Greenville (13 page)

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 perceptibly. 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.

I don’t care what you do. Burn the place down, I don’t care. It ain’t Uncle Wallace’s, it don’t concern me.

What’s your uncle’s is yours. That how it goes Amos?

The boy is about to leave without replying when he notices an
ashtray on the narrow mantel above the fireplace, and then, when Donnie crushes his cigarette on a worn pine floorboard, the boy sees a few other butts scattered around his feet. He glances around the tiny room then, but all he can make out in the dim light is that time has stripped it of everything, not just paint and plaster and straight lines but size, space. Although the room was probably the house’s main parlor, the boy cannot imagine it ever being large enough to contain anything besides himself and Donnie and that ashtray. A real ashtray, not a recycled can of tuna fish or green beans but cut glass, gleaming dully in the thin light, and cradling a dozen white butts like eggs in a nest of ash.

Who owns this place?

Donnie’s eyes follow the boy’s, see him looking at the ashtray.

Not your uncle, that’s for sure. Not you. He taps the soft curve of the plaster wall with his foot. Used to think I might buy it someday but it looks like that ain’t gonna happen either, thanks to you Amos. He kicks the wall again, harder, and the boy hears grains of plaster trickling through the lathe. This house was built in seventeen hundred and sixty-one, Donnie says with something like awe in his voice. It is older than our nation.

With a glance the boy takes in the four corners of the room. It seems hardly larger than one of the stalls in the hay barn. He is five feet two inches tall, but he’s pretty sure that if he wanted he could touch the ceiling with his fingertips. Were people shorter then, he wonders, before the Declaration of Independence?

Donnie is lighting another cigarette.

Thought I had my future all mapped out. I did. Work with Wallace until I’d put back enough money to buy this piece, then pick up Wallace’s too, when he was ready to retire. Who knows,
maybe he’d’ve even left it to me. It don’t look like he and Edith are gonna bury the hatchet any time soon. But all that was before you come along and decided you wanted to be a dairy farmer. I gotta hand it to you, Amos, you played your cards right. You work hard, keep outta trouble. You’re a regular Tom Sawyer, Amos, a true credit to the family line.

The boy has to stand on tiptoe to run his fingers along the ceiling, but when he does a puff of plaster dust falls on his face, and just before he closes his eyes against the dust he suddenly sees that the little room is not empty, but as full of Donnie’s empty future as the west wing of his uncle’s house is filled by an equally untenable past. When he rubs his eyes it is less an effort to wipe the dust from them than to clear those shadow lives away, and when he speaks his voice surprises him almost as much as it seems to surprise Donnie.

What were you gonna do with two houses?

His voice surprises him because even as he asks the question it occurs to him:
he
has two houses. Here, and on Long Island.

What?

I don’t understand, the boy says slowly, why you would need two houses. Uncle Wallace don’t even use all of his.

Ten people sleep under one roof in the house on Long Island—nine, with him gone—and although that house has many inconveniences he never once thought it too small. He swipes at his eyes again, clears his throat.

A man can’t live in two houses, he says as forcefully as he can. He’s got to choose.

Donnie drops his half-smoked cigarette to the floor, but when he speaks there is a fire in his voice where the cigarette had been.

I don’t know, Amos. Maybe I wouldn’t choose. Maybe I’d sleep in one house one night and the other house the next. I’d have options. Two beds instead of one. Breakfast here, dinner over to Wallace’s, flip a coin for supper. Maybe I’d tear one down and live in the other, maybe I’d pitch a tent on the front lawn and leave em both empty. Two houses is options, Amos. But thanks to you I don’t have no options no more. Once your uncle finishes teaching you everything he taught me I probably won’t even have a job.

He pauses then, uses his heel to grind out the smoldering cigarette on the floor. In the dim light his face is nearly invisible, his expression inscrutable, his voice as cold as the butt beneath his boot.

But I guess you didn’t figure on Wallace getting married, did you, Amos? That throws a wrench in the works, don’t it?