“We just don’t have a responsible man to watch things, Johnny. Madbury’s too damned confused all the time, but I can’t think of another yardman in the whole bunch. Maybe Bruce is right, and we’ve got a home for the aberrations here. What I mean is, if the carpenters go off and leave nothing but the felt on a roof in this wind, what can I do about it? I remember during the war thinking won’t it be wonderful after it’s over and the men won’t give you any sass any more! And look what happened! I guess they just got sassy when labor was scarce and never got over it. Anyway, I’ve got to stay here and take care of the retail and the books.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I know. Sure.” But the carpenters were the only ones who could be responsible for such things. You couldn’t tell a carpenter anything about his job. His father couldn’t and he certainly couldn’t. Maybe Bruce could. In Leah only Bruce’s frightening inner pressure could awe a carpenter. It was a habit in Leah not to take any sass from a superior.
“I don’t know why it is,” William Cotter said. “I’ve been working pretty hard ever since Bruce went to the hospital, but I just can’t seem to get things going right. Back before the war I did all right, but I can’t any more. I guess I’m getting old, Johnny.”
“You’re not too old,” John said, and then they waited for the wind to let up a little.
“Not too old for what? I guess I’m old enough to see what I can do. I know me pretty well by now, Johnny.”
“No!” John said involuntarily, then didn’t want to go on. His father waited expectantly. He didn’t want his father to say such a thing—to make such a final verdict. And it was not just because he didn’t want to stay in Leah and work for Cotter & Son—now another son! He’d had the same opinion of his father for a long time, but for the man himself to say it, to see the end of his own life! Nobody should do that. As for himself, he’d always considered himself full of potential, and he firmly believed that one day everything would change and he would suddenly find himself in the midst of the future, happy and full of accomplishment. But he was thirty years old, and time was settling in. Would he ever have to make an admission like his father’s, see himself one of the admitted mediocrities? For a moment he toyed with the idea of making such an admission, and saw with a chill how seductive, how peaceful it would be. The long years had once been his friends, when age itself was an accomplishment, but now they had turned into quick enemies.
“I don’t want to push you, Johnny.”
“I’ll start to work tomorrow,” John said. He would have to get used to this new feeling of mortality. If fate could strike so close as to take away his father’s pride, to smash his only brother! He’d always been lucky in little things: he’d never had to be hungry for very long, money had always come from somewhere when he needed it, he was extremely lucky in poker, lucky with girls, lucky about catching trains. Maybe he’d been given this petty good fortune in place of happiness, or maybe some final tragedy would come along and smash him all at once.
He hadn’t expected to see Jane at the Paquette farm. He hadn’t expected to stay for supper, either, even though he knew that anyone who happened to be there after five-thirty had a difficult time refusing.
Bob had finally bought Mike’s motorcycle, and he and two of his younger brothers were excitedly pushing it, starting it, running it down the driveway and back, burning their fingers on the hot cylinders as they probed in the grease for the carburetor adjustment screws. Any small damage to the machine was explained to him—the bent crashbar, the tiny licks of paint scratched off here and there. Oh, it was in wonderful shape, they told him, and a little red enamel would fix it right up. Before milking, John helped them clear a space for it in one of the sheds. They piled all scratchy, puncturing junk out of the way and led the machine inside.
“There!” Bob said, patting the saddle, “Ain’t it pretty, John? I mean Jerome.” They always called each other Jerome, for some reason.
“I guess so.”
“You guess so! That’s all my chicken money right there, Jerome. Worth it!”
He followed Bob to the barn. Bob walked ahead, impatient, springy on his feet.
“I’ll get the hay,” John said. He climbed the ladder into the great hayloft and walked along above the stanchions, throwing a forkful of hay to each cow. The heat and the heavy odor of the cows came up around him and mixed with the mown smell of the hay. The beams leaned together above him in gray clouds of cobwebs, and dusty rays of cathedral light shone from the gable-end ventilators. Bob came down the cement aisle below, followed by four milk-hungry cats.
“Hey, Bob,” John said, and dropped a bunch of hay on his head.
“You’ll give me the willyprickles, you horse’s ass!” Bob went down beside a cow and shot a stream of milk six feet into the air, splattering John’s shoes. The cats sat in a row and opened their mouths, presenting little pink targets. Bob sprayed them and they retreated to lick the milk out of their fur.
“That shaggy one can carry off a whole quart in his overcoat,” Bob said. “Git yourself a bucket, you want anything to eat tonight, Jerome. We got twelve cows to milk.”
John got a pail from the milkhouse and took the cow next to Bob’s. She stopped eating long enough to turn her neck in the creaking wooden stanchion and look him over with one brown eye, then went back to chewing the thin hay. The milk sang into the pail, and the cats, hearing it, lined up for him, too. By the time he finished the one cow his hands were nearly paralyzed. Bob had finished two more and had moved on up the line of craggy rumps.
“You hear about old Prescott, Johnny? I mean Jerome?” he called above the zinging of the milk.
“Yuk, yuk,” John said.
“Listen, Jerome. That old bastard, you know what he done? He got so rang-dang mad from being swatted on the head by his critters’ tails while milking…Jesus! He took a hand ax and a block and chopped off every one of ’em’s tail. The ASPCA preferred charges and it cost the old fool eleventeen bucks per whack! Hundred and fifty bucks he had to pay. You know what? He lost every damn’ one of his cows come inspection. TB. How do you like that?”
“He always was a mean old bastard,” John said.
“Cruel,” Bob said thoughtfully, “awful cruel.”
John managed to do four cows while Bob did eight. With aching hands he helped Bob lower the tall milk cans into the water tank in the milkhouse.
“Water’s too low. We ain’t going to just but scrape by this year,” Bob said. “Spring’s going dry. First time in my young life I ever seen that happen. They closed the woods yesterday, you hear about it?”
“My father told me today. Hey, Bob? I mean Jerome!”
“Huh?” Bob let the trapdoor down over the water tank.
“Did you know anything about Bruce going out with Minetta Randolf?”
“Bruce?”
“I mean it. She told me.”
“Bruce Cotter? No, I guess you wouldn’t joke right now. Don’t that tear it? Bruce!”
“I guess so. I never knew Bruce to go out with any girl,” John said.
Then Bob asked the inevitable question: “I wonder if he made out?” He looked shrewdly at John. “Old Minetta’s one to speak right out, by God. I got a kind of natural feeling she and Bruce might of just hit it off.”
“It was pretty strange. I brought a case of beer and old Howard and I drank it.”
“You mean the old bag’s on the wagon?”
“No, she stuck to her wine.”
“She sure does, don’t she?” Bob said.
“Wait a minute. Let me tell you how Minetta acted. Afterward we went down to the car—Minetta and I…”
“Yow!” Bob said, putting out his fist.
“No, wait a minute! Let me tell you! I started to neck with her—you know—same old story. Nothing. I was kind of lit.”
“No gibroni,” Bob said.
“God dammit, listen! I must have said something she didn’t like, and she blew her stack.”
“She did!”<
br />
“She said nobody in Leah was a man except Bruce. She said the rest of us were all honyaks. Stuff like that. Nobody was a man except Bruce.”
“She never give me a chance to prove that, one way or the other,” Bob said regretfully. “Well, I’ve more or less rang-dang had it! Bruce!” He continued to shake his head as they went toward the house.
They went through two dark connecting sheds and then a door opened into the bright, crowded kitchen, where the Paquettes seemed to do everything at once in a continuous roar. John said hello, shouting and being shouted at, to Ma, Pa, Dick, Paul, Jean, little Timmy, and Charlotte. It was then that he noticed Jane, sitting behind the huge kitchen table in a relatively calm, protected spot, talking to Charlotte. He started across the room toward her, but Timmy, who was seven, had spread a series of Montgomery-Ward catalogues, wooden blocks, little cars and a model road grader in and out among the table legs and out across the linoleum. John accidentally shifted one of the blocks, and Timmy’s shrill voice came from under the table: “Dammit! Who done that?” He put his head out.
“Hush, now!” Ma said to him, a frown passing over her face. She poured water from a dishpan full of steaming boiled potatoes. In spite of the uproar she had to contend with all the time, she looked quite young, with a kind of French chic about her. Bob, the oldest, had been born when she was seventeen, and Bob was thirty. Pa was a good deal older than Ma; a wide, thick-featured man. All his children looked like Pa. His round face rarely showed any expression but one of serene amusement. He sat at the head of the table and said very little except, “Pass the picklelilly,” but he did listen to the constant hubbub and seemed to get from it a certain infusion of contentment. The Paquettes set a loud, happy table.
John still tried to reach Jane, and found that in order to get there he would have to go underneath the table, where he moved another part of Timmy’s highway system.
“Jesus, you’re clumsy, John,” Timmy said, but gently, to show there were no hard feelings.
Under the table John met Shep, who had been stepped on so often he had evidently decided not to worry about it. Shep knew him, nodded once, once flopped his much trodden-upon tail and went back to watching a cat who watched back from beneath the woodstove.
Jane raised the oilcloth to let him come out. For a second he looked up at her, seeing her arm above him, her face and silvery blonde hair, in a kind of shock. She smiled down at him, and she seemed terribly beautiful to him all at once. He had never before thought of her as anything but mildly pretty—in fact, rather funny-looking in a pleasing way, with her little puggish nose and crinkly eyes. Now she was clean and fresh, her summer dress crisp, her breasts small and firm, her narrow waist trim. There seemed to be a tone to her flesh; a healthy, spare, animal tone to it he had never seen in a girl before.
“Are you coming out?” Jane asked. Charlotte had been watching, smiling in a thoughtful way.
“You have a way of turning into a statue or something,” Charlotte said to him. “Now, what could you have been thinking about?”
“Hey, John!” Bob called from the sink. He spread Boraxo up and down his greasy arms and grinned. “Ain’t you going to wash, John? We generally wash out here in the country.” Pa smiled and Ma, passing, hit Bob on the back of the neck. He ducked and then said seriously, “Dirt ain’t healthy. I been trying to make that clear to John, that’s all.”
John started under the table again. Jean, who was twelve, still blocked one side of the kitchen. He had his bicycle upside down on unsteady handlebars and seat. He had started to tighten spokes, but now turned the pedals by hand, as fast as he could.
“Look!” he yelled, “That’s a gyroscope! Look at it? Look at it?” Ma looked and ordered him out to get some wood. Dick and Paul, twenty-six and twenty-four, were Indian wrestling.
“John don’t seem to learn,” Bob said. “Come here and clean your dirty self!”
Jean came back and dumped the wood into the woodbox. Ma told him to remove his bicycle. He turned it over, trying to hit somebody, missing Paul, and wheeled it into the living room.
“Jean!” Pa said. Jean and the bicycle came back into the kitchen. “Put that bike outside. It ain’t new! You act like you want to eat with it!”
“Yeah, Pa,” Jean said hopefully.
“You take it out.”
“It’s because of Bob’s new motorcycle,” Ma said, and then looked guiltily at Jane and away again. “Take it out, now!”
“Aw, hell I” Jean said, and banged the bike on the door.
Charlotte set the table while Timmy entertained Jane. He tried to ignore his mother, who wanted him to put away his highway system. John wanted to get back to Jane, but Dick challenged him to Indian wrestle. They put their right feet together and clasped right hands. The object was to force the other to move his front foot. To Dick’s shame, John won easily. Then he won from Paul. It quickly became an affair of family honor. He beat Bob, and supper was forgotten for a time. They made Pa get up and try. Pa gripped John’s hand with his great splayed fingers and set himself. They pushed and jerked sideways, trying to get each other off balance. John felt that he could tip Pa over anytime. It didn’t seem to be a matter of pure strength, but of a certain rigidity in the upper arm and shoulder, and to John’s surprise his shoulder was immovable, rigid—he felt himself to be all of a piece, as if he were a statue. At the end he had Pa bent over and had his own wrist against Pa’s foot. One sideways and upward jerk and he could have won. But he didn’t make the move. After much grunting they called it a draw.
“You’re strong, John,” Pa said. The others nodded. Coming from Pa, it was a real compliment.
A little subdued, they sat themselves around the table. John sat on one side of Jane and Timmy on the other. Timmy probed the mustard pickles for pimento. Charlotte forcibly removed the mustard pickles, while he screamed, and put beet greens on his plate.
Pa was staring at John, frowning. Everybody noticed it, and even Timmy shut up.
“I got a feeling you held off, John,” Pa said. “You could of beat me.”
“No, Pa!” Dick said, horrified. Paul, Bob, Jean and even Timmy looked the same, their round Paquette faces, blue eyes and black hair, all seemed to flash and bristle with disbelief.
“Bob could beat me,” Pa said.
“No, I couldn’t!” Bob said, “I couldn’t come nowhere near it, Pa!”
“And you beat Bob,” Pa said to John. “You boys be quiet. What I want to know is why John held off.”
They all turned silently toward John. He couldn’t deny it—that would be calling Pa a liar. Silence. He heard for the first time that day sounds he hadn’t been able to hear before—the old pendulum clock ticking, a drip of water at the sink, green wood hissing in the stove, and between gusts of the incessant wind the drone of the water pump out in the milkhouse.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You must know something about it,” Pa said, “ ‘cause right plumb in the middle of it you had a change of mind.”
No one ate. They all looked at John until Jane said, “He didn’t think it would be right to beat you, Pa.”
“Hah!” Pa said, and then grinned, looking all around the table. “That’s what I figured. Now, John, I don’t mean to give you no third degree, nor nothing like it. But you been coming out here ever since you was kindygarden age and we always considered you as near a member of this family as a body could stand. You always called me Pa and Ma Ma, same as Janie, and you’re both welcome. But it don’t strike me right you dasn’t beat me if you could. I never wrestled with Bob, but if we did he wouldn’t think nothing of beating me if he could.”
“That’s right,” Bob said.
“If we try it again I’ll do my best to beat you,” John said.
“No, we ain’t going to try it again,” Pa said, and turned to the potatoes, obviously through talking.
Timmy had been listening carefully, and now his high voice cut across the clashing of forks on plates. “D
id John do something wrong, Pa?”
“Eat your greens,” Ma said.
His head bent over his plate, Timmy turned to John and whispered loudly, “What did you do, John?”
John was about to answer “I don’t know” again, but caught himself in time.
“Timmy! You hush!” Ma said.
“He beat Paul and Dick and Bob and he could have beat Pa,” Timmy said. Then a crafty look came over his face and he whispered again, holding a large forkful of beet greens in front of his face, like a screen, “Maybe he peed his pants.”
“Timmy! You want to go to bed without your supper?” Ma said.
Bob choked and sprayed coffee over the table. Dick had to get up and wipe his face with the dishcloth, while Paul laughed and wiped the tears out of his eyes. Timmy sat pleased and smug—a comedian who didn’t quite know whether to laugh or keep a straight face. Even Pa smiled.
“Did you, John?” Timmy asked.
“Now that’s enough of that,” Bob said, chuckling and sighing, “Don’t milk it dry, Timmy. You got your point acrost.”
John smiled, feeling absolutely helpless and stupid. He tried to keep his smile on, to keep it real, but was saved by the business of mashing potatoes. Clink, clink, clink, the forks went, in a surprisingly complicated and interesting rhythm. All faces, he gratefully saw, were turned toward plates; serious, concentrated upon the mashing. Pa held the gravy boat in one hand while he got his potatoes just right, then poured. After the mashing and pouring was finished, the less serious business of eating began. After the first helping Pa decided to speak.
“You was afraid I’d git mad,” he said.
“Git mad!” Bob said wonderingly.
“Maybe that’s right,” John said. “I was wrong there. I never saw you get mad at anything like that, Pa.”
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