Читать книгу Driftless - David Rhodes - Страница 19

HUMPED FLOORS

RUSSELL (RUSTY) SMITH NEEDED SOME WORK DONE ON HIS house. The paint had peeled, especially around the upper windows, and the roof leaked in two places. But the retired farmer had long ago stopped climbing ladders. After sixty years of milking cows, carrying sacks of feed, and jumping off tractors and wagons, his knees had given out. He also had problems inside, where the hardwood floor in the guest bedroom buckled into hills and valleys. To make matters worse, his wife’s sister had called, announcing her intention to visit at the end of next month, and after hanging up the phone his wife, Maxine, had instantly reordered her collection of things to worry about, placing house repair at the very highest peak of concern.

Rusty called all the lumberyards—even in Kendall, more than fifty miles away—and was told there were no construction crews available. He called all the listed carpenters and contractors.

“This is always the worst season,” said Rodney Whisk at Whisk Lumber. “Everyone puts off construction until frozen ground is just around the corner. There’s more building now than you can shake a stick at.”

“I need someone,” said Rusty, flipping his spent cigarette to the asphalt and grinding it beneath the pointed toe of his cowboy boot. He tried to keep from reaching again into the pocket of his insulated vest, failed, found another cigarette, and lit it from a disposable lighter.

“Everybody works for the big boys now,” said Rodney. “Pete Hardin was in last week looking for someone to finish the addition on his house. He finally hired some Amish.”

“Don’t want Amish,” said Rusty. “Don’t want to encourage them to keep moving in.”

“Appears they don’t need any encouragement,” said the lumberyard owner as a tractor-trailer load of Canadian plywood backed toward them from the street.

“The wife doesn’t like to drive at night,” said Rusty. “Afraid of hitting ’em.”

“They finally put electric lights on their buggies.”

“Didn’t do it until they forced ’em.”

“They’re hard workers,” said Rodney. “Give them that.”

“Never said they weren’t. Never said they weren’t. Just think they make poor neighbors.”

Rusty paused to remind himself why he had a right to complain about religious groups and anything else. He had grown up in an always-hungry family that never took charity. His father never held a steady job for more than three months, never owned his own home, and didn’t live past the age of forty. Rusty had dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work as a farm laborer, as did his younger brother.

From one rented room to another, Rusty had worked seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, year in and out. He had worn other men’s clothes, slept on cement floors, and hidden rice in soiled pockets of his overalls. He’d plowed with horses, shoveled manure, butchered animals, and cleared timber. He had worked for some of the most miserly farmers in the area—well known for their cruelty to family, animals, and themselves.

When he was old enough to be legally employed, he had worked nights as a grinder in the foundry. At thirty-eight he finally made a down payment on his own farm and a year later married a school-teacher. Then for the next thirty-five years he farmed with a moral ferocity that more resembled mortal combat than work, until he had paid, in full, for every blade of grass and splinter of wood on his property. Meanwhile, his wife had raised their two daughters, who eventually attended the state university, married young men from the suburbs, and provided his two grandchildren with lives of nurtured indolence.

Rusty Smith had the right to talk about other people. In a culture that valued work, he was a living testament to that virtue, a gnarled emblem of relentless toil.

He continued, “The Amish don’t pay gasoline taxes but use the roads and leave horse manure all over them. Their steel wheels cut deep into the cement. They don’t use electricity, so the rest of us have to pay higher rates. They don’t follow the same school laws. They get special privileges when it comes to having outhouses. Hell, for ten years my neighbor tried to build a hunting shack, but they wouldn’t let him unless he put in a complete sewer system. They say crapping outdoors is part of their religion.”

Rusty rarely talked about anything, but this was one of the few issues he had well rehearsed. “Amish don’t believe in owning cars, but they sure like to ride around in them. They don’t believe in owning phones, but they sure like to use them. They don’t believe in medical insurance, but they run to the hospitals in every emergency. They don’t believe in owning power tools, but they sure like to borrow them.”

“Do they borrow your tools often, Rusty?”

“Not mine.”

“You’re a hard man,” said Rodney, “and I’d like to talk to you more, but I’ve got to check over this plywood before they unload it.”

“Suit yourself.”

Rusty returned to his dual-wheeled pickup and began the drive back to his farm. Well, it really wasn’t a farm anymore, he reminded himself. Two years ago he had sold the land to Charlie Drickle & Sons. All his equipment had been auctioned. Now he just owned the house, the barn, and four acres. Drickle had wanted the barn, too, but Rusty refused, even though it stood a long ways from the house. “I’ll build you a big garage,” Drickle said.

“Not the same thing,” said Rusty.

At home, Rusty went directly into the basement. He always changed clothes down there to keep the smell of the farm out of the rest of the house. There was a shower next to the washer and dryer. After stepping out of his city clothes, he put on a pair of forest-green coveralls that zipped up the front and exchanged his leather cowboy boots for insulated rubber.

It was the only place in the house where he smoked, and he squatted onto his old milking stool and lit a cigarette. His knees hurt. From above him came the sounds of Maxine and the vacuum cleaner. The humming and bumping gradually moved north. Running out of electric cord, she turned off the cleaner and returned south to retrieve the plug from the socket.

The telephone in the kitchen rang and her footsteps reversed, then stopped directly above him. Though he could not understand individual words, the fleeting sounds of occasional laughter led him to suspect the caller to be one of the girls, Maxine’s mother in Milwaukee or her sister in Chicago. About 90 percent, or more, of their calls could be traced to these sources. Rusty lit another cigarette as he listened to her pull a chair out from under the table and sit on it. Her voice lowered as she settled into the conversation, and the silences grew periodically longer as superficial greetings ended and more vital communication began to flow.

Rusty didn’t like talking on telephones. His circumstances had frequently made it unavoidable, yet he could not remember a time when he had ever agreeably dialed a number. And as he had so often demonstrated, it always proved easier to drive twenty miles to see if a store carried a desired item—or if it was open—than call. Holding a telephone against his ear had the same effect on him as entering a room filled with tourists in flowered shirts. He was not gregarious in that way. To be honest, he was not gregarious at all. His entire social capital had been invested, wisely and exhaustively, in Maxine. He hadn’t talked to his own brother or sisters in over fifty-five years. He so rarely thought about them that they seemed little more than characters in a mostly forgotten book.

Finishing his cigarette, Rusty groaned to his feet and climbed the cement stairs into the yard. He let the white bull terrier crossbreed out of her pen. The enormous dog limped through the wire gate, reminding him of her untreatable arthritis. Together they completed the long walk to the barn, which sat on the edge of a woodlot.

The building’s interior looked more like a museum than a barn. After selling the farm, Rusty had turned his attention to all the things he had promised to do whenever he found time. He oiled, repaired, and arranged all his tools. Then he made a pegboard to hang them from. Though he had resisted buying certain tools during his farming life—not wanting to spend money on things he would use only infrequently—he now purchased them to complete his collection. He built a new workbench, with oak drawers to sort the nuts, bolts, screws, washers, nails, clips, pins, wire and wire fasteners, insulators, brads, tacks, rivets, and other things he had accumulated over the years, labeled and arranged according to size. He painted his vise. He painted his gasoline and oil cans and set them along the wall. He painted two metal storage barrels and put them at the end of the bench. He painted a wooden sign and hung it on the pegboard: TOOLS. He painted the doors and window frames. By the time he had finished, the inside of the barn looked like a Walt Disney production.

He backed the Oldsmobile out, drove it up to the house, parked it next to the water spigot, and began hosing off the dust and road dirt. On Wednesday nights Maxine volunteered in the library, and she often took Leslie Weedle, the librarian, home afterwards.

Keeping vehicles clean seemed important. Cars and trucks were extensions of the home and reflected their owner’s character. Like ragged clothes, a dirty car said a number of things Rusty did not wish to be associated with. Though he didn’t give a nickel what any particular individual thought about him and even held most of his neighbors in near-contempt, the mass of all of them together—the community—had considerable weight.

He began to go over the Oldsmobile with a chamois cloth to eliminate water stains. Maxine came out of the house and stood beside him. “The library’s closed tonight,” she said. “Someone is waxing the main floors.”

“Won’t hurt to have the car clean,” said Rusty.

“No it won’t, Russell. Anyway, Margie called and it looks like Mother might be able to come with her. She talked with the doctor and called the airlines. She can take her walker on the plane.”

Rusty wrung out the chamois and wiped off the trunk.

“We’ll have to put Mother in the girls’ room,” she said, turned, and spoke again. “It’s been almost ten years since they were both here—clear back before the girls were out of high school.”

Rusty finished with the trunk and continued until all the water streaks had been removed. Then he rewound the hose and drove the Oldsmobile back into the barn. He stood beside the workbench and lit a cigarette. He didn’t know what to do. He had to find someone to work on the house. Maxine was beginning to panic. At this point she could contain herself, but she wouldn’t last long. He should have found someone to do the repairs early in the summer, but he’d put it off. The bitter fact that he couldn’t do the work himself had made everything else easier to ignore.

He checked the oil in his lawn-mowing tractor, took a deep breath, and climbed stiffly onto the seat. With a turn of the key, he was out of the barn and moving along the fruit trees like an insect perched on a noisy green leaf, the giant old dog ambling alongside as well as she could.

While he had been farming, their yard could be mowed in fifteen minutes with a push mower. After he retired, the mowing area gradually expanded until it now took three hours. The mower deck beneath him chewed into the thick damp grass and sprayed cuttings onto the blacktop road halfway to the centerline. The roaring and churning sound was punctuated at odd intervals by an occasional ping from a piece of gravel coming into contact with the whirling blades.

He made two passes along the orchard, and a white pickup stopped on the shoulder of the road, maybe twenty yards away. A man climbed out. From this distance, without his glasses, Rusty couldn’t be sure he knew him, but with both of them moving toward each other he soon recognized July Montgomery, a Jersey farmer near Words. Jerseys, Rusty smiled, were for people who were afraid to milk Holsteins and too ashamed to milk goats. He shut off the engine and lit a cigarette as a way of saying hello.

“Rusty,” said July, smiling with a sincerity that Rusty interpreted as feigned. “I’ve been meaning for a long time to stop. How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“How are those knees holding up?”

“I’ll let you know. What do you want?”

“Dog won’t bite, will it? Looks mean.”

“Take your chances like everyone else,” said Rusty.

“Remember that grain drill I bought from you?”

“No refunds.”

“How did you set the boxes for barley?”

“Set the outside box on about the sixth notch, the inside ones on the tenth.”

“Sixth notch outside, tenth notch inside.”

“Worked for me.”

“A little wet to be mowing, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Want a job doing carpenter work?”

“No. What kind of carpenter work?”

“The house needs a new roof, among other things.”

“I found a good carpenter last summer. Eli Yoder and his boys Isaac and Abraham. They built my new shed.”

“Don’t want Amish,” said Rusty.

“I thought the same thing,” said July, taking his cap off. “But I hired them anyway, and it was the drop-dead best thing I ever did. They work like mules but you only have to pay them like horses.” He laughed. “No, seriously, they did a good job. Eli lives—”

“I know where he lives.”

“Say, have you seen any signs of that cougar?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither. But they say it’s around. Many people have heard it and some people have seen it. I saw it myself.”

“First time I see it will be the last,” said Rusty.

“Big cats used to be all through this part of Wisconsin,” said July.

“Maybe so, but people back then had the sense to kill the buggers off.”