Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

15. 1968

1968

The men are out on the farm and I am spending the morning at home trying to finish some of the endless chores I set for myself.

Busyness is the only thing that helps. People spoke to me of meditation after Bobby died, I was lent library books on Buddhism and the ancient art of yoga. And I thought, Really, you think a few minutes of intense breathing will modify my pain? In the agonizing first months when I still saw Bobby everywhere and nowhere, I could not even read. I’d taken solace in books for my entire life. As a child I’d become so absorbed in my favorite stories, the characters sometimes felt more vivid to me than my friends. Even as an adult, I could still lose myself in fictional worlds, feeling the wrench when I was forced to return to real life. And, quite suddenly, I didn’t have the heart or the mental capacity for any of it. I could not listen to the radio. I could not manage a conversation with anyone other than my own family and, even then, only at the most cursory level. But what I could do was work, really hard. It was my father-in-law, David, who put me back to work on the farm, understanding hard physical labor, twelve-hour stretches of it, was a necessary outlet for my grief. I can do everything the men do, milk cows, herd sheep, mend fences, heft hay bales. Me and Frank and Jimmy, the hardest workers you’ll ever come across.

When the doorbell rings, I am kneeling on a sill furiously shining a window with newspaper and white vinegar. It is annoying to get down and answer the door but I do it— country people usually do. We live a more courteous life than town folk, or so I have always imagined: We greet each other, we lend things, we share useful information.

What I am not expecting when I throw open the door is to find Gabriel on the other side of it.

“Hi,” I say, attempting to sound nonchalant though my heartbeat tells a different story.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not at all. Would you like to come in?”

Country manners, ingrained and inescapable.

Gabriel looks around him with open curiosity when he comes into the room, and I wonder what he sees. It is a classic farmhouse kitchen, I suppose. A huge oak table that belonged to Frank’s grandparents and has endured three generations of eating and laughter and arguments. An assortment of dining chairs, some I have painted, others in dark old wood. The huge fireplace at one end of the room which always draws admiration—it feels medieval as if it should have huge black cauldrons dangling in front of it. The dresser with the pretty blue-and-gold china we inherited from Frank’s parents and rarely use. A framed picture of pressed wildflowers, the same ones I gave Frank on the bus all those years ago, now fading beneath its glass. And, blown up to poster size, a picture of Bobby on his third birthday, chin smeared with chocolate, eyes crinkled in his trademark grin.

I watch Gabriel taking him in.

“Your son? Beth, he’s you exactly.”

“People say that.” If my voice is too crisp, I can’t help it. “Was there something you wanted?”

He hesitates, thrown, perhaps, by my directness.

“I’m horribly behind on my deadline and I’ve realized I need someone to look after Leo for a couple of hours each day. A paid job, I mean. Picking him up after school and keeping him busy while I write. Would you consider it?”

“I have a job. I run the farm with Frank and Jimmy.”

“The thing is, he adores you. It would only be a couple of hours. You quite often spend that with him now. The only difference is that I’d pay you.”

Gabriel is right: In the past few weeks I’ve spent more and more time at Meadowlands. Leo’s easy friendship—his quick laughter, his chatter, his curiosity—has consoled me more than anything else. It began with dog training. Before long I was pointing out wildflowers and teaching him to tell different birds apart, their colors, their sounds. All the things an urban child grows up without knowing.

“I wouldn’t like taking money from you.”

“You’d be taking it from the publisher, not me. I got a decent advance on this book, I’d want to be generous.”

Gabriel Wolfe as my employer, how would that feel? And how can I possibly expect Frank to agree to it?

He steps closer to me, so close I can smell the woody, cedary aftershave he’s wearing. I can see the muscles working in his jaw. “Can I say something?”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

“It’s made such a difference to Leo—and me—having you around. I only wish you didn’t feel you had to avoid me. I know it’s awkward with everything that happened. What I’m trying to say is, I’d really love it if you and I could be friends.”

“We are.”

“We’re not. You hardly ever come into the house. You always rush off as soon as I appear. You never stay for a cup of tea.”

“I have things to do here.”

“Beth. Look at me. Please.”

I do look and it becomes a kind of staring contest, the two of us gazing at one another long enough for it to become comical. Both of us smiling. In this moment, I feel like Beth Johnson, the farmer’s wife. There is nothing of Beth Kennedy, the teenager who once fell crazily in love with the man standing before me. I think, Perhaps we can do this. Perhaps we will be all right after all.

“I’ll have to talk to Frank. We decide everything together.”

“Of course,” he says. “And thank you.”

Over dinner Frank and I talk about the farm, its growing debt, a looming meeting with the bank that is worrying him. Smallholder farming doesn’t pay, it’s not something you do for the money. We struggle a little but never enough to sell up; the farm is our mutual passion, Frank’s and Jimmy’s and mine.

“Guess what I saw earlier?” Frank says. He’s watching me carefully, a look on his face I can’t quite read. “The kestrels are back.”

“They are not.”

“Yup. Didn’t have the binoculars so I couldn’t tell if the chicks have hatched yet, but I don’t think so. They’ve just arrived, I’m sure.”

We had nesting kestrels in one of our ash trees three years in a row, and Bobby was obsessed with them. Frank built him a hide opposite the tree out of a wooden stepladder with a beer barrel for its seat and he’d spend hours up there, binoculars trained on the nest, counting the chicks as they hatched. Every day after school we’d go to the hide, waiting for the male kestrel to fly off in search of food, which he always did, sooner or later. Our favorite thing was when the chicks were a little older, big enough that we could see them waiting for the male to return, pink mouths open. We were always sad when they left the nest at around six weeks old, thrilled when they came back the following spring. The year Bobby died the kestrels stopped coming.

“Tomorrow I’ll come with you and take a look,” I tell him.

We carry on eating, but the conversation we need to have is nagging away at me, until I can no longer hold it in. “I’ve got something to tell you and you’re not going to like it. But it’s money.”

Frank laughs. “If it’s money, I’ll like it.”

“Gabriel has asked me to watch Leo after school. A couple of hours each day. Sometimes I’d be at Meadowlands but I’d like to bring him here. He’d love the farm. He’s mad about animals.”

“No, Beth.”

The change in his face, I hate it. You spend years looking at someone night after night across a table, you know every inch of him. I know from the set of his mouth, the hurt in his eyes, what Frank is thinking. It’s a precipice we are on, I don’t need him to tell me.

“We don’t need his charity. I’m surprised you’d even consider it after everything that happened.”

“It’s hardly charity, it’s a job. If I don’t do it someone else will. But I’m going to do it. For the money, yes. But mostly it’s the boy. It helps me, Frank.”

“It’s dangerous what you’re doing,” he says, quietly.

And there is nothing I can do but nod.

“I don’t want it to come between us,” I say, but he shrugs.

It already has.