place like cigarette smoke over the poker game my father used to have once a month in the dining room, before my mother told him he needed to stop smoking and move the game to the VFW. Cows at dawn are different than cows at dusk. A farm in winter feels different than a farm in summer. The whole year passed in front of me on the farm. The cornstalks with yellow edges that meant summer was over and the classroom getting ready to close around you. The pumpkins of October that squatted where the yellow flowers sprouted on the vines in August. The mornings when you could hear the cattle complaining like a bunch of old men with tobacco throats and you knew, you just knew, that it was February and their water trough was frozen solid and you were going to have to go out there with an old shovel and beat a hole into the ice until it fell apart like a broken window.
The one constant all year round was the sound of my father, in the foggy mist of summer or the dry-ice mist of winter, taking care of business in the barn. My father liked to whistle while he worked in there. He had a strange whistle, more like a breathy thing that came out between his teeth than that full pursed-lip sound my brother made, or used to make. My father usually whistled from the time he slid the barn door open until he slid it closed. On Saturdays, when I’d sleep in a little bit, I’d roll over in bed sometimes and hear it, faintly, unless it was raining hard and the rain was bigger than my father’s whistle. Then it would wind up drowned out completely by the thunk of the sump pump.
My father took a lot of pride in keeping a neat farm. He never said much but you could tell he had contempt for people who had messy knock-around farms, with broken hay wagons falling apart in the corner of the field and moldy straw to one side of the barn door. My father even dug a big trench down one edge of the barn and into the far fields so that when the groundwater was deep, which happened more and more the older I got, the cows wouldn’t get foot rot. There was an order to running a farm right, and my father appreciated it, and so did I. It was a little like math, one thing in front of another until it was solved. Sometimes I would pull on a pair of dungarees and a sweater and give my father a hand before I got the bus to school. Sometimes he’d drive me to school so I wouldn’t have to take the bus at all.
I was already halfway across the road one morning in March, stepping carefully because of the black ice slicks on the tar, my wool gloves frozen into hand shapes because I’d left them to dry outside by the door, when I heard my father stop whistling and say, “Lord give me strength.” I came up behind him and saw that where our big tractor always sat there was an empty place, and an empty forty-ounce bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. My father favored Iron City or, when he was feeling flush, Rolling Rock.
We were less than a mile along the road when we found the tractor overturned down the side of the shoulder. The engine was still running but it made a grinding noise, like it was butting up against something it had no business touching, and Tommy was lying half under it with blood on his face and all over the front of his shirt. I could hear the tractor but no sound of breathing but my own, and I made a fluttery motion with my hands in their old gloves, then put them under my armpits to make them stop. Tommy wasn’t even wearing a coat, and there were two other beer bottles near the tractor, although they could have been from anyone since there was a lot of racing down our road at night and throwing beer bottles from the window, which was probably why my father hadn’t noticed the sound of the tractor starting up in the first place.
“Don’t try to move him or you might make it worse,” I said.
“I couldn’t if I tried,” my father said.
We were a family that didn’t use the rescue squad, figuring we could handle most things ourselves with a
The one constant all year round was the sound of my father, in the foggy mist of summer or the dry-ice mist of winter, taking care of business in the barn. My father liked to whistle while he worked in there. He had a strange whistle, more like a breathy thing that came out between his teeth than that full pursed-lip sound my brother made, or used to make. My father usually whistled from the time he slid the barn door open until he slid it closed. On Saturdays, when I’d sleep in a little bit, I’d roll over in bed sometimes and hear it, faintly, unless it was raining hard and the rain was bigger than my father’s whistle. Then it would wind up drowned out completely by the thunk of the sump pump.
My father took a lot of pride in keeping a neat farm. He never said much but you could tell he had contempt for people who had messy knock-around farms, with broken hay wagons falling apart in the corner of the field and moldy straw to one side of the barn door. My father even dug a big trench down one edge of the barn and into the far fields so that when the groundwater was deep, which happened more and more the older I got, the cows wouldn’t get foot rot. There was an order to running a farm right, and my father appreciated it, and so did I. It was a little like math, one thing in front of another until it was solved. Sometimes I would pull on a pair of dungarees and a sweater and give my father a hand before I got the bus to school. Sometimes he’d drive me to school so I wouldn’t have to take the bus at all.
I was already halfway across the road one morning in March, stepping carefully because of the black ice slicks on the tar, my wool gloves frozen into hand shapes because I’d left them to dry outside by the door, when I heard my father stop whistling and say, “Lord give me strength.” I came up behind him and saw that where our big tractor always sat there was an empty place, and an empty forty-ounce bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. My father favored Iron City or, when he was feeling flush, Rolling Rock.
We were less than a mile along the road when we found the tractor overturned down the side of the shoulder. The engine was still running but it made a grinding noise, like it was butting up against something it had no business touching, and Tommy was lying half under it with blood on his face and all over the front of his shirt. I could hear the tractor but no sound of breathing but my own, and I made a fluttery motion with my hands in their old gloves, then put them under my armpits to make them stop. Tommy wasn’t even wearing a coat, and there were two other beer bottles near the tractor, although they could have been from anyone since there was a lot of racing down our road at night and throwing beer bottles from the window, which was probably why my father hadn’t noticed the sound of the tractor starting up in the first place.
“Don’t try to move him or you might make it worse,” I said.
“I couldn’t if I tried,” my father said.
We were a family that didn’t use the rescue squad, figuring we could handle most things ourselves with a
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