The Farm
Nothing could ever be too safe. The woman knew she was
silly about it sometimes. A person with a more practical turn of mind would
laugh. But she had yet to make herself into a practical person, so she
applauded the brick patio between the rest of the Virginia farmhouse and
its kitchen. The old house at the foot of the Blue Ridge was wooden and
in the kitchen was a big wood-burning cookstove, a Mephistophelean combination
without the buffer. She enjoyed the word "Mephistophelean" when
she came up with it.
The woman sat on the plastic-cushioned kitchen chair she'd
brought out. Snapping beans her husband had harvested that morning and
would expect for lunch when he came up from the field, temporarily contented,
she watched the little girl play with a saucepan and spoon at the edge
of the bricks.
She pinched the end of a green bean with her thumbnail,
snapped the body of the bean in thirds, and dropped the pieces in the heavy
ceramic bowl on her lap. For now she was not even anxious over crazed rustics
with sawed-off shotguns, cows with anthrax, or wolves. Glad for little
safeties like the patio, she dropped her recognition of them into the silence
of the country like stones in a wall against her future fear.
She was not so afraid for herself as for her three-year-old
daughter.
The child had abandoned herself to an elaborate fantasy
game with the saucepan and spoon. Several of her favorite imaginary playmates
were at her dinner table. She was conversing and laughing with them as
she served the food from the saucepan. Occasionally, her invisible companions
got out of hand and she sometimes argued with them or hit them with the
spoon. But she had her mother's timidity. Even the reprimands were quiet.
The large man was most often a problem. Today he was making
a pig of himself, as usual. He often had to be scolded and frequently sent
to his room. He was never good about that. He whimpered and begged to come
back. Sometimes she gave in and let him sit at the table again, but her
real feeling was, if you're going to make a pig of yourself, you'd better
be ready to face the consequences.
That was one of the few things she didn't see just the
way her mother did. When her mother played the eating game with the girl,
she would talk her daughter into letting the fat man back.
The little boy was almost always well-behaved. Sometimes
the girl had trouble keeping up a conversation with him. It wasn't rudeness,
really, on his part. He was just daydreaming of somewhere else, of other
things.
When the girl was tired of scolding the fat man or trying
to get the boy's attention, she just sat back and listened to the Pearl
Lady. The lady had lived everywhere and told stories about her life in
a big city where she walked a Boston terrier with rhinestones on his collar.
When her mother played the game, she supplied new stories for the Pearl
Lady.
But even the lady could get dull, as she was doing then.
The little girl put down the saucepan and spoon and went to see what her
mother was doing.
The woman smiled at the child. The girl stuck her hand
in the bowl and pulled out a bean section.
"No, baby, it's not cooked yet. Put it back,"
the woman said.
Mother and daughter understood each other. The girl fingered
the piece once more, rubbing her index finger against the grain of the
bean. It stuck for a second to her skin, released itself, and fell into
the bowl.
"All done," the woman said. She stood up with
the bowl in her hands. "You can stay out here on the bricks, but don't
go off them. Daddy hasn't mown the field up here yet." She pointed
to the tall grass just beyond the bricks.
The girl looked out into the field. When the grass was
short it was her favorite place to play. It was bordered on the far side
by a low stone wall. Her mother let her play there without supervision
because she could not get over the wall and onto the road.
The woman went inside. The girl returned to the edge of
the bricks. She banged around the inside of the pan a few times with the
spoon.
There was danger in the field, she knew. Once her father
had carried her on his shoulders down a dog trail through the brambles
and poison ivy to look at a thick black snake sunning itself on the stone
wall.
But the cornflowers growing as high as herself were the
color of her eyes. She touched her eye experimentally, drooping the lid
so her finger didn't go in. She remembered the color from the mirror.
From the open kitchen window the woman watched the girl
lift her finger to her eye. She did not call out when the girl stood up
and stepped off the bricks. The woman was, for the moment, more curious
than afraid, and once she'd begun to suppress her fear, she found it easier
to continue. Her daughter was smart enough to understand why she was banned
from the field.
Just before the girl disappeared into the tall grass she
turned to look toward the kitchen. The look was enough to keep the mother
quiet even then. It was not a look of mischief or of defiance but one of
regret.