The Rural Life (22 page)

But as autumn advances, the woods will open up again. The deep shade, which seemed so unfamiliar when it first returned in
late spring, will dissipate. Antiseptic sunlight will again reach the waterlogged earth beneath the great stands of oak and
maple. Even as daylight slackens week by week, the turning, yellowing leaves will reflect more light in wavelengths with a
warm, inviting cast. As the leaves cover the ground, the floor of the deciduous forest will begin to throw light upward toward
the sky. The landscape will seem to decrease in volume because the woods are bare.

What all of this means is that the catbird will be leaving soon. It’s lived in the green shade beside a rotting porch all
summer long. I glimpse it only now and then—a slender gray bird wearing a black skullcap, scratching among the lower branches
along the edge of the woods. When it calls, it doesn’t sound like a cat meowing. It sounds like an imitation of a cat meowing,
like a squirrel throwing its voice in order to puzzle a dog. But when it sings, the catbird distills shadows into music, the
way the nightingale does in English poetry. There’s a faintly mechanical quality to its song, as though the notes were produced
by small bells or the operation of intricate machinery. When the woods open up and there’s no shade left to hide it, the catbird
will go. Summer will finally have come to an end.

T
he farmers I buy hay from said it wasn’t frost the other morning. I saw them walking across high, rocky ground, beyond a barbed-wire
fence and an old truck body, driving heifers from one pasture into another. Each man carried an old, smooth stick with a wide
crook in the end. The older farmer walked as though he hated cattle—would like for just one morning to sleep in and not have
to wonder what spooked the cows through the fence during the night. He was hunched, sore from what might be Lyme disease or
what he calls “sugar”—meaning diabetes—or just lingering stiffness from the ribs he broke when he fell from a hay wagon in
June. He looked cold, as if the frost had gotten into him.

Except that it wasn’t frost, just heavy dew. The roof on that dairy barn had turned white, and on my deck at home the wood
was grease-slick. But the thermometer had only read thirty-six degrees overnight. All the cold air had slid downhill into
a basin of fog. From my place I could see its limbs, and from the hillside where those two farmers work, I could see the body
of the fog slowly dissolving down in the hollow on what would turn out to be a bright fall day, the first day that truly felt
like fall. Where moths had tented the tree limbs along the road, it looked as though the fog had torn off in rough shreds
as it shouldered downhill toward town.

I had driven across the valley at seven-thirty and up onto the skyline farm for a load of hay, the fifth or sixth in a week
of fourteen-mile round trips for hay. We’ll stack eight hundred bales in our barn by the time we’re done, and the pickup holds
fifty-two bales. Sometimes both farmers stack hay in the truck, and sometimes I take the place of one and climb onto the hay
wagon and toss bales down. The running gear creaks as I work my way, kneeling, across the top row of bales. I can smell the
smoke from the woodstove that burns year-round in the milk room across the barnyard. The emergency-services radio in the coveralls
of one of the farmers scratches out an unintelligible phrase from time to time. How an actual emergency sounds is hard to
tell. Perhaps the pitch is higher or the unintelligible words run closer together.

At home I ease an orange hay elevator onto the stack in the pickup. It starts with a whine that never lets up, kicking loose
hay into the air, throwing dust into the sunlight. The bales catch on the chain-teeth and shudder upward at an angle into
the darkness of the mow, where my wife’s hands and my father’s hands catch them. The horses stand by the barnyard gate and
watch philosophically, deeply satisfied with the proceedings. The barn dog lies by the horse trailer and watches too. His
house is filled with last year’s hay, swept down from the mow when we began stacking a few days ago. We’re all bone tired.
Real frost will come tonight, and it will bring down the garden, which was doing a good job of bringing itself down already.
We should stack wood or lift tomato cages or till ground for next year’s garlic. Instead we’ll sit in the autumn sunshine
and enjoy being bone tired, harvesting our fatigue.

T
he weather has been unseasonably hot in central Iowa, and farmers who are used to worrying about getting crops out of the
fields before the weather turns wintry are harvesting with the air-conditioning turned up full in the cabs of their combines.
The Midwest is never more beautiful than at this season, even though the air is dull with humidity. The ditches have ripened
into pale ocherous colors, shades of russet intermixed, and in the fields where soybeans have already been harvested, the
stubble lies slicked back like an old man’s crew cut. The corn hasn’t stood in shocks for sixty years and more, but even as
it stands—still in rows, dry, skeletal ruins of the plant it was in mid-August—it suggests cool weather, sharp nights, and
the plumage of that most autumnal bird, the pheasant.

Because of the dry, warm weather, harvest is running ahead of schedule, and the fields are full of machinery. All-devouring
combines run down the rows cutting twenty-foot swaths well into the night, moving across the landscape in the darkness, their
lights suggesting earthgoing yachts or mobile oil refineries. Grain wagons pull alongside, offloading beans or corn from the
combines’ hoppers. In the stubble rows, trucks with red boxes wait to be loaded, and then one after another they make their
way to grain elevators and storage bins, where grain dryers work ceaselessly. The local news programs report uneven crop maturity,
and when they’re asked, farmers say they hope for a freeze.

It’s a laborious landscape, and that’s part of its beauty. But even as farmers stare ahead at the rows of uncut corn in the
headlights, their minds are on the grain glut, which has dropped prices below the cost of production, and on the decline in
the value of farmland. The fields are enormous, the yields are remarkable, the machinery is gargantuan, and so is the level
of agricultural debt. The margin on which the enterprise operates this year is nearly nonexistent, which is why, as farmers
watch the harvest progress, their minds are also on Washington, where year after year Democrats and Republicans debate the
terms of relief.

O
ne day last spring the fire in the kitchen woodstove went out and was never relit. I didn’t record the date, because some
endings are lost in a crowd of beginnings, passing unnoticed until months later, when the oversight seems almost melancholy.
So I note here the first fire of the new season: October 4, thermometer lodged in the midforties, a chill in the bones of
the house, rain falling hard through dwindling yellow hickory leaves. When the kindling caught the first dry log—a length
of honey locust—in its flames, the stove called all the dogs. They sprawled across the warm tiles, mouths agape. Not a half
hour had ticked away, and there we were, back on the night before the fire went out for the last time last spring.

A kind of accounting has been going on here for the past few weeks, how many pounds of honey gathered, how many bales of hay
laid up in the loft, how many cords of wood stacked and under cover. This is such an ancestral satisfaction—the antithesis
of the city’s constant abundance—that it feels almost embarrassing to acknowledge it, the sign of the hayseed. The manure
pile, steaming in the cool drizzle, looks like simple wealth, and so do the hickory nuts that crack beneath my feet as I walk
to the barn and the milkweed pods that crowd against the fence line, ready to burst. The mice are fattening up in the woodshed.
There’s a fine crop of horsehair coming in on the mares and the gelding. It will go to make bird nests in spring.

In April what you see are your own intentions. In October you see their unexpected wreck and fulfillment. All summer potato
vines spread across a corner of the garden. But when I lifted a plant, hoping to rob new potatoes, I saw that the vines, every
one, had rotted right at the soil. Meanwhile two peach trees—planted vainly, I thought, by previous owners—blossomed heavily
and set fruit. When September came, the peaches turned as red as the Virginia creeper is turning now. I finally picked one,
just to savor my doubts. But it was the very promise of a peach. A garden is so full of cheap sermons.

I
found myself Monday on a stretch of rural highway in eastern Colorado at the time of morning when round bales lying in the
hay fields look like cattle grazing, and vice versa. I was driving toward the sunrise, which was still only a premonition
in the distance. The horizon in that direction was a long, low ridgeline dotted either with trees that resembled a band of
clouds or clouds that had rooted themselves with stems to earth or possibly very large sheep moving single file with a grim
and stately purpose.

Over the ridge and into the next swale rode the pickup, and there I saw a small corral with four horses, all of them looking
intently—wishfully, I suspect—at the kitchen light that had just been switched on in a dark ranch house across the barnyard.
On a fence post near the road sat a bulbous red-tailed hawk. The rising light caught in his eye, and to me he looked dour,
hungry for a diet less rich in rodents, a palate-cleansing carrot perhaps or a plate of watercress.

I’ve always loved the crescendo Monday brings, but I’ve always thought of it in strictly urban terms. By the time darkness
has begun to wear away on a New York Monday morning, the city has rumbled to life, shaking off Sunday like a distant childhood.
Soon the streets are filled with people, some of whom look as though their coattails had caught in the city’s gears and dragged
them headlong from their beds. Millions of weekday morning habits iterate themselves anew, yet even the familiarity of it
all seems somehow fresh.

But in deep country, near, say, Last Chance, Colorado, the week evolves more slowly. Monday’s chores look much like Sunday’s.
The headlong rush to get kids off to school is no different on the Colorado plains than anywhere else. But once the school
bus has come and gone, once the high school kids have driven themselves off to class in a neighboring town, silence falls
over the highway again. The low angle of the sun seems to give every object it strikes a higher profile. Its light throws
the long shadow of a pickup and horse trailer into the far ditch, where the driver waves to himself.