Beautiful Kate (24 page)

“Talk about Stinking
Joe
” she said, tossing her head.

“Have a good time with Alfalfa,” I told her. “I just did.”

It was a sorry joke, I know, and she justly ignored it.

As the two of them got into the car and drove off, I went around to the front porch, where Mother and Jason were proudly watching the departure. Mother in particular was ecstatic.

“I’m so happy about her now,” she was saying to Jason. “The way she’s turning out. She used to be—well, so
different
, I worried about her.”

“Yeah, now she’s only boring,” I said.

“That is not so, young man.”

Whenever my mother disapproved of me, even in childhood, I abruptly became a
young man
. It had always mystified me.

Jason asked me if I had finished with the west field and I told him that it was all down, fence post to fence post.

“We’ll bale it tomorrow,” I added.

“If it doesn’t rain.”

“Right.” I opened the screen door to go inside. But my mother was not finished with me.

“I do wish I knew what’s wrong between you three,” she said.

“There’s nothing wrong.”

“There is too. When you just run off the way you did. And when you and Cliff have a fist fight. You must think we’re blind, your father and I.”

“What could be wrong?” I said.

“That’s what I’m asking.”

Shrugging, all innocent confusion, I let the door close behind me. “Everything’s just fine,” I told her.

The next day was hot and sunny, with the result that Jason, on a rare foray out into the fields, pronounced the alfalfa ready for baling by midafternoon. Stinking Joe had the baler greased and ready to go, and normally I would simply have followed along after him with the second tractor and the lowboy wagon, getting down every hundred feet or so to load the bales onto the wagon myself. But because the west field was our largest and Jason did not want to risk leaving any hay on the ground overnight, he pressed Kate into service—over Mother’s objections, it should be noted. In former years Kate had always driven the hay-wagon tractor, often jumping down to help with the heavy work when we got behind. But this year Mother evidently was so taken with her daughter’s recent plunge into silly, helpless femininity that she tried to put her foot down: Kate was not to do farm work anymore. Apparently my mother feared that even a one-day reversion to the old ways might somehow become permanent and condemn the girl to a lifetime of being “different.”

As usual, however, it was Jason who prevailed, with the result that by two in the afternoon Kate was out in the sun with Stinking Joe and me. And though she stayed up on the tractor as it pulled the lowboy slowly through the field, her hair-do of the night before soon was wilting in the sweltering heat and a spine of dark sweat had begun to spread down the back of her chambray workshirt, all of which meant that she was looking better by the minute as far as I was concerned.

I don’t want to overdramatize the character of the work I did that day, and had been doing off and on for weeks, but the truth is that it was about as hard as work gets. Normally farmers exchange their labor or hire an entire crew to bring in the hay, with at least three “buckers” on the ground, picking up the bales and loading them onto the lowboy and then unloading them in the barn. But Jason never had much to do with our neighbors, which effectively precluded our exchanging labor with them. He also refused to hire anyone other than Stinking Joe, who resolutely believed that his only job was to
bale
the hay. And while Cliff in previous years had been able to help out, this summer he was simply too busy at the Eskimo to get away. So everything inevitably fell on my weary shoulders—which I could not really bitch about, I guess, since it was precisely what I had wanted and asked for.

Nevertheless the work was rarely easy. The temperature out in the sun often was over one hundred degrees and the air was usually soggy with humidity and full of nasty little bugs and bounding grasshoppers that pelted my bare torso like a biblical rain of toads. In a kind of trance I would hop up onto the tractor and pull the lowboy wagon a short distance ahead and then jump down again and start whipping my hay hook into one eighty-pound bale after another, swinging them up into the air and shoving them into place on the wagon, each time eating a heavy shower of dust and chaff as the stack grew higher. And yet I took a kind of mindless pleasure in it too, sometimes feeling as if I were nothing but muscle and bone, a lifting machine, as insensate and tireless as the tractor itself.

But this day Kate made all the difference, and not only because I no longer had to keep jumping up onto the tractor to move the wagon. More important was the difference she made in my head, in my constant awareness of her sitting up there on the old John Deere, turning every now and then to look back at me, to see whether she should speed up or slow down. I kept wondering what she was thinking, whether it was about me or about her date with Arthur the night before or about something entirely different. Somehow, just because she was working again, and sweating, letting her hair wilt back to its natural long blond straightness, I could not help feeling that her head might be undergoing a similar reversion to normality—or should I say to abnormality? In any case, I preferred to believe that if she was thinking about anybody, it was me, the great haybucker. Callow narcissist that I was, I even speculated on her reaction to the sight of my hard, brown torso shining with sweat in the brutal midday sun.

I realize now, writing these words, that all this must sound like a very strange attitude for one who thought he had put the past behind him and who was going to work hard and keep his nose clean and make sure that nothing ever happened again between him and his twin sister, no matter what she herself might do. And though I really can’t explain it, I am led to wonder if it wasn’t at times when my guard was down—when I was full of alcohol or half asleep or lost, as on that day, in a trance of physical labor—that I would let that lovely serpent of an idea come coiling out of my heart, to hold me in the sweet death-grip of a desire, a love, I often pretended did not exist.

Whatever the reason, when Mother came out to the field that afternoon with ham sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade, I was more than willing to take a break and sit down with Kate in the grassy shade of one of the fence row trees. Mother left almost immediately, saying that she had some pies in the oven—“And you know how fussy your father is about the crusts.” Stinking Joe meanwhile had stretched out under a tree of his own, where he could spit his tobacco juice in peace, away from Kate’s customary jibes.

So the two of us sat back alone in the cool shade and ate our sandwiches and drank the lemonade. When I lit a cigarette, she shook her head in mock sorrow.

“I see the track star has passed on. What comes next?”

“The haybucker,” I said. “I figure if I work hard, I can be one of the best.”

“No doubt.”

She had stretched out in the grass, with her eyes closed and a haystem in her mouth. In her jeans and sweaty workshirt and with her hair a golden tangle in the grass, she looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. I wanted to take her in my arms. I wanted to hit her with the hay hook.

“Well, how’d it go last night?” I asked. “The big date.”

“Boring. We went to the Lincoln and saw some lousy John Wayne western. The popcorn was all right, though.”

“How about Arthur?”

She smiled. “He’s good at opening doors.”

“Well, I’m happy for you both.”

She continued to lie there with her eyes closed and her mouth teasing the haystem. And I could see the tension coming into her face. She bit off the stem and blew it away. Finally she spoke.

“Why did you leave?”

“Why do you think, after what happened?”

She said nothing for a few moments. And finally she sat up, squinting as she stared out across the freshly mowed field, which shimmered in the heat.

“I try to understand,” she said. “But it isn’t easy. It doesn’t really make sense. I mean, it seemed so right that night. So easy. So—perfect.”

“Kate, we’re brother and sister, for God’s sake. We’re
twins
.”

“I know, I know. It’s unnatural and it’s wrong. I know all that.” She looked at me now. “But it didn’t
seem
wrong.”

“Well, it was. And it can’t happen again. Not ever.”

“I know that now. I knew it when you ran off.” And suddenly there was an edge to her voice. “I guess I thought you were different from the herd. Not so timid and conventional.”

All I could do was shake my head in amazement. “Jesus, Kate, don’t you have any idea what it would do to Mother and Jason—what it would do to all of us—if people found out? They’d probably put us in a madhouse somewhere.”

“Maybe I’m a monster,” she said. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you believe it.”

“I do not. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Well, if I am a monster, at least you know how it happened. You were there.”

“Kate, please. Let’s talk about something else. All that’s over and done, and the best thing we can do now is forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”

But she was not listening. “You were there. So you know.”

It was my turn then to lie back in the grass. I covered my eyes with a sweaty forearm and pretended deafness to the seductive drone of her voice. Incest was something she had read about, she said. But that was all. She had never thought of it in terms of the real world and certainly not in relation to me.

“Like I told you before—I knew that I was different and I wondered about it, why I couldn’t stand the thought of a boy—” She faltered for only a moment. “I wondered if I’d ever be normal. That’s what I was doing at the mirror when you broke in. I was just looking, and wondering.”

“The door was unlocked. I didn’t
break
in.”

“Anyway, when we fell on the bed that way and I was crying, I had no idea—what was—until you—”

“I know, Kate. I was there.”

“Well, later it dawned on me what it meant—that I had that kind of appeal for you. And that it was natural—”

“Kate, please.” I looked over at Stinking Joe sitting back against his tree, Caterpillar cap down over his eyes, and I wondered if he could hear her.

“It made me feel good,” she said. “Can you understand that? For a change, I didn’t feel like some kind of freak.”

It was then her voice broke, a cracking I felt in my own body, as if I were thin ice that she had stepped through. And when I saw the tears standing in her eyes, I grasped her by the arm. I had to fight to control my voice.

“Stop it, Kate. Don’t do this.”

But she would not stop. “Come to the pond tonight. Please come.”

Abruptly I was on my feet and calling to Stinking Joe.

“Come on, we can’t loaf all day!” I snapped. “There’s work to do!”

And I started back into the field, without even looking at my twin.

The rest of that afternoon and evening I worked like a Jap on amphetamine. Kate had left after our break, running most of the way back to the house. So it remained for me to get the rest of the hay bales out of the field and into the barn. Normally we would have winched them up into the mow, but that required at least two men, and Stinking Joe remained glued to the baler. So, having no other choice, I temporarily stacked the bales—almost six hundred of them—in the cow’s loafing shed, which was closed off for the summer. And when I was finished, I went into the house and wolfed the dinner Mother had waiting for me. I showered and dressed and drove the pickup into town, to Hogan’s bar, where I drank boilermakers until closing time at one o’clock. I talked the waitress, a blowzy thirtyish woman named Rita, into getting me a pint of bourbon, and when she hinted that she might want to share the whiskey with me, I invited her along. We parked in the forest preserve and drank and made futile attempts at sex and conversation, but I could sustain neither an erection nor any interest in what she said, and finally she fell asleep, muttering something about my being “a queer or worse.” At first light I drove her home and she got out without a word, saving all her resentment for the closing of the truck door, which she effected with such force that I thought the window would break. I went on home then and slunk into the house and down to my room like any other recidivist drunk, except that I quietly locked the door before dropping into bed. And I remember now the feeling of relief I had, lying there looking up at the beautiful dust-swarmed slab of sunlight running horizontally across the tiny room. It meant that I had made it through the night, without going near the pond.

Saying that he was feeling better, Jason got out of bed yesterday and let me help him down the stairs and into the kitchen. But the effort exhausted him and I practically had to carry him back to bed. His weakness alarmed me and as soon as I could, I left him and began making phone calls, trying to find a doctor who would come to the house. But all I got was a series of receptionists, each assuring me that her employer did not make house calls and that if my father was as sick as I said he was, then I should take him to a hospital. This was something I already knew of course, but at least now I felt I had some professional opinion backing me up, something with which to beat down Jason’s objections. But when I got back to his room, I found him propped up in bed waiting for me, his arms crossed and his jaw set. Even his breathing seemed stronger.