Greenville Page 10

  I seen them snap bone. You were lucky.

  It is only a moment before the water runs clear and then his uncle shuts it off and smears a thick dab of liniment on his arm, the same liniment he’d rubbed on the Jersey. The liniment is clear but unguent, like bacon grease, and even though his uncle rubs it in vigorously the boy resists the urge to flinch. Through the oily sheen coating his arm the boy can see a bit of blood well up, though not enough to push through the liniment.

  You’ll want Aunt Bessie to wrap that in a clean rag, his uncle says, and then his voice changes and he says, Listen to me, Dale.

  The boy looks up from his arm. His uncle is twelve years older than the old man but their faces are the same, soft, slightly babyish, held in place by cold green eyes. He squats in front of the boy, one hand still holding the boy’s injured arm, the other the tube of liniment.

  You don’t go making someone depend on you and then up and let them down. You don’t do that. You just don’t.

  His uncle pauses. Looks down, then looks up again, and when he looks up the boy recognizes the hardness in his uncle’s eyes as the same hardness the old man had in his the day he brought him here.

  I’ll tell you something Dale. I didn’t want you here. I told your father to take you back to the island with him. But you earned your place. You work hard and you learn fast and you’ve got a real feel for the ladies. The boy looks down at the bite on his arm and his uncle says, That ain’t nothing. I been bit more times than I can count. But listen to me, Dale, I ain’t done yet. I gotta know I can depend on you. That you’re not gonna go out for a run and come back six hours later smelling like perfume.

  The boy blushes and his eyes fall to his feet, but then he steels himself and looks back into his uncle’s face, and he sees that his uncle’s green eyes have gone soft like grass after it rains.

  Don’t let me down, Dale. You went and earned a place here, don’t go and let me down.

  The boy has thrown his arms around his uncle’s neck before he knows he is going to do it. He squeezes his chest against his uncle’s and beats back the urge to cry.

  I’m sorry, Uncle Wallace. It won’t ever happen again.

  It’s rare for him to touch even one person during the course of a day. Not like Long Island, where there was always a brother or sister all over him, or the back of his mother’s hand, and mixing with the still shapeless joy his uncle has filled him with—no, dipped him in—he is disturbed by the fact that there is an ill-defined but inescapable similarity between this embrace and the one he had given Julia Miller.

  It’s not until he’s getting ready to go to bed that he remembers the ball of paper she had thrown on the ground. He’s torn then. He doesn’t know if he should read it or throw it away. He decides that he will smooth it out without reading it and put the wrinkled white triangle in his top dresser drawer containing his socks and drawers and the old man’s medicine. Edith’s dresser really. The boy remembers how his uncle had methodically emptied the dresser of its contents, waited until he was burning the rest of the day’s trash before burning them. At the time the significance of the gesture was lost on the boy, but as he reaches for the drawer-pull a shiver shakes him up and down as he realizes what he has come so close to losing.

  The old man’s bottles clink when he slides the drawer open—not against each other, but against the silver medal he won in the Schoharie Invitational, and despite himself, he looks at Julia’s words.

  Water is

  you can’t

  irrigate our

  either. Your

  water, in ways

  would die of thir

  Luckily the

  unlimited supply of

  which flows into the

  New York, is located

  should be thankful that

  of our most precious nat

  deserts do not have all the

  as a result they are often ver

  who live near polluted water

  but it is not clean enough to dri

  So when it rains be thankful

  you are blessed to live in temperate climes

  It makes your life a whole lot easier.

  The boy notes that Julia hasn’t signed her essay, at least not on his side of the page, and then he closes it up in the drawer.

  5

  About a month after the boy arrived a man had come around with a petition to improve 38. The petition claimed the dirt road was dangerous, impeded commerce, and impassable in winter, none of which was true, but the boy’s uncle, like his neighbors, signed it anyway. That’s the last we’ll hear-a that, he told the boy, and indeed, they all forget the man had been by until the week before the boy is due to start high school in September, when, out of nowhere, a road crew shows up.

  The crew fascinates the boy. The precision, the elegance with which the operators use their machines as extensions of themselves: these flannel-shirted men in thick work gloves wield jackhammers and chainsaws as delicately as Aunt Bessie handles needle and thread. Their treadling bulldozers peel away the old road an inch at a time, the arms of their backhoes lift and swivel and stab as methodically as a heron hunting fish in the shallows of the reservoir. The crew rips the old road apart and leaves a new one in its stead, and where cars and trucks once rattled over washboard ruts they now hum over spongy tar; but by then the crew has moved on to the next stretch of road. Bulldozers widen it, backhoes deepen the ditches on either side. Dump trucks stop the gash with tar that a steamroller, its platen as big as the holding vat, presses flat, and then finally a paint truck bisects it with a double yellow line down its center, as if to say: CUT HERE. When the double line is in place the road suddenly reminds the boy of the frozen river he had to cross to get here, the great sheet of ice and the single channel in its center. The line is like the seam in his life, he thinks, the chasm he doesn’t like to remember because he no longer knows which side he’d rather be on, or if he wants the tear open or closed.

  The crew works in stages, destroying a stretch of road and replacing it and then moving on, and from the end of October through the middle of November the length of 38 in front of his uncle’s house is in fact impassable, and he and Kenny and Flip Flack have to catch the bus on Newry Road. The pump truck uses Newry Road as well. It’s able to reach the Flacks’ dairy barn via the two-track they drive their tractors on, but even though the muddy wash of 38 is less than twenty feet wide—less river than muddy creek—the pump truck cannot ford it to reach his uncle’s land. When the boy’s uncle protests that it is costing him two weeks’ income the driver says, I’m sorry, Wallace, I get this baby stuck it’ll be my ass, I’m truly sorry. And he does sound sorry, but not sorry enough to risk his job.

  Meanwhile there are the ladies, whose udders care nothing about infrastructure or broken axles or two cents a quart, and in the end there is nothing for it but to dump the contents of the vat. The boy’s uncle doesn’t say anything as he hooks a rubber hose as big around as a sewer pipe to the vat and runs it out to the barnyard, but Donnie curses and stamps his feet and seems on the verge of picking a fight with the road crew, until finally his uncle says,

  No use getting riled up, Donnie. It’s just the government’s way of helping out poor folks. Raising their taxes and then depriving them of their income in return for the favor.

  Donnie kicks at the hose spewing forth a solid column of milk like an endless tube of toothpaste. The column squiggles, straightens out again.

  It ain’t right, Wallace. It just ain’t right.

  The boy’s uncle continues to stare without expression into the torrent of milk spewing from the hose. Then he looks up, not at Donnie but at the boy.

  No use crying over spilt milk. Ain’t that what they say?

  His uncle laughs then, but two weeks later, when the vat has to be dumped a second time, he makes Donnie and the boy do it alone, and sets off down Newry Road, where he has parked his car for the meanwhile.

  As the boy watches him pick his way across the mess
of 38, he realizes the season has changed. Fall is over, winter setting in. The leaves on his uncle’s elms were golden two weeks ago. Now they’re as faded as old newspaper, and fall off the branches like drops of water off a cow’s whiskers. The maple leaves in the Flacks’ yard have gone from red to rust and they too fall to the earth, a brown drizzle that clacks on the frozen soil with a hard mournful sound. It hasn’t snowed yet, but a week’s frosts have left the ground hard as concrete, and when his uncle clears the churned-up road his heels clink on Newry Road as if on metal. The boy listens to them fade away until they stop, and a moment later the slam of a car door shakes him from his reverie, and he hurries off to the barn to help Donnie.

  The boy doesn’t like working alone with Donnie, who is always on his back. Grabbing tools from his hand, correcting errors visible only to him with a look on his face like, Jesus, Amos, ain’t you learned nothing yet? But this morning Donnie seems too genuinely angry to affect it, and in a few minutes they’ve hooked the hose to the vat and run it outside, and when the boy opens the valve the milk rushes from the hose as from an open hydrant.

  It ain’t right, Donnie says, staring at the milk as it runs down the frozen slope of the barnyard. A man’s honest labor, wasted. I tell you, it ain’t right.

  Where the milk spews from the hose it seems so solid you could pick it up like a rope, but five feet on it suddenly disintegrates, rippling and spreading out like a wet bedsheet fallen from the line. It isn’t right, the boy thinks, but it is beautiful. The milk is thick as paint—whitewash, he thinks, Huck Finn, something like that. Its widening ripples are as gentle as ocean waves on a windless day. Whitened stalks of grass stick out of it like upright icicles, stalagmicicles, and here and there a cow patty makes a chocolate-colored island in the alabaster sea. Frost crystals glitter in the cow patties but the forty-degree milk steams as if it were boiling.

  Just look at that. It’s no wonder an honest man can’t get ahead.

  The boy tears his eyes from the steaming milk. Donnie is standing with his foot on the end of the hose behind the metal coupling, as if it were the head of a poisonous snake.

  I heard there’s farmers get paid by the government not to raise crops. They let their fields sit empty and get paid anyway. You think Uncle Wallace could get some of that money?

  Donnie looks at the boy as if he is speaking a foreign language.

  Shut up Dale, he says finally. He kicks the hose and the boy has to jump to avoid getting sprayed. When he looks up Donnie is stalking toward the dairy barn. I’m gonna clean the gutters, he calls over his shoulder. Keep an eye on the hose, Amos.

  Keep an eye on the hose Amos, the boy says under his breath. As if gravity needs his help emptying the vat. As if he’s just a kid, useless to do anything but watch his uncle’s hard work flow toward the crease between the barnyard and the north hill, wetting the cedar fenceposts they’d labored so hard to set in the spring. Why don’t you keep an eye on the hose, the boy says out loud. Don, Don—Donald Duck.

  The insult is hardly satisfying, but it doesn’t matter: a new sting has replaced it. Although it’s the second time they have pumped the vat, it’s not until the boy hears the word coming out of his own mouth that he associates this hose with the one his mother used to beat him with, and now the memory takes him over completely. The fear, the pain, the rage. The two hoses are the same, the boy sees now. Black rubber with metal couplings at either end—only this one is larger. The one at home is attached to the washing machine. Foamy gray water drains through it into the back yard at the end of every cycle, and when his mother swings it through the air it releases a clean bleachy smell, as if she is beating the dirt out of him, the impurities, the stain of the old man’s blood.

  A cold breeze chills the boy’s neck, and when he pulls his jacket around him he feels the remembered pain in his shoulders and back at first, but then he feels the constriction of the material itself. It’s getting too small for him, just like everything else. The boy buries his hands in the torn lining and wiggles his toes in Kenny Flack’s boots and feels the tips of his toes rub against the worn leather. He kicks the spewing hose, and this time it reminds him of something else. It reminds him of Julia Miller. For two weeks after their meeting at the Alcove Reservoir the boy had avoided her on the bus and at school, and then summer had come to his rescue. All through June and July and August he had kept his gaze focused on the ground whenever he ran past her house so he could tell himself he hadn’t seen her wave; mostly, though, he’d stuck to his new route along the reservoir. He remembers his impression that his love for her was like a thread of milk shot from an udder, and he finds himself measuring that thread against this river, against all the sacrifices entailed by life on the farm. He has been here less than a year, already lost his family and first love to memories that wash over him in waves of heat and coolness. But now he wonders: how much has his uncle given up? And what could he possibly have left?

  The boy feels trapped by all these thoughts and he wills the milk to hurry and drain from the vat. It took a good twenty minutes the first time around, and he’s only been out here for about ten. But then an Ayrshire calf trots into the barnyard, her nose high in the air, the smell of milk reining her in visibly, like a lasso. The Ayrshire bleats like a sheep as she runs up to the flood of milk, and even though the boy knows he should chase her away he wants to watch her—wants to devote his whole attention to something that’s no more comprehensible to him than his memories, but at least doesn’t hurt. And besides, he thinks, it would be a shame if no one profited from the farm’s loss.

  The Ayrshire wades ankle deep into the pool. She twirls about in a circle, kicking white drops every which way, paws at the milk with one hoof as if trying to get to the ground beneath it. Finally she stands still, panting slightly, head lowered, and then, with the delicacy of a cat, touches her lips to the milk. She weaned more than a month ago, but the boy wonders if she retains some memory, some regressive urge toward suckling, helplessness. But the Ayrshire reacts as if shocked, jerking her head up and running across the barnyard like a colt. The boy can hear her bleating her discovery to the rest of the herd, but if any of the other ladies understand what she is trying to say she doesn’t respond, and when the last of the milk has finally drained from the hose he flushes it with water to keep it from curdling and molding, and then he shakes the water from the hose to keep the rubber from freezing and splitting, and then he rolls up the hose and puts it back in the vat room and heads off to school.

  That afternoon as he runs home from cross country practice the boy heads down Newry Road so he can avoid the mess of 38, and as he passes the spot where Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie have been parking their cars he notices that Uncle Wallace’s car isn’t there. Aunt Bessie’s is exactly where it was when he caught the bus that morning, and Donnie Badget’s battered Ford pickup is still there as well, but there’s no sign of any of them at the farm. The cows have wandered in close to the barnyard in anticipation of the evening milking but other than a few calves running through the pasture the fields are silent. In the kitchen both his and his uncle’s breakfast dishes are still in the sink and Aunt Bessie’s plate is still on the table, its napkin still laid atop it. Normally they would be gone, as would the dishes from the noon meal, and the beginnings of supper would be on the counter or the stove. But the house is quiet and the fire in the kitchen stove long extinguished, and so the boy changes out of his sweats, exchanges his school-bought sneakers for Kenny Flack’s boots, and then, not sure what else to do, he cleans the ashes from the stove and builds a new fire, and then he sits at the kitchen table and eats a slice of apple pie and a wedge of yellow cheddar cheese, which is to say New York cheddar, made from New York cows, rather than Vermont cheddar, which is white and mealy. The boy eats his snack off Aunt Bessie’s breakfast plate, but before he starts he fits her unused napkin back in the holder carefully. The fire and his fork scraping his plate clean are the only sounds in the little house. Outside, the light dims perc
eptibly. Within a half hour of his return it’s nearly dark, and he can hear the first impatient calls of the ladies, eager to be relieved of their burden of milk. It is nearly five.

  The boy puts his plate and fork in the sink, and then, instead of heading up to the barn, he turns back into the house, going not into the living room or up to his bedroom, but instead into the west half of the house. The main part of his uncle’s house is divided by a central hallway. The eastern half, which connects to the kitchen wing, contains the living room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, but the western half remains shut up all winter to save on fuel costs. The big room downstairs and two small rooms upstairs mirror those on the eastern side of the house, but the beds and couches and chairs they contain are disassembled or broken or piled over with unmarked boxes and crates and layer upon layer of dust. The boy pokes randomly through a couple of boxes as he has done three or four times before, thinking he might find something that belonged to his deceased Aunt Ella Mae or absent cousin Edith, maybe even a relic of the farm in Cobleskill, but everything he touches is anonymous and empty, Mason jars, brownware crocks, frayed extension cords, and he is about to leave the room when a flicker of light in one of the west windows catches his eye. The light is tiny and winks in and out of the overgrown cedars surrounding the abandoned house that abuts his uncle’s property. The cedars are so thick it takes the boy a moment to realize the light is in fact inside that house. A hundred feet away there is someone standing in a window as he is—smoking.

  It turns out to be Donnie Badget.

  Well if it isn’t Amos, he says as the swollen front door squeaks out of its frame on crooked hinges. He takes a long drag on his cigarette and the lit end glows brightly. Come to tell me I shouldn’t be smoking here, I’ll bet. That I could burn the place down. Or maybe you just wanted to remind me it’s time to get the ladies in?

  Donnie’s words have a force to them, as if he has been waiting a long time to speak them, or some version of them. The boy is glad it’s nearly dark and Donnie can’t see him flush. He had thought of saying both things.