My father is a tall, gaunt man with very dry hair and proud features, a wide nose that, come summer, reddens almost daily. His arms are long, and his hands carry muskmelons as if they were softballs. He resembles the picture we have of his grandfather, the North Sea sailor who, eighty years ago, decided to leave the Netherlands and cut a life for himself and his family from uncut Dakota grasslands.
My father has mellowed in the years that have passed since that summer. He laughs now as he watches his own grandchildren play on the rope swing he hung, not four years ago, from the maple I remember as a sapling. Back then, with three teenage boys and six children in all, with thirty-five milk cows, with all of that life riding the back of the cold and dreary lakeshore seasons, he seemed to me to be driven. I remember unforeseen spurts of temper during harvest, nervousness in unexplained silences during early spring planting. Whole nights passed in October when he didn’t speak a word to my mother or to us.
Although he was a man to be feared then, it would be wrong to say that I was ever afraid of my father. He was to be feared the way he himself talked about fearing God. Each of us, I think, lived in a kind of awe of him. Darrell, the oldest, still wrestles him: if Dad says Darrell shouldn’t use herbicides, Darrell claims he’ll go bankrupt if he doesn’t. Andy simply follows Dad. He’s learned to live with him the way a good Marine feels comfort in a well-defined chain of command. I don’t claim to know about myself.
“You know,” he said to me that day when I’d climbed up in the mow beside him, “I always thought it would be Darrell and Gloria, the way they neck. I didn’t think it would be you.”
Little Jesse was loading the bales on the elevator that poked its nose into a square door maybe twenty feet off the ground. Trillian was helping him. We were putting hay up in the corners of the east loft, and the air was hot, full of chaff and dust, even though it wasn’t past ten or eleven in the morning.
“We’re all capable of it,” he said. “I’m not throwing the first stone either.”
He pointed me over to the place where he’d been packing. “Watch out for those kittens there,” he said. His stacking had uprooted four of them, gray ones--farm cats--certainly no more than a month old, from their nest, so he’d put them up beside a rafter that he likely didn’t mean to cover. The end of the yellow elevator, anchored with twine down to the wall, protruded from the open door behind him, sunlight cutting through the maze of dust in perfect geometric shafts.
“You know you shouldn’t have done it,” he said, not meaning it as a question.
I nodded.
When he didn’t hear me reply, he looked straight up at me.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Our bodies are the temple of the Lord,” he said.
I really didn’t feel any less healthy having made love eight times. It didn’t seem somehow like a desecration.
When a bale came up the elevator, it fell, end first, down to the floor where it grazed off the edge of another set deliberately below, then flipped over completely, landing flat, strings up, four, maybe five feet closer to the spot where we were trying to fill in the last of the holes in that corner of the mow. He’d grab them from the spot where they’d finally come to rest and heave them at me. Jesse was sending them up plenty fast.
“I’ve been thinking for hours,” he said, “and I just don’t know what to say to you that you don’t already know.”
I didn’t talk back. I was sorry for letting them down the way I did, but Cassie wasn’t really a girl I’d marry anyway, I thought. I’d miss her. I knew I would. But I didn’t love her, not love like you’re supposed to, I thought. Besides, she really wasn’t even of us. She was “lake people.” And she was leaving.
“Slow down, Jesse,” he yelled down the open hole. “We’re finishing up up here.”
He motioned with his arm for me to climb up and take the bales from him when he picked them off the floor. His was the heavy work; mine was simply tedious: fitting them into what spaces remained.
“The church calls it a sin,” he said.
“I know it,” I told him.
“I don’t know if it’s a bigger sin if it happened a hundred times, or a little one if it happened just once,” he said, “but you and this girl, how often did you do it?”
I don’t know why I said what I did, but I told him it had happened four times. “But she let me do it, Dad,” I told him. “Every time. She told me that it was okay, that nothing would happen.”
“You and Adam,” he said. He picked up a bale and heaved it up to me off his knee. I was standing on a ledge of bales maybe four feet above him.
“Well, you saw her,” I told him.
“Sure I did.”
“She let me.”
“Slow down, Jesse,” he yelled again. Bales were piling up after flipping over the end as if they were riding a waterfall.
He pulled his handkerchief out and wiped his face. “So you just go and do whatever that thing you got in your pants says?--is that it?” He stopped and stared at me, bales still falling heavily to the floor.
I threw one in a hole without looking up at all. But I didn’t talk.
“Does it say somewhere in the Bible that it’s all just fine and dandy if the girl says yes? Is that a verse you read somewhere?”
I was up high, I remember. I reached up and scraped away cobwebs so thick with dust that they could have passed for yarn. But he stayed there at my feet, staring. I wouldn’t look at him.
He turned around and grabbed for another bale. That’s when I said, “Any guy would have done it, and you know it.”
“Does that make it right?” he said, shoving another one up at me.
I twisted around, keeping my feet straight beneath me as I picked up the bale and swung it into a hole at the corner of the roof line.
“What’s the big deal?” I said. “By football season it’ll be all over anyway.”
I’m not sure where that came from.
“Football season,” my father said, in a tone without emotion, as if he were repeating it in order to get me to verify that what I’d said actually came from my lips.
“That’s what I said,” I told him.
His face turned suddenly into some fierce mask. “It’ll all be over, will it?” he said, laughing in a biting, mature way that I’d never heard him laugh before, as if I wasn’t his own boy.
Behind him the bales kept falling all over the spaces where he could walk. He twisted around quickly, as if he had forgotten what he was about. He scrambled down two levels of bales to get to the window, then dug his knees into the hay to look outside. “Slow down, Jesse--didn’t you hear me?” he yelled, and he grabbed the end of the elevator and shook it. He stayed there for a minute, ripped four bales from the track and stacked them, one atop the next, to keep them out of the way.
Seated over there, he had to yell for me to hear. “You think it’ll all be over, do you?” he said. “Just like that--like the mumps. You think it’ll all go away, just like that. Like a sore knee, is that it?”
“What?” I said. “She’ll be gone. She’s rich. You saw her old lady. She’ll take care of the whole business.”
The floor at the end of the elevator was cluttered with bales. He pulled himself up from his knees, grabbed the end of the elevator, and twisted himself around it; but his foot slipped in a crack, and he twisted his back when he couldn’t keep his balance, finally falling to all fours. Just like that, like a slap in the face with an open hand, another bale came off the end and slammed to the floor over his twisted foot.
He came up swearing under his breath, something he rarely did, and he grabbed that elevator and twisted it, wrestled it loose from the knot Andy must have tied to anchor it, the chain jangling like loose bells, then turned it completely upside down, dumping every last bale off the track and to the ground between the barn and the wagon. “Now slow down!” he yelled again at Jesse.
“You don’t have to lose your temper,” I said.
“You shut up,” he said, pointing back at me. “You talk like a child--it’ll all be over--” he said. “It’s no big deal at all because once you make a touchdown nobody will remember.”
Anger and hurt twisted his mouth and narrowed his eyes, pouring out in something close to tears. “We’re talking about life here. Don’t you understand that--or is all you care about getting laid?”
I never heard my father use that kind of language.
“Life,” he said, and he put both hands down on a row of bales and climbed up several levels, lifting himself to the nest of kittens he’d laid at the beam. He grabbed a kitten from the pile that he’d found up there, took it in his huge hand and held it towards me like some circus magician, the kitten’s round head protruding between his thumb and forefinger, the rest of its body in his fist, small and gray with long fur. He raised it higher and higher towards me, then jerked down suddenly, as if he were snapping his fingers, as if he were a kid snapping a lead pencil in half. When he opened his hand, the kitten was perfectly dead.
I couldn’t believe what he’d done.
He didn’t say anything just then. He looked at me and tossed the kitten across the mow somewhere. If his eyes could have spoken, they would have explained everything, but his eyes were vacant. He just stood there and stared, almost as if I could be next.
“Dad--” I said.
“You two made a child,” he said, “not a kitten.”
And just then Jesse came up the ladder, almost crying himself. “I tried to get that old guy to slow down, but he just kept on going,” he said. “I tried.”
“That’s what you made,” my father said, pointing at Jesse. “And who’s going to be nice to him--who’s going to dry up his tears, Gary? You going to be there?”
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Tomorrow: Denouement
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