The organic tenor

He breathed as deep as he could, pinching the buttocks together, looked back a couple of times, stopped breathing, bowed and took courage to say:

“Want to dance?”

Her gaze hit his neck and slid slowly downwards, for a moment considered his shoes and then slipping into the impersonal background:

“I’m already engaged.”

“Now again,” he thought desperately. “Why do they all say no? I might as well go home and go to bed. My days start early, and when the cows are herded into the meadow and I’m plowing, I feel good. When I sit at the tractor with my pipe in the mouth, followed by flying and diving gulls, and watching the furrows, I don’t feel the taste of these bitter drops, but am looking forward to the cap loose on the thermos and pour a drop of coffee up. That’s my life, and perhaps the highest goal that preliminary is set for me.

He had even been washed in the face, and had lubricated the forearms carefully with his deodorant. To cap it all, he came a lot brilliantine in his hair and slapped abundant the shaved cheeks with Esprit de Valdemar, so there shouldn’t be something to mention there, and the smell of cow and pig barn, which had to hang on, should now be eliminated. He could at least himself just smell the overwhelming shades that came from the materials he had bought in the supermarket, to look good in festive occasions. He also had smeared petroleum jelly on his sun-shelled ears, to smooth the similarity with the bark of old trees which was unavoidably after many weeks in the field, where the sun was often relentless.

But the girls wouldn’t dance with him. Maybe because they knew he only was general farm man, and not foreman like Kevin, but as he after a few years from now would become herdsman on Northern Fields Farm, which had four chimneys, they would with no doubt notice him. So he could probably also begin to be critical and merely ask the good looking girls to dance.

One thing that no one but the cows and gulls knew, or at least believed, was that he could sing The Yellow Rose Of Texas as good as Bobby Horton, maybe like José Carreras would have sung it, but it was not so simple to achieve general attention to that. If the girls had heard him sing, there might have been some that would ignore his unmistakable scent of farm life, which was mixed with the smell of brilliantine and Esprit De Valdemar, accompanied by a subtle after smell from petroleum jelly.

But the gulls and the cows heard him, and when he put his pipe in the pocket and singing his heart’s content, the cows began to gather and walk towards him. They knew that it was about time going home and being milked, and together they went, with wonderfully relaxed and meaningful glances toward the Milky Way with nodding heads, like the undulating surface of a lazy river that flowed towards the lower-lying areas.