Kenny's Back. Victor J. Banis
any hesitation, like he had already thought all this out for himself. No doubt he had. “But I think I’ll stay around the house today, kind of get the feel of things again. It’s been a while.”
I nodded and started for the door. “Does Pete still work the fields?” he asked after me.
I was glad he had asked after the old man. I think that one question did more than anything else to restore Kenny to the spot he had always held in my affection, and I was even smiling when I looked back at him.
“Not anymore,” I said. “He looks after the equipment and does chores for Olsen. You’ll probably find him in the barn if you go looking for him.”
He seemed to understand the reason for my smile. He grinned back at me as though to say, “I want you to like me.” For a brief moment the years had fallen away from us.
“I’ll track him down later, maybe,” he said.
“He’ll want to talk with you. He must have a real store of yarns saved up by now.”
I guess it sounded like I was criticizing him for having been gone, or at least reminding him of the fact. His grin faded, and our moment went with it.
“See you later,” I finished lamely, and went out.
“See that you’re back for dinner,” Olsen called as the screen door banged shut after me.
I saw Pete myself, when I went to take the Jeep out of the barn. He was repairing a halter, and I found myself thinking that he must be repairing it for Kenny. We only had two horses now, Jezebel and Ladyship, and those two did little enough to earn their keep. No one rode them anymore and even if they had been suited for work, we had no need of them for that purpose. Jezebel could still be ridden, if she had a mind to let you, which was always in question, but Ladyship had a game leg, and it wouldn’t have been worth the risk to her. Kenny had always liked to ride, though, even if he hadn’t been very great at it, and he would probably be doing so, soon again. “I guess you’re glad to see Kenny back,” I said to Pete as I climbed into the Jeep and started it up.
If he was, he didn’t show it. I suppose he was still sore over the greeting he had gotten. He continued to work at the halter, squinting to make up for his bad eyesight. “Has he seen her yet?” he asked. I knew who he meant, of course.
“Not yet.” I backed out of the barn and turned the Jeep around in the yard. When I glanced up, Ingrid was standing at the window of her bedroom, staring out. She had been there the morning before, too. Then, she had been watching for Kenny to arrive. Now she was watching for…for what? I didn’t know, any more than I could explain my own mood of things “going to happen.”
There was that meeting, of course, between Kenny and his mother, and we were all waiting for that. But there was something more, something I couldn’t understand but was sure the others felt too. The prodigal son had come home, the fatted calf had had her day on the table, but the electric atmosphere that had built up was still charging the air about the place with tension.
Ingrid saw me and waved, and disappeared from the window, and I drove off toward the back fields. I was luckier than most, I suppose—certainly luckier than Kenny, who faced a day of waiting around the house for something that might not even happen. At least I could keep busy and lose myself in hard physical work, as I had been doing for five years. Farm hands and farm managers don’t as a rule need pills for their nerves, and today I was grateful for that fact.
The farm year was almost over for us, and the work nearly done. We had even had a frost earlier, a light one, before the weather turned hot. But I was too well acquainted with the fickle nature of our weather, to think that it would continue to favor us for long. We had started the fall work early, for no better reason than that Olsen had informed me one morning, while rubbing a bothersome elbow, that she felt cold weather coming, and I had learned long ago to trust her intuitions.
There was the winter planting yet to be done, and then the work would be light for the rest of the year. The farm encompassed more than two thousand acres, most of it in this one location, but with two smaller properties nearby as well. That was a big farm and a rich one, even by the standards of the area, which were high. That meant a lot of farming, especially in the spring and the fall, but we worked mostly summer crops and, with Pete and another man working regularly on the repairs and upkeep usually reserved for cold months, our winters were easy ones.
That had been a necessary schedule when I had been in school and there was no one to run the farm, and we had stuck with it since then. Others argued that the farm could turn twice the profit, and probably it could have, but we did well enough as it was. Another owner, one interested mostly in accumulating wealth, could have done very well indeed by the Baker lands. There was a large piece of land, mostly untended, that could be turned into a highly profitable place too. In addition to that, there was another small farm that had been rented out in the past and had produced a small but livable income for the farmer tenants. They had moved from there the year before, and Mrs. Baker had shown little interest in replacing them, so that, except for keeping the house and the farm buildings in repair, we did little or nothing with that.
Mrs. Baker was old, of course, and no one imagined that she would live too many more years. She had all the income from the property that she needed or would ever need. Someday soon it would pass into other hands—maybe Kenny’s, maybe not. Whoever it was would be getting a lot, not a great fortune, maybe, but not a small one either.
I wondered if Kenny had thought much of that, and whether that had influenced his coming back. He had never given much thought to money when he was young, but a young man didn’t, usually, not until he had gotten old enough to appreciate its value. At any rate, Kenny had never been poor, not so long as he had been at home. People who have never had money, and those who have always had it, don’t as a rule attach much importance to it. It’s those who’ve had it and lost it to whom it means the most.
I felt guilty harboring such thoughts, and yet I found myself again and again wondering how Kenny had lived since he had gone from here. How hard had he had to work to earn what kind of living? How many things had he wanted that he’d had to admit he couldn’t afford and that there had suddenly been no one to afford for him?
Enough to make him think about the money in this land? Enough to cause him to remember that this could have belonged to him, and might yet? Enough—I tried not to think of this, but it came anyway, in the stubborn way that unpleasant thoughts have—enough to bring him home?
That was the question that was really bothering me, and now that I had faced it, it wouldn’t go away, but kept hanging around in my head no matter how hard I tried to lose myself in my work.
What had brought Kenny home? His mother? I tried to remember what it had been like between the two of them, whether they had been close, whether they had loved one another in the way that some mothers and sons love one another—but I honestly didn’t know. Somehow I had always thought of Kenny as loving everyone generally and no one specifically. Maybe that was because I had been afraid of realizing who and what he didn’t love. He had never said to me, “Mar, I love you,” and I guess for that reason I had never let myself imagine him saying it to anyone else.
But he had loved the farm. I couldn’t deny that. For all his carelessness and his chasing after things, I had always believed in his love for this land. He had taken to the tractors and the farm equipment the way some young men take to women or drink. He had romanced the sun through many a summer, and there had been more honest passion in the way he threw hay than had been evident in any of his little episodes with the girls around town.
Maybe this was what had brought him home. Or maybe it was just the fact that this was home. Kenny was the sort who had to have someplace to go. Maybe he had come to the point during those five years where there was no place else to go but home.
I’d have given anything to have that question answered, but there was only one person who could have answered it, and I wasn’t likely to put my question to him.
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