Free Clear Springs by Bobbie Ann Mason

crossed the Mississippi River to Missouri to look at cows. Within a month, they had bought a brindle cow together. Mama was crestfallen.
    Daddy seemed restless and undecided. The G.I. Bill entitled him to an education, so he enrolled in automotive mechanics, a night class at the high school. But he quickly learned that he hated working on cars.
    “
Why
didn’t he go to college?” I asked my mother recently. It was less a question than a sputter of fury over this lost opportunity. How different our lives might have been, I thought.
    Mama scoffed at the idea. “Why, he couldn’t go to college. He had a family to support!”
    The nearest college was twenty miles away, and he didn’t have a high school diploma because he had failed the final algebra exam. Hehad always made good grades, but he was too humiliated—and proud, I imagine—to try to make up that one course later.
    Daddy dawdled on the farm that summer. It seemed to my mother that the more she tried to encourage him to launch out in a new direction, the more noncommittal he was about his plans.
    “Why don’t you see about getting Wilburn a job at the Merit?” Mama asked Granddaddy. “It would pay regular.”
    Bob shook his head doubtfully. “Answer to a boss? I never seed the good to come of such.” He added, “Besides, Wilburn wouldn’t be able to do that kind of work.”
    My mother is angry when she tells me about this now. “Bob didn’t seem to think Wilburn could do anything except milk cows and work on the farm,” she says. “He never praised him or encouraged him. They both worried about him because he’d had scarlet fever, and they held him down. But he was smart, and he could have done something different.”
    As the days following his return from the Navy went by, it grew clearer that he was thinking about cows and mules and crops. He and his father planted corn. He set out a small patch of tobacco, which he had never done before. I can imagine his state of mind then. There was nothing as comfortable and secure as the fields he knew. I can see how he sank back into the soil. It must have been easy. The awkward challenge of training with strangers at the Great Lakes base and the dark journeys on the blank ocean were all history. Back home, he knew everybody; nobody spoke with a brogue. The two weeks he was in New York, based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, had startled his soul. “He said he was amazed by how lonesome a big city could be,” my mother says. “It was more than he could take in.” I imagine that he had gone out to see the world and after a year realized he didn’t need to go anywhere again. He had everything he wanted here at home. He told Mama it wasn’t worth the trouble of going out there. He saw so many terrible things she didn’t need to see. The roaring of the guns still reverberated in his ears and woke him out of deep sleep.
    Mama was exasperated. By the end of the summer, she realized he wouldn’t give up dairy farming. She knew she couldn’t talk him out of it, but she thought if he was determined to farm, he should buy some more land. When a piece of land directly across the road came up for sale, she jumped. She knew they could buy it with her savings. It was a fine piece of land. It had an easy roll to it, no troublesome creeks, easy access to the highway. It wouldn’t even need a barn or a house, since itwas adjacent to the present farm. It seemed an ideal solution, she thought. They wouldn’t have to abandon his parents, but they could have more land to work.
    Mr. Coleman owned the property. One day, my parents were walking down the road past his house, and they saw him sitting in his porch swing. They called out howdies.
    “I want to sell you that piece of land across from you,” he said, his swing creaking slowly. “Come on up here and sign the deed,” he said.
    Daddy grinned and shook his head no. Mama was saying, “Yes, yes.” But Daddy wouldn’t say anything.
    He didn’t take her seriously. He