by Dale Peck
He stands then, and the girl steps back, feeling for the second or third or fourth time like a voyeur in her parents’ home.
Guess we’d better go see the “ladies,” the son says.
There are only half a dozen cows in the barn. Donnie’s tour is cursory, and already almost over: he has walked from one end of the milking alley to the other. The son follows his father and the girl walks behind, single file. She is barefoot, and she takes care not to slip into the manure gutters.
At the far end of the barn Donnie turns, pauses. The father turns, looks again at what he’s just looked at.
It’s all automated now, huh Donnie?
Yup.
The father turns to his son.
When I was up here we still had to carry the milk in pails to the holding vat. Eighty pounds those buckets weighed. I used to carry two at a time, they weighed more than I did.
Donnie says, Yup, again. He does a little soft-shoe sidestep. You used to sway between em like you was drunk, but you never did fall over.
Well hell, Donnie. Uncle Wallace would’ve kicked me square in the ass if I’d done something like that. He’d’ve put his boot right through the seat of my pants and had Aunt Bessie charge me for sewing up the hole.
Donnie nods his head. Wallace was a thrifty man. There is a pause, and then he says, Silage is automated too. He presses a button on the wall behind him, and a few grains of corn and ground stalks spew into the end of the trough.
One of the ladies lows.
Well look at that, the father says. Is that corn?
Corn, yeah.
Just then the door at the other end of the alley opens, and the girl’s grandfather walks in. He limps only a few steps into the barn on his lame hip, spots Donnie, and waves a hand.
That’s Ralph, Donnie says. I gotta get going.
He trots down the alley. The grandfather has already left the barn.
That’s my grandfather, the girl says to the son. Donnie’s always been a bit afraid of him.
Donnie pauses in the barn door.
Bye Dale. Good seeing you.
Bye Donnie, the father says to the closing door. He laughs. Donnie Sutton. Seventy years old, gotta get to the fields.
On the way out of the barn the father scratches one of the ladies on the forehead, then cups her head in both his hands.
Well, hello there baby. Yes hello there beautiful. Those are just the prettiest brown eyes I’ve ever seen, yes they are.
The son watches his father with a soft smile on his face, full of wonder and love, and longing too. He looks at his father with the same expression he’d looked at the girl’s house a moment ago. The father continues to hold the cow’s face in his hands, his face blank again, lost to memory, and all at once the weight of the afternoon settles on the girl’s shoulders, the significance of what is passing between these two men. The father holds the head of the cow in his hands as though it were something delicate, precious, crystalline—and already broken—while his son watches him with a look on his face that seems to say, If I had a tube of superglue in my hand, I’d put it all back together for you. But the father has eyes only for the cow in his hands. The years seem to melt off his body for the few moments he holds her, the thin limbs of a boy emerge, eyes innocent of a loss he can only acknowledge by pretending it didn’t happen. All at once the girl looks around at the spindly walls of the dairy barn, the vertical slices of light that come through the boards where the battening has fallen off. She sees the straggly lines of the unkempt garden, the unmown lawn, the grass obscuring the edges of the Century Farm plaque. She realizes that loss belongs not just to these men. It’s all she can do not to take the son’s hand in hers and squeeze it.
The son puts his hand on his father’s shoulder.
We’d better get on the road if we want to make it back to Rochester tonight.
The father looks up with a start. Looks at the girl, and then at his son.
I tell you what Dale. There was a time when all I wanted was to be a dairy farmer. I called up Uncle Wallace and begged him to take me back, but all he would say was, You broke my heart Dale, you broke my heart. I told him Ma beat me and Dad was drunk but all he’d say was, You broke my heart. But his heart was too hard to break. It’s a hard life, dairy farming. It’s no life for a man.
No one says anything, and after a moment the father turns back to the cow in his hands.
But you’re a pretty thing anyway. Yes you are. But not as pretty as Gloria Hull.
As they leave the barn Donnie and the boy are pulling out of the driveway in Donnie’s pickup. Sand spurts from under his tires as he races after her grandfather. The father laughs again.
Seventy years old and still raring to work. Donnie Badget. Sutton, I mean. He laughs at his son. Donnie Sutton. Hey, he says then, to the girl. Would you mind if I took a picture of you and Dale? Nobody’s gonna believe me at the reunion when I tell them a sexy blonde made me lunch, I’m gonna need proof.
The girl feels her blush on her cheeks like a prickly brush. She pushes her fingers through her hair.
Sure.
She and the son stand side by side with their backs to the barn. She feels it behind her like a backdrop, sees the farmhouse over the father’s shoulders as similarly two-dimensional, unreal. She and the son sling their arms over each other’s shoulders. She tries to pinpoint a moment when this understanding was forged, this connection, but can’t. Still, it feels natural, and she squeezes his shoulder a little.
Now it is the father’s turn to beam at his son.
Look at that, he says. Dale with his arm around a pretty girl. He guffaws, but lightly. Oh well.
The camera clicks audibly in the quiet afternoon.
They linger by the Lincoln, hug. Linger a moment longer. The girl wants them to stay, and she wants them to go too. The moment is full, and she feels it would become distorted if anything else were added to it. Then the father and son get in the car. The girl watches the car as it drives away—it’s what you do, after all, at a leave-taking. The son backs out of the driveway slowly, the gravel crunching under the Lincoln’s big wheels, then pilots his father’s car a little too quickly around the curve by the creamer and shoots up the hill toward the bridge into town. Then the car crests the hill and is gone as suddenly as it appeared. The girl watches the empty space for a moment until it occurs to her that she will probably never see it, or its occupants again, and then, with a small, nebulous sadness, she walks toward the house to do the dishes before heading back to Justin’s. Within moments she’s distracted by the prospect of hand washing seven plates (why won’t her mother buy a dishwasher?), scrubbing the burned residue of canned asparagus from the bottom of the pot, taking a wire brush to the barbecue grill. She should dump the ash bucket too. Maybe she’ll even plant those impatiens. But Justin’s mother had talked about roasting a chicken tonight, and she doesn’t want to be late. She looks at her watch. It’s coming up on three-thirty. A two-and-a-half-hour lunch. Her grandfather would have a cow.
The twins have returned to their collage in the living room. There seems to be more paper stuck to their skin than to the piece of cardboard between them. The place is a mess, and she feels a surge of anger. She is almost ready to deliver a lecture about how the twins don’t care about their own home when Carly says,
Dad called. She doesn’t look up from her work.
The girl’s heart rises to her throat. It is an effort to say,
And?
Mom’s fine, Christine says, they’ll be home for dinner. You be here?
And just like that, the girl’s anger melts away. She watches as Christine’s scissors turn a picture of a car into little slips of blue. She is silent for so long that Christine looks up at her.
No, she says then. Justin’s mom is roasting a chicken tonight. I gotta get back. She resists the urge to add the word home.
Christine turns back to the page in front of her. She and Carly’s scissors make a sound like water as they cut through
paper. After a moment Carly looks up, blowing her bangs off her forehead with a puckered lower lip.
What?
Nothing, the girl says. I’m gonna do the dishes.
She hasn’t exactly forgotten the men, not yet, but she’s not exactly thinking about them either. Instead she feels a warmth across her cheeks, her shoulders: that’s how she’s remembering them. Later, over dinner, she’ll tell Justin and his family about them, and she won’t be conscious of the distance her words put between her and the afternoon, the men, the physical memory of their presence on her cheeks, her shoulders. Her mother will call after dinner, thank her for cooking lunch, quiz her about the two strangers she invited into her house, and the girl will find herself defending them slightly. They were nice guys, Mom. And anyway, the dad was old and the son was gay.
Certainly she’s not conscious of the residence she’s taken up in both the father’s and son’s lives. That she has confirmed the father’s faith in good country people, that the son thinks of her as the one positive experience he’s shared with his father as an adult. It would never occur to her that weeks, months later she’ll be the person they remember from this trip. Not Donnie, not the father’s brother Jimmy dying in Florida, not his mother sitting in the chair in her brother Herb’s kitchen because of her arthritis and refusing even to move to a chair on the patio with the rest of the family. Not even the reunion—the union, really, the first meeting—with the father’s long-lost half brother, his namesake whose name was changed, and who as a result disappeared for sixty years. Dale Peck who became Dale Gorman. Who lost his name along with his father, lost it to a brother who in his imagination stepped into it like a pair of handed-down shoes.
Almost as soon as they leave Hull Farm the father begins pulling cinnamon candies from a big bag on the center console of the Lincoln and sucking them down one after another. He puts the red cellophane wrappers in his empty coffee cup in the cup holder that sticks out from the dash. The cup holder can slide flush with the dash when not in use, but the son has never seen it empty of cups and candy and cigarettes in all his times in the car.
The son pilots the Lincoln along 81 through Oak Hill until he reaches the intersection of 81 and 32 in Greenville. The Thruway is dead ahead, the farm to their left.
Want to take one more look at the place?
Yeah sure, the father says, and the son can’t tell if his voice is wistful or just quiet. He sucks on his candy. Why not.
Thirty-two to 38. Past what used to be the high school—it’s the middle school now—past what used to be Shepherd’s Bush—now it’s called Pine View—then right toward what used to be Uncle Wallace’s farm.
Used to run this every day, Dale. Yes, son, your old man was a cross-country star in his day.
How is your foot?
Last night, when he’d carried their luggage up to their motel room, the son had been surprised to find a pair of crutches in the trunk, even more surprised to find out they were his father’s.
My foot’s all right, thank you Dale. Last week I couldn’t hardly walk it hurt so bad. But that’s the thing about gout, it comes and goes of its own accord.
As the Lincoln ascends the last hill toward the farm the son feels a little thrill in his chest. It’s not just his father’s presence in the passenger’s seat. He first discovered the farm two years earlier, and he’s driven by it several times since then, and every time he crests the hill he feels that same sense of what if? in his gut. It’s hard to frame the feeling more specifically than that because so much seems to hang off his father’s decision to leave the farm when he was fourteen. If he had stayed, the son thinks, he would have been a different person. Not the same man with different qualities, but someone else entirely. He would have had a different wife, different children. He—the son—would be different too.
First there’s the abandoned house north of the farm. The Flacks own it now, Flip plans to renovate it for his daughter and her fiancé. Then there’s the Flacks’ own house, a stately white Greek Revival backed by a cluster of pristine green-roofed barns, divided by a gleaming asphalt parking lot the size of a minimall’s. Then the farmhouse.
It seems naked without any trees in its front yard, just the row of six stumps cut flush to the ground like a row of checkers. This time the first thing the son notices is that the house doesn’t have a porch. He remembers standing on the Hulls’ front porch in the shade of the two well-grown sugar maples that flank the front walk, but the Pecks’ farmhouse—formerly the Millers’, as the historical marker next to the driveway still proclaims, and now someone else’s—has neither a formal front porch nor a side porch for outside meals and sunsets. It does have a few extra feet of eave over the front door, but it is hardly a porch. It is barely as wide as a grown man’s shoulders, just enough to shelter strangers—friends would come around to the kitchen—as they wait for someone to answer their knock. It is a compact Federal-style house. A contemporary viewer might call its simplicity elegant, but no one would ever mistake it for what weekenders call a country house. The Hulls and Flacks live in country houses; the Pecks lived in a farmhouse. A house that has only what it needs. Whose plainness isn’t aesthetic, but economic. The fieldstone foundation was extracted from the yard; the rectangular dentals aren’t decoration, but rather the tips of the roof joists extending beyond the asphalt-shingled eaves to provide a secure base for the gutters. The bay window on the east wall of the kitchen wing was added by the most recent tenants, and if you look closely at the mullions in their other new windows you’ll see that they’re just strips of tape applied in a cosmetic grid. By contrast the tongue-and-groove ceiling of the side porch on the Flacks’ house is painted light blue—Tiffany blue, Prussian blue, sky blue. When the man’s son tells him that it is a country custom to paint a porch’s ceiling the color of the sky the man says, I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting. It certainly is the color of the sky, he adds, though he is still sucking ruminatively on a candy and staring at what used to be his uncle’s house.
Those stumps used to be trees, he says.
They were elms, his son says, a little fact the son pushes forward like a novice chess player advancing all his pawns to get them out of the way. Flip said they had to cut them down in the early seventies.
Elms? the father says absently. Yes, Dale, I think they were elms. But his voice is so vacant he could as easily have said oak, ash, redwood, banyan.
It’s a beautiful house, the son says now, though by then the slow-moving car has passed it. They’re in front of the field now, what used to be the north pasture. It’s freshly mowed, and a long black serpentine drive leads to a stately white neocolonial at the top of the hill. It’s only a few months old, its corners so crisp against the empty sky it could be a billboard rather than a building.
Ah, now that’s a house Dale. Look at that, right up there on that hill where I always wanted to build a house. If you’d only come up here a year sooner, that’d be my house up there on that hill.
The son hears his father say house three times, but none of the words seem to refer to the building on the hill.
You wouldn’t want to live in Uncle Wallace’s house?
Aw hell Dale, that place is a step above a shack. There wasn’t a plumb line in the whole house forty-five years ago, who can say what kind of shape it’s in now. Lead pipes, oil burner in the basement, some rusted-out cast iron tub with hot and cold water coming out of two different faucets.
There are some people who like that sort of thing.
I know it, the father says. They keep me in business.
He and the son laugh.
No, Dale, if I wanted to live there I’d have to gut the thing, rebuild it from the inside out just to make it livable. Be better off tearing it down and starting over. And the view’s better up there on that hill.
Yeah, no, I guess you’re right. He taps the steering wheel. Well, I guess we should head back then.
The son says he thinks he knows a shortcut back to the
Thruway but as it turns out he doesn’t know the area as well as he thinks he does, or would like to. He spends an hour piloting them through the twists and turns and hills of Greene and Albany County back roads, and the whole time the father admonishes him to slow down, you’re gonna get us killed Dale, Jesus Christ, be careful, I want to get to the reunion but not on a stretcher.
Look, Dad, the speed limit’s forty-five. He taps the digital speedometer. I’m driving forty-three.
Well there’s no law that says you have to drive at the speed limit, Dale. Keep both hands on the wheel. You have to pay attention to road conditions.
It’s a sunny day, Dad, road conditions are perfect. They wouldn’t make the speed limit forty-five if it wasn’t safe to drive forty-five.
The father reaches nervously for another candy.
Well just take it easy for your dad’s sake then.
The boy slows down to forty, thirty-nine, sets the cruise control.
Happy?
The father laughs. Father and son is a game the two have only recently begun playing, and both enjoy it.
This was a very nice trip, Dale, thank you very much for suggesting it.
It was my pleasure.
It was good to see the farm again. And Flip and Donnie. And of course Gloria Hull.
She was sweet.
Prettiest girl in Greenville, New York.
Actually, she lived in Oak Hill.
Prettiest, nicest girl in Oak Hill, the father says, untroubled. Oak Hill, Greenville, they’re all the same. Hell, there’s a Greenville in every state of the country, but you’d be lucky to find a girl half as pretty or as nice as Gloria Hull in any one of them.
That’s true.
By the time they’ve reached Rochester she’s become the prettiest, nicest girl in Upstate New York, and by the time the bulk of the family shows up Friday afternoon she’s become the prettiest, nicest girl the father has ever met—except my daughter, of course, he says if his youngest child is in earshot. By the time Dale Peck Gorman shows up Saturday morning, thirty-six hours after the two men have returned from Hull Farm, the father has told everyone who passes through his Uncle Herb’s house about the prettiest, nicest girl you could ever hope to meet—told many of them more than once, in between telling them about his rebuilt ’31 Chevy street rod and the advantages of trenchless sewer pipe replacement over traditional methods, which in the father’s eyes seem as backbreakingly labor intensive as Roman aqueducts. When he talks about his car he talks about how Donnie Badget messed this up or did that wrong (he calls him Donnie Sutton sometimes, and every time he does he curses his son for confusing him), and when he talks about trenchless sewer pipe replacement he talks about the four hundred thousand dollars he has invested in it and the downturn in Kansas’s aerospace-driven economy, but when he talks about Gloria Hull his voice lightens, slows down. If his digital camera is handy he calls up her picture on the square-inch screen and points with his blunt index finger at the orange blob on the right, smaller than his nail. There she is. The prettiest, nicest girl in Greenville, New York.