Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 72

Fanny’s days as a farmer started auspiciously enough but frequently turned discouraging. She’d arranged for Lafaele to take a wagon into town and pick up a shipment of plants. “Do not lose the plant labels,” she’d instructed him. So that he understood her clearly, she showed him what she meant by label. In the afternoon, when he returned, he was smiling proudly. He produced a bag he had kept close to him all the way home. Looking inside, she found that he had taken every doggone label o? the plants and put them into one safe place. When she pointed out his mistakes, Lafafele’s face looked as though it might crack with shame.

It was hardly the first of their disastrous miscommunications. What to do about her paltry pidgin English? What to do about Lafaele? He meant well, and he was so devoted to her that he called her Mama. Recently, while they worked together out in a ?eld, he’d felt it somehow important to confess to her that during the previous evening he had encountered a girl on the road and had sex with her, after which he informed the girl that he would have to tell his “Mama” about it.

Fanny examined a patch of wilted yellow lettuces. These were her own personal failures, for she’d planted them in too sunny a spot. That problem was easily remedied, though the rats that ate the innards of her melons could not be dispensed with so handily. The farm animals bedeviled her most. Mornings, she set out with  her wooden  egg-collecting  box, hoping to ?ll its soft horsehair indentations with fresh eggs. Often enough she found her chickens were on strike, or if not, the cock had pecked holes in the eggs. Every remedy she tried was useless. The cock knew perfectly well he had the upper hand and strutted by her with  contempt.  The  unruly  pigs,  which  were  downright  mean-spirited,  de?ed  her  by breaking through their pen and lumbering into the forest. Complicating the whole picture was her awful sense of guilt that sooner or later, she would be the instrument of their murder.

That night, after a day of swine chasing, she slept on the ?oor next to Louis, having washed only her feet and hands. The muscles in her back made a crunching sound when she lay down on the hard wood.  “Three hundred acres of our own.” She yawned.  “What were we thinking?”

“What were you thinking?” he said. His eyes stayed on the page he was reading.  “You

were the one who wanted to be a farmer.”
Fanny was quiet, considering the idea.

Louis looked over his book at her. “You have the soul of a peasant, my dear. Accept it.” She shot a puzzled look at him, unsure of his direction. “I love the soil, yes.” “That’s not what I mean. It is not so much that you love working with the earth but that
you know it is your own earth that you are delving into. If you had the soul of an artist, the stupidity of possessions would have no power over you.”

Fanny fell mute. How could Louis not know—creative energy so possessed her mind and body that some days she thought she might go mad from it. That sometimes it took fourteen hours of grinding work before the forces inside her had been sated and she could lay herself down to rest.

She waited for Louis’s hand to reach out to hers to say, There now, I didn’t mean that little cruelty. But it did not come. While he dozed o?, she stayed awake, nursing her trodden pride. When it was clear she would not sleep, she got up and went to a makeshift desk to write in her diary.

I would as soon think of renting a child to love as a piece of land. When I plant a seed or a root, I plant a bit of my heart with it and do not feel that I have ?nished when I have had my exercise and amusement. But I do feel not so far removed from God when the tender leaves put forth and I know that in a manner I am a creator. My heart melts over a bed of young peas, and a blossom on my rose tree is like a poem written by my son.

A couple of weeks later, the insult was still fresh. The joy she’d felt at the beginning of her farm-making seemed to have shriveled since Louis had hurled his dart. One day, when Lafaele succeeded in planting Fanny’s precious supply of seed corn, she made a show of complimenting him heartily in front of Louis. Lafaele beamed like a man made new.
“Don’t all of us love a little praise sometimes?” Fanny said when Lafaele walked away. “Love it like pie,” Louis assented.

Fanny thought of all the stories she had written that had never made it into print. She had wanted only a scintilla of recognition.

“I always thought being a peasant was the happiest of lives,” she said to Louis the next night when they retired. “It is a simple, noble life.”

“You are what you always wanted to be, then. I personally think the peasant class is a most charming one.” He rolled over to face the wall. “Admire it immensely.”
“You are condescending to me,” she seethed. “Why don’t you just say you appreciate art, and I appreciate mud!”

“I don’t know why you’re o?ended,” he muttered. “No one should be o?ended if it is said that he is not an artist. The only person who should be insulted by such an observation is an artist who supports his family with his work.”

“Louis, do you hear yourself? You are talking like a fool. You are saying a person is not an artist if he doesn’t support his family with his work. You are saying you are the only member of this family who is a real artist.”

He put his arm up over his ear.

“Do you know what I think?” she said. “You’re angry that the New York Sun doesn’t want any more of the letters you’ve been sending them, and you’re taking it out on me.”
Louis did not respond. She pulled his arm down so he could not pretend he didn’t hear her. “I warned you readers would find them boring. And I was right!”
Louis sat up in a hu? at her remark, took his pillow, and climbed over her and out of the bed.

Sleepless in the ensuing hours, Fanny knew Louis was camped on the ?oor of the new house.  It  was  three  or  four  o’clock  before  she  drifted o?.  When  she  woke  and looked outside, she caught sight of Louis’s back as he rode off on his horse.

From  her  window,  Fanny  could  see  the  big  ?eld  where  the  day  workers  had  been planting co?ee seedlings for a  few days. Her mind’s eye skipped forward: She saw the house surrounded by acres upon acres of co?ee, vanilla, and cacao trees. How vivid the picture was! She imagined herself in six or seven years—I would not be so terribly old yet—a woman  planter  and  the  living  legend  behind  the  vast  and  thriving  plantation  called Vailima.  “There were moments when I lacked faith,” Louis would admit to a newspaper reporter someday, “but my wife always knew it would be a success.”

She closed her eyes, savored the image for a minute longer, then moved away from the window. Dressing quickly, she collected a hard-boiled egg from the kitchen hut that she peeled and ate as she walked out to inspect the distant ?eld where the co?ee plants grew. What she found made her heart drop. The starts, unwatered, were all dead. She should have come out sooner to oversee the men, but she’d been too busy, too trusting.
“Damned tears!” she cursed aloud, wiping her eyes as she contemplated the big ?eld for which  she’d  had  such  high  hopes. “Damned  plants!”  When  the  tears  stopped,  she recognized in herself a perverse sense of relief and satisfaction. This week, at least, she had failed rather grandly at being a peasant.