The Farm

By Rick Bass

Rick Bass is the author of 22 books, and his stories have won the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize. Here he turns his attention to his birthplace, Texas. In “The Farm,” he tells a story of his mother, his children, and the link to a place that binds them all.

It was still the end-of-winter at our home in northern Montana, but down in south Texas, in April, at my father’s farm, it was full-bore spring. It was a joy to me to realize that Lowry, just-turnedthree, would now have the colors and sights of this place lodged in at least her subconscious, and that Mary Katherine, just-turned-six, was old enough to begin doing some serious remembering. Some children of course hold on to odd-shaped bits and pieces of memory from a much earlier age—but around the age of six and seven, nearly everything can be retained—or at least that was how it worked for me, when I was a child.

We had flown to Austin, rented a car, visited my brother, and then had driven down into the brush country and toward the live oaks and dunes that lay in braided twists some 50 miles inland, to the farm. As we drove, Elizabeth and I talked and watched the late-day sunlight stretch across the green fields; the girls slept, tired from their travels, in the back seat. Angels. So much joy do they bring me that sometimes I wonder if, since my mother is not here to love and know them, I’ll carry also her share, having inherited prematurely her share of that joy. For a fact, this joy seems too large. I think maybe that that is what is happening, sometimes, at certain moments. I glance at them, and love them fully and deeply, but then a second wave or wash comes in over that one, as if she is watching them over my shoulder, and I feel it again.

It used to give me a bittersweet feeling, but now I’m not sure what the word for it is. Gratitude, sometimes: to the girls, of course, but also to my mother.

They woke when we stopped to open the gate. We drove through and closed the gate behind us, and because we could not wait, we parked the car there and decided to walk instead of drive the rest of the way to the farmhouse. We walked in the late-day light, the last light, down the white sandy winding road, beneath the moss-hung limbs of the enormous live oaks—trees that were 500 and 600 years old. It’s so strange, the way there will be certain stretches of time, certain moments, where for a little while it will feel exactly as if I am walking in her every footstep: as if I am her, in that moment, set back in time— and enjoying that moment as I know she must have enjoyed it, or one like it, 30 or 40 years ago. And I wonder, is it just this way for me, or do others experience such feelings, such moments?

Buttercups, winecups, and black-eyed Susans; before we had taken 10 steps, Lowry and Mary Katherine both had picked double-fistful bouquets, and had braided flowers in their hair. Another 10 steps took us across the culvert that ran beneath the road.

There was water standing in the culvert and in receding little oxbows on either side of the road, and as we approached, 10,000 little frogs went splashing into that muddy water. “Frog alert, frog alert!” we cried, and ran down to mud’s edge to try to catch one, but there were too many, springing zigzag in too many directions; you couldn’t focus, and couldn’t chase just one, because their paths were crisscrossing so. There were so many frogs in the air at any one time that occasionally they would have midair collisions; they were ricocheting off each other. The mud around the shoreline of their fast-disappearing pond glistened, so fast was the water evaporating, and the mud was hieroglyphed with the handprints of what might have been armies of raccoons, though also it could have been the maddened pacings of one very unsuccessful raccoon.

We finally caught one of the little frogs, and examined it: the gray brown back that was so much the color of the mud, and the pearl-white underbelly. I wondered why, when frogs sunned themselves, they didn’t stretch out and lie on their backs, the way humans do at the beach. I guess they would get eaten. I guess if a frog had a mud-brown belly it could lie on its back, camouflaged to the birds above, and still be able to listen for the approach of terrestrial predators, but I guess also there’s no real evolutionary advantage to a frog being able to warm its belly in the sun. Though for that matter the same could be said of us.

Into the farmhouse she loved so much—she had lived in it, and loved it, for only a few years before she fell ill, but had loved it so fully in that time that I still cannot step into it without feeling that remnant love of- place. And it is thin substitute for her absence, but with the exception of my own blood in my veins, and memories, it is all there is, and I am grateful for it, place.

From the book, Home Land: Ranching and a West That Works; Johnson Books 2007.

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