But that isn’t the really beautiful part of this invention, this three-part invention that Bach would have loved to water his Lutheran tomatoes with. The beautiful part comes in front, where there is a small, seemingly atrophied wheel. This wheel is curved so that it can fit over the hose. Thus the tractor, as it moves along, is compelled to follow the route of its own motive force. The hose becomes the guidance system. Consider for a moment the power and the glory of that.
You may say, well, obviously it’s propelled by water, and obviously it follows the hose. But it wasn’t so obvious in 1909, when Benjamin Sweney got a patent for his sprinkler. Sweney’s sprinkler sprinkled and moved forward at the same time, but it didn’t do anything with the hose except drag it behind. Not enough. Viggo Nielsen, an Australian, got his tractor sprinkler patent in 1933. It sprinkled and moved and it rolled the hose up on itself. Not quite right, either. Then came a Nebraskan freethinker, John Wilson. Wilson got two water sprinkler patents. His first sprinkler looked like an old-fashioned bicycle, with a large wheel in front and a small wheel in back. The large wheel was a gear, pushed by a pawl — a word later made famous by Richard Eberhart, in his poem “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment.” But Wilson wasn’t satisfied. The second patent, applied for in September 1941, was for a sprinkler that looked the way the traveling sprinkler looks now. That’s when it all came together. Just before World War II, Wilson disassembled a piece of dairy equipment called a cream separator and used a piece from it as the driving gear in the middle of his machine, while in front he put a small loose wheel that wanted to go wherever the hose went. Now the source of the sprinkler’s power was the route it took: the link back to its past was also its future. You could buy more hose and make long twisty routes for it to follow, even up slight grades if you wanted. As long as you didn’t set the hose up so that there was too sharp a turn, the sprinkler would go anywhere. It was the trustiest little hardworking machine. And if you got tired of watching it, and went inside after a while, as I used to do, to make a sandwich, the tractor, this Great American Invention, would finally arrive at the moment when the two universes of forward and backward time would collide at the faucet by the house.
National Walking Sprinkler of Nebraska made Wilson’s machines, and they still do. They made them for Sears and that’s where my father bought his. Everything about it is immediately understandable. It’s what America did before it threw itself wholeheartedly into the making of weapons that kill everyone.
I have been trying to write a poem about this sprinkler for years, because I like it so much, and I’ve never managed to do it. What a joy now to wind it around Nan’s tomatoes and watch it, in all its intuitive clumsy ungainly beauty, do some good.
• • •
RAYMOND TURNED in the driveway while I was standing watching the sprinkler. “Hey, hey,” he said. “That’s a handy little machine.”
“Isn’t it? I don’t often get a chance to use it. I’m terribly sorry about your grandmother.”
“Oh, thanks. It’s very sad.”
“How’s your mother doing?”
“She’s okay, I think.”
We looked at the sprinkler twirl. I asked him how his music was progressing.
“I’ve got a new song,” he said.
“Can I hear it?”
We went up to his room, which had a poster of Bob Marley on the wall and a corner filled with a multileveled shrine of musical machinery. There were two important-looking squarish studio speakers with yellow cones. Raymond played me his new track, called “Promises Burn.” He played it loud, but even so I couldn’t make out all the lyrics, which went by fast. I heard the chorus, though: “Lips say words and promises burn, so can we.” It was a genuine brainworm, and I said so. I suspected that Raymond had been through some recent unhappiness with his girlfriend, but we didn’t talk about it. He showed me how he’d used three vocoder tracks to mix pitched synthesizer sounds in with his singing, and he revealed a neat trick for reversing a piano note using a virtual guitar pedal, so that it plays backward: yeet, yeet, yit!
“There’s so much to this software,” I said, shaking my head. I told him I’d been working on some dance songs, but they weren’t finished. “If you ever want to try making a song together, just let me know.”
“Sure,” Raymond said. “You could email me some chords and I could email you some beats and we’ll each work on what the other person began. How about that?”
I said that sounded good.
“If we end up with something usable, I’ll play it at Stripe. I’m guest DJ’ing there next week. I’m going to drop some Diplo on them. ‘Shake it till it pops out.’”
“That sounds great. What’s Stripe?”
“It’s a dance club. It’s on Chapel Street.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. Suddenly I remembered Nan’s tomatoes. “Shoot, I better go check the sprinkler now.”
I went outside. My tractor had made almost the full circuit around the tomato bed. The chickens were flapping their wings just out of range of the spray. The rooster crowed.
Thirty
I’M DRIVING HOME NOW from Federal Cigar with all the windows open and the air shuddering through the car, and as you can see it’s one of those days in which visual beauty has been laid on — lain on? — has been laid on with a trowel. There was a new man at Federal Cigar, a serious chap with a zip-up vest. I asked him to recommend some cigars that were like Faustos but different. “I might try the Skull Breaker,” he said. “Or the Bone Crusher.” I bought both of them — they were cheaper than the others — plus eight Faustos and a fourteen-dollar top-shelf creation with a pointy tip. This could get expensive. On impulse I drove down Chapel Street past the gray-and-pink-striped door that leads into Stripe, the dance club that Raymond told me about. I had a moment of thrilled apprehension. It’s not really for fifty-five-year-olds, I don’t think. I’ve hardly ever been to a dance club. Even back when I was writing dirty poems I was more of a dance-at-home kind of guy. I had some good twirly moves, though.
I just listened to Cormac McCarthy — not the novelist, the musician — sing one of his songs, “Light at the Top of the Stairs.” He’s got a voice that can do everything. I met him once. He lives near here. He writes songs that tell whole stories, the way Pat Pattison wants us to. He plays at the Press Room sometimes. I’m jealous of him.
I’m going to park and try a Bone Crusher. I’ll save the Skull Breaker for later.
• • •
AMY LOWELL, queen of the Imagist poets, said that you prepare a cigar for smoking the way you seduce a woman. First you unwrap its tinfoil wrapper. That’s like removing her dress. Then you take off the label — that’s like the shift. Finally you’re down to the nude cigar. Amy Lowell would have enjoyed smoking this Bone Crusher. It’s true to its name, good gracious.