Remembering Page 2
“And the four percent left on the farm live better than the forty-five percent ever hoped to live. This four percent we may think of as the permanent staff of this great food production machine that is the farms and fields of America. These people have adapted to the fact that American agriculture is big business. They are as savvy financially as bankers. And they are enjoying the amenities of life — color TV, automobiles, indoor toilets, vacations in Florida or Arizona.
“Oh, I know there are some trade-offs involved in this. There is some breakdown in the old family unit we used to have. The communities are not what they were. I see some small businesses closing down. Farmers have fewer neighbors than they used to have. We have some problems with soil erosion and water shortages and chemical pollution. But that’s the price of progress.
“Let me tell you something. This is economics we’re talking about. And the basic law of economics is: Adapt or die. Get big or get out. Sure, not everybody is going to make it. But then, not everybody is supposed to make it. This is the way a dynamic free-market economy works. This is the American system.
“I’m telling you one of the greatest success stories you have ever listened to. The American farmer is now feeding himself and seventy other people. And he can feed the world. He has put in the hands of our government the most powerful weapon it has ever held. I am talking about food.”
Andy wrote: “4%. Grvlng in rth. Big biz. Amnty of lf: TV. Trd-offs: fam, cmmnty, nghbrs, soil, wtr. Prc of prg. Adpt or die. Gt bg or gt out. Fr mkt. 1 to 70. Fd wrld. Weapon.”
The audience sat submerged in the bright sea-space of the room, the air conditioner pulsing in the walls, the high official’s confident, dryly intoned sentences riding over them, wave after wave.
Andy thought, “Why did they invite me?” But he guessed he knew: because he had achieved a certain notoriety for contrary opinions. He was there to inject a note of controversy into the proceedings.
He is a man, he thinks, of contrary opinions — a man the size of a few contrary opinions. In the simple darkness, far away, he no longer feels the uneasiness, the fear indeed, that tightened him in that meeting room. He is afraid, but not of the rostrum, not of any answer anyone might make to anything he might say. What he is afraid of now has not answered.
He raises his right forearm, its lightness still residing in it as if by permanent surprise. The memory comes to him, rising out of the flesh of his arm, of how it felt to flex and then extend the fingers of his right hand. He longs for the release of that movement. As sometimes happens, his hand seems now not to be gone, but to be caught, unable to move, as if inside an iron glove.
In October they had been helping Jack Penn harvest his corn: Andy and Nathan Coulter and Danny Branch. Jack’s father, Elton, had died in March, and Jack, who was twenty-two, had never farmed on his own apart from his father’s experience and judgment. And so the three of them, his father’s friends, and his, had gone through the whole crop year with him, accepting his help in return for theirs. Now the harvest was almost over. If they could keep everything going until night, they would finish the field. Andy was running the picker, the other three hauling the loaded wagons to the crib and unloading them. They had, in fact, more help than they needed; it was brilliant warmish fall weather, ideal for the job; and today, with the end in sight, they had worked with an ease of mind that they all had enjoyed. Still, because it was getting on in the day with plenty left to do, there was some pressure on the tractor driver to hurry.
The picker became fouled as it had been doing off and on all afternoon, and Andy stopped to clear it, leaving it running. He began pulling the crammed stalks out of the machine, irritated by the delay. He pulled them out one at a time, shucked the ears that were on them, and threw the stalks aside. And then something happened that he thought he had imagined but, as it turned out, had not imagined at all: The machine took his hand. Of course, he knew he must have given the hand, but it was so quickly caught he could almost believe that the machine had leapt for it. While his mind halted, unable to come to the fact, his body fended for itself, braced against the pull, and held. When intelligence lighted in him again, he saw that only the hand was involved, and he carefully shifted his feet so as to give himself more leverage against the rollers; he did not want his jacket sleeve to be caught. And he was already yelling — Hey! Hey! — trying to pitch his voice above the noise of the machine.
There is no way for him to know how long he held out against the pull of the rollers, which soon pulled with less force, for they were lubricated with his blood. He was there long enough, anyhow, for the horror of his predicament to become steady, almost habitual, in his mind, although it retained the shock and force of its sudden onset. He heard the long persistence of the noise of the machine that did not know the difference between a cornstalk and a man’s arm. He felt its relentless effort to pull him into itself, while the bloodied rollers wore against flesh and crushed bone, and the oblivious metal rattled and shook. He heard his cries to the other men go out time and again.
Finally they must have heard him, for he saw them coming, not with the tractor and empty wagon, but in Nathan’s truck. He saw them coming along not too fast, until they saw him and suddenly sped up, the old truck leaping and swaying across the harvested rows.
He saw Jack leap out of the truck before it stopped, run to the tractor, and turn the ignition off. He heard the silence coming slowly down, and Nathan, running, saying to Danny, “Get my toolbox!”
And then they were with him, Danny holding him, his arms around him, while Jack and Nathan tied a tourniquet above his wrist and then worked to loosen the rollers. When what was left of the hand was ready to come free, Danny clamped his own hand over Andy’s eyes.
“Andy,” Nathan said, “we’ve got to get you into the truck now. Don’t look at that hand, do you hear? Just keep your eyes shut. We’re going to help you.”
“All right,” Andy said. His voice breaking, he said, “Shoo!” He began to shake. The silence around him rang, the air traveled by flashes and whirls, the day outside him, beyond him, uncannily bright.
By the time he was ready for the operating room, Flora was there. She smiled and picked up his left hand in hers and patted it. She seemed still to be living in that other time, before. “What have you done to yourself ?”
Bitterness and fear and shame rushing upon him then, he said, “I’ve ruined my hand.”
His foream raised as if to lift his open hand to the air, to learn the temperature of it, he lies in the dark, listening. The city around him has subsided to a remote hum, constant and unregarded as the breath of a sleeper. Only once in a while there is the sound of a solitary car moving in the street below.
He is long past sleep now. His mind has begun to work on the agenda that it sets for itself, and he knows that he will not be able to stop it. It is hunting, as if for a way out, and yet is fascinated by every obstacle. He offers it one of his contrary opinions, as he might offer a bone to a dog, and his mind, like a disobedient dog, takes it, tastes it, lets it fall, and continues with its own business. It intends to sniff its way through the Future of the American Food System until it finds the ache in it.
After the high official’s speech there was a bustle while he made his exit from the meeting, surrounded by handshakers and thankers. The audience drew its attention back to itself in vague underwater stirring and murmuring until the door to the lobby shut upon the official exit and the organizer of the conference returned to the rostrum to introduce the next speaker: an old farm boy who had become one of the most astute agricultural economists in the world today, whose accomplishments had been universally recognized, and whose services had been found useful by many governments both domestic and foreign.
The great agricultural economist then gravely assumed the rostrum. Like his predecessor, he was impeccably clad, a tall man in a dark brown suit, with a face prepared to be consulted by the government. He beamed upon the audience a moment by way of greeting, adjusted his sp
ectacles, and began to read statistics from a paper:
In the slightly more than a quarter century from 1950 to the present bicentennial year, the tonnage of fertilizer used on American farms increased by 500 percent. During the same period, work hours required in farming decreased by 69 percent, tractor horsepower increased by 149 percent, and the number of tractors by 30 percent. Simultaneously, the farm population declined from 23 million to 7.8 million, a difference of 15.2 million. The number of farms decreased to about half the number in 1950 (from 5.4 to 2.7 million), whereas the average farm size had doubled (from 200 to 400 acres).
These figures, the economist said, were causing concern in some quarters that the family farm might disappear, along with the family’s traditional role in farming and other traditions of American agriculture. On the other hand, larger and more efficient farms would provide a larger volume of farm commodities at lower prices and, at the same time, provide a higher standard of living for the remaining farmers.
Obviously, he said, we have a choice to make — or, perhaps, a choice that we have already made. In order to facilitate this choosing, or this acceptance of a choice, as the case might be, the economist and his colleagues had developed a quantimetric model of the American food system.
“The model,” he said, “has pre-input, input, and output divisions for each of its fifteen crop submodels.” The economist read in a detached monotone, as if thinking of something else.
Andy wrote: “15.2 mlln gone. Qntmtrc mdl. Pre-inpt, inpt, outpt. Submdl.” He could see bubbles rising from the great economist’s mouth, breaking, high up, in the wash of the light. The economist looked almost as far away as he sounded, far off through the water, his words popping out of the bubbles and sinking back into the room:
“A model will be recursive in structure when two conditions prevail: the matrix of coefficients of endogenous variables must be triangular, and the variance-covariance matrix of structural equation disturbances must be diagonal.”
The pencil fell out of Andy’s hand, and he leaned and picked it up. His mind was coming loose from his body, beginning to float. It soared upward slowly and, looking down, saw a large green fish give the economist a kiss just under his right eye.
Andy’s head fell forward and he woke. He sat up and shook his head. He felt like a sentinel on watch, a mourner at a wake — aggrieved, endangered, and falling asleep.
He wiggled his toes and bit the knuckle of his forefinger and looked around at the people in the room: an audience of professors, mostly, so far as he could tell. A few students. He wondered if any farmers were there and knew that it would be surprising if any were. Plenty of old farm boys, no doubt, but no farmers. Only sons and a few daughters of farmers, their parents’ delegates to the Future of the American Food System.
He thought of Elton Penn, that accurate man, in his year-old grave.
The economist said, “The aggregate submodel collects the pre-input and input variables and adds to them the exogenously derived pre-input and input variables for the American food system as a whole.”
What would Elton have said about that? He would have said, “If you’re going to talk to me, fellow, you’ll have to walk.”
That was what Old Jack Beechum once said to Andy’s grandfather, Mat Feltner, when Mat was trying to impress him with something learned in college. Old Jack stopped and regarded him, his smart nephew, and went on to the barn. “If you’re going to talk to me, Mat, you’ll have to walk.”
Mat had never forgotten it, and neither had any of the rest of the company of friends who inherited the memories of Old Jack and Mat. It had become one of Elton’s bywords, one of the many that he kept stored up for emergent occasions. He had said it to Andy a thousand times. When Andy got his mouth running on what Elton classified as a Big Idea and there was work to be done, Elton would give him a look that made Andy remember the words even before Elton said them. And then Elton would say them: “If you’re going to talk to me, Andy, you’ll have to walk.”
Elton’s mind had been, in part, a convocation of the voices of predecessors saying appropriate things at appropriate times, talk-shortening sentences or phrases that he spoke to turn attention back to the job or the place or the concern at hand or for the pure pleasure he took in some propriety of remembrance; and he was a good enough mimic that when he recalled a saying its history would come with it. When he would tell Andy, “If you’re going to talk to me, you’ll have to walk,” it would not be just the two of them talking and listening, but Old Jack would be saying it again to Mat, and Mat to his son-in-law, Wheeler, Andy’s father, and Wheeler to Elton, and Elton to Andy all the times before; and an old understanding and an old laughter would renew itself then, and be with them.
“And now may we have the lights out and the first slide, please?” the economist said, and the light obediently subdued itself and departed from the room. The great screen came alight with Table I of the Quantimetric Model of the American Food System, dense with numbers.
In the dark Andy saw what he never actually did see, but had seen in his mind many times as clearly as if he had seen it with his eyes.
Elton had not been well, something he pretended nobody knew. But they did know it. His wife, Mary, knew it. Wheeler knew it. Andy and his brother, Henry, knew it. Arthur and Martin Rowanberry knew it. They knew that he needed help with jobs he never had needed help with before. And they knew he was worried about himself.
“If you don’t feel good, Elton, go to the doctor,” Mary told him.
And he said, “I feel all right.”
“Go to the doctor,” Andy said. “I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not sick.”
“And you’re not stubborn, either.”
“That’s right,” Elton said, grinning big. “I’m not.”
But they knew he was sick. And he knew it, though he made a principle of not knowing it.
“You all come over to supper,” Mary said to Sarah, Henry’s wife. “Elton’s down in the dumps and I am too. Come over and cheer us up.”
So they went. And it was a cheerful meal. They ate, and then sat at the table afterwards, talking about the times, beginning nearly thirty years before, when Henry and Andy had worked sometimes as Elton’s hands. They had gone through some hard days together. The work had been complicated always, and sometimes impeded, by the youth and greenness of the boys, by the brotherhood of the brothers, by the friendship of them all. Most of their workdays had ended in simple weariness, but some had ended in coon hunts, some in fish fries, some in furious arguments, one or two in fights.
Among the results were a lot of funny stories, and that night Elton had been telling them, Henry egging him on.
Elton told about Henry and the bumblebees. They had been cleaning the toolshed, and there was a bundle of old grain sacks hanging from a rafter.
“Cut it down,” Elton said.
“Sounds like I hear something humming in there,” Henry said.
“Ahhhh, take your knife and cut it down!” Elton said. “There’s nothing in there.”
“I swear I didn’t think there was,” he said, for the hundredth time, laughing and looking at Henry, who laughed and looked back, for the hundredth time not believing him.
“So I loaned him my knife. He didn’t have a knife, of course. Never did have one. Hasn’t got one yet. And he cut it down.
“It fell right on his feet. ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘Ow!’ He did a little dance, and then ran right out from under his hat. His clothes were just sizzling.”
Elton was laughing while he told it, and they all laughed.
“I reckon it’s a lot funnier now than it was then.”
“A lot,” Henry said. “You were running before I even cut the string.”
“Naw, I wasn’t! No sir! I was just as surprised as you.”
That had been a long time ago, w
hen Henry was about fourteen and Elton not yet thirty. Probably neither of them any longer knew whether Elton had known about the bees or not. But they played out their old game of accusation and denial once more, both enjoying it, both grateful to be in the same story.
Elton pushed back his chair and got up as if to lead the way into the living room.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve had some good times, haven’t we?”
He staggered, reached to catch himself, failed. And all that was left of him fell to the floor.
To Andy, Elton’s absence became a commanding presence. He was haunted by things he might have said to Elton that would not be sayable again in this world.
That absence is with him now, but only as a weary fact, known but no longer felt, as if by some displacement of mind or heart he is growing absent from it.
It is the absence of everything he knows, and is known by, that surrounds him now.
He is absent himself, perfectly absent. Only he knows where he is, and he is no place that he knows. His flesh feels its removal from other flesh that would recognize it or respond to its touch; it is numb with exile. He is present in his body, but his body is absent.
He does not know what time it is. Nothing has changed since he woke. The darkness is not different, nor is the faint blur of light above the curtained window, nor are the muted night sounds of the streets.
For a long time he has not moved. He lies with his unhanded right forearm upright in the air in the darkness, his body bemused at its own stillness, as if waiting patiently to see how long his strayed mind will take to notice it again.
And now the anger he felt at the conference starts up in him again, for after his fear and grief and boredom it was anger that finally woke him and hardened him against that room. He did not belong there. He did not know anybody who did belong there.