Greenville

by Dale Peck

  Dale.

  For a moment he is able to hold on to the whole of the experience: the dying cow, her warm belly, the frozen barn, the memory of the bed he shared with his brothers, the simple sad fact that he loves his mother and wished she loved him too, and then, when he realizes the pink glow behind his eyes isn’t an udder but the glow of the morning sun, the sense of loss he feels is almost overwhelming.

  Come on, Dale. Get up from there.

  The boy squeezes his eyes tighter. No, he tells himself, it’s not fair.

  Straw rustles. When the voice comes again it is closer, quieter—and, he suddenly realizes, Donnie’s. In a tender voice that marks him apart from the boy’s family Donnie says,

  She’s dead, Dale.

  All at once the boy is screaming. You can’t make me go! Not again!

  He is not sure at what point he opens his eyes, but the first sight he registers fully is the white hill between the barn and the house, and then he sees the bus coming down 38. He runs around the house and throws himself on the bus without a word to Kenny or Flip and when he gets to school he goes to the bathroom and combs the straw from his hair and wipes the dried milk from his chin.

  As he gets off the bus that afternoon his eyes fall on the sign next to the driveway. He stares at it as the bus rumbles past in a cloud of exhaust. The letters are obscured by hoar frost, the thin sheet of snow hangs off in an east-southeast line sculpted by the prevailing winds. Kenny and Flip Flack walk up their yard but the boy stands beneath the frozen elms, staring at the sheet of snow hanging off the sign. What he sees now is that the delicate white arc looks for all the world like the polar image of the fence that had gone down in the barnyard last spring, impossibly delicate but resistant—insistent—as well. The sheet of snow is only slightly thicker than a piece of paper, and yet it has endured three months of wind and snow, daytime melts and nighttime freezes. The loops of wire the boy had clipped off the barnyard fence had looked equally delicate, harmless, but now, thinking of that fence and looking at this pole, the boy sees it as a link in a different kind of fence. The sign is a historical marker after all, a pole supporting an invisible wire that stretches from his time to a past that seems not very far away. For a moment the entire fence hangs in the air beside 38, reaching back to a past the boy cannot begin to imagine but that he can feel nonetheless, a past as inevitably a part of his life as the future that awaits him. He whips around then, as if he’ll be able to get a glimpse of what’s in store for him, but all he sees is the glare of the setting sun glinting off the snow-capped hill behind him.

  He turns then, shucks his schoolbooks in the kitchen, heads up to the dairy barn. He and his uncle milk the ladies in silence and he shovels out the gutters after they’re done, uses a push broom to sweep a few blown flakes of snow from the front walk, and then he goes inside to do his homework. He comes down for dinner and then he takes his bath and goes back to his room. He hears his uncle and aunt get ready for bed, and then he hears his uncle in the hall outside his door. The floorboards’ creak makes knocking unnecessary, but his uncle knocks anyway.

  The boy looks up at his uncle. He is a small man in a small door, but somehow scale doesn’t correct for proportion. They both seem small, a doll in a doll’s doorway, a doll’s hand hanging on to a doll’s doorknob. But beneath his gaze the boy feels as tiny as an ant.

  I’m sorry I killed her, Uncle Wallace.

  His uncle’s mouth remains level, firm, as does his voice.

  I come to tell you something, Dale.

  The boy looks at his uncle and knows before he speaks that he is not going to send him away. A feeling of dread fills him then. He has worked so hard to forget all his uncle’s revelations. The image of the sign flashes in his mind: what part of his past is his uncle going to drag up now?

  But he is surprised by what comes out of his uncle’s mouth.

  Your father was a good boy, Dale. Just like you. Hard working, honest, a bit of a temper maybe, but a good boy.

  He stops again. His hand turns the doorknob but the door is already open.

  Then one day—

  His uncle stops. The latch clicks when he releases the handle but the boy’s uncle stands there as if frozen, but softly frozen—as if cast in soft white wax. He is staring at the floor and the boy studies him. His uncle is looking at the floor and there is a half smile on his face. Later on—in just a few minutes, as soon as his uncle finishes saying what he has to say—the boy will understand what his uncle is looking at, but for the moment he is struck by the awe there, the sense of comprehension. Belated comprehension—belated compassion too—and the boy understands that his uncle is not just speaking to him.

  His uncle nods his head. Then:

  Lloyd found our father, Dale. In a field, just like you found your lady. I tell you, when I saw the look that was on your face it brought me back. Lloyd was thirteen, Dale, same age as you are.

  The boy turned fourteen two weeks ago, but he doesn’t say anything.

  Our father was shot dead, Dale. Lloyd found the gun. Nobody knew if it was suicide or murder. Some folks even wondered if Lloyd—

  He stops again. It is a long time before he continues.

  It ruined him, Dale. Just ruined him. He couldn’t go on—go back to how it was, go forward to something new. So instead he drank. And of course our old man was a drunk and that was the one thing Lloyd said he’d never be. But he just couldn’t face life after he found Daddy like that.

  No, the boy thinks. Stop. This isn’t right, this grandfather story. It is as though his uncle has laid the corpse in bed beside him, said, See? Your troubles ain’t so bad. He wants to say to his uncle, This is your story, not mine. It means something to you, not me. But even as the boy thinks Stop it’s already over. His uncle has told his story and the boy has heard it and neither of them can erase his past.

  His uncle turns to the boy and addresses him directly.

  You got to put things aside Dale, he says, and the boy has never heard him sound so plaintive before, so unsure of himself. Sometimes all you can do is what’s right. Do what you have to without thinking about it. Put the mistakes behind you, the bad times, because nothing can fix the past or bring it back.

  The historical marker beside the driveway flashes in the boy’s mind. No, he thinks again, that’s not true, and his uncle must know it too. He leaves the sign there after all.

  It’s a hard life, his uncle is saying, and there is still that plaintive edge to his voice, as if he is not just willing the boy to believe but asking him to confirm his own beliefs. There’s only the future to look forward to, his uncle says insistently. Nothing else. Nothing but. And—His uncle’s voice catches, then resumes. And I just couldn’t take it if you got stuck like Lloyd did.

  His uncle stops then, finally, and this time doesn’t start again. He is finished, waits only for some sign that the boy has heard him, understood.

  The boy says, I’m fourteen Uncle Wallace, and his uncle nods once, then closes the door.

  As soon as he leaves the boy shuts the light off. He lies on the edge of the mattress as he always does, but tonight he’s not making room for his brothers but instead for his grandfather’s body. The boy doesn’t doubt his uncle’s story, but he can find no way to attach any meaning to it either. He tries to imagine the old man standing over his grandfather’s dead body, and the inevitable happens: he sees himself, standing over Lloyd, the warm barrel of a gun clutched in his hand. He sees the dead Guernsey too, sprawled across the stall. Even after he falls asleep he feels her cold carcass beneath him instead of the mattress, each of her ribs pushing into him like a root pushing out of the ground. Her head is stretched out as if in birthing, her legs stick straight out of her body, two flush with the straw, two poking into the air, and when his uncle raps on his door in the morning he shudders awake, realizing—remembering—that he never actually saw the Guernsey’s body. He had run from Donnie’s alien sympathy without looking back, just as he had forgotten to look back
at his house when the old man had taken him away last year. All at once images from his dreams and his life and his uncle’s mouth tumble on him in a rush. The pillowcase beneath his head is stuffed with his brothers’ clothes and the old man’s bottles and the dead cow’s torso, and the pillowcase itself is a net of snow-white wire. The cow becomes his invisible grandfather and he himself becomes the old man, and then Dolly’s calf, sold off for veal. The Guernsey, he knows, is already gone, sold off for dog food. Is this what makes history so terrible? the boy wonders. This constant effacement of one real thing by another, yet yielding neither? It is worse than death. It is as if the Guernsey had never lived at all, nor his grandfather—as if someone had made the whole thing up.

  His uncle knocks on the door again, something he has never had to do in the boy’s thirteen months here.

  Come on Dale, he says through the closed door. Ladies won’t milk themselves.

  6

  Covered wagons must have gone this slow, the boy thinks. Third gear, hauling a full load—a half ton of tarp-covered manure capped by the fifty-pound bundle of Flip Flack—and his uncle’s 1934 John Deere can do no better than three, maybe five miles an hour; certainly no faster than a man walking. He tries to imagine crossing the continent at this pace, the mountains and rivers, endless plains yielding to relentless deserts. Gold Rush? Gold Crawl is more like it. He’ll take a brand-new Chevy any day of the week.

  The four-cylinder engine protests its heavy load with a sound like a match dropped in a bottomless bag of firecrackers, an endless series of tiny explosions that vibrate their way into the boy’s body through his numb bottom and out his tingling ears and fingers. If he concentrates on the noise itself it seems deafening, but long hours mowing fields and hauling loads of hay and manure have taught him to tune it out. Now he inches his way west on 38 in a bubble of sound, peaceful, protected. Though the soundless world is visible all around him, it seems to exist at a conceptual remove, like a three-dimensional silent movie. Inside the bubble there is nothing but the boy and the pedals and knobs and wheel of the tractor, and Flip Flack. Or Flip’s voice at any rate, which, though muffled, is still perfectly audible.

  I wish Kenny wasn’t working road crew this summer. That means I’m gonna have to do all his chores and mine too. I practically do as much as he does anyway, so that means I’m gonna have to do twice as much as I do now. Two times. I don’t know why Kenny wants to work road crew anyway. All that stinky old smelly old tar. I’d rather clean up after the ladies any old day, wouldn’t you, Dale?

  A pair of passing crows seems almost to leave contrails in the sky, a honeybee bounces along like a poorly flicked yo-yo bobbing at the end of its string. The muggy air is bright blue, so thick with moisture that the tractor could be a boat on the river. Chicory blossoms seem almost to be floating at the end of their stems like water lilies. The fluid sunlight pulses through the trees like liquid amber, outlining everything, separating objects one from another. Each tuft and wisp of vapor, each twig and leaf takes on a gilded edge. The film of sweat that covers the boy’s body seems part and parcel of the same effect, as if the boy is coated in a residue of sunlight. As if he has been dipped in it. Though it is only the second week of June, the thermometer read 94 degrees at the noon meal, and the radio said the humidity was about the same.

  Kenny says he don’t want to be a dairyman at all, Flip goes on. Says it ain’t no kind of life for a man in this day and age, being chained to a udder. Our dad says real freedom comes from knowing your place but Kenny still says he’s gonna do something else with his life, be a carpenter or maybe even join the armed services. Something that won’t tie him to one place. Dad said dairy farming was good enough for three generations of Flack men, it should be good enough for Kenny, but Kenny said carpentry was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for him. I thought Dad was gonna pop him sure. Your butt’s sweating.

  The boy nods his head; then, when his brain catches up with Flip’s words, squinches a little on his perch. The tractor’s seat is bare metal, its cushion—leather, vinyl, cloth, whatever it might have been—long since worn away. Sitting on it in the summer is like simmering on a hot stove, and he himself has seen the sweat drip off Donnie or his uncle through the tiny holes drilled in the seat. The holes, as fine as those on a spaghetti strainer, are arrayed like a Jewish star. He doesn’t know if they were drilled there to let the sweat out or not.

  Kenny says he’s taking off after the letter ceremony next week. You lettered, right? Are you going to the ceremony?

  The boy nods his head. The letter ceremony. It is why he is driving this load of manure to Shepherd’s Bush. He is trying to earn enough money to buy a letter jacket. He finished the year with eight medals to his credit, and by the time his sophomore year begins in the fall he wants them all on his chest, spangled and loud.

  Ew, gross. Looks like you peed your pants.

  I wouldn’t talk, the boy calls back. You’re sitting on a pile of shit.

  The last half mile of 38 to Shepherd’s Bush is one long if not particularly steep incline, and when the tractor reaches the top it’s nearly crawling. It takes the two boys almost three hours to unload the half ton of manure by the resort’s kitchen garden, and Flip continues to talk the whole time. For the most part the boy lets him prattle without answering, occasionally identifying tender shoots of basil or onion or kale in response to the younger boy’s inquiries, asters, vinca, yes, Flip, those are morning glories, but they bloom all day. The boy finds Flip’s garrulousness soothing, comforting even, the absolute lack of anxiety the ten-year-old has about his family, his future, everything else he doesn’t know. When I grow up I’m gonna do exactly what my dad does, Flip says, I’m gonna milk cows and live in our same house, and the boy has no doubt that he will.

  When they’re finished the boy collects three dollars from the gardener. A letter jacket is fifty dollars, the boy thinks, pocketing two of the dollars and giving one to Flip, who sweeps out the trailer with a push broom. Three months of vacation, four loads of manure each month at three dollars per, a dollar to Flip, say, every other time, and … the math gets lost in his head. He spreads the tarp over the ripe-smelling planks and Flip tosses his broom and the shovels on top and climbs in. The trailer, almost as old and infirm as the tractor, bounces from one wheel to the other as they rattle back down 38’s smooth tarred surface, and once he’s got the tractor going the boy drops it into neutral and, freed of the gears’ restraint, the wheels pick up speed down the long hill. Flip lies down and lets himself be tossed from side to side, his laughter constant, punctuated only by cries of Faster, faster! The freshly hayed fields on either side of the road are studded with crows and seagulls massacring the field mice whose homes have been mown into bales. The crows and gulls straggle over the fields like two chess teams too busy to notice each other.

  At first the boy doesn’t recognize the straw-haired girl with the baton walking between the road and the line of elms in his uncle’s front yard. She is walking away from him marching-band style, the baton resting on her shoulders like a soldier’s rifle. From the back she reminds him of Julia Miller. Sunlight streams through the leaves on the elms, which are still small and pale, none bigger than a silver dollar. In a few months they will be as big and dark as dollar bills, the shade beneath them as thick as pea soup, but right now the sun can still sneak through the half-grown, half-green leaves and glint off his sister Joanie’s hair, and the first thing the boy thinks when he realizes who it is is that Joanie’s hair isn’t blonde at all, but brown, hardly lighter than his. Then Joanie turns around, and almost immediately jumps up and down and points at him with her baton.

  It’s Dale! It’s Dale!

  The boy can’t hear her inside the tractor’s noise. He still hears nothing besides Flip’s giggles and screams as he rolls from side to side in the rattling trailer, but he knows that’s what Joanie is saying. He is thinking that the truck must have driven right past Shepherd’s Bush on 38 when he and F
lip were unloading the manure and he didn’t hear that either. He would have thought he’d have heard it—would have thought he’d have sensed his mother’s approach like a cold wind on his neck. But he had no idea.

  He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he nearly rolls past the driveway, and he makes the hard left without braking, nearly tossing Flip from the trailer. Then he has to slam right to avoid running into the back of the old man’s truck, and even over the roar of the tractor’s engine he can hear Flip’s body slam into the other side of the trailer. When he pulls up short he finds himself staring right at the truck’s broken taillight, and he turns and looks at the big sugar maple that stands across the road in the northwest corner of his uncle’s south pasture. Flip is lying in the trailer, his limbs askew, his belly still shaking with laughter, and when the boy cuts the motor a backfire makes Flip jump and scream and then giggle again, but to the boy the sound is nothing so much as the sound of his bubble bursting. Flecks of grass and manure cling to Flip’s sweat-wet cheeks and his eyes are closed. Seventeen months ago the boy had gazed at the broken panes of the garage door on Long Island without knowing why the sight filled him with a sense of loss, but as he looks down at Flip’s dreamy smile and quivering stomach he knows full well that he will never see him again, and his only consolation is that Flip is himself unaware of the impending separation.

  That was fun.

  Without the sound of the tractor’s engine Flip’s voice is more distinct but thinner, and quickly dissipates in the hot afternoon air. Giggles still bubble out of him like bubbles from frogs hidden under water.

  I think I’m broken.

  A shriek rends the air.

  Dale! Dale!

  Joanie jumps up on the trailer even as Flip sits up and they miss butting heads by inches. Joanie falls backwards but by then the boy is behind her and he catches her. The rubber tip of her baton hits him in the eye as she whirls around but he binds her to him in a bear hug anyway.