by Annie Proulx
The limb swam in ichorous fluid and as he studied the naked ulna he knew it was late in the day to get out, late to buy a farm, never mind the rest of it, but he knew that he had to do something or burn his money in the stove. Maybe it would work for him. Maybe Vernita did him a favor. Why had he stayed so long?
Kiss the little adobe studio good-by, kiss good-by to the freezing nights. And the stupid hours leaning on Criddle’s zinc-covered bar until Ben was ready to be hauled away.
34
Tumbleweed
SO THERE HE WAS, fifty-one years old and in North Dakota. The farm a curve of earth, a slat-sided house leaning into the wind, starved fields among the ranches and sugar beet farms. Why the hell was he buying this, he wondered, even as he pushed the bank check at the vulture-wattled man in the sheepskin coat. Imprisoned in his mind, like an iridescent beetle in a matchbox, was the image of his slanting field crowned by scribbled maples, not this bony square of dirt. He didn’t even know what he wanted to do with it.
Half an hour later on the street he saw the wattled man in his truck, leaning his head on the steering wheel as though resting a little before he drove off.
He couldn’t think of it as his farm, and called it ‘the place.’ That’s what it was, a place. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, grow sugar beets, soybeans, wheat – the County Agent had mentioned the new kinds of Durum, Carleton and Stewart, good grain quality and resistant to stem rust. The machinery was expensive. He could run cattle or raise hogs. There was money in cattle, but you had to be born to it he thought. He only knew dairy farming, pasture, hay, woodlot, some crop management. It wasn’t that kind of place. Things were different in farming now. He bought fifty barred rocks while he thought about it. He could go into poultry. Or dry beans or peas.
It was not a good place to sleep at night, that metal bed, paint chipped iron, sheets trailing on the floor. An uneasy house. There was always a fine grit on the linoleum, soil blown from across the world, brown roils that rose from the steppes of central Asia and ended lying on his windowsills. The plate on the table made a grating sound. He’d picked up a persistent cough; the dust was irritating his throat.
In the back of his mind he had believed and not believed that the work of a farm would set him right. His trouble seemed to shift rather than repair. He woke up one night after a dream of Ben, but a far younger Ben, melting under his hands, rounding into a woman, the gaping stitchery where his sex had been, the face of the whore in Criddle’s showing her smeared eyes and coyote teeth. Thrashing awake he felt burning weals the size of pancakes on his neck and buttocks, his forearms. In the mirror his black fine hair, threaded with white, was shrinking back from his forehead. He still had his anger, hot as new blood. And hated it in himself.
It was three miles west to the next place, Shears’s hog farm, a huddle of buildings scraped together by a careless stick. He ran into old man Shears with his feed cap matching his white hair and the mustache fringing a juicy mouth, at the feed depot. From a distance somebody pointed out the two wheat-colored oldest sons, Orson and Pego, farmers whose land butted onto the father’s at the west. The hired hand, Oyvind Ruscha and his family of boys, swung in and out of a mobile home set beside the road.
Old Shears was full faced, tobacco chewing, violently progressive about new farm machinery. He urged Orson and Pego to go in together on an air-conditioned, self-propelled combine.
‘Get it with the eighteen-foot cutter bar. Get the safety-glass windows and air condition. Tell him you want the lubricating bearings and the new V-belt and pulley drives. Get it as big and strong as you can. That’s the way it’s all going, big, quick machinery. You don’t have that stuff you don’t got a chance in hell of makin’ it in farmin’.’ They added a windrow pickup attachment. When it was delivered the old man tried it first, praising the smooth gear and speed shifts.
‘That son of a bitch can harvest anything you grow, wheat, oats, barley, flax, peas, rice, clover, alfalfa, soybean, hay, lupine, sunflower, sorghum or weeds, and them two can grow anything it can harvest.’
‘Yeah, especially the weeds,’ said Orson, the family joker. Loyal liked him. Reminded him of Dub. He’d write to them at home one of these days, let them know he had a farm.
The woman at the drugstore where he got his cough medicine told Loyal stories about the other Shears son, the youngest, who came back from the Vietnam War so misanthropic in spirit that he’d moved into a shed and took his meals from plates of bark, eating with a pointed stick or an old bayonet, she said, still stained with blood.
The drugstore was a crackling metal building hunched beside the Farmers’ Cooperative Bank. The woman’s shape was as formless as poured sugar. Two strange front teeth like the points of knitting needles clashed at her lip. ‘He don’t help out on the farm. He’s just holed up back there. Shears said he was gonna starve him out. So, they didn’t put any food out for him for a week. But Mrs. Shears couldn’t hold out and she was slippin’ a plate out there every night when she went to feed the hens. Now they got him goin’ regular over to the VA hospital in Fountain. Say it could take years and years to straighten him out.’
Every time Loyal drove past Shears’s farm he glanced at the shed and hoped for a sight of this specimen.
He thought he might grow sugar beet. The County Agent leaned hard on sugar beet. There was good high-yield hybrid seed now, resistant to curly top and downy mildew. When old Shears heard he was thinking beets he warmed up.
‘O.k., here you got a real choice which way you want to go on your beet harvest equipment. You can go two routes. Your first route is your harvester that does in-place topping. It comes along, see, and cuts the tops off while the beets are in the ground. Then she’s got two wheels that point in toward one another, dig into the soil, loosen and lift out the beets in one operation. The kicker wheels clean ’em off and your rod-chain elevator carries ’em back to the beet wagon. That’s one way to do it. The other way, and the way I’d go, if I was you, is the harvester with a wheel, a spiked wheel, that lifts the beets out of the ground – the tops are still on. There’s a pair of stripper bars that raise the beets off the spikes and your pair of rotating disks cuts the tops off at the height of the lift. Then they go back to the trailer. It’s simpler. Man, I raised sugar beets back in the old days when the goddamn leafhoppers would wipe you out and what was left you had to get in with hand labor. Wouldn’t do it again. No way, José.’
Loyal saw the sign FREE PUPS propped against Shears’s mailbox. He had not had a dog in all the years since leaving home. Did he want to start now? It seemed he did.
He pulled into the yard, watched it fill with dogs, the plumy-tailed mixed-breed bitch, part English sheepdog, part German shepherd with a dash of collie, showing her teeth and growling, four half-grown puppies racing from the side door to his truck. Shears’s truck was not there.
He sat a minute studying the dogs. The door of the back shed opened and there was Jase, strange from his journey through the mountains of Vietnam. Talking to himself. Looking away from Loyal, away from the dogs, his blue-circled eyes skirting the edges of the buildings, slipping along the edges of clouds to motion on the ground, a bird, a car on the highway. Tall. Thin and stiff as a music stand, hardly twenty-one, with hair so light it looked silver. Now his flickering glance shot from one puppy to another, his mouth hung open with the effort to keep them all in sight. He pressed his chin down to his breast, wrenched his mouth to one side. Loyal hung on the truck door, marking out the pups he liked. There was only one after all, a quick-witted bitch who dipped through the snapping feints of her littermates, squatted near the truck tire to piss, and got behind Jase, out of his sight until he whirled.
‘Guess that’s the one I like,’ said Loyal. ‘Can I offer you something for her?’
Jase threw his head back until his Adam’s apple strained white, tried to speak and faded, the words jerking at his mouth, tautening the cords in his straining neck.
‘All – all – all – the
rest of them,’ and, in a rush of jammed syllables, ‘overatthesitefortheMcDonald’s. Neeeeee – ar thecrossroads. Building it. McDonald’s.’
Loyal crouched and made kissing noises at the pups. They rushed at him, laughing in his face, their hot paw pads and sharp nails paddling at his knees. He picked up the smart girl and put her in the truck on the floor.
‘Obliged to you,’ he said to Jase. ‘Stop over some time. Have a beer.’
‘Ah – ah – ah.’
The pup was on the seat, scratching at the glass.
‘Down. Down Little Girl, down Girly.’ He knew dog names should be short and crack in the mouth like ‘Whip’ and ‘Tack’ and ‘Spike’ but this was better. Little Girl. They drove away, the puppy lunging at the steering wheel as Loyal turned it, biting at the wheel and growling small growls until the jouncing stunned her into sleep, curled in a knot of sunlight.
At night on the ploughed prairie the darkness was darker than the Mary Mugg which at least had been illuminated by those blue and orange tracers of light that appear even behind closed eyelids. This darkness was thrown into deeper ink by the sprays of stars, asteroids, comets and planets trembling above him as though in a sidereal wind. As far as he stared across the fields there was no yellow window, nor crawling headlights pitching across the waste. The stars flooded him with longing for Ben, the great lover of cold points. Probably dead by now. The stars were not steady; they shuddered as though in a black jelly. That was the wind, the laminated streams of air flowing above the earth like distorting fluids, the silt-stippled wind wrinkling the distant astronomy.
The wind moved back and forth like a saw endlessly sawing. If he lay on his back, his ears free of the pillow, he could hear grains of sand strike the windows. On full moon nights the wind roared against the house, mooing and rumbling in the dark, rolling a bucket across the yard, dragging weeds along the clapboards until the squeaking and banging sent him up out of the grey sheets, shouting at the ceiling. When you lived alone you could shout at the ceiling. But it got the dog up, made her pace the kitchen linoleum, her toenails clicking, worrying if the menacing clouds that raced the daylight sky had at last attacked under cover of darkness.
He thought he’d go in for dry navy beans. The hell with sugar beets. Beans he understood. He fitted himself out with a used tractor, cultivating and planting attachments and made an arrangement to lease the Shears boys’ famous combine at bean harvest, after their grain was in.
‘If it goes good in a year or two you might want to get a blade-type bean harvester,’ old Shears advised, ‘it’s got your vine turners, your row dividers and your windrowing rods. But you can probably do pretty good with the boys’ combine, just so’s you run it at about one-third speed. You still gonna lose quite a bit to shatter. When you’re ready I wouldn’t mind comin’ over, take a look at how it goes.’
The beans came along well the second year. Before he harvested them Loyal wanted to fence off the yard and set out a triple row of Scotch pines for a new windbreak. The old poplars were shredded and broken with age. Jase came skulking in unbidden one noon to help him build fence. Loyal was startled to see him, thought the poor bugger must have pulled himself together at last after months of therapy at the VA hospital. They worked in silence through the day, the scrape and chunk of the posthole auger, Little Girl’s gallop stirring up beetles. Loyal looked over at Jase again and again. He knew how to set posts. There was a fluidity in the shift of muscle that drew his eyes. He must have come out enough to work for old Shears lately; face and torso were a sore red. The silvery hair was knotted up in a club under the ranch hat. In the late blaze of afternoon Loyal called it quits.
‘Five-thirty. That’s enough for me,’ said Loyal. ‘Let’s have a beer out on the porch, cool off a little.’
The beer was sweet in their hot throats. They drank in silence. Loyal brought out a pound of rat cheese and some bread. The sun boiled away at the end of the plains and in the limpid sky the first stars came out. Jase slapped at his neck.
‘Got ’im!’ The bottle hooted when Loyal blew across its mouth. Jase stood up. There was something about the way he moved that brought the image of a trout hanging still in the current, then dipping away.
‘Well, I’ll be goin’. Just as soon come by again if you can use me.’
‘’Preciate it,’ said Loyal, understanding he was hiring. He felt an absurd rush of pleasure and played the radio until late.
The pure darkness of the nights was broken by the spill of light from the McDonald’s at the crossroads. Farm families drove distances as though to a son’s wedding to eat meat in buns, lick at the slippery sauce, suck from waxed paper cups. The lights of the parking lot swelled like blisters on the droughty night.
Loyal and Jase sat out on the porch in their stiff clothes at the end of the day, the cold bottles in their hands, Jase, naked to the waist, his chairback leaning against the wall, hair wadded up off his neck, the twists of wet hair in his armpit visible every time he raised the bottle. Little Girl lay on her back exposing her belly to the stir of air, jaws smiling in sleep.
‘Want some of this?’ Jase, shaking the homegrown into a Zigzag paper and twisting it up, sucking in the hay-smelling weed smoke and passing it to Loyal.
The talk began slowly, Jase wanly dragging out a few jagged words, warily. Loyal sorting through his mind for subjects. They could work in comfortable silence all day, just the words to pass the fence pliers. On the porch there was a difference. Loyal did not look at Jase now except from the corner of his eye. He felt his own withering skin hang on him like rotting wallpaper. The antiphonal conversation began with weather, drought, thunderstorms, ahh the goddamn wind and tornado weather. How much meat was left in the freezer. Was the gardens burning up or not. Sick animals. Water and wells. What the dogs been up to. An engine running sweet as you’d want but no brakes to speak of. Elvis.
‘Yoooooo – u want Elvis? Look!’ Jase, as perfect to look at as a river stone, flapping his arms began to howl, to thrust his pelvis at the yard. ‘Ah – oooo, ah – oooo!’ until the dog sat up and tipped her muzzle back for a good yodel. Out in the darkness a coyote answered derisively and Loyal, heart beating, boot heels beating time on the step.
Coyotes then, and wheat, dry beans, soybeans, corn, pig Utters and weight gains, Mormons, poison baits, and back to coyotes. Trapping, no not trapping, at the word ‘trap’ Jase shook, his mind veered dangerously to booby traps, humping up the red mountains, probing the soil with a K-bar for a safe place to sit down, digging in, the pick barely denting the root-shot soil. His panicked memory leaped from Bouncing Bettys, punji sticks, the old C-ration cans soured with spring-detonated bombs, the children who exploded when you clasped them. The random bits of metal, feet and tissue and splinters of bone raining around you. How few understood the frightening and devious intelligence of hunting humans. He would choke off the talk, stare at the dog’s dream-twitched hind leg and rush away, be gone for days, leaving the work to collapse around Loyal.
‘You dooooon’t know. How smaaaaart. A huuuumanbeingis.’
So, milder subjects, how small farms were doomed, was that son of a bitch Butz doing any good at all in the world or selling them out to the big corporations, bee stings, people with big feet. Mormons, the best wood for fence posts, what the dogs were doing, if beer was better ice-cold or just chilled a little, Frank Zappa, women, miniskirts. No, not women. Loyal would crackle his beer can in his scabbed hands, spit at the dirt.
Together they built hog pens, a new machinery shed, fenced in a square yard around the house, planted the Scotch pines, put up a garage for Loyal’s truck. Why not, thought Jase, there was good money paid and not everyone would hire a crazy son of a bitch who smoked weed and howled. Why not, thought Loyal, it didn’t hurt anybody to talk.
After the stifling August days of the third season a dry summer persisted, the wind never stopped. Loyal could not get used to the way it leaned over with him as he bent to loosen a wheel, crowded him around the c
orner of the hen coop. The dog, the hens, Jase. He was as isolated in his life as an exhibit. The farmhouse was barely furnished. The filmed windows reflected back his own face, his grizzled jowl, arms akimbo or hands half opened like someone moving toward a dancing partner.
He turned the kitchen radio up loud in the morning and only shut it off when he went to bed. On the dresser the old black and white television boomed tin laughter, and the other radio on the chair that served as his bedside table chattered along comforting with rosaries of songs repeated again and again, and again and again the excited voice crying, ‘National shoes ring the bell!’ until he fell asleep, and in his sleep half-heard, under the wind, voices laughing between the music like a distant family, the crackling of galaxies in static.
Through that autumn the drought did not break. Jase took a back turn and again went to the VA hospital every day. The equinoctial dry storms came, wind and soil and locked knots of tumbleweed bouncing across the fields, gathering fellow weeds as they rolled, spraying the earth with seed. He’d hear them at night working up against the house with muffled scratches.
The last week in October, beans still in the row, the wind was a tidal wave from the west tearing over the earth. The house shuddered. Loyal sat on the edge of his bed writing in the Indian’s book, now a green-paged bookkeeper’s ledger with vertical columns for income and debits. The farm was blowing away. The sky choked with dust, the stars smothered. The house nearly lifted on its foundations, the windows nearly cracked. The dog was tormented by the wind in the chimney. Only Loyal’s pen, moving blackly, fluidly, was calm.
‘Stung by a yellow jacket on thumb. Beans almost ready. Few more days. Wind strong all day. How is Jase doing.’