Sleet: Selected Stories

It’s only when we’re left to ourselves that we can play for real, and then our clumsiness and stupidity just sort of drift away. There’s only one game small farm kids really play, and it helps us deal with pretty much anything and everything without giving in to tears. What we do is play at being grown-ups, and by doing that we sort of forget that we’re expected to be that way anyway. And so we walk and eat and swear just like them. It might not be so nice or proper, but it’s needful. And like all things of use, the sooner we master it the better. The way we play the game is to think of these needful ways not as coarse or hard but as beautiful. And it’s really easier than you might think, especially in the summer when the other kids don’t come around and draw attention to the freedom we lack. We can see them from the fields, of course, riding by on the road in the distance, free as birds on their bikes, or swimming down by the docks like fish flashing free in the river. To our relief it never occurs to them to seek us out and try us with their freedom. Not that they wouldn’t realize from the start just how pointless it would be to try and tempt a dismal crew like us anyway, us with no bikes to ride or money to spend, and dogged by guilt the moment our splintered, dirt-stained fingers let go of a rake.

Still, small farm kids like us aren’t as hobbled as those freer kids might think. We imagine ourselves free and by doing that we become what we imagine. When we rake the roadside embankments we aren’t just out to scrape together some meager piles of straw. No, we’re hunting snakes, the most poisonous breeds of India or Africa. And when we’re out mowing the rye, we hold our breath as we hear the sputtering of the harvester behind us, our hearts pounding harder and harder the closer it gets, like it’s some kind of great beast fast on our heels, fixing to devour us. The final round is always the most exciting one of all, when all the rats left in the field huddle together in the small square of uncut rye, fearing, as we well know, for their miserable lives. As we bind and shock the cut grain with our fingers getting bloody at the nails, in our minds the rats turn into larger and more ferocious beasts, terrible creatures of the dark forest wilds, roaring tigers or mountain lions. But the fantasies we get caught up in the most come later, as the hay swells and swells under our trampling feet in the murky loft, pushing us ever closer to the long and dangerous nails sticking down through the splintered roof bottom. From overhead comes the hay that we must stamp down to make room for more, but we pretend it’s water. Shipwrecked on a stormy sea, we can sense yet another wave about to break over us in the dark, wave after breaking wave. But we always manage to cling to our lives, invincible, if not in the world’s eyes, then at least in our own.

So this is how we small farm kids swap our lean lives for large ones, as heroes in our own private dramas. And why not? The tighter our belts or shackles, the more powerful our dreams are of other lives shaped by freedom and honor. There’s no reason to pity us as long as we can imagine these things. Not until our private dramas stop playing and the dreams lose their hold on us is there any reason to speak of pity. Not until we recognize ourselves for who we really are will pity be a needful thing. And then tears may be all we have left.

Of course, every now and then we can’t help really seeing ourselves for what we are. We hear it whispered back at us in the schoolhouse after October’s potato harvest illness. We sense it during the eternal lunch breaks, as we hide our crude cucumber sandwiches behind our backpacks, or as we trail the rumors from mouth to mouth that our homes are infested with lice. But these are things you meet and move beyond. In the free rein of the hayloft or the barn’s dark and liberating cubby holes, we almost manage to forget them altogether. But then comes a time when forgetting isn’t possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.