“Not so damn fast. I ain’t said so yet.” He studied me for a minute while he rubbed a stump along the bristle on his jaw. “How do I know you can cut hay?” he said. “I never seen you.”
“I cut some of ours last year.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not. Ask anybody.”
“Hah.”
But he studied me some more, examining me now as if I was maybe a little less dangerous than corn blight; more like I was a pissing yellow dog or a talking jackrabbit. He spat between his feet and covered it with one of his shoes. “Drive around this yard once,” he said.
I got up on the tractor, an old John Deere, started it, and made a slow circle in the yard in front of the house and then stopped again beside them.
“So,” he said, “let’s see if you can find reverse.”
So I backed up and came forward to the same spot.
“It still don’t make enough of a show,” he said. “See them cheat weeds over there east of the barn?”
“Yes.”
“See can you cut them weeds without chopping no hole in my barn.”
So I drove over to the barn, lowered the sickle bar, and mowed the weeds beside the foundation, the section blades cutting them off low to the ground. There was a snarl of rusty fence wire in the weeds, but I managed to see it in time. Then I came back to Edith and Roy.
“Found the wire, did you?”
“Yes, but I missed it,” I said.
He looked at the sickle bar for tangled wire or new nicks. “Well, ain’t you the big britches,” he said.
“Stop it,” Edith said. “He’s already proved that he can drive a tractor better than I ever will. And probably as good as you could when you were his age.”
“I drove horses,” Roy said, and made a coughing sound that was his idea of a laugh. “That’s what you know about it.”
“Still,” she said, “you know what I mean. I’m going to start picking peas.”
She turned and walked away from him. She could be firm with him, even harsh with him occasionally, when she had to — over the little things. But she wouldn’t ever leave him; she just would not allow herself that much freedom. He watched her walk away, a small fine woman in a clean work dress that was still filled out in the right places, even if those places were never going to receive the full attention or the appreciation they deserved. At the picket gate she turned and called to me: “Sandy, you can eat lunch with me.”
Then she closed the gate and went up the steps into the house. The old man stood staring at the back door. He didn’t seem to be able to grasp that she had gone, disappeared, refused him. The door was shut. Finally, as if he expected some sudden help to descend out of the clear blue, he looked at the sky, then he looked at the tractor where I was, then at his hands, where there sure as hell was not any help. “Women,” he said. “That’s what I got left to me — a woman and a smart-ass neighbor kid.” He spat into the gravel again. “Hot damn.”
But the old buzzard had no other recourse. He climbed onto the tractor with me and I buckled the belt behind him. “Boy,” he said, “what the hell you waiting on? Drive me to the field.”
We drove out of the yard down the wagon track to the hay field. The old man stood spread legged and swaying behind me, leaning against the belt when the tractor jolted in the rut. When we came to the gate into the field he said, “Turn in here.”
“I know,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “Just a goddamn big britches.”
That was my name all that day and most of the summer. I began cutting his hay that morning, circling in the field, making my rounds toward the center while the sickle bar rode wet and shining beside the tractor and laid the green grass down in rings. All the time too the old man rode behind me, waving his stumps past my ears to give me directions I didn’t want or need and yelling at me above the fire and crash of the tractor engine to turn, Britches, turn, goddamn, even though I was already turning the damn thing. So I must have determined at least a hundred times that if he shoved those raw nubs past my face again or called me Britches just once more I was going to buck the front of the tractor up, so help me Jesus, and pitch the old bastard off, sail him over his lousy belt contraption and, with any luck, if there was any justice under that sun, snap the strings in his scrawny neck. Of course just as often I decided not to. Instead I tried to go blind to his hands and deaf to his fool yelling. But it was a real test, and the only time I recall his being satisfied with anything I did was when the mower chanced to cut through the back of a five-foot rattlesnake. “Sliced him, by damn,” he shouted. “Hah.”
At noon we rode the tractor back to the house to eat. I didn’t know if I could take any more; I was hot, tired, itchy, mad. The old man seemed no different, though. He seemed to have only one gear in his makeup — a kind of full-speed-ahead crazy. When we got up to the house Edith was waiting for us. “Your plate is on the table,” she said. “Sandy and I are going to eat in the side yard.”
She led me around to the east side of the house. It was shady there under an elm tree in the grass.
“I’ll get him started, then I’ll bring yours.”
“But I brought my own lunch.”
“I know that, Sandy,” she said.
So I sat down in the elm shade while she returned to the house to start the old man, butter his bread, tuck his napkin in. I leaned back against the trunk of the tree. Now what am I going to do? I thought. I’ve got to eat two women’s lunches and I’m not even hungry. I’m too damn hot to be hungry. The shade freckled across the grass up the side of the house. I took my cap off to let the breeze blow my hair.
Then she came back with a feast on a platter — ice tea, fried chicken, potatoes, peas in butter, fresh bread, homemade ice cream. I wanted to whine and kick my feet, but I ate all she gave me and heard someone with my voice ask for seconds. I suppose it was a cause worth dying of bloat for.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, watching me. “Any of this, you know.”
“You don’t either.”
“I want to,” she said.
“So do I,” I said. I was half in love with her myself.
“I know, but just the same, Sandy. And you thank your daddy for me, too. Will you?”
She knew all right. She knew. I was there driving the tractor so she wouldn’t have to and I was stuffing myself stupid while she watched me with those brown grown up-woman’s eyes — because my dad had sent me. I guess it was enough too, because I did all the tractor driving there was to do at the Goodnoughs’ that summer, raked hay, cultivated corn, all of it, and ate my mother’s lunch on the half-mile walk to and from their house, hiding the bucket in the soapweeds between times, because how was I supposed to tell my mother I didn’t want or need her lunch either? She wasn’t wild about my being over there in the first place. She had her suspicions.
Anyway, I think I grew three inches that summer and began to get hair in places I didn’t have hair before and to gain weight. I was too busy to notice it much, though, and too confused to care.
WHEN THE SUMMER ended I went back to school where things were a lot less complicated. I began high school that year and played a clumsy halfback on the freshman football team and held sweaty hands at a dance or two with a plump little girl named Doris Sweeter. Doris is married and divorced now in Denver, I hear, and the best our football team could manage was a nothing-to-nothing win over Norka, but none of that matters anymore — didn’t matter much then either — because at least in school I didn’t have to stand still while somebody held me hard by the overalls and asked me to do something he couldn’t do himself without first killing someone in order to do it. And nobody was fanning my face with ruined hands or screaming insanity at me, and nobody was watching me eat while she wished maybe I was somebody else or at least her own boy, and if things had been different I might have been, too. No, school seemed like a positive relief after the summer.