That day fell at the end of the haying weather. As it got late in the morning, they could hear dull blasts of thunder. A wind rose in the neighborhood, but there was none to speak of in the field. Kasiak trailed after him a rich blend of citronella and vinegar, and both men were plagued with flies. They did not let the chance of a storm change the pace of their scything. It was as if there were some significance, hidden, surely, to them, in completing that field. Then the wet wind climbed the hill behind them, and Paul, taking one hand off the snath, straightened his back. While they had been working, clouds had blackened the sky from the horizon to above his head, so he was given the illusion of a country divided evenly between the lights of catastrophe and repose. The shade of the storm was traveling as rapidly up the field as a man walks, but the hay it had not touched was yellow, and there was no portent of the storm in the delicate sky ahead of him or in the clouds there or in anything he could see except the green wood, whose color the storm had begun to deepen. Then he felt against his skin a coldness that belonged to no part of that day, and heard at his back the rain begin to drop through the trees.
Paul ran for the woods. Kasiak followed slowly, with the storm at his heels. They sat beside each other on stones in the shelter of the dense foliage, watching the moving curtain of rain. Kasiak took off his hat—for the first time that summer to Paul’s knowledge. His hair and forehead were gray. Ruddiness began oh his high cheekbones and shaded down to a dark brown that spread from his jaw to his neck.
“How much will you charge me for using your horse to cultivate the garden?” Paul asked.
“Four dollars.” Kasiak didn’t raise his voice, and Paul couldn’t hear him above the noise the rain made crashing into the field.
“How much?”
“Four dollars.”
“Let’s try it tomorrow morning if it’s clear. Shall we?”
“You’ll have to do it early. It’s too hot for her in the afternoon.”
“Six o’clock.”
“You want to get up that early?” Kasiak smiled at his gibe at the Hollis family and their disorderly habits. Lightning tipped the woods, so close to them that they could smell the galvanic discharge, and a second later there was an explosion of thunder that sounded as if it had destroyed the county. The front of the storm passed then, the wind died down, and the shower fell around them with the dogged gloom of an autumn rain.
“Have you heard from your family recently, Kasiak?” Paul asked.
“For two years—not for two years.”
“Would you like to go back?”
“Yes, yes.” There was an intent light in his face. “On my father’s farm, there are some big fields. My brothers are still there. I would like to go there in an airplane. I would land the airplane in these big fields, and they would all come running to see who it was and they would see it was me.”
“You don’t like it here, do you?”
“It’s a capitalist country.”
“Why did you come, then?”
“I don’t know. I think over there they made me work too hard. Over there, we cut the rye at night, when there is some moisture in the air. They put me to work in the fields when I was twelve years old. We get up at three in the morning to cut the rye. My hands are all bleeding, and swollen so I can’t sleep. My father beat me like a convict. In Russia, they used to beat convicts. He beat me with a whip for horses until my back was bleeding.” Kasiak felt his back, as if the welts still bled. “After that, I decided to go away. I waited six years. That’s why I came, I guess—they set me to work in the fields too soon.”
“When are you going to have your revolution, Kasiak?”
“When the capitalists make another war.”
“What’s going to happen to me, Kasiak? What’s going to happen to people like me?”
“It depends. If you work on a farm or in a factory, I guess it will be all right. They’ll only get rid of useless people.”
“All right, Kasiak,” Paul said heartily, “I’ll work for you,” and he slapped the farmer on the back. He frowned at the rain. “I guess I’ll go down and get some lunch,” he said. “We won’t be able to scythe any more today, will we?” He ran down the wet field to the barn. Kasiak followed him a few minutes later, but he did not run. He entered the barn and began to repair a cold frame, as if the thunderstorm fitted precisely into his scheme of things.
BEFORE DINNER that night, Paul’s sister Ellen drank too much. She was late coming to the table, and when Paul went into the pantry for a spoon, he found her there, drinking out of the silver cocktail shaker. Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten. Ellen was a heavy-featured woman who held her strong blue eyes at a squint. She had had her second divorce that spring. She had wrapped a bright scarf around her head for dinner that night and put on an old dress she had found in one of the attic trunks, and, reminded by her faded clothes of a simpler time of life, she talked uninterruptedly about the past and, particularly, about Father—Father this and Father that. The shabby dress and her reminiscent mood made Paul impatient, and it seemed to him that a vast crack had appeared magically in Ellen’s heart the night Father died.
A northwest wind had driven the thundershower out of the county and left in the air a poignant chill, and when they went out on the piazza after dinner to watch the sun go down, there were a hundred clouds in the west—clouds of gold, clouds of silver, clouds like bone and tinder and filth under the bed. “It’s so good for me to be up here,” Ellen said. “It does so much for me.” She sat on the rail against the light, and Paul couldn’t see her face. “I can’t find Father’s binoculars,” she went on, “and his golf clubs have disappeared.” From the open window of the children’s room, Paul heard his daughter singing, “How many miles is it to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can we get there by candlelight? …” Immense tenderness and contentment fell to him with her voice from the open window.
It was so good for them all, as Ellen said; it did so much for them. It was a phrase Paul had heard spoken on that piazza since his memory had become retentive. Ellen was the mote on that perfect evening. There was something wrong, some half-known evil in her worship of the bucolic scene—some measure of her inadequacy and, he supposed, of his.
“Let’s have a brandy,” Ellen said. They went into the house to drink. In the living room, there was a lot of talk about what they would have—brandy, mint, Cointreau, Scotch. Paul went into the kitchen and put glasses and bottles on a tray. The screen door was shaken by something—the wind, he guessed, until the thumping was repeated and he saw Kasiak standing in the dark. He would offer him a drink. He would settle him in the wing chair and play out that charade of equality between vacationist and hired man that is one of the principal illusions of the leafy months. “Here’s something you ought to read,” Kasiak said, before Paul could speak, and he passed him a newspaper clipping. Paul recognized the typeface of the Communist paper that was mailed to Kasiak from Indiana. LUXURY LIVING WEAKENS U.S. was the headline, and the story described with traitorous joy the hardy and purposeful soldiers of Russia. Paul’s face got warm in anger at Kasiak and at the uprush of chauvinism he felt. “Is that all you want?” His voice broke dryly. Kasiak nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at six,” Paul said, master to hired man, and he hooked the screen door and turned his back.
Paul liked to think that his patience with the man was inexhaustible—for, after all, Kasiak not only believed in Bakunin, he believed that stones grow and that thunder curdles milk. In his dealings with Kasiak, he had unconsciously sacrificed some independence, and in order to get to the garden at six the next morning, he got up at five. He made himself some breakfast, and at half past five he heard the rattle of a cart on the road. The puerile race of virtue and industry had begun. Paul was in the garden when Kasiak brought the cart into view. Kasiak was disappointed.