Читать книгу Mending - Sallie Bingham - Страница 10

SELLING THE FARM

IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT WAS ALSO, STILL, enormous, Shirley thought, sitting behind the wheel, her older sister Miriam beside her, neatly buckled in. Shirley had parked her hybrid by the old farm gate that still scraped the ground as it had every time their father jumped out of the car to open it, years and years ago, with the two sisters in the back seat and their mother cow-patient in front, waiting for him to jump back in and drive them through. After church, it would have been, Shirley thought, after a visit to the aunts in town, after a rare excursion to a state park to mark a holiday. The gate had scraped whenever she opened it to drive in with an armload of groceries, a stiff supermarket bouquet to cheer their mother. All that had stopped with her death; Shirley had not opened the gate since the funeral.

It was locked now with a big new padlock.

“I had no idea,” she said, looking helplessly at Miriam.

Miriam shuffled through her big black bag, coming up with a bit of paper. She handed it to Shirley, who took it, climbed out of the car and began to wrestle with the combination.

After a minute Miriam rolled down her window. “You need help?”

“No!” The lock gave finally. Shirley dragged back the gate, then climbed in again behind the wheel.

“At least we don’t need to lock it till we leave—nothing to keep in, or out, now,” she said.

Miriam didn’t answer.

On the other side of the gate, the long rolling cornfield that had bristled with dry stalks at this time of year had been leveled. The bulldozers, having finished their work for the day, were drawn up in a row, bright yellow and massive along the side of the old tenant’s cottage. It was falling down. The roof had caved in, and the modest white posts on the porch were sagging.

“Those posts were still straight last time I saw them,” Shirley said into the silence that had opened between them as soon as she’d turned off the highway onto the old two-lane road, recently widened.

“Where?” Miriam craned her neck, surfacing momentarily from what their mother had called a brown study. She had been on the edge of it and sliding when Shirley picked her up at the hotel.

Shirley pointed. “We used to sit on that porch swing when we went to play with Johnny’s kids. Once I swung so high I touched the ceiling with my toes.”

“Wretched old place. It always smelled like mice droppings. Johnny’s wife—what was her name?”

“Susie,” Shirley said. “Susie Taylor. She said she was related to that Civil War general.”

“Unlikely. Anyway, she was no kind of housekeeper. I always thought she drank, hid the bottles behind the stove. I peered when she wasn’t looking.”

“My, you were suspicious.”

“Realistic,” Miriam said, her voice crisp as her profile. Hawk nosed, like their father, the effect was softened by her small pointed chin, as though, Shirley thought, the upper half of her face had been designed for something grand, the prow of a boat, perhaps, but then the maker had thought better of it and given her a girlish chin. Not that the effect had really been diluted, at least in terms of the way Miriam led her life—as far as she knew, Shirley added to herself, in the interest of fairness. She saw her sister once or twice a year, and their rare communications were courteous and vague.

“When did they bring in the last crop?” Miriam asked.

“A month ago, after you sold the place. Johnny called to let me know.”

“Johnny on the tractor and all those local kids he col lected?” There was no nostalgia in Miriam’s high clear voice, the voice that, carefully developed, had led her all over the world.

“A bunch of Mexicans, this time. All gone now, vanished into some illegal immigrant hell.”

“Johnny?”

“He’s gone too. Packed his pickup, loaded his wife, and drove off without even saying goodbye.”

“Probably already had another job lined up,” Miriam said.

Shirley imagined how Johnny would describe himself to a potential employer—twenty years running a farm, a few cattle, corn and wheat. Then, as she bumped over the rutted road, she thought of how she would put her own possibilities into words: wife and mother, dedicated community volunteer who still baked her own bread. As for Miriam, she would describe herself, Shirley thought, as a magnet for music lovers with a soprano voice that still in the lighter repertoire continued to be sought after, although now most of her commissions came from small-town orchestras, the ones that had survived.

Miriam, never married, had supported herself with her singing, while Shirley knew she would have been lucky to find a job as a librarian or an elementary school teacher—and even that would have required a degree—if Brian had ditched her, as he had sometimes threatened to do in the old, hot days.

Miriam said, “It was a pretty good harvest, for this kind of farm,” and Shirley realized she had known all about it and had only asked when the harvest had happened out of politeness. “The crops were never rotated and Johnny used chemical fertilizer.”

“Well, that’s what Daddy told him to do.” Shirley stopped the car in sight of the farmhouse and Miriam unfastened her seat belt and climbed out, deft and slender as she had always been (except, Shirley reminded herself, for one terrible summer when she was ten and Miriam, to everyone’s amazement, had turned fat and sour at thirteen. But the episode had been brief; their mother had seen to that.)

She scrambled out of the car, following her sister who was climbing the farmhouse fence. “We can drive around to the gate,” she called, but Miriam was already hoisting her leg over the top railing. She dropped to the other side, wincing on contact with the hard ridged dirt.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Shirley asked, hurrying after her.

“Just turned my ankle.” Miriam leaned on the fence, massaging her right ankle; she was wearing bright-red shoes with heels.

Shirley was glad Miriam was too occupied to notice the way she hauled herself over the fence. It had been a long time since she’d faced such an obstacle, and she’d gained some weight although she kept herself in pretty good shape with weekly visits to the gym where the trainer sometimes complimented her on her strength and flexibility—but that was part of the trainer’s job, to keep her clients happy. Now, Shirley was glad for every pair of weights she’d lifted—baby-blue five pounders; she was able to haul herself up the fence with only a few gasps at the top. She did not drop to the ground on the other side but lowered herself cautiously.

Miriam was trying her weight on her ankle. Nothing seemed to be wrong, and she struck off across the field.

The farmhouse, empty but still intact, was half-hidden by a mock orange hedge, its second story windows lighted by the setting sun. Beyond it, a snaking line of walnut trees followed a wire fence. Through the trunks, Shirley saw the concrete flash of new foundations.

“They’ve started,” she said.

Miriam didn’t answer. Stooping down, separating weeds, she clawed up a handful of dirt. “Look, all clay, hard as concrete. Ruined even for corn after all these years.”

Shirley reached a finger to touch the dirt. She noticed that her sister’s hand was trembling.

“It could be turned around with the right techniques,” she said.

“Do you have any idea what that would cost?”

Shirley studied her sister. How hard it had always been to accept Miriam’s authority, shining now from her pale blue eyes. Her face was remarkably unlined and from a little distance she would still look like a tall athletic girl.

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Believe me, I looked into it,” Miriam told her.” The soil could have been reconstituted, you’re right, but even aside from the astronomical cost, it would all have to be planted in soybeans, the only crop that’s profitable now, and this farm is too small to—”

“Five hundred acres?”

“The only farms that are making money are thousands,” Miriam said. “Everything’s changed, Shirley. The government subsidies, the climate. Nobody grows corn and wheat anymore, unless they’re just hobby farming.”

“What about organic vegetables? I read restaurants pay good money for tiny peas.”

Miriam sighed. “Too labor intensive. The only crop this land is good for now is houses.” She waved at the foundations gleaming through the trees.

“Row after row after row,” Shirley said.

“Actually not. This is the newest design, a real innovation. Laid out like a village, sidewalks, trees—”

Shirley had seen the plans, published a few weeks back in the local newspaper under an admiring headline. “Houses so jammed together they don’t even have yards.”

“Yards don’t make ecological sense,” Miriam reminded her. “The green belt we’re planning—”

“A border. How wide?”

“We’ve laid aside twenty acres.”

“Twenty acres in the gulley, too steep for building.”

“Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Not my kind of sense,” Shirley said. With the field under her feet, she felt the desperation she’d felt as a child when a beloved patch of earth fell to the bulldozers. She’d thought then she would willingly kiss each inch of the plain, scrubby fields that had been her kingdom, kiss every inch of the ten miles that divided the farm from town. Even now she would have crouched down on the torn ground and kissed it if she’d dared to risk her sister’s laughter.

“I hate it,” she said softly.

“What?” Miriam scrutinized the distance.

“What you decided to do. It’s not fair.”

Miriam looked at her. “I think Mama and Daddy divided their estate as fairly as they could. You get the farmhouse and five acres and I get the rest.”

“The house will be surrounded by that.” Shirley pointed at the foundations. “Row after row—”

“Not rows.” Miriam raised her voice a little. “All the streets will be curved, and we’re going to plant trees, to shield you.”

“Three foot saplings. I’ll be dead by the time they’re big enough to provide a screen.”

Miriam sighed. “What can I say? At this point I can’t afford to run a farm. This is my only asset, this four hundred and ninety-five acres, to provide for me in a few years when I have to retire.”

“Are you really going to retire? It seems so . . . unlikely.”

“Oh yes. I do everything I can with makeup, but it’s not only my voice they want. No one enjoys watching an old woman sing. And so, you see. . . .” She trailed off, shading her eyes to look at the house. “Shall we look inside? You must have the key.”

“We really don’t have time before your flight.” If she saw the house again, Shirley thought, Miriam might find some way to possess it.

Miriam seemed to understand. She turned toward the car. “If there’d been any way. . . .”

“You could leave New York. That would cut your expenses.”

Miriam stopped. “I will never leave New York. My whole life is in New York. Friends, professional contacts, music—everything.” Her voice had sharpened.

“Well, I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve looked at this land since I first opened my eyes.”

“I looked at it, too, until I decided to leave, but it never meant to me what it meant to you.” Miriam broke a milkweed pod off its stalk and began to pry it open.

“Of course not. How could it? You were almost never here.”

“We both made our decisions a long time ago,” Miriam said, slitting the pod with her fingernail.

“And now we have the consequences. Don’t scatter those,” she added. Miriam was throwing a handful of white parachutes into the air. “Those seeds will spring up all over.” Shirley knew her reprimand was ridiculous; the bulldozers would make short work of a field full of milkweed.

Miriam smiled. “I used to love letting them go.” The parachutes floated down around their feet.

For the first time, something usable stretched between them.

“So you do remember,” Shirley murmured.

“Every bit of it.” Miriam folded herself down on the ground, risking the ruin of her good slacks. She patted the dirt beside her. “Sit down, Shirley. Lets’ talk.”

Shirley lowered herself as best she could, wondering how she would get up and what damage she was inflicting on the gray skirt she’d chosen with such care. As she spread her hand on the dirt, supporting herself, she saw her sister’s, long-fingered, deeply mottled, so like her hand she could only tell them apart by her wedding ring.

“I want you to understand,” Miriam said, looking off toward the line of walnuts and the foundations beyond them.

“You’ve explained it before. I guess I understand it as well as I can. You need the money.”

“I tried to find an alternative but nothing makes sense, financially.”

“Did you really look into keeping it?” Shirley asked. How impulsive Miriam had always been, how quickly she had made the sale.

“Yes, indeed. I had quite a lot of correspondence with the state Ag department—”

“They don’t know anything about the new methods.”

“You’d be surprised. They were quite well informed about crop rotation, natural weed suppression, that kind of thing. And of course I talked to other experts as well. I wanted to keep the farm.”

“I never heard you say that before.” Shirley smiled with relief. “But I still think you could have found a way.”

“Not to farm it and make even a tenth of the profit I made off selling it. This is prime real estate now, almost flat, half a mile from the interstate. Twenty minutes into town, even at rush hour. People kill for houses with that kind of commute.”

“Real estate—that’s what land becomes when it goes on the market. An estate, and a real one. Nothing else counts, not the birds, or the deer, or the wild turkeys.” When Miriam didn’t respond, Shirley asked, “What did you make off it.” She had wanted to ask ever since Miriam sold the land; now shame prevented her from turning it into a question.

“I hate to disappoint you,” Miriam said, “but not nearly as much as you imagine, after I paid off the back taxes.”

“Back taxes?”

“Five years, I guess ever since Daddy got sick. Mama never kept up with that kind of thing, she just let it all go. I found a whole drawer stuffed with overdue bills.”

“But we went over the house together.” Shirley remembered the chill of the house after the funeral, the thermostats turned down and the curtains drawn.

“After you left,” Miriam said with a gleam of foxy humor. “To go home to dear old Brian, waiting with dinner.”

Shirley might have told her that Brian had never learned to cook; they’d had takeout that night, after a nasty argument over which one of them was going to get it.

“So that’s when you did your snooping,” she said.

Miriam laughed. “Oh, I was shameless. I even went through Mama’s lingerie.”

“Underwear.”

“She used to rail against ‘panties’—said the word was obscene.”

“Panties—obscene!”

They leaned back, laughing.

“She was a stitch, a card!” Miriam said.

Shirley sat up. “She was a handful, these last years. Gave me a run for my money.”

Miriam sat up as well. “I envy you that.”

Shirley stared at her. “Three years of drudgery?”

“You got to spend time with her. I never spent more than an hour after I left home. She felt I’d defected.”

“She accepted daughters leaving to get married, but not for anything else.”

“Saw no reason why I couldn’t pursue my career with the local chamber music society. And Daddy just wouldn’t enter the conversation.”

“It was pretty loud, for a conversation.” Shirley, crouching on the stairs, had listened to the shouting.

“She never held it against you when you left,” Miriam said.

“We settled half a mile away, and she always thought there’d be babies.”

“But not.” Silence intervened. Miriam picked a dry stalk and broke it into small pieces. “Why was that?”

“You’re still snooping.”

“Is it snooping, after all these years?”

“I tell you what,” Shirley said, turning toward her sister. “I’ll tell you why if you’ll tell me how much you got for our land.”

“Our land! Do you still really think—”

“Not think. Feel. I’ve walked here every day for the past three years.”

“To get away from Mama?”

“That, and to feel something solid under my feet. Something I thought was solid, anyway. I saw a bunch of wild turkeys last fall, feeding under those trees.” She waved at the line along the fence. “A gobbler and six hens. They used to be almost extinct.” Marion wasn’t paying attention. “So, do we have an agreement?”

“Mama took care of Daddy when he was dying,” Miriam murmured, “so I guess it was our turn when her time came.”

“Our turn.”

“I was in Berlin,” Miriam reminded her. “Probably my last important engagement. I won’t be on the road much anymore, I’ll need to find a small apartment to buy, in New York. Park Avenue, I think. Renting doesn’t make any sense, long term.”

“Park Avenue !”

“I’ll have to devise a new life. Opera tickets, more friends. I don’t intend to become an old lady nobody knows but the super.”

“Park Avenue’s terribly expensive.”

“Not so much these days. The bottom’s fallen out there, too.” From her tone, Shirley knew her sister did not expect much of an argument.

“So that’s what this farm will become—two windows looking out on a street.”

“More windows than that, and maybe a cottage on the Cape.”

“You’re not even ashamed,” Shirley said.

“Why should I be ashamed? You made your choice, I made mine. You never worked,” Miriam added dryly.

“Never worked!” She heard her voice squeak and knew it was a hopeless argument. “It still isn’t fair,” she rasped. Her voice felt as though it were cracking open, letting something hidden escape. “Why did they do that, Miriam, when they knew I loved this place?”

“They had to divide it up some way, probably thought you and Brian would rather have the house. They knew I’d never live in it, while you two—”

“Oh stop,” Shirley pleaded. “Please stop! I’m not talking about fairness now. This isn’t a court of law! I’m talking about how much I love this piece of land.”

“Then sell the house and buy land someplace else.”

“The house won’t be worth anything, surrounded by your subdivision.”

“Not a subdivision,” Miriam said wearily, “a village.”

“You can’t build a village from scratch. Villages take time. Houses have to come and go, fall down, be replaced, people have to move in and out, leaving their scents, their traces, shops disappear, new ones open—it takes time, lots of time, to make a village, and here you go and try to plop one down, ready-made. It’s crazy,” she said heatedly, “and all those people who want backyards for their barbecues are going to take one look at your houses all squinched up together and go elsewhere.”

“My, what a sermon. I didn’t know you felt so strongly.”

Shirley yelped. “You didn’t know?”

“I mean, I thought it was all about the land. You despise my plan, as well.”

“I’d despise anything that takes my land away,” Shirley admitted.

“By what right of ownership—”

“The ownership of walking on it! Looking at it! Smelling it! You talk about how you have to live in New York, your life is there. My life is in every broken cornstalk and milkweed pod on this place, every wild turkey footprint, every mock orange and walnut, and here you come and just sell it like some kind of old . . . remnant!”

“To me, it is a remnant,” Miriam said reasonably, “of a life I never wanted to live, and I still don’t understand why you want it, after all these years, particularly with no babies.”

“So we’re back to that again.”

They stopped, staring at teach other.

“Well, babies—children—would have given this place a meaning.”

“I give this place a meaning,” Shirley said.

“Well, yes, of course, but if you’d had children—”

“Another meaning, but mine is just as valid!”

Miriam stood up suddenly, discarding her patience as she used to discard her clothes, strewing them around her room and tramping over them to the bathroom door. “I want to take you out to dinner before I have to catch my plane. Where should we go?”

Stunned, Shirley stared at her. It seemed they’d barely begun to talk.

“We can go on arguing in the car,” Miriam said resignedly.

Shirley got up the way the trainer had taught her, hands and knees first and then a wobbling ascent to upright. Too late, Miriam slid a hand under her elbow. “I don’t need help,” Shirley croaked, shaking her off, but she was gasping.

Miriam withheld a comment, visibly. They walked single file back across the ruts to the car.

“Don’t you see, it’s the end of the world,” Shirley said after they had climbed into her car and she had started the engine.

“It’s certainly the end of our world,” Miriam agreed. “We’re the last, and with no heirs, the name will die out.”

“There’s cousin Harold, somewhere in Africa.”

“Yes, but I doubt if he’ll ever have children.” They let that rest without comment. “How different it would have been if that last baby had survived,” Miriam went on thoughtfully.

“Whose last baby?”

“Mama’s. It was a boy, but he died right away. They didn’t want you to know—they thought you were too young. Didn’t want you to be upset, the way you were when Johnny drowned the kittens. You were always so sensitive,” Miriam said.

“You never told me till now!”

“It wasn’t my secret. After Mama died, I knew I could tell you. Should tell you,” Miriam admitted,” but I didn’t want to at her funeral, or over the phone. The reason Mama regretted, so bitterly, you never had sons. She cherished that name—Papa’s name—way more than her own.”

Shirley was speechless. She was driving so slowly another car, behind them, began to push in close to her bumper, and she pulled over on the shoulder so it could pass. “It makes the whole past look different,” she said finally, “as though it’s changed colors. I never knew that baby existed—”

“Well, it didn’t really exist—”

“—And I never knew Mama regretted I didn’t have sons. Or daughters,” she added, her eyes fixed on the road. Ahead, the thruway appeared between the trees, car roofs flashing.

“Daughters wouldn’t have counted,” Miriam said. She was staring at the road as though she might need to grab the wheel to correct her sister’s wavering.

“I never knew,” Shirley said, “and Mama and I were so close those last three years. At least I thought we were close.”

“Mama knew what a hard time you were having, taking care of her, and she didn’t want to add to that,” Miriam told her.

“Hard time! She told you that?”

“Said you were exhausted, as of course anyone would be,” Miriam said kindly.

“But it was my last time with her—I valued that!”

“She knew that,” Miriam said. “Maybe you should pull over a minute, before we get to the thruway.” She reached for the wheel.

Shirley tightened her grasp. Traffic rushed by them like water released from a dam and she realized she’d been holding up the whole late afternoon procession. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know I was going so slow.”

“Doesn’t matter. Cut the motor, I want to get out of this belt.” Released, Miriam stretched as though she’d been clamped in for hours.

“What else don’t I know?” Shirley asked, staring at the passing cars.

“There’re probably some other things—little things,” Miriam said, “but I can’t remember right now.”

“Will you tell me when you remember?”

Miriam smiled. “I’ll tell you if you’ll let up about the farm. Deal?” she asked hopefully. “I don’t want to go on arguing with you, Shirl. And it’s done. There’s no way back. We need to protect our relationship,” she added. “We’re all we have left.”