Mustard Fields by Barry Rachin (classic literature books .txt) 📕

“On a windy afternoon in November they were gathering kindling in the Black Wood, Dinah Lock, Amy Hardwick, and Rose Olliver, three sere, disvirgined women from Pollack's Cross."

A.E. Coppard


Mustard Fields


"Can I borrow your husband?" Maddie Timberland was standing on the front stoop of the house directly opposite her split-level ranch.
"Well, that sounds rather obscene," Kimberly Osborne tittered.
Maddie had always considered the woman a latter-day Stepford wife - a gynoid designed to look the part but with few if any feminine virtues. For the third day in a row the temperature was already hovering in the high eighties, but the svelte blonde with the tepid smile seemed unaffected by the heat wave. "My lawn mower keeps sputtering and dying out," Maddie explained.
Maddie wished Kimberly would call her husband, but she just stood there gawking at her like she was a Jehovah Witness prospecting for fresh converts. The woman aggravated the hell out of her, but what could she do? Kimberly's husband was a regular wizard with anything mechanical, and Maddie hadn't had a spouse in the picture for the past five years. Not that Jake, had he still been around, would have known what to do. Finally, Kimberly stepped out on the front stoop. The woman was dressed in a snazzy pair of spandex shorts and Addidas sneakers. In her right hand was a mug of fresh-brewed tea with a slice of lemon bobbing up and down. "I was just going for a walk."
Going for walks - that's all Kimberly Osborne ever did. It was her all-consuming passion. Other woman raised families, held careers, nursed chronically ill relatives, volunteered at the local library or taught English as a second language. Kimberly fixed herself a cup of Bigelow's English breakfast tea, which she leisurely sipped on the short ride in her twin-turbo BMW328 with the retractable hardtop to the Brandenberg Athletic Field where she power walked around the track a dozen times or so. Sometimes she brought small weights which she pumped furiously in order to raise her metabolism and burn extra calories. After the exercise regimen, she ate a buttered croissant and swigged a second cup of tea at the Honey Dew Donut shop in the center of town. Then she went home and formally started her day, which consisted of not much of anything.
Maddie didn't know what to think. Even though Kimberly had always been decent to her in a deferential sort of way, the insipid creature freaked her out. And here Maddie was standing on the Osborne's front stairs ingratiating herself, begging for small favors.
Well, maybe Maddie was just a tad jealous.
Not that she had any reason to be. She had a reasonably good figure, but you would never know it by the way clothes hung on her angular frame. Maddie's hair was dark and straight. If she grew it long, the wispy strands hung limply. An act of desperation, she had her stylist trim it short over the summer. The page boy was suppose to make the lanky woman who turned forty on Tuesday look mod, hip, cool—not like Tinker Bell in midlife crisis. Over the years, the body had seen a bit of wear and tear—a handful of birthing stretch marks around the lower belly and, more recently, a smattering of crow’s feet about the eyes - the not-so-subtle indignities of aging. And, within the last year or so, her breasts had begun to sag, enough so to precipitate an anxiety attack bordering on full-blown despair. By comparison, Kimberly's perky little breasts would do what they were meant to do with or without the supportive services of a sports bra; that taken together with the high cheekbones, willowy legs and hazel eyes made the woman a complete knockout.
Trevor, who had been cleaning out the gutters in the back yard, came around the side of the house. "Maddie's lawnmower is busted," Kimberly said. "Perhaps you could take a look."
He stepped closer and the musky scent of English Leather pervaded the humid air. With his ruddy complexion and Vandyke beard, Trevor exuded a relaxed competence. The man stripped off a pair of rawhide work gloves. "Let me grab some tools."
When he was gone, Kimberly added, "He's a real nutcase when it comes to his Toro self-propelled. Every spring he does a complete tune-up… even sharpens the mulching blade by hand with a metal rasp." She giggled, a breezy, adolescent laugh. "Don't know what I'd do without him." Maddie wasn't quite sure what she would do without him either, but, as a slightly horny, unattached female, it didn't seem appropriate to share that intimacy with Kimberly.


The previous winter when a nor'easter dumped a foot and a half of snow in Maddie's driveway, Trevor slogged across the street with his Ariens two-cycle snow thrower and cleared the icy mess away inside half an hour. He had purchased the super-deluxe model, the bright orange monster big as a tank that registered an apocalyptic roar when he fired up the engine. The sixteen-inch, serrated steel augur tossed the snow effortlessly fifty feet onto the side lawn. Maddie didn't ask Trevor to do it. He never even rang the bell, just cleared all the snow away and went home - chug, chug, chug - guiding the machine, like a docile beast, in low gear.

"Your lawnmower is dead?" Trevor was unscrewing a tin lid on the left side of the two-stroke engine. "Let's have a look-see." Maddie dropped down on her haunches and tried to make mental notes in the event the temperamental machine went on the fritz again.
Trevor pulled the metal cover away and gestured with a finger at a wedge of yellow, spongy material. "That's your air filter." He pulled the soft block free of the compartment and washed it clean with the garden hose. "Dirt or grass clippings can block the passageway and foul the fuel mixture." After thoroughly cleaning the filter, Trevor screwed the lid back in place. "Are you aware that a groundhog is devouring your garden?"
Maddie glanced over her shoulder. In the far corner of the yard, a burly ground hog had wriggled under the wire netting and was feasting on a row of carrot tops. "That's Burt ...a regular visitor. We've agreed to share the harvest."
Trevor's blank expression eased into a lukewarm grin. "You grow the vegetables. What does the rodent contribute?"
"He's quiet, stolid… a creature of few, pithy words and very indefinite wants. We have this understanding." Maddie waved her arms up over her head - once, twice. The groundhog scurried along the perimeter of the garden, which was overgrown with crabgrass and noxious jimson weed, before disappearing into the underbrush. By the wry look on his face, her neighbor had picked up on the not-so-veiled allusion to Maddie's former spouse but opted to let it pass.
"I just finished the novel, My Antonia, by Willa Cather," Maddie noted. Trevor was an avid reader. It was the one hobby the neighbors shared in common and when, on the few rare occasions that Maddie had him to herself, she enjoyed the intellectual tête-à-tête. "The National Organization of Women was recently advising members not to patronize her works."
Trevor tipped the mower up on its side and was checking the blade and undercarriage. "And why was that?" Setting the machine back down on its wheels, he examined the choke adjustment.
"At the end of the novel, the heroine marries and goes to live on a farm."
"And the radical feminists viewed that as a cop-out?" Maddie nodded once. "What's your take on Ms. Cather's fall from literary grace?"
"Asking you to help me with the broken-down lawnmower puts me squarely in the enemy camp."
Trevor, who seemed reasonably sure the choke was working properly, rose to his feet and stepped around to the front of the machine. "My daughter, Melissa, was accepted to Northeastern for the fall semester." The Osborne's had two children. The oldest boy was in his last year at Boston College, studying engineering.
"Congratulations!"
"I'm serving Kimberly with divorce papers."
"Excuse me?"
He fitted a silver socket onto a ratchet and, pulling the spark plug wire free of the copper tip, seated the tool over the slender, ceramic stub. "Next week. I'm moving into an efficiently apartment in Foxboro. I can't live with the woman anymore." Five flicks of the wrist and the badly corroded spark plug wobbled free of the engine block. He stood up straight, glanced at her absently and looked away. "You divorced Jake and with good reason, so you know how it is."
Maddie's husband was a thirty-five year old adolescent trapped in a man's body. He didn't need a wife as much as a nursemaid or nanny. And Trevor's wife wasn't much better. The man wiped the blackened deposits away from the tip of the sparkplug then ran a piece of bluish-black Emory cloth over the sooty mess. After a moment the abrasive cut through and the metal arm began to shine. "That should do it." He fitted the sparkplug back in the engine and snugged it hand-tight with the socket.
"She doesn't know?"
The man shrugged. "I'm planning to break the news over the weekend. In all likelihood, she'll sell the house and go live with her mother. The old lady will help her over the worst of it. Kimberly… she's not like you - resourceful and self-sufficient."
He paused to wipe a bead of sweat that was gathering on his forehead. “I’m not leaving Kimberly for another woman.” He looked Maddie full in the face and held her eyes for a solid five seconds before turning away. “I’ve never cheated on my wife. Not once.” He primed the engine then gave a tug on the starter cord. The mower fired up on the first try. "You're good for another hundred thousand miles." Trevor collected his tools and sauntered back across the street to the home with the double garage, in-ground pool and perfectly manicured lawn that he would be shortly vacating.

   

The temperature rose another five degrees, bludgeoning Maddie's brain into a state of vegetative torpor as she groomed the lawn. Dragging the weed whacker out from the shed, she trimmed around the bricks framing the front walkway, as though sprucing up the property might somehow tidy the neighborhood as a whole.
Two thoughts came to mind. When her ex-husband, Jake, cleared out, a subtle settling process took hold. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the white noise of his endless finagling, scheming, angling and parasitic machinations fell away. The din dissolved instantaneously in blissful silence. Maddie bathed in the lush tranquility, luxuriated in the rich nothingness of total peace. No more bah, blah, blah. Maddie wandered about the house with a shitty grin, looking as though she had lost her sanity. But she lost nothing. Rather, the woman had regained her fundamental essence.
One day in late October after the divorce, Maddie drove to the outlet stores in Kittery, Maine and walked the malls. She made the two-hour drive alone in the late fall with the windows rolled down and a chilled breeze stinging her cheeks. The season