Saturday morning was fair and clear. Rising Moon and my mother worked and talked in the garden. Is read a book in his hammock. A wisp of smoke rose from the campfire. From the van I could feel Janet’s eyes on me as I passed toward the machine shed.
On this fine June day, with the hay fields between first and second cutting, it was corn cultivating time. After a midweek rain, the corn was growing quickly, beginning to rustle at night as it neared knee height. There was time for one more pass through the field with the tractor and cultivator. Then, with the weeds smothered and the stalks banked up with a dust mulch, the corn “laid by,” was on its own. In July the rains tapered off. With luck the corn would have stored enough moisture to get it through the dry weeks of August.
My father liked to say it was a metaphor of faith. Which I had little of these days. At night when I tried to read the Bible, I fell asleep within minutes. If I couldn’t read or sleep, I listened to WLS out of Chicago and, even later at night, to rock-‘n’-roll stations that came all the way from Little Rock and Memphis.
In the cool shed, I lay in the dirt attaching sharp new shovels on the tines of the cultivator. Then I saw her—Janet—pass by the open door on her way to the barn. I glanced around, stood up, brushed myself off, and followed her. Inside the dusky barn, I found her petting the calves.
“Hi again,” I said.
“Hi,” she murmured.
“That one’s only a week old,” I said, pointing.
She smiled shyly and rubbed his head.
“My name is Paul.”
“I know,” she said. “You said so last time we met.”
I shrugged.
“Mine is Janet.”
“I know.”
She nodded. Her eyes caught my smile. “What’s so funny?” she said.
“Nothing really. I was just thinking that we both have names that are”—I fumbled, felt my ears warm—“old-sounding.”
She shrugged.
I bumbled something more, then said, “Well, I’d better get to work.”
She turned back to pet the calves.
In the machine shed I climbed aboard the John Deere with its front-mounted cultivator, started the engine, backed out, and headed toward the field. Its shiny shovels and shields swayed as I drove. I looked back several times toward the barn and yard, but didn’t see Janet.
At the field I forced myself to focus. I stopped and counted rows. It was crucial to begin cultivating on a
matched set of four rows. Since we had used a four-row planter to seed the corn, the cultivator tines were spaced to match the planter rows. Many a farm kid had had his hide whipped, many a hired man had been sent down the road for getting “off row” and rooting out the young plants.
I kept thinking of Janet. Her shining long hair that hung down straight and thin as the rest of her. She was my age and had only pointy bumps for breasts; then again I was no Joe Weider.
I found my four rows and concentrated on the first round. The corn rows passed evenly between the tines, through the shields, and popped up straightly behind. The narrow shovels “scoured” as they should, and the loamy soil rolled up damp and warm against the stalks and corn roots. Mosquitoes, disturbed, filtered up from the fronds, and though the heat and noise of the engine dispersed most of them, a few drafted my back and found their way onto my neck and shoulders. I turned up my collar and drove on.
At field’s end I levered up the cultivator, swung around for the next set of rows—and saw a flash of yellow in the woodlot along the field. I looked again but saw nothing. On the next round I kept a watch on the trees along the fence. I thought I saw her alongside a red oak—but it was only some leaves turned yellow. On the fourth round I saw Janet’s hair, then an arm and a leg. She was leaning against a tree watching. I pretended not to see her. With each successive round I came closer.
Finally I looked up—pretended to suddenly see her—and waved. She smiled, and covered her ears against the tractor’s noise. I headed downfield, occasionally looking over my shoulder. She came all the way to the fence now, and put her arms and chin on the post. She was still there when I returned. I kept looking back at her as I circled the field. Each time I passed, I waved and she waved. Once when I came around she had made a string of black-eyed Susans along the top wire. I pointed to it and held up my thumb. She smiled.
On the next round I braked to a halt. Letting the engine idle, I walked over to the fence. A post and four barbed wires separated us. “Great flowers.”
“Thanks.”
Then we were shy and silent.
“What are you doing to the field?” she asked.
“Cultivating weeds from between the corn rows. I just go round and round.”
She toyed with the black-eyed Susans.
“Would you like a ride?”
She slipped quickly between the wires.
At the tractor I helped her aboard. “Be sort of careful,” I said. She put a bare foot in my hand and I hoisted her up. Her legs were long and smooth as chamois. Her foot rose from my palm in slow motion, and her shirt rode up, revealing, for an instant, her flat white belly and the paler curving undersides of her breasts.
When she was aboard we started downfield. The tractor lurched slightly, which brought a small squeak
from her, and we were under way. She stood rigid beside me on the iron platform, clutching the seat with one hand, her forearm stiff across my back, the other bare arm stretched out, frozen, to the headlight arm. As she rode along, her clean smell engulfed me and I could not keep my eyes from her bare arm, her hand. “Left!” she called to me.
“Sorry!” I corrected, saving a few corn plants but rooting out several others. “I’m not used to having company,” I said.
“I can get off,” she said quickly.
“No, no. I like the company,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” As I drove along I explained to her about the row spacing, about matched sets, about tractor hydraulics—the suave, sophisticated adventures of a corn cultivator like me. She actually seemed interested.
Back near the fence I slowed. “Well, here we are.”
She looked ahead, her lips moving as she counted rows. “Are those the next four?” she said, and pointed down.
“Yes.” I swung the steering wheel—one of my smoothest turns of the day—hoisting the cultivator with the hydraulic lever, arcing squarely into the next quad, dropping the tines dead on dirt, and we headed back up-field.
Gradually, after several more rounds, she began to sway with the undulations of the dirt below. I felt her
spine loosen, her torso, her arms, her legs accept the rhythm of the machine. She did not mind, now, leaning against me.
“Want to try steering?” I called out.
“Sure.”
I slowed, gave her the seat, and crouched beside her, my arm alongside hers.
“That’s good!” I said. She drove straighter than I did. We laughed.
At field’s end I had, of course, to make the turns, but she wanted to steer again, so this time I sat far back on the iron seat and gave her the front part. She sat between my thighs and steered, and I raised and lowered the cultivator when I had to and in this way we kept moving up and down the field. I do not remember much about the rest of that morning other than the warmth of her back against my chest, and her outstretched arms slowly flushing pink from sunlight, and the warm wash of June drifting through her hair and over me.
That evening, at supper, I was silent. The potatoes and meat came by on their platters. I took only small portions.
“Paul? Are you well?” my mother said.
“Yes. Just tired, I guess.”
“Did you get the whole field done?” my father asked. He had been busy in the machine shed.
I nodded.
“It went well, I take it?”
“Sure. No problem.”
Later in the evening my father drove back up the lane and into the yard. He walked briskly to the porch where I sat staring across to the peace van where Janet was cloistered.
“Paul, come with me please.”
I nodded absently and got into the pickup. My father drove down the lane and back to the cornfield. The sun was lower now, which deepened the shadows and highlighted the corrugation of the rows—which no longer looked so parallel. The rows had gone from straight and narrow to wavering, almost paisley in the worst spots.
I stared.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were drunk when you did this,” he said. That vein throbbed in his forehead.
I looked over my shoulder to the yard. Janet’s hair flashed as she swung one of the little kids around and around, and their laughing voices came faintly across the field. My father’s eyes followed mine.
“I get it,” he said. Then he reached into the rear of the truck. “Here’s a hoe. I want you to repair every corn plant you tore out. Don’t come back until it’s dark. Do you understand?”
To spite him I worked until well after dark, when I could no longer see my way, and then the moon came up and I could see again. I kept working until the truck’s
headlights came down the lane and shone into the field. It was my mother come to take me home. “Paul,” she called out. “Come in. It’s time!”
“No, thanks. I’m fine,” I said. And I was. I felt full of power, full of moonlight—I could have worked all night.
“Please, Paul,” she said, “come home.” Her voice broke.
I stood up, and only then felt the blisters on my hands, the deadness in my legs, the cold wetness of my dew-soaked jeans. For her, I shouldered my hoe and came in.