Modern American Memoirs

Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online
Authors: Annie Dillard
little human box in its way, moan and mourn under the eaves and through the screens.
    The homestead, though it was a stead of sorts, was never a home. There was only a handful of real homes on either side of the Line. Most houses were like ours, shacks made to be camped in during the crop season; and some were like Pete and Emil, never meant to be lived in at all, but only to satisfy the law’s requirement. (The grass grows more sweetly on Pete and Emil than on our place, for during their simple-minded effort to cheat the government out of title to 320 acres their owners plowed no prairie, imported no weeds, started no dust bowl.) Those of us who really tried to farm lived on the prairie as summerers, exact opposites of the métis winterers who knew that country first, and anyone who tries to farmthere now will still be a summerer. Nobody, quite apart from the question of school, wants to risk six hard lonely months thirty or forty miles from fuel, supplies, medical care, and human company.
    As agriculturists we were not inventive. We used the methods and the machinery that were said to be right, and planted the crops and the varieties advised by rumor or the Better Farming Train. At least once, tradition did well by us. Because my parents had brought from Dakota the notion that flax is the best crop in a newly broken field, we endowed our prairie briefly, in 1916, with twenty acres of bluebells. I remember the pleasure their beauty brought us all; that was a green and rainy summer, and the sight of lush grass and wildflowers and the blue wave of flax persuaded us for a little while that we did indeed live in the Garden of the World. But I remember them also for the evidence they give me now of how uneventful and lonesome the homestead must have been for two boys who had read everything in the shack ten times, had studied the Sears Roebuck catalog into shreds, had trapped gophers in increasing circles out from the house until the gopher population was down to bare survivors, had stoned to death the one badger they caught in a gopher trap, had lost in a big night windstorm their three captive weasels and two burrowing owls, and had played to boredom every two-man game they knew. We couldn’t even take our .22’s and go killing things, for we had no money for cartridges, not even shorts, not even the despised BB’s.
    To keep us from our interminable squabbling, my father said we could reap as our own crop all the flax that had grown up too close to the pasture fence for machinery. We cut our flax with butcher knives and threshed it by beating it against the inside of a washtub. It took half an hour to realize a cupful, but we kept at it until we had filled two flour sacks. It brought us, as I recall, about four dollars—memorable money. But I have a more lasting souvenir of that piece of bored laboriousness. Cutting at flax stalks with my knife, I slammed my hand into a cactus clump and drove a spine clear through my middle finger. There was no pulling it out, for it was broken off at the skin, and so I waited for it to fester out. It never did. It is there in the X-rays yet, a needle of authentic calcified Saskatchewan, as much a part of me as the bones between which it wedged itself.
    When he first broke sod, my father took pride in plowing a furrow six inches deep, as straight as a string, and nearly a mile long. He started at our pasture fence, plowed straight south to the Line, turned east, plowed a few rods along the border, and turned north again to our fence, enclosing a long narrow field that in a demonic burst of non-stop work he plowed and disked and harrowed and planted to Red Fife wheat.
    It was like putting money on a horse and watching him take the lead at the first turn and go on pulling away to the finish. That first summer, 1915, the wheat came up in thin rows—a miracle, really, considering that we ourselves had done it, and in so short a time. Rains came every few days, and were

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