“Hah.”
But he studied me some more, examining me now as if I was maybe a little less dangerous than corn blight; more like I was a pissing yellow dog or a talking jackrabbit. He spat between his feet and covered it with one of his shoes. “Drive around this yard once,” he said.
I got up on the tractor, an old John Deere, started it, and made a slow circle in the yard in front of the house and then stopped again beside them.
“So,” he said, “let’s see if you can find reverse.”
So I backed up and came forward to the same spot.
“It still don’t make enough of a show,” he said. “See them cheat weeds over there east of the barn?”
“Yes.”
“See can you cut them weeds without chopping no hole in my barn.”
So I drove over to the barn, lowered the sickle bar, and mowed the weeds beside the foundation, the section blades cutting them off low to the ground. There was a snarl of rusty fence wire in the weeds, but I managed to see it in time. Then I came back to Edith and Roy.
“Found the wire, did you?”
“Yes, but I missed it,” I said.
He looked at the sickle bar for tangled wire or new nicks. “Well, ain’t you the big britches,” he said.
“Stop it,” Edith said. “He’s already proved that he can drive a tractor better than I ever will. And probably as good as you could when you were his age.”
“I drove horses,” Roy said, and made a coughing sound that was his idea of a laugh. “That’s what you know about it.”
“Still,” she said, “you know what I mean. I’m going to start picking peas.”
She turned and walked away from him. She could be firm with him, even harsh with him occasionally, when she had to—over the little things. But she wouldn’t ever leave him; she just would not allow herself that much freedom. He watched her walk away, a small fine woman in a clean work dress that was still filled out in the right places, even if those places were never going to receive the full attention or the appreciation they deserved. At the picket gate she turned and called to me: “Sandy, you can eat lunch with me.”
Then she closed the gate and went up the steps into the house. The old man stood staring at the back door. He didn’t seem to be able to grasp that she had gone, disappeared, refused him. The door was shut. Finally, as if he expected some sudden help to descend out of the clear blue, he looked at the sky, then he looked at the tractor where I was, then at his hands, where there sure as hell was not any help. “Women,” he said. “That’s what I got left to me—a woman and a smart-ass neighbor kid.” He spat into the gravel again. “Hot damn.”
But the old buzzard had no other recourse. He climbed onto the tractor with me and I buckled the belt behind him. “Boy,” he said, “what the hell you waiting on? Drive me to the field.”
We drove out of the yard down the wagon track to the hay field. The old man stood spread legged and swaying behind me, leaning against the belt when the tractor jolted in the rut. When we came to the gate into the field he said, “Turn in here.”
“I know,” I said.