And what would that “Thank you” have meant, exactly? Thank you for the opportunity to jog all day behind the folksy old wagon pulled by the folksy old tractor steered by the folksy old neighbor? Thank you for the opportunity to burn and lacerate my fingers heaving folksy hay bales up onto a folksy old platform baked by the folksy old sun? Thank you for the opportunity to scream myself hoarse in an attempt to be heard over the tractor’s folksy engine, so that the folksy driver might turn around just once and acknowledge my folksy arm signals, which in the folksy parlance of the place conveyed quite fluently the notion Ease it up, coot, or I will climb up onto that tractor and kill you?
There was no lemon anyway in the Styrofoam jug this decrepit brought out at midmorn for the two of us to share, and no sugar even at the bottom, and no possibility that he would not have touched his papery lips to the spigot before I ever got a go at it, and so deposited his old-man sloughings around the orifice, which convinced me to refuse any interaction with the jug until I had almost begun to hallucinate (and could half envision the tractor tipped over, and the neighbor pulped, and myself happy and explaining to the authorities that it must have been some function of his advanced years, as we certainly had plenty of water), after which, I confess, I did take that thermos up, and sucked like a babe from its crusty hole, only to discover that the water was so warm it could not have been properly cooled to begin with, which discovery, and my alarmed inquiry into the matter, the old man met with a self-satisfied lecture on the need for hot water, not cold, beneath a summer sun, lest a shock to the system occur and accelerate, rather than ward off, your common heatstroke.
Once relieved of this useless lore, and once certain I understood that it was the town people, with their cold water and their lukewarm ideas, who had got it all wrong, he lit up a pipe so as to give me time to drink my fill of his wisdom and his backwash. I remember that he gazed out approvingly over the trees, and helped himself to a puff or two, and then widened his jaw so as to speak again (this time no doubt about how he had learnt that warm-water trick from his father, who had learnt it from his, and so on, until at last I saw how I might one day pass this crappy magic along to some overworked and underwanted son of mine), at which point I threw the jug down and declared him to be an idiot, which outburst he started at, sure, but for the most part pretended not to hear. He simply emptied out the contents of his pipe against what tire was nearest me (the right, as I recall), and got that tractor up and into gear, and for the rest of the day drove it and me so hard across his field that by nightfall I was too tired and too nauseated to care who was the idiot here, or to dwell much more upon murder.
Crypt
These hands, I submit, were not meant for farmers’ throats, any more than they were meant for the coarse twin loops that encompassed and defined those bales: too loosely here, too tightly there, so that the knee came up under too early or too late, which then caused a great jolt to the spine, and further tear on the fingers, and a resurrected desire to crush for good the old man’s already half-collapsed smokestack. These hands were meant for finer things: for piano keys and pages, for soft cheeks and new hairs, for those parts of people that reward kind pets more than they ever will your numb and calloused scrape. These hands were meant to play, I submit, and one day, God willing, to make something, not to yank up out of the ground something that had long since learned to remake itself, which miracle humans had not caused to happen but only caused to happen here (in this particular field, on this particular patch of grime), so as to aid in a crude vegetation’s slaughter by bushwhacker, and its inept mummification by baler, and its removal by pain and by wooden hearse from a field no one saw for a killing floor to a barn no one saw for a crypt.
Arrangement is not creation
Arrangement is not creation. How might sometimes coincide with where, but it will never amount to if. Farmers, or should I say farmers manqué (for how many of us, honestly, take the whole of our living out of the dirt nowadays, or did so even thirty years ago?), are no more the sires of their plants and their cows, or of the milk and meat pulled away from these creatures, than I am of these words I spread around and imagine, for a happy moment, to be mine.
If the thinkers are to be trusted, and supposedly they once were, we are none of us the maker of anything, not even ourselves, but are stardust both in metaphor and in fact, comprising elements far older than the milk or the meat or the words could possibly be. Yet although I see ample reason why this selfless conception of reality might appeal to the Christians infesting what mostly just pretends now to be American farmland, no system by which authorship of the universe is reserved to God alone, and our earthier people receive not even partial credit for what their planet produces (and so no say in who will or will not be going to hell), has ever, to my knowledge, caught on here.
Despite all fashion, then, I will admit to being no maker of reality but only a decorator of its interior, as are all farmers, and certainly all those mall-walking rodeo clowns who are not farmers even in the liberal sense yet stand firm in their belief that by a decision to stand firm in this sort of boot, and to sit pat in that sort of truck, and to cast their vote as if it were a siege weapon against anyone who will not conform to their purchasing patterns, they have sided with the natural folk (whom they greatly outnumber now and have failed even to resemble since at least the 1950s, when it was quickly forgotten that just a generation prior a large number of American farmers professed to be Communists) against the urban, college-boy (and, yes, sometimes Jewish: what of it?) homos who control the media and fail to promote sufficiently the idea that self-congratulatory dirty hands and a penchant for store-bought yellow ribbons wrapped around store-bought flagpoles in support of a tax-bought soldiery whose television-bought purpose and behavior it should by law be considered treasonous to question can be sexy too.
A fly has just now landed on my arm. Why are there still so many flies this far into autumn? Is it only because I am not at a latitude normal to me, nor I suppose at a longitude either, but am down and over and despite myself sweating and remembering, unbidden, the way in which my father’s mother kept a swatter always active in her hand during the summer months, and punctuated her talk with a use of it as easy and as coy as that of any great Spanish lady with a fan, so that when her teenage grandson inquired (cleverly, he thought) about the man who had lately been seen taking her square dancing, widowed the same as she was and soon to marry and disappoint her, she told him swish that he was a farmer like my grandpa had been and that she did love dancing with him, he really whap! knew what he was doing out there, but what most impressed her was that he underwhap!stood life as being something precious and short, having seen a child of his cut in half by a seatbelt of all swish swish things, and before that having served his country in the Korean War (did I know about that? whap! that we had a war with Korea?), and having been sitting on a log with a friend of his when a bullet came through and splattered the friend’s brains all over the both of them, and why swish if you think about it, did the good Lord decide it was the friend’s time and not Mr. ____’s? whap! Whap!