The Farm, Part III
Daughter
a short story by
Brock Taylor
Claire stared a long time at the old table before she pried the lid off the can of stripper and began to apply it with a wide brush. There were at least three coats of varnish to be removed before she could get down to the detailed work. It was a strange day for her to embark on this project and she didn’t understand what had prompted it. The night before had been the first hard freeze of the season and she could feel a snowstorm brewing in the north, its fresh, biting wind whipped the dead grass in the yard and ripped at her pant legs as she’d stumbled out this morning to light the workshop furnace. Cold weather and furniture re-finishing didn’t mix, so it didn’t make sense. But maybe it did, in a way. By ten o’clock the shop had warmed up enough and she’d hauled the old thing out of its corner, wiped three years of accumulated dust off it, and set to work.
Although it had been thirteen years, part of her still couldn’t believe she was here, living on a three hundred acre chunk of prairie north of Tulsa. A rusty old windmill still pumped water for the cattle Mike insisted on keeping, and it seemed that no amount of patching would keep the driven prairie dust out of the century-old ranch house. Isn’t this just what she’d sworn all those years ago she’d never endure again? She’d been raised on a farm, admittedly in a different part of the country, with cows and dirt and grassy fields that stretched to the horizon. She’d run away from it, escaped to the city, vowing never to smell another cow fart as long as she lived.
The creaking door announced Mike’s arrival, but she didn’t straighten from her task. She felt his arms slide around her waist as she applied the last stripper to the broad tabletop. His chest rested against her back, “Finally getting to it,” he said, snuzzling his nose behind her ear and giving her a kiss on the neck. She stretched to lay the brush across the top of the open can then turned in his embrace to wrap her arms around his shoulders. She sniffed and wiped the tears from her cheeks with a sleeve. “Damned fumes,” she croaked. “So hard on the eyes.” Mike grasped her shoulders and pushed her back so he could see her face, still streaming with tears. “Uh-huh,” he said, then he smiled.
*
She’d met Mike in San Francisco when she was twenty-eight, living in the attic of Jack’s Haight Street party house with her two pre-school kids, working days in a diner and weekend nights in a strip joint. The first time she’d seen him she was on her knees trying to give head to some prone stranger. They were surrounded by about a dozen other naked people in varying stages of copulation. She heard the door open and close and looked over her shoulder to see a fully clothed, bearded man enter the room and lean against the wall. A minute later he was still there watching her. She gave up on the linguini and walked up to him. “Either get with it or get out,” she snarled. “Okay,” he said, and he left.
The next morning, feeling a little ragged, she was walking down the front steps with her two children, Aaron four and Linda two, taking them to pre-school and daycare respectively, rushing to get to the diner before the eight o’clock crush, when she almost tripped over the same guy who was sitting there, talking to one of the neighbors. He got up to introduce himself, but she turned on him angrily, called him a pervert, and told him to leave her alone. He came into the diner around ten, when things were slow, and ordered eggs and coffee. A month later she moved out of the party house to share a decent two-bedroom place in the avenues with him.
Mike was a student on scholarship at the San Francisco School of Design, learning furniture building. He was twenty-five, divorced with no kids, with a year to go in his coursework. She didn’t know why he’d picked her, he never said, she never asked. She was beautiful back then, she knew that, and still was fifteen years later. She’d inherited her father’s lanky frame and none of her mother’s bulk. Five eleven with the telltale Swedish platinum hair. Maybe it was as simple as that. But picking her was one thing, sticking with her was something else. He had courted her, been with her every evening, taken her out to movies, plays, and dinner, helped her arrange babysitters, sat in with her when one couldn’t be found. For the first two weeks he hadn’t wanted to sleep with her, which annoyed her more than pleased her, but then one night it happened as naturally as a summer shower, and she still smiled to think about it. She slowly came to realize that he was reforming her, pulling her out of the gutter, and making a clear distinction between himself and all the rest. The two-week hiatus, was it a test or merely a chance for her to refresh herself? Somehow it had worked. She was tired of sex without affection, lust without love. She didn’t think it immoral, just boring. Mike had been the right person at the right time.
He got on with her kids, took them to the playground and zoo, treated them as if they were extensions of her, showing them respect and kindness. It was a new thing for her and she prized it. His light, Southern drawl was as gentle as his touch and two years flitted by, then she found herself pregnant again. He wanted to marry her, and she assented. He wanted to adopt her children, and that pleased her too. Then he wanted to go home, back to Oklahoma, where there was space and cheap land and they could have a real house and he his own workshop. At this she’d balked. Not back to the country. But he was persistent. They’d gone to Tulsa before the wedding to meet his parents, the again for the wedding, and she could see that Tulsa was a far cry from San Francisco. On the other hand, it was something like a city. So, against what she thought was her better judgment, the five of them moved to a small house in Tulsa. It was the thin edge of the wedge. A year later she was pregnant again, they were outgrowing the house, Mike quite clearly needed a shop bigger than their tiny, unheated garage. His family connections were blossoming into business connections, so Tulsa and environs were the only choice. And then these three hundred acres were such a deal! She thought it would break Mike’s heart if he couldn’t have it, so here she was.
The workshop was two large rooms, one for building, and one for finishing, and they were separated by a heavy door that allowed not even the finest sawdust to float from the building room to mar some wet varnish. Claire heard the planer start up in the other room. Mike had just purchased a thousand lineal feet of ponderosa pine that he intended to make up into Mexican wardrobes. He had a good design and they had been quite successful the previous year in Tulsa and Dallas, where his two main distributors were. It wasn’t really what he liked to do, but it was bread and butter. Besides, he couldn’t do his really fine work anymore.
Elizabeth had been born a few months after they had settled into the house and that fall little Aaron bravely boarded the bus and went off to school. Claire found herself house bound with her two daughters and wondered what she would do. Do for herself, that is. The big, drafty house and the two babies more than filled her days. “Work with me,” suggested Mike. “Working with your hands, finishing furniture, is very satisfying.”
“More busy work,” she said.
“It’s not busy work,” countered Mike. “It’s work work. It needs to be done, and you could be a great help.”
Mike’s shop was ready and he’d just sold his first real order: a dozen dining room suites. “My father built furniture,” her voice was flat and cold, “and my mother finished it in the evenings by lantern light. It took them ten years to furnish their house. He built and she finished every stick of it.”
“You never told me this.” As she sat silently staring at him, her eyes dead, her face blank, he realized that she’d told him very little about her family. He didn’t even know their names. “So, because your mother finished your father’s furniture, you don’t want to help me with mine?”
“Something like that,” she said.
But in the end she did. Not out of boredom but love. She was strong, with long, firm fingers, and muscled arms. She knew she’d be good at it. And he’d teach her, they would work together, she would share his passion. She could use that in this lonely place.
Long before the dining room job was done more orders came in, and Mike and Claire found themselves with more work than they could handle. They converted the house dining room into a finishing room, with heavy drapery in the doorways to keep in the dust and fumes, so she could work without leaving the children. Within a year they had two employees working in the shop with Mike.
Claire found that she enjoyed the work. It was finicky but mindless in a way, meditative, and the results could be spectacular. Mike was a craftsman, taking great care with every detail, and her work, which was a real skill in itself that took her years to master, enhanced his, bringing out the beautifully matched grain, and the delicately turned spindle. He designed rocking chairs with floating backs that molded themselves to the contour of the sitter, and elegant tables with leaves that folded away without a trace. Soon they had four employees, then six. Claire didn’t have to work anymore, but she didn’t want to quit.
It might have been six months, maybe twelve, after Claire had mentioned her father’s furniture that Mike asked her about it. “Oh,” she said, “it’s just old clunky junk. He was a farmer, not a furniture builder. They were just too poor to buy anything.”
“What’s it made of?”
“Maple. All boring old maple. He cut down the tree himself, milled it himself, planed it, stacked it in the barn for a year to dry. Everything, did it all himself, and all by hand. No electricity out there in those days. One of those family sagas you hear every day of your life.”
Mike was impressed. “Wow,” he said. “I’d like to see this furniture.”
“Not a chance,” she said. “Never in a million years am I going back there.”
Never say never. Ten years later her mother died and her little sister Johanna tracked her down, God knows how, and something pulled her back. It wasn’t her sister’s pleading or her grandmother’s terse telegram. Maybe it was the old man, who, now knowing her whereabouts, kept his silence. They delayed the funeral for four days for her, first to find her, then as they waited for the whole damned family to drive all the way from Tulsa.
There were six of them by then, although Aaron was away at college in Oklahoma City, and didn’t make the trip. And they drove because they couldn’t afford to fly. Three years before Mike had lost all of the fingers on his left hand, and the tip of the thumb, in a shop accident. He had been teaching a new employee how to use the radial arm saw. They had pulled the blade off and sharpened it, then put it back on, and were checking the saw’s alignment, pulling it back and forth along a straightedge that Mike was holding, when the kid accidentally hit the power switch. While Mike had screamed bloody murder and one employee got a tourniquet on his arm, another ran to the house for Claire. It was thirty miles to the hospital, so the calmest person available drove them there at full speed, but not before Claire had taken a two-by-four and beaten the shit out of the kid who’d done the damage. He sued and was awarded a half-million in compensation. It wiped them out. They lost the business, all their savings, and had to re-mortgage the paid-off house. In the meantime, of course, Mike wasn’t able to work for almost a year, partly due to the depression that enveloped him like a fog. Claire had started taking in re-finishing work to make ends meet, and, although Mike was back designing and building furniture again, it was Claire’s business that mostly supported them.
*
The finish on the table had bubbled and softened. Claire took a broad scraper and carefully pushed it up the table, following the grain of the buried wood, curling row after row of plastic goop onto the drop cloth that covered the floor. After three complete passes of the top she went to work on the table’s edge, skirt, and legs.
The table had a simple design with square, slightly tapered legs pegged to the skirt and cut to fit snuggly into a square hole in the tabletop, where it was glued. The top itself was made of random width one-inch planking that had been meticulously joined. Although she figured the table was fifty years old the planks had stayed true and all the joins were intact. In one corner of the table, under the cloudy finish, she found initials carved like a small mountain range. They had been filled in with colored framer’s putty before another coat of varnish had been applied. The whole tabletop would have to be sanded down at least a sixteenth of an inch to eradicate this blemish. The job was growing like any other. The six rickety chairs were going to be even more work.
*
It was a small funeral with perhaps thirty mourners. Her father, Nils, said a few words, as did her grandmother. Claire had skipped out on her family when she was sixteen and had returned just once in the intervening twenty-two years. That was just after her daughter Linda had been born, so she would have been twenty-six. It was partly pride that brought her back, wanting to show off her two beautiful children, and partly spite, to push her difference in their smug faces. These two survivors with their few words, they had driven her away, steeling her resolve never to return. Her grandmother had called her a slut and her children bastards, while her father had ignored her. Only her mother had shown affection, in her almost comatose way, and quite clearly preferred working in her garden to anything else. Nils Junior had been there, or Neil, as he called himself, in his stupid uniform, gracing everyone with his boring stories and his distain for them all. And goody-goody-two-shoes, back from Harvard, or wherever it was, with nothing bad to say, just lapping up the babies. Claire couldn’t even remember what the occasion had been that had brought them all together.
Now, here they all were again, less one. Miss two-shoes with her brood of two and a husband, quite handsome, and Neil, sweating in the same uniform, white as a fish and running to fat. How can you live in the Philippines and not get a tan? But, her father’s few words touched her. He mumbled and rambled, it wasn’t quite clear what he said, but Claire thought that was what had made it effective. There was nothing prepared or affected about him. “Fifty years of marriage were enough for her,” he’d said, without a hint of humor, “God rest her soul.”
They had been late. After driving madly for two days they’d been ten minutes late and had burst into the chapel in the middle of the pastor’s eulogy. Johanna had smiled at her with all the radiance she could muster, Neil had just given them an appraising glance, her grandmother had scowled and shushed them, and her father hadn’t noticed. After the main event they all returned to the farmhouse where her mother’s friends had laid on quite a feed. In spite of all the tears it wasn’t a morose gathering. The children discovered their relationship, paired off, grabbed piles of food and ran off to the barn to horse around and get acquainted. The old man, who seemed to know Johanna’s husband better than he wanted to, hit it off with Mike and insisted on dragging him around to every building in the place recounting the tale of each project. When he discovered that Mike was a furniture builder he ordered the women to clear off the dining room table that was choked with food, then, after giving it a couple of thundering slaps with the palm of his hand to demonstrate its worthiness, he flipped it upside down in the middle of the floor so the two of them could discuss the workmanship. When Mike expressed his appreciation of it, the old man told him to take it right then and there, to load the table and six chairs onto the roof of his van while there was all this help standing around. No amount of protest would bring him to change his mind, and when Mike refused firmly, and for the last time, the old man hauled the table out onto the deck and threw it into his dead wife’s flower garden, taking out at least a dozen late-blooming dahlias. “Then I’ll haul it to the dump,” he cried. “Don’t need the damned thing no more. Wife’s dead and gone. I suppose I’ll be eating off my lap looking at the damned TV for the rest of my days. Prob’ly six months till I’m in one of those deathwatch stations anyhow, with no one to feed me.”
Mike almost fainted with embarrassment and consternation. He and Claire rescued the table, bringing it back onto the deck. “’Course, it’s just an old farm table,” bellowed her father, “but your grandchildren will dance on it at their weddings. Not too fancy, but built to last. You should take it and pass it on.” He gave Claire a sudden look as if he’d just recognized her. “My daughter here doesn’t visit the old folks too often. Do her good to have it around.” So, in the end, they found an old blanket and wrapped it around the tabletop, then tied it to the top of the van, with six chairs nested in as best they’d fit.
*
By late afternoon the storm was upon them, rattling the shop doors and whipping snow against the windows. Mike had pushed the thousand feet of pine through the planer and stacked it in the drying room out back. Claire watched him beat the fine dust off his overalls with his good hand before coming to appraise her work. He walked around the table a couple of times, running his hand along its edge, “Not a nail or a screw,” he said. “It’s a treat to see such plain work.”
Claire stared at him in silence and when he stopped before her their eyes met briefly before she turned away and, leaning both hands on a corner of the table, she squatted, then finally sat fully on the floor in the dust and goop. Her forehead rested against the edge of the table and slowly she ran her hand up and down its naked leg. “Will you look at this?” She didn’t turn to her husband, but seemed to be addressing the table leg itself. “I lived in that house for sixteen years. Sixteen years of breakfast and dinner at this table. We had two sit-down family meals a day, every day, breakfast and dinner. We never went out to eat, not even once as a family, at least not that I can remember. A couple of times a year maybe I’d eat at a friends birthday party or something. How many meals is that? How much time? But I never noticed these legs. See how he tapered them. I measured them this afternoon and they’re all perfect. Three-inch square at the top, two-inch square at the bottom. Hardly enough taper to notice. With a handsaw and a plane, I suppose. From each side of each leg he hand cut a wedge a half-inch down to nothing, then planed it and sanded it to take away the edge.” She glanced up at Mike for just a second, but long enough for him to see tears beginning to well up in her eyes. “The stupid old bastard!” Her legs were wrapped around the table leg now and she struck at it with her fist. “You know, he used his fucking furniture as a club, as a weapon, to beat his righteousness into us, to teach us that industry, attention, dedication had their rewards. ‘This table you sit at,’ he’d say, ‘this table, I built it with my own hands, from my own tree, and in generations to come, your grandchildren, their grandchildren, will dance on it at their weddings. After the cows were in and milked, after a day of working in the fields, on the fences, on one of these buildings or another, by lantern light in the barn, I built this table, these chairs. Everything good in this world comes from work and diligence. Hard work and perseverance. There is no time for sloth or laziness on a farm.’ That’s what he’d say day after day, that was his sermon. ‘No time for sloth or laziness on a farm.’ And, rather than appreciate the love and hope he’d poured into this table leg, love and hope from his younger years that must have been for us, all of us, I hated it. I hated him and this table and the farm and the drudgery with every ounce of fury a teenage girl can summon, and I’d have taken an axe to it all and burned every stick if I’d had the courage.” Mike had squatted beside her and had an arm around her shoulder, and she turned to him, her eyes pleading, streaming with tears. “But look at this!” She turned back to the table. “Think about it! What a fucking waste! The stupid old coot! I could have appreciated this. I could have understood the subtlety, the beauty in it, his dedication. I would have liked to have appreciated it! I was dying for some glimmer of meaning, some hint of quality. I might have found some respect, maybe even some love for him if he’d shared this with me. In that house they brought us up without religion, without ideas, without beauty, without music, without laughter, without love, without hope. But look at this! Mike, look at this. It was there. He had it. He knew what quality and hope and beauty were, but he kept it a fucking secret from me!” Suddenly she shrugged off Mike’s embrace, rolled onto her back and kicked out at the table with both feet, sending it tumbling across the room to crash against the back wall. “No wonder I ran from him, from them, from their small, tight, cold little world. It was worse than ignorance. It was intentional!”
*
The next morning Claire shoveled a foot of snow off the path to the shop, lit the heater then went back to the house for another cup of coffee. A half hour later she and Mike went out together. Mike righted the table and tested its legs. “Built like a brick shithouse,” he said. Claire was hanging back against the door. He went to her and wrapped her in his arms. “Finish it, Claire. Finish his piece. Make it new again, like it was when he first made it, full of hope and love for his new family, his love for you. It’s there, in the table. Bring it out. Roll it on your tongue. A parent’s love is a mighty thing. And, forgive him. He was who he was, a good man in his way. But, don’t do it for him, do it for yourself. Put your love into it, your care and attention, and savor his. Do it. Go with it. Work it out.”
Mike picked up a rag and wiped the tabletop, inspecting it for damage. His fingers found the initials NM in the corner and he stooped to decipher them.
“My brother Neil,” she said. “He got a good licking for it.”
Mike stood and laughed. “I’ll bet he did,” he said. “Well, leave them, leave them just like that. A whole inter-generational thing is happening here.” He slapped the table hard with his hand. “Our grandchildren will dance on it.”
A sob burst from Claire, but he saw that she was smiling through fresh tears. “At their weddings,” she said.
Taos
October, 2000
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