All the red-winged blackbirds are gone to the mountains, where it’s cool. The morning glory vines have shimmied every cornstalk and planted pine and fencerow on the farm, embracing without prejudice one and all, overwhelming the undercarriage of nature while flaunting strings of languorous pastel flowers. The exception to this riot of polite colors is the tiny scarlet morning glory, a tulip-shaped flower that jumps out of the weeds like a redhead at a Primitive Baptist prayer meeting.
Waterfalls of kudzu yield to gravity like a woman’s hair. Someone once said that if New England is a woman’s brains, the South is her belly.
Green darters, dragonflies the size of hummingbirds, rise out of the pond and roar about, terrorizing the rest of the insect world. My friend in Alabama shoots mosquito hawks with .22-caliber ratshot. Cicadas wearing an extra layer drone through the heavy breath of summer looking for the right pine tree to grasp and shed a shell. Old-timers feed the ground shells to their coon dogs to make them better tree dogs. Pine trees hit by lightning rot in a month. Yellow butterflies huddle face-to-face in the middle of dirt roads and scatter in the air like flower petals. Bullbats (nighthawks, order of goatsuckers) dive at insects with gaping mouths; the air growls when they pull up short of the ground. The Mississippi and swallowtail kites replace the bullbats. They too swoop from tremendous heights at the locusts that flush ahead of the tractor. The grasshoppers are as big as my thumb and the kites catch them in their talons, inches from my face. When the birds have reached altitude they raise both talons to their chin and eat the grasshoppers in midair, stalling their wings in the process.
White rain rushes across the water. Raindrops the size of marbles dimple the pond. In June eleven woodies fell out of the duck box in front of my studio. There are only three left, not counting the hen. A late afternoon rain break under the toolshed in August. It rained on the first day of dog days last year and, just as the saying goes, it went on to rain for forty days. This year, however, there hasn’t been a shower on the farm since June, and the sun hides behind a permanent heat haze. The clay is so hard that in places the fields have split in two. No one has seen dew on the grass in weeks.
Charley has been pushing dirt. Bill has been watering the trees—sawtooth oaks, sycamores, Lombardy poplars: thirty-three in all—that we planted this winter. He waters by hand, out of fifty-gallon drums lashed to the trailer, and a five-gallon bucket. I promise to buy him a water wagon. He drinks coffee, nods at the rain that finished his job, and prods absentmindedly into the small round holes in the clay outside the shed with a piece of grass, to tickle the doodlebugs. He looks tired from toting all that water, but if I say so he’ll deny it. Age may have pulled some weight off his frame, but in his head Bill is as strong as he was when he was twenty. The only time I ever raised my voice in the eight years I’ve known him was to force liquids down his throat one burning summer afternoon while he was pouring cement behind the dam. The temperature was one hundred degrees, and there was as much color in his face as there was wind at the bottom of the twenty-eight-foot structure. He obliged me because I am his boss, but he wasn’t happy about it and for months afterward insisted he had been fine and was aware of his capacities. That may be, but he hasn’t accepted the wearisome implications of time yet.
Charley points to a purple beetle, laughs, and slaps his leg. A hard-shelled purple turd-tumbler has reared up on its gnarled hindquarters, churning the dusty clay, pushing and herding a dog shit large enough to die under. Charley said, “Damn if that ain’t a lot of tumbling.”
“You’re telling me.”