Greenville (12 page)

Brother.

At first the boy doesn’t say anything, and then he says his own name.

Julia has pulled her feet up out of the water and wrapped her arms around her knees.

You’re weird, Dale Peck. But I like you.

The boy nods. When he hears his name in Julia Miller’s mouth he suddenly understands why his uncle doesn’t name his ladies. He understands that you only name something when you don’t know what it is. You name it to squeeze out all the parts you don’t know so that you can hold on to what you do know—what you need, what you think you can control.

I like you too, Julia Miller.

Later, after she gets back on her bicycle, he sees the wadded ball of paper she’d torn from her notebook. He doesn’t unwad it, just puts it in the pocket of his damp shorts and heads home. But his timing’s off, his muscles sore. Long before he clears the reservoir a cramp in his left leg has slowed him to a near walk, and his uncle has already brought the ladies in by the time he gets back to the farm. He can hear the rumble of the boom collars’ motor as they lower in place, and he fills a pail with water, grabs a rag, hurries through the door.

Before he can start with the first cow his uncle tells him to change out of his running uniform. By the time he gets back his uncle has hooked all the cows up. There is no sign of Donnie, but his uncle is seated in front of Dolly herself, milking her by hand. The boy hauls the buckets of milk to the vat room, ignoring the ache in his shoulders and legs but unable to tune out the ringing in his ears of his uncle’s oppressive silence, and as soon as all the buckets of milk have been dumped in the vat and rinsed out he finds the shovel and wheelbarrel and starts in on the gutters, and he scrapes up every last flake of manure and even hoses the gutters out when he’s done.

Come here, his uncle says then, and the boy hurries over, hoping that he’ll be able to do something that will ease the hardness
from his uncle’s face and voice. Lay a mile of fence or build a castle out of hay bales or skim all the cream from the holding vat with a teaspoon.

His uncle is standing in front of a little Jersey girl with long brown whiskers. She is tossing her head agitatedly, banging it against the boom collar.

Looks like someone got a little too curious. Poking around where she don’t belong.

The boy blushes and is about to apologize when his brain catches up with his ears and cheeks, and he realizes his uncle has said
she
. He looks at the Jersey more closely, sees interspersed with her whiskers the barbed darts of half a dozen porcupine quills sticking out of the pinkish white skin of her muzzle.

With a quick gesture his uncle slips a coil of rope around the Jersey’s neck, pulls it tight.

Hold this. Higher up, keep it tight. And watch it now, she’s liable to go for you.

His uncle uses a pair of pliers to pull the first quill out. He has to jerk hard to work against the barbs, and the boy can feel the Jersey’s pain in his hands and forearms and the biceps he kissed the other day, which aren’t strong enough to prevent her from snapping the back of her head against the boom collar. The collar’s hollow piping echoes like plumbing and the Jersey spits a cup of red-spotted cud onto his uncle’s overalls. A few of the ladies look up from their feed momentarily, then resume eating.

Hold it tight now. Come on, Dale, she’ll hurt herself worse than she already is.

The boy puts all his weight on the rope until the Jersey’s triangular head sticks straight out from its thick neck like a bull
snake’s. The Jersey’s ears are laid flat against her skull and her eyes rolled back to display two crescent moons below the dark brown irises and her top lip rolls back to reveal a thick pink wedge of gum. Though neither boy nor cow is moving it feels like he is pulling on a tree trunk vibrating in a storm. He wonders if this is what sailing feels like, tacking into the wind, carving sky and sea to your will, and even as he braces his bare feet against the lady’s hooves and watches his uncle work there is a part of him that misses the ocean with the longing that only the island-born can feel.

His uncle works quickly, squeezing, pulling, squeezing, pulling, and each time he pulls out a needle the Jersey makes a sound like a fan belt about to break. Thin streams of blood marble her muzzle as though she has just slopped up a tomato or a raw steak. As the last quill comes out the Jersey lunges forward, and the boy barely has time to feel her teeth on his forearm before his uncle smacks her on her inflamed nose. When the knob of the Jersey’s skull strikes the boom collar the whole barn shakes.

The boy looks down at his arm, sees first the single crescent of toothmarks and a smear of the Jersey’s blood on his skin, and then a half dozen rubies of his own blood bead up through the thumbnail-sized tears in his forearm. The drops of blood well up, coalesce, drip to the floor, but the wound doesn’t hurt, yet.

The boy looks at the single crescent of toothmarks and remembers that cows only have incisors on their bottom jaw.

First his uncle rubs some liniment onto the red nose of the pricked Jersey, deftly dodging her swipes at his fingers, and then he takes the boy outside and puts his arm under the spigot. The water is cold but not as cold as the water in the Alcove Reservoir.
It runs pink off his arm and the cuts immediately burn, but the boy can see that none of them is very deep.

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.

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.

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.