The Good Daughters (4 page)

A Long Line

F
OR ALL THE
generations of the family I grew up in—ten of them, by the time I came along—it was having a son to carry on the farm that mattered most, and so, for a Plank, the birth of nothing but daughters, one after the other, had to have been a cruel disappointment on at least one level. But my father never treated the fact of our gender as anything besides a marvel. He spoke of us as “my girls,” and it always seemed, when he did, that he took a particular pride in the fact of having fathered such a brood. If he ever allowed himself to imagine the son he didn’t have, he never let us know.

But there remained a question nobody spoke of, though we all knew it was there: what would happen to the farm when he was no longer able to tend the land? Who would carry on, after?

I was never so young that I didn’t know what it meant to be a Plank—that we were marching at the end of a long line dating back a few hundred years with the responsibility to tend our land well and turn it over to the next generation. The people would come and go. It was the farm that endured, and in our family and the world at large, it was believed this was a man’s job.

Nobody ever doubted that my father loved us all, but it had not been a natural idea for him to share his work with a girl child. With my older sisters, there seemed no interest on their part to know our father’s world of the barn and the fields, but I longed to be with him. Not so much for love of farming, perhaps, as for the love of him. And perhaps because by the time I came along, he’d given up on fathering a son, he acquiesced to my joining him for his morning chores.

I had to wake before dawn if I wanted to accompany him out to the barn, his workday began so early. Those mornings I’d jump out of bed and pull on my pants and shirt, step into my Keds without even lacing them, and scurry down the stairs just as he set his coffee mug down and headed out the door with our dog, Sadie, close behind. He might greet me, might not. My father inhabited another world when he had milking and crops on his mind.

I usually trudged a few steps behind him. I had a hard time keeping up, his stride was so long, but it was important to get to the barn when he did, so I could slip in with him. The door, on its heavy iron hinges, was way too heavy for me to open by myself, but he held it open for me, as long as I didn’t lollygag.

Entering the barn, I’d be hit with the aroma of the manure and the fragrant hay up in the loft, where my father had put up a swing for my sisters and me. Hanging on the wall were the worn leather harnesses and collars our old workhorses used to wear. They’d been retired back when I was very little, but my father always said they deserved to live out their days in the home they started out in and the pastures they knew.

First off we headed to the feed supplies. This would be when my father might at last look up at me and nod. “You want to lend a hand here, Ruthie?” he said.

One by one then, we fed the animals—my father up ahead, and me, his eager helper following behind. Wordlessly, my father forked the silage into a wheelbarrow, then worked his way down the rows, making sure every cow got her share. I followed along, trying to whistle the way he did. I’d use my hoe to gather up the manure and then scrape it into the gutter, which ran the length of the barn, where we collected it.

As I worked I loved to think about how connected everything was on our farm—that the hay and silage our cows were munching had been grown here on our land, and that the manure the cows would create, from eating it, would ripen and be returned to that same land come spring, to fertilize the soil and start the process all over again.

While the cows were eating my father did the milking. My job: filling a bucket with a mix of water and disinfectant for wiping down the udders of each of our four cows—two Guernseys, two Holsteins—to keep them healthy. And sometimes, if I finished before my father, I climbed up into the prized Model T Ford he kept in the barn, and sat behind the steering wheel, pretending to drive.

My father said we didn’t need a fancy milking setup. The old-fashioned way was good enough. He’d lower his long frame onto a three-legged stool, with his forehead leaned against the cow’s flank and his fingers rhythmically working the teats, with a bucket below to catch the warm stream of milk and our old barn cat, Susan, waiting expectantly for her share. Her reward, my father said, for keeping the mouse population in check.

After we finished in the barn, we headed out to the truck and began our rounds of the farm. From his silence, you would have thought he didn’t even know I was there, except he’d never start the ignition until I’d climbed up beside him and Sadie, on the seat of his old Dodge truck. On the dashboard he kept his farm log, in which he recorded every day’s observations of rainfall and weather conditions and planting data—with comments like “Poor resistance to bottom rot. Plant in drier ground next time” or “Too much leaf, not enough yield. Don’t use again.”

We made our stops like milkmen—checking in on the cabbages in one field, the carrots next, to see what rows needed weeding or thinning that day, and what crops were ready for harvest. My father always kept a bucket of clippers and knives on the floor for cutting broccoli or cabbage or lettuce when they were ready. Sometimes I’d munch on a carrot he pulled for me as we worked.

We hardly ever talked on those mornings, or if we did, it was just a few words. Mostly he worked in silence, or whistled. But I loved those times with
my father, when I had him all to myself. I waited for the end of his long workday to come, when we’d head to the irrigation pond and take a swim—my father in his shorts, me in my underwear, our two pairs of shoes (his heavy boots and my Keds) lined up along the shore, side by side.

My sisters never liked the water, but I was a fish, he said. So he taught me how to hold my breath underwater, and do the crawl, and then, the summer I turned seven or eight, how to dive off the big granite boulder at the far end of the pond. He said I had the build of a diver, meaning the same build as him.

After, we’d head up to the house for dinner with the family. My mother must have noticed our wet hair, but she never made a comment, though I sensed a certain edge of disapproval. She was afraid of the water and kept her distance from the pond, same as my sisters did. Swimming belonged to my father and me alone. The irrigation pond was our spot and ours only.

Windowsill Garden

W
ALKING HOME FROM
school, sometimes, I’d study other kids with their dads and wonder what it would be like to have a father like that. Mine, when he was home, seemed more like a lodger than a member of our family. He’d turn up in between what he referred to as his business trips, wearing some fancy shirt and, if his latest project had taken him to some warmer climate, a tan. For my brother, George’s greeting was a slap on the back of the kind businessmen or fraternity brothers might give one another. Though even as a kid, Ray was never the backslapping type.

For me there was a kiss on the cheek, or he’d pat my head as if I were a puppy. He brought me hotel soaps and shower caps, and once, a shirt with rhinestones on the front that said
I LEFT IT IN LAS VEGAS
. I often wondered, did he know me at all? How could he, and think I’d wear that shirt?

With Val, George seemed to adopt a kind of sharp and bitter humor lacking anything that passed for affection. They’d disappear into the bedroom shortly after his return from one or another of those trips, but I never saw them kiss, and when he spoke of her, it was usually to make fun of something—her
poor housekeeping skills, her hopeless cooking, how much money she spent on paint.

I was too young to understand, but there was always an edge in his voice that left me anxious. “Your mom find any new boyfriends while I was away?” he’d ask. Or once, to my brother, he said, “Take a piece of advice from me, buddy. You’re better off with an ugly woman. Those are the ones you can count on to stay out of trouble.”

Val never said anything when he made these comments. None of us did. At times like this my brother could be counted on to head off on his unicycle, or pull his harmonica out of his pocket and start blowing on it. Val disappeared into whatever space she’d set up for herself to do her artwork. My father usually headed out for a beer. He no longer gave any indication of working on his novel.

As for me, I went to the library and checked out a new biography of some inspirational figure—Nellie Bly, reporter; Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad. I tended my windowsill avocado plants and concocted interesting combinations of organic materials—coffee grounds, crumbled-up eggshells, and old vegetable peels put through our juicer—to use as fertilizer. I conducted experiments with bean sprouts and bread mold. I dreamed I was living in the country somewhere, raising chickens and living off the land, with no people around to mess things up.

Staying Within the Lines

T
HINGS WERE NEVER
easy with my mother, but I adored my dad. My father alone, of all the people in our family, seemed to appreciate me, even if he didn’t always understand what was going on in my head. Where my mother remained distant and dismissive, my father offered nothing but love. Stern as he could be if I’d neglected my chores in the barn, or there was mold on the blueberry bushes I was supposed to be looking after, he seemed only delighted by all the ways in which I revealed myself as different from the others.

“My beanpole,” he called me. “After all these years of tending corn, someone up there must’ve thought I should have a daughter with hair the color of corn silk.”

“I didn’t get a son,” he said. “But I got an artist.”

All those years growing up, I had felt my mother’s coolness toward me. She was never an easily affectionate person. But where her quiet, contained expressions of affection for the other girls came naturally—if not in abundance—with me, she always seemed to have been following directions, going through the motions of brushing my hair or kissing my cheek, in the same dili
gent manner with which she would go through the steps for canning tomatoes correctly in the pressure cooker or making pickles. There was always, in her behavior toward me, a sense that she was having to remind herself “Don’t leave Ruth out.” Her touch had a mechanical quality. Her words of encouragement, a script.

She’d compliment Esther or Naomi on a paper they brought home from school, or tape up a drawing they’d made—then, as if following a checklist, add, “What about you, Ruth? Show me what you did today.” Worst of all was when she hugged me. Her lips on my cheek felt dry and frozen. I imagined that she must be counting the seconds before dropping her arms from that stiff embrace. One one thousand, two one thousand. Then, abruptly, release. A relief to us both.

I’d show her my drawings, of course, that being what I did best. I loved art class, and hungered for access to oil pastels and paints, and things like glue and glitter, markers and construction paper and silver foil, that we never had around. At our house, the same box of Crayolas had remained on the shelf for as long as I could remember. Jumbo, but so old now that all the best colors—like purple and orange, pink, bright yellow, crimson—were used up or worn down to the nub.

I asked my mother once if we could get a new box. “They wouldn’t get used up so quickly if you didn’t press down so hard,” she said. “And anyway, there’s plenty left.” Meaning brown, gray, beige. In my mother’s book, colors were interchangeable.

And oddly, though I was always the one who loved to draw, my mother demonstrated a strong preference for the pictures my sisters brought to her. Winnie’s specialty was coloring books, where she, better than any of the rest of us, had mastered the ability to stay within the lines. Naomi had become particularly skillful at copying
Peanuts
characters.

“We should send this in to the newspaper,” she said one time when Naomi brought her a likeness of Charlie Brown standing in front of the doghouse, with Snoopy on top.

“It’s a copy,” I said, but only to myself. Why would the newspaper want to publish my sister’s drawing, when they already had the real cartoons?

My own pictures were full of made-up images that I worked on out in our barn, in the hayloft—fantasy figures, beautiful girls in dresses fancier, even, than the outfits of Dana Dickerson’s Barbie. It was one of the many things I liked about drawing, the way—on paper—you could dream up anything you wanted, your only limitations those of your imagination, which in my case meant no limits at all.

It was viewed as a problem in our family—this fantasy life of mine, and my capacity to think up stories and scenarios. To my mother, this kind of activity suggested a deceitful character, and a susceptibility to the temptations of impure thought. All the stories we needed were right there in the Bible. Why go further?

But in my bed I did. I lay there sometimes, with my sister Esther asleep across from me and Winnie on the bunk above—and thought up characters and situations they’d find themselves in.

Sometimes I acted them out, but only in my head. I imagined an orphan girl who works on a farm, weeding strawberries until one day a woman pulls up and sees her there. First she buys all the strawberries. Then, as the girl is carrying the flats of ripe berries out to her limousine, the woman asks, “Where do you live?”

“Over there,” says the orphan girl, pointing to the barn, where she sleeps next to the cows on a hard pallet her cruel employer has given her, with only a scratchy horsehair blanket for cold nights.

“I’m taking you away with me,” the woman says.

“What about my clothes?” the girl asks, meaning a few rags and a pillow-case with holes for her head and arms that the cruel farmer’s wife has given her.

“Never mind those,” the woman says, stroking the girl’s head and pressing her tight against the soft white fur of her cloak. “We’ll buy you everything you need when you come to live with me in Hollywood.”

Of course the woman turns out to be a movie star. The two of them make
a movie together, in which the orphan girl, whose name is Rose, plays the star’s beloved daughter. She’s famous now. Off-screen, Rose is adopted by the beautiful movie star.

One day the cruel farmers go to the movies.

“That pretty little girl up on the screen looks familiar,” the farmer’s wife says to the farmer.

“Oh my God, it’s Rose,” he tells her. “If only we’d treated her better. Now it’s too late.”

Later I’d tell myself a different kind of story. I did this at night still—or times at the farm, when I’d be driving the tractor or hoeing the tomatoes. Around age twelve—at about the age my mother sent the Dickersons that mortifying announcement of my recent entry into womanhood, with little in the way of additional explanation for me concerning this development besides the information that I’d better be careful now, and my sisters would answer my questions if I had any—I started including a new set of characters in my stories.

These were boys around the age of the ones my father tended to hire to help out in the summer, but handsomer. Not Victor Patucci, though he was always around. Victor had acne—from all that hair cream I figured—and instead of calling our cows by their real names, he referred to them by the names of
Playboy
centerfolds, whose pictures I found when I was up in the loft one day, in a secret stash he’d evidently tucked behind some hay bales. The kind of boys I liked were more along the lines of Bob Dylan, whose album—with a soulful picture of him walking down a street in New York City with his beautiful long-haired girlfriend—I played on Sarah and Naomi’s record player as much as my sisters allowed me. I kept this to myself, but the harmonica parts always made me think of Ray Dickerson.

Sometimes I dreamed of Bob Dylan. Sometimes Ray. Where my old stories featured shopping trips for dresses and rooms with four-poster beds, the pictures that filled my head now showed these boys taking my clothes off, though I never could picture how it would be if they’d taken off their own. In one, Bob Dylan was brushing my hair. Then he was kissing me. Then his hands were
touching my breasts, and I was touching them, too, as I thought about this. Then lower. The place my mother did not ever talk about, except to say that babies came from there.

Not just babies.

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY
father had brought home a book called
Harold and the Purple Crayon
. My mother never had much use for children’s stories, but my dad used to take me to the town library—rainy days, when there was no way to work in the fields and nothing much was going on in our greenhouse that couldn’t wait till tomorrow.

In this book, the boy named Harold gets a magic crayon and starts drawing things with it, and as he does, the lines he makes come to life, so when he draws an apple, he can actually eat it, and when he draws a rocket ship, he rides on it to space.

The message was clear to me: a person who can draw can do anything, go anywhere. This was the kind of person I wanted to be, and the fact that my father recognized that well enough to pick out that book for me was what I loved about him. One of the things.

I also believed my father—my father, alone—recognized and felt pride in my artistic talent. When we needed a sign for the farm stand (
FIRST PEAS! SPRING ONIONS! PLEASE DON’T PEEL THE CORN! WE PROMISE THERE’S NO WORMS!
), I was the one given the job of making it. When our dog, Sadie, died, he asked me to paint a picture to remember her by.

My father hardly ever took a day off work, besides those car trips every February to wherever the Dickersons lived at the time, and every now and then down to where the state agricultural school was, if some pest was giving him trouble and he needed advice, or soil testing. These were rare times my father set aside his Dickies overalls and put on his brown pants and regular shoes. He’d make an appointment to visit the lab, and when we walked in, carrying our soil samples, or a Tupperware container with a pinch of leaf mold or a fungus that
was worrying him, or a new strain of potato bug, one of the professors would analyze the situation.

My sisters never came along on those trips, and I loved it that I got him all to myself then—sitting next to him on the bench seat of our old Dodge truck listening to the radio, or just the sound of him whistling, or talking about things in a way that never happened when my mother was around. Stories from the old days, when he was growing up on the farm. The time he spent a whole summer cultivating a pumpkin with the hope of winning first prize in a 4-H competition at the fall harvest fair, and then the night before the competition, a hailstorm had destroyed it. A trip he made to New York City—home of Greenwich Village, home of Dylan!—with his grandfather to the 1939 World’s Fair.

The war, and my father’s obligation to run the family farm, had ended my father’s plans for a college education. He wanted that for me.

Meanwhile, he loved visiting the agriculture professors, and talking with them about issues on the farm. They had the book learning, he had the field experience. “If we could just get together on this stuff,” he said, “there’s no telling what us farmers could grow.”

I loved those days, just my father and me, traipsing over the university campus, carrying our soil specimens and plant samples. After we were done talking with some professor there, my father took me over to the experimental barns where they bred the cattle. They had this one bull there, a new breed they’d been developing, though still in the experimental phase. I asked my father what he meant by that.

“This is a prize bull,” my father told me. “Back home we breed cows the old-fashioned way, but here at the university the students extract the semen from him and inject it into cows they’ve selected for the purpose of improving the breed. Eventually, they hope they’ll come up with a whole new breed, created right here in the state of New Hampshire.”

We were standing outside this bull’s pen at the time. The sign on the front of his stall said his name was Rocky. He was the biggest bull I’d ever seen, though the fact that he’d been confined within such a small space, and he looked
so angry about that, no doubt contributed to the sense you got looking at him that this bull was enormous. I got the feeling he might at any moment break right through the bars and stomp on us, but I felt safe, because I was holding my father’s hand, and I always felt safe when he was there.

I asked him how they got the semen. If I’d known better what it was, I might have felt embarrassed but I didn’t. He would never have talked about these things if my mother was around, but when it was just the two of us, as it often was, my father loosened up considerably.

“One of the things I love about being a farmer,” he said, “is having the opportunity to put together totally different genetic strains and come up with a whole new breed of living thing. Could be a cow. Could be a watermelon. That’s how it is when a man and a woman get together too. You mix up the bloodlines and come up with the best of both, if you’re lucky. Like I did with you.”

Later that night, the bull entered my dreams. He was stomping his huge hoof in the sawdust of his pen, and his eyes were red, and there was drool coming out his flaring nostrils. He was scary, but something about him was exciting too.

When I came down to breakfast the next morning, my mother was at the stove, as usual, making the oatmeal. My sisters were already at their places.

“Did you and your father have a nice time at the university?” she said.

“Yup,” I said. “Very educational.”