now. “It’s three o’clock,” he said severely. “I eat corn at three o’clock and it’d have me up and on the toilet before six.”
“Corn was intolerant of Earl the same. But he couldn’t stay away from it or tomatoes. Tomatoes were the hives though. All summer long his mother used to have to watch him. He’d steal corn out of the garden; he’d sneak out with the salt shaker and eat tomatoes warm off the vines. Ate the corn raw and nearly shit himself silly. The boy never had a trace of sense.”
“Now you go easy,” warned Stutz, “or you’ll work yourself into a state again. Remember what I told you before? You got to accept your part in it, Alec, but nobody can say how big that part is. And your part isn’t all of it neither.”
Monkman did not appear to notice what was being said to him. “Vera wants to know where he is. She’s set the boy to spying on me.”
“You know what I think. I’ve told my opinion before.”
“And if I told her, what then? That girl’s flint. I always meant to – when we settled our differences. But I can’t even get forgiveness where I don’t see I done any wrong. You tell me what I did that was so terrible? Asked her to stop at home and take care of her brother. Most girls would have jumped at the chance of such an easy life, keeping house for a man and a boy. She didn’t have enough work to keep her busy half the day, always smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes with her friends in the Chinaman’s. That’s suffering? Most girls that age would have been beside themselves to be free as a bird, a regular allowance to spend as they liked – plus what she stole from housekeeping. The way she milked me she could have been rich as a princess in a few years.
“And I wouldn’t have asked her to do it but for Earl. He needed somebody after his mother passed away. Him going on about hearing Martha moving around the house when he was alone; I figured that for wishful thinking out of loneliness. So I wanted her there at home for him because he was high-strung, high-strung from a baby up. He always showed it.
“And now she wants to know where he is? Did she ever think she’s got no right? Because she walked out on her brother, didn’t she? I’m not just talking about the Army and the war, but after, too. Because didn’t she disappear on him? After the war he never got a letter from her. You think that didn’t upset him? You’re goddamn right it did. No letter until the one she sent to announce she’d got married and that one was too late, he never got it. So sure he was upset. People disappearing on him left and right – his mother, his sister. No wonder he hung on my heels like a stray pup, probably afraid I was going to vanish into thin air on him, too, I suppose. You remember how that was, Stutz? We couldn’t turn ourselves around without bumping into him or tripping over him. He wouldn’t let us out of his sight.”
“His company was no trouble. He was always a pleasant boy.”
“Sure he was a pleasant boy. But you wasn’t the one responsible for him was you? You didn’t have to get him to some point of usefulness, did you?”
“That’s true. It wasn’t me who was responsible.”
“I mean, how long was I supposed to let him continue on that way? Isn’t it natural for a boy his age to want his independence? Instead, he had to trail around after us. Christ, he could’ve been taken for simple. It had to stop. The boy had to make himself suitable, had to find his place. And I tried him every place, didn’t I, Stutz? I gave him his chances, didn’t I?”
“Alec, nobody could ever say you didn’t have his interests at heart.”
“The boy graduated high school and he couldn’t meet the train on time with the dray. He run the projector fine if I was there to watch him but as soon as I left he burned the film on the bulb, or didn’t thread it right, or ripped it to ribbons. All he wanted to do was hang around the garage with us. The boy finished school and all he wanted to do was pass his father tools. He’d have been content to pass me tools the rest of his life if I’d have let him.”
“He done a beautiful job with the garden though. He made you a beautiful garden, Alec.”
Briefly, Monkman’s face lit with pleasure at the praise of his son. “By Jesus, yes,” he agreed. “Earl could garden. That’s what gave me the idea for the farm. A grown man can’t be a gardener but he can be a farmer, can’t he? What’s a farm but a big fuck of a garden? Make him a farmer, I thought.”
He had determined to see it done. A farmer needed a farm, so Alec had bought one; the farm he still owned and Marker rented. It had been a weedy half-section the bank had foreclosed on early in the thirties and since then had installed a series of improvident tenants on. When Alec had made them an offer the bankers had been quick to accept and rid themselves of a load of care and trouble. Alec bought cheap, the way he seemed to get whatever he wanted now that his luck had changed. He had to take a mortgage on the theatre but that didn’t cause him to lose any sleep. Cattle and grain prices were strong and Alec believed that the farm could pay for itself. Along with the 320 acres of land came an assortment of ramshackle, second-hand implements and a small house that was in decline but still reasonably comfortable. Only one thing more was necessary. In the spring Monkman engaged a hired man named Dover to help work the place and teach Earl farming. Nevertheless, when he proposed his plan to Earl, his son had resisted.
“I don’t know if I want to be a farmer.”
“Of course you don’t – until you give her a whirl, give her a try. That’s all I’m asking – that you try.”
“What if you need me here in town?”
“What would I need you for? Stutz and I will manage. What I want to see is you managing too, on your own.”
All he wanted was his son to learn self-reliance, that was what was behind the exiling of Earl. He explained it to him at length, so that the boy would know why he demanded it of him.
“The time has come for you to show you can stand on your own two feet. Dover’s going to take you to the farm and see you stick to it. Don’t come making your way back to town every couple of days because you’re homesick, either. Maybe I’ll just put it to you this way. Don’t bother showing your face around here again until you’ve raised a crop. I mean it, Earl. If somebody has to come to town for groceries, or fuel, or parts, or whatever, let it be Dover. By September we’ll have you weaned of this nonsense and a man. I think me and Mr. Stutz ought to stay clear, too. No visits until you’ve finished your work, done the job you’ve been put out there to do. But the day you’ve got a crop ready to cut, send us word, Earl, and we’ll be there to admire what you done with bells on, me and Mr. Stutz. None gladder to offer you congratulations and shake your hand. That’s going to be my dessert the end of summer, to see the crop my boy raised.”
There were times when the temptation had been very great to disregard his own rules, jump in the truck, and pay Earl a visit. He missed the boy a good deal, missed his presence in the house, found himself still glancing over his shoulder to locate him when he stepped back to survey a piece of work finished in the garage. However, he curbed his desire and relied on what Dover would report when the hired man made his trips to town. The difficulty was Dover wasn’t much of a talker. This was the result of having lived most of his life as a hired man in the midst of families he longed to be a part of, yet upon whom he had no right to lay any claims of affection. It had been a queer twilight sort of existence and it had taught him that what was not his to receive, was not his to give either. He grew to be a frighteningly detached and disinterested man. A lank sixty year old who became drier and sparer with every passing season that brought him nearer to the end of his working days, he volunteered nothing to anybody. An employer had once characterized him as the sort of fellow who wouldn’t warn you if you were about to step backwards off a cliff because it wasn’t any of his business, what you wanted to do. “Mind your own business,” was Dover’s practical motto. In his travels over the years, in and out of dozens of farmhouses, Dover had encountered his share of peculiar situations and peculiar types. He had learned to pretend, along with the rest of the family, that whatever was going on was perfectly normal and usual. Living alone on the farm with the boy caused him no grief. He was a quiet, polite, clean boy. If Monkman wanted to ask questions he would answer them but he wouldn’t draw conclusions for him.
“So how’s my boy? You turning him into a farmer?”
“Getting there, getting there,” Dover would allow, sliding his eyes from one thing to another in the shop, never looking Monkman directly in the face.
“And Earl’s working? He’s working hard?” Laughing, “Tell him if he isn’t, he’ll have to dig the toe of my boot out of his arse.”
“No complaints there,” Dover had said slowly, “but the boy seems to have work and weather confused. Seems to think that just hard work’ll allow him to take his crop off a month earlier than anybody else. I tell him it doesn’t quite work that way, you can’t trick the seasons. I tell him save your hurry for what can be hurried, growing can’t. But he doesn’t listen to me when I give him the facts.”
