My dad was chastened down at the Farm & Fleet for having only a few of the props. His farm was a mere kitchen garden that had gotten slightly out of hand — and only slightly. And he had painted his barn not the cheap, blood-camouflaging red of the country (which against the green fields and shrubs reminded my mother too much of Christmas) but blue and white like the sky, the silliness of which was spoken of often in the county feed shops. (Though these colors pleased my mother, I supposed, with their reminders of Hanukkah and Israel, though she professed to despise both. My mother’s capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.) Plus, our farmhouse was too fancy by local standards — cream city brick mixed in with chicago to form a pattern of gold and dusky rose, with the mansard roof of an affluent farmer, though my father wasn’t one. The dentils on the soffits my father sometimes painted brown or orange or sometimes a lurid violet — he altered their color every other summer. What was he, “some pillow biter from the Minnesota Ballet”? He sometimes pretended to be deaf and carried on with his own sense of humor and purpose. He had added a family room by hand, in the green way, the first in the county, and he mixed his own earthen plaster and hand-troweled it onto some wired bales of hay stuffed between the beams. The neighbors were not impressed: “I’ll be damned. Bo’s gone and built a mud and straw hut and he’s attached it to his damn house.” The sills were limestone, but reconstituted, and so they were just poured in. He was seldom deterred. He loved his old blue dairy barn with its rusty pails never thrown away and its adjacent stream that could still cool milk and which ran down to a small fish hatchery. He had a woodlot and few tillable fields. It was simple hill farming, really, but to the locals he seemed a vaguely contemptible character, very out-of-town. His idiosyncracies appeared to others to go beyond issues of social authenticity and got into questions of God and man and existence. My father tried not to use hybrid seeds — wouldn’t even plant burpless cukes — and so his lettuce bolted early. Perhaps this seemed hilarious — along with the low acreage, even lower attendance at church suppers and county fairs, plus an eccentric spouse of indeterminate ethnicity who slept too late for a farmer’s wife and did not keep herself busy enough with chores. (My mother laid full-length mirrors on their sides in the back of the flowerbeds to double the look if not the actual volume of her gardening.) Worse than farming out of a book, my father seemed to be farming out of a magazine article: the ginseng farmers were held in higher esteem. Still, he would try to ingratiate himself — plant a small field of decoy soy to enliven the soil and lure the pests over from the neighbors’ alfalfa, help them out a little. He rotated crops, not just for soil but in a fun game to confuse the enemy: if one year one put wheat in where the potatoes were and put the potatoes where the soy was, one seldom got borers. Or, one got bored borers — incapable of the excitement required to track down a snack. Our soil looked chocolatey and had structure, like wine, whereas the Atrazined dirt of our neighbors was often a sad heap of dry gray clods. My dad was local and green and organic and correctly slow but had years ago refused to be bought up by any of the organic cooperatives who were buying up the old truck farms. This just isolated him further. He was known as a Tofu Tom, or Bo the Tofu Prince, or sometimes just “Bofu,” even though he grew potatoes.
“Yeah, his potatoes have a rep — at least in certain places,” I hastened to add. “Even my mother admires them, and she is hard to please. She once said they were ‘heaven-sent’ and used to call them pommes de terres de l’air.” Now I was just plain talking too much.
“That’s funny,” said Sarah.
“Yeah. She felt no name existed that accurately described them.”
“She was probably right. That’s interesting.”
I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, “That’s funny,” or instead of smiling said, “That’s interesting,” or instead of saying, “You are a stupid blithering idiot,” said, “Well, I think it’s a little more complicated than that.” I never knew what to do around such people, especially the ones who after you spoke liked to say, enigmatically, “I see.” Usually I just went mute.
“You know, Joan of Arc’s father grew potatoes,” Sarah now said. “It was in her father’s potato fields that she first heard voices. There’re some legendary potatoes for you.”
“I can understand that. I’ve heard voices myself in my father’s fields,” I said. “But it’s usually just my brother’s boom box clamped on the back of his tractor.”
Sarah nodded. I could not make her laugh. Probably I was just not funny. “Does your father ever grow yams?” she asked.
Yams! With their little rat tails and their scandalous place in contemporary art, about which I’d read just last year. “No,” I said. I feared, as interviews went, I was in freefall. I wasn’t sure why either of us was saying what we were saying. “Potatoes are grown from the eyes of other potatoes,” I said, apropos of God knows what.
“Yes.” Sarah looked at me searchingly.
“In winter my brother and I actually used to shoot them out of pipes, with firecrackers,” I added, now in total free association. “Potato guns. It was a big pastime for us when we were young. With cold-storage potatoes from the root cellar and some PVC pipe. We would arrange little armies and have battles.”
Now it was Sarah’s turn for randomness. “When I was your age I did a semester abroad in France and I stayed with a family there. I said to the daughter Marie-Jeanne, who was in my grade, ‘It’s interesting that in French-Canadian French one says “patate” but in France one says “pommes de terres,” ’ and she said, ‘Oh, we say “patate.” ’ But when I mentioned this later to her father? He grew very stern and said, ‘Marie-Jeanne said “patate”? She must never say “patate”!’ ”
I laughed, not knowing quite why but feeling I was close to knowing. A distant memory flew to my head: a note passed to me from a mean boy in seventh grade. Laugh less, it commanded.
Sarah smiled. “Your father seemed like a nice man. I don’t remember your mom.”
“She hardly ever came into Troy.”
“Really?”
“Well, sometimes she came to the market with her snapdragons. And gladioluses. People here called them ‘gladioli,’ which annoyed her.”
“Yes,” said Sarah, smiling. “I don’t like that either.” We were in polite, gratuitous agreement mode.
I continued. “She grew flowers, bunched them together with rubber bands. They were like a dollar a bunch.” Actually, my mother took some pride in these flowers and fertilized them with mulched lakeweed. My father, however, took even greater pride in his potatoes and would never have used the lakeweed. Too many heavy metals, he said. “A rock band once crashed their plane into that lake,” he joked, and though a plane had indeed crashed, the band was technically R&B. Still, it was true about the water: murky at best from gypsum mining up north.