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Debra Marquart The Farmer’s Daughter: A Revision |
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A traveling salesman is driving alone
late at night. He loses his way on a back road and
knocks on a farmer’s
door. He asks for a place to sleep… —Opening Lines to all Farmer’s
Daughter Jokes She waits, as all farmer’s daughters must, in her bedroom at the top of the wooden staircase, along the balustrade, down the creaky hallway to the right. The light from her window glows golden through lace curtains and spreads like a beacon across the tilled fields, the thick black furrows and hundreds of acres belonging only to the farmer that roll in waves around the farmhouse. It’s important to know that the farmer’s daughter is beautiful, that her beauty is like the sound of one hand clapping, not in the forest, but in a cornfield or a wheat field where she goes during the lonely days to spin in the ripeness, oblivious to her beauty, which is the same oblivious corn-fed beauty and the same oblivious wheat field her mother spun in. The traveling salesman is out there in the darkness, driving lost along the section lines, his product samples shuddering in the back seat with each washboard rut. He squints and downshifts. He rubs the windshield with the ragged sleeve of his suit coat and drives on, road-weary and blind, going deeper into this dark, rural night. This must be the middle of nowhere, the traveling salesman thinks, the place of alien corn where the locals are friendly but suspicious, where the pitchforks are menacing. His maps lie unconsulted and twisted in fat folds at his feet. Across many miles and states, his product samples—hybrid corn or aluminum siding, wire brushes or miraculous cleaning solutions—shift and sway, bristle and slosh in the back seat behind him. One thing about the traveling salesman—he’s good at neither travel nor sales. He never displays the products or demonstrates them to anyone. They ride in the back of the Buick like closely-held government secrets. He inherited this job from his father who was retiring after thirty years of service, who was talkative and back-slapping, a natural salesman. This traveling salesman, the son, is reticent and inward, a shy homebody. Down the gravel road and to the left, the farmer sits inside the farmhouse at his kitchen table where all farmers must sit at the end of the day. He wears a clean white t-shirt and overalls. The bronze osh-kosh buckles shine on his thick chest. The chores are finished, the cows are milked, the straw is spread. Most likely he is busy now, reloading the shotgun shells he has emptied while shooting clay pigeons or chasing vermin from the yard. Whatever dares to enter the farmer’s yard—fox, skunk, traveling salesmen—could come to know the experienced end of the farmer’s shotgun. Maybe. Maybe not. His neck is red and leathery from driving the tractor all day in the sun, but he is no redneck. He has many fertile, rolling acres to defend; he must remain vigilant. A cone of light shines over his bent head as he sits at the kitchen table weighing gunpowder on a scale, packing the wad of buckshot into the spent hulls. The small rounded BBs run down a funnel into the long, empty cartridge. He packs the shot tighter with his blunt thumb, then places the cartridge in the reloader which compresses the wad and crimps the ends. When finished, he lines up the shotgun shells, brass caps down, on the kitchen table. They gather in neat rows like soldiers or like corn rows or like grain silos. The farmer is a farmer, after all; he must arrange things in rows. Outside, a calm, green evening unfolds. The spring air is crisp and cool with a dewy edge. The vapor light buzzes to life, shining a megaphone of brightness onto the farmyard. Moths and mosquitoes and fireflies circle and rise, driven toward the sudden light. Upstairs in her bedroom, the farmer’s daughter reclines on her four-poster bed reading a book, her head propped against a pillow. Her long hair spreads silky as a spider web around her. For the record, she is not busty or pig-tailed or wearing a tight checkered cotton shirt cross-tied at the navel. She lies on the bed, fresh from a shower wearing an oversized t-shirt, her long legs crossed. As she reads, she bobs a delicate foot—her only sign of impatience. The knock on the farmer’s front door, when it comes, is not expected nor a surprise. It is neither too loud nor too soft. It is just right. The farmer rises from his chair and turns on the porch light. Through the window he sees the young face of the traveling salesman—the wavy brown hair, the gaunt features, the dark worried eyes. “Sorry to bother you so late,”
the salesman says when the door opens, his hat brim shifting in his large
hands. The salesman glances into the lighted kitchen, sees the neat row of
shotgun shells lined up on the table. He notices the polished “I’m driving and I’m lost,” the traveling salesman says to the farmer, swallowing hard, finding the words almost against his will. “And I’m wondering if I could trouble you for a place to sleep?” The farmer wonders, could this be his traveling salesman? He notes the height of the boy—almost six feet—and the solid width of his shoulders, although thin under his dark suit. The farmer knows this is his moment; everything depends on his answer. Should he say, We’re a little tight on space, since the hired hand’s sleeping in the spare room, as other farmers have said in the past? Should he offer to let the traveling salesman sleep in the barn? Not in this day and age. The farmer shifts in the doorway and considers. “You’ll have to share a room with my daughter,” he finally submits, understanding that this is the only answer a farmer can give in response to a traveling salesman’s request for a place to sleep. Then he adds, significantly, “But don’t you dare touch her.” Why is there never a farmer’s
wife in the story? Why never a farmer’s son? The failure to produce sons is
what drove the farmer’s wife finally away—all those scowls from her husband
in the pew on Sunday when the sermon turned to the subject of being fruitful
and multiplying the earth. She is now a waitress in The hired hand, Hans or Ole, is indeed upstairs in the spare bedroom, perhaps whittling a long stick into a sharp point or lying on his bed reading Popular Mechanics. He has large fumbling hands, and cowlicks, and a toothy guffaw that bursts out when nothing especially funny has been said. In the beginning, the farmer had designs for the hired hand—perhaps a conjugal union with his daughter—but that was before he realized that the boy is no good with animals and not remotely interested in things that grow; besides, the farmer’s daughter despises him. The hired hand is happiest when something on the farm breaks—when the baler stops twining, or the Oliver’s engine stalls in the middle of a field, or a plow disc shatters against a buried boulder. His enthusiasm at these moments infuriates the farmer, who only keeps the hired hand around now because he’s an ox with heavy loads and a genius with equipment. The hired hand is saving money to attend auto mechanic school in the fall at the nearby community college, although the farmer does not know this. The farmer’s daughter hears the traveling salesman coming through the house a long way off—his small leather suitcase bumping against the balusters, the footsteps creaking slowly along the dark upstairs hallway. She rises, leaving her book open, face-down, on the bed. She knows she only has a few minutes. She switches off the overhead
light and clicks on the blacklight. The room goes
dark, then a buzzing violet phosphorescence rises in
the room. Ghostly letters emerge from posters on the wall announcing rock
concerts she has not been able to attend— She turns to face her record collection stacked tall in milk crates along the wall. She thumbs through and finds the album she wants—Physical Graffiti. She twirls the vinyl between her fingers, centers the record on the turntable, and searches for track six. The needle settles with a scratch into the groove just as she hears the first timid knock. “Come in,” she sings. She plops
down on her bed and picks up her book. From the speakers, the guitars crunch
out the ascending chord progression. Oh
let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreams. The door
creaks open. The traveling salesman fills the doorway—worn black suit, long
arms, shabby leather suitcase. I am a
traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been. “Don’t tell me,” the farmer’s daughter says at the first sight of the traveling salesman. “Lost on a country road.” She punches up the pillows behind her head. “Needed a place to sleep.” She thumbs through the pages of her book—Heidegger’s Being and Time—trying to recall the last part she read, something about the mystery and arbitrariness of where and what and whom one is born. “Yes, I’m afraid so,” the traveling salesman says with resignation, “that’s exactly what happened.” He moves into the dark room and drops his suitcase. The bedroom is made small by his height. He takes off his jacket. The wide shoulders of his white shirt glow in the black light. As he bends to click open the latches of his suitcase, the farmer’s daughter cranes her neck to see the shape and size of the salesman’s hands, to note the way his fingers negotiate surfaces. The farmer’s daughter has a thing about hands—she could never love a man unless she first loved his hands. “Well, okay,” she concedes, seeing enough. She pats the empty side of the bed. “I guess we’re in this together.” The farmer’s daughter leans over and opens a small drawer by her bedside table. From it, she draws out a baggie containing many long, robust twists of green-gold marijuana buds with auburn filaments shot through them. “No sense in making it hard on each other,” she says. The traveling salesman stares, incredulous, at the farmer’s daughter. “You can get that stuff out here?” He means to say, in the middle of nowhere, but stops himself. He removes his shoes and drops them with a loud thump on the wood floor. In the room below, the farmer, lying in bed reading True Crime mysteries, takes note of this sound. The farmer’s daughter pulls two
zigzags from the slim white pack and licks a gluey edge. She affixes it to
the other zigzag with her forefinger and fans the paper in the air. “For your
information,” she says, bunching the weed in the paper crease and rolling up
the joint in one quick swipe, “there’s more than hard “But don’t you dare tell my father.” She smiles sideways at the traveling salesman and flicks her lighter. The joint’s tip flares in the black light. She inhales deep, bringing the cherry to a bright glow, then, holding her breath, hands the joint to the traveling salesman. He takes it between his fingers, brings the paper to his lips, and inhales deeply. The farmer’s daughter exhales, a blue smoke filling the space between them. The sweet, musty odor of pot fills the room. At that moment, there’s a loud knock on the bedroom door. It’s a knock made by a big hairy-knuckled fist attached to a big beefy arm. The traveling salesman glances at the farmer’s daughter in alarm. He rises to his feet, the smoldering roach between his fingers. Another knock comes. The door shakes on its hinges. “I’m okay,” the farmer’s daughter yells impatiently in the direction of the closed door. The hired hand barks through the door frame, “I’m supposed to keep an eye out for anything funny.” It’s the hired hand’s only spoken line and his one assigned task—to watch for signs of hanky-panky. “Nothing funny going on here,” the farmer’s daughter answers. She rolls her eyes at the traveling salesman. The hired hand listens at the doorway for a moment, then retreats down the hallway to his room. He heard electric guitar music, he will report to the farmer in the morning. He believes he smelled incense. “I thought he’d never leave,” she says when the hired hand’s footsteps disappear. She turns and switches off the blacklight. Small bits of moonlight filter through the curtain replacing the darkness. “Now where were we?” the farmer’s daughter says, pulling the traveling salesman closer. She reaches for his face, begins to trace his worn and furrowed brow, the tired hollows of his eyes. “There, there,” she says. She brings her lips to his cheek, tastes the oily softness of his skin. “There, there,” she says in the darkness, her hands mapping his sinewy curves and ridges, which unravel and let loose their exhaustion as her fingers travel over them.
The hours that follow are a tangle of sheets and limbs, of shifts, adjustments, and accommodations. To her surprise and her delight, she finds he follows simple instructions very well—Yes, There, No, Higher, Harder, Don’t stop, etc.—and he never tires of being told what to do. She decides to always value this in a man. Toward morning, they settle
into a rolling, dozing peacefulness. Between sleep and waking, they speak
quietly of their disappointed fathers. She tells him she yearns to go to “Do you know how to work a stick shift?” she asks. He props himself up on his elbow and chuckles, thinking it’s some kind of kinky farmer’s daughter sex talk. “Been driving tractors since I was eight,” he says. She smiles widely, her back turned to him in the darkness. In the earliest light of morning, the farmer’s daughter slips out from under the traveling salesman’s arm and gets dressed in the half light. She goes down the hallway to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. As she flosses, her beautiful corn-fed reflection stares back at her in the mirror. The farmer and the hired hand,
she knows, are already in the barn milking cows. On her way back to her
bedroom, she sees the Inside she finds the traveling salesman sleeping peacefully, the bed sheet pulled up around his waist. She lingers over him for a moment observing the softness of his features in sleep—his olive skin, his full lips, his delicate well-shaped ears. He is, she thinks, adorable in the early light; even his small drool on the pillow almost breaks her heart. She resists the urge to crawl back into bed with him, to feel the warmth of his skin, the weight of his arm circled around her. She turns to her closet and retrieves her purse. She will take only a change of underwear and her small dial of pills. She finds the traveling salesman’s suit coat draped over the back of the chair just where he left it. The ring of keys is in the right hand pocket. Tiptoeing along the creaky hallway and down the wooden staircase, the farmer’s daughter takes care not to wake the traveling salesman, who is actually awake, who has been awake since earliest light listening to the first morning call of birds. As the door closes, he rolls on his back, stretches his long legs out before him, and props his hands behind his head. Through the open window, he hears the cranky spark of the Buick’s ignition. The crunch of tires follows as he hears the farmer’s daughter circle the gravel driveway. The traveling salesman smiles to himself, thinking that perhaps today, for all his trouble—the theft of the Buick, the irreplaceable loss of his product samples—the farmer will take him skeet shooting. In the car, the girl turns right at the section line and bears down on the accelerator, leaving a long plume of dust in her wake. If she looked back now she would see the long winding driveway and a white farmhouse surrounded by neat outbuildings and tall cottonwoods that seem to stretch to the sky. If she looked back now, she would see her father in the doorway of the white barn, his hand raised to her in neither a fist nor a wave. And so agriculture sustains itself and is sustained. Section lines weave and criss-cross at every turning. Traveling salesmen must be lost before they can be found. Hired hands secretly wish to be mechanics. Shotguns are loaded and propped against doorways but are rarely fired. Farmers do not mean to be so possessive; they’re just punctuated that way. And farmer’s daughters must struggle against the powerful apostrophes of their fathers. They must drive away some early spring morning, hands planted firmly on the wheel, convinced they will never look back. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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