by Jim Harrison
“Joseph?” Her voice was thin. “I made some coffee. Please come in. Did you feed the birds?”
“Shit, I forgot.” He poured a cup of coffee. They kept a few chickens, ducks, and geese. Other than Catherine's horse they were the only animals left on the farm. The last cow had gone dry the fall before and he had given it to a poor family to slaughter. His father had been stupid about animals, always looking for a combination out of which some profit could be wrung. While most farmers stuck to a single breed of cow, Joseph's father had moved improvidently from Jerseys to Holsteins to Guernseys, thus never building up a profitable dairy herd. He was simply too whimsical, preferring Poland China pigs to the better Chester Whites because he liked the name. It was obvious to the other Swedes in the farm community that his people had been fishermen in Sweden before they emigrated, not farmers.
“Joseph?”
He numbly escaped his reverie and walked to her bedroom in the gathering light. There was a thin line of red out the east window.
“How are you feeling, Mama?” He leaned and kissed her. Her Swedish Bible was open on the bed beside her. He didn't know the language and wasn't curious.
“Very badly. It feels like there are nails driven in my stomach.” It wasn't a complaint but a statement of fact. “You have to marry Rosealee if you are going to sleep all night with her, Joseph. You weren't brought up to act this way.”
“I know it.” He felt shy before her biblical authority.
“Rosealee told me the other day that she didn't think you wanted to marry her. I told her nonsense. You were just waiting for me to die so you wouldn't have so much on your mind.”
“Maybe I'll marry her in June. People get married in June a lot.” He wanted to get off the hook, feed the birds and go to bed.
“That's so they can have a spring baby,” his mother laughed. “You're not thinking of babies at your age? But I had you at thirty-nine. Carl wanted to try again for a son. He was so happy when you came he bought a frilly nightgown for me.” She laughed again.
“You know I have to get a job. I told you the school is closing. I can't marry without a job.”
“Nonsense. Sell the forty to Atkins. You work too hard. Marry and farm Orin's place. You're stupid for a school-teacher. You said you were going to see the ocean. You could take Rosealee for a nice honeymoon to the ocean. Your father took me on a train to Wyoming. We saw Indians out there.”
“I'll think about it.’
Joseph fidgeted in his chair. It was getting light and she turned off her bedlamp.
“Well I know you wanted to marry Rosealee when Orin did. Now you can. So do it.” She closed her eyes, a clear signal for him to leave her alone with her pain which had deepened her lines and shrunk her face. Joseph kissed her forehead.
One late sleepless night a week later he came downstairs and ate some herring alone. He tiptoed through the parlor and into the bedroom but his mother was sleeping, if fitfully. He missed the rye bread she made once a week. The rye bread was good with herring as was the salty butter she no longer churned. He looked down at his plate of herring and closed his eyes, overwhelming himself with the feeling that they were somehow all alive and vibrant again. Arlice was there teasing her older sisters to distraction. Dad would tell her to stop but he was gentlest to her. Dad himself was very happy because he had gotten a nickel more a bushel than he had expected for the potatoes. The pigs were fat, ready for their week of butchering, plus a single steer for the winter's beef. The beef was an event. They ate little fresh beef except right after butchering before it was dried, canned, or corned. That is why they so enjoyed Orin's or anyone else's venison, or the occasional gifts of beef from other farmers that were always reciprocated. It was hard to admit that you looked forward to a milk cow going old and dry. But you got tired of veal from the very young and utterly useless bulls that no one wanted to castrate and raise as beef. You might keep a single bull or three or four farmers would share one. In a way they were wild animals and everyone had stories of near misses after being chased by an angry bull. His sisters all giggled when they watched the bull mate outside the kitchen window. Dad sent them into the house but Joseph got to stay. The same when horses bred. Horses were more interesting Joseph thought. Pigs were the funniest.
But when he opened his eyes he was alone. His mother began whimpering in her sleep. He got out the whiskey and turned on the radio.
Everyone got disgusted with winter by March and usually before, and a major April storm could bring on a fit of sheer spite in anyone. Carl used to say that winter was like a cow chewing the same cud for six months or more. And despite all the church activities, school, the dances and card parties at the Grange Hall, everyone grew morbid and nervous toward spring, about ten degrees out of kilter in fact. There were more fights at the tavern than at any other time of year and the simplest family quarrels extended into days of silence with the snow and wind outside roaring louder than the wood fire in the stove. Spring, whether false or not, brought on laughter and a kind of easeful drowsiness, a time of general good feeling when people yawned and smelled the air with a few weeks’ respite before the fields would be dry enough to plow. Joseph thought it a grand time; it was simply that they had all lived through another winter and that under its heavy lid of snow and ice and frozen ground the earth was actually alive.
For three days in April it became very warm. At school all the children took their sack lunches outside to eat. They became dreamy with the promise of spring and were inattentive. At recess the older students sat on an elm log out near the road and some of the boys took their shirts off. The younger students wallowed around in the sea of mud that was the schoolyard. The first polliwogs were caught from the swamp behind the school and stuck in Ball jars to be studied and die. In the fields there was a vague cast of green emerging beneath the brown matted grass. Joseph and Rosealee opened all the windows for the first time since October, letting the fresh air wipe away the musty fetor of the coal stove, varnished wood, chalkdust, the urine from the faulty toilets.
Joseph stood at the window and watched a group of boys playing marbles. It seemed sad that the best players won them all. One boy was much admired because his father owned a junkyard and supplied his son with small ball bearings that the boys called “steelies.” They were much desired and though the boy from the junkyard was on the verge of being retarded and came from a bitterly poor family he had his place in the sun each spring with his steelies.
“How's your mother?” Rosealee came up behind and put an arm around Joseph's waist. When the children saw any sign of affection between them they shrieked and jumped around like young goats. Catherine walked by the window and pretended not to notice them.
“Bad. It can't last much longer.” The pressure of her hand drew him to her. Since their night under the lights they had become rather wild-eyed. With two lovers Joseph's appetite increased. He had heard of the magic power of oysters but hone were available in the area except canned ones that tasted like tin. The night before Joseph had roasted two grouse for himself and made some soup for his mother. After he had returned from a session with the new Rosealee, he had lazed in the bathtub then fried himself a steak which he ate while listening to the news and drinking his nightcap of bourbon with a little water.
“Do you want to go to the movies or something tonight?”
“I can't. I'd have to get someone to sit with mother. Charlotte's coming tomorrow, so we can go out then.”
“I'll come over for a while.” She insisted.
“Don't bother. I got to get some sleep. I'm going to spread manure tomorrow.” He felt irritated with his runaround.
“It's too warm and wet. You'll just get stuck.”
“The news said it was going to freeze hard. I'll get up early.”
“Damn, I wanted it to be nice for the weekend.” Rosealee walked out into the foyer and rang the bell that ended recess. She had an impossible case of spring fever and wondered aloud why anyone lived so far north.
Joseph remained at the window as the children filed in, feeling weak and stupid with his lies. Now he would have to spread manure whether he wanted to or not. He walked from Rosealee's room through the door of the partition into the upper grades. There were only fifteen students left from a high of thirty some years back. The loss of students was easily explained by the number of empty, marginal farms in the township.
“Sit down. Shut up. Put your books away. Take out paper and pencil. We're going to have a quiz. We've studied Emily Dickinson for a week. The question is,” Joseph went to the blackboard, “was Emily Dickinson lonely because she wrote those poems or did she write the poems because she was lonely. Use examples.” There were groans. The question approached gibberish but Joseph wanted to sit and think. He had lied to Rosealee because Catherine was coming over to go riding after school and he no longer could face the two of them in a single day, for both physical and emotional reasons.
Some of the girls screamed. A garter snake was wriggling down an aisle toward his desk. The boys laughed.
“Robert, take the snake outside.”
“I can't, sir. I'm frightened of snakes.” Robert wore a red nylon jacket he had insisted Rosealee buy him. The jacket was exactly like the one James Dean wore in a recent movie. “How many examples do we have to use, sir?”
“Three,” Joseph said. A girl stood on her desk seat as the snake passed. “Daniel, take the snake outside before I tie it around your ugly neck.”
“Yes, sir.” Daniel stumbled forward though Joseph knew he hadn't brought the snake in. He lacked that much imagination. He was a Pole, the son of war refugees, and had signed up for the Navy for the coming June. He wanted to fight Communism. His father talked about the evils of Communism in the tavern every afternoon and bored everyone silly. Daniel lifted the snake gently and dropped it out the window. He leaned far out the window with his fat butt jutting into the classroom. He was teased because he farted constantly. “It crawled under the building, sir.”
“That's nice. Thank you, Daniel.” Daniel returned to his desk and pulled out his American literature text book. He simply couldn't remember anything, so out of despair cheated on every test. Joseph didn't mind; he thought of Daniel as inane cannon fodder. When the Navy recruiter had called to inquire about his seniors Joseph had said there were only two boys and one was a sure thing. Joseph enjoyed talking to the Navy recruiter who it seemed had sailed the seven seas, though Joseph found he knew nothing of marine biology.
“Sir?” One of the girls had her arm raised.
“Yes, Susan.” He wasn't getting much thinking done.
“Did Emily Dickinson ever have a boyfriend?” All the girls giggled.
“Not in the ordinary sense of the term. She wrote love letters to a man but I'm sure she died a virgin.” The word “virgin” brought forth nervous laughter and a few of the boys slugged at each other and rolled their eyes wildly. “Cut the crap,” Joseph added. He was a stern disciplinarian though he didn't mind the snake prank. He remembered stuffing a large blue racer in his own teacher's purse and zipping it back up. He was delighted when the teacher fainted at lunch hour. She had been a boring old nitwit and loved to hit her students with a maple ruler.
As the students wrote with a mixture of disinterest and puzzlement Joseph tried with a notable lack of success to clarify his thoughts. He was addicted to Catherine as the dope addicts he read about were addicted to their drugs. When he forced her from his mind the image of her body oozed in from a corner and he felt it in the pit of his stomach. He did not put much stock in psychologizing but knew from what he read that she was a classic neurotic. Sometimes her fingernails bled from her chewing. She was very pretty but sallow from refusing to eat well. Her alcoholic mother was a great burden to her and her father had been absent so much of the time she had no choice but to shoulder it. She clearly had decided on drama school because she knew that her only true gifts were for fantasy, for acting out parts that lessened the dreariness of the world. She sat through every change of movies with great enthusiasm and had managed to make friends with Robert, who often accompanied her. They made an odd and stagy pair for a country school, Joseph thought. He felt tremendously awkward when he and Rosealee met them at the movies. The month before they had all gone to a restaurant for hamburgers and Catherine had rubbed his leg under the table.
During the afternoon recess Joseph had glanced at the quiz papers. “Was Emily Dickinson lonely? Yes Emily Dickinson was lonely for we know she had no man friend while she lived. So she wrote verses. Who knows if she was married she would not have written these verses. That is the question that stumps us today.” Joseph dropped all the papers in the wastebasket except Robert's and Catherine's but then theirs proved to be full of arch posturings. Robert insisted that the world was full of lonely, bored individuals. He didn't like “E. Dickinson” because she “didn't face up to reality.” Catherine insisted that though the poetess didn't know “physical love,” “she was one of the great lovers in all poetry along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Brontë sisters.” Over his many years of teaching Joseph had come to be suspicious of mere literacy when it was so ubiquitously devoted to idiocies, livestock reports, comics, and the sports page.
When Joseph reached home after his drink at the tavern Catherine pulled into the driveway after him in her Jeep. She wore the same riding clothes she had worn their first day. Going riding had become a euphemism for their lovemaking, a perfect cover in an area where perfect covers were so impossible most lovers were forced into blatancy out of desperation. In seven months they hadn't managed to make love in a bed—they were limited to the barn, the granary, or the car. Catherine preferred the car while Joseph liked it least because of its vulnerability to surprise by strangers and the fact that his bad leg made him feel the most awkward in the car.
Joseph checked his mother while Catherine walked to the barn ostensibly to saddle her horse. A neighbor lady who spent the day with his mother had left a tuna fish casserole on the table with cooking instructions. Joseph dumped it in the garbage. Casseroles reminded him of all the dreadful local events that called for potluck—weddings, anniversaries, the gatherings of mourners after funerals.
When he walked into the stable it took a moment or two for his eyes to focus from the bright light of the afternoon. Catherine was sitting on her saddled horse, nude.
“Jeeesuss, Catherine!” he exploded.
“I'm Lady Godiva.” She laughed and walked the horse past him. He grabbed the bridle.
“Get off, you goddamn lunatic. What if somebody walked in?”
“What if they walked in anyway?” She slipped nimbly off the horse and stood facing him with her hands on her waist.
Of course she was right, Joseph thought. They moved past the stanchions to their blanket. “You just surprised me is all. I'm an old man. You got to watch my heart.”
She began by doing what she called the “other thing.” The week before during her period she did the other thing with great intensity and Joseph enjoyed it, never having done it with anyone else before. Catherine's versatility astounded him but he supposed it was only his own inexperience. They made love on their hands and knees then dozed off into a sweet spring haze.
“Hello Joe, what you doing?” It was the doctor looking over the stable partition.
“Napping.” Joseph said, still dazed. Then he looked frantically beside him where Catherine gave out a moan with her jeans clutched over her face.
“I'll wait outside.” The doctor waved and left.
“What are we going to do?” Catherine scrambled into her clothes while Joseph yawned and scratched his head.
“He won't say anything. I know him.” He felt terribly embarrassed but the doctor was such an old friend that Joseph wasn't worried about their loss of secrecy.
Dr. Evans and Joseph sat on the porch as Catherine drove out of the yard. She beeped and waved.
“You ought to stick to fucking grownups, dumbass.”
“Yes.” Joseph knew he was due some advice.
“When they're as young as she is and that mixed up they'll make trouble for you. I treat her mother.” The doctor sipped on his drink. “Of course you might want some trouble. You're sure enough going to get it. How long is this going on?”
“Since October. It was her idea.”
The doctor whistled and hooted. “You're forty-three and she's seventeen and it's her idea. You're cracking up, boy.”
“How's Mother?” He drank deeply and stood to get another one.
“She won't last the month. Neither will you if the major finds out.” The doctor laughed at the idea. “Of course he probably suspects what she's like. Maybe he'll just shoot you in your good leg.” He laughed again. “She didn't actually look too bad especially for this county where they pork up so fast. You taking vitamins? Rosealee looks happy enough. Of course you know it will get out before long some way or another.”
Joseph was flustered then belligerent. “If it's going to get out I may as well keep it up because it's fun and I sat on my ass too long.”
“Don't get pissed off. I'm almost seventy and I still manage on the rare or not-so-rare occasion. My dad told me you don't regret the ones you do when you're old and thinking back, you only regret the ones you don't.” The doctor slapped his leg and hooted. “How about another drink?”
Joseph took his glass. “You still want to go to Canada in June?”