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By Root 953 0

you think we’ve got fuel problems now. Wait till you got a bunch of those monsters they’re gonna have in the fields.” He rocked back on his heels with a satisfied air. Daddy listened, but held his peace. He complimented Loren on the pork and looked Jess up and down suspiciously and ate a lot of fruit salad. It was generally accepted that Daddy and Bob Stanley, who was about Ty’s age, didn’t get along too well. Pete sometimes said, “Larry knows Bob wants to piss up his tree. Bob knows it, too.” Bob always had more to say—he was a sociable man—but it was true also that the other farmers always glanced at Daddy when Bob made some pronouncement, as if Daddy should have the last word, and Daddy liked to exude skepticism, which he could do with an assortment of heavings and grunts that made Bob seem loquacious and shallow.

Toward dusk, I began going around and picking up paper plates, and I noticed a little group, including Rose and Caroline, as well as Ty and Pete, clustered on Harold’s back porch, with my father talking earnestly at the center. I remember Rose turned and looked at me across the yard, and I remember a momentary inner clang, an instinctive certainty that wariness was called for, but then Caroline looked up and smiled, waved me over. I went and stood on the bottom step of the porch, plates and plastic forks in both hands. My father said, “That’s the plan.”

I said, “What’s the plan, Daddy?”

He glanced at me, then at Caroline, and, looking at her all the while, he said, “We’re going to form this corporation, Ginny, and you girls are all going to have shares, then we’re going to build this new Slurrystore, and maybe a Harvestore, too, and enlarge the hog operation.” He looked at me. “You girls and Ty and Pete and Frank are going to run the show. You’ll each have a third part in the corporation. What do you think?”

I licked my lips and climbed the two steps onto the porch. Now I could see Harold through the kitchen screen, standing in the dark doorway, grinning. I knew he was thinking that my father had had too much to drink—that’s what I was thinking, too. I looked down at the paper plates in my hands, bluing in the twilight. Ty was looking at me, and I could see in his gaze a veiled and tightly contained delight—he had been wanting to increase the hog operation for years. I remember what I thought. I thought, okay. Take it. He is holding it out to you, and all you have to do is take it. Daddy said, “Hell, I’m too old for this. You wouldn’t catch me buying a new tractor at my age. If I want to listen to some singer, I’ll listen in my own house. Anyway, if I died tomorrow, you’d have to pay seven or eight hundred thousand dollars inheritance taxes. People always act like they’re going to live forever when the price of land is up”—here he threw a glance at Harold—“but if you get a heart attack or a stroke or something, then you got to sell off to pay the government.”

In spite of that inner clang, I tried to sound agreeable. “It’s a good idea.”

Rose said, “It’s a great idea.”

Caroline said, “I don’t know.”

When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn’t believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.

My earliest memories of him are of being afraid to look him in the eye, to look at him at all. He was too big and his voice was too deep. If I had to speak to him, I addressed his overalls, his shirt, his boots. If he lifted me near his face, I shrank away from him. If he kissed me, I endured it, offered a little hug in return. At the same time, his very fearsomeness was reassuring when I thought about things like robbers or monsters, and we lived on what was clearly the best, most capably cultivated farm. The biggest farm farmed by the biggest farmer. That fit, or maybe formed, my own sense of the right order of