Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  In the early days of June, she let herself pat and poke at the problem of Margaret, which was serious enough to be interesting, but not yet desperate, since the girl herself, though tearful, seemed not unhappy. Margaret, she decided after a few days’ thought, could be a teacher or a nurse, something helpful and secular, but also somewhat virginal. Later on, after a little experience, she might come to marriage and children, but a girl needed a trade, Kate felt, especially if she was not very pretty or vivacious, however kind-hearted. After thinking it out in the abstract golden living room, Kate called Margaret in for confidences.

  Her daughter had grown already into one of the sort of women Kate could never get along with: emotional, large-breasted, hesitant. At one time there had been some speculation that she would become a nun. Her religious early teens had been more fervent than most, and once Kate had come upon a suitcase in Margaret’s closet, leaned against the wall and spread with a white towel. To the right was Margaret’s daily missal, and to the left a collection of prayers for various occasions. Above the makeshift altar and below the brass crucifix, a small gold box thumbtacked to the wall contained a rosary, and taped so as to shine down over all was the flashlight Kate had been looking for in the first place. When Kate questioned her about it, Margaret confessed to fifteen rosaries a night, unless she happened to fall asleep in the middle. Kate had praised her guardedly, and watched her in church. After a while it subsided, and Margaret started kneeling upright at the rail and looking around surreptitiously during Mass like the rest of the children. The rosary was left at home, and the lace mantilla gave way to a demure circlet. Confession ceased to be a daily event, and there was no more secret fasting. Since then, however, Kate had been unable to conquer her sense that Margaret was somehow fragile, somehow pious, and somehow rather weak. When Margaret laughed at her father’s jokes (not really a rare occurrence) Kate was in the habit of being mildly surprised.

  “Mother?”

  “You can close the door, Margaret.” Kate didn’t know how to elicit confidences, or even how to make them. She lay back against the arm of the blue sofa, as if invitingly relaxed. Margaret sat upright in Axel’s wing chair. The curly fringes of her hair were damp; she was everything, they both knew, that was opposed to her mother’s neat coolness. Kate decided to stress teaching over nursing. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. “Will you try again at college this fall?” She sensed that in avoiding sentimentality she was coming out accusatory.

  Margaret shrugged. “I can if you think I should.”

  “Now that’s just the wrong reply, Margaret. I don’t think anything about it. I want to know what you want to do.”

  “I’m fine.”

  This too was the wrong reply. In spite of herself Kate grew annoyed. “Of course you’re not fine.” She tried to clarify her point. “There’s no place here for you anymore.” Margaret looked at her very suddenly and very briefly. “Of course there’s always a place here. I mean that any eighteen- or nineteen-year-old worth . . .” She stopped, took a breath, and started again. “You children always say you’re fine when it’s patently obvious . . .” And now she was sitting up straight. She reclined carefully again. “Now, Margaret,” she began, and stopped. Perhaps, she decided, since the subject was broached, it would be better to just sit quietly until Margaret herself said something. Out in the barn, John and Henry were yelling back and forth to one another. Margaret said quietly, “I am fine. I don’t think the crying is all that important, really.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that, although, of course, it does rather disturb me that you . . .”

  “I am fine, really.”

  “I don’t understand it myself, but it seems . . .”

  “Mother, you never cry. You think it’s a big deal because you never do it, but it isn’t.”

  “Well . . .” It was true that Kate had never cried in her life. Even as a baby she had screamed or shouted, but never shed tears. She had stood dry-eyed at the funerals of her father and mother, at the hunting field destruction of her first and best-loved horse, at the rabies diagnosis of her prize Golden Retriever bitch, at the whinnying screams of three trapped dressage horses in a barn fire in Pennsylvania. When the horse trailer belonging to a friend rolled, fully loaded, over an embankment, and the head and back leg of one of the horses appeared in unnatural relationship to one another, it was Kate who jimmied open the trailer door, tranquilized the animal, and dared to look at the damage. Six months later, when the friend herself fell in a horse show and had her pelvis crushed, Kate was the first into the ring with blankets and brandy. Through all her injuries and childbirths she had remained open-eyed, alert, and silent.

  Now she changed the subject. “Margaret,” she said, sitting up and leaning forward conspiratorially, smiling at the perfection of her own plan. “Margaret, you would make a fine teacher. You’re very good with children, I think. You always do much better with the beginners than I do. I think you really have quite a knack, though you may not see it. Now I think if you had some purpose, some goal that you were working for, then this crying would stop. Perhaps it doesn’t bother you, but surely you’d be better off without it?”

  “Sometimes I think . . . Well, you know, mother, in the Middle Ages there was this woman named Margery Kempe, and she cried all the time. They said it was some kind of visitation from the saints. She couldn’t help herself. People began to avoid her.”

  “Well . . .” About miracles other than her own Kate did not know quite what to say, although she kept an open mind. “But anyway, think about this teacher idea. It seems like a good one to me. Third grade, fourth grade, something like that.”

  “I don’t want to be a teacher.” In its baldness, the statement seemed rather cruel, and Kate smiled, anxious to seem unhurt. Margaret shrugged sheepishly again, rushing to seem unhurtful. After a minute, Kate said, as if idly, “Where did you hear about this Margery Kempe?”

  “In my medieval history course.”

  “Oh.”

  There was another long pause.

  Margaret said, “I thought I’d go out and look over the broodmares this afternoon.”

  “Good idea.”

  Margaret left. Kate heard her sigh as she closed the door behind her, and had to sigh herself.

  In the way that most people cannot remember not walking Kate could not remember not riding. In Maryland families of the tradition and connections her family possessed, horseback riding was the only truly acceptable sport, and sport the only truly acceptable form of recreation. It was not known how much money they had. Mother dressed superbly, there were two servants, riding boots and breeches were custom-made, and the annual subscription to two local hunt clubs was as inevitable as nourishment, but there were complaints about extravagance, and Kate was encouraged to attend a nearby girls’ college, which suited her because she didn’t want to leave her horses behind anyway. She bargained for her best mounts, and bought them green and gawky. When she found out what other local riders paid for their pushbutton hunters, she was indignant for them rather than envious. From her mother and father she had imbibed manners, taste, a certain eloquence, and conversance with a modicum of culture, but it was an unconscious inheritance. She had never for a moment directed her energies toward any activity besides horses until her conversion. To begin to fathom Margaret’s condition of futurelessness was beyond her. Even if you didn’t want to be a teacher, she thought, it was better to think you did until you wanted to be something else.

  Margaret was happily cleaning: cleaning because the upstairs closet needed it (she actually found a pair of overalls with snapping inseams, relics of Henry’s years in diapers), and happy because the huge cedar-paneled space was dark and cool as well as private. She’d been there two hours already, folding old clothes and tying up bundles for the Goodwill. It astounded her how much there was, and what a lot of it she particularly remembered, as if the sight of a dress or a plaid shirt could do away with years of other dresses and shirts. Few of the
clothes had holes or patches, and a number of them were neatly folded and with sales slips tucked into the packages they had come home in, relics of mother’s habit of picking up things at sales that turned out to fit none of the children. Mother would then throw them into the big closet, vowing to give them to some other child at the next birthday, and here they all were.

  In addition to clothing, there were skeins of yarn and half-finished sweaters, pieces of fabric, old patterns, galoshes, boots, shoes, three fedoras, many caps for winter and summer, broken toys and tools, a set of paints, an envelope of photograph negatives, a stack of picture frames, and three sewing boxes. Margaret didn’t know how to sew, and Kate hadn’t made anything in years, but the sewing boxes were lovely. One, of walnut and lined in yellow silk, had belonged to her grandmother, who’d liked to make her own underwear, gossamer and richly trimmed. She’d taken all the stitches by hand. Such a finely feminine accomplishment appealed to Margaret in its very strangeness, for the only underwear practical when you were riding and doing chores and sweating all day was waist high and pure cotton. Her grandmother’s elegance had been merely forbidding during Margaret’s childhood, but now, spreading flat and then folding up nubby yellowed lengths of lace, she sighed nostalgically, imagining the discrimination and the expertise that had gone into their choosing, and that would have gone into their use.

  The door opened, and father said, “Margaret, you’re in there?”

  “Hi, daddy. I’m rooting out the old clothes.”

  “Did you find my supercap, and the Sweater of Invisibility?”

  “Oh, daddy.”

  “Oh, daddy, what?”

  Margaret smiled, but did not say anything.

  “Oh, daddy, what? You’re smiling. You must have found them.”

  “Oh, daddy, they don’t exist.”

  “Don’t think, my dear girl, that just because you’ve been to college and taken a semester of psychology you know everything.”

  “I didn’t take psychology, I took chemistry.”

  “C six, H twelve, O six, and all that?”

  “More or less.”

  “More? Or less?”

  “Too much more, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, what did I tell you? You should have taken psychology.”

  Margaret shut the beautiful box, having ordered the spools of thread into precise rows, and then balled a multicolored tangle between her palms. Axel watched her for a second, then left and closed the door. Margaret began picking up the pieces from old games: Clue, The Game of the States, Careers. All faded but newish looking. Even in winter there had always been other things to do than play games. The door opened again. “Margaret, might you go back to college and take psychology?” said Axel.

  “You’ve been talking to mother.”

  “Why? Has she been after you about this?”

  “Not exactly after me.”

  “Will you tell me what you told her?”

  “I don’t want to be a teacher.”

  “Oh. Had you told her that you did?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” The obvious question hung between them, but Axel did not ask it. Instead, he picked up one of the boys’ old baseball caps and perched it on his head. “This might be it,” he muttered theatrically, “but on the other hand, it never did much for John’s baseball playing.”

  “Oh, daddy.”

  He squatted down, and tucked the baseball cap under the string of one of her parcels. “Margaret.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Your mother and I certainly haven’t talked about this, so I’m not reporting to you officially, but I do think it’s very important, when one is your age, not to get into the habit of quitting something or failing at something. It’s a very hard habit to break.”

  “Yes, daddy.”

  “That sounds like an official, no-comment-so-mind-your-own-business sort of reply.”

  “It isn’t. I’m not in that habit.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I’m not. I’m fine, really.”

  “O.K.” Axel stood up. “Can I take some of these bundles down to the car for you?”

  “I’d love it.”

  Margaret did not blame them for their concern, but neither did she share it. Since her return, the farm had seemed outside the normal grip of time, an arena of endless summer, endless exertion, endless security. Change was something she no longer quite believed in.

  It grew dreadfully hot, so hot that the horses were sweating in their stalls and the geese had given up their continual foraging to settle under the lilac bushes by the house. John hosed and hosed Freeway’s leg, three times a day, an hour each time, and his temper got shorter and shorter. He was hosing when Mr. Eisen came to pay for Spanky. He put down the hose and ran to get his mother. The check, he saw, was for more than he knew the horse was worth, and though he hosed calmly while they were standing there (Ellen’s father grateful and apologetic, Kate benevolent), once he was left alone he had to run around behind the barn and scream at his mother’s dishonesty.

  The afternoon was even muggier. He turned the water over himself, but in seconds even that felt like sweat. And he was sitting in the sun because the hose wasn’t long enough to reach around the corner of the barn. The sun made him feel funny, very breathless and far away from himself; when he’d hosed five minutes the braiding rivulets down Freeway’s leg made him dizzy. Ten minutes seemed like half an hour, and he was nauseated to think of the fifty long ones ahead.

  In the days since the accident, Freeway had come to have the droop-headed, gingerly look of a lame horse. It was more attitude than lack of conditioning. He no longer seemed, even when just walking, to be moving lightly upward and forward; instead he slouched, depressed and heavy-footed. This sudden lack of elegance robbed John of his sympathy and made the hosing a duty, so, although he was faithful about doing it and knew that once he got started it really wasn’t that unpleasant or even boring, he put it off a little each day so that it loomed huge most of the time. Now, he threw down the hose in disgust and decided to hike through the broodmare pasture down to the woods, because even if the blazing walk brought a headache and the grass seed stuck itchily to his damp skin, the smooth, cool pebbles and running water would be worth it. It was almost impossible to stand. Dust and gravel, burning white fences: it all seemed endless. John felt lost in himself, with few thoughts and those like bare rooms off long corridors. Even the expectation of the stream, as he parted the high grass and Freeway limped behind him with an irritating rhythm, grew worthless and old. There were a great many things he hated, and primary among them was sunshine. He hadn’t the energy to enumerate the others, but he supposed that the list would be a catalog of the world.

  Left. Right. Left my wife with thirty-six children, home in the kitchen in a starving condition with no gingerbread left. Dum-dit, dum-it, dum-dit went Freeway’s forelegs in the dumb dirty dust behind him. They came to a path made by the mares and foals. John paused. Freeway nudged his arm with his beautiful velvety muzzle, flared his nostrils peacefully, and pricked his ears. His coppery face was veined and intelligent. Now rocky ground and trees. Shade. Flies. A disappointment, these leaves filmed with dust, unmoving, but he could hear the creek, and then it was before him, wet and clear, mud and pebbles in paradisiacal complement, the banks glistening dark, blanketed in shade. John felt himself knit together. Freeway blew and tossed his head. They came to a declivity of the bank and the horse would go no further. “Come on!” said John, yanking the halter. “Come on!” The stream, which was shallow here, ran clear and musical in its bed. Freeway set himself against the lead rope. John yanked him to the left, then to the right, but the horse’s refusal to enter the water was absolute. John broke a branch from the nearest elm and began to hit him over the head and neck, advancing as Freeway retreated. The leafy branch rose and fell, and the horse jerked and jerked at the rope in John’s hand.

  The branch broke and he threw it down. Freeway was bleeding over the left eye an
d across the nose, and when John lifted his hand to push back the horse’s forelock, he threw up his head and nearly got away. Somehow, John was surprised at this, and hurt. His anger spent, he had worlds of patience now. “Get in the water, Freeway,” he said. “It’ll be so cool.” He led the horse down to the ford, then tried to walk him upstream to the shade. Freeway balked and hesitated at every step, and when John turned toward him, he shied. “Come on, now,” the boy crooned. “I won’t hit you again. Really not. Cross my heart.”

  The horse would go no further than ankle deep, but it was enough. The water slipped around John’s rubber boots, cooling his feet and calves, refreshing his blood as it flowed upward to his heart. He sank his arms in to the elbows, then splashed Freeway’s leg with a gentle motion. He said, “Isn’t that better? Isn’t that better?”

  At feeding time, the bright chestnut banged his buckets like the other horses, but when John came in with the grain, he stood in the corner and laid back his ears. This was more vivid and shocking than anything about the beating, which seemed to John to have taken place at a great distance; the sight of his horse’s brown eye rolling white (the horse bred and trained just for him) made John’s insides feel as if they were concentrating, heating up, draining away from his skin. After dinner he turned down a game of Crazy Eights with Henry (mother said, “You boys have saddles to soap, anyway”) and went up to his room.

  While they were eating, clouds had blown in from the west, and air moved through the papers on his desk, making friendly noises. The disks of the shell chimes someone had given mother on Christmas knocked together, and he could hear Freeway, Herbie, and MacDougal rummaging about in their stalls, for his windows gave onto the driveway, the barn ring, and the main barn. He could, in fact, hear everything: through the open downstairs windows, Peter and Henry were arguing over whether the pitcher was a pot or a dish, since it was between these categories that the division of washing-up labor lay. Margaret was out in the driveway, slapping curry combs against a fenceboard and singing to herself. Jeepers, the border collie, barked. A cat yowled somewhere nearby, and one of the broodmares over the hill whinnied to her foal. “A pitcher is a dish,” shouted mother, “and I don’t want to hear any more about it.”