The Farmer's Daughter (4 page)

The deathwatch was forty-nine days but Tim was dead a couple weeks before he died. Well beyond consciousness it was hard for a body to let go. Sarah that evening kept putting her face to his to see if he was still breathing and finally near midnight he wasn't. She actually thought she saw his spirit rise and float out the open front door over Rover's head who turned to look at her. She shivered and looked around at the cabin which was homemade and crude but beautiful to her. There was a woodstove and then a propane heater which was used when the weather got to its coldest. There were two rifles and a shotgun in a cabinet but the only thing of beauty was a wood chest that doubled as a coffee table. When he was still conscious he told her that the cabin was hers, also about three thousand dollars in a tobacco tin at the bottom of the trunk. The eighty grand that Frank had paid for the land was going to a county fund for the poor and indigent. That last conscious day he had reached out with his left hand, the only one that worked, and touched her breast.

“I don't want to be impolite but that's the finest breast I've ever seen,” he whispered.

“Thank you.” She stood and curtsied and they both smiled. After that moment he was pretty much incoherent.

Two days later at the small funeral at the canyon's mouth Sarah strewed Tim's ashes on the rocks for the rain to wash away as he had requested. Tim had fashioned himself an agnostic (“I don't really know anything for sure except horses, cows, and dogs”) so there was no preacher, just a half dozen old cowboys, a few townspeople, Laverne, and Frank and Sarah. For lunch after the funeral on Tim's porch Sarah had made a ham-and-potato salad. The old cowboys drank whiskey and water with their lunch except for one who had taken the pledge. Two took off their hats and their foreheads were so white compared to their brown, wizened faces. Listening she learned that at one time Tim had been the best fistfighter in the county which didn't jibe with the gentle old man she had known.

The next two days she struggled to prepare her 4-H club vegetable display for the upcoming county fair and rodeo. She had burned up body and mind in her long vigil and felt generally out of contact except with the steering wheel of her truck. Her father was no help because he spent so much time on the phone with his ex-wife about whether or not to pull the plug on Brother who was now unconscious with his brain damage and severe pneumonia. Frank's ex-wife had been in AA for three years and had flipped back into booze with the injury to her son. Frank kept saying to Sarah that her half brother was a “vegetable” which made Sarah feel odd about her 4-H display exhibit.

Luckily she felt secure in her truck because when she got up past Lahren's ranch, normally the range of her world, she felt a little eerie outside her circumscribed Eden. Her father had joined a co-op of a half dozen other growers so that there would be far fewer trips to Great Falls, Helena, and Missoula with the members taking turns on the marketing chores. She mostly drove for two days, stopping now and then to sleep on a two-track leading into the mountains. Once a cowboy on horseback stopped to see if she was okay and Rover went crazy. He was fairly handsome but her senses were dead as a doornail. She even visited the regional high school up near the county seat. It was sprawling and modern, actually crummy-looking she thought, and it was hard to imagine attending it in a month or so. Rover, who was enjoying these drives because dogs are also susceptible to boredom, stared at the high school with incomprehension. Rover had seen nothing of the outside world what with Tim always leaving her behind to look after the cabin. On the way home Sarah stopped at the fairgrounds to watch them set up the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round. Men were practicing calf roping and people were pulling in with trailers. She absolutely counted on the fair and rodeo to lift her spirits.

Part II

Chapter 5

On the second and last night of the fair and rodeo the worst possible thing happened to Sarah short of fatal illness and death of which she was recently all too familiar.

She had been sleepwalking since the fair began and was angry at Lad during the “best-groomed horse” event because he misbehaved having developed a hatred for another horse. He was on a lead but advanced on the other horse with his ears laid back and clacking his teeth. It is not largely known that horses, like people, can develop instant hatreds. The judges asked her to get Lad out of the arena for which she needed the help of a cowboy, an embarrassment in itself. Winning the top blue ribbon for her vegetables helped though this was muted by the fact that the competition was dismal.

A good thing happened after the Lad mud bath when the cowboy who helped her said that Lad had probably been gelded late and thought he was still a fighting stud. She was still half in tears and eating a lukewarm hot dog when two girls approached. She had met the tall, rawboned girl with her father up at Tim's two years before. The short one was feisty and pissed off after winning third in the barrel racing. The girls knew that Sarah was coming to their regional high school in the fall and wanted to know if she wanted to join their hunting club. There were two girls now and Sarah would make three. They could hunt elk near Sarah's place and antelope five hours east near Forsyth where the tall girl, Marcia, had an uncle who owned a big ranch with plenty of antelope. Marcia herself had shot three since she was twelve and also a cow elk over near Lincoln. Sarah confessed that though she had gone hunting a dozen times with Tim she had yet to pull the trigger on an animal. Before doing so Tim wanted her to be able to fire five shots within a five-inch pattern at a hundred yards with either his .270 or .30-06. The girls agreed with this and said that there was plenty of time to practice before hunting season.

This meeting gave Sarah an expansive but brief relief from her sleepwalking mood which affects anyone who has experienced the recent death of a beloved. She had no one to turn to because her friend Priscilla was a pleasant nitwit and her father had emotional limitations. His own son was near death and he was flying back to South Carolina in a day but he couldn't say a single thing about Tim or Brother.

She put the irritable Lad away in the horse barn with hay and water but no oats. It occurred to her that Lad had misbehaved in part because he wasn't used to being around a crowd which only reminded her of her own stunted access to people. On the way to the 4-H heifer barn where the 4-H club camped out her mind flared in anger at the whole idea of homeschooling and that she had been a puppet of her parents' daffy ideas that though you had to live within the culture you could minimize the bad effects by staying as remote as possible. Now she found herself quite happy that Peppy had run off with the rich rancher because finally she could join the human race.

In the box stall she and Priscilla had as a camping spot Sarah lay down on her sleeping bag spread on fresh alfalfa which had a sweet, haunting odor. Priscilla had been sent home by their leader Mrs. Lahren to get some different clothes to replace her very short short-shorts. “Young woman, your ass flaps are sticking out!” she said and everyone laughed. Sarah was thinking that everyone touches each other and hugs but she had mostly just petted Rover. She slid a hand in Priscilla's pack feeling the usual condoms and then she reached what she wanted, a small rack of two-ounce shooters of Kahlúa. Sarah didn't care for whiskey or beer but she liked the coffee-chocolate flavor of Kahlúa. Priscilla would ride to the liquor store in the county seat with her mother when she restocked the village tavern. While Giselle was choosing stock Priscilla would go into the walk-in cooler with the geeky clerk who was in his midthirties and let him suck her breasts for a minute in exchange for a dozen Kahlúa shooters. When she heard the story Sarah had said, “You're so biological,” and Priscilla had answered, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Sarah lay splayed on her back listening to the Grateful Dead on her tape deck wondering how a tiny bottle of booze could make you feel that much better. She slept for two hours until dinnertime.

In a hall in the middle of the fairgrounds they had their annual beef barbecue. Outside there were a number of steer halves roasting on wood-fired grills. There were at least five hundred diners who drank beer and gorged on the meat. Whiskey was banned on the fairgrounds but most men carried their own bottles anyway. When dinner was over all the tables were pushed off to the side and a country band that had traveled over three hundred miles from Billings began setting up their equipment. Mrs. Lahren had insisted that Sarah do the warm-up for the band on an upright piano. Sarah had snuck off to the toilet to have another Kahlúa which she downed in a single gulp feeling her body suffused with warmth. Nearly all of the young people would have preferred a rock band but ranchers controlled the fair and at least Sarah's ragtime and boogie-woogie was a compromise. She didn't have to look to play and she exchanged glances with the country band fiddler who was plugging in amplifiers. Priscilla had told her all about the band. The fiddler who was big and mean-looking was in his twenties and hauled horses for his living with his partner, the bass player, because they couldn't quite make it as a full-time band. They had taken fifth place in calf roping that day and were too erratic to be really good. She also knew that the fiddler's name was Karl and he hailed originally from Meeteetse, Wyoming.

She played a half-hour set to everyone's delight until the end when she snuck in a little Mendelssohn and Karl moved forward and played along with her beautifully to her surprise. Afterward he bowed to her in mock lust or maybe it wasn't mock. She was jangled and exhausted and couldn't wait to get out of there to have her third wonder-working Kahlúa.

“How old are you, cutie?” Karl said grabbing her arm way too tight.

“I'm fifteen, sir.” She always called older men sir.

“Fifteen will get you twenty,” Karl laughed and turned away.

Sarah had heard this before and knew it meant that if a man fooled with a fifteen-year-old girl he could do prison time at Deer Lodge though this was less likely out in the country than in the city. She felt curiously flattered that someone might want her though nearly every man did but she wasn't conscious of it. It was different anyway from the day before when a hideous, dirty creep setting up the merry-go-round told her that he wanted to go down on her, an act she had heard about but did not yet comprehend.

After her drink in the dark and looking back at the yellow square of light made by the big open door of the dance hall she was overwhelmed by loneliness for Tim because the band was playing Bob Wills's “San Antonio Rose” which was Tim's favorite. She swallowed a sob and hurried to her campsite in the heifer barn, confused that the drink had made her forlorn rather than relaxed. Her bookish friend Terry had given her the novel Light in August and she had just begun the book but felt like the girl Lena standing on the side of the dirt road. She paused outside the barn to try to vomit up the last drink but couldn't do it. She got in her sleeping bag and slept the sleep of the dead. In the middle of the night for a moment she heard Priscilla on the other side of the box stall with a boy but drifted back to sleep remembering back in Findlay one summer day when Brother had taught her to roller-skate.

At first light she was up and had saddled Lad. Her intention was to school him after his naughtiness. On the way out of the fairgrounds she paused seeing Karl the fiddler sleeping facedown in the dirt under a cottonwood near a travel trailer. She wondered how someone could get so wiped out on whatever, likely a combination, that he would collapse facedown in the dirt unable to make himself comfortable as an ordinary pig would. Tim had told her that such people are unhappy in their skin which was simple enough.

She rode in new country which exhilarated her, even letting Lad chase a jackrabbit on a sagebrush flat, something he had learned from Rover. It was a deliriously cool early morning on a day that was to be hot and she was amazed at the way the weather could change the mood. She turned up a two-track that led into a forested mountainside listening to the profusion of birds. It was all perfect except for a slight ball of fuzz in her head so she got off Lad and led him up the mountainside to see if her exertion would pump out the remains of alcohol. She thought of the old gossip she had heard before they left Findlay how the police had found her father's first alcoholic wife naked in a public park at midnight with some teenage boys.

Her spirits were fairly high when she got back to the fairgrounds a couple hours later noting that Karl was still facedown under the cottonwood but his partner, the bass player, was drinking a morning beer on the trailer steps. This was the last day of the fair and they were breaking down the vegetable exhibits to avoid spoilage. Sarah gave her display to a woman who lived down the road near their home with her hired-hand husband and four children in a rickety pole barn.

She ran into her new acquaintances, Marcia and Noreen from the girls' hunting club, and the three of them drove over to a stream a few miles away and went swimming. Marcia had a boom box that worked off the cigarette lighter, a couple of six-packs on ice, and some baloney sandwiches, a regular Montana picnic. It was very hot and Sarah came off the wagon she had decided on that morning and kept up with the other two girls in the beer drinking. They sang along with Jagger's “Honky Tonk Women” while skinny-dipping. They finished the beer and went back to the fairgrounds where a local bluegrass band was playing. Sarah danced with a half dozen cowboys insistently pushing their hands off her bottom. She also had a few sips from whiskey bottles she didn't need. Karl showed up not completely revived from whatever he had done the night before, his eyes cold and glittery. He was an amazingly good dancer but they became tired and went over to her camp spot to rest with Priscilla and the bass player who she seemed not to like. Everyone else was outside in the gathering dark waiting for the fireworks. Karl got fresh and despite his size she was able to push him away. The bass player was in the dimly lit corner of the box stall making drinks from his shoulder satchel. Sarah said she only wanted water and he drew some from a corner faucet. They toasted the first of the fireworks glowing through the dirty window. Within a minute Sarah was floating down a black hole which in her unconscious delirium she thought of as one of the uncovered abandoned mines in the area. One of the nicknames of ketamine is actually “black hole.” Karl had gotten the drug from a veterinarian to help subdue rank horses for hauling. A minute quantity and you could fuck any resistant girl. He couldn't get a hard-on because of his drugs and alcohol but he thought a piece of ass is a piece of ass whatever happened. Going down is going down and is better than nothing. He actually chewed. He and the bass player made short work, as it were, then packed up and headed back to Billings.