The Frustrations of a Silly Farmer

There are “good” farmers and there are “bad” farmers. There are efficient producers and inefficient producers. There are handsome ranchers and there are ugly ranchers. On occasion one can even point out a wealthy grain grower and contrast him with one of tightened circumstances. Rarely however, search as you will, can there be found a truly silly farmer. This is a story of one of that spare breed. Sure, everyone breaks clods, but did you ever do it with your forehead?
To begin with, Merle came from the city. Strike one. His most profound thought about earth was that it got you dirty despite all precautions. Strike two. Strike three, the ignorance of the fact that man, weather and land are not always compatible, could have been the telling blow, but Merle was not one to run away should some odd misfortune settle down on his fields or farmyard. For this fellow, this Merle Tugley, was above all else, silly. He knew you needn’t wet down your brother-in-law before you turned him into a 5×7 shed but he was willing to try any interesting method.
There was the day he spanked the tractor. It broke down in mid-row and, livid Merle wanted to put it over his knee but knew that that would be a crushing burden. Instead he thrashed it with his bare hands right where it sat, spitting vituperatives downwind. He melded this dramatic tragedy into a type of domestic romance by forthwith marching back and slugging the plow several times.
The following summer, on a Thursday, Merle and his wife, Winnie, were sharing a plate of sweet gophers when Lochinvar, the teenaged moose the Tugleys called their oldest son burst in the door carrying the boar which he used for weightlifting practice. For an instant Merle considered removing the cheese he had rubbed on his mandolin but refrained and sat calmly waiting for the breathless Lochinvar to explain himself.
“There’s a guy at the gate who wants to see the farmer, I guess that would be you,” said Lochinvar pointing at his father. The heir-apparent then stepped into the pantry and began opening a can of asparagus with his teeth.
Merle trudged out to the gate, stopping once along the way to adjust his eyebrows and asked the stranger, “In what way may I be of assistance?”
“I’d like to see your calves.”
Merle sighed. “You’re the third one this week. All right, come along.”
He led the stranger to the barn and they entered whereupon Merle seated himself and then pulled up his pant-legs.
“Well, there they are. Fine pair of calves for this far north the agrologist says.”
The stranger hesitated and then knelt and examined Merle’s calves. He chuckled slightly and then looking Merle full in the face said huskily, “Victorian. Your thighs are probably Tudor. Goodbye.”
“Bloodsucker,” thought Merle as he strode back to the house.
One day Merle was out at the woodpile splitting infinitives with his dictionary for the winter supply when Winnie came rushing up to him, wiping her wet hands on the collie. She moaned, saying. “Your aunt is keeping that groundhog in her hair again. You must talk to her. I can’t stand the chirping and you know I’ve always been mistrustful of a woman who feeds her coiffure.”
“It was you,” Merle intones, “who stopped her from picking rocks. You know that’s always been her hobby.”
“I stopped her, and you agreed at the time, because one night her hernia bounced off our bedroom wall and struck my collection of ornamental muskrats. Smithereens.” The troubled woman threw up her hands at this memory and struck a subsidized magpie that was flapping by.
“All right, I’ll talk to her but first give me a smooch.” Winnie closed her eyes, lurched forward and planted her lips on her husband’s open left eye. He reared back, pawing his face while Winnie turned and went back to the house. Merle was accustomed to this. He remembered several instances of poor aim (not all of them uncomfortable). Once, when Winnie was particularly amorous she lunged at him and with a subsequent crash kissed an Armenian in the adjoining unit of the motel in which they were staying.
Clarissa, the Tugley’s twelve year old daughter, could be a trial. She wanted to become a nurse and to this end would often rise at 3 a.m. and, while Merle and Winnie slept, bandage her father so completely that when he awoke in the morning he would, half dozing, think he had either entered nirvana or that his muscles had been removed during the night. She went to school all week and then on Saturday mornings explained logical positivism to her family who offered her tiny arguments in favor of the relativistic morality of stunning your MP with a two-by-four. She considered everyone other than her girlfriends Lou and Miss Libberull, the teacher, to be cretinous oafs who have trouble perceiving even the evident fact that horses are next to godliness.
Clarissa enjoyed sponging the pigs and could watch for hours as Merle pumped money into the machinery. She and her father would go for long walks where he would point out to her the difference between a weed and a shaft of grain (“the weed is like a little muscle-man,” Merle would say, his teeth gritted) or they would observe the wildlife happily until a black or brown bear approached them dragging a scarred attaché case and requesting with gestures the Merle sit down and discuss his life insurance needs.
One fine fall morning Merle was out harvesting when Winnie gave birth to Albert, the Tugley’s youngest. He remembered that he discerned the “pop” all the way from the house while he was steering the combine and almost drove it into the side of the old kosher restaurant that sat noisily in the middle of his best wheat field. Merle rushed back to the house to find Winnie and the baby arguing over what the tiny Albert would have for supper.
Now, at five years of age, Albert still argued over his diet. He most enjoyed dallying about the yard, eating dirt, bark, insects and other assorted delicacies, his mother not far behind slapping his hands and dredging his mouth of this and that. His parents didn’t know it but Albert could have digested northwest Manitoba if given the chance. His mother dreamed that some day her little man would grow up to be a writer, perhaps becoming the editor of the county weekly. Albert had not such ambitions but wouldn’t have minded explaining to anyone his recipe for beetles-in-mud.
Merle could have found a good hired hand. Instead he took on Manny; “Not short for Manfred,” Manny told Merle one day, “but for ‘Man-do-I-feel-good,’ ” the hippie hired hand explained. When there was work to be done you could always count on Manny. He would be either out in the fields picking weird mushrooms or in his room above the garage reading some novel with his eyes closed. He slept a good deal and was known to have once become splendidly recumbent on the buffet table for the entire weekend of a Protestant Businessman’s Retreat when he worked as a waiter in the city. He enjoyed sniffing gasoline fumes and could walk right out of his overalls when called to dinner. Every year he threw his back out at harvest time and then threw his front out in the spring. He threw his top out when there was fencing to be done and then his bottom when asked to paint the barn. Finally Merle would throw him all out. He came back each time claiming he had forgotten his feet.
Merle was almost always an optimist. One day Harold Swuggert stopped by wanting to boot somebody in the head and instead, just for the fun of it, told Merle that a plague of locusts was expected. Merle studied a moment and then said, “Well maybe they won’t be hungry. Besides, Albert could eat them.” He read Bottleby’s prognosis one year and decided to plant eucalyptus trees. Winnie marveled at the way Merle could mash sugar beets under his arms when the crusher broke down. He massaged the cattle regularly and was finally able to throw Lochinvar a distance of at least seventeen feet. He heralded the birth of piglets by facing the sun an giggling thanks to the porcupine god, ending the dissertation by singing, “Swine you very much,” while he tossed his dentures high in the air.
Winnie, too, was happy with her life on the farm. She could now fillet a badger and was able to vacuum around the kittens when she cleaned up the barn. She loved to cook and her specialty was chickens stuffed with beef and a venison garnish, with ham on the side. She always made sure her family had enough to eat. She entertained thoughts of becoming a “new” woman and one day decided to take a course entitled “Micro-economics and the Desirability of Sewing Your Own Pantsuit,” but decided against it when Albert broke out in scarabs. She enjoyed the odd bit of lust and could always find a market for her needlework.
Merle and Winnie would sometimes go to the city for a little holiday and a couple of games of “For God’s Sake Look Out For That Car!” They would check into a hotel and order drinks from room service until Merle got slightly tanked when he would list for Winnie all of the Czars of Russia since 1247 A.D. They looked at each other in a different light during these excursions; Merle seeing a beautiful temptress and Whinny perceiving Merle as a leader of, at least, John Diefenbaker’s stature. They would slide into the hotel bed each night and wake up in the morning on the other side of the room. The farm was a distant oasis that nourished and nurtured and held close to itself everything precious to them, except for Lochinvar’s new Hi-fi.
Ah, farming. Is there a better life? Probably not. Except perhaps for the business of buying and selling exotic kitchen appliances.
-Merle Kissack