“Hey, Peter,” said my father, waving the smoke away from his face, “where have you been?”
“I was up in Scrub Oaks,” I said.
My mother came out of the house. She had a beer for my father, in the bottle, and a small glass for herself, part of the contents of his bottle.
“Scrub Oaks?” she said. “What were you doing up there?” She was wearing her worried look: a furrowed brow and a frown. I don’t remember when this look first appeared, but at about this time she began wearing it more and more.
“I went to see Marvin,” I said. “A kid in my science class. He’s in the where-do-you-stop group.”
“The what?” said my father.
“I told you,” I said. “Remember? We have to answer the question ‘Where do you stop?’”
“Who is this Marvin?” asked my mother.
“Marvin Jones. He’s a kid in my science class.” I must have known what piece of information she was looking for, and knowing what she was looking for must have been what made me withhold it, and that must have been what made me shift the subject. “They don’t have any sidewalks up there,” I said.
Neither of them said anything. My mother was fussing around the table. My father was shaking garlic salt onto the steak.
“They don’t have any trees, either,” I said. “Not real trees, anyway. Just little trees, crummy trees.”
“It’s the soil,” said my father.
“I guess,” I said. I knew that this was possible. I had spent many happy hours testing the soil in our back yard with my grandfather, using a nifty little soil test kit that he had ordered by mail. It came in a sturdy white cardboard box, inside which were tiny vials of liquid and larger empty vials. One mixed a pinch of the soil and some drops of the various liquids in one of the larger vials and then held the resulting muddy water up to the light of the sun and compared its color with the colors of cellophane circles in a card that came with the kit. The circles progressed gradually from one color to another, so gradually that you couldn’t say, exactly, where the dominance of reddish brown ended and the dominance of yellowish brown began. From this testing I learned that each vegetable requires, in effect, a soil of a different color, so I knew that it might have been the soil that stunted the trees, but something in my father’s voice, a reluctance to continue, said that there was more to it than that. I had heard this reluctance whenever I raised embarrassing questions. I seemed to hear it more and more, and more and more it seemed to inspire me to ask embarrassing questions.
“That would account for the trees,” I said.
“Sure,” said my father.
“But not for the sidewalks.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well. That’s the way they like it.”
I was young, it’s true, and I was ignorant, too, but I wasn’t stupid, and this explanation was so obviously ridiculous that it opened the widest crack yet in the myth of my father’s good sense. He had been chipping away at this myth for some time now, but only with tiny hammers that didn’t do much more than surface damage, crazing and nicking it. Now he seemed to have taken up something heavier, a real sledgehammer, determined to finish off the job.
“It is?” I asked.
“Yes, Peter,” he said. “If they didn’t like it that way, they’d change it, wouldn’t they?”
“I guess,” I said, because I was still a long way away from the time when I would dare to tell him exactly what I thought.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 607, Mark Dorset considers Tools: Soil Test Kit from this episode.
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🎧 607: “Hey, Peter,” ...