red cedar review fall/winter red cedar review fall/winter $1.50 special double issue red cedar review Volume 8 Number 2/3 Copyright by Red Cedar Review, December, 1973 contents FICTION Andrew Scheiber boden's ground........................................................................................................ 3 POETRY George Oppen From a Phrase of Simone Weil's and Some Words of Hegel's.................................47 Jim Harkness Touring.....................................................................................................................48 David Gitin “what do we see''....................................................................................................52 Meadowlark.............................................................................................................53 Upstate.....................................................................................................................56 Carl Thayler Goodrich..................................................................................................................58 The Haggard Ode.....................................................................................................65 Tomas Transtromer Traffic (Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly).................................................................................68 A Few Moments (Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly) ...........................................................89 Jim Harrison Sergei Yesenin 1895-1925...................................................................................... 70 Peter Nye The San Diego Autorama........................................................................................71 Rus Myers One Father...............................................................................................................72 Estelle......................................................................................................................74 Michael Hamberger Love.......................................................................................................................76 The Glade...............................................................................................................78 Roses, Chrysanthemums........................................................................................80 Dan Gerber The Cycle of Waters................................................................................................81 November................................................................................................................82 Aneurysm................................................................................................................83 Thomas Vandenberg Homecoming...........................................................................................................85 “The one who likes to accuse”................................................................................86 ‘I declare bankrupt”...............................................................................................87 Robert Vas Dias Your Voice Falls On................................................................................................90 A Retreat That Is an Advance.................................................................................91 The Food Game...................................................................................................92 “It's a world of an egg”...........................................................................................93 ARTICLES & REVIEWS & Three First Novels.............................................................................................................96 The Progress of a Small Press....................................................................................... 100 Dreaming of Gardens......................................................................................................103 Speech Acts & Happenings.............................................................................................106 COVER: Untitled/ Drawing by David Kirkpatrick boden’s ground short story by Andrew Scheiber Figure without caption. (Lucas) The grandfather clock is broken. I just asked him where the tool box is but he can’t remember. “Look out there by the barn,” he says. “I used it yesterday to change them washers on the pump.” He shouldn’t of done that because I did it myself only three weeks ago and it won’t need a new set for a while yet. “Pa,” I tell him, “why the hell did you take them washers out? They were just new three weeks ago.” “The water got brackish again,” he says. “Just plain damn rotten. Been that way three days now.” He rocks quietly and looks out the window the way he always does. His eyes follow the cars on the interstate as they zoom by the window and past where he can see them. I bend down by the glass plate on the clock where it is cracked and dusty, trying to see up inside the works, but it is nothing but dark up in there and I give up. “I can’t fix it, Pa,” I say. “You’ll have to abide radio time for awhile.” He munches his glob of Mail Pouch and hocks. “Goddamn,” he says, and a car zips past his vision, his eyes still tracking it through the walls when he can’t see it any longer. “Another one of them little Hitler scooters. Pink to boot. Too many of them goddamned things on the road.” “I hear tell they make pretty fair mileage,” I say. He pushes the wad to one side of his mouth and raises his bottle of pop for a long swallow. “Course they do,” he says. “They make the A-frames out of old Jew bones. That’s how them German jobbies make up their duty loss.” And he laughs, throwing his head back and shaking till he starts to feel his stomach burn, and he settles down in the rocker and curses. “Damn that old gizzard,” he says. “When you gonna cook them fish for supper?” “I ain’t got ’em cleaned yet,” I say. “They’re still all wrapped up.” “Well hep to it,” he says. “Daylight savings don’t change suppertime none you know.” His eyes flash past me to the clock, darting down the crack in the glass. “I can’t figure that sucking clock” he says, and chews. I go to the kitchen and unroll the fish from the towel. They are white-silver and still glistening with wetness. Their eyes and mouths stand open and blank like on crazy people, and I take the knife and begin to slice down under the skin, carving around the stiff spary of fins. The towel stains red where the blood, thin and watery, drains from the long smooth cut ( RCR/5 Untitled (from the sequence Harvest 1865) / David Kirkpatrick Untitled (from the sequence Harvest 1865) / David Kirkpatrick 1. Matthew If you take a left three blocks down from the diner and drive on into the country until you come to where the new interstate crosses the old gravel road, you will see it. The house and barn are across the way, beyond the four lanes of concrete and its flanking bobwire fence, but still you can see it where the interrupted gravel road continues on into the patchwork of corn, alfalfa, and wheat fields. And if you’ll look close enough, you’ll see a tall thin man in farmer’s bid overalls, carrying the aluminum milk cannisters from the barn to the back of the house. That will be me brother Lucas. If you have binoculars you can see the brass buttons and blue suspenders where his overall bib is fastened up across the chest. And, if by chance you can see through the window that now faces the turnpike, you will see another man, this one a little smaller and a little bent in an armchair, looking out on those four lanes of shining concrete. That is my father. If you watch close enough, you will probably see my brother Lucas bring him a Coke or a Seven-Up, even though is stomach is bad. Then they will both sit by the window, looking out, watching the autos and semi-trucks buzz past on the interstate. And maybe they will see you, standing there by the barricade on the old gravel road that once ran straight into town—you with your binoculars, or whatever you have taken with you down that dead-end road to help you look across at them—and they will roll their chaws and hock into the spittoon on the sill, as if that little hollow of brass were your own pretty face. RCR/7 They have been there for over half a century now—rather, my father has, since Lucas is only thirty-five. My grandfather Boden settled it in 1912, a short time before they stopped selling land to Germans and started burning dachshunds and effigies of the Kaiser on their front porches. But Grandfather Boden never swore enough in the old tongue or met enough people from town to get them or the Muncie D.A.R. chapter on his back; so when he died he left some four hundred acres of good soil, as free from mortgage foreclosure as any spread could have been in 1930. This plot was my father’s inheritance, and apparently he had some foresight with regards to it—he had married five years before the old patriarch died, and begun praying for some sons. He got the first of them in me a couple of years before the Depression hit and offspring got to be an economically delicate subject. There were two more of us during the New Deal even though things hadn’t gotten much better, but that was all. The last time around Mother hemorraged, and my father roared bitter indignation over the fact that there wouldn’t be any more to help him string bobwire and do the milking. I left in ’43, first for Fort Knox and then the European Theater. My father had warned me to hedge around and get an agricultural deferment, but I told him that I could think for myself now, and he laughed and said that was right, that now I had a diploma to prove it. I said that finishing high school didn’t have that much to do with it, and besides it wouldn’t have looked good for me to keep at home. He himself had told me enough about flaming dachshunds that I knew better than that. Mother died two years later, with me in Germany and brothers Lucas and Frank, by now aged fourteen and eleven, respectively, down on the farm with her and my father. I never knew until I got home, and she was already three months in the ground by then. “It was awful sudden,’’ my father told me. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t have written and let me know, but I never held it against him. It was September when I got back, with harvest-time getting near, the tall yellow cornstalks standing crowded and stark like straw soldiers in the field. That very afternoon he took me, still in my uniform, through the long tall rows out to the grave. They had buried her. to the grove in the south, the one they would later level for the highway, with a crude half-hewn slab of marble bearing the name Sarah Jacobs Boden and the dates 1906-1945, thrust cockeyed into the ground as if it had been dropped there. He told me he had scripted the stone himself, and then he said how good it was to have the oldest son home in time for harvest. I replied I had been meaning to talk to him about that. “J feel like I got to get away for awhile,’’ I told him. He was digging his heel solemnly into the young grass in front of the stone. “Get away?’’ He said. “What the hell you mean by that?’’ I told him college, and his leathery forehead wrinkled up beneath the brim of his hat. “They’ll be some jack coming in from the government,’’ I said. “It won’t cost you nothing.’’ He scowled and turned away from the grave to spit. “Nothing but a son,” he said. He was facing away from me and jamming his hands down in his pockets the way he always did when he started to get angry. I remember him spitting once or twice more before he wheeled back to face me, saying, “So you’re a big soldier man now!” and knotting his fist he knocked me to my knees in front of the stone. I tried to get up but he grabbed me by the hair and pushed my face down, rubbing it in the baby grass RCR/8 over the grave. “Some big soldier boy!” he spat. “Now wouldn’t your ma be proud of you—why you’re even too good for the farm! Twenty years old and you’re too good to work the earth you’re made of!” And he twisted the crop of my crown like he was screwing my face down into the ground. I swore at him and he let me up, not even looking me straight in the face, and I walked behind him to the house with grass-stain on my forehead and my khakis. If you look east from the barricade down the turnpike you will see, just before the twin bridges across the creek, a small slash of backwater ferns rising along the median out of the incline from the creekbed. That is where Mother was buried, before we had to move her because of the interstate. That ground was part of the reason my father was so stubborn about selling that oblong strip of acreage to the government; but the caterpillars would have come and turned the stone and the box anyway, so I had her moved to the cemetery in town before he gave them the chance. But moving her wasn’t the only time I had to do something first and tell him about it later; it was like that long before even that first autumn after the war, when I applied for the business school in Muncie. After the first forms were in the mail I would always have to be the first back from the noon feeding so I could check the RFD box. I was afraid if he beat me to it he might find their letter of acceptance waiting there and tear it up before I ever had a chance to see it. The note came just six weeks after I got home, in plenty of time for me to start the January semester. I took care of the initial fees with the back pay I had saved up because the government checks hadn’t begun yet and I didn’t want to ask my father for money. But I never thought they would actually mail a receipt, so when he found it in the RFD after I had stopped checking it was out. He waited until dinner, with Lucas and Frank looking on, to tear into me about it. “Boys,” he said, looking at them and holding the envelope above his plate, “Matthew here is leaving us for the big world outside, he’s going off to col-ledge.” They set their glasses down and stared at me in the fuzzy lamplight of the kitchen. Frank laughed at the pronunciation of college, a thin crescent of milk mustached on his upper lip, but Lucas sensed what was happening and stayed quiet. “Look at your brother here. Now damned if he don’t look just like the rest of us with them big overalls and that old barn smell stuck on him like glue. But down underneath he tells me he’s different, he can’t get held down by the likes of us.” He puts the envelope down on his plate where the hash was and laughed as if to himself. “You see boys, when you been to France and Germany and blowed folks to pieces the way Matt has-” I threw my fork down in the hash and looked across at him angrily. “I done what I had to over there,” I said, but that grin of his had wrinkled to a scowl and he kept on talking. “Like I say boys: when you done all that, a skip up to Muncie ain’t really nothing to speak of—especially for a college boy like your brother Matt here.” He settled back in his chair, not even like he expected me to come back at him but just for a pause, and then he said, “Now ain’t that right?” I picked up my fork and began scooping hash again with my head bowed down over my plate. “Whatever you say,” I answered. RCR/9 “Whatever I say hell!” he shouted. I didn’t look up but I heard the paper ripping and the clank of his coffee cup just as the liquid stung me and spattered steaming across my forehead and into my eyes. I set my fork down and wiped the hot coffee away with my bandanna, my eyes smart and watering, and by the time I could see again he had refilled his cup and was forking away at a fresh plate of hash. Frank started to giggle but Lucas took him by the shoulder and said hush. We didn’t talk anymore about it that night, or any night after that, and I went on to school in January. I still lived down on the farm, partly to pacify my father a little and mostly to see to it that Lucas and Frank stayed in school enough to keep from flunking. I drove the milk to the distributor every morning on my way out to Muncie, picking up the empty cannisters on the return trip every evening. Once in a while I would get home around suppertime and find Lucas putting the tractor in the shed when he should have been on his way home from school, and I would cuss at my father until he swore back at me or simply spit and said, “That fence needed mending bad,’’ and dropped it cold. I did some cooking too, and the milking on weekends, and most nights I got home just in time to help him tote the cannisters from the stalls to the cooler at the back of the house. But one day that April I didn’t get back in time for it, and he came running down from the barn and yanked me out of the truck as soon as the motor had stopped. “You goddamned bastard,’’ he cried, “where the hell you been?’’ He grabbed my collar and shook me, trying to smash my head against the engine head. I cupped my hands across his mouth, trying to push him away from me but I heard him hiss you good-for-nothing bastard as his lips sputtered tobacco against my palms. He was still trying to bang my head against the truck and I caught a good one on the windshield before Frank came bolting out of the house crying pa and he let go of me. He stepped back, wiping his hands on his overalls as if they were bloody or soiled or something, and spit into the gravel at the edge of the drive. “Get the hell on up to the house,’’ he said to me, “and keep those goddamn books outen my sight.’’ Then he turned and walked away from me into the barn. Frank looked up at me from where he was standing beside the truck and his eyes were getting moist and weepy. “The cow died, Matt,’’ he said. He crumpled his hat and pulled it on and ran out to the barn after my father. In the house Lucas was at the sink cleaning up the supper dishes. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table, touching my fingers to where my neck was bruised from my father’s greeting. Without turning to face me Lucas said that the prize cow had calved that afternoon. “She started to bleed and we couldn’t get her stopped,’’ he said. Then he turned away from the sink to look at me, those hollow eyes of his glowing with a dim fierceness in the dim kitchen. “We couldn’t get the doctor in time and she died. Pa said if the truck would of been here we wouldn’t a lost her.” “The hell,” I said. “Even if that damn radiator hadn’t blown I wouldn’t of had the truck back till suppertime. It’s his own damn fault that cow died. I told him we ought to have a phone put in.” Lucas went back to doing the dishes, and I told him I was plumb beat and went to bed. I was waiting for my father to come back, to hear Lucas tell him what I had said about getting a telephone, but he never did before I was asleep, and he wasn’t at RCR/10 Boy and Dog (from the sequence Harvest 1865) / David Kirkpatrick Boy and Dog (from the sequence Harvest 1865) / David Kirkpatrick breakfast when I got downstairs in the morning. “He was gone when I came down,” Frank said, looking up from his bowl of oatmeal. I started looking around the kitchen to get ready to go to Muncie, but something didn’t add up and an odd, half-angry feeling began to creep upwards from my spine. “Not only that,” I said to Frank, “but where’s my books?” “Dunno,” Frank said, and went back to his oatmeal. “They was on the table when I came in last night.” “God damn it,” I said, throwing the door open and heading for the truck shed. The garage was empty, but there were little shreds of paper strewn in the wheelmarks down the drive to the road, all crumpled and mashed into the mud, as if they had been chewed by the cows and trampled there in the path. I ran back to the house, thinking that god damned fool, that idiot old man, with my heart pumping furiously blood burning through my veins. Frank was just leaving the kitchen with his schoolbooks and I almost ran over him through the door. He said Matt as I brushed past him muttering that son of a bitch I’ll fix him good that father of mine, into the front room where he kept the shotgun. I grabbed it and rushed back out to the barn thinking that’s it, I’ll blast his stud, with Frank yelling for Lucas behind me. I had the barrel up against the skull of the big bull when Lucas came up from behind me and laid one of his hobnail boots up between my legs as hard as he could. “Goddammit,” he said, “if pa seen you try that you’d be as good as dead yourself.” “You little son of a bitch,” I said, leveling the gun at him. He stood stock still, trying to draw himself up taller than he really was. “You get on out of here before I shoot you too. I done it in Germany and I can do it here.” He spit at me, and before I knew it the gun went off, and he was half-spinning on one leg, like a top coming to a standstill, the other leg bent backwards further than it ever should have been, and a red splotch sprayed across his overalls, as if someone had hit him in the knee with an everripe tomato. I dropped the gun and ran to him thinking Jesus Christ I’ve shot him, but I heard Frank yelling pa and I ran out of the barn, cutting across the yard and into the road towards town. If you drive down that road to the barricade, you can see how hard it must have been running flat out down that gravel three and a half miles, balls smarting all the way. If you could just draw a beeline coming out of the barn and cutting across four lanes of traffic and through that bobwire fence, all the way to town, you’d get the picture. I never once looked back, never dared, for fear I would see that truck of my father’s, returned from wherever it was that morning and now heading hell-bent after me with my brother Lucas screaming and bleeding all the way. With that behind me, you can see there was no question of what to do once I got to town. But the bank wasn’t open yet so I hid myself in the corner booth at Spenze’s and ordered a cup of coffee. The wait was all right since it wouldn’t have looked too good my withdrawing every penny of a five-hundred-dollar bank account out of breath and my hair full of gravel dust as if I’d just come in off a hard day’s ride to say, stick ’em up there Sherman, and ride off into the sunset. So I washed my face and got a comb there at Spenze’s before I went to the bank, and with that five hundred nestling pretty in my wallet I caught a ride thumbing down old 38 and landed in RCR/12 Muncie that afternoon. I’d missed all my classes but I didn’t have books or notes anyway so I put my money in the Muncie First Federal and found myself a room at a place called Rooker’s. It was a boarding-house run by a kind but gossipy old nag named Lydia Rooker, and she had set it up just for men attending the local college on GI Bill. She had a particular fondness for the men who’d been delayed overlong with the occupation armies, and her motto was “Make a Home for the Boys Coming Home.” It hung on a placard above the trellised front porch, and at the beginning of May she hung a ribbed chain swing down underneath the eaves. This was to encourage summer romances, and as an observer she took great pleasure and interest in them. Mr. Blackford at the First Federal had given me a job when school let out that June; he was a kind and decent man who, like my father, had driven his wife to an early grave, and when old Lydia learned that I had been seeing his daughter in earnest she felt obliged to ask if we had set a date. I told her no, that we hadn’t even considered engagement for sure yet, but by December it was certain; old Lydia had a special dinner for Monica and me on Christmas, when all the other boarders were home on vacation, and she even took photographs of Monica stretching across the table to kiss me after I gave her the ring. That was 1946. I had started my second year at the business college, and hadn’t heard a thing from the farm until it was April again, when Lucas suddenly showed up at the boarding-house. I happened to look up from my dinner and see him through the window as he pulled up in the truck. I excused myself from the table and left before Mrs. Rooker had a chance to go to the door. I got to the porch just as he was starting up the steps. He didn’t limp as much as I thought he might, judging from the way he looked that day in the barn. “Hold on there,” I said. “I don’t recall sending any invites your way.” “Don’t fret,” he said, brushing past me onto the porch. “I didn’t bring a gun or blade or nothing.” “So I see,” I replied. He leaned up against the porch rail, facing the house, and I stepped sideways so that I was between him and the door. “So what’s on your mind?” I said. He just stood there, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his bib overalls, and said, “Pa wants to see you.” Lucas was a shade taller now than when I had seen him last, but he still had that thin, hollow look about him. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the no-button collar just like our father always had, but his shoulders were not yet quite so hunched underneath it. “He hasn’t seen me for a year,” I said, “Why should he want to see me now?” “It’s about the farm,” Lucas said. “It’s always about the farm,” I snapped. “He heard you were gettin’ married. He just thought that you, bein’ the oldest son, might want a piece of the land, a few acres maybe—” “I don’t want any part of it,” I answered. “If my blowing your leg halfway off didn’t satisfy his curiosity about that—bye the bye, how is that leg of yours?” Lucas flushed a shade or two, looking down as if he could see that knee through the overalls. “It mended,” he said. “Pa just thought you might need a place—” RCR/13 “Now where in hell did he find out about my getting married?” “It was in the local weekly,” Lucas said. “He wants to talk to you, Matt. I think maybe you owe him—” “I don’t owe him anything,” I said. “He still hasn’t paid me back for those books he put through the stump grinder.” Lucas just leaned there now, looking down and muching the lump of tobacco he was already chewing then at age sixteen. “Go ahead, then,” he said. “Go ahead and spend the rest of your life plugging cracks for some city bitch. See if we give a damn.” I grabbed him by the collar with one hand, cletching the flannel tighter and tighter until I could feel the bob of his Adam’s apple. He just stared back at me, that wad of tobacco bulging incongruously in his beardless cheek. I let him go, and he did not even slack away, standing there as rigid and straight as when I was holding him. “Get out of here Lucas,” I said, trembling. “Get out, before I break that goddamn leg of yours all over again.” He turned and left, not running, not afraid, just calm and sober, as if he had hoped for better but found pretty much what he expected. Even now it’s hard to scare Lucas or even surprise him; I suppose when someone’s stood there and watched his leg get blown off out of the clear blue by his very own brother, it would take quite a turn to overcome the baptismal grace of that first shock. So Lucas wasn’t scared at all; in fact, he came back to Rooker’s once more, one Sunday that July. He drove up in the truck again, this time with brother Frank, who was just now beginning to look awkward in his churchgoing tweeds and tie. Lucas was in his Sunday best too, an old suit of my father’s with ragged seams and pockets misshapen from the constant stuffing of wadded handkerchiefs. Monica was with me there in the chain swing, and she must have felt me tense when I saw him because she looked across the street too and asked me who it was. “Some fool who’s got no business here,” I told her, but she closed her elbow so that it pinched me there where it was folded around my arm. “Who is it Matt,” she said again, but he was almost to the porch so I told her to stay put and listen and she’d find out soon enough. He had left Frank across the street in the truck. He still limped some, but this time he walked a little straighter than before, maybe because of the starch in that old collarless shirt. I got up from the swing when he got near the steps, but he held his hand out and said stop when he saw me getting ready to speak. “Now hush up and listen for a change,” he said. He bobbed his head politely at Monica, and then turned to me. “I ain’t here to try and tell you to come back to the farm for good,” he said. “That’s your own business. But pa wants to see you, just for a day. Both of you.” “Why Matt—” Monica said, but I told her to sit quiet and she asked what was wrong with that. “Forget it,” I said, and then turning to Lucas: “What for?” Lucas’ face twisted into a scowl of serene frustration. “God damn it Matt—” “Now don’t you God-damn-it me,” I said. “I asked you what for!” I heard Monica say Matt what’s wrong and she began tugging at my shirtsleeve as if she wanted me to lay off him and tell her, but I asked him again, this time louder: “I said what for!” Lucas’ hands moved nervously in his pockets, as if he were digging for change. RCR/14 “God damn it Matt, you already took away his first born heir,” he said. “You gonna take away his son now too?” I felt Monica grip my forearm tight as if to hold me closer to her there and away from Lucas. “No,” I said. “I won’t go out there.” Monica said Matt again, and this time she was up from the porch swing, moving up close beside me and half-facing Lucas down the porch steps. “Why not,” she cried. “For the love of God Matt what’s wrong with it? Won’t you tell me anything?” I pulled away, backing up against the railing away from them both, where I could look the two of them square in the face. “You, Lucas, I said, “you get on home. I don’t want any more of your sermons on what I ought to do. And Monica—” “Stop Matt,” she said, with a moistening sternness in her eyes. “I want to go out. I think we should.” “For Christ sakes why?” I yelled so that even Mrs. Rooker must have heard. “How can you be so cold?” she cried. “How can you snip them out just like that can you just tell me that much?” I saw then that there would be no getting around it, but I knew too that I didn’t dare go except on my own terms. “All right then,” I said. “I’ll go out there. But right now.” “This minute?” Lucas said with curious unsurprise. “You heard me,” I answered. Monica half-smiled through weepy eyes and tried to draw hereself up to kiss me but I went on down the steps and across the street to the truck. Frank whipped his cap off and jumped down from the cab when he saw all of us coming, and asked me if he could ride in the bed, twisting the brim of his cap underneath until what he was holding was all balled up like a baked roll of triangle dough. I nodded yes, and the rest of us crammed into the cab with Lucas driving and Monica between the two of us. It was hot that day, and Lucas started bitching about how if he’d known we were all coming out today would of driven the Willys and left Frank home. I told him to shut up, and I never meant to come out in the first place, and Monica tried to hook her arm up underneath mine the way we had been sitting in the swing, but she kept having to lift her feet and the hem of her dress so Lucas could get at the shift lever. When we hit the stop sigh turning on old 38 Lucas rolled his chaw and spit out the window into the street. About a mile outside of Muncie Lucas yanked the truck off the highway and headed down an unfinished county road, the wheels chattering vehemently across the washboard riffs. The midsummer heat and dust that rose from the gravel made us itch and sweat in spite of the breeze that tickled the cornstalks, cool and trembling, as we passed. “Good year for corn,” Lucas said. “I’m glad,” I said dully. “Ours was almost belt high by the fourth,” he said. Monica coughed delicately, the dust in the cab swirling in front of her. Lucas looked her way, easing up on the accelerator. “I can drive slower if you want,” he said, “There’d be less dust.” RCR/15 Ira W. Davis / David Kirkpatrick Ira W. Davis / David Kirkpatrick “If you’d taken the highway there wouldn’t been any goddamn dust at all,” I said, passing Monica a handkerchief. “This way is shorter,” he answered. “I thought you was in a hurry.” “Then why don’t you roll up the window?” I said. “We’d have dust anyway. We ain’t airtight in here, and then we’d lose our breeze.” This time Monica sneezed, and Frank leaned in the window at the rear of the cab and said Gesundheit. She blew here nose two or three times before she took the handkerchief away and then coughed. The dust jumped again, swirling in little eddies around the cab. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Where did he learn that word?” “He must of picked it up from pa,” Lucas said. “Pa says it all the time to the sick cows,” Frank added. Lucas jerked his head around to look cross at Frank. “Then why the hell did you say it to Miss Blackford?” he demanded. The truck hit a chuckhole and lurched swanchwise on the road until Lucas righted it. “Why don’t you shut up and drive,” I said. Monica coughed, dropping the handkerchief, and tried to take hold of my arm, but Lucas started fumbling with the shift lever and she had to pull her dress up out of the way. I asked Lucas how much farther to the farm and when he said he reckoned a half hour yet I swore and put my arm around Monica, helping her find the handkerchief down in the seat between us. That road is paved now, glossy black and asphalt, until you come to a mile south of the interstate, where it crosses the road to the farm. There you will find a little sort of dead-end, a four-way stop like a cross with the lower stem jeweled asphalt and the arms and upper stem gravel, grey and lusterless in the blazing sun. If you take a right onto the road to the farm you come to the real dead-end, where the glistening steel barricade will stop you from taking that route all the way out to my father’s place. You will see the barricade first, then the gleaming twin lanes silver in the sun, rising out of the wheat and corn, and by the time you hear the buzz of the cars and the long white dividers focus where they split the silver, you will see the farm. It seems oddly close, the way the white stripes of divider is squat and fat in the distance but waxes longer and clearer the closer you get, the way the house and barn back away from the interstate when you look at them close enough. Once the silo would have been the first thing you saw above the untopped corn and then the rest of the farm rising, not unlike the highway does now, parting the fields away like waves. And even if you were looking closely because it was the first time you would probably not notice, not know how to notice, how much or how very little a place like that could change in a year. The bobwire along the road had been freshly strung, and I recalled that the field of corn had been alfalfa the autumn I got home. But the house and barn were the same, except that the Mail Pouch sign and the Joseph Boden printed in block letters on the barn had faded and peeled some. Down the back of the house my father was bowing over a tote of cannisters as he carried them from the barn. He must have seen us, because when we pulled into the drive he hiked them up a little higher and hurried to the back of the house where we had the cooler. RCR/17 Lucas stopped the truck where the walk to the front door met the lane. What had once been a dirt path was now covered with old slats, like railroad crossties, and there was a new glass-panel door on the front of the house. Lucas told us to get on out, and I opened the door, sliding down out of the cab and looking and Monica. “Well?” I said. “You still want to see the old homestead?” One of her feet, squeezed slender in her Sunday high-heels, flicked out of the cab and down onto the running board. “I came out here to see your father, Matt,” she said with an injured air. “I mean to do just that.” I lifted her to the ground, and Lucas and Frank took the truck on back to the garage. We had just started up the walkway when my father appeared at the door in his flannel shirt and bib overalls, the tobacco rolling silently in his mouth. “Well come on up,” he said from behind the screen door. “If it ain’t the prodigal son himself.” “I don’t need any of that prodigal son crap,” I said, Monica drawing closer to me. She sneezed, and he cracked a toothy grin. “Well,” he said, “come on in out of that country air before Miss Blackford catches a cold.” “It isn’t the air,” I told him angrily. “It’s all that dust on these goddamn country roads. That fool Lucas—” “Please Matt,” Monica said, wiping here eyes with the back of her hand. “Let’s go in and talk awhile.” We sat down in the front room, Monica and I on the couch and my father directly facing us, rocking silently in his old chair by the window. Lucas and Frank came in but he nodded at them and they shooed upstairs. He hocked into the spittoon on the sill, still rocking with a lazy regularity, the sunlight highlighting the fine creases on his brow and cheeks. Finally he smiled and said to Monica, “That’s a mighty pretty dress you got there, Miss Blackford.” Monica smiled back at him, gripping my arm. “Thank you Mister Boden, but you can call me Monica,” she said. “No, not right yet,” he said. “I don’t think it proper to get familiar with you, like first names and all, till I learn how to behave. You see I ain’t never had a banker’s daughter in the house before. Now Matt, he would of turned out just like me, maybe worse, if he hadn’t took a skip to Muncie and got some manners.” Monica turned my way, looking distraught and confused. “Would you quit,” I said to him. “But look at me,” he want on, “here it is Sunday, with all this fine and so-fisticated company and I ain’t even shaved or scraped the dung offen by boots—” “Would you shut up!” I shouted. His eyes sparkled with a hollow little fire and he sat forward in the rocking chair, the long sunlight blazing full on his back and shoulders. “You shut up yourself!” he said. “You ain’t spoke or written to me for over a year now—so you come out here on my invite and want to shoot your own mouth off! If you wanted to get at me you should of took the initiative yourself!” “So that’s it!” I said. “You get me all the way out here so you could take me on your own terms, your own ground! Well now that’s just dirty, even for you!” RCR/18 I thought I had gotten to him then because he receiled a little in his chair, but it turned out he was just going back to rocking again. His jaws worked silently for a few moments, then he spit and said, “You’re a mighty pretty woman, Miss Blackford.” “Matt thinks so,” she said, sitting nervously erect and tightening her grip on my arm. “And how old are you now, Miss Blackford?” “Twenty-one.” He guffawed, mumbling old enough to know better and young enough not to give a damn, but he shut up when he saw me stiffening to get up from the couch. He rolled his chaw and spat, asking where she met me. “At my father’s bank—last summer. He was clerking part-time.” He paused in his rocking, peering out the window at the long rows of corn. “Tell me something Miss Blackford,” he said, chewing intently inside a mocking half-grin, “did my boy here ask you nice or come right out and feel you up?” Monica’s breath caught inhaling I beg your parden and I jumped up and grabbed him by the suspenders, pulling him up almost out of the rocker. “I had my fill of your hem and haw already today,” I said. “Now stop your goddamn picking at us and talk to us straight before I bust your goddamn face! Why the hell was it you had to see us anyway?” I began to shake him, my fists clenching tighter and crumpling the suspender straps until Monica cried for me to stop it and I quit shaking him. He brought his hands up and grabbed my forearms when my grip slackened. “Get your hands offen me and go set down,” he said. I let go of him and he cleared his throat and spit. “Matt will you tell me what’s gotten into you today,” Monica said. “I took too much off him before I ever knew you,” I said, “so lay off me a minute will you!” “Matt, he’s your father—” “So what? What right does that give him to—” “Listen up, Matthew,” he said, rocking and chewing again. “Miss Blackford’s tryin’ to talk sense to you.” “Now you listen to me old man,” I said, stepping towards him with my fists balled, “you keep the hell on out of our affairs. You caused enough trouble already today.” He leaped up, the sun from the window hitting his body full and lighting up his eyes like they were newly sparkled coals. “Trouble!” he spat. “I made trouble? You’re telling me that—you the one blew his brother’s leg to pieces over some goddamn books and a kick in the balls, and left me down here with just a couple of kids to run the farm—no boy, you made the trouble, puttin’ all your jack into school, never sendin’ a dime home—and then you get some pretty little rich b—some city kitten to—” “Stop it!” Monica screamed. She threw herself sideways, burying her face in the soft arm of the couch, and began to cry. He kicked the rocker away and hocked one last time into the spittoon. “I’m sorry, for her sake,” he muttered. “Go out and see your ma before you leave. I done said my piece.” He hiked his suspenders and began to leave the room. I grabbed the spittoon and threw it after him, and it hit the doorjamb just as he passed by it, the brass RCR/19 clanging to the floor leaving the jamb dripping and stained with the locust-colored tobacco rheum. “You always was one to leave a mess,” he said, and went to the back por