business suit bound at the shoulders when he left the car, as if he had taken on height, for the place told him that he was ten years younger; the maples, the house, the simple mountains all told him this. His two small children stormed around the edge of the barn and collided against his legs. Taller, browner, healthier, more handsome, more intelligent?they seemed to him to be all these things each weekend when he was reunited with them. A sere branch on a maple caught his eye. That would have to be cut. He stooped down to pick up his little boy and girl in a scalding rush of love, for which he was unarmed and, it seemed, unprepared.
The duck house, where they put the rabbits that morning, had been empty for years, but there was a cage and a shelter, and it would do. “Now, these are your pets, these are your rabbits,” Paul told the children. His sternness transfixed them, and the little boy began to suck his thumb. “These are your responsibility, and if you take good care of them, perhaps you can have a dog when we get back to New York. You’ll have to feed them and clean their house.” His love for the children and his desire to draw for them, even faintly, the mysterious shapes of responsibility reduced him to a fatuity that he was conscious of himself. “I don’t want you to expect someone else to help you,” he said. “You’ll have to give them water twice a day. They’re supposed to like lettuce and carrots. Now you can put them in the house yourself. Daddy has to get to work.”
Paul Hollis was a summer farmer. He mowed, cultivated, and waxed angry about the price of scratch feed, and at that instant when the plangent winds of Labor Day began to sound he hung up his blunted scythe to rust in the back hall, where the kerosene was kept, and happily shifted his interest to the warm apartments of New York. On that day?the day when he bought the rabbits?he went to his bedroom after he had lectured the children, and changed into a pair of coveralls that were still dimly stenciled with his name, rank, and serial number. Virginia sat on the edge of the bed while he dressed, and talked about his sister Ellen, who was spending a month with them. Ellen needed the rest; Ellen drank too much. But there was no suggestion of correction or change in what Virginia said about Ellen, and when Paul glanced at his wife, he thought how forgiving and comely she was. The room was old and pleasant?it had been his parents’ room?and what light reached it reached it through the leaves. They lingered there talking about Ellen, the children, tasting the astringency of their contentment and their worthiness, but not so long as to seem idle. Paul was going to help Kasiak scythe the highest field, and Virginia wanted to pick some flowers.
The Hollis property was high, and it was Paul’s long-dead father who had called the highest pasture Elysian, because of its unearthly stillness. This pasture was mowed on alternate years to keep the scrub from taking hold. When Paul reached it that morning, Kasiak was there, and Paul judged that he had been working for about three hours; Kasiak was paid by the hour. The two men spoke briefly?the hired man and the vacationist?and picked up the tacit bond of people who happen to be working together. Paul mowed below and a little to Kasiak’s right. He used a scythe well, but there was no confusing, even at a distance, Kasiak’s diligent figure with Paul’s.
Kasiak was Russian-born. This and everything else Paul knew about him he had been told while they worked. Kasiak had landed in Boston, worked in a shoe factory, studied English at night, rented, and eventually bought, the farm below the Hollis place. They had been neighbors for twenty years. He was doing the Hollises’ work that year for the first time. Up until then, he had been merely a persevering and colorful figure on their landscape. He dressed his deaf wife in salt bags and potato sacks. He was miserly. He was bitter. Even on that summer morning, he cut a figure of chagrin and discontent. He kept his woods clear and stored his hay at precisely the right moment, and his fields, his gardens, his compost heap, and the sour smell of milk in his immaculate kitchen conveyed the sense of security that lies in the power of intelligent husbandry. He mowed, he walked, like a prisoner in a prison yard. From the time he went to the barn, an hour before dawn, until his day ended, there was no hesitation in his thought or in his step, and this flawless link of chores was part of a larger chain of responsibilities and aspirations that had begun with his youth in Russia and that would end, he believed, with the birth of a just and peaceable world, delivered in bloodshed and arson.
Virginia had been amused when Paul told her that Kasiak was a Communist. Kasiak had told Paul himself. Two weeks after he had begun to work for them, he had taken to cutting editorials from a Communist newspaper and handing them to Paul or slipping them under the kitchen door. Reasonableness was Paul’s watchword with Kasiak, he liked to think. Twice, in the feed store, when Kasiak’s politics had been under discussion, Paul had defended Kasiak’s right to draw his own conclusions about the future, and in their conversations he always asked Kasiak lightly when he was going to have his revolution.
That day fell at the end of the haying weather. As it got late in the morning, they could hear dull blasts of thunder. A wind rose in the neighborhood, but there was none to speak of in the field. Kasiak trailed after him a rich blend of citronella and vinegar, and both men were plagued with flies. They did not let the chance of a storm change the pace of their scything. It was as if there were some significance, hidden, surely, to them, in completing that field. Then the wet wind climbed the hill behind them, and Paul, taking one hand off the snath, straightened his back. While they had been working, clouds had blackened the sky from the horizon to above his head, so he was given the illusion of a country divided evenly between the lights of catastrophe and repose. The shade of the storm was traveling as rapidly up the field as a man walks, but the hay it had not touched was yellow, and there was no portent of the storm in the delicate sky ahead of him or in the clouds there or in anything he could see except the green wood, whose color the storm had begun to deepen. Then he felt against his skin a coldness that belonged to no part of that day, and heard at his back the rain begin to drop through the trees.
Paul ran for the woods. Kasiak followed slowly, with the storm at his heels. They sat beside each other on stones in the shelter of the dense foliage, watching the moving curtain of rain. Kasiak took off his hat?for the first time that summer to Paul’s knowledge. His hair and forehead were gray. Ruddiness began on his high cheekbones and shaded down to a dark brown that spread from his jaw to his neck.
“How much will you charge me for using your horse to cultivate the garden?” Paul asked.
“Four dollars.” Kasiak didn’t raise his voice, and Paul couldn’t hear him above the noise the rain made crashing into the field.
“How much?”
“Four dollars.”
“Let’s try it tomorrow morning if it’s clear. Shall we?”
