Miller's Valley Read Free Page B

the way I looked was a trial, as my aunt Ruth called things that bothered her. “I won’t listen to complaining about what’s on your back, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “There’s too many fences need mending around here.” I remember first finding the expression “mending fences” in a book and being confused because I couldn’t think of it as anything but literal. Cows get antsy, or randy, or just stumble sideways, and a section of fence comes tumbling down, and they trudge out onto the road, and you have to fix the fence fast or more cows will follow, and maybe get hit by a truck driven by someone not paying attention. Happens all the time.
    My father was a farmer, although I guess that’s not what the neighbors would tell you. They would have told you that Bud Miller fixed things for a living. A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If you had a radio that stopped working, or a fan that didn’t turn anymore, you brought it to the little square lean-to stuck like an afterthought to one side of the smaller barn, the one where we kept the feed corn, and you left it with my dad. If he wasn’t there you just put it on the workbench with a note. I was always pretty amazed that my father could work out the problem from those notes. They usually said things like “Buzzing noise.” If your problem was too big to be portable, a washing machine, say, or even a front-end loader, my dad would come to you, climbing out of the truck slowly because his knees had hurt ever since high school football and only got worse as he got older.
    My mother was a nurse. When I was a kid she would leave after dinner and be back in the morning just in time to make sure my brothers and me got on the bus for school, especially Tommy, who usually had a bunch of ideas for the day better than sitting through geometry and civics. She wore a white uniform with a name tag that said MIRIAM MILLER RN . Her name had been Miriam Kostovich, and she was happy to become Miriam Miller, which made her sound a little like she was a movie star. Most of her shift we were asleep, so it was like she hardly left at all.
    “You think your mom will take us to town for Popsicles?” LaRhonda asked, rubbing her thumb over Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime, but she was just winding me up. She knew the answer was no. My mother was thrifty. I wouldn’t be getting any white patent shoes until I had a job and could pay for them myself, and even then she would say it was a waste and I should put it all in a passbook account. There was nothing my mother liked more than a passbook account.
    My mother was a nurse and my father was a fix-it man. But if they’d ever applied for passports, which they never did, where it asked for profession they probably would have written “farmer,” or at least he would have. There were 160 acres of flat, sometimes wet land around our house; it had belonged to my father’s father, and his mother’s family before that, bouncing back and forth from one side of the family tree to the other. When my father put in a new stove for my mother, when I was eight, he found a limestone lintel in one corner of the wall that had 1822 carved into it as crude as a kid’s printing.
    My parents had some beef cattle, black and white, and one field planted with hay to feed them, and another planted with feed corn to feed them, too, and another planted with bicolor corn that we sold from the card table in front of the barn, mid-July to September.
    “There’s no money in it,” my father used to say about farming, mainly to get my brothers to stay in school, although he wanted at least one of them to take the place over when he was done. Every once in a while the cows got sold while I sat on a hay bale in the barn, sobbing—“How many times do I have to tell you not to name them?” my father always said—and the sale price barely covered the cost of feed, never mind the hours my father