Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

26. Before

Before

If I had begun the process of civilizing the Johnson men, it is the arrival of Bobby that has the biggest impact.

Frank is like a caricature of a doting father: He wants to do everything I do, he’d breastfeed Bobby if he could. When he comes in from the farm each night he holds his arms out, impatient for his turn, holding Bobby so tightly against him our baby’s skin is scented with the day’s labor—cow dung, tractor oil, and Imperial Leather, the soap Frank uses so frequently throughout the day I have come to think of it as his particular smell.

“I missed you,” Frank says, kissing his son’s soft cheeks. “And you.” He reaches out to grab whichever part of me is nearest.

I always save Bobby’s bath-time for Frank, no matter what time he comes in from the farm. I fill up a tub with warm water and Frank lowers him in, swooshing him back and forth, while I dab at his face with a soft flannel. Mostly, the two of us gaze down at him in wonder, cooing occasionally. It’s my favorite time of day.

The biggest surprise is the way David falls for Bobby. Frank and Jimmy always mentioned how absent David was in their childhood, out on the farm all hours of the day. Now he is a changed man. In the evenings, he sits with his grandson on his lap, singing to him, songs that come from another age, music hall numbers and lullabies Frank and I have never heard. He reads the newspaper to him, which seems strange at first, but there is something about David’s low, gravelly voice that lulls Bobby to sleep. If Bobby is crying, I’ll hand him to David and say: “Can you work your magic?” And it is like magic, for the baby settles instantly in his grandfather’s solid embrace.

“Will you look at that?” David says, looking up at me, thrilled.

Bobby has humanized him. This stiff, wordless farmer has become a man who laughs and sings and smiles. In bed, at night, Frank and I whisper to one another that our baby is nothing less than a miracle.

The change is apparent in Jimmy too. He’s still in trouble at school from time to time, but I have noticed a new confidence in him. Jimmy has grown up, or perhaps it is more that ever since he stepped in and calmly delivered our son, averting disaster without once giving in to panic, I have found myself looking up to him. He is someone who can thrive in a crisis.

When Bobby is a few weeks old I start walking around the farm, baby strapped to me in a sling I fashion from an old blanket. The farm seems vast and unending when you traverse it by foot, it’s rare to pass anyone else. Sometimes it feels as if Bobby and I are the last people on earth.

I talk to my sleeping infant as we parade around the land, which is his land, I tell him.

“One day, Bobby, you’ll be doing this with your son or daughter.”

There are so many species of birds here and David seems to know them all. On warm evenings he’ll walk out with us, his fields changing color in the dusk light, a shimmering purple, a deep blue. He teaches me how to recognize lapwings and yellowhammers and chaffinches by sight and by song. Nothing is too small to go unremarked upon. Butterflies are named—marbled white, skipper, meadow brown—and a scurrying vole makes him gaze upward for the predator he always finds. A sudden rustle alerts him to hedgehogs, perfectly camouflaged in nondescript brown, as they hunt for beetles and slugs. When we stumble upon a litter of tumbling fox cubs, David grows still and I do the same. In silence we watch them play while, close by, their mother hunts for food. It feels like a gift catching this.

Through David’s eyes, Blakely Farm is coming alive for me.

Before Bobby is a year old, David starts taking him around the farm on his tractor.

“You will be careful?” I say, but David just laughs, driving away with the baby wedged between his knees.

He drives with one arm on the steering wheel, the other draped casually around his grandson. I am glad of the time alone but I never relax until they return to the yard an hour or so later, both beaming.

“You don’t need to worry,” Frank says, when I tell him of my fears at night, the two of us facing each other in the darkness. “My dad is a safe pair of hands. He grew up on this farm. He would never let anything happen to Bobby.”

Look what happened to your mother , I think, although I would never say so. Her accident, being kicked in the head while she was milking, came out of the blue and couldn’t have been avoided. A stark reminder, if ever there was one, that you could never be too careful on the farm.

Despite my misgivings, I adore the way Bobby is growing up with his grandfather. Before long he’ll be shooting and skinning rabbits himself, he’ll fish for pike and carp, he will learn to birth a lamb, he will be able to name every bird and insect on this two-hundred-acre farm; all the wisdom that has been passed through the Johnson men over generations will be his. It is his right. And I want that for him.