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Life and Death on the Farm
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11127 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1993 |
1,338 Words |
| Author
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Catherine Maclay
Catherline Maclay is a writer and editor who lives in
Berkeley, California. |
THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE
Stories about the Boys
Jim Heynen
New York: Knopf, 1993
224 pp., $20.00
When I was eleven years old I made a rare visit to some relatives who lived on a farm in Texas. Once, some of the teenage boys--my third cousins--took me out for a drive along some dirt roads that cut through their fields. It was a lovely summer night, all the windows were rolled down, and I sat in the backseat shyly enjoying the warm and dusty farm smells, the flow of fireflies, and my newfound family's soothing Texas drawls.
The spell was broken when they suddenly stopped the car and piled out, leaving all the doors open as they raced to the furrows between rows of whatever crop it was that they were growing. There was a lot of whispering and rushing about. The boy closest to me was jumping up and down vigorously in the darkness right outside the car. I watched and listened, unable to guess at what they were doing. Then I caught a glimpse of something beneath his feet, illuminated by the light from the open car door, and I realized that they were stomping on rabbits. When they crowded back into the car, talking excitedly about how many they'd gotten, I stared hard into their eyes, hoping I could somehow conceal my horror. Then I fainted.
We stayed at the farm for a week, and no one said a word about the rabbit hunt or my momentary lapse of consciousness. I told myself that rabbits were a threat to the farmer's livelihood, reminded myself that I ate meat and so was also responsible for the deaths of animals. But the relish with which they had crushed the soft bunny flesh under their big shoes made me feel sick for months to come.
It's a feeling that came back vividly when I wandered into The One-Room Schoolhouse, Jim Heynen's deceptively innocent fictional reminiscences of country life. Heynen, a Minnesota resident whose short stories and poems celebrating his rural Midwest have been published in small-press editions and journals, seems to take as much pleasure as those cousins of mine in the visceral experiences of life, and especially death, on the farm.
The stories, simply and elegantly told, have a quaint, ingenuous tone, a sort of Tom Sawyer dreaminess that quickly brings the reader under their spell.
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