Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

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  It was only later—lying in his room in the last of the light—that he thought of the canvass bag in the closet, a slight memory. It had come to Doyle from the weekend conference he had been to in LaCrosse over the winter. Small group talks on sustainable agricultural and low-input farming. One vendor had offered the bag for all of the books he was buying. He brought it home, emptied it out, and hung it in the closet, empty.

  He got up then and looked in the closet and now found the hook empty.

  Doyle went to sleep thinking of things this way: The Form had sat on the bed and arrived at The Thought. It seemed an impulsive one. One or two or three? Whoever, however many it was, they had seen the shells and the rifle cartridges and searched quickly (first or last?) and had come up with the bag. Amidst the little shards of glass, someone had reached and pulled the doors free and piled the ammunition home. Then the guns. Then strangely the glass doors:

  Someone had closed the doors again.

  Questions

  Habits are not to be dislodged by a little thievery. Milking the next day, the barn was as it always was this time of year: windows open, doors open in the cool of the morning, welcoming.

  As usual, Doyle poured a bit of warm milk by the open door to attract the flies. They obliged, working their way down from the joists of the hay loft above, away from the backs and muzzles of cows, towards the sweetness of warm milk steaming in the morning air. Then, just before turning the cows out, he let the chickens out for the flies. They worked on the flies while he cleaned up things in the milkhouse and then knocked back the old wood stanchions, one by one, the cows pivoting in turn—heading towards the open door and the gate.

  There they waited as he worked his way through the herd, Doyle looking them all over for one last time. The gate was riding on a large wheel that Doyle had welded up at the very end. It was an easy matter to swing the gate and set them free.

  As he swung it open and back and then latched it, Doyle thought of the events of yesterday. Gates. Not the big one where he was standing but the little one, closer to the barn.

  Had he truly forgotten? Had the Form come up to simply play a prank—set the cows loose in the farmstead for the sake of trampled nasturtiums? Or was it intentional? Crafted? Were the cows a diversion, something to distract the farmer were he to arrive too soon? Doyle thought of the Form waiting in the cornfield, close to the house, watching his habits of a Saturday morning. Perhaps the Form had been there several times, studying things? Did he carry a screwdriver?

  He could see the cows, heads turned with their big eyes that drink in the world, watching the stranger as he played with the gate, meandering close but not too close, then slowly, carefully, and finally skittishly at the very opening itself, walking through to freedom.

  Third Crop

  They were at that time of year, now, when the moist air from the depth of the night made dew for the grass and for all the foliage. In places it split light into small, miniature rainbows; in places, it painted a Teflon coat that glistened. The dew clung to the yellow of the goldenrod; to the umbrella-like flowers of Queen Anne’s lace and the upper structures of mullein. By the ditch it was on the fox tail as Doyle looked down from the Allis Chalmers D17 while heading out with the flat rack.

  For the third time this year it was haying time.

  Gilbert was already there at the old Megaard place. He could see the red of a strange pickup through the old thick shrubbery of the abandoned farmstead as he drove in the lane. Two figures in the truck. Jim Gilbert, for sure, and someone else, a woman, sitting behind the wheel on the driver’s side.

  He had called Gilbert the other night about making hay and had told him all about the break-in when their conversation had extended beyond his usual request for haying help. Now the break-in came back again.

  “I suppose you’re missing them two guns,” Gilbert said, after introducing Doyle to Annie, “a friend of mine come to help.” Gilbert seemed at ease with her as she stood there, at ease herself, gloves in the back pocket, shaking his hand firmly, slim, solid. She had a way of looking hard in a probing, peculiar kind of way, without seeming to—a wiry woman with dishwater blonde hair.

  They stood there awhile in the shade of the oak that used to frame the house, its branches curving over the mossy roof where shingles were lying amiss, above where others had fallen, missing teeth from a carved pumpkin, lying in a tangle of grass.

  “Well, I reckon that the sun has about burned it off out there,” Gilbert said, looking out to where the sun was brightest on the short stand of third-crop hay, and Doyle agreed. They would rake the third crop, while Doyle brought up more flat racks. Then Gilbert would bale, Annie stack the short square bales, and Doyle shuttle the full loads back to the barn. Her presence would make it go some faster than on other years.

  Gilbert started the old International M, while Doyle came off the Allis and picked the pin out of the draw bar so as to drop the tongue. He pulled away and was conscious of being looked at. She was pretty, sure enough, but Gilbert’s age—eight, ten years away from him—and he felt the old feeling he had, the one that told him that women were a waste of time. Better things to do. A kind of an ache it was when it came to him at night, but now just a matter of principle.

  They made hay according to plan throughout the late morning hours and into the early afternoon before stopping to eat. Doyle hauled the stacked bales dutifully back to the barn and wrestled the bales onto the elevator. They were green and sweet-smelling, a sharp contrast from the dull brown, rain damaged second crop hay that they had eventually given up on, consigning most of it to the garden as mulch.

  She had the pickup tail-gate down and had a cooler there with iced tea and lemonade that she had brought along. He ate the first sandwich from the tractor seat of the D17, but she motioned him to come over to the Megaard front porch so that the three of them sat facing the field watching the heat build, while behind them the old worn shiplap of the porch patterns made old worn eyes where the wood had given way. Were they to have turned, it would have been the bay window of the living room, etched in spots, that would have looked back upon them, as it captured their outlines and curved, almost recumbent forms for a few minutes as they stretched out in the heat.

  “You been here much,” she said to Doyle, patting the wood of the porch. “You seemed so hesitant to come over.”

  “Did I?” he said, hardly paying attention.

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Well perhaps so,” he said, mildly irritated, “but I wouldn’t make much out of it.”

  “Oh,” she smiled a thin smile, “I’m not. After all it’s just an old worn-out house.”

  “You got that right,” Doyle said, his thoughts on the field.

  In the evening, with the last flat rack emptied out, Doyle and Gilbert and the woman Annie gathered one final time at the Megaard place while he paid them their wages. Cash.

  She took his money and folded it with one motion of her slim hand and reached back behind her in a move strangely familiar, placing the cash in her back pocket before shaking his hand one more time. She was frank. Settled. Forthright. Gilbert took the M back over to the home place just as she was pulling out with the truck, so she turned and came close to the Allis D where Doyle was sitting. He watched her drive out with the tail-gate still down.

  At the washboard, she didn’t slow down. The rain slicker that had been stuffed into the corner of the open bed slid free and then he saw the box—green and red on the sides with the top half ripped off. A box of shells, it was, just like the one he was missing.

  Invitations

  Of course, the shells were a coincidence. A lot of people ripped the top off of a box and many others no doubt left it ragged. Still, Doyle couldn’t help thinking about them. He worked through the rest of that week and into the weekend with its market day and, when he was done with all that, the pickup and the sh
ells and the woman Annie were mostly but a memory.

  Doyle came back from Saturday market and God was in the heavens and his cows right where they should be in the barnyard. But in the mail there was a note. No return address on a plain, slim, white envelope neatly typed. Inside, on a piece of white paper ripped into one simple square, just three words:

  Do you remember?

  Doyle felt something at the bottom of his gut. Deep down like looking down the irrigation pipe to the bottom of the well. He saw the woman Annie and the box of shells way down there in the tube of his mind and felt something strange.

  It was with him most of the rest of that day, and then the next. The following day, like a wood sliver or a tick overlooked, it had worked its way all the way in, showing up in his dreams.

  Night Moves

  For I, being poor, have only my dreams says the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats, whom Doyle would read on occasion before falling asleep. I have spread my dreams under your feet. He liked Yeats. He liked “The White Swans at Coole” with its sad and poignant vision of aging and the passion of “Leda and The Swan.”

  But now these things were past him, for Doyle the farmer was sharing his bed with someone else. She would show up in the middle of the night often wearing denim shorts, cut off high, with steel-toed work boots and an old sweat shirt, the sleeves trimmed at the shoulders and the bottom cut high, showing off her tanned waist and navel. She would rest her foot on the bed and jostle it until he turned in his dream. One arm always was behind her back, as she leaned towards him, one hand out of sight. When he would open his eyes in the dream, she was always looking straight at him with that probing, penetrating gaze, her face a pale oval in the night.

  See what I’ve got for you? Wanna see? was how it would end, the words flowing out into the air from her thin lips as he jerked awake, sitting up, at three a.m.

  Always three a.m.

  He would read, then, to get back to sleep. Farm reports. The newsletter from the USDA. Even Yeats. Sometimes the lines from “The White Swans…” would calm him but now, those final lines, with their sense of transience often would leave him restless. Instead he would choose “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and read the first verse, saying the final two lines over and over until sleep came:

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

  Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  And live. And live alone in a bee-loud glade would become the sound of his alarm raking over his body at four thirty, five sometimes five thirty a.m. when he would struggle up and out to the barn, the cows at the closed door, bawling.

  To counter these developments, Doyle would go to bed early. And some nights indeed would be calm. But when she came, it always was the same: boots on the bed, hand behind the back, Wanna see?

  He took the thin scrap of white paper with the three words, one noon-time after his dinner meal and before an afternoon of work in mid-September and dropped it without ceremony into the burning barrel out back. But that night she was there, nevertheless.

  By October, he began to realize that in the dream, the room was different. The wood was old and worn, and one night he glimpsed the rotten floor by the bed where she stood. Ovals. Ovals in the floor reminded him of the oval shape of her face while she spoke her same words. But they also reminded him of the porch where the three of them had sat that day, months back, at the Megaard place. Eyes in the floorboards now in his dream watching.

  He rarely drove that far down Jim-Town road unless it was for the fields he rented there. But now, one crisp morning he did so, without explanation. Just turned the steering wheel of the truck right instead of left and watched the fence row and then the old house itself loom into view. He pulled in and sat in the truck and looked at the house with its sad windows, some boarded over some still intact, the grass and weeds sere, having died back from the field-stone foundation of the old home.

  It became a weekly habit. Came and sat and looked. He never got out. Just sat and felt that same bottom-of-the-well feeling that he recognized both from the note in the mail and now every time she came, the woman Annie, in his dream. He looked at the frail structure, the weathered boards, the angles of the place collapsing away from plumb and straight, and felt it again.

  One night it was different. One night, in the middle of the month, the night air clear and the moon up, he came once more to his three a.m. encounter. He roused himself and sat up and watched his own room return: the gun case, the open closet door, the pale light in the window. He knew where he was but did not feel it. It was as if this night the dream itself were gossamer, clinging to him, refusing to be put away.

  Doyle sat on the edge of the bed in the moonlight. Outside, through the clear glass of the window, light was filtering through the last of the autumn leaves on the oak tree—a clear, brilliant fall night. He thought of the garden, of the last of the cucubrits waiting to be harvested. The frost was on the pumpkin. But these things could not make her go away. Her words seemed to hang on the air, her leaning, sometimes leering ways:

  Wanna see?

  He dressed in moon light. It was easy to find his denim jeans, hanging on the chair. Then he pulled on his boots and looked suddenly and quickly at the case where his hand found the 30-30, still there, passed over, well-oiled, waiting.

  He came down the stairs hard, crossed the threshold and out into the cool air, 30 caliber cartridges jingling, clinking in his pants pocket. It was a short drive, and when he turned in, he doused his truck lights and drove by the moon.

  Nothing, no one was waiting, just the house. Still he took the rifle and worked in three rounds, by the truck, in the quiet.

  The screen door was just as they had seen it that day, angled down and half off. He propped it open and tried the door which yielded with an almost smooth arc as it swung wide.

  He had been here before. Not on the porch. Not just inside the Megaard home of a Sunday afternoon visiting. Not just at fall harvest, dinner time, eating with the custom cutting combine crew. No, other times. No, one other. One other time.

  Moonlight? No. Late afternoon light.

  He climbed the stairs and climbed back into the past, a boy of what, ten? Eleven? Thirteen. The house quiet. No one home.

  At the top of the stairs, the light was coming through the open door of the bedroom to the right. Her bedroom. He entered and felt that deep-well feeling bubbling up. Irrigation water surging, the pump on.

  Up.

  He looked around: bedsprings, forlorn, forgotten in the last move. Magazines in the corner. He could see her bed now. Clothes in the closet. And the dresser.

  There had been a dresser, not far from the window. He could feel himself close to it. Looking. Looking at the porcelain horses, the hand mirror, the comb, curlers in a little cardboard box.

  Ahead of him the dresser mirror. Below him two smaller drawers and beneath them two other, larger ones.

  What was in them. Underwear. Bras, brassieres?

  Doyle could see her now as she looked then. The older sister. Emily? He searched for her name through the open window where the moonlight poured in. One of three.

  He could see her in shorts. Cut offs. Two, three years ahead of him in school. See her walking the hallways in a pleated skirt, reappearing after these years in the moonlight. And now it was on him in full.

  Her face. His hands were on the knobs of the dresser, but there was her face. More of an oval than the other two. Oval in the mirror. Oval behind him. Oval at the door, looking and him turning.

  ”I’ve got something for you. You bastard. Wanna see?”

  One hand behind her back, leaning into the room.

  “No! I don’t want to!”

  “I’ll bet you don’t, you weasel! Come to smell my things, have you! Why don’t yo
u get a girl of your own? I’ll bet you don’t have the balls to do that!”

  He sees her reaching, the smooth motion of her arm and forearm, appearing.

  “I’ll bet you don’t even have a prick!”

  Shotgun it was. Extension of her arm. Shifting her weight now. Bringing it up. In the afternoon air, the window, half open, was showing him the porch roof.

  One, two strides. Western roll. They taught that in track, just last year. Western roll. Sound of glass, breaking, skittering, and him sliding like shingles on an old roof, his knee suddenly bleeding. He went grasping it, blood on the hand, half crawling.

  Oval in the window. His finger curling on the edge of the gutter, rolling off.

  “Little dip-shit bastard!”

  Blast. Rending sound. Leaves falling from the oak tree just above his head. His body hanging free from the gutter. Slab meat. Pump action sound. Shell sliding into chamber.

  He drops.

  In the moonlight he can see it now.

  Drops straight down. Sound of glass as she cleans out the window with the barrel of her father’s gun. Below her footsteps, he runs along the wall, sees the door mat besides the kitchen door entrance as he runs.

  Sudden thought. A small grace now as he remembers it.

  Stops. Picks it up. Comes to the edge of the porch. Silence above while below he lofts the mat, throws it into the air.

  Watches the shredded brown of the door mat float out into the sudden stillness of the afternoon before the sound of the gun catches up.

  Like the sound of the starting gun.

  He explodes from the porch. Little dip-shit boy flushed out. Running rabbit-like, left and right. Left and right again, until, at the corner of the house he looks, just once, at the oval face, gun down, watching him go, the open window behind her lean form, glass glittering at her feet.

  Where had it all been hiding inside of him? Where had it all gone to? Doyle stands with his 30-30 in the moonlight by the window; by the window with its glass strangely, impossibly in place.

  Reprise

  Some things are possible once, but not twice. The woman was back with her two sons the last Saturday in October and beneath her sunglasses Doyle now could see the lineaments of one of the Megaard girls. She came into focus quickly after the moonlight.

  The middle girl: Jayne. Younger than Doyle. Chubby. Sitting across the table during those fall harvest dinners. She came up to his table while the boys were playing down at the end of the aisle, about Table Seven, with the aunt; with tawny, slim Annie.

  Deep feelings from inside now were flowing all over his face as he looked straight at her in the clear, mid-morning light.

  “No russet potatoes?”

  “Not this time.”

  “I’m not surprised, because now I remember you.”

  “You sure, Doyle?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Remembering a lot of things lately.”

  “You got a note from someone in the mail.”

  “Yeah.” He could see the handwriting and the paper. “Got a lot of things, ah, sort of straightened away inside.”

  “Well good for you, Mister,” her lips were steel, “good for you.”

  She had come with a paper and she shoved it, folded, between two boxes of spaghetti squash at the edge of the table and turned, walking quickly away.

  “I’m sorry, Jayne. Real sorry,” he said mostly to the air where once she had been, but loud enough to be heard.

  She raised her hand, a kind of blunt wave, but didn’t turn. Down the aisle at Number Seven, the woman Annie looked up. Then, half-way down, Jayne Megaard did a turn, and looked at him across the open space of the late-fall market crowd thinning out.

  “Me too.”

  Doyle kept the paper folded until he was all packed up. He drove as though to drive out of the parking lot, but stopped in a quiet corner instead and, engine running, read the obituary, two years old.

  Her picture was there, sure enough: The woman with the oval face; the woman on the porch roof, glass at her feet.

  Emily Megaard Johnson.

  It was clear, now. Everything. He sat there in the truck and it seemed to him at last that the light of mid-day had become a little less stern. It was clear, now, and he was clear: At last he remembered.

  VOICES