory “And the old man died”), that it was only nine-thirty, the day barely begun. And yet that same day (there were so many such days), after a moment spent glancing at a magazine to speed the digestion of the lunch my grandmother had hastily scratched together, I would look up from the sofa and see the mailman’s dusty Chevrolet at our box, half in the shadow of the barn, for it had become, in one swift stroke, the middle of the afternoon.

Now the day and the fields it contained seemed about to break over our heads like a tidal wave, with the tractor still asleep. My mother tried to hurry and touched her hand to her chest as her breath came up short. By daylight the lawn was painfully ragged with plantain and crabgrass.

The tractor, an ancient gray Ford with a narrow bonnet that suggested the head of a mule, used to wait under the homely overhang that my mother had at last pulled down. There, on the straw-strewn dirt and footworn stones of the barnyard, it was out of the rain but exposed to the wind which, on wet days, would fling and float into this space tingling intimations of the downpour. When I was young this space of shelter had for me a precious wild intimacy. Adze-cuts were still visible on the beams and posts; the tractor, ticking as its motor cooled, reminded me of live animals once housed here. Once I had stood here and watched my mother outrace my father to the house under the rain.