The Rural Life (11 page)

T
he dogs hear it in the distance before I do, and so do the horses, a dry dislocated thump, thunder from far away. One moment
there’s no wind, the air still and damp. The next moment the wind is turning corners where there aren’t any, lifting and coiling
the barnyard dust. Wind flails the leaves on the sugar maples, revealing their silver undersides. It scatters spent hickory
flowers in drifts. The sky blackens, and I can almost hear rain begin. But then the wind drops and the front unravels over
the western ridge, where the weather comes from. Blue sky intervenes. A clear night threatens once again, Venus hanging peaceful
in the dusk.

It’s gone on this way for several days here in the midst of a dry season. Rain promises, and then the cloud cover, which was
as tight and dense as a peony bud, blows away in loose tatters to the east. There’s no point waiting for thunder to crowd
in overhead and rain to fall. But a single thump sets everyone listening, ready to count the seconds between the flash and
the crack of the storm, ready to welcome the hard downpour if it ever comes, though it will cut the garden soil and beat the
last of the peonies to the grass.

And yet somehow the need for rain domesticates the very idea of a thunderstorm. Were a storm to blow in now, soaking the earth,
it wouldn’t be Wagner that ushered the thunder across the treetops and into the clearings, tearing at tree limbs and driving
the horses into a frenzy. It would be Rameau, and in the beat of the thunder coming overland there would be something folkish
and formal at once, a country dance welling up through the refined strains of an operatic suite.

The horses would circle the pasture in a ground-eating trot, and the trees would sway in some sort of unison, a hiss arising
from the new rain on their leaves. I’d hear the clatter of the downpour on the barn’s metal roof all the way from the covered
porch. The Shakespearean undergrowth on this small farm—the dame’s rocket and cow vetch and ground ivy—would twitch under
the heavy drops, and the old question of how bees fly in rain would present itself once again.

Only then would something come unhinged in the music of the storm, the lightning moving too close, the shade deepening too
abruptly, one of the dogs fetching his breath up short with anxiety. The cataclysm would gradually slide across the valley,
and as it did Rameau’s music would be heard again, dying away in the east, the ground sated with rain. If only the storm would
begin.

I
owa farmers used to call a stalk of corn growing in a soybean field a “volunteer.” I’ve always loved the personification lurking
in that use of the word, as though a cornstalk among the soybeans were like a zealous schoolgirl sitting in the first row
of desks, arm thrust in the air after every question. Farmers get rid of volunteers with chemicals now, but in the early 1960s
they organized gangs of kids to walk through the bean fields pulling up volunteers as well as the real weeds. This was called
walking, or cleaning, beans. The goal, of course, was higher yields, but there was also a German vanity lurking in the desire
for a perfectly clean field and perhaps also a perfectly disciplined child.

This place is choked with volunteers, nearly all of them welcome. In fact, if the plant community on this place consisted
only of individuals I had put in the ground myself, or that had spread from seed of my sowing, it would resemble one of those
fading Midwestern farm towns where the schools have closed, the grocery stores have pulled out, and the only new building
in town is the nursing home. Instead this place is crowded with life. Outside my second-story office window, the leaves of
a birch tree living in a planter tap against the screen. I had nothing to do with it. Potato vines claw their way out of the
compost heap, no matter how often I turn it. On the north edge of the vegetable garden, a young hickory has started up out
of nowhere, but in exactly the right spot.

Last summer I planted a striped-bark maple called
Acer tegmentosum,
which came all the way from California. A few days ago I took a walk up the dry creek bed behind the barn, a ravine that
thunders with runoff after heavy rains, looking for the spot where its water goes underground. I noticed a familiar leaf and
realized that I was surrounded by a grove of striped-bark maples—a species called
Acer pensylvanicum,
but otherwise almost identical to the one in the garden.

Walking back to the barn, I crossed a slope filled with maidenhair ferns, not a bit different from the cultivated one we put
beside the hostas last spring. The hillside, once a field, had filled with saplings. A couple of years ago, you might have
mowed them down with a bush hog. No longer. They’ve passed the point where they could accurately be called volunteers. Now
they’ve made the place their own.

I
n 1969 my father and I drove from Sacramento, California, to George, Iowa, to gather a few of my grandmother’s belongings.
She had lived at the edge of George in a house of dark woodwork, scented by geraniums standing in the winter windows and by
a slightly scorched odor from an old electric stove. When my grandfather died, much of the substance seemed to go out of that
house, and my grandmother followed him into the earth soon after. Now all that was left were empty cupboards and closets and
drawers. We took home to California a stiff wooden chair and an old rolltop desk that had stood in a small room on the second
floor, its drawers stuffed with valueless yen brought back by one of my uncles from the postwar occupation of Japan.

For most of their adult lives, my grandparents lived and worked on a farm northwest of George. My father grew up there, and
it was unclear what he felt when we came to visit it, as we often did when we still lived in Iowa. I still feel a kinship
to that farm—to the house and grove and a long-since reordered pattern of fields—without ever pretending that my feelings
could serve as a sort of levy on the place. I suspect my father felt the same way. There wasn’t enough land in the family
for every one of his father’s children to inherit a farm of their own. Besides, this was America, the Midwest, where the idea
of a legacy in land only a couple of generations under the plow seemed almost czarist. Instead of farming, my father became
a public-school music teacher, a career that appeared to lead away from the soil. In 1966, when he was thirty-nine, he moved
west from Iowa with his young family and started again, as many Iowans did, in California.

A few years later Dad bought thirteen acres in the oak and madrone hills east of Sacramento, within sight of the Sierra Nevada,
and my brothers and sisters and I came home for part of the summer of 1978 to help build a house there. The foundation slab—a
rectangular pool of concrete that looked like slick water on an overcast day—had already been poured when I arrived from New
York. It was notched into an eastern slope overlooking a ryegrass pasture studded with ponderosa pines. And that’s where an
old conversation with my father resumed—how expansive that slab seemed, how perfectly level, how smoothly finished, and what
it promised about the house we would build upon it with our own hands. Plumb and level and square—while we worked our talk
realigned itself around those perfectly unambiguous standards. As subjects go, plumb and level and square sound too rectilinear,
but not in the mouths of a father and son looking for something to say. “Close enough”—both of us eyeing a spirit level laid
against a beam or along a header—became words of genuine, unexpected complicity.

There had been years of do-it-yourself construction in our household, years of work with drill and hammer, shovel and saw,
day after day when I might have spoken this particular language with my dad. When I was a young boy he taught me how to nail
together beehive frames and brood boxes in the basement of our house, which he and his brother-in-law built. There was always
a project of some kind under way—turning a garage into a bedroom, pouring a new patch of concrete, reroofing the house. But
by the time we moved to Sacramento and I entered high school, I was already living on some dark planet orbiting between my
ears, inaccessible to the humble claims of amateur carpentry. And no wonder. When Dad got up from the dinner table, disgusted
beyond words with another of my ironic impieties, he usually retreated to the woodshop he had built near an apricot tree in
the far backyard. Silence and glum looks fell all around the table whenever that happened—until from the shop, rising high
above the sounds of traffic on Watt Avenue, came the repeated, inarticulate scream of a table saw. I used to joke that Dad
was crosscutting two-by-fours and pretending that each piece of pine was my stiff, impenitent neck. Only my mother found it
hard to laugh.

One after another these images gather—crossing the high plains of Wyoming more than thirty years ago during the long drive
“back,” as we always said, to Iowa, both of us watching the moonlight on the snow between Rawlins and Laramie—the two of us
wandering, not quite together, through my grandmother’s empty house in George that bitter cold Easter—the sullen distance
between us as I drifted into private insurrection in high school and college—and then a picture of him standing between the
studs of a wall we had just raised on that new foundation, while behind him, well off to the east, rose the granite peaks
of the Sierra Nevada, all their difficulty smoothed by distance.

Now, so many years later, I find myself in a new relation to the old story. I’m as old as my father was when the shape my
young life was taking must have looked most hopeless to him, when he might have given up guessing altogether the shape my
life would take. Lindy and I have no children, and when the state of our childlessness occurs to me, as it often does, I also
think of something my brother John said when his son, Jake, was born—that he suddenly understood Dad in an entirely new way.
Instead of a child to understand my father by, I have an old house and this land—a pasture, stone walls, outcroppings of bedrock,
and ordinary, acidic soil set in a largely graceless climate. Every time I walk out onto this property with a tool or a pair
of gloves or a purpose, I think of my dad walking out, in exactly the same manner, onto his property in the foothills of California.
I realize that I’ve been caught up in an urge—an atavism really—that reaches well past the limits of my own nature. I’ve discovered
a stirring, restless desire to improve this place—to father myself upon it.

My plan in buying this small farm wasn’t to tutor the pasture and the sugar maples and the hemlocks. I hoped instead to let
the landscape tutor me, to lie fallow for a while myself. But most days I find myself walking out the mudroom door in old
jeans and a torn jacket and leather gloves. There are asparagus crowns to be trenched or apple trees or roses to be planted
or a garden plot to be tilled. An entire pasture needs refencing. The chain saw needs sharpening, and when that’s done there’s
a pile of logs to be cut into stove lengths. One of the yard hydrants leaks, and the barn needs to be emptied, cleaned, redivided,
rewired, hay stacked, manure hauled.

Some days I do just the one thing that needs doing most, whatever it happens to be that day. But many mornings I leave the
house and find myself, hours later, in a trance of physical labor, covered in sawdust or mud or sweat, muttering quietly to
myself. This is the very work I hated as a kid, the thing I dreaded whenever my dad came into a room where I sat reading.
“I need some help,” he would say and then walk out the door ahead of me, a little slumped in the shoulder, perhaps from knowing
how grudging my help would be. It’s not grudging now. I used to believe you could choose your influences. That’s the principle
behind every rebellion. Now I know that they choose you.

A few years ago I learned that my dad had consulted seriously with his father before moving to California in 1966. It was
a small detail, but it reminded me that his life was not just an adjunct of my own. When I was young, he had always been in
the public eye, even if it was only a small-town public. He was a bandleader—the man who stood at the conductor’s podium in
the high school gym, who directed summer concerts in the town park band shell, whose white, gold-braided band uniform hung
stiffly in the closet. I had watched him playing cards with his wry farming brothers, their wit more caustic than his own,
with a gift for irony that he has never had. I had seen his perennial optimism—his self-assurance. I noticed how readily people
turned to him for practical advice and how sound that advice usually was. He tended to exaggerate, and he had a hard time
admitting the limits of what he knew, but whenever I noticed those things he was in the presence of his smart-ass kid. From
time to time, when I was still a boy, he took me outside town to visit farmers he knew—men whose children he had taught to
play clarinet or drums. Those farms awoke a different man in him, the same one I saw working in the woodshop or garden. I
was so bent on avoiding that work when I was young that I never wondered how my dad had learned to do it or what part it might
have played in an inner life that was truly his own.