Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  Eventually I asked him about school.

  “It’s awful,” my brother said, then turned away toward the view. I knew he was an outcast in school, and I knew he had lost the older brother who had once been the only friend he needed. It had changed him. He no longer made a fool of himself in order to make us laugh. His body became both a thing to hide and a place for hiding.

  “It’ll get better,” I told him, unsure, and my brother nodded and I opened us each a second beer, which he accepted with a nod, and we listened to the motors and birds that resonated up there on the mountain.

  The beer made us sleepy, so we leaned our heads back on the stand and lay there for a while in the sun with our eyes closed, listening to our father’s Farmall down below, and to a wood thrush, and to a blue jay’s racket, and to a two-stroke engine farther off back in the woods, and I looked over at one point and saw my brother smiling, his face radiating a sleepy, half-drunk peace, and I will always remember that afternoon for the subtle brotherly sweetness that was there, and I will always regret that it was just that one time, and that the rest of the summer I was too busy making cash and fucking a rich girl to ask my brother up to that spot in the trees for a beer again.

  The sun is bright now, lighting the whole yard. From where I stand I can hear Jane’s farm down the road—the low groans of cows, the clank of a metal gate swinging closed, a tractor engine starting up. I think about who I would be if I had taken over this farm, as I was expected to do, about how regular and comforting the mornings of my life would be—the clock of milk-full udders keeping me from the ponderous fits of melancholy that mornings so often send me into—and right now, for this one moment in the sunlight, I long to hear a cow’s desperate bellow from this barn before me so that I have somewhere I must be, something I must do. But there is no one who needs me, no cow or child or woman waking up and turning over in search of the tender release of touch. Forgive me, Helen. I sit down on the porch steps with my elbows on my knees, my face in my hands. I breathe in the scent of mud, that dank and harrowing smell that wants, every year, and with such determination, to break things open.

  It was not a good summer for farming. Milk prices were in the dirt, and our first cutting had been rained on and lay in the barn starting to mold. The fields were ready for a second cutting, but it rained through the rest of July, and when, in early August, the radio predicted a possible dry day or two, my father decided to risk it. On the fifteenth of August he cut the hay, and two days later he came in from the barn, past these very steps, stood in this doorway, and looked at my mother and me eating breakfast.

  “Need your help today,” he said, nodding toward me.

  “Can’t,” I said, not looking at him, shoveling a forkful of my mother’s eggs into my mouth.

  “Need your help. Got to get the hay in.”

  “I can’t,” I said again. “I have a job.”

  My father stood still and looked out the window. He cleared his throat and then said under his breath, “No-good goddamn pansy job.”

  My mother went to the stove and laid a cast-iron pan down hard.

  “At least I make money,” I said.

  I saw my father’s left hand start to shake. That hand had smacked me across the face many times before, but I knew we were beyond that now. “Goddamn spoiled son of a bitch,” he said quietly, to which I shrugged, the worst insult I could have given him, and then my father turned and went out this door, slamming it behind him, and I saw my mother, still turned toward the stove, flinch, and I put my empty plate in the sink and mumbled thanks to her and went out this door also, and stepped into my Volkswagen, and drove away.

  It’s a terrible thing to have been the lucky one. And even worse for that luck to have led you to an insolence and arrogance that you will spend the rest of your life regretting. I did not even have to work that day—I had made a plan to pick up my blue-eyed Wellesley girl whose hair smelled like oranges and take her to an abandoned quarry, where we made love the rest of the day on some rocks in the sun and then, once it began to rain, in the backseat of my German car.

  And it is a terrible thing, too, for the pleasure of sex to be poisoned forever by the guilt of one day.

  I leap up, rub my cold hands on the legs of my jeans, and start walking across the yard to the road. My limbs are weak from caffeine, and the breath coming out of my lungs burns. At the road I stop and look in both directions: uphill into the woods where it dead-ends; downhill toward Jane’s farm and the road that leads away. “Goddamnit,” I whimper, but only the birds can hear. It’s a spot I stood in many times as a boy and, later, as a teenager, a place where you can see the clean streak of Silver Creek and beyond it the gentle swell and tip of Monadnock’s breast-shaped peak, a place that offers the gift and promise of distance. South of me I can see Jane’s husband driving east on his shiny new John Deere across what we always called Stink Pasture for the way it smelled of skunkweed and wet cow shit, and I begin walking, almost running, down the road toward that tractor for a reason I can’t explain. From the crest of the hill I see Jane’s house, and I pause to look at the new white vinyl siding on the old structure, making it look tidy and durable, and the blue-gray double-wide a quarter mile downhill, a Chrysler parked in its front yard, and then I catch a glimpse of red hair through the window of the barn and for a moment I am fifteen again and it is Jane—Jane, a year older than I, with long, coltish legs and full lips and a way of teaching boys things in haylofts that they will never in all their lives be able to thank her appropriately for—but then I realize that Jane’s hair is chopped short now and losing its color so it must be her daughter’s hair I see through the dusty glass, and I slow down.

  My father never spoke of what happened, so it is my mother’s and my sisters’ stories that I have pieced together into history. My mother told me later, much later, that after I left that day my father came into the house and said, “Get the other boy.”

  My mother turned to him. “Jake, he can’t.”

  “He will,” my father said. So my mother went upstairs and woke Ross, who dressed and ate the biscuit my mother handed him and followed my father out into the field.

  My mother stayed in the house for an hour, washing the breakfast dishes and starting bread, then went outside to feed the chickens. Back inside she woke my sisters and told them they had to go to the field too, to help get the hay in. They woke up slow, took their time getting dressed. The sun by that point had already disappeared behind some clouds, and there was a thick, dark bank rolling in from the west.

  At around ten my mother filled a jug with cold spring water and walked out toward the farthest hayfield, where my brother and father worked, the field just visible to my left now, if I turn my head to see it. My sisters were still in the kitchen eating breakfast. My mother could hear my father shouting before she could see the field, and so she walked quickly. When she got there she saw my father leap off the tractor and yell at Ross, who had a bale in his arms, which he was slowly and painfully trying to roll toward the truck. Dark, charcoal clouds gathered in the sky, and my mother felt a drop of rain on her cheek. My father must have felt one too, for at that moment he looked up toward the sky and yelled “Goddamnit!” to my brother, who was at that point straining with his upper arms and torso, while balancing on his unstable legs, to lift the bale up toward the back of the truck. “Goddamn useless!” my father yelled. And my mother told me that forever after those words could be heard in her head if she allowed them to ring there.

  I turn my head to the east, toward the field I have tried not to look at for twenty years: Stark’s pasture. A flat field gently sloping, a long birch in its center. I cannot move, looking at that just-visible field. I kneel down, there in the grass at the edge of the road, and feel the mud soak through the thin denim knees of my jeans. I put my face close to that mud and think for a moment I may stay there forever, and then I hop up and rub my face with my sleeve and start walking, as fast as I can, until I reach the edge of the Cole, no, Clemen
t barnyard. My breath is uneven; my legs shake. No one is in sight, and the yard smells of tractor oil and cow shit and hay, and the combination is a smell as familiar as a damp wool coat or Helen’s just-washed hair. I go to the barn and pause in the doorway and look into the darkness my eyes have yet to adjust to. I can hear a shovel in the far end of the barn, and the radio is playing someone who sounds like Reba McEntire but probably is not, as it’s been a good fifteen years since I last listened to this station.

  It was this barn my mother ran to for help. I don’t know the details of that moment—whether she encountered Jane’s father in the doorway and told him to call or whether she found the phone in the house herself. And I don’t know what her face looked like, or whether the words she said to the operator were garbled by terror or whether they came out matter-of-fact and plain, as shock will sometimes make them come. I know that the local firemen were the first to show up, and that they drove out into the field in their red truck, and that one of them, a friend of mine, knelt in the damp and freshly cut hay where my father had lain my brother’s body, and checked his pulse, and I know that the fireman did not look in my mother’s eyes when he told her that her son was dead. Adelaide told me all of that. She had just been cresting the hill with Dell when my father screamed at my brother to move his “goddamn legs,” and so Ross had spread his legs and put his chest up against the bale and wrapped his arms around it and leaned his head back, trying in vain to heave the bale four feet up onto the top of the stack, and as he did so he screamed, a scream that was not a scream of effort but of anger and anguish, and still the bale did not make it even halfway up. And then my sisters watched as my father, in a rare moment of acquiescence, saw the raw misery of his deformed son and so called out, “Stop,” and said, for perhaps the first time, his youngest son’s name—“Ross, stop”—and my sisters watched as my brother either didn’t hear my father over the noise of the tractor or ignored him and continued to lift and scream, and my sisters stood there, still watching, as our brother’s screaming suddenly stopped and his face went white and his body, like a doll’s, began to slowly tip sideways, and the bale fell by his side, and they stood there at the top of the hill, half blinded by the soft rain that now fell, as our mother dropped her jug of water and ran to him, and as my father stood there unmoving in terror and disbelief, before running toward his son, his son with the weak heart, whom he picked up and carried to the shelter of that single birch tree. It was his weak heart. That weak heart he was born with that did him in.

  That is when our mother left for the Cole barn. This very same barn whose doorframe I now kneel in, dizzy, my hands shaking, spitting up what has risen in my throat into the hay and dust and dirt that has collected in the corner of the doorway. My head throbs, my legs ache, and I think, for a strange and elated moment, that I may die.

  That is when I notice her sneakers. I lift my eyes and there is Rachel, redheaded, the girl with her mother’s hair, standing in front of me, eyes wide, lips parted, as if I am some feral animal she has just come upon.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I lean my hand for a moment against the wood of the doorway and put my head against my arm and whisper—it is all I can manage—“I think so. Yes. I think so. Okay.”

  The girl just stands there, watching me. “Do you need some water?”

  “Yes,” I say. “That would be good.”

  “Wait here,” she says, and goes to the tap in the milk room and comes back with a Mason jar full of water.

  “Here, take this,” she says, and I dust off my hands and take a sip of the water. It is so cold, it makes my teeth hurt, and it is the cleanest thing I have ever tasted.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Sure,” she says, still standing there, looking at me as if I am crazy, or drunk, which I might still be, but she doesn’t look scared anymore, or like she will go away, and I don’t want her to, and am surprised to find myself thinking that.

  “Need anything else?” she asks.

  “No. I don’t think so.” I manage to smile at her. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She smiles at me then, an old-hearted and gracious smile, for which I’m grateful.

  Then she shifts her feet. “You want to come see the calves? I was just cleaning their stalls.” And like that there is a way forward. All I have to do is nod, and she leads me through the milk room and down a hallway to a small room with one window. It’s one big stall and in it are three calves, each no more than a few days old. They stand on shaky legs and look up at me with wide, wet eyes, and when I hold my pale hands toward them they lick my fingers, their tongues rough as beach sand, and their dark eyes are so full of trust, as is this Rachel, who has brought me into this room, that I think I may foolishly cry. But I do not cry. Instead I think of Helen, and wish she were here with me, wish she could see these calves lick my hands and let them lick hers, wish I could start over, but I let that thought pass, and simply kneel in the clean sawdust Rachel has just laid down, and let the small creatures lick the salt off my face and my arms and my hands.

  “Sweet, huh?” Rachel says, and I nod, and then I stand up and look once again at her slate-blue eyes, and reach my hand out and touch her shoulder, and then turn and leave the barn and walk back up the road toward my own farm. I pause for a moment in that road with my arms at my side and close my eyes and think that maybe life offers us more than one chance to survive, or more than one way to be lucky, and then I keep walking, toward the place where I was born, toward the place where too many of my loved ones died, and from this angle the house and barn somehow look less solid, less violent, less permanent, their half ruin letting in some new kind of light, and the rivers, which at dawn looked like veins, now look like rivers, carrying cold water toward some larger, yet-to-be determined home.

  “Ross,” I say out loud. I haven’t said his name in such a long time. “Ross,” my voice broken, too loud, an animal in there. “I’m sorry. I’m so bloody sorry.” And he answers. His body everywhere. The field the grass the mud the barn.

  9

  THE LONG ROAD TURNS TO JOY

  Apple conceived in a field in early September 1987, the year she turned nineteen. She had named herself that after moving to Vicksburg, where hundred-year-old apple trees grew around all the old houses and sometimes appeared, gnarled and unruly, deep in the woods. The night she conceived she lay in the wet grass and watched the sparks from a nearby bonfire transform into a meteor shower that suddenly appeared above her. The man she slept with was a long-fingered married guitar player, passing through, but all of that was unimportant. When she found out she was pregnant, a month later, she wrote in her journal that a spirit had moved through her that night like a warm wind. Sparrow, she named her boy, for the bird that sang outside her cabin window the June he was born.

  Now, eighteen years later, Apple sits in her trailer, which perches on a hill above a large farmhouse. It’s late December, a week before Christmas, and she rests her sock feet on top of the gas heater. Her feet are cold. The trailer is cold; the trailer is always cold. The house below used to belong to a woman named Cora, whom Apple took care of when she was dying, but now it belongs to a couple of thirty-year-old artists—a dancer and a trapeze artist—who rented the trailer to Apple and Sparrow two years ago. Sparrow was a junior in high school then, and the man and woman had stared intently and with curiosity into Sparrow’s eyes. He was—is—a beautiful boy, deep, dark eyes and an overly serious look for his age, and most people find themselves drawn to him. “It would be nice to have some young blood around,” the man had said, and Sparrow smiled and told them he looked forward to being somewhere quiet, somewhere without too many neighbors. The couple looked at each other and smiled, and Apple had felt proud. They were good landlords. It was a good place to live. She liked having Cora’s ghost around—her efficiency and kindness. Apple was happy here. Until the day after graduation when Sparrow came home and told her he had joined the
marines. It’s the things you can’t imagine, she thought then, that sneak up and knife you from behind.

  The trailer has a large picture window that faces the field, and from where Apple sits, looking out, she can see the hill slope away toward the road and, beyond that, a bank of trees and, to her left, ninety feet downhill, the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse where the artists live. The barn that used to stand across from it burned to the ground not long before Cora died. The ashes from that fire are nearly gone; the grass grows abundant. Apple often finds herself watching the house and the couple who live in it without intending to. In summer they weed their large vegetable garden together, the woman (the trapeze artist) in a bikini top and a short cotton skirt, the man (the dancer), shirtless in cut-off jeans. Sometimes they do yoga in the yard. They are both thin and tan and have enough money to buy themselves this house and a brand-new four-wheel-drive Volvo, and to Apple they always seem happy. Now she watches as they come out of the house, dressed in snow pants and thick down parkas. They grab bright plastic sleds from the porch and hike up the hill in front of Apple’s trailer. When they get to the top they lie down on their sleds and shoot down the old cow field together. At the bottom, before reaching the trees, they bail out of the sleds and throw themselves into the snow. Apple can hear their shrieks and laughter; she can see them crawl toward each other and start groping each other there in the snow in their big down jackets. Her eyes are still that good. Apple has been single, barring a few errant nights, for eighteen years.