“Sure,” he said. “Just a goddamn big britches.”
That was my name all that day and most of the summer. I began cutting his hay that morning, circling in the field, making my rounds toward the center while the sickle bar rode wet and shining beside the tractor and laid the green grass down in rings. All the time too the old man rode behind me, waving his stumps past my ears to give me directions I didn’t want or need and yelling at me above the fire and crash of the tractor engine to turn, Britches, turn, goddamn, even though I was already turning the damn thing. So I must have determined at least a hundred times that if he shoved those raw nubs past my face again or called me Britches just once more I was going to buck the front of the tractor up, so help me Jesus, and pitch the old bastard off, sail him over his lousy belt contraption and, with any luck, if there was any justice under that sun, snap the strings in his scrawny neck. Of course just as often I decided not to. Instead I tried to go blind to his hands and deaf to his fool yelling. But it was a real test, and the only time I recall his being satisfied with anything I did was when the mower chanced to cut through the back of a five-foot rattlesnake. “Sliced him, by damn,” he shouted. “Hah.”
At noon we rode the tractor back to the house to eat. I didn’t know if I could take any more; I was hot, tired, itchy, mad. The old man seemed no different, though. He seemed to have only one gear in his makeup—a kind of full-speed-ahead crazy. When we got up to the house Edith was waiting for us. “Your plate is on the table,” she said. “Sandy and I are going to eat in the side yard.”
She led me around to the east side of the house. It was shady there under an elm tree in the grass.
“I’ll get him started, then I’ll bring yours.”
“But I brought my own lunch.”
“I know that, Sandy,” she said.
So I sat down in the elm shade while she returned to the house to start the old man, butter his bread, tuck his napkin in. I leaned back against the trunk of the tree. Now what am I going to do? I thought. I’ve got to eat two women’s lunches and I’m not even hungry. I’m too damn hot to be hungry. The shade freckled across the grass up the side of the house. I took my cap off to let the breeze blow my hair.
Then she came back with a feast on a platter—ice tea, fried chicken, potatoes, peas in butter, fresh bread, homemade ice cream. I wanted to whine and kick my feet, but I ate all she gave me and heard someone with my voice ask for seconds. I suppose it was a cause worth dying of bloat for.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, watching me. “Any of this, you know.”
“You don’t either.”
“I want to,” she said.
“So do I,” I said. I was half in love with her myself.
“I know, but just the same, Sandy. And you thank your daddy for me, too. Will you?”
She knew all right. She knew. I was there driving the tractor so she wouldn’t have to and I was stuffing myself stupid while she watched me with those brown grown up-woman’s eyes—because my dad had sent me. I guess it was enough too, because I did all the tractor driving there was to do at the Goodnoughs’ that summer, raked hay, cultivated corn, all of it, and ate my mother’s lunch on the half-mile walk to and from their house, hiding the bucket in the soapweeds between times, because how was I supposed to tell my mother I didn’t want or need her lunch either? She wasn’t wild about my being over there in the first place. She had her suspicions.