The Farmer's Daughter (20 page)

They had barely finished their meal when there was a slash of lightning on the ridge across the river and a monsterous crash of thunder. She shrieked, dropped her plate, and burrowed into the tent. B.D. piled an armload of wood on the fire as the first sheets of rain hit.

When he got back in the wind was buffeting the tent and Gretchen was sniveling. He hugged her while listening to the rain pouring heavily onto the tent, knowing where the main leaks would begin. As if on cue he felt water dripping onto his face. Despite the closed flaps there was enough twilight in the tent for him to see the leaks nearest them. He shone the flashlight down the roof line and detected some major problems just as lightning sizzled the air and there was a hollow, raspy crash of thunder.

“I'm supposedly smart so why does this scare the piss out of me?” she said clutching him closer. She craned her neck up. “My feet are getting wet.”

“Everybody gets a little scared. Delmore says it's the ‘thunder beings.'” He could see in the flashlight glare that they were fucked. The tent was leaking everywhere. Also through the front tent flap he could feel the temperature dropping precipitously. “Just a minute.”

B.D. burst out of the tent, trotted to the pickup, and grabbed a big trash bag from his catchall box in the pickup bed. He stooped and shoved the big pile of wood closer to the tent entrance. When he got back in the water was falling everywhere. He shook open the Visqueen bag.

“Get in here. You'll be dry and warm.”

Gretchen got out of her wet summer bag and wiggled into the plastic container. Quite suddenly the rain let up but not the cold wind. In the remaining twilight he could see the driving snow through a crack in the tent flap.

“This is already working,” she said, curled deep in the trash container.

B.D. leaned out and stirred the remaining fire coals and heaped on a pile of pine branches for quick kindling, then cross-piled bigger sticks of hardwood. He shed his soaked clothes.

“Got room for me?” He had left the other trash bag in the truck hoping for companionship.

“If you behave,” she whispered peeking out of the container.

He slid in and grabbed the gin taking a couple of quick gulps. She took a few sips and rubbed his nude chest to warm him.

“We'll be snug as two bugs in a rug,” he said.

“Of course, dear, if you say so.”

They lay there and then the fire caught and the wind subsided. They were rubbing each other and she parted the flaps to watch the snow falling thickly on the fire. It was dark and the fire's eerie orange light in the falling snow looked lovely to her. Now that the thunder was gone she was feeling better with the help of the gin. She took another slug and passed him the bottle. She slid her hand down feeling the closeness of his erection.

“We could have a third session for insurance. We should stop on an odd number. Three not two.”

“Fine by me.” For the first time he was being allowed to run his hands closely over her body which was warm and damp.

She abruptly made a decision. She slid down her shorts and panties and turned her back to him, arching out her bottom and thinking wistfully that this was the way all mammals get their babies. He was thinking immediately that this was the grandest moment of his life. He attacked his job with affectionate energy. Afterward they dozed for a while and then he opened the flaps and studied the scene. The world was quiet but the snow was still falling thickly. These storms rarely brought more than half a foot of snow but he couldn't be absolutely sure they wouldn't get stuck there if the snow mounted to a foot.

“We best get the fuck out of here. Sit tight.”

He pulled on his wet clothes and boots and walked to the pickup, starting it and wiping the wet snow from the windshield. He would come back the next day and pick up his gear. Despite his wet clothes he was still warm from his exertions. When he turned around she was shining the flashlight on him and half out of the bag.

“Stay inside. The pickup doesn't have heat.”

He picked her up in the bag and carried her to the pickup. It took nearly an hour to make their way along the log road to the blacktop that led to town. Off to the east the blackish clouds opened and the moon shone through. She was snoring lightly within her cocoon. He had the absurd feeling of a reverse Christmas in May and remembered the holiday line, “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow.”

The little village had never looked better and when he knocked on the motel office door he could see the bright lights and the snow-covered cars parked in front of the Dunes Saloon. The new owner of the motel looked at him askance but was pleased to take his cash. Early May was slow in the Great North. He carried her into the room like they were newlyweds. She sleepily got out of the bag and under the covers of the twin beds, getting out of her clothes under the sheets.

“You sleep there,” she said, pointing at the other bed.

“It wasn't that bad, was it?” He smiled.

“It was bearable but I'm not intending to do it again. I got this feeling I'm going to be pregnant.”

“I did my best. I'm heading down the street for a few drinks.”

“Suit yourself, darling.”

His heart was light with pleasure as he walked toward the tavern, turning around once to look at his tracks then flopping down in a vacant lot to make a snow angel. It was a fine one and he smelled Gretchen's sweet-smelling sweat on his hands. Somehow the big trash bag had been the perfect place.

The Games of Night

Part I

I Am Afflicted

There was a bit much of me to stay in one locale for very long. I was too heavy a rock to sit on any shelf as country people used to say about especially difficult individuals, no matter that my problem was systemic before it was behavioral. However, I do not favor the posture of a victim.

My parents were both unsuccessful academics, my mother with a master's in classics and my father a doctorate in ornithology which he finally acquired in his early forties from Cornell after a twenty-year struggle with his colleagues and superiors. My mother was of Quaker inclination and grew up on a small farm near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and my father was raised by Unitarian parents in Dowagiac, a small city in southern Michigan near the Indiana border. They shared the reality of their parents being disappointed in them and tended to be remote from their families. Both of my parents as academics tended to think that life was in the effort to understand it. Given this background it is peculiar that I became a hunter though only on two nights a month and I went unarmed.

If you are hard-hearted and hard-boned enough my father's problems were all in all comic. Simply enough he couldn't see well enough to be a competent ornithologist. I mean he could read but birds as objects of study are rarely within reading distance. His sight wasn't disastrously poor but if you're only right 90 percent of the time you'll suffer the ridicule of your peers. Poor-sighted birders can be amazingly accurate when they know the songs but my father's obsessive subject of study was hummingbirds and they don't sing. They're too busy eating to feed their furious energy. My father's main character faults were a free-floating dreaminess and perpetual ill-directed anger. When I was ten years old Cornell let him go from his marginal position as an instructor because of a nasty public fistfight he had with a colleague over a drawer full of sixty-eight Mexican hummingbirds he had hidden in his office from the prying of an up-and-coming hummingbird expert who was an assistant professor and who used his superior rank to bully my father. My mother never forgave him for their expulsion from Cornell which had offered her the only opportunity in her career to teach an actual course in classics literature. She had graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and taken a master's in classics from Harvard but had truncated her studies to marry my father. She told me later when I was in my teens that she had loved my father for a scant two years and after that their marriage was fueled by their intricate quarrels. Such quarrels of academic nature take place on the head of a pin what with both classics and ornithology being of severely limited use in our society.

I've always taken delight in the accidental nature of their meeting and my consequent arrival on earth. She was reading on an old wooden chair near a fine pond on her family's farmette near Fitchburg when down the gravel country road came a van full of birders (it's hard not to think of them as twitchers, the British name) led by my father who could see fairly well back then. He spotted the fetching girl but, more important, a relatively rare Hudsonian godwit wading near the pond's edge. He asked permission to enter the property for a closer look at the bird and my mother said no, that she didn't want to be disturbed while reading. My mother continued this habit of outside reading even when she had to bundle up against the cold. That afternoon while she was working a shift at her father's fusty hardware store my father entered to replace a broken thermos. They began to talk and the fatal tie was made though she wasn't the least bit interested in birds except those unique to Greece and Italy mentioned in classical literature.

It is pleasantly awkward to think of how close we come to not existing. Without the Hudsonian godwit on the pond's edge my father might have slowed down but certainly wouldn't have stopped. And without a broken thermos he wouldn't have visited Grandfather's hardware store. I'm only nominally interested in birds and a thermos is a trifling thing but I owe my life to them. If I ever bothered to design a personal escutcheon there would have to be a needlepointed Hudsonian godwit and thermos.

Enough of my parents. A few days before I left for Northwestern University in Evanston near Chicago at age seventeen, I noticed that my mother was packing several trunks and suitcases with books and clothing and a sparse number of bibelots and mementos in a spare room of our rented house in Cincinnati where my father's academic career had descended to his teaching life sciences at a junior college. This room was at the back of the second story of our house and I'd go in there on warm, sunny afternoons in hopes of seeing the girl next door rubbing lotion on herself and sunbathing. She was homely but her lush, almost tubby body was attractive.

Mother was startled when I entered the room and could not look at me directly.

“I'm leaving when you do,” she said in a whisper.

“I don't blame you,” I said, surprised that I'd said it, watching her pack her small, green Loeb classics.

“I met a man who's going to take me to Greece and Italy.” She smiled at the thought of the trip.

And that was that. She taught a Latin course in adult education, her pay depended on the number of students which was never more than five, and she had met an Italian widower, a retired civil servant in his midsixties who loved Ovid and Virgil as much as she did. At my age it was hard to imagine that a romance had blossomed but I knew little of such matters. The day before we both left I met the man in a park. He was small, courtly, well-dressed, and had a fine sense of humor, the latter a quality totally missing in my father. It was a hot, early-September day and the air stank of auto exhaust and the fetid river. My mother and this man, Armandino by name, walked hand in hand which embarrassed me but I managed to say, “I wish you well.” She was forty at the time and I had no idea what she expected of this man beyond plane fare though they lived in Modena, Italy, with infrequent trips back to the States until he died at eighty at which point she moved to Greece for a number of years before returning to Massachusetts to take care of her ailing parents.

I suppose my mother was an odd duck indeed but then I had no meaningful base of comparison. She certainly wasn't what we think of as motherly but was a far step up from my father who tended to ignore me. From my childhood on she always spoke to me as if I were an adult.

My most peculiar memory of my mother came from a spring afternoon when I was fifteen. I was morbidly distraught over my love for an upper-crust girl who utterly ignored me. I was in the backyard digging my mother a perennial bed while she sat there reading aloud to me from the Rolfe Humphries translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I was too self-sunken to listen. We were, at the time, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Curiously she was never to see any of her perennial beds come to full flower. She knew slightly of my hopeless love having caught me weeping in the lilacs. I was digging with too much energy and she stopped me with a short lecture: “Samuel, try to imagine you are inside the house looking at yourself out the back window. Loving someone who doesn't love you is one of the world's oldest and dreariest stories. Loving someone who thinks they love you can be worse. There's no guarantees but if you don't love you're a coward. So now you're inside looking out here at yourself. Just who do you think you are? That's the point you have to work on.”

This struck home. I have found it helpful at any given moment to know who I am, not to speak of where I am geographically, historically, botanically, geologically. I was amused in a beginning anthropology course at Northwestern to hear a junior professor say that the Navajo bow to the four directions on waking to remind themselves where they are within the nature of life. I spoke briefly to him after class and he advised me to read Clyde Kluckhohn's Navaho Witchcraft, surely the eeriest scholarly text in Christendom. Of course you can shellac Catholicism onto these people but it's a mere patina.

Well, we moved from place to place every year or two in tow to my nitwit father, dragging a U-Haul trailer behind an old Dodge. My two favorites were Bozeman, Montana, and Alpine, Texas, between my years of eight and twelve. I exercised a weak religion in both places in hopes that we could stay in each but it was a vain hope indeed. This was in the sixties but both places were conservative bulwarks against the social upheavals of the time. When we made the long slow drive from Tallahassee in Florida to Montana we were amazed to see actual cowboys doing cowboy things in Wyoming and Montana. I had never been interested in the usual cowboy-Indian myth but this quickly changed. In the parking lot of a shabby country cafe near Hardin, Montana, with an eight-year-old's occasional boldness I introduced myself to two preposterously tall Crow Indians who were drinking morning wine leaning against their decrepit Studebaker. They told me that their grandfather killed Custer which proved to be untrue because it was the Lakota. My mother interrupted the usual quarrel with my father, apologizing to the Indians for my “cheekiness.” The drunker of the Crows said to my mother, “You're quite a piece of ass,” and she said, “Thank you,” and curtsied. I noticed at lunch that my mother was particularly cheery.

We lived in a modernized bunkhouse on a small ranch about a dozen miles from Bozeman where my father taught. The rent was free on the condition that my mother look after the old rancher who showed occasional signs of dementia. This was all arranged by the rancher's obnoxious son who ran an auto dealership in town. The old man was a dream grandfather for me teaching me how to trout fish on a spring creek that ran through the property, ride a horse of which he had several, and drive the ancient Ford tractor. Here I was an eight-year-old driving a tractor like other ranch kids. My father questioned the legality of this but the old rancher said, “I'm the law of the land,” which I learned was a typical Montana attitude, also true in our next stop two years later in Alpine, Texas. My father was forever complaining about the paucity of songbirds in Montana but my mother was generally delighted because the rancher's deceased wife had left ample perennial beds and a good vegetable and herb garden spot. My parents were always squeamish about eating much meat but the rancher had to have it three times a day and I joined in. He was easier to cook for because Mother had only to fry his homegrown beef, spuds, and to a lesser extent pork which he only ate for breakfast. I can still see her sitting beside the luminous peony blooms reading Virgil's Georgics, the text brought to vivid life by her surroundings. When we left Montana after two years I wept for days. When we said good-bye old Duane's voice was quivery and he gave me his spurs saying, “I wish you were my son.” A couple years later when we left Alpine for Cincinnati which I immediately hated I called Duane and got no answer, and then his auto dealer son who said he was dead. I had intended to run away back to where I was happy.

After Bozeman our move to Alpine in west Texas was puzzling. There is a clarity to childhood because the attention you pay to what you are doing is total. Whether you're currycombing a horse or trying to catch a brown trout in a spring creek or teasing a rattlesnake to its exhaustion that's all you're doing. You're also a good listener because you're unsure of what to say except to disagree on principle with your parents. When I sat on the porch one day with old Duane having a summer lemonade he told me that in his own childhood back at the turn of the century there were still a few wolves in the surrounding mountain ranges, the Bridgers and Gallatins, and the huge Spanish Peaks to the south. His talk was intensely vivid as wolves along with grizzly bears were mythologized creatures to me. It was hard to connect anything in my schoolbooks to the world I daily witnessed on that ranch.

It was even harder when we drove south from Montana to the soaring heat of west Texas that August, a region that seems a country of its own. I didn't mind the extreme heat because it reduced my parents' nattering quarrels. My mother would lean forward in the front seat vainly trying to find classical music on the radio as we chugged slowly up the mountains of western Colorado with the Dodge laboring in exhaustion pulling the U-Haul full of Father's books and our odds and ends of battered furniture.

Looking back at my early life from age six I'm amazed at what trifling things determine our future. Being ignored by the rich girl in Cincinnati made me vow never to be as poor as my parents even though in my twenties I realized she was from a distinctly middle-class family albeit still far from our threadbare existence. And on the second day after our arrival in Alpine I was roundly pummeled by two neighbor brothers which caused me to begin a lifelong somewhat obsessive program of physical fitness that has lasted to this day. The brothers were aged ten and twelve and named Dicky and Lawrence Gagnon. I was saved by their sister Emelia who was eleven, not out of kindness but her view that she was destined to direct all activities. She whacked them with an old Mexican riding crop that concealed an actual dagger that no one knew existed except us kids. Emelia had had an early growth spurt and was taller than her brothers. Perhaps from reading a comic book she fashioned herself an Amazon princess and we had to call her “Princess.” She was rather pretty and I felt a yearning toward her that I didn't recognize but began to understand in the two years of our companionship. Their family had only been there a year from Lafayette, Louisiana, and the father worked on pipelines. Their mother, Mina, was corpulent and mostly sat on the shaded porch, drank beer, read mysteries, and thought about what she would eat next. They were an odd pair but she and my mother became friends probably because Mina was knowledgeable about wildflowers. Our shabby little stucco house was on the outskirts of the poor side of town. I was lucky to be taken under the wing of Emelia, Dicky, and Lawrence because they were the toughest kids at the grade school. Their rarely seen father must have made good money because they all had newish bikes while mine was a pinkish girl's bike my father had picked up at a yard sale. My tears over this indignity were brief because I had already come to understand that in practical matters he was a nitwit. To comfort me he said, “At least no one will steal it.”