by Jane Smiley
He wanted a response, but I couldn’t speak, knowing how acutely he would hear me, how clearly he would know from whatever I was saying what I was thinking. After a while, I couldn’t even hear, although I tried to listen. I was a slow-burning fuse, but a fuse nonetheless, who could not fail to blow up the little gathering around the table. Aloft we went, spinning head over heels. There is no getting over it, for me or for them; there is only, I suppose, adding to it. With luck, balancing it. However my life looks to others, what it looks like to me is a child’s tower of blocks, built in ignorance and without a plan.
I wonder if my father and uncles recognized their desires, or if they only recognized their duties: when desire expressed itself, in the form of my aunt, they contained it by force and made sure it never expressed itself again. Their lives always frightened me—wordless and monolithic, as if my uncles were not men but mere features of their own flat landscape. And so I guided myself by the light of my desires, as Pat, too, did, and from us our children have learned the same thing. Even so, we have not always known what we wanted, or not often known what we wanted, or not EVER known what we wanted, only that we wanted.
I think of Joe’s smile as he told me that we had survived everything so far. I don’t like to make too much of this. As Joe would say, children are starving and all that. He will survive this. Michael will survive this disaster as well as whatever drives him away and deadens him inside as he goes. Ellen will stay married or be drawn to divorce, the thing she loathes the most and can’t get out of her mind. Whatever she does, she will survive it.
Even so, as I sit on my bed and pull off my stockings and rub my fifty-two-year-old toes, I think that I, too, have done the thing I least wanted to do, that I have given my children the two cruelest gifts I had to give, which are these, the experience of perfect family happiness, and the certain knowledge that it could not last.
GOOD WILL
1. August
During the first part of the interview, when we are sitting on the porch looking down the valley, I try for exactitude more than anything—$343.67. She is impressed, which pleases me, makes me impressed with myself, and then ashamed, so I say, “And seventy-four cents of that I found, so I really made only $342.93. I suppose there might be a few more pennies somewhere, in a pocket or something.” She writes it down with a kind of self-conscious flourish of her pen—a Bic “round stic,” ten for ninety-nine cents, plus tax, if you buy them at the beginning of the school year—and I can see that momentary pause while she inventories all the things about her that she couldn’t have if her income for last year were, like mine, $343.67. The view at the far end of the valley, the scattered houses of Moreton against the west face of Snowy Top, clears suddenly of August haze, and a minute later I feel a strong southwesterly breeze. Rain by mid-afternoon.
The other subjects in her book, some Seed-Save people, a tree-fruits fanatic, a raised-bed specialist, a guy who’s breeding field corn back to its prehistoric varieties, all of them are going to be included for innovative gardening. Me I don’t think she would have used if I’d had an outside job, or if Liz, my wife, had a job. We are no more up-to-date than Rodale, and she, that is, Tina, the interviewer, will know my methods from looking at the beds. But the money. That gets her. I say, “Before Tommy was born, our income usually hovered around a hundred and fifty dollars a year. But you simply can’t raise a kid on a hundred and fifty dollars a year.” A kid likes to have nice school supplies, for example. In September I expect to go to K-mart and spend six dollars or so on school supplies. Tommy likes the trip. He chooses very carefully.
The gardens lie around the house in a giant horseshoe, five ranges, forty-five separate beds of plants, some neat, some shaggy, all productive. There is nothing to brag about, to her; she knows her stuff, and anyway, this time of year everyone looks like a terrific gardener. The plants are thick and hung with fruit, but not unusual. She fingers the leaves, pulls some soil out from under the mulch, looks for pests. There are a few, but not many. I rely on companion planting, crop rotation, garden sanitation. It works, but she doesn’t ask about it. The praise she has to offer is in the sensuality and pleasure of her gestures, the way she lingers over each bed.
This is better. I didn’t like the way the focus was so clearly on the money before. Money is the precise thing Liz and I don’t focus on, which is why we earn so little. As soon as you bring up the money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral. I would rather talk about food, or swimming, or turkey hunting, or building furniture. The thing to do would be to get Liz to say, “Oh, Bob can make anything,” in that factual way she has, explanatory rather than boastful, but Liz is offended by the whole interview process, by the light it shines on our lives and the way it makes a story of us. My promise to her was that Tina wouldn’t ask her any questions and that she and Tommy wouldn’t have to appear in any photographs.
The fact is, I should like this unaccustomed view of the Miller family, Robert, Elizabeth, and Thomas, on their small but remarkably productive acreage just outside Moreton, Pennsylvania. The fact is that years ago, when I had first bought the land and was building the big compost heaps behind the chicken shed, I used to imagine some interviewer just like Tina passing through, showing just her degree of dignity, respectability, and knowledgeable interest. I used to plan how I would guide her around the beds, then undug, show her through the house, then unbuilt, seat her in the chairs, feed her off the table, entertain her on the porch, and through imagining her, I saw all the details she might like. I imagined I would tell her, as I did during the interview, that imagination itself was the key—once I knew what it was specifically that I wanted, then either I would build it or it would turn up. And here she is, though I stopped looking for her long ago, right on schedule, reacting as she was destined to react. The pleasure of that is a private one, not one Liz would share, but not one I am inclined to give up, either.
It’s true that I even foresaw that she would focus on the money. That’s what I focused on myself then, how I had bought this great piece of land at an estate sale for only thirty-three hundred dollars, that was about sixty dollars an acre, as if all the acres were interchangeable. The bargain was precious, a good omen, a substitute for knowing what I was doing. Now the land has a personality, is without dollar value, and each acre is simply more or less useful or beautiful or ripe for improvement. The money embarrasses me. I should have been less exact. I should have said, “We made some. Enough. I don’t know how much.” But there is false humility in that, too, since I do know how much, since I do pay property taxes and buy school supplies and Tommy’s yearly ticket on the school bus. Tina stands up and stares down the valley, then takes a deep breath. As we turn toward my workshop, she says, “This spot is paradise, isn’t it?”
On my grandfather’s farm in Ohio, the shop was neater than the kitchen, the tools shone more brightly than the silverware. For me, still, my workshop is apart from everything else. We try to cultivate orderly habits, but I don’t mind the ebb and flow of schoolbooks, projects, articles of clothing, or toys through the house. Piles accumulate, are disposed of. Here nothing accumulates. When I am not working, the place looks like a museum exhibit—galleries of narrow shelves holding planes, chisels, knives, joiner’s saws, files, hammers, mallets, rulers, gouging tools, sandpaper. Light pours through the open skylight and the window above the workbench. Each space is neatly labeled, identifying the resident tool, calling out for any absent one. The floor is swept (Liz made the broom one year, didn’t like it in the house, and sent it out here). In a way this workshop is money, since it contains an irreplaceable treasury of tools, but other than the sandpaper, every item came to me as a gift, an inheritance, or a castoff. The planes, for example, with their thick beechwood stocks and blue steel blades, have been outmoded by table saws and routers, and auctioneers at farm sales used to thank me for taking them away by the basketful. I refinished the stocks and reseated the hardware. Now I am told people ransack
antique stores for old planes to give their living rooms that “country” look. I could not afford to replace these. Tina glances around politely, and says, “Lovely,” before stepping back outside and staring at the gardens again. When I join her, she remarks, “The best carrot germination I ever got was fifty percent, and that was the time I nicked each seed with a file.” I cough. Carrot seed is about the size of beach sand.
Liz waves to me from the porch. Lunch is ready. Although she disapproves of the interview, she wants to please the visitor. She has asked me every day about the menu for lunch, about whether she should bake the sourdough bread from whole wheat or white flour (our biggest expense after property taxes), whether I think any melons will be ready, what the chances are that Tina will be repelled by the wild foods—purslane, blackberries, angelica—that we eat routinely and enjoy. I, on the other hand, have been wanting to impress. “I built that chest from a black walnut Liz and I chopped down ourselves. I found the axle and the wheels for that wagon in the junkyard. I built the box myself. We caught these trout this morning. We gave up row planting before any books came out about it.” My own bragging voice followed me around to every job for days. It cannot be done, this task I give myself, the task of communicating the pleasures of our life in this valley, even to an ear that longs to hear of them.
I would begin with the weight and cottony fragrance of the quilts we’ve made, an “All Hands Around” on the bed, a big log cabin in rainbow colors against black on the wall. In sixteen years we’ve made twelve quilts, used up one, burned a hole in another. In the winter we use two or three for warmth, and the first thing I see in the morning, in the white light of our whitewashed bedroom, is the clashing colors of the quilts spilling away from me over the bed. Then, under my feet, I feel the smooth-painted floorboards. The windows are uncurtained and unshaded, usually flat gray with morning fog. All of this is familiar and comforting.
Or I could begin with something even more inexpressible, which would be the stiffness of muscles worked the day before and sensed afresh a moment after waking. I think my consciousness must rouse before my senses, because there is always, always, a pain-free moment, and then the ache flows in. I like the ache. It tells me what I did yesterday, suggests what I might do today, even how I might do it. Farm work doesn’t have to be backbreaking. It can be as aerobically sound and healthfully taxing as any other sort of exercise. Liz calls this “spading-as-sport” my private obsession, but another early morning pleasure is her sleepy, admiring rake of fingertips over my pectorals and abdominals.
Or there’s Tommy’s room, when I pass his doorway first thing in the morning, when Tommy is thoroughly asleep. He seems afloat in his bed, under his quilt, a green, orange, and yellow “Rail Fence.” On the shelves I built are the toys we made him. He sleeps in a shirt Liz wove (I built the loom) on a straw tick the three of us stuffed. Across the room he has known since birth is the rocking cradle I copied, in local butternut, from a picture in a book I got out of the library. The headboard and footboard trim is carved with a twist, to look like a piece of rope; then the twist is repeated in the four braces that hold up the cradle. The lambskin lying across the mattress Liz made came from one of our lambs. The lamb’s wool of the baby blankets was spun from some of the others. Liz’s mother taught me to crochet, and I used to crochet while Liz knitted. When I look into my son’s room, my pleasure is the knowledge that I have brought all of my being to bear here—not just hands and brain, but seed, too, and not just seed, but hands and brain, too. If he were really afloat, his bed would bump against the window, and he could look upon the orchard I planted, then bump against the shelves I built, where he could snatch down tops and cars and blocks and tools and dolls we’ve made him; this is a lovely sea, I think, tiny, enclosed, friendly, all his, and his alone.
Lunch doesn’t look too weird—a plate of sliced tomatoes and green peppers, a couple of trout, cold boiled potatoes, beet greens, blackberries. Tommy follows his mother back and forth between the range and the table in a way I find annoying, and so I say, “Son, sit down!” He tenses, smiles, sits down. He is a good boy. Tina sits beside him and he offers her the pitcher of cold springwater, as he should. She looks around the room.
I can’t help it. I lean back in my chair and say, “You know, it’s remarkable what I’ve gleaned for free over the years. We have fishing rods and ponies and bicycles, a canoe, plenty of tools, sheep, two goats, lots of chickens. We tried a couple of turkeys a few years ago, and a cow, but she gave too much milk. This house has double-hung windows, figured brass doorknobs, a front door with a big pearly oval of etched glass. An old man in State College gave me that kitchen range. It’s from the twenties. He found it in his barn. A guy I know in Moreton hauled it for me, in exchange for three lambs. It cooks our food and keeps the entire house warm. The first five years I lived here I spent getting to know people and offering things, then asking for things they were about to discard. Now, when people for miles around want to get rid of something, they send me a card. Incoming mail is free. Every so often I jerk loose and buy a couple of dollars’ worth of stamped postcards for replies.” I smile. “Compared to scrounging in Vietnam, which I did, this is no big deal.”
We begin helping ourselves to the food. Tina asks, “What do you do for transportation?” Her manner is mild. I was the one looking forward to this, so I’m not sure why it puts me on edge. I say, “We think about it.”
Liz doesn’t like my brusqueness. She smiles and says, “He means that we plan ahead. Most days nobody goes anywhere except Tommy to school on the school bus, anyway.”
“If I have a job or am trading something, part of the bargain is that they come here and pick me or it up. Besides, it’s only three miles to town. We can walk or ski. Tommy can ride the pony.” The tomatoes are delicious, sweet and firm and juicy. I never plant hybrids, only old fashioned varieties like Rutgers and Marglobe and Roma. I save the seed from the best plants and best fruits, selecting for hardiness and flavor. It works. “The thing is, going away should be something you contemplate, not something you do automatically.”
“Could you live this way farther back in the mountains?”
“You mean, where it’s colder, harder to get places, and rockier?”
“Yeah.”
“You really mean, if not this extreme, then why not more extreme, as extreme as possible? Why not Alaska or the Australian outback?”
“I didn’t mean that, but why not?”
“Why not really live off the land. Grubs and ants and spearing fish with a sharpened stick.”
“Bob, come on,” Liz says; then she turns to Tina. “We went through that about five years ago. Bob kept looking at brochures about land in Montana and British Columbia.”
“We didn’t ever send in the business reply cards, though. I was joking then, I’m joking now. My purposes aren’t extreme, or political. My aim wasn’t to choose the hardest path and prove I could do it. It was the same as everyone else’s aim. It was to prosper. You don’t prosper on hilly, rocky soil. It’s more expensive to live in town or far from town, less expensive to live outside of town. We’re self-contained, not isolated and hostile.”
Tommy relishes everything on his plate, not preferring the sweet to the savory, the cooked to the fresh, the domestic to the wild. He is a model eater, would devour grubs and ants and roots if they were on the table. Can Tina see what a miraculous child he is, how enthusiastic and open and receptive to guidance? Before he was born, I used to imagine a child-raising program that was purely example-setting. I would go about my work and he would accompany me, gradually assuming responsibility for the tasks that he was strong enough and smart enough for. There would be a lot of informative conversation, I thought—me explicating techniques and him asking intelligent questions. The reality is better than that. He tags along as eagerly as anyone could hope for, but he does all the talking. A lot of it is questions, but much of it is observations, remarks, little stories, bits of songs that are going through his
head. There is a large category of stray sounds that simply escape his lips, from grunts to hisses to yells that I hope he has the sense to contain when he is at school but that I like for their animal quality, for their way of saying, “This organism is alive.”
Which is not to say that example-setting is sufficient. I find that he does need a lot of molding and guidance, but that is another task we plan for, Liz and I.
After lunch there is a routine of work—bringing the animals into the barn out of the sun, checking water buckets, looking for eggs—that I think Tina should accompany me on, but when we sit back in our seats, Liz speaks up and says, “Tina and I will clear this up. Why don’t you and Tommy come back in an hour for a swim?”
Considering that, when I asked her what she thought about this interview a couple of weeks ago, she said that she would rather chase pigs in a snowstorm, I am a little surprised. But it is a relief. Tommy runs out ahead of me, knowing that after chores he can ride the pony for half an hour before his rest time. He doesn’t notice the view, but I do; every time the screen door slaps shut behind me, I pause and stare down the valley meadow toward Moreton, Snowy Top, and the dusky receding folds of the mountains beyond. My land is laid out rather deceptively—the smallest part is open field, valley floor, but all of these acres are visible from the house, and all of them are flat. The slope from the foot of the valley to the house is only three degrees, which is unusual around these parts. There has always been a farm on this site, and the barn remains, though the original house burned down in 1904—it was a big house and a big fire that the volunteer fire department could see from town but couldn’t get to, because over a mile of the road was drifted in. One of the children ran burning from the house, but they rolled him in the snow and saved his life. The article took up half the front page of the Moreton Record. The family moved in with relatives in town, and their descendants farmed from there—keeping this land in pasture for seventy years, and running sheep and heifers and horses on it. When I bought it, the soil was so well fertilized that all I had to do the first year was turn under the turf and dig the beds. The other outbuildings were pretty up-to-date, too: the lean-to workshop beside the barn, a well-ventilated root cellar ten feet from the foundation of the old house (when I scraped dirt and caked mud off the old door, I found its surface scorched black from the fire, but the shelves inside that once held bins of vegetables were only dusty).