The Farm, Part IV
Survivors
a short story by
Brock Taylor
Lise pulled her rocker to the edge of the covered deck to get the late September sun. She was well into her second pot of coffee when she heard the unsteady tread of Nils, her son-in-law, on the bridge that joined their two houses. She had been expecting him. She lit another cigarette and gazed across the wetlands below the house at the familiar lumpy green horizon created by a massive row of willow trees that blocked her view of the neighbor’s fields. It had been three days since they had buried her daughter, Erika. Three days in which she’d been left alone to grieve or to hang herself or to starve to death. It was her business. That must be what they’d thought, if any of them had given her any thought at all. She figured that Nils could eat for three days on the food left from the funeral and by now he’d be wanting someone to cook for him.
Erika had been her third child, and the third to die. Jens had drunk himself to death over a decade before, following the lead of his father, and Nick had died of heart failure five years later. Children dying, even if they are all in their sixties, isn’t something you get used to.
She had a right to her bitterness, she told herself; it was the natural outcome of living a life. She wondered now and then if it was her bitterness that kept her going. Her anger, her prejudice, for years she had examined them as if they were apart from her, curiosities that she had picked up in a junk store. It was healthy, such analytic introspection. She thought back to her rude beginnings in the first decade of the last century of the second millennium. She liked to think of time that way, segmented and laid out for analysis, her stretch clearly specified in the orderly progression. A cold village on the gray shore of the black Baltic. More siblings than she cared to remember, her mother dying giving birth to the last, yet another brother. She was almost grown then, fourteen, and her impression of her mother was well developed. A beaten woman; scrawny, gray, struggling just to keep her head above water and her children alive. Lise had always viewed her mother’s death as willful abandonment, supposing that she had just given up the fight, being unable to imagine coping with another infant she didn’t want but would learn to love, another frozen winter without a penny for firewood, another day, another night, with her churlish, drunken husband. She remembered her father with his new son in the crook of his arm cursing his dead wife, her body still warm and twisted in the agonies of childbirth, for deserting him, as if he too understood her willfulness. Lise was sixteen when she had married, a jailbreak marriage, a desperate lunge over the wall, and at eighteen she found herself pregnant in the Stockholm harbor eagerly dragging her husband up the gangplank of a rusty steamer bound for the New World.
Yes, she remembered that eagerness, still felt it stir within her, even after living through what it had brought her. Lise had two renditions of her younger years, one public and one private. She’d made no bones about the public one: her desperate childhood, her wretched marriage, her thankless offspring, all of which was true, every bit of it. But hidden in the crevices of all that bleakness, folded behind the stark ramparts and battlements that she called her life was the intimate stuff of it, her personal, private treasure. There was a tarn high above her childhood village that for years she had called her own, and on summer days, before dawn, she would escape the house and chores, with no thought of her father’s wrath, and slip up through the forest to explore its shores and the surrounding fields spangled with wildflowers, blue and red, orange and violet. She would strip off her tattered clothes and plunge naked into the crystal waters and find salamanders in the soft mud at the bottom by their tiny bubbles, swim in quick, even strokes across to the far shore and back, then pull herself, every inch of her flesh tingling and alive, onto a weathered log to dry in the noon-day sun. In the evenings by firelight, candlelight, lantern light, in every spare minute her family would allow her, she read the romantic novels of Russia and England and America. In bed at night, curled up against the cold, sharing with her sisters and often her mother, when she could not read, she would dream of her destiny, the American Wild West of infinite spaces, fast horses and daring men, where even a woman, if she had grit, could command her own destiny. And here, in that New World of her dreams, in this land of false promises and endless male stupidity, there had been, in spite of it all, a wealth of living.
Now, in her decrepitude, Lise felt the glow of an inward smile and a slight softening of her eyes when she recalled those precious long gone times, and she didn’t castigate herself for her naiveté, or foolish dreams. It was in the dreaming of the dreams, and the reliving of the dreaming that their value lay. She had long ago realized that dreams were to be dreamed, not lived, that they were an end in themselves, and were not devalued when they did not come true. It was the physical pleasure of dreaming them that was their purpose.
This is not to say that Lise spent her days addled by fantasy and memory. She considered that she had a very balanced life. Almost half of her waking hours were devoted to housekeeping, laundry, food preparation and consumption, and the like. For at least an hour a day she walked around her neighbors’ pastures or along the roadways that carved the county up into sections. There was a four mile loop that she had walked regularly in her spryer days, but in the past few years the arthritis in her knees and back had slowed her down some, and two miles was about as much as she could manage now, and that only in fair weather. Lise was a counter, and as she walked, consciously or un-, she counted things: her steps to the corner, the vehicles that passed her, the cows each dairyman kept in each pasture, the number of each variety of fruit tree. Someone had told her that an active mind warded off senility so she felt that she had an excuse for this oddity. She never wrote down what she’d counted when she got home, but tried to remember the numbers and to confirm those that would be constant, like the number of pear trees in a certain orchard, the following day. Back in the days when she had friends and would occasionally find herself in need of conversation material this little habit gave her something inoffensive to talk about, her natural tendency being to deride everyone she met for his or her bad health, stupidity, slovenliness, bad upbringing or poor posture. Instead she could comment on the number of cords of wood so and so had cut so far that year and wonder if there was speculation of a harder than normal winter, or congratulate someone else for a growing herd, or discuss the economy in different fence designs, this one requiring fifteen fewer posts per mile while that one perhaps lasting longer.
The time in which she was not working around the house or walking or counting things, Lise divided more or less evenly between reading and thinking. Her eyes had never been good, something she put down to the poor light in which she had read as a child, and since early in her marriage she had worn ever thickening spectacles. Since sometime in her mid-eighties she had found that she needed to use a magnifying glass as well as her glasses, and it had taken some of the pleasure out of reading. Still, she managed. Every week Erika had brought her a stack of books from the library, some printed specifically for the vision-impaired with a large type. She enjoyed a good mystery, and had read a vast number of them, as well as countless English classics. Her daughter had tried to get her hooked on romance novels, but Lise had shunned them, saying they were simply idiotic. She mostly read during the afternoons, when the natural light was good and the print was easier to see. By three-thirty or four o’clock she would put away her book and brew a fresh pot of coffee, usually the third of the day, and settle down to her thoughts.
Lise thought about everything, including what she thought about. When you’re old, she told herself, it’s important to think carefully, and it was conveniently possible as it had never been in younger years because now there is no one pushing her around. She could be impulsive, had been impulsive, but in her decrepitude, as she liked to think of it, she’d rather not be. Years before she had noticed that she spent about one third of her thinking time thinking about practical and everyday things, another third griping to herself, and the rest of the time reminiscing, recalling happy times, and daydreaming. This seemed to her to be a healthy division and now she stuck to it, not allowing the black thoughts and bitterness to take over, but making sure they had their airtime; remembering carefully what she’d done that day and the day before, and thinking about what she’d do the next. She thought about her health and Erika’s health and Nils’, and reviewed her plans should any of them start to fail.
Since Erika’s death her schedule had gone to hell. To start with, it had been almost a week before they had buried her, and during that time Lise had almost constant company, primarily from Johanna, her youngest grandchild, the brainy one, but also from the others and some great-grandchildren, and a few of her daughter’s friends. They had dragged her over to the main house because that was where the action was, which nobody wanted to miss, and they didn’t want her to be alone. For her own good, they said. So she sat on the couch being bored to death by the most boring people and the most inane conversation. They didn’t give her a chance to think, and they thought it was rude of her to pull out an Agatha Christy, so she sat there and nodded her head and mumbled responses to sincere platitudes. She had a problem, she knew that. Erika was her support system and Erika was dead. She needed to think about this, to figure out what she was going to do, but her brain just wouldn’t focus on it. Every directed thought invariably came hard up against a numbing barrier, the image of Erika prone on her back, arms flung wide, one under the bed, the other splayed across the brown carpet, her flannel nightgown riding up over her enormous chalky thighs. Erika’s eyes were fixed on the ceiling, wide open, as if death had startled her, and did still, and her mouth was twisted in pain. From this well of horror, for that is what it was for Lise, her own flesh and blood, her only daughter, an ugly mountain of corrupt flesh, the last thing on earth she would have wished to see, from this well flowed, unbidden, a million thoughts and memories, jumbled together, without order or sense. She remembered Erika’s birth, that mixture of pain and joy that, in some ways, was the highlight of her life, bringing into the world something female she could love and nurture; how her heart had flown from her body, literally, she could still feel it, with happiness and relief and thankfulness. She remembered Erika’s own ventures into motherhood with six births that produced her three living children, Lise had been present at every one, and had known, with an immediacy and intimacy, her daughter’s worst anguish and greatest joy. Lise remembered Erika’s lithe young form skipping down the summertime river, hopping from rock to rock, chasing crickets and tadpoles, and she remembered the joy it had brought her to think that her daughter had a better life than she’d had, and that she’d done well to have managed it. Every memory led to another and another, looping, with a dreadful certainty, back to that corpse, lying with so little dignity in a soiled nightgown on the ratty carpet in a badly lit room, choked with fat and disappointment.
*
In the days before the funeral Erika’s Johanna, had tried to convince her to move into a home. Johanna had sat close beside her on the couch so that their shoulders touched and she could speak directly into Lise’s good ear. She had held her wrinkled hand, interlacing their fingers, and stroked it as if it were a cat. Johanna’s warm hands. Even as a child her hands had been abnormally warm, as if she were burning up with fever. “It’s my warm heart,” she’d always say, and Lise figured that was probably what it was. As Johanna talked Lise looked at their hands, thinking how foreign they looked together, her brown, sinewy fingers stained yellow with tobacco entwined in those of her granddaughter’s, plump and white and manicured. Flesh and blood, she thought, how strange. Johanna had spoken with earnest exaggeration, a little loudly, and with much repetition, as if she were trying to convince a five-year-old of the joys of attending kindergarten. She meant well, Lise knew that. It was the sensible thing to do, but she’d refused, carefully. It was too sudden. Maybe in the spring, she’d said. Lise had heard of cases where children had managed to lock up a troublesome parent, shelve them out of sight in a home for the elderly. She supposed that grandchildren could manage the same indignity. Johanna wanted to know how they’d get on, her father and her grandmother, and how they’d survive, how they’d get in groceries and firewood, and Lise admitted that she wondered herself.
She and Nils had not had a conversation in over twenty years, and had not exchanged more than a Thank you or Goodbye in ten. When he’d found her daughter dead on the bedroom floor he’d crossed the bridge and banged on the door. “Erika’s dead,” was all he’d said, indicating that she was in the house with the jerk of his head, then he’d walked back and slumped in a lawn chair until the ambulance arrived. Miserable old coot! It was he who should be in the old-folks home.
When they’d finally got Erika into the ground and Lise was left on her own again, she didn’t fare much better. There was housework that needed doing but she just couldn’t get started on it. Instead she slumped in one chair or another feebly trying to ward off depression. She tried to marshal her mind: time for happy thoughts, she would say aloud, sitting up straight and clasping her hands on her lap, and forcing her mind back to her childhood lake, to the salamanders and minnows and flowered fields. But she found no life in the old images. It was as if she were looking at a stranger’s photograph album. Time and again she found herself with her face in her hands, her hands wet with tears. So she gave in to them, telling herself that grief and tears were healthy, healing, and she crawled into bed and stayed there, weeping and sleeping and waking to weep again, for two days. She didn’t know what she thought of as she lay there; nothing, she supposed. Her mind seemed to be a blank. It was her body that was grieving and her mind, for once, took a back seat.
On the morning of the third day she awoke feeling curiously refreshed. She washed, started a fire in the old stove, put on some coffee and some oatmeal then lit a cigarette. On her porch she could smell autumn in the air, but there had been no frost. She sat and smoked and looked out across the fields. Two huge cottonwoods stood on either side of the creek to her right, and both above and below them were clusters of alder and willow, the water-seekers. The willow and cottonwood leaves were already tinged with yellow. Straight ahead of her was the row of weeping willows her son-in-law had planted years ago, now grown so big she couldn’t see past them. To her left and looming over the house were the maples and further down to the left by the neighbor’s fields a couple huge cedars. She knew all of these trees, each of them individually. She had been looking at them for close to forty years. She pre-dated many of the willow and alder. They weren’t friends. She didn’t feel a kinship for them, but there was a kind of solidarity. She sensed that the trees felt a solidarity with her and over the years she had grudgingly felt it in return. Grudgingly, because she didn’t want to see herself that desperate for companionship.
But she did know the trees, knew the number of each, their relative sizes, which provided homes for which animals in which seasons. She had watched the weeping willows grow from nothing, huge maple limbs die and fall and suckers generate to replace them. Lightning had blasted the tops off a number of trees, but none had been killed by it. Storms and heavy snowfalls had brought down maple and cedar branches and caused a number of alder to crash into the creek. That morning as she sat in the sun with her coffee and cigarettes she felt surging from the emptiness within her a love for the trees, or at least an acknowledgment. Survivors, she said to herself with a nod. We’re survivors. That thought gave her momentary pleasure, but she quickly dismissed it as rubbish. In time, she knew, these trees would all be hauled off for lumber or would be rotting in the earth, just like Erika was rotting in the earth, and she’d soon be too. Everything had its time, trees and people alike.
She heard the scrape of Nils’ footstep on the bridge and it snapped her out of her mental meanderings. Curiosity had got the best of him, she thought. He needs to know if I’m still alive. The footfall stopped and started again. There was a hesitancy in it, perhaps nervousness, but she dismissed the thought. He’s probably just hungry, the old coot, and is wondering if I’ll cook for him.
*
Nils stopped on the bridge and worked the toe of his boot into the rot in one of the cedar planks. Over the years he’d replaced a few of them but most of the decking was the original he’d laid down forty years before. He didn’t figure he’d be replacing any more. A couple more trips this way and that and the thing would never be used again. The old woman couldn’t live out there by herself any more, so that would be the end of it. Of course, his daughter didn’t think he should be on his own either, as if being seventy-seven meant he was ankle deep in fresh earth.
Nils knew he was being a stubborn fool, but that’s how he was, god damn it, and he intended to stay that way. He’d get by on his own, always had. When the crowd had cleared out, the teary-eyed, the meek and pious, the bored, he was so sick of them he could have puked. With their departure came a new beginning. Literally, in holding the door open for the mass exit, he could smell the fresh autumn air, crisp with apple and turning leaves, as it invaded the house, the house so stale with mourning and grief and boredom, fusty with black clothes and bowed heads. There was fruit to harvest and a life to pick up again.
His children had pushed him to move into an old folks home, but he’d told them to stuff it. Two of them he hadn’t seen in over a decade. What right had they to an opinion? Johanna, the attentive one, had been quite insistent, with her sincere and doleful eyes, her warm hand on his arm. What did they take him for? An invalid? A child? Well, he’d got his way. They had left him alone.
He had seventy-two fruit trees, six varieties of apple and two of pear. Each variety matured at a different time, starting with the transparent apples in early August and ending with the King apples in November, so over about ten weeks he was busy every day. During the really heavy period in mid-October he’d have to hire the neighbor kids like he’d done the previous few years to help out. He just wasn’t as quick as he used to be. He’d lost a week with Erika’s death and the funeral. If he didn’t get busy he’d lose the Delicious and Bartlett harvest as well as his wife.
The fruit harvest was his only income these past years, except for social security and the bit of interest on his stash from the selling off of his cow pastures. It was something that had to be done, but it wasn’t as easy as it used to be, and not just because he was getting on in years. Wholesale prices were lower every year, what with orchards popping up all over the state, and out-of-state fruit flooding the market. And his trees were getting old and cranky too. If it were a real business he’d be cutting them down and replacing them with the high-yield dwarfs everyone was using these days. Seemed a shame, but it made sense economically, or it would for a youngster. Every winter it took him two months or more just to prune them all. Over the past few years he’d let the giant Kings get away on him, and he was no longer able to reach the top third of them with his tallest ladder, so they’d gone wild and a half ton of fruit was wasted every year.
The day after the funeral it was late afternoon when the last of them left, but they weren’t out of the driveway before he was hauling the ladder out of the barn and setting up his boxes. When it was too dark to pick he backed his pickup over to the apple shed and loaded it. There were forty boxes that had been moldering there for over a week. First thing in the morning they were bound for the co-op.
For the next two days Nils was up before dawn getting his fruit into boxes and delivered to the market, not returning to the house until an hour after dark. There was enough food around the house to keep him going for at least a week, which was a blessing. After he’d caught up with the harvest there would be time to shop.
But nagging at him the whole time was the old crone holed up across the creek. She had never had a polite word to say to him, had hated his guts since the day he’d first made eyes at her daughter, but he supposed that she was his responsibility now. He couldn’t very well just let her starve to death.
*
Nils stood midway on his bridge looking down at the creek, barely flowing this time of year. Huge maples hung over him, heavy green clouds, now tinged with yellow and orange. He didn’t raise his head to look at them, but felt their monumental presence like old friends, his friendly giants keeping the ravine in gloom and shadow even on the brightest day. Upstream, perhaps a hundred yards, was the now familiar lightening in the forest where his hoodlum neighbors had massacred his trees. He could contemplate it calmly now, these ten years later. Just months after selling them the property on the condition that they would preserve every tree he had heard the chainsaws. It was sometime after eight in the morning and he had left his second cup of coffee on the table and followed the old cow path across the ravine. There, parked at the end of a new rough driveway, he’d found a battered orange pickup truck emblazoned Analog laden with chainsaws, heavy cables, and come-alongs and two young men felling trees into the clearing. He had moved quickly and shoved the closest one aside, wrestled the saw from his grip and held it like a weapon over his head. “What are you morons doing?” he demanded. The second saw was stilled and its operator came to the defense of his friend. “Cutting down these trees,” the second one said, “per the owner’s instructions.” He indicated about twenty trees marked with orange spray-paint. “Like hell you are,” retorted Nils and he advanced to take possession of the other saw. The first man rose from where he had fallen and threw his arm around Nils’ neck, twisting him to his knees, and retrieved his saw. “Butt out, old man, or I’ll charge you with assault,” he said, then cranked his saw to life and went back to his tree.
Nils found a crowbar in the back of the truck and advanced on him while the other man shouted a warning that was unheard over the scream of the saw. Nils brought the bar down with all his strength on the saw, already deep in the tree, causing it immediately to bind and snap its chain which flew fifty feet into the ravine. Within two seconds the second man was on him, knocking him unconscious with an axe handle. When he came to, face down in the dirt, one of them was sitting on his back and the other had gone in the truck to get the sheriff. Nils spent four days in jail and was fined a thousand dollars. By the time he was out the trees were down and hauled away. His lawyer told Nils he was lucky to get off so easy, and that he could have been charged with attempted murder. “What do you call what they did?” he demanded, red-faced. “I call that murder. Murder of twenty trees! My trees, protected by a promise and a handshake.” The lawyer told him to get it in writing next time.
Nils had one hundred and fifty-nine mature trees on his five acres. There were sixty-five naturally grown maples, cedar, fir, and cottonwood in and around the ravine, ten hemlocks that Erika had planted years ago as a hedge that were now an impenetrable mass along the road, twelve weeping willows he had started from slips off a neighbor’s tree, left in the creek for a couple of months in the spring then stuck into the soggy ground along the south boundary, plus the fruit trees. He figured there were at least fifty smaller trees on their way. He’d cut nine trees to build the farm buildings, and two cherry trees that he’d planted too close to the house. Some of that cherry wood was still stacked in the barn. Cutting trees for their lumber wasn’t murder, no more than clearing a field for cattle was, but when it was just to improve your view! Better to move your house than to destroy a single two hundred year old living thing, never mind twenty.
Nils resumed his shuffle across the bridge. That old woman! What was he going to do with her? She had been completely dependant upon Erika. What was she going to do now? Sure be simpler if she’d move into the house with him, although, how he’d be able to put up with her, he didn’t know. She’d been against him right from the start. He remembered the wedding reception, just an hour after he’d married her daughter, and seeing her standing to one side looking at the two of them, with tears running down her cheeks. He had misread those tears, thinking she’d softened towards him, and was crying for happiness, like every other mother at her daughter’s wedding. He’d gone over to her, with Erika on his arm, and reached to embrace her, but she’d stepped back and slapped him hard across the face. “Don’t touch me, you oaf,” she’d snapped. Now, fifty years later, Erika, who had loved them both, facilitated both their lives and maintained harmony by keeping them apart, had left them stranded with nothing but each other. “This bridge,” he muttered as he stepped off it, “a metaphor for nothing.”
Nils came around the side of the little stone house and mounted the two steps to the deck. She looked like a bundle of rags rocking back and forth in her chair in a cloud of cigarette smoke, the afternoon sun full on her shriveled face. Nils leaned against the deck railing waiting for her to acknowledge him. Smoke was pouring from her perforated ear. He coughed into his hand, but she continued to ignore him. “How you making out?” he finally said. His hand jerked forward involuntarily, as if to get her attention.
Still she didn’t look at him. “What’s it to you?” Seventy years she had been in this country and still she sounded like she was just off the boat, all v’s and z’s and oot’s. She jabbed at the decking with her toe and the rocking chair picked up speed, as if the orchestra had just changed from a foxtrot to a Strauss waltz. Nils hesitated for a long second then jerked around and stepped off the deck. “Come and sit down, you old fool,” she shouted at him. He took another couple of steps on the gravel path then stopped, looking back across the bridge to his house. He could hear her get up from her chair. “I’ll get you something to sit on,” she said, then the screen door creaked open and slammed shut behind her.
Nils stayed where he was, but turned to watch her lug a kitchen chair out onto the deck. He remembered that chair. He’d built it half a century ago along with seven others, six of which had been hauled off by his daughter. She plunked it down in a strip of sunlight and resumed her seat, waving her hands as if she’d just materialized the thing for his amusement. “Who are you calling an old fool?” he demanded.
“I wasn’t talking to myself,” she said. Again she waved at the chair. “You came all the way over here. There must be something on your mind.”
He felt fifty years of suppressed rage boiling up within him. His knees began to shake. This woman! This wretched, ungrateful, wizened old bitch! He stepped back to the steps not because he intended to sit with her, but in order to grasp the railing to keep himself from keeling over. She would rather sit out here and starve to death than ask for an acorn to chew on! Then she was talking again, her voice cracking but the tone direct and sure.
“I have been sitting here looking at your trees, if you want to know. Those willows you planted. Remember? They were just a row of slips when I first came here. Now they are like the Great Wall of China. Twelve weeping willows all in a row. I like them more than these stiff old maples you are so fond of, and I think that is because there is somehow the touch of the human in them. Orderly. Planted. Maybe too, because they are a bit feminine. Supple. Moving with the weather instead of fighting it.”
Nils had kept his eyes on his boots during her speech, the longest he’d ever heard her make, but now he looked up and saw that she was sitting forward staring straight at him. Their eyes met and they held each other’s gaze. Neither smiled nor seemed even to breathe. Nils’ knees quit quaking and he slowly unclenched his hand from the railing. He glanced down at this heavy black work boots and watched the left one rise from the gravel and settle onto the lower step.
Taos
December 2000
Go to back to Table of Contents