I wasn’t surprised she called me. Since the death of my own dad I had been checking on her once a week, stopping by the Goodnough house in the early evening before I went home to supper. The old man would already be fed and put to sleep, and Edith and I would sit in the porch swing, visiting, passing that best hour of any day together while the barn swallows hunted bugs and the locusts sang from the elm trees. She began to keep beer on hand in the refrigerator, too, because she knew I liked it in the evening after work, and I would drink beer while we talked and pushed the swing a little. Occasionally on those evenings she would recall the things she knew about my dad, and it seemed to help us both get over him.
So now the old man was dead. That much was over. He was buried in town, in the plot west of Ada’s. It was how Edith wanted it arranged. She said the old man had blocked her mother’s view of the east while she lived, he wasn’t going to do that in death. There was still the problem of his mouth, though. I don’t know how John Baker got the old man’s mouth to stay closed for the funeral, but I suppose he had to break the jaws and wire them shut. And that was funny, that the old man died with his mouth locked open after he had spent the last nine years of his life refusing to open it, declining whatever to say yes or no to anything, but just sitting hard in his chair before that south window in the winter or watching from the car during the summer while Ralph Johnson made those slow circles in the field. Well, he sure as hell would not have liked what he saw the next year. It might even have made him mad enough to speak again. Because, like I say, after he died Edith insisted that I begin to lease the land myself, and I did that. I’ve been leasing it ever since.
THERE FOLLOWED about a ten-year period in my life that I am not particularly proud of. For most of that time I was drifting, falling headlong and heedless as in one of those old grade-school fire escapes that were constructed like covered slides in which you entered at the top and shot down through several loops and twists and then scooted out at the bottom into a mudhole. It was a long wild ride I was on, and for quite a while it seemed like the thing to do.
Clevis Stouffer was a good part of that heedless drifting, though he was not the cause of it. I had my own motivation, my own inspiration. Clevis was merely ready on hand and more than willing to drift with me, content to ride along and to contribute his share. I had taken him on as hired man to help me work the Goodnough place, after leasing it from Edith, because he was a good hand, a good farmer. He knew then, and I believe he still knows, as much about Case tractors and Gleaner combines as any two men in the country, with the kind of curiosity about machines that can’t rest until it understands fully just why that loaded spring and that set of cogwheels have to interlock the way they do in order for the thing to work and propel weight.