don’t use electricity, so the rest of us have to pay higher rates. They don’t follow the same school laws. They get special privileges when it comes to having outhouses. Hell, for ten years my neighbor tried to build a hunting shack, but they wouldn’t let him unless he put in a complete sewer system. They say crapping outdoors is part of their religion.”
Rusty rarely talked about anything, but this was one of the few issues he had well rehearsed. “Amish don’t believe in owning cars, but they sure like to ride around in them. They don’t believe in owning phones, but they sure like to use them. They don’t believe in medical insurance, but they run to the hospitals in every emergency. They don’t believe in owning power tools, but they sure like to borrow them.”
“Do they borrow your tools often, Rusty?”
“Not mine.”
“You’re a hard man,” said Rodney, “and I’d like to talk to you more, but I’ve got to check over this plywood before they unload it.”
“Suit yourself.”
Rusty returned to his dual-wheeled pickup and began the drive back to his farm. Well, it really wasn’t a farm anymore, he reminded himself. Two years ago he had sold the land to Charlie Drickle & Sons. All his equipment had been auctioned. Now he just owned the house, the barn, and four acres. Drickle had wanted the barn, too, but Rusty refused, even though it stood a long ways from the house. “I’ll build you a big garage,” Drickle said.
“Not the same thing,” said Rusty.
At home, Rusty went directly into the basement. He always changed clothes down there to keep the smell of the farm out of the rest of the house. There was a shower next to the washer and dryer. After stepping out of his city clothes, he put on a pair of forest-green coveralls that zipped up the front and exchanged his leather cowboy boots for insulated rubber.
It was the only place in the house where he smoked, and he squatted onto his old milking stool and lit a cigarette. His knees hurt. From above him came the sounds of Maxine and the vacuum cleaner. The humming and bumping gradually moved north. Running out of electric cord, she turned off the cleaner and returned south to retrieve the plug from the socket.
The telephone in the kitchen rang and her footsteps reversed, then stopped directly above him. Though he could not understand individual words, the fleeting sounds of occasional laughter led him to suspect the caller to be one of the girls, Maxine’s mother in Milwaukee or her sister in Chicago. About 90 percent, or more, of their calls could be traced to these sources. Rusty lit another cigarette as he listened to her pull a chair out from under the table and sit on it. Her voice lowered as she settled into the conversation, and the silences grew periodically longer as superficial greetings ended and more vital communication began to flow.
Rusty didn’t like talking on telephones. His circumstances had frequently made it unavoidable, yet he could not remember a time when he had ever agreeably dialed a number. And as he had so often demonstrated, it always proved easier to drive twenty miles to see if a store carried a desired item—or if it was open—than call. Holding a telephone against his ear had the same effect on him as entering a room filled with tourists in flowered shirts. He was not gregarious in that way. To be honest, he was not gregarious at all. His entire social capital had been invested, wisely and exhaustively, in Maxine. He hadn’t talked to his own brother or sisters in over fifty-five years. He so rarely thought about them that they seemed little more than characters in a mostly forgotten book.
Finishing his cigarette, Rusty groaned to his feet and climbed the cement stairs into the yard. He let the white bull terrier crossbreed out of her pen. The enormous dog limped through the wire gate, reminding him of her untreatable arthritis. Together they completed the long walk to the barn, which sat on the edge of a woodlot.
The building’s interior looked more like a museum than a barn. After selling the farm, Rusty had turned his attention to all the things he had promised to do whenever he found time. He oiled, repaired, and arranged all his tools. Then he made a pegboard to hang them from. Though he had resisted buying certain tools during his farming life—not wanting to spend money on things he would use only infrequently—he now purchased them to complete his collection. He built a new workbench, with oak drawers to sort the nuts, bolts, screws, washers, nails, clips, pins, wire and wire fasteners, insulators, brads, tacks, rivets, and other things he had accumulated over the years, labeled and arranged according to size. He painted his vise. He painted his gasoline and oil cans and set them along the wall. He painted two metal storage barrels and put them at the end of the bench. He painted a wooden sign and hung it on the pegboard: TOOLS. He painted the doors and window frames. By the time he had finished, the inside of the barn looked like a Walt Disney production.
He backed the Oldsmobile out, drove it up to the house, parked it next to the water spigot, and began hosing off the dust and road dirt. On Wednesday nights Maxine volunteered in the library, and she often took Leslie Weedle, the librarian, home afterwards.
Keeping vehicles clean seemed important. Cars and trucks were extensions of the home and reflected their owner’s character. Like ragged clothes, a dirty car said a number of things Rusty did not wish to be associated with. Though he didn’t give a nickel what any particular individual thought about him and even held most of his neighbors in near-contempt, the mass of all of them together—the community—had considerable weight.
He began to go over the Oldsmobile with a chamois cloth to eliminate water stains. Maxine came out of the house and stood beside him. “The library’s closed tonight,” she said. “Someone is waxing the main floors.”
“Won’t hurt to have the car clean,” said Rusty.
“No it won’t, Russell. Anyway, Margie called and it looks like Mother might be able to come with her. She talked with the doctor and called the airlines. She can take her walker on the plane.”
Rusty wrung out the chamois and wiped off the trunk.
“We’ll have to put Mother in the girls’ room,” she said, turned, and spoke again. “It’s been almost ten years since they were both here—clear back before the girls were out of high school.”
Rusty finished with the trunk and continued until all the water streaks had been removed. Then he rewound the hose and drove the Oldsmobile back into the barn. He stood beside the workbench and lit a cigarette. He didn’t know what to do. He had to find someone to work on the house. Maxine was beginning to panic. At this point she could contain herself, but she wouldn’t last long. He should have found someone to do the repairs early in the summer, but he’d put it off. The bitter fact that he couldn’t do the work himself had made everything else easier to ignore.
He checked the oil in his lawn-mowing tractor, took a deep breath, and climbed stiffly onto the seat. With a turn of the key, he was out of the barn and moving along the fruit trees like an insect perched on a noisy green leaf, the giant old dog ambling alongside as well as she could.
While he had been farming, their yard could be mowed in fifteen minutes with a push mower. After he retired, the mowing area gradually expanded until it now took three hours. The mower deck beneath him chewed into the thick damp grass and sprayed cuttings onto the blacktop road halfway to the centerline. The roaring and churning sound was punctuated at odd intervals by an occasional ping from a piece of gravel coming into contact with the whirling blades.
He made two passes along the orchard, and a white pickup stopped on the shoulder of the road, maybe twenty yards away. A man climbed out. From this distance, without his glasses, Rusty couldn’t be sure he knew him, but with both of them moving toward each other he soon recognized July Montgomery, a Jersey farmer
