Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “It feels long because it’s February,” I said to him now.

  “Shortest month on the calendar, longest month to get through.” He took a long pull on the cigarette and turned to blow the smoke downwind. “But you made it through all right here? You’ve got folks to call on you, aside from Lydie and me?”

  “My sisters have been out, when the weather doesn’t keep them. Rena’s close by, you know, and Edith and Iris are right in town. And Herb, he and his family come down every now and then.”

  “That’s good you’ve got your family around.”

  “It’s a blessing.”

  Another pause, and I tried to figure out if it made me uneasy to stand there, making small talk with him. Three separate times in the past few months, I’d gotten visits from old bachelors figuring they’d audition for Karol’s place, exactly as my sisters had predicted, but this was something different. George wasn’t offering anything, or asking for it, either. He just looked kind and curious and a little bashful, as a person not used to paying social visits always appears when they’re struggling through a conversation. I believed what he said: that it had simply popped into his mind as he was driving back from town that he should stop off and see how I was doing.

  George threw down his cigarette butt and mashed it into the grass. “I won’t keep you any longer. If you need anything, you just holler.” He turned a half step away, putting one hand on the open door of his truck. “Neighbors want to be there,” he said. “You know that, Hazel, don’t you?”

  I did, I told him.

  “But we don’t want to push.”

  I wanted to tell him that I knew that, too. We weren’t people who often stopped by unannounced. When we saw lights burning in a neighbor’s windows at night, we felt a quiet satisfaction that they were warm and safe in their home, and then we kept on driving to our own dark house. Neighbors were friends, but the love we gave them was not the same we gave to those who shared our same roof. The love between neighbors was like a walnut kernel. Politeness was its hard shell.

  I wanted to say all that, but tears were pricking my eyes, and so the thing I wanted most of all was for George to get up into his truck and drive away. “Thank you for stopping by,” I said, backing up a step, and then one more. “Tell Lydie I said hello.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said, touching a hand to his forehead. His head was bare, his ears sticking out under little tufts of hair. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but the gesture worked without it.

  7

  As winter began to melt into spring, I knew that it was time to deal with the machinery in the barn. The door was padlocked, the key in a drawer in the kitchen. I hadn’t taken it out since October, though I saw it often enough, sliding around with the tape and scissors and twine. I’d half expected Joe to sneak it out to have a look around the barn. The cats were still out there: they came and went through the gap between the walls and the ground. Joe would go in and find their shining eyes in the dark and he wouldn’t be afraid. He was a nine-year-old boy, ready to climb up into the seat of the tractor and pretend he was driving it, ready to build obstacle courses in the empty stalls.

  Or so I figured. But the barn must have seemed to him to be full of ghosts, because the key remained untouched all through the late fall and winter. I was in no hurry to put it to use, either. Selling the machinery was going to be harder than anything I’d done yet, harder even than planning Karol’s funeral. In the witching hour of grief, choosing the outfit for burial had been a mechanical act: this shirt, those pants. It was the same with the coffin. Nothing seemed real. Then his body was laid in the dark wood box I chose, and I hadn’t even seen it covered with dirt before I let myself be led away, a hand at my back, I didn’t know whose.

  All through the winter, whenever I looked out over the empty fields, I’d tell myself that they were still ours, and I would believe it. Karol had gone away somewhere, he’d had enough of the cold, but come spring he’d return. The thin light of March would flutter down and from far off I’d see it glinting off his sandy hair, rising like moths into the rain-smelling air. Underground, the seeds would put out their first green shoots, and one night we’d leave the windows cracked and in the morning we’d wake under dew-soaked quilts, and the birds would find their voices again, and the new year would begin.

  This was only fantasy, of course, and like all fantasies, it lost its power the more often I imagined it. The truth was that the fields still belonged to me on paper, but they weren’t really mine. Just after the New Year, John Charlie had told me Nate Grisham was interested in renting. Nate had too many sons and not enough land, and he lived close enough that he made sense as a renter. So I’d signed the paperwork for a one-year lease, and now that it was spring, in the mornings I’d see one of Nate’s boys seated on a tractor, riding right up to within a dozen yards of the house. I could look out the kitchen window at the young man riding his bright green John Deere like a conquering knight, and if he saw me, he might lift his hand and wave. A neighborly gesture, but unsettling.

  My own tractor was currently sitting unused in the barn. Nate wasn’t interested in purchasing, and he didn’t want to get in the habit of using it and then find himself in a bind when I sold it off. I hadn’t yet even tried. John Charlie had bothered me about it, but I thought of the conversation I’d had with Rena and Iris and figured I’d reached the end of asking for help. Moving forward, all the decisions would be mine, so it was best to start now. Winter had passed, and the earth was warming. There was some symbolism there, and you didn’t have to try very hard to understand what it was.

  I called the office of the co-op and credit union downtown and spoke to someone named Mr. Freese. I didn’t ask for his first name, and he didn’t tell me. Karol had always handled the business in town. Mr. Freese said he’d known Karol, and he sure was sorry he hadn’t made it out for the funeral. The way he spoke made me think he hadn’t thought very much about it, that maybe he’d forgotten until now that someone named Karol had once existed and now was dead.

  He told me he wanted to come out to the farm to check over the equipment and make sure everything was in good shape—that we’d seen to oiling the chains and keeping the engine clean. I bit my tongue to keep from asking if he thought Karol was in the habit of burning money, which is what a man did when he let his tractor upkeep slip. Come on out, I told Mr. Freese, any day of the week.

  He showed up on a Friday morning, driving a red-and-white Ford Fairlane that looked as if it had never been out of town—the dirt along the bottom was newly applied. “Nice bit of land you’ve got here,” he said as he opened the door and got out. He squinted at the fields that lay bright as silver all around. We’d had a full week of heavy rain, and there were giant puddles as far as you could see.

  “Those aren’t our fields out that way.” I lifted my hand in the direction he was looking. It bothered me the way he was peering around, like all this was for sale, too, and not just the equipment. “Across the road belongs to the Weavers. That’s their house you see through the trees over there.”

  “They talked to you about buying some land?”

  “I’m not interested in selling.”

  “Sure, sure. You’ve had a lot to deal with this year.” It was the kind of thing people often said to me in sympathy, but coming from him, it was flimsy. He thought I was distracted by grief and would come around to reality at some point or another: I would sell off and move out. He wanted this for no reason but that it was the way sensible women might be expected to act. I got the feeling he’d already decided I wasn’t a sensible woman. “It was your late husband’s land?”

  “He did the work on it, if that’s what you mean.”

  Mr. Freese gave me a patient smile. “I was referring to the deed. Did it come down to you from his family, or was it on your side, Mrs. Wisniewski?” He handled the name without any trouble, as if he had practiced saying it during the drive out from town.

  “It’s from my side,” I told him.

&
nbsp; “Well, now,” Mr. Freese said after a moment. “Should we go on and take a look at that John Deere?”

  I led the way to the barn, slid the lock from the iron latch, and pulled back the door. Inside, old hay carpeted the ground, and a fusty smell clung to the air. The cats were slinking silently between the big machines, their pupils wide in the dark.

  Mr. Freese started looking it all over. Dipping out of sight behind the planter, he observed, “A piece like this is perfectly fine for what you’ve got out here. Some of the bigger farms now, they’ve got these new grain drills. You seen them?”

  I told him I hadn’t. Didn’t have any interest in them, either, though I kept that to myself. I didn’t like him, and I wanted him to do the inventory quickly and not talk to me about it. But he took his time, walking up to each piece and then stepping back to peer at it like he was waiting for it to perform some sort of magic trick.

  My eyes went back and forth between him and a pair of Karol’s gloves. One of them lay on the ground and the other was dangling from the bench above it, somehow not having fallen during all those months. After a minute of silence that seemed to have its own kind of thudding heartbeat, I went over and knocked it from its hold. Mr. Freese turned to give me a curious smile and asked if something was the matter.

  “It’s just a mess in here, is all.” I stooped to pick up the gloves. I had a very clear image of Karol wearing them as he backed out of the barn one spring day—was it only a year ago?—with his shoulders hunched, dragging an eighty-pound sack of seed to fill the spreader.

  Mr. Freese turned his head one way and then the other. He was up in the tractor seat now, examining the steering wheel, the clutch, the brakes.

  “You’re particular,” I said.

  “It’s a particular process.” He climbed down carefully and went around the front to look at the engine. At last, he said he guessed he was just about done. Closing his notepad and tucking his pencil into the back pocket of his trousers, he swept his arm toward the door, but I told him to go on so I could lock up. When I met him at his car, he was gazing at the fields across the lane. He turned and smiled. “I’m going to get together some figures and see what kind of deal we can strike for the whole lot,” he said. “How’s that sound?”

  “Just give me a call when you have a number.”

  “We’re going to look out for you, Mrs. Wisniewski. Don’t you worry.”

  I nodded and then stayed on the lawn, watching him go. That’s a custom I’ve always appreciated: the person driving away can only guess whether you’re seeing them off as a friendly gesture or whether you’re checking to make sure they’re good and gone.

  That night I had a dream I was a contestant on I’ve Got a Secret. I was scheduled to go up after the man who revealed he had witnessed Lincoln’s assassination. I never saw that episode; I only heard about it from Iris, who watched more television than anyone I knew. But I’d seen the show and could fill in the gaps. I stood behind a curtain, waiting my turn, and watched Jayne Meadows and Bill Cullen and everyone sitting in a line behind the desk while Garry Moore interviewed a little boy. Of course, when he was on the show, he was an old man, so old that his skin hung off the bottom of his chin and his eyes were watery. They’d put a picture of him in the paper after the episode aired, and then again a few months later when he died.

  But in my dream he was a little boy, about the age he must have been when he heard a loud shot and darted his eyes across the theater to see a mad scramble around the fallen president. Sitting in the seat beside Garry Moore, he swung his legs and twisted his hands in his lap. He sat forward on the edge of the seat, and even then his feet didn’t touch the ground. In answer to one of Jayne Meadows’s questions, he said he had to go to the bathroom, and everyone in the audience laughed. For shame, I thought, making this little child talk about such a violent event. I was looking right at him and saw how scared he was, how much he didn’t want to answer the questions, how he had to think about each one and then come up with a response he thought the host and the panelists and all the people sitting in the audience wanted to hear, all of them craning their necks forward to make sure they didn’t miss a word.

  I had a terrible feeling that my secret would sound dull after his was revealed. Garry Moore would introduce me and the panelists would ask questions, and I’d sit there knowing it was nothing they would care about. In fact, it was so uninteresting that I’d already forgotten it myself. The panelists kept asking questions, one after another. I could see the smile on Garry Moore’s face, so insistent it looked frightening. But I kept watching the boy as he grew more and more anxious, and it gradually dawned on me that the boy was Joe. The moment I realized it, he looked up, cocked his hand at me, and shot a fake gun—one shot: pow!—with a firm, small sound like a cherry pit dropping into a tin pan.

  I woke up just as quickly as if one of my children was shaking me. It was that time between night and morning, the time you start calling early rather than late, and the sky was that particular shade of dark turquoise that comes a half hour before the sun starts its slow climb over the horizon. It gives lie to the old saying, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” I remember my mother telling that to a neighbor when the woman was going through a time. That’s what we called it then, as if adding the word hard could make it worse. I didn’t know then what this neighbor woman had experienced, only that she had hovering around her that particular air that children learn early to consider with awe. It was grief, though that’s not what I would have called it then. I didn’t know that she had recently lost her third child in the womb; I pieced that together a few years later. But that afternoon she sat on the porch with my mother, neither of them doing anything with their hands—not shelling peas or darning shirts or peeling potatoes—and when my mother spoke those words about the world being darkest before the dawn, the other woman blinked at her and said, “Seems to me that such a point comes right in the middle of the night.”

  True enough. I lay in bed awhile and watched the sky turn blue and violet by degrees. With windows on two sides, I could turn one way and see night and then turn the other way and see dawn. It was a tame sunrise, the sun pale as pancake batter spreading over the sky. Once the room was half lit, I swung my legs over the side of the mattress and padded to the kitchen in my slippers to start the coffee.

  As I measured out the grounds and filled the pot, a sudden quiver of sadness ran through me. I felt as if I had a deep well inside me, so deep that if you hollered down into it, all you’d get back were echoes. It wasn’t like those moments when I suddenly missed Karol. The feeling then was more like losing my stomach, a pendulum swing that left me nauseous. This was more deep-rooted and lasting. Usually I enjoyed this time on weekend mornings, knowing that Joe and Debbie wouldn’t be awake yet for hours, and I could sit with my coffee and the paper, easing into the morning instead of running at it full force.

  But this morning, that sadness opened up inside me, and I suddenly needed to be near someone I loved. While the coffee gurgled in the pot, I climbed the stairs and crossed the landing to Debbie’s room. She was sleeping deeply, her hair bunched around her shoulders and one arm outstretched like a swimmer reaching for the edge of a boat. She looked as if she’d been caught unawares by sleep and might be angry when she woke up and learned of the trick. Next door, her brother was an imitation of Jesus on the cross, arms flung out in a T and head hanging to the side. I thought of the dream I’d had, of his turning to shoot me with his little gun. That wasn’t the part that mattered. What mattered was that he was the child who’d witnessed a death, long ago, in another century. He’d seen violence and was coming to tell me what it was.

  No, he was my son sleeping with his mouth, his whole face, open to the world. And his sister in the next room, scowling in her sleep. They were vulnerable things. It was a wonder that I was left alone to look after them, that this was the one thing no one would think to contest.

  Almost a week passed before I heard from Mr. Freese
. He called and apologized for how long it had taken to get in touch. He’d been waiting to hear back from Dewey Henderson, he said—Did I know Dewey? Up near Hamel with close on three hundred acres?—to see whether he really did want the tractor, after all. Dewey thought he might be in need of it, but he wasn’t sure what he was willing to pay. “When will he be sure?” I asked.

  “When we lower the price, I expect.” Mr. Freese punctuated the sentence with a syllable of laughter.

  I hadn’t realized we had a price to begin with. I’d been left out of the process. This should have made me angry, and I tried to feel that way, but instead I felt a kind of horror at the thought of someone named Dewey coming to drive away that tractor. It was Karol’s. Any other year, he’d have been out in the barn weeks ago, getting everything cleaned and oiled. He’d be driving that tractor out of the barn each morning like a train conductor.

  I told Mr. Freese that I’d changed my mind—I wasn’t ready to sell, not just yet.

  He was quiet a moment. Then he asked who I had helping me. These were difficult matters, he said, real tough questions to sort through on my own.

  “Don’t I know it,” I replied, and then hung up the phone.

  March came, and then April was over before I knew it, and then, in mid-May, the cicadas came. The regular ones wouldn’t start singing until July, but this was one of those years when the sleeping ones crawled out of the ground and took over the world for a while before disappearing again for a decade or two. They’d been out for a week, whizzing through the air, slamming into the screens of all the windows in the house, when Lydie called me up and said she needed some conversation to fill her ears. “I swear I’m going nuts with these dang bugs screaming.”