He stole a look kapok-way, but Dad was waiting for him. Artie never had a very smooth motion to first, and his Dad was the greatest balk detector of all time. “Son?” Pop inquired, fleshing out the word with a sadistic, smart-ass grin. Artie filled with filial hatred, a familiar and quiet disgust at knowing that Pop always had been and would be able to see through the least of the thousand pretensions Artie needed for self-esteem. He’d lived with him too long. Pop had gotten hold of his rhythm. Worse than that: his rhythm was Pop’s, handed down. And here Artie was, trying to drive past the man who’d taught him how to dribble. Spin, fake, or weave, he would be there keeping pace, predictable to himself, smirking, Who taught you that move?
“Dad?” Artie mimicked, returning a poor version of his father’s grin. There on the kapok, head propped up off the pillow in a crooked arm, stick limbs dangling, a gut that dumped its cargo across the bed, torso decked in ratty corduroys and vintage fifties crew neck: the man was a living denial of social decorum. His face, flushed with challenge, met Artie’s in impudent amusement and dare.
“Calamine. Couldn’t be simpler. Can we conclude that the much-touted Mr. Memory is stumped?” Dad stumbled on the first syllable, but as soon as he came up to thirty-three and a third, he was almost fine.
Artie forced a laugh and put his thumbnail squarely in the chip of his right incisor. “Don’t rush the neurotransmitters,” he whistled. His recall tested out in the upper stanines, but that was with objective stuff. With Dad, one could never be sure that the investigation dealt with verifiable fact. Phantom tracers had to be followed down as well. Odds were the word was some allusion to family history. Art considered calling in Eddie Jr. to pinch hit for him; his younger brother coped with nostalgia much better than Artie, although he had lived through less family trivia than anyone. The kid could identify the reference. But Dad hadn’t given the problem to little brother. It was all Arthur’s, and he’d sit with it until Christmas, if need be.
The trick to bringing something back was to look at something else altogether. So Artie let his attention wander from the emaciated, fat man in the crew neck to the maple leaves piling up on the front lawn. The men of the 19th had long been after the elder Eddie about criminally negligent raking, but Pop stood them off, exercising civil disobedience, the only exercise he got anymore. He refused to ruffle the leafstuff until someone in civil power once again legalized burning. The right to burn leaves, Hobson claimed, was in the Constitution. The Hobsons, he told the precinct, had been burning leaves ever since they came over. He neglected to tell the 19th that the Hobsons came over only seventy years ago, but what the community didn’t know about the local opposition couldn’t hurt them as much as what they already did.
Artie focused on the leaves, on how each shed piece of maple, in ridiculous tints of flint, cantaloupe, and rose, falling in front of a lamp globe, captured a corona, flapped once to keep aloft longer, preened down the debutante runway, and made that superfluous but all-important coming-out spin. Hair by Austere. Gown by Chlorophyll. Artie concentrated on not concentrating on Pop’s secret word as if curing his father, or at least being temporarily rid of him, depended on identifying the allusion.
He was interrupted by sister Rachel, who stuck her head in through the front-room door to check on the Boy Talk. “Okay, Rach,” Artie said, drawing her in. “For ten points . . .” He held up an index finger. Attempting to imitate his father’s voice, Artie looked at her bluntly and said, “Calamine.” But he couldn’t keep the questioning out. Dad’s voice had had no interrogative. Pop’s had been pure command.
Rachel scrunched up the skin below her eyes, thought a moment, then did a search-me, Emmett Kelly look, brows grotesquely up and mouth pulled down to the right. “You two are both whacked, as far as I’m concerned.” She looked at Eddie Sr., who now lay on his left side, facing the side porch wall, ignoring his kids and taking perverse pleasure in the ellipsis game. Certain that the man couldn’t see her, Rach made a motion toward her brother, an inquiring sweep of hands around her eyes. But before Artie could respond with an equally covert gesture, Dad supplied, “Nope. Nothing yet. Your poor father has so far tonight behaved himself perfectly. Give an old guy some time to warm up.”
Rachel, herself an in vivo variant on their father’s black humor, shook her head in resigned admiration, mildly amused at Pop’s once more raking them over the coals. Artie paled, again beaten. He looked at his sister. She shrugged and said, “Calamine, is it? Can’t help you, Boy Scout; the tall trees will show you the way.” She crossed to her father and sat on the bed next to him. She turned him over like a five-pound sack of turnips, gave him a painful, therapeutic pinch on the deltoids, and asked, “Throw up?”
“‘Throw up?’ Is that an inquiry or an order? ‘Throw up?’ That’s exactly the kind of question your mother always asks. These little, two-word interrogations that I’m supposed to answer intelligently. Give it to me with syntax, will you? I can handle it. I’m an educated man, you know.”
She jabbed him in the solar plexus and smiled. “Sure y’are, buddy. So’s my old man. Have you regurgitated yet this evening, sir? How’s that?”
“No, I haven’t regurgitated. Do you want me to? I can give it the old college try.”
“Stop harping on college already. I promise to go back and finish as soon as they start granting degrees in dilettantism.”
She rolled him over on his belly again, launching him wallward with an affectionate shove. But Eddie Sr. rolled right back around, saying, “And I promise that as soon as I throw up I’ll bring you a sample.”
“Gaaa. That’s disgusting. Definite lowbrow humor. When did you grow up, the Depression?” But despite her faces and her jabs at the man’s midsection, Rachel was, as always, enjoying herself immensely. She was at her best with their father when he was his most boorish. Then she could deride him with lines like the Depression one, hold up his own favorite hobby horses for ridicule.
Nor did she pick only on the sick; she went after Ailene, too, whenever she got the chance. Rach never let her mother forget that day, ages past, when the woman reprimanded four ingenuously foul-mouthed children who had come home full of the joyful discovery of dirty words. Appalled at the naifs, Mother had demanded, “Who do you think I am, one of your alley friends? I’m your mother, you know.” Now that the four kids were grown, Ailene could not say the word potty without Rachel jumping on her with, “Who do you think you are, one of our alley friends? You’re our mother, you know.” And their father: their father was their father, as he was tonight again intent on proving.
Rachel folded a pillow over the old man’s face and left him where he lay. On her way back inside, she made a point of stepping on her brother’s big toe and grinding it into the carpet, grimly warning, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” At the door, she turned and said, “You deal with him, Artie. For a change.”
“Terrific,” replied Artie, who had been dealing with him the only way he knew how. But he was glad at her exit. With Rachel gone, he could think more clearly. Truth was, his sister’s burlesque left Artie as queasy as Dad’s own. For all her insouciance, Rach could not pinch the word out of the man. It had to be removed by incision. Artie had it almost worked out, that calamine rub. The only thing preventing the recollection was his own reluctance to rebleed. But the alternative to remembering was worse. He turned in the rocker to look at Dad. “We are young,” he said.
“Warm,” said Eddie Sr.
“We are very young, and all together. Sometime in late summer.”
“Very warm,” said his dad.
“We haven’t moved to Illinois yet. But I think we’ve left the Brook Street house already.”
“Exactly. Getting hot.”
“And the kids have something. Some illness. The kids always had something, didn’t they? Whoever invented childhood diseases must have been able to retire early.” He looked to his father for an encouraging word. But he had already exceeded the usual seldom. The man had returned to
the old arm crook and challenging silence.
“It was for us. The calamine was for us, wasn’t it? Wait a minute. It wasn’t disease. Here it comes. I’ve got it. Aptos. That summer in California.”
It came out of Artie in one piece, the pain of the excision far greater than the pleasure the unrecoverable moment had once given. Intact in front of him, transplanted to the Second Street front porch through a contest of personalities that Artie should have been wise enough not to enter, was the image of a summer from the Hobson past, a seaside vacation from years before.
A summer in a bungalow by the ocean: perhaps the best vacation the family had ever taken together, their only extended trip besides the ongoing one, the one Pop now took them on. They had had the whole summer, and three months to young children is time without end, time stretching endlessly in all directions. Pop patrolled the cottage in a cotton T-shirt and straw hat and any of a number of fifties checkered pairs of shorts: a T-shirted, checker-shorted, four-kidded Crusoe playing camp counselor and lifeguard and quiz master all at once, using any antic, however unforgivable, to soup up and egg on the progeny.
Praise for Richard Powers
“What is most remarkable about . . . the body of Powers’s work so far is how much life is in it, and how much intelligence . . . I can think of no American novelist of his generation who makes a stronger [case] that the writing of novels is a heroic enterprise, and perhaps, even a matter of life and death.”
—New York Review of Books
“One of the few younger American writers who can stake a claim to the legacy of Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo.”
—The Nation
“A writer of blistering intellect. . . . [Powers is] a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in both respects, he has few American peers.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Powers is a genuine artist, a thinker of rare synthetic gifts, maybe the only writer working—Pynchon and DeLillo excepted—who can render the intricate dazzle of it all and at the same time plumb its philosophical implications.”
—Esquire
“America’s most ambitious novelist. . . . No one who becomes immersed in [his] poetry will walk out the way he or she came in.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Richard Powers is America’s greatest living novelist.”
—Boston Review
“Powers hovers impossibly between extremes with a tightrope walker’s perfect balance. He may be at once the smartest and the most warmhearted novelist in America today.”
—Chicago Tribune
Also by Richard Powers
Bewilderment
The Overstory
Orfeo
Generosity: An Enhancement
The Echo Maker
The Time of Our Singing
Plowing the Dark
Gain
Galatea 2.2
Operation Wandering Soul
The Gold Bug Variations
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Copyright
Frontispiece copyright the Estate of August Sander, courtesy of the Sander Gallery, New York, NY.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE. Copyright © 1985 by Richard Powers. Excerpt from PRISONER’S DILEMMA © 1988 by Richard Powers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photograph © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur–August Sander Archiv, Cologne/ARS, NY 2021
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1985 by Beech Tree Books, William Morrow and Company, Inc. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Beech Tree Books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2001.
SECOND WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2021.
* * *
The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as follows:
Powers, Richard.
Three farmers on their way to a dance / Richard Powers.—1st HarperPerennial ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-097509-1 (pbk.)
1. World War. 1914–1918—Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3566.O92T47 1992]
813'.54—dc20
* * *
Digital Edition JUNE 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-311945-1
Version 05062021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-314021-9
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