The Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Farther south of Towner, down in the Arkansas Valley, the snow had fallen as rain. The same was true farther east, in Kansas. But the altitude at Towner, which lies due east of Eads, was just high enough to sustain a blizzard. The country there is as stark as a coroner’s receipt, even on a hot autumn day with no chance of snow in it. Or perhaps that’s just the way it seems after reading those old headlines and looking into those almost forgotten faces. Their names were Louise Stonebreaker, Bobby Brown, Arlo Unte, Kenneth Johnson, and Mary Louise Miller, the youngest of them all. The bus driver was Mary Louise’s father.

  At halftime in Absarokee, Montana, last Friday night, the candidates for homecoming queen of Absarokee High School stood at midfield, young women shivering in bright, backless gowns as though they were creatures just uncocooned. Beside each queen candidate stood a king candidate who was also a football player with helmet-matted hair, a running back or tight end or linebacker armored in black and orange, the colors of the Absarokee Huskies. The rest of the Huskies had just tramped off the field, and the king candidates looked impatient to follow, detained only by female hands laid lightly upon their arms. The Huskies were trouncing the Lodge Grass Indians, from the Crow Reservation, and the mood was high, for this would be the Huskies’ first victory of the season, 42–8.

  The Huskies had made all the pregame noises required of football players pumping up for a homecoming game. They groaned and grunted and thumped each other on shoulder pads and helmets. They seemed to be trying these noises on for size, as though they didn’t quite believe in the ferocity they showed or weren’t quite certain who they were showing it for. The psychological distance from the bleachers to the playing field, even in a small town like Absarokee, is as great as that from the dress circle to a Broadway stage. The players felt it. Even the water boy felt it, running in self-conscious haste to the loose huddle that formed onfield during time-outs.

  Rain was expected, and fans had parked directly behind the bleachers in case of it. But the rain held off, and so the pep band played and the cheerleaders cheered and students strolled back and forth along the cinder track in front of the bleachers as if it were a midway of sorts, while on the field a boy named Wilcox was being tackled by a boy named Rides the Bear. Young cowboys walked past riding their hips like horses. Girls walked past in knots of four or five, borrowing babies from the hands of the mothers they passed. Children played in the sand pit where broad-jumpers would land during track season. Everyone felt the season pivoting, as if the giant illuminated A on the hill above Absarokee High stood suddenly for Autumn.

  The weight of the afternoon sun already falls more lightly on my back than it did a few weeks ago. The days seem not only shorter but also somehow thinner too, and every morning that dawns above freezing feels like a morning won back from the inevitable. Nothing is dry yet, of course, but the promise of eventual dryness is in the air. A day will come when every crown of seeds will rattle on the weeds in ditches and fields, when leaves will crunch obligingly underfoot again.

  A wet summer is a dark summer, and around here this was one of the darkest summers on record. In fact, darkness was about ten inches above normal by the time fall began. Never were the fungicidal qualities of exterior paint more highly prized than during this summer past. Old wooden barns and outbuildings became studies in parasitism. In our bedroom a mushroom the size of a child’s head sprouted from an interior beam. All in all, it was a good summer to be an epiphyte from one of the gloomier, more downcast species.

  But as autumn advances, the woods will open up again. The deep shade, which seemed so unfamiliar when it first returned in late spring, will dissipate. Antiseptic sunlight will again reach the waterlogged earth beneath the great stands of oak and maple. Even as daylight slackens week by week, the turning, yellowing leaves will reflect more light in wavelengths with a warm, inviting cast. As the leaves cover the ground, the floor of the deciduous forest will begin to throw light upward toward the sky. The landscape will seem to decrease in volume because the woods are bare.

  What all of this means is that the catbird will be leaving soon. It’s lived in the green shade beside a rotting porch all summer long. I glimpse it only now and then—a slender gray bird wearing a black skullcap, scratching among the lower branches along the edge of the woods. When it calls, it doesn’t sound like a cat meowing. It sounds like an imitation of a cat meowing, like a squirrel throwing its voice in order to puzzle a dog. But when it sings, the catbird distills shadows into music, the way the nightingale does in English poetry. There’s a faintly mechanical quality to its song, as though the notes were produced by small bells or the operation of intricate machinery. When the woods open up and there’s no shade left to hide it, the catbird will go. Summer will finally have come to an end.

  The farmers I buy hay from said it wasn’t frost the other morning. I saw them walking across high, rocky ground, beyond a barbed-wire fence and an old truck body, driving heifers from one pasture into another. Each man carried an old, smooth stick with a wide crook in the end. The older farmer walked as though he hated cattle—would like for just one morning to sleep in and not have to wonder what spooked the cows through the fence during the night. He was hunched, sore from what might be Lyme disease or what he calls “sugar”—meaning diabetes—or just lingering stiffness from the ribs he broke when he fell from a hay wagon in June. He looked cold, as if the frost had gotten into him.

  Except that it wasn’t frost, just heavy dew. The roof on that dairy barn had turned white, and on my deck at home the wood was grease-slick. But the thermometer had only read thirty-six degrees overnight. All the cold air had slid downhill into a basin of fog. From my place I could see its limbs, and from the hillside where those two farmers work, I could see the body of the fog slowly dissolving down in the hollow on what would turn out to be a bright fall day, the first day that truly felt like fall. Where moths had tented the tree limbs along the road, it looked as though the fog had torn off in rough shreds as it shouldered downhill toward town.

  I had driven across the valley at seven-thirty and up onto the skyline farm for a load of hay, the fifth or sixth in a week of fourteen-mile round trips for hay. We’ll stack eight hundred bales in our barn by the time we’re done, and the pickup holds fifty-two bales. Sometimes both farmers stack hay in the truck, and sometimes I take the place of one and climb onto the hay wagon and toss bales down. The running gear creaks as I work my way, kneeling, across the top row of bales. I can smell the smoke from the woodstove that burns year-round in the milk room across the barnyard. The emergency-services radio in the coveralls of one of the farmers scratches out an unintelligible phrase from time to time. How an actual emergency sounds is hard to tell. Perhaps the pitch is higher or the unintelligible words run closer together.

  At home I ease an orange hay elevator onto the stack in the pickup. It starts with a whine that never lets up, kicking loose hay into the air, throwing dust into the sunlight. The bales catch on the chain-teeth and shudder upward at an angle into the darkness of the mow, where my wife’s hands and my father’s hands catch them. The horses stand by the barnyard gate and watch philosophically, deeply satisfied with the proceedings. The barn dog lies by the horse trailer and watches too. His house is filled with last year’s hay, swept down from the mow when we began stacking a few days ago. We’re all bone tired. Real frost will come tonight, and it will bring down the garden, which was doing a good job of bringing itself down already. We should stack wood or lift tomato cages or till ground for next year’s garlic. Instead we’ll sit in the autumn sunshine and enjoy being bone tired, harvesting our fatigue.

  October

  The weather has been unseasonably hot in central Iowa, and farmers who are used to worrying about getting crops out of the fields before the weather turns wintry are harvesting with the air-conditioning turned up full in the cabs of their combines. The Midwest is never more beautiful than at this season, even though the air is dull with humidity. The ditches have ripened
into pale ocherous colors, shades of russet intermixed, and in the fields where soybeans have already been harvested, the stubble lies slicked back like an old man’s crew cut. The corn hasn’t stood in shocks for sixty years and more, but even as it stands—still in rows, dry, skeletal ruins of the plant it was in mid-August—it suggests cool weather, sharp nights, and the plumage of that most autumnal bird, the pheasant.

  Because of the dry, warm weather, harvest is running ahead of schedule, and the fields are full of machinery. All-devouring combines run down the rows cutting twenty-foot swaths well into the night, moving across the landscape in the darkness, their lights suggesting earthgoing yachts or mobile oil refineries. Grain wagons pull alongside, offloading beans or corn from the combines’ hoppers. In the stubble rows, trucks with red boxes wait to be loaded, and then one after another they make their way to grain elevators and storage bins, where grain dryers work ceaselessly. The local news programs report uneven crop maturity, and when they’re asked, farmers say they hope for a freeze.

  It’s a laborious landscape, and that’s part of its beauty. But even as farmers stare ahead at the rows of uncut corn in the headlights, their minds are on the grain glut, which has dropped prices below the cost of production, and on the decline in the value of farmland. The fields are enormous, the yields are remarkable, the machinery is gargantuan, and so is the level of agricultural debt. The margin on which the enterprise operates this year is nearly nonexistent, which is why, as farmers watch the harvest progress, their minds are also on Washington, where year after year Democrats and Republicans debate the terms of relief.

  One day last spring the fire in the kitchen woodstove went out and was never relit. I didn’t record the date, because some endings are lost in a crowd of beginnings, passing unnoticed until months later, when the oversight seems almost melancholy. So I note here the first fire of the new season: October 4, thermometer lodged in the midforties, a chill in the bones of the house, rain falling hard through dwindling yellow hickory leaves. When the kindling caught the first dry log—a length of honey locust—in its flames, the stove called all the dogs. They sprawled across the warm tiles, mouths agape. Not a half hour had ticked away, and there we were, back on the night before the fire went out for the last time last spring.

  A kind of accounting has been going on here for the past few weeks, how many pounds of honey gathered, how many bales of hay laid up in the loft, how many cords of wood stacked and under cover. This is such an ancestral satisfaction—the antithesis of the city’s constant abundance—that it feels almost embarrassing to acknowledge it, the sign of the hayseed. The manure pile, steaming in the cool drizzle, looks like simple wealth, and so do the hickory nuts that crack beneath my feet as I walk to the barn and the milkweed pods that crowd against the fence line, ready to burst. The mice are fattening up in the woodshed. There’s a fine crop of horsehair coming in on the mares and the gelding. It will go to make bird nests in spring.

  In April what you see are your own intentions. In October you see their unexpected wreck and fulfillment. All summer potato vines spread across a corner of the garden. But when I lifted a plant, hoping to rob new potatoes, I saw that the vines, every one, had rotted right at the soil. Meanwhile two peach trees—planted vainly, I thought, by previous owners—blossomed heavily and set fruit. When September came, the peaches turned as red as the Virginia creeper is turning now. I finally picked one, just to savor my doubts. But it was the very promise of a peach. A garden is so full of cheap sermons.

  I found myself Monday on a stretch of rural highway in eastern Colorado at the time of morning when round bales lying in the hay fields look like cattle grazing, and vice versa. I was driving toward the sunrise, which was still only a premonition in the distance. The horizon in that direction was a long, low ridgeline dotted either with trees that resembled a band of clouds or clouds that had rooted themselves with stems to earth or possibly very large sheep moving single file with a grim and stately purpose.

  Over the ridge and into the next swale rode the pickup, and there I saw a small corral with four horses, all of them looking intently—wishfully, I suspect—at the kitchen light that had just been switched on in a dark ranch house across the barnyard. On a fence post near the road sat a bulbous red-tailed hawk. The rising light caught in his eye, and to me he looked dour, hungry for a diet less rich in rodents, a palate-cleansing carrot perhaps or a plate of watercress.

  I’ve always loved the crescendo Monday brings, but I’ve always thought of it in strictly urban terms. By the time darkness has begun to wear away on a New York Monday morning, the city has rumbled to life, shaking off Sunday like a distant childhood. Soon the streets are filled with people, some of whom look as though their coattails had caught in the city’s gears and dragged them headlong from their beds. Millions of weekday morning habits iterate themselves anew, yet even the familiarity of it all seems somehow fresh.

  But in deep country, near, say, Last Chance, Colorado, the week evolves more slowly. Monday’s chores look much like Sunday’s. The headlong rush to get kids off to school is no different on the Colorado plains than anywhere else. But once the school bus has come and gone, once the high school kids have driven themselves off to class in a neighboring town, silence falls over the highway again. The low angle of the sun seems to give every object it strikes a higher profile. Its light throws the long shadow of a pickup and horse trailer into the far ditch, where the driver waves to himself.

  On yet another fence post another hawk preens, and on the unplowed side of the road antelope move stiffly up a ridge and out of sight. Then the highway is still, except for the wind. What day of the week it is is anybody’s guess until the next vehicle passes, when, for a moment—in the presence of a service truck or a postal carrier or a delivery van—Monday reappears.

  When fall comes to the Southwest, the chamisa blooms, and suddenly a shrub that is inconspicuous most of the year seems to dominate the landscape. An old chamisa plant grows upright out of a weir of downswept dead boughs, and its whiplike pale green branches terminate in clumps of yellow florets, which brush against one’s hips. When rain falls—and Santa Fe recently got half an inch—the scent of chamisa seems almost too heavy for the wind to carry. The odor is opaque, insidious. It infiltrates. It loiters. Even with nostrils buried deep in the plant, you end up asking, What does chamisa smell like?

  The common name of chamisa is rabbitbrush, and the scientific name is Chrysothamnus nauseosus, which says something about the olfactory impression chamisa makes on botanists. But nauseosus is a pretty vague descriptor. If you went about giving binomial names to the artifacts of modern life, how many of them might deserve nauseosus as their specific term? Coming upon a stand of chamisa, trying again to decipher its scent, you wonder, Nauseosus how? “It smells like a rank little fox,” said one Santa Fe resident. “It smells like being four years old,” said another, an answer that hints at the profound association between odor and memory. To use the perfumer’s language, the scent of chamisa is at once woody, green, and animalic, with several miscellaneous notes thrown in. It smells like a kitchen full of fresh herbs where a mouse has died behind the stove. It smells like a sachet in a drawer full of rubber gloves. It smells like the Southwest in autumn.

  Talking about scent is like speaking a foreign tongue badly: you’re always searching for a word that lies just out of reach, uncertain, finally, of your own meaning. It’s easier to describe a complex emotion than a complex odor. What do the dogs of Santa Fe think when the chamisa comes into bloom? Perhaps an entire spectrum of scent goes into eclipse, concealed beneath the weight of rabbitbrush. Or perhaps in the unending orchestration of smell in their world, the blossoming of chamisa is like the sudden entrance of the cello section, playing slightly out of tune and out of tempo. In the end, you’re brought up hard against the circularity of scent. Chamisa smells like chamisa. And vice versa.

  On a warm October afternoon, high in a sugar maple, a crow tore apart a hornet’s nest,
discarding shreds of gray hornet-paper like leaves in a monochrome fall. A hail of ladybugs rose and then fell against the south side of the house. They were hapless fliers burdened by ungainly wing-covers, clattering almost inaudibly against the parched siding, seeking cracks and lifted clapboards to winter under. The sight of so many ladybugs in flight, each one armed with a faint acrid stench, looked like the threat of a hard season coming. When that many creatures take shelter at once, you wonder what they’re sheltering from. Soon we’ll know.

  The woods are bright, brighter where the maples stand against a backdrop of unchanging hemlock. Even as light leaks out of the month, the woods seem to compensate, opening again to the western horizon. The sun has made its way southward like the fox that crosses the pasture most evenings. The air wears the tannic acidity of decaying leaves. The suppleness of light just when it fades in late afternoon seems almost mocking. It’s a humiliating display of color, towering out of the treetops and into the backlit clouds overhead. At twilight Lindy found a newly killed male cardinal lying in the grass, its head severed by one of our cats. There was nothing in the day as sharply defined as the line where the black around its bill met the red of its crest.