April moonlight and watched the last snow of the year fall on the cars shining in the lot, and then he turned to her and kissed her amid the flakes. And Sarah looked over Sam’s shoulder (barely, he was so tall) and seen Marva Harrison inside at the table in the rear, looking out through the plate glass window at the two of them.
Marva had it bad for Sam, but Sam, with his football (all-league end), basketball (the boys went to the quarter-finals in the state tournament), and baseball (batting .421 and playing a lanky first base), and farming (milking 400 head of Guernsey cows) was too tired to notice anything but the sun coming up and the sun going down. So it had been Sarah who had taken him in hand, basically asking him about the semi-formal until Sam had tentatively asked her, and then carefully not leading him into the snowy parking lot night. But Sam had kissed her, that was unaided, and so Marva now had it for Sarah. And her friend Nora Kindle was just as bad, the two of them. Sarah looked toward Sam, bent to barely six feet now with his head turned to cock his hearing aid toward the second reading, following along slowly with a finger stumped at the middle joint in the large print missal, and Sarah smiled. Go ahead, whisper you two.
Sam looked at Sarah and saw the smile with the corners turned down and wondered when his wife might ever be happy. The two boys (there had been three, until Dave had run off Givens Road on that tricky corner and hit the old oak where so many other high school graduates had taken their last turn), the two boys ran the farm, a business now with 1,200 Holsteins milking three times a day, and another 400 in the field. Plus the new business – 50 white-faced Herefords eating only grass in the lower pasture.
It got so that the EPA was out four times a year to look at their manure pile – an environmental hazard, according to the government. And the pile had lost its sweet, earthy smell of Sam’s boyhood cowshit. Now it was sharp, it made his nose wrinkle in the spring afternoon. And the boys were talking to him about methane gas production. Apparently there was now so much cowshit in the pile that the boys said they could pipe it into the cow houses and use it for heat.
Sarah didn’t like him to say cowshit, she liked to say manure when she had to say it at all, but cowshit was what it was and now, the second reading over, Sam stood slowly and said “Cowshit” under his breath and remembered milking by hand in the warm, comfortable barn, his forehead buried in the soft flank of a cow whose name he knew. He stood listening to the Gospel and thought of the cold beer he would drink on the rotting back porch of the old house when he got home, and of the warm sun on his face.
Sam Jr. looked down the pew at his old man and wondered when he might die. The old man was hanging on and hanging on – he had a stroke last year and they had all sat around the hospital bed looking out over the lake and waiting for the machines to stop beeping. But they never had stopped and the old man had walked out in time for Christmas and they had all gone on.
Sam Jr. closed his eyes and thought of the hot sun on his baking bare back as he and Dave trudged over the dusty furrows, bending to heft rocks and toss them in the hay wagon as they had walked. And the old man’s dusty cap on his head as he sat on the tractor idling along. And he thought of the August sun slanting in to the barn at the top of the haymow as he and Dave hauled and slid and stomped bales into place, stumbling as their legs dropped suddenly in between bales with the sharp straw scratching their legs and leaving long bloody lines under their jeans. And he thought of breaking the ice in the water troughs on hard cold January mornings with the wind slicing through his barn coat and the cows butting his back, edging toward the water. And he thought of school mornings at the end of the drive in the November rain with the rain trickling down into his eyes – seventeen and not driving to school because Dave had whacked himself in a tree on graduation night – and climbing up the goddamn steps of a school bus and looking down the rows of little kids and sitting down with his books on his lap, wet and steaming on the over-heated bus.
And Sam Jr. waited for the old man to die. Not because he hated him. Hell, the old man had lifted him up out of a grain wagon as his legs had scrabbled toward the auger waiting for him underneath the chute. And the old man and him and Dave had left the barn on that hot August day and driven in the pick-up down to the lake and he and Dave had run pounding down the dock and up and into the cold clear water, down under with their eyes closed and feeling the water flooding away the dirt, and sweat, and straw, and washing the dust and chaff from his nostrils, and leaving a little slick on the surface when they came up clean and cool to watch the old man ease himself into the water with a bar of Ivory soap and smile at his sons forehead deep in the lake. Not because he hated him, but because he was an old man and it was time for Sam, Jr. to have the farm.
When Sam Jr. gets the farm, Steve thought, then we can do some things. Sam Sr. would sit on a contract for weeks into months, the papers rolled up and drying out in the old desk buried in feed bills and fishing flies. Sam, Jr. would get the contract electronically, and print it out and sign it the same day, and then fax it back. Sam, Jr. was all ready to start producing methane; he had already had plans for another barn and another 800 head. Sam Jr was looking into GPS receivers for the tractors and the new planters that read the signals and adjusted the seed and fertilizer according to the soil analysis Steve had done two summers ago. Sam Jr. was the future of that farm and when he was in charge…
Steve looked over the congregation and counted the dairy farmers and multiplied their heads by his commissions on new tractors and implements and barns and computers and service fees. He had stayed on after business school, been in town for four years now, and he had learned to stop talking about optimizing assets and continuous improvement and start talking about pounds of milk per head and grain prices. He was a whiz at account management and could review all of his clients, and plan his conversations at coffee hour, before the priest finished the Gospel if it was a long one.
It was a long one, thought Father Young, and he fought to maintain the narrative as he read it aloud for the third time that weekend. Father Young was young, he was only 35, and the day he left the seminary, fresh from his ordination, the fervor of his vocation had cooled sharply as he looked at the letter from his new bishop and plotted his three new parishes on the map.
Father Young was from suburban Long Island and had never been north of Poughkeepsie. These three towns, tiny dots on a road map of New York, were spread along a lake with a name he could not pronounce. They were ten or twenty miles apart, connected by spidery lines. He Googled the town names and found spare little sites, with sparse information beyond the elected officials and pictures of “town barns.” And snowplows. Each town had pictures of their massive snowplows and, gathered around the high curling blades were men wearing farmer caps with rough beards. His new parishioners.
So he had driven up from The City and across the bottom of the state and then north into the lakes where the roads rose up steep ridges and then fell so sharply that Father couldn’t see the bottoms from the top. Further north, the roads began to smooth out and when he reached the lakes themselves, they rolled more evenly, dipping down to stony lakeshores and rising up into fields of corn and cows and bales of hay rolled huge among the stubble. The lakes glittered in the afternoon sunlight, peeking through the trees as Father sped along. When he reached the town of his first parish, he stopped and bought an ice cream cone and walked along the quiet main street, looking into shops. A group of men at a fire station had waved hello and Father waved tentatively back at them. He reached his church and walked up the steps and turned around and sat there, licking his ice cream cone and listening hard to the stillness.
The first winter had been very hard. Father fought his way up and down the hills in the snow. Each storm had been worse than the one before and the plow drivers pushed the snow up into high jagged drifts. His thermometer in his apartment’s window had actually dropped below zero and, fantastically, stayed there for two solid weeks. He learned to be careful on the high windswept stretches where the snow snaked
across the road, rolling and hissing on black ice. And he learned to drive, as one parishioner had told him, like he had no brakes when his tires spun through six inches of soft slushy new snow with more coming down so fast his windshield wipers never caught up. He learned that Mass was never canceled, hardly ever, and he bought snow tires.
He could use snow tires now, and probably studs, because his sermon was wandering all over the slippery long Gospel. It was the Samaritan woman at the well, giving Jesus a drink, and though he had the first reading, with the water bursting forth in the desert to help him, he now felt, on this third reading of his sermon, that he hadn’t developed the theme well enough – it wasn’t clear, even to him now. He felt the congregation wandering, he could see them check out, one by one, and he finally summarized and closed and walked back to his seat, defeated.
That wasn’t too bad, Stan Burgess thought. I liked the bit about the water being just water, and you would be thirsty again, but Jesus giving
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