Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “I’m doing jam today,” I told her. “Been putting it off. But I’d be glad for the company.” Out on the porch were several buckets of strawberries waiting to be hulled. They’d come in a little earlier than usual—we’d had a warm spell for several weeks at the end of April—and every day I was out in the garden picking them. I’d just brought up the buckets from the cellar, where I’d been keeping them cool until I could force myself to set aside a morning for making jam. I hated doing it on hot days, and the past several days had been hot. The paper said it wasn’t supposed to get warmer than eighty-five, so I figured today was the day.

  “Oh, goody,” Lydie said, and told me she’d come around after a little while.

  By the time she arrived, I was standing at a sink full of floating strawberries, slicing off their heads and dropping them into a pan. “Debbie would think you’re brave as an Indian,” I said as Lydie stepped inside and shut the door behind her. “Walking all that way. She’s scared to death one of those bugs will fly in her face.”

  “Better her face than her ear.”

  “She’s scared of that, too.”

  Lydie set her purse down on a chair and stepped up to the sink. “I’d have drove over, but George took the truck down to Theo’s.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t seen George other than at church on Sundays, and though I thought I was calm enough about whatever quiet signal had flashed between us, I didn’t want to talk about him with Lydie. Handing her a knife, I stepped aside to make room at the sink. A cicada thumped off the screen and spun drunkenly away. “This noise,” Lydie said, plucking a floating strawberry out of the water.

  “Makes you feel a little crazy,” I agreed.

  “It’s been giving me dreams. Takes me back to when I was working at Curtiss-Wright.”

  During the war, before she married, Lydie had worked at a mechanics factory in St. Louis, making airplanes. I’d forgotten all about it. Now I listened as she told me about her dream. “It’s just like it was back then: I’m seated on a tall stool with a container of bolts set on a little shelf that hangs off the side of the conveyor belt. The metal got poked through with holes and then they’d come up to me, and my job was to put the bolts through the holes and then it went on to the next gal to screw it in.”

  “Just up there above your head,” I interrupted when I saw her looking around for a bowl.

  “Thanks,” she said, retrieving the bowl from the cabinet. “So anyway, I’m working and working and the girl next to me is talking, but I can’t make out a single word cause it’s so loud. It’s all just a buzz and a whir.”

  “Sounds like a pretty dull dream.”

  She laughed. “But see, when I turn to look at her, I realize that she’s really a giant bug. It’s her that’s making the noise, not the machines.”

  “And then the bolts turn into bugs, too, and start flying up out of your hands?”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “The bolts are just bolts.” She reached up to wipe the back of her wrist across her face. It was humid in the kitchen and we hadn’t even started boiling the strawberries.

  “Maybe you miss working there,” I said.

  She answered with a shrug. “Maybe,” she said. “The work was boring, but that’s the only time I ever lived in a city, and it was nice. Every day I’d see a person I hadn’t ever seen before and probably wouldn’t see again. And taking the bus to work, I liked that, too. I even liked the sound of the garbage collection.”

  I tried to picture Lydie in a blue cotton work suit, a Lydie sixteen years younger than she was now, boarding a bus with a lunch pail in one hand and a purse in the other. I couldn’t quite see it.

  Once we got the strawberries boiling, we went out onto the porch with some iced tea to cool off. We’d been out there a few minutes when Nate’s tractor came into view. It was a long ways away, on the other side of the field that stretched from the clearing where I burned trash and down over a slight hill. I was used to the sight. I saw it every day. But Lydie squinted at the tractor and asked me how things were working out.

  “Good enough,” I said. “It doesn’t startle me anymore to see him or his boys out there. Three months ago I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.”

  “Nate’s a man you can trust.”

  I nodded. “Trusty, but stubborn.” I explained that at the end of winter, he and I had sat down to figure out the best crop plan for the season. I wanted him to turn over more of the cornfields to soy. This was what Karol had been moving toward over the past two years because although the price for soy was more variable, the lows weren’t that low and the highs were better than the highs for corn. But Nate wasn’t sure—he was a corn and alfalfa man—and in the end, I gave in. Now we had more corn than we’d had in our fields for a while, and I figured by the time it reached its full height in the fall, I’d be so boxed in that I’d have to go up to the second floor of the house to see past my own yard.

  I told Lydie that part and she laughed. Every woman around could tell you about the summer when she’d thought she was going crazy with the corn closing in. Maybe men felt that, too, but if they did, I hadn’t heard about it.

  I got up to go stir the strawberries and add in some more sugar. When I came back out onto the porch, Lydie took up the conversation as if there hadn’t been a pause. “That’s pretty generous of you.”

  “What is?”

  “Letting Nate make a choice like that. You’re the one that’ll suffer if he’s wrong.”

  “So will he. We’ve got a split on the profit.”

  She nodded, though she looked unconvinced.

  The tractor had stopped moving, and I saw a figure climb down from the seat. “It’s a strange business,” I said, “figuring out where I get my say, and where I don’t.”

  She nodded again without looking at me. We were both watching Nate, who was kicking at something with his shoe, nudging it along the ground. It occurred to me that he might have run over some living thing with the tractor. If he had, I hoped it was dead. I’d once come upon my brother Junior in the act of braining a raccoon with a shovel; he’d left it still moving, screeching in pain, and I’d waited until he disappeared into the house before taking up the shovel and finishing it off myself. “He’s a good man,” Lydie said, and it took me a moment to understand that she was talking about Nate.

  She’d already made this declaration earlier in the conversation, and her repeating it made me suspect that she had something else to say. I figured I might as well say it for her: “Good or bad’s not the problem. It’s whether I listen to him or he listens to me.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I expect that’s right.”

  In early July, Nate told me he wouldn’t be able to pay the other half of the rent. Not on time, anyway. Not until after the harvest. He came out to the house to tell me, and we stood in the yard because he didn’t want to track dirt inside. Overhead, an old oak shook its leaves like a tambourine. Cicadas were droning in the trees behind the barn. These were the regular ones—the others had gone back underground to wait it out another thirteen years. I couldn’t imagine that far into the future: my children would both be adults, no longer living at home. And what would I do then? What would my days look like when they were spent all alone?

  Nate took off his cap and worked at its bill as he told me he was sorry, he’d thought he’d have the money ready, but he hadn’t budgeted correctly. “You know me, Hazel,” he said. “You know this doesn’t sit right. I’m going to get you paid just as soon as I can. You’ve got enough to get through awhile longer?”

  I told him I’d figure it out, which put a look on his face like he’d just been punched. There was nothing left for him, though, but to turn away.

  After he’d gone, I went inside the house to get the key to the barn. Then I went back outside and pulled open the doors, and I stood in the hot, dry stillness, thinking that everything was recognizable and no longer dear. A single bright beam of sunlight was shooting through a hole near the top of one w
all, a stick of light that seemed solid enough you might swing from it, if only you could get up there and grab hold.

  Back in the house, I looked up the number for the co-op. The phone rang twice, and Mr. Freese picked up. He told me to come down to the office anytime.

  The next morning, I dropped Joe and Debbie at Rena’s. My children ran inside, and my sister looked me up and down, eyes narrowing behind the lenses of her glasses. “Don’t you look nice,” she said. She was thinking, no doubt, that I’d dressed up for Mr. Freese, and it was true, I wanted to appear my best. I’d set my hair the night before, which I normally only did on Saturdays. I didn’t want to look like a farmer’s wife, with stretched-out curls and chapped red hands. I wanted to look like a woman in control of her future. Rena stepped aside to welcome me into the kitchen. “John Charlie,” she said, “don’t you think Hazel looks nice?”

  He glanced up from the sink, where he’d been drinking a glass of water. “She looks pretty as she ever does,” he said with a wink at me. “You’re not planning on running off to Hollywood now, are you? Planning to turn yourself into a movie star?”

  “Not pretty enough for that,” I said, patting my head. One of the curlers had come out during the night, and I’d had to pin up the loose strand behind one ear.

  “No, I guess not.” John Charlie laughed. “Not for the pictures. But maybe you could get yourself a job in a commercial. Be that mother in the Swiss Crème spot, singing in the cardboard kitchen.”

  Rena sighed and shook her head. This had been their bit from way back: John Charlie making jokes and my sister pretending to feel embarrassed for him. Rena was nearly ten years older than me but had married young; she and John Charlie had been together so long it was impossible to know what they really felt about each other anymore.

  “You sure you don’t want John Charlie to go with you?” Rena asked in a low voice.

  I nodded. “I’ll be all right on my own.” Then I said my good-byes and told her I’d be back around noon. “Take your time,” she said. “We’ll give them some dinner.” I went out to the car, but a moment later, she came chasing after me, waving a ten-dollar bill. “Wait,” she said, “wait,” though I had already stopped backing up. She handed me the money and asked me to stop by the pharmacy for her. “My back is killing me,” she said, and told me to pick up some aspirin. Then, as if it were an afterthought, she told me I might as well get a bottle of Early Times, too, while I was in town. It wasn’t any secret that Rena had a whiskey and water every afternoon as she did the ironing, but she pretended as if it were.

  I took the money and drove off toward town. When I passed my house again, I glanced at it with a strange fear that I’d see a figure at the window, my mother or some other ghost. She and my father had been dead eight years, both killed in a car accident way down in Biloxi, Mississippi, but sometimes the house still seemed like theirs. Of course, I didn’t see anything but fluttering curtains.

  When I got to the co-op, I parked a few spaces down from the entrance and took out a tube of lipstick. It was part of the effect I wanted: lipstick the color of holly berries, applied with a perfect clean edge. I made sure it was just right before I went up to the entrance. On the pebbled glass door were the words “Madison County Marketing Co-Operative and Credit Union.” Their storage facilities were outside of town; this office was only for money affairs. I knocked once on the door and then went in. Mr. Freese was standing before a filing cabinet the size and shape of a dining-room hutch. The top drawer was open, and he had just been riffling through it.

  He said hello and held up one hand, his pink palm facing me like a traffic cop’s. I stayed by the door as he continued searching through the files. After a moment, he found the one he wanted and took it over to the only desk in the room. “Please,” he said, sweeping his hand toward a chair on the other side, “make yourself comfortable.”

  Obligingly, I stepped forward and took a seat in the chair. My purse felt heavy and awkward on my lap, so after a moment I moved it to the floor.

  “You’re looking well, Mrs. Wisniewski.” He lifted his chin a little, and I thought of my lipstick, my hair, the way I’d had to search through my closet for a skirt with no slit on the left side because the left leg of my stockings was stitched twice at the knee. I folded my hands together in my lap, to keep myself from raising them to adjust any part of my appearance. “Thank you,” I said.

  The file he’d taken from the cabinet lay on the desk before him, and for a moment he seemed ready to consult it. Instead he folded his hands and began rubbing the tops of them with his thumbs. “I’m glad you came down to see me today. We’ve got some matters to talk over, and I like to handle things in person. Much more personal than over the phone. You all on a party line out there?”

  I nodded.

  “All the more reason, then. You wouldn’t want your neighbors hearing all your business, would you?”

  “I don’t suppose it would matter all that much,” I said. “I’m only selling a tractor. It’s not exactly keeping books for a mobster.”

  “No, you’re right about that.” He chuckled and lifted a hand to his face, rubbing the smooth surface around his mouth. He was not quite the same man in the office that he’d been on the farm. This version had a colder eye, a sort of clinical confidence. I preferred it to the other version because it was truer.

  I asked Mr. Freese about looking for buyers. “Selling off Karol’s tractor,” he replied, “is going to take some time.”

  “My tractor, you mean.”

  “Now, look, you’re clearly a woman with a good head on her shoulders. So I’m going to lay it all out on the line. That tractor you’ve got out there is in decent shape. It did the trick for Karol”—he paused, seemed to make a decision within himself, and then continued—“and for you, too, I suppose. But it’s not top-of-the-line, the tractor or any of the hitches. I might be able to sell them piecemeal, but of course the best situation would be to sell them all together. However, I’m not sure that’s going to happen anytime soon. Unless—” Here he stopped and sat back in his chair. He was waiting for me to prompt him to continue, but I didn’t feel like giving him the satisfaction. So I sat quietly and tried not to fill in the rest of the sentence.

  He cleared his throat. “Unless,” he said again, “you sell it all together.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I thought that was the goal from the beginning.”

  “I’m not talking about the machinery only. I’m talking about selling what’s in the barn and the barn itself, too. The farm, Mrs. Wisniewski. I’m talking about selling the farm.”

  I drew in a sharp breath of air, and the next moment I was laughing. “What in the world would make you believe I wanted to do that?”

  He raised his shoulders. “Nothing. In fact, I’m betting you don’t. Who would? You and Karol lived there happily for—what? Fifteen years?”

  “Just about.”

  “Well, of course you wouldn’t want to leave it, then. And I don’t want to pressure you here. But I can tell you that a load of equipment like yours has some real use when the land is right there waiting for it. You have children?”

  “Two.”

  “Sons or daughters?”

  “A boy and a girl.”

  He smiled—a real smile. For the first time, it occurred to me that he might have a wife and children of his own. It didn’t necessarily make me like him any better. “Two’s a fine number,” he said. “Back in the old days, it wouldn’t have been enough, but there’s the wonder of the modern age for you. No need for seven sons and seven daughters when you’ve got a John Deere tractor and a washing machine.” He paused and took out a pack of cigarettes, raising his eyebrows to see if I minded.

  “Go ahead,” I said as he rooted around in his pocket for matches.

  “But the fact is that you still need someone to drive that tractor. You might not need a whole army of men any longer, but you need at least one. How old is your son?”

  “Nine.”

/>   “That’s a long time before he’ll be able to take over things. And that’s only if he wants to do it, isn’t it? These days, you just don’t know. Boys decide they want to do something else. Go to college, work at a bank. Work at a credit union.” He stopped to laugh at himself. Pointing one finger upward, he drew a ring around the ceiling, encircling everything that could one day be Joe’s. “And in the meanwhile, I guess, you rent out your land. Is that the idea?”

  “It is.”

  He grabbed an ashtray at the front of the desk and dragged it toward him. “To Nate Grisham, I take it?”

  Clearly, he already knew all about my situation, but he wanted me to verify it. I had to prove the wisdom of his advice, to show once and for all that it was better to let him do the thinking for me. If I’d gotten into a mess with Nate, it only proved the point. I glanced at my hands folded in my lap, and they looked calmer than I felt. “You don’t know our terms,” I said carefully.

  “No, I don’t, not precisely. But we’re a credit union here, so I do know the size of the loan he’s taken out. And that means I happen to know something about his finances in general.” He tapped two fingers on the folder he’d taken from the drawer when I came in.

  My eyes wanted to linger on the folder, but I forced them upward, to look Mr. Freese in the eye. “Nate’s a good man,” I said, parroting Lydie’s words from a few months before. And just like then, the pause after I spoke made the words seem meaningless.

  “Sure, sure.” He nodded patiently.

  “And we’ve signed an agreement. A contract.”

  “For what period of time, may I ask?”

  “For the year.”

  “You were smart not to commit yourself.” I saw him wanting to ask whether I’d asked for those terms on my own, but he shrugged and the question evaporated. “Now, what that means, of course, is that after this year you’re free. Free, that is, of commitments that are written down on paper. You’ve got other commitments, don’t you—ones you never signed your name to. And if you don’t mind my saying it, I think we can agree that those are the more important promises.” He was bearing down on the real purpose now. He lifted a finger in the air and twitched it like the needle on a gauge in your car, telling you the speed and how warm the engine is getting. “Look,” he said, “that’s fine land you’ve got out there, and I’m sure that Nate knows it. He’d pay you a good rent if he could. But even at the right price, it wouldn’t be much, not when you’ve got two children to raise. Just a little bit coming in every now and then, two or three times a year.”