The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard [Maynard, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ruth

Road Trip

IT WAS HAYING season when my mother died, and maybe because of that, my father had little time to grieve for her, though he must have thought about her plenty, all those hours on the tractor moving in circles, mowing the fields.

We were experiencing a low-rain summer again, so he was occupied all that July moving the irrigation pipe. He still did a lot of that heavy work himself, though often now my sisters’ children helped out, along with his longtime worker, Victor Patucci—whose title was foreman now.

“Victor’s always after me to retire and let him run this place,” he said one night, coming in from the field after a particularly long day in which he’d stayed out, watering, until the last hours of sun were gone. “But there’s something about that fellow that rubs me the wrong way.”

As rough as things had been for my father ever since the barn burned down, he wouldn’t have known what to do in the Florida retirement community whose brochure Victor showed him one time, or on the senior citizens’ cruise to Bermuda. My father needed Victor, but he had never cottoned to Victor’s ideas concerning how our place should run. Maybe it was true that we’d boost efficiency and increase profits if we cut back on all the little specialty items we grew and gave up on growing things like zinnias and peas—crops he loved, that weren’t particularly profitable—to focus on volume and what Victor called “the entertainment factor” of the farm that could turn it into a real moneymaker.

But tending the land had never been just about making money for my father. Not even mostly about making money.

“If all we had to do was cultivate plants and we never had to worry about selling anything,” he sometimes said, “life would be perfect.”

But for Victor, the bottom line was profit. “He’s a bean counter, not a farmer,” my father said. “The only thing that fellow likes to see growing is his bank account.”

If my mother had been alive, she would have sat with him all those nights after work, working on a quilt while she listened to his reports on how the corn was looking and what kind of a tomato crop they might expect. As it was, the evenings must have been lonely for him. Even with my sisters and me dropping by when we could, bringing dinners over, he came in from the fields so late that he ate most of his meals alone.

Come fall, after the frost, he was restless. Once pumpkin season was done, there was little work remaining, and he’d take walks along the road, throwing sticks for his dog, Sam, or spend hours playing solitaire. My daughter, Elizabeth, used to stop by and play hearts with him, but she was busy with homework most nights now, and on weekends she visited her friends. The other grandchildren were no different.

“I wish those darned seed catalogs would get here,” he said, but it was only November. He

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