An Opening Day

Chuck was late because he had been all the way down to New Orleans on the weekend. So I performed our duty alone, by going out on the line-hunt with Vernon and the other farmers in the morning and shaking the pheasants out of the corn. The fields were half-cut, with about twenty rows down and twenty up, so that it made for good shooting, although somewhat mechanical. We walked in a line, as though we were beaters for some rajah who would never arrive. The birds were very well-fed and the older ones, when they couldn’t run, would burst out of the tall corn just at the height of the taller stalks and fly there, down the row, or suddenly across, so that the shots on them were difficult.

The farmers were very good at those shots, and they were serious and efficient men, so that by noon all of us had our day limits and they left, because of the filled limits and because the moisture was at a good level for the corn and they all had a lot to get in. If it got too damp they had to use dryers and that burned a lot of expensive electricity.

I ate lunch and when Chuck came we went across the dirt road to where there was a weather-beaten house, once painted a gaudy orange, but now almost penny brown, at the end of a long driveway where the fence was rusty and weak at the corner-posts. Behind the house was a tall, cylindrical crib made of open wire, and still a quarter full of shucked corn, and to the left Interstate 80, so that the fence there was new and taut, and beyond the single open crib, running east along the new fence, was a row of storage bins, the colour of old pewter, closed-in like inverted mugs, three across and forty long and with many cubits of corn inside each one.

“Let’s try around the open crib,” I suggested. “If it’s good for the Angus it should be good for birds.”

Nothing stirred up.

To the right of the crib was a field of timothy and white clover and weeds, crushed by the winds and strong with seed. The field was high in the centre and dipped down on all sides, but most strongly toward us. With the dirt road side it was almost even, but before we could get down into that field now we would have to climb two fences, the second one an old one that ran along what had once been a creek bed, where the field ran its steepest slope. Then the grade curved around on the east side, a little more steeply than on the dirt road side, and sloped one final time to the south, moderately, at the beginning of a long grade that ran down through all of the next farm.

Over there a herd of forty Angus had trampled everything into mud, but in our field there were only three horses, a white mare and two chestnut ones.

“Let’s try the crown and then come on down on them once or twice,” Chuck said.

“Prego,” I replied, but he didn’t smile.

“Should have a dog,” he said. “One of us should settle down and run a spaniel or two.”

The last time I had seen him and Mary they had been living in a third-floor flat on the Via Babuino, seemingly enjoying the artist’s life, with lettuce stored in the bathtub to keep it crisp. She had been painting blocked-out women in full primaries, and he translating Montale.

We went over the fence and started up the hill. The storage bins were at our backs, as was the once gaudy orange house. The horses had left shit in the field, but not much, and they hadn’t been there long enough to trample all the resting spots of the birds. The two chestnut horses ran into the corner by the dirt road while we were coming over the second fence, but the white mare stood steady until our first shot. It was my miss. And then Chuck’s too.

We hadn’t expected birds on the way up the slope, for we had been counting on coming down from the crown and hearing the birds running ahead of us and flying only when too close to the fence. These went right over our heads, two whirring hens and a cock, and when they were past the storage bins they made a long glide across the Interstate to the fallow fields on the far side.

“Home safe,” Chuck said.

The crown was thick with grass cover. Rich soil. You could take a cubic foot of the field there, the timothy, and the air, and the sow-thistles, and the falling seed as you brushed through it, and paint at just that cube for a month, but you would never get it and it would have changed. It changed as quickly as the sun-glints of a Finnish girl shaking out her hair after pulling off a hat of fox fur.

In a slow curve from the dirt road to the south-east corner ran a wagon rut, and in the clumped grasses beyond that we put up the second cock and missed him too.

“We’ve been away too long,” I said.

“I just want them too hard. You’re being pleasant. You’ve already got your tail-feather for the twerp. Mary was doing a picture of him, you know.”

“She never got to see him.”

“In that picture you sent us, with Rachel belly-side up in your corn field when she was pregnant. African corn, eh? Not even up to her shoulder. She looked like she had been planted in it and the kid ready to burst out.”

“You should have tasted that stuff. Awful. Even after we boiled it all night once. But I remember that photograph.”

“It’ll be a good painting.”

“She’s serious, eh.”

“Never was anything else.”

“Let’s try and work up into that far corner. Might have another chance there, if I don’t pepper one of his steers.”

“Next time it’ll be better,” he said.

We walked ten feet in from the wagon ruts, making a lot of noise, and when we did get near the angle where the fences met, a hen went up over the sagging board gate, and then a cock.

“There he is,” Chuck had said.

“Prego,” I laughed. Chuck tumbled him.

“It must have been an Italian bird,” he said. “If you knew one more word of Italian, it probably would have flown back to us. Did you see the way he stopped and listened to you?”

We had to shoo away the cattle to get the bird. We went back over the board gate and through the thick timothy. The one hundred and twenty storage bins along Interstate 80 were not quite out of our sight. As the sun hit them from a lower angle they looked less like pewter.

In front of us, across the dirt road, Vernon had a goodly portion of his field of corn picked and shucked out and sitting yellow as nuggets in the wagons and bins.

“You’ve never seen anything like it over there.” I said, “The way one man would put in a whole field of corn with no more tool than a hand hoe and his back.

“The government gave us a house on a hill and I gave the hill to a gardener of one of the Party bosses and that gardener and his wife for months cleared it all of scrub and cultivated it and planted it, with only a machete and a hand hoe; must have been almost an acre, but all of it on an incline like a dropped ice-cream cone, and the rains came early and hard, before he had it properly mounded, and the top of the field was washed clean and the bottom was silted up and the middle of the field was bared-out, so that the corn borers got at it and out of that whole field they cleared no more than six or seven bushels of corn about the size of your hand.”

My pants were burred and seeded.

“Here you know, Chuck, even Vernon’s paranoid about the Chinese; figures they’ll attack sooner or later. A Quaker, but he killed his two birds this morning. Keeping in shape.”

Down in New Orleans, Chuck hadn’t convinced Mary to rejoin him, and now he didn’t want to look at things seriously, didn’t want me to talk. He offered me his pheasant while we plucked it, but I said no, we’d share the feast. Rachel would cook the three at once. With real wine. We continued on the slow diagonal curve of the wheel ruts, across the empty field of dry timothy, the blowing seeds, until we got to Chuck’s grey Volkswagen and could drive home.