by Josh Weil
If one of the heifers would have trouble calving, if one of them would just give him a chance to do something, he knew he wouldn’t come down here with the steer nearly as much. He felt a little guilty about that. After a while, he shut his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face and the almost too bright redness of his eyelids.
“Wendell,” he said again, realizing, suddenly, that was the kind of name his father would have given a steer.
For two days, off and on, sleet fell like old rain. In the middle of the field next to the government land the wind buffeted the mineral box; its weather vane, giving in to the push of nature, turned the roof to shield the pink block of salt. Clumps of cows stood still under shaking trees, calves pressed close to their sides, out of the wind. Across the fence line, against the woods, the row of abandoned hay bales rotted.
Two weeks after the steer came down with grass tetany, the hydraulics on Osby’s dump truck gave out in the middle of a job. He was over in the auto graveyard behind the field that separated the Old House from the one he lived in, hoping to avoid a trip to the Pfersicks’ garage all the way across the valley near Narrows, trying to salvage a cylinder off an old front-end loader when he heard a truck approaching up the road. He didn’t recognize the small green-and-tan pickup with a dirty white cap that turned up the driveway toward his home. Or the young guy who stepped out: skinny, his flannel shirt flapping around him, his jeans sun-bleached along the front of his legs. A bushy, red beard flamed around his face when the sun hit it. Glasses glinted beneath a green hat. The guy looked around, walked up the front porch steps, and knocked on the door.
Osby stayed where he was.
The guy walked back down the steps, peered around the house, and shouted, “Hello? Hello?” After a second, he walked back around the porch, back up the steps, knocked again, shouted again, and then returned to his truck.
Osby watched him get in, waited for him to shut the driver’s door.
Instead, the guy got back out, and walked back to the porch. There was something in his hand. A book, Osby realized. The guy sat down on the front steps of Osby’s home, opened his book, and started to read.
After two or three minutes, Osby jumped down from the front-end loader and headed across the shortcut between the houses. When he came around the porch, the guy was already standing.
“Hi,” the guy said. “I’m here about the room.” He talked twice as fast as Osby was used to. “My name’s Tim. I saw the sign about the room? I hope I’m in the right place. Are you Osby Caudill?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Tim,” the guy said again as they shook hands. “I hope I’m not bothering you. I mean, I know it’s the middle of the day and—”
“No, no,” Osby said.
“This is a wonderful place.”
Osby looked at the sagging porch, tools scattered over the peeling floorboards, rags, a couple rusting lawn chairs. “Lived here all my life,” he said.
“Really? Wow. Born here and everything?”
“Yeah.”
“Incredible.”
As far as Osby could tell, the guy really thought it was. Osby stared at him, thinking he looked like a kid, thinking: This kid wants to rent a room in my house.
“I’m a grad student over at VTU,” Tim was saying, “In agronomy. Getting my master’s. I’m working on this project trying to introduce kenaf. It’s a kind of crop, kind of like … well, anyway, it’s a crop, and I’m trying to—”
Osby interrupted him. “You lookin’ to rent a room here?”
Tim’s free hand went to his beard. “Uh,” his fingers hovering at his chin, “I saw a sign … I … Did someone rent it already?”
Osby stuck his hands in the front pocket of his sweatshirt and tried to think of how to answer that. After all, he’d put that sign up. And the kid was so excited he didn’t feel right lying to him. “Well,” he said after a second, “There’s no one usin’ the room, now.”
Tim nodded. “Do you think I could, uh … Would it be all right if I took a look at it? Just to … make sure.”
How could he say, No, you can’t look at it. “Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
He clumped up the stairs, Tim talking behind him.
“I bet you’re wondering what the heck kenaf is,” Tim said. Maybe, in the dim light of the hallway, the kid thought there was a nod somewhere in the way Osby moved up the stairs in front of him. “Hardly any of the farmers around here have even heard of it, but it’s revolutionary. I mean it. It’s going to revolutionize agriculturally based economies in regions of the country like this one.”
At the top of the stairs, Osby turned to the right and headed for the room his dad had slept in all the years Osby had known him.
“Do you grow any crops?” Tim asked. “I saw most of the land around here is in pasture.”
“Clendal Veltre down bottom 247’s got dairy cows,” Osby said. “Your corn, soybeans. I’m just beef, here.”
“See, corn and soybeans,” Tim said, “if you’re growing them as feed for your cows, okay, but as cash crops? You can’t make a living at it, right?”
Osby pushed open the door to his dad’s room. “That’s her,” he said.
Tim went as far as the doorway, stood, looking in. Osby backed up a bit, trying to think what he’d say if the kid liked it. He couldn’t imagine he would—a college kid, carrying his books around, thinking up new ways of farming and everything. The room was just as his father had left it: muddy work clothes strewn over the floor, lamp made of a deer’s leg on the bed stand, old apple crates full of older clothes stacked against the wall next to the dresser, the Nascar pillow on the sagging bed.
Tim didn’t let on whether he liked it or not. He just kept talking while he looked at the room. “See,” he said. “Kenaf, that’s the crop I’m doing my thesis work on, it’s from Asia, mainly India—”
“Asia?” Osby said, thinking of the little girl on the pamphlet. “Like Korea?”
“Well, not Korea, I don’t think,” Tim said. “Sri Lanka. China, a little. Mainly, though, in India.”
“Uh-huh,” Osby said. It suddenly seemed incredible that a graduate student at the university in Coalsburg, someone who knew what kinds of things grew in countries like India and China, was standing in his house, looking at his father’s room thinking of renting it.
“Yeah,” Tim went on. “The thing is, we’re trying to introduce it into the States. It’s not like any crop we grow here, really —well, it looks a little like sugarcane, a little like big, uh … you know … cannabis—but,” he moved on quickly, “it’s almost woody, very stiff, large stalks and—this is the thing—you can use it for a whole slew of things from paper to—this is what I’m interested in—as biomass plant material that could provide this entire country with its own renewable, environmentally tenable, domestically produced energy source.”
Osby just nodded, but he was paying close attention. Not to what the kid was saying, but to how excited he was about it. Imagine feeling like that, Osby thought. Tim was talking about carbon and the atmosphere and something about the dinosaur age. Osby didn’t listen so much as watch. The guy’s hands flew everywhere. He could hardly stand still. His eyes looked like they were powered by something completely foreign to Osby, completely different from whatever it was inside him. This kid, he thought to himself, thinks he’s going to save the world. It was the kind of thing people usually laughed at around Eads County, but it seemed to Osby like something wondrous. Not that this kid was actually going to do any of this stuff, but that he thought he could. He really believed it. Some kind of pot plant from India replacing coal and oil in the whole of the United States. It seemed to Osby that he had never even thought of anything close to something that big. Here he was, he thought to himself, putting a check in the mail to help out one little Asian kid, helping a cow give birth to a calf that was going to die in a year anyway, trying to keep a one-balled steer alive. And he couldn’t even do that.
“Well, this
is great,” Tim was saying. “I mean, I guess the clothes and stuff are someone else’s, but the room comes furnished like this, right? ’Cause I actually have all my stuff here with me in the truck.” Tim laughed, awkwardly. “I’ve been staying over at Whistler’s Meadow.”
Osby had never more than nodded to any of the commune people who lived in that strange place out near Narrows on 42; he’d never thought he’d actually speak to one.
Tim must have seen it in his face, because he said, fast, “Just camping on their land. They let me, you know, until I found something. Do you think, I mean, if it’s okay, if you don’t have anyone else lined up, or anything, do you think I could move in today?”
Right then, Osby didn’t see how someone like him could refuse someone like Tim anything.
“I wouldn’t touch the clothes,” Tim said. “I mean, whoever’s they are—if they’re yours or anything, the clothes and stuff, we could just move them out when it was convenient, you know?” He laughed again. “Boy am I tired of sleeping on the ground.”
“Yeah,” Osby said. “All right.”
“Great. That’s really great. Thank you.”
“Sure.”
Tim seemed to be waiting for something. Osby was still trying to imagine living with someone other than his father in the house. “Uh,” Tim said, “what kind of, you know, rent were you thinking?”
Osby peered in at the room, as if getting a better idea of the dimensions would help him decide on how much rent. All he could think of was those plants of Tim’s and India and China and things like that.
“Two hundred,” he said, finally, thinking of the little girl on the front of that pamphlet and the check he’d sent in the mail.
It took Osby a while to replace the hydraulic cylinder on the dump truck, and he finished spreading his last load of gravel in fast-approaching dark, the bits of gray stone on the Whorleys’ new driveway holding onto the light longer than the fields and yard. When he got home, the house was lit up like he’d never seen it before: upstairs windows glowing; the downstairs ones, too; even the porch light on. The ruts in the driveway seemed to fall in the wrong spots. Osby listened to the weeds scrape the dump truck’s belly as if he’d never heard the sound before.
When he climbed out of the truck cab, he went suddenly still. Strange music came from the house, Indian or Arab or maybe even the kind of stuff they played in Korea. He took a few steps back and looked up at the window to his father’s bedroom. From in there, a woman’s voice sang in a language that seemed like an entirely new way of making sound.
Even the creaking of the trees sounded like a different forest below an unfamiliar ridge. It was almost like watching a movie, except the screen was wrapped all the way around Osby. He looked up at the sky. The stars, still and distant as ever, hadn’t changed. In his father’s bedroom, a figure crossed the patch of yellow-glowing glass, just a dark shape, any man, any person, in any window of any house. Except his.
The temperature had dropped—he figured it was close to fifteen. A gust of wind stung his face. He would have liked to go inside, make some coffee, bring his thermos with him to the pastures. Instead, he walked quickly to his pickup, as if sneaking through the light thrown from the porch. The kid’s truck squatted alongside his, the tailgate and the cap’s rear window open. It looked empty. Osby wondered what kinds of things had been moved into his father’s room.
It took two hours to break up the ice on the creeks and ponds, to spike the five hay bales, roll them out in each pasture, do a quick roving check of each herd. When he had swung the last gate shut, he leaned against it, his cold hands on the freezing crossbar, and tried to think of what else he could do to keep from going home. Whistler’s Meadow, he thought. They had bought Don Demastus’s farm a couple years ago and turned it into what they called communal living, a group home. He tried to imagine what that could mean. There had been times when he had driven past the sprawling compound and felt a pull in him, a need so strong it scared him: to be touched—on the shoulder or cheek or anywhere—by some other human’s hand. Now, he knew it wouldn’t have done any good. Behind him, the truck’s taillights reddened his back, painted the shadow of his shape into the reddened grass.
He wondered what the kid was doing back at his house. Probably making dinner. His stomach gurgled. What would a kid like that eat? Probably vegetarian. Leaves and grass. He suddenly knew that his kitchen would smell like Indian food when he got home, however Indian food smelled. He imagined the kid, in slippers and a bathrobe, cooking things on the stove. He saw himself standing in the doorway, feeling as if he had done something rude by not taking off his boots. The kid might offer him dinner. Over plates of strange food without any meat in it, the kid would tell him all about his plans to change the world with trees from India.
Osby shoved off the gate, letting it clang, and drove the forty minutes into town.
At the Buttercup, all but two tables were empty. The few diners greeted Osby when he came in. A nod, a quick hello. Then Gary Huffman returned to cutting up his daughter’s meal. Powell and April Avehart went back to the quietness of eating together. Old Mose Hamblin gave his attention again to getting his shaking fork into his mouth. Osby settled onto a stool at the counter, his back to the room, and ordered the $4.95 special. When it came, he hunched over the plate, cutting a chicken liver in half, easing it onto his fork, eating as slowly as he could.
In the kitchen, Vance was yelling. Hazel entered the dining room, forcing a smile onto her face, and Osby wanted to tell her that without her, the old men who came in each night might not ever eat dinner. He wanted to tell her she was indispensable. Indispensable. Thinking of the word, he was suddenly sure that if he said something she wouldn’t even hear him.
He eased a sliver of fried onion onto a square of green pepper on top of the half of a chicken liver. The onions were fifty cents extra, the green peppers another fifty. He felt like he could spend everything in his wallet, clean out his bank account with a check, and it wouldn’t matter.
Forty-five minutes into his meal, the mashed potatoes cold, he realized he had forgotten to give the paralyzed steer the Cowdex. He finished chewing. All the tables were empty now.
Should have put a bullet in him from the start, he thought.
At 8:30, the restaurant closed. By then, Osby had finished three peach cobblers with ice cream and he could tell by the way Hazel slapped the chairs upside down on the tabletops that he was overstaying his welcome. His belly sloshed as he climbed into the Sierra. Under the cab light, he peered inside his wallet: two crinkly dollar bills. His jeans pockets, front and back, held a quarter, three dimes, and a penny. In the restaurant, slowly picking at cold, gooey slabs of peach, he had gone over his life, scavenging for something he could change to make him indispensable to somebody.
So it seemed almost inevitable that he passed the sign for 33 and pulled into the C & O parking lot. He parked by the Dumpster in the back and killed the engine. Quiet filled the air. He listened to a car pull up to the pumps around front. Another picked up speed heading out of town. He had the impression that he was drifting first one way and then the other, but always down, as if he’d driven his truck off a roadside into deep water. He zipped up his camouflage jacket so the metal tab jutted against his chin. Waves of wind rolled over the top of the cab.
At a quarter to ten, he roused himself, stiff with cold, and made his way around to the front of the store. His legs felt unused to walking, his face puffy. The doorbell’s high jangle almost took the strength out of his knees. Everything in his chest felt packed in too tight.
“Osby,” Deb said as she came out of the restroom, as if him standing there was a big surprise pulled out from behind someone’s back. “You just made it. I was ’bout to close up an’ go home.”
“Oh,” he said. “You want me to leave?”
“Leave?” She peered at him. “No, you got five minutes. Go on an’ get whatever you came for. I’m not gonna slip out and lock you in.”
He could feel her eyes on him, and he was sure she must be able to see his pulse at his throat—it felt like twice the blood was being pumped through there. He headed down one of the aisles, just to move, and, remembering how she made him get a sandwich last time, headed for the refrigerated closets.
“That meatball sub,” he said, when he put the sandwich down on the counter. “Janice knows how to make ’em, huh?”
“She makes good ones.”
She started ringing him up, and he almost panicked, seeing the whole exchange finished and nothing for him to do but walk back out the door. “Hey, wait,” he said. “I guess I better microwave that.”
She paused, looked at him queerly. “I don’t know if it’ll be good hot.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was real good.”
“The meatballs?”
“Yeah. You was right ’bout that.”
“This is chicken salad,” she said. “Did you want meatball?”
He stared at the sandwich. “No,” he said, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets. “That’s all right. This ’un looks good.” He raised his eyes as if asking for confirmation.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “I go for Janice’s chicken salad.”
His smile hung on his face longer than he wanted it to.
“That’ll be $3.50,” she said.
He remembered, then, that he only had two bucks and change. “Okay,” he said. He wedged his thick fingers into his pocket, dug out his wallet, opened it, and tried to look surprised. “Oh, no.” The words tasted tinny in his mouth. “I don’t have but two bucks. I better put that back.”
He watched Deb’s eyes take in something, realize something. Her look changed from perplexed to pleased, right there in front of him.
“I just rang you up,” she said, smiling.
“I know. I’m sorry ’bout that.” He reached for the sandwich, but she took it, and put it in a bag.