The Farmer's Daughter (3 page)

“Thanks for teasing me,” Tim said when he left. He poked her lightly in the ribs with a forefinger and laughed. She blushed with shame when he drove away though she was glad he had told Rover to stay with her because the dark is darker when you're alone. She got out her father's pistol and holster and practiced quick draws in the hall mirror. Tim had taught her but she wasn't as fast as he was at age seventy-three. She went to bed and tried to concoct a fantasy where she was naked in bed with Montgomery Clift but with no experience she couldn't make the fantasy convincing. What worked was the two of them necking in a phone booth at night in the rain.

The next morning she was watering the plants in the greenhouse, a two-hour process, and getting ready to rototill the open garden when her father arrived to Rover's howling. The dog's fidelities were limited to Tim and Sarah and she would shy away if anyone else tried to pet her. Frank stood blank-faced in the greenhouse door. She tried to embrace him but he was stiff as an oak plank.

“Your brother's a goner, that's for sure.”

“He's dead?” Her voice wobbled.

“May as well be. He and his two buddies were driving at ninety on the way back to the base with the cops chasing them. One of the buddies is dead. The car rolled about ten times. Your brother fractured arms, legs, and pelvis but most important he has severe closed-head injuries. He didn't recognize me and the doctors said he never will. He'll be like that Denison boy in town, who sits on the porch in a wheelchair drooling.”

“I'm so sorry. What happens now?” She began to cry.

“Life in a V.A. hospital. How are you feeling about your mother?”

“I'm not sure what to think. I can't quite believe she went away.”

“It's the same with me. She called but it didn't quite sink in. Of course I know I'm real slow emotionally. I couldn't believe these two things could happen at once.”

“She wasn't too happy,” Sarah suggested. “She didn't like it way out here in the country.”

“She was a pain in the ass these last couple of years. When she wasn't working she was frantic and when she was working she was complaining.” Tears were forming in his eyes.

“We'll figure things out.” Now his body softened when she embraced him.

“We'll have to.” He went outside and cranked up the rototiller. At lunch he acted as if nothing had happened.

Two days later at midmorning when he was rigging up a three-way tow hitch on the pickup, she asked him what he had in mind.

“It's your birthday and Grandma called when you were giving Lad his oats. She reminded me to get you your own vehicle on your birthday. You'll need it for school this fall.”

She was nearly dizzy while she got ready, partly at the idea of her own car but also that five years of homeschooling was at an end. Perhaps in reaction to her mother she wasn't a complainer but she devoutly hoped for something fresh in her life aside from the once-a-month 4-H club meeting.

Chapter 4

“Before we visit car lots we're going to a doctor to get you a pill,” Frank said halfway to Bozeman on that fair May morning.

“Dad, I don't need a pill. I've never even had a boyfriend.”

“Everyone can get carried away,” Frank said as if the subject was closed.

“Mom said I never could have the pill because it causes bad behavior,” Sarah said idly.

“Forgive me but there were many times when your mother didn't know her ass from a hole in the ground as they used to say back in Findlay.”

“I suppose that's true. Her preacher said that there should be a prison camp for all gay people in California.”

The visit to the gynecologist was unpleasant though the doctor, a woman in her fifties, was quite nice and said, “You have a gorgeous body, young woman. Out in the backcountry where you live you'll have to carry a pistol against cowboys.”

Sarah thought the stirrups were a hundred times worse than a dentist's chair. She recovered in two hours of wandering car lots with Frank though his questions to salesmen were so thorough it made her back teeth ache. They had to double back three times before they reduced the possibilities. It came down to a choice between a red Toyota and blue Subaru, both four-wheel drive which her father thought obligatory for mud season and winter weather. Finally Frank wrote a check and hooked the Toyota up to the tow bar.

“I had planned on us having a look at the university and then a steak dinner but Old Tim wanted to bake a cake and grill an elk loin for you. I know the old fool is sweet on you. Evidently men never get over women. Back at Purdue my philosophy professor said the hardest thing for people is the unlived life.”

“Dad, for God's sake, he is just my best friend.” Sarah blushed over her little games which boys referred to as prick teasing. She figured that if it wasn't Tim it would be someone else but he was the only man around. Sarah wasn't mentally comfortable with the biological aspects of life. Everything comes on so fast. It was one thing to have a fantasy about the deceased Montgomery Clift which was as safe as your favorite pillow but she in no way had any desire for reality to intrude. She had developed the soul of a solitary during her homeschooling and her life had been without the dozen adolescent crushes that trail one from childhood through puberty, the terrifying lack of justice in having an infatuation with someone who hasn't quite noticed that you exist. Her taste for love was more spiritual but not the way Peppy would prate at her about how one's body was a holy temple of God. It was comically shocking that despite her beliefs Peppy had gone off and fucked a geezer rancher she had met at Giselle's. Sarah only liked to study nonhuman biology. For the time being she preferred the idea of physical love to stay bathed in mist. Just last week at 4-H club, on a warm afternoon, a Mexican man had shown up at Lahren's trailering a cutting horse stud up from Kingsville, Texas. Mr. Lahren was going to board the horse for a rich cousin from Bozeman. Both man and horse were the most beautiful creatures of their kind that Sarah had ever seen. The Mexican man was quite shy and just nodded at everyone then worked the travel kinks out of the stud in a corral. The horse was wild but everyone agreed that the Mexican sat a horse better than anyone. The boys stood back more than a bit jealous and when the man dismounted and led the horse into a box stall in the barn the girls flittered around him like fireflies with hot butts. He bowed to them all and carried his saddle and bridle toward his truck stopping at the entrance to the barn where Sarah stood having held herself back from the gaggle, looking at his chest and the muscular arm that held the saddle over his shoulder. He paused in front of her and smiled.

“What's your name?”

“Sarah,” she said in a whisper because that was all she could manage.

He nodded as if he'd received an important piece of information and strode to his pickup. Meanwhile she felt a heat in her lower body almost like she might pee her pants. The girls circled her wondering what he had said but she walked out the door and watched his truck head down the road encircled by dust. She was startled by her feelings but decided she couldn't think about it at the time. It would take a trip to the canyon to figure it out.

The birthday party was subdued because everyone was tired and Priscilla couldn't come because “a certain special someone” had shown up. Frank always referred to Priscilla as “Tomcat” which Sarah didn't like but she had admitted to herself that the nickname was appropriate. She had a peculiar sense of foreboding when she saw Tim wince twice while inspecting her new used vehicle. The second time he paled crawling out from under the pickup where he'd inspected the muffler.

“She's got about a year on her,” Tim said, and Sarah wondered why a muffler was a “she.” “This country is hard on mufflers,” he added.

The elk loin was grilled perfectly but Tim was a bit pissed that his German chocolate cake was a little lopsided. He sipped from his whiskey flask and she saw him sneak a pill with his back turned. Her father had a two-dollar bottle of Gallo burgundy and poured her a few ounces. They toasted and the men sang a horrible version of “Happy Birthday.”

Twice that night Sarah had gotten up to look at her truck in the dim yard light. She fully understood that it meant freedom. Unlike Peppy, Frank never tried to control her. There was always the example of his younger sister Rebecca who had been wild in her youth but now was an important astronomer on the faculty of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Rebecca had only visited them a couple of times because she loathed Peppy and the whole idea of Sarah's homeschooling.

In the morning Sarah confronted her father.

“What's wrong with Tim?” In the night she'd recalled that she'd first noticed that Tim was in pain a few weeks before when he took her to the county seat in his old Studebaker so she could get a learner's driving permit. He had stumbled in a cafe when they'd stopped for a hamburger and when he'd caught himself at the table's edge he'd lost his color.

“He's feeling poorly.” Frank was listening to the weather and livestock report without interest.

“I figured that. I want to know why?”

“He didn't want you to know anything on your birthday. Well, you know he was gone two days last week. He was at the V.A. hospital in Great Falls. There are five kinds of prostate cancer. Three aren't so bad and two are real bad. He's got one of the real bad ones. These old cowboys are used to putting up with pain and he waited too long for any possible treatment. It's spread around, you know, metastasized.”

Sarah began to sob and Frank came over and put his hands on her shoulders. Frank couldn't think of a thing to say about an obviously fatal illness.

When Sarah went outside to start her morning's work in the greenhouse and the open garden she barely noticed her red pickup. The lump in her throat was overwhelming. She kept on walking up toward Tim's cabin meeting Rover, who looked distressed, halfway. Tim was dozing in his rocker on the porch facing east toward the rising sun. There was water and a bottle of pills on a small table beside him. She was questioning herself whether anyone had a religion to deal with this. Peppy had browbeaten her with her own evangelical religion but she had followed her father's example and not much had stuck. Her father had taught her astronomy all too well setting up his Questar in the nighttime yard. Sarah could not imagine that people like God and Jesus shaped like humans could invent the billions of galaxies. She meant the gray-bearded God sitting on a throne behind a gate and the Jesus perpetually on a cross with blood leaking from his hands and feet. The invisible Holy Spirit made more sense. Someone had to invent horses, dogs, and birds. She thought she sensed a spirit of some sort in certain creatures or places but was unsure about humans who according to her history books had a grim and murderous record. As she was sitting there beside the sleeping Tim her mind whirled with the immensity of it all, and then it winnowed down into the inevitable self-pity. How can I lose the only man I love in my life except my dad? Her loneliness was as big as the landscape.

Tim awoke and she took his hand.

“I suppose you've been told?”

“Yes.”

“It feels like I'm sitting on a spike or a hot rock. I figured it would go away.”

“I'm so sorry.”

They drove up to their miniature canyon with her at the wheel of the Studebaker and Rover between them ever alert for threat. It was a warm morning and she reminded herself to be wary for rattlesnakes. She helped him up onto her flattish boulder.

“I hate these goddamned pills. They make me woozy as a bottle of whiskey but they said the cancer is traveling up my spine.”

She cradled him with his head and shoulders on her lap and the braless nipple of a breast beneath her T-shirt grazing his nose.

“You got my heart sounding like a beehive. I suspect this is how I started.”

“There has to be a chance.”

“That isn't what I was told. Three score and ten is what they call it.”

They went up to the canyon for nearly another month until he couldn't walk and then she would visit his cabin. Several times he called her Charlotte, the name of his first love over near Livingston, and they would laugh. A hospice woman came from the county seat during the day. She and Tim had known each other in childhood and didn't like each other. Sarah would referee their spats.

“In first grade she was always beating on me,” Tim said.

“You and the other boys peed on my dog. You were the one I could catch,” Laverne said. She was about seventy, quite religious, and an expert on cancer care having nursed her husband and sister through their deaths, the husband with a brain tumor, and the sister pancreatic. She had a sense of humor and after praying on her knees beside Tim's bed she'd say, “Here's God's answer to pain,” and give him a shot of morphine. At night Sarah gave Tim a shot which was illegal but Laverne would say, “I don't give a shit about the law.” She carried a six-shooter in her purse and while driving she'd shoot out the window of her car at marmots, coyotes, crows, whatever. To her knowledge she had never hit anything.

Sarah slept on a cot near Tim's bed. Sometimes she'd read to him from old Zane Grey novels which she didn't care for, and sometimes she'd play old-time country music like Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, and George Jones which she also didn't like preferring Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead or classical music.

What kept her going was her four hours of work with her father in the gardens every morning. Counting the different lettuces they were raising twenty-three kinds of vegetables, some of them exotic for Montana but they sold well to the university people in Missoula. When they first raised arugula and radicchio to fulfill a demand Sarah and her father were suspicious of the flavors but shrugged off their own tastes. Japanese eggplant was also a mystery. It was the spirit of repetition in gardening that soothed a person. She'd finish work, eat a little lunch, doze in the hammock for fifteen minutes, then head up to Tim's.