Remembering (2 page)

Having come in just at starting time from the clear warm morning outdoors, Andy felt suddenly submerged, as if he were sitting on the bottom of an aquarium. That his ears were still tightly stopped from his plane flight seemed to corroborate this impression with physical evidence. It was as though he had changed, not only elements, but worlds. Where was he only this morning?

He got up in the dark, the whole country asleep around him in the stillness at four o'clock. He went to the barn, did the feeding and milking, and returned to the house where Flora had his breakfast waiting. He went in sheepishly, for they had quarreled the night before and he had not succeeded in shedding the blame for it, not even in his own eyes. But she said “Good morning” brightly, and took the milk bucket from him with a smile.

He wanted impulsively to tell her how slow and awkward he still felt, choring with one hand, but he held himself back. He had told her, Heaven knew, often enough, for much of his thought now had to do with the comparison of times, as if he were condemned forever to measure the difference between his life when he was whole and his life now. He told her, instead, “Good morning,” and then, reaching toward her as she turned away, “Listen, Flora, I
hate
to quarrel with you.”

She turned back, smiling, determined, he saw, to be superior to the possibility of yet another quarrel. “Then why do you do it?”

He had hoped, vaguely, for some reconciliation between them. And
so he did not say as he might have said, not in justice, but to prolong the contest, the contact, “Well, why do you quarrel with me?” There was not time for that, and he felt hollowed out by his anger of the night before. He said, “Wait. Listen. Are the children up?”

“No.”

“Well, listen. I don't like to leave, feeling the way I do.”

She answered him in the lighthearted, practical tone that always infuriated him, as she undoubtedly knew. “When the time comes to leave you have to leave, I suppose, and how you feel doesn't matter. How
do
you feel?”

Again the anger flashed in him that would leave him burnt and empty in his soul. “You know goddamned well how I feel.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing her lips tighten. She was straining the milk, not looking at him.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, if you say so. It's lovely that you understand me so well.”

“I feel like I'm no account to anybody.”

“Well, unfortunately, that's not for you to decide. Have you asked me? Have you asked the children? Have you asked Nathan or Henry or Wheeler or your mother?”

He started to raise his right forearm in a gesture, as if the hand were still attached, and then caught himself and put the hook behind him. “
Why
should you want to live with me?”

Even in his anger he knew that he was pleading with her, hoping to be surprised by a better reason than he knew.

“Oh, I guess because I'm used to you. Sort of.”

She had put the strained milk into the refrigerator and now was at the sink, rinsing the bucket, wiping it out with the dishrag.

“Flora, you don't love me. You never have.”

She stood looking at him, holding the dishrag in her hand. And then she flung it hard into his face. He can still feel the lick, as if it is burned onto his skin. Lying in the strange room in the dark, he can feel it. And he can see the look she gave him afterwards, surprised at herself, perhaps, as he certainly had been, but determined too. He saw that he had met finality in her, and he understood it. She was
done
with him as he had become. There was nothing for him to do but change his clothes and go.

She did not look at him again. She did not leave the kitchen. She did not call out to him any word at all. And he said nothing to her. When he shut the door behind him, the children were not awake.

His anger flickers in him again. She will not have him as he is, and he will not crawl back to her through the needle's eye of her demand.

Now he is outside whatever held them together. He feels the vastness of that exterior, but it does not excite him as he wishes. Would there be in all the boundlessness of it another woman, perhaps more than one other, another kind of life, for such a man as himself?

It does not excite him. It is only where he is.

A man with somewhat disheveled hair and a worried look came to the rostrum, removed the worried look from his face as if suddenly aware that he stood in public, and smiled warmly at the clock on the back wall of the room.

“We appear at last to have reached the beginning of our conference, ‘The Future of the American Food System.'”

He introduced himself as a member of the Department of Agricultural Economics and one of the organizers of the conference. He expressed his deep conviction of the importance of the conference in this our Bicentennial Year, quoting, in support, words of a high agricultural official to the effect that “man can live without petroleum, but not without food.” He said that he supposed we had to have
some
pertroleum in order to produce food but that, anyhow, we could not eat petroleum. He said that he was an old farm boy himself, and understood from firsthand experience the problems of America's food producers and also their indispensable contribution to the economy of our country and indeed of the world.

He then said that he felt highly honored to present the first speaker of the day, the high agricultural official just quoted, in fact, who was an old farm boy who had made good, by becoming, first, a professor of agriculture, and then a great administrator in a great college of agriculture, and then the chairman of the board of a great agribusiness firm, and then an agricultural official, and then a high agricultural official.

The professor sat down. The high official stood and, amid much
respectful applause, made his way to the rostrum. His dark suit was as unwrinkled as if made of steel. He was faultlessly groomed. He was a man completely in charge of his face, on which not the slightest smile or frown might appear without his permission. Or he was completely in charge of his face except for his left eye, which, while his right eye looked at his notes or the audience, gazed about on its own.

“Thank you,” he said. “I have thought that perhaps it is inappropriate for me to speak at the beginning of this conference, the title of which implies that there may be some question or problem about the future of the American food system, and I can only reassure you: The American food system is going to continue to be, because it is, one of the wonders of the modern world.”

Andy, sitting in the back row with Flora's lick angry on his face, shrugged it away in response to pain from another adversary. He took from his jacket pocket a small notebook, opened it, and wrote, “Am Fd Syst. Wndr of mdrn wrld.” After months of enforced practice, his left hand was finally learning to write at moderate speed a script that was moderately legible. But it was still a child's script that he wrote, bearing not much resemblance to the work of his late right hand. That had flowed like flight almost, looping and turning without his consciousness, as if by intelligence innate in itself. This goes by rude twists and angles, with unexpected jerks, the hand responding grudgingly to his orders, seized with little fits of reluctance.

“I thank my stars,” the high official said, “that I grew up a farm boy, and had the opportunity to work closely with my father. I learned some things then that I have never forgotten, and that have stood me in good stead.

“But let's face it. Those days are gone, and their passing is not to be regretted. A lot of you here are old farm boys, and you know what I mean. You knew what it was to look all day at the north end of a south-bound horse. You knew what it was to walk that outhouse path on a zero night. Your mothers and sisters knew what it was to stand over a hot woodstove when it was a hundred degrees, and no air conditioning.

“I, for one, don't want to go back to those days. I'm glad you can't turn back the clock. I want to live in a changing, growing, dynamic society. I want to go forward with progress into a better future.”

Andy wrote, “Lvd wrk. No rtrn. Lvs ftr.”

“When I was a boy,” the high official said, “forty-five percent of our people were on the farm. Now we have reduced that to about four percent. Millions of people have been released from farmwork to make automobiles and TV sets and plumbing fixtures — in other words, to make this the greatest industrial nation the world has ever seen. Millions of people have been freed from groveling in the earth so that they can now pursue the finer things of life.

“And the four percent left on the farm live better than the forty-five percent ever hoped to live. This four percent we may think of as the permanent staff of this great food production machine that is the farms and fields of America. These people have adapted to the fact that American agriculture is big business. They are as savvy financially as bankers. And they are enjoying the amenities of life — color TV, automobiles, indoor toilets, vacations in Florida or Arizona.

“Oh, I know there are some trade-offs involved in this. There is some breakdown in the old family unit we used to have. The communities are not what they were. I see some small businesses closing down. Farmers have fewer neighbors than they used to have. We have some problems with soil erosion and water shortages and chemical pollution. But that's the price of progress.

“Let me tell you something. This is economics we're talking about. And the basic law of economics is: Adapt or die. Get big or get out. Sure, not everybody is going to make it. But then, not everybody is
supposed
to make it. This is the way a dynamic free-market economy
works.
This is the American system.

“I'm telling you one of the greatest success stories you have ever listened to. The American farmer is now feeding himself and seventy other people. And he can feed the world. He has put in the hands of our government the most powerful weapon it has ever held. I am talking about food.”

Andy wrote: “4%. Grvlng in rth. Big biz. Amnty of lf: TV. Trd-offs: fam, cmmnty, nghbrs, soil, wtr. Prc of prg. Adpt or die. Gt bg or gt out. Fr mkt. 1 to 70. Fd wrld. Weapon.”

The audience sat submerged in the bright sea-space of the room, the air conditioner pulsing in the walls, the high official's confident, dryly intoned sentences riding over them, wave after wave.

Andy thought, “Why did they invite me?” But he guessed he knew: because he had achieved a certain notoriety for contrary opinions. He was there to inject a note of controversy into the proceedings.

He is a man, he thinks, of contrary opinions — a man the size of a few contrary opinions. In the simple darkness, far away, he no longer feels the uneasiness, the fear indeed, that tightened him in that meeting room. He is afraid, but not of the rostrum, not of any answer anyone might make to anything he might say. What he is afraid of now has not answered.