Greenville (16 page)

In this light her leg is soft, featureless, as swollen as a wineskin, the hoof shoved into it like a split cork. The boy need only train his beam on it for a moment to see that the situation is hopeless. His anger surprises him. How could she have betrayed his ministrations like this? He has washed the manure and urine from her coat with his own hands, dried her even, to prevent her from catching a chill. He has proffered handfuls of grain unadulterated by augured silage, held them on a piece of cloth to her mouth so that she could lick them up from her prone position. Doesn’t she understand the significance of his efforts? How can she repay him by dying?

The Guernsey sighs, an almost human wheeze reflecting the pain and boredom of illness, even mortal illness, as if she were eager for it to be over. The sigh blows out the boy’s anger as if it were a candle, and in a moment he is on his knees beside her head, stroking it, sshhing her, willing her to be strong. The Guernsey’s ears twitch but other than that she doesn’t respond to his presence, his caresses. The ladies aren’t like dogs or cats; their neediness isn’t the neediness of pets. She neither tolerates nor welcomes his fingers, but simply lies there, as insensible as the weather. The boy notices he is shivering then. In the dark
silent barn with the Guernsey unmoving before him there is nothing to do but feel the cold. Within minutes it is unbearable. A fit of shaking rattles his limbs with the fury of a pot boiling over and he has to clamp his lips between his teeth to silence their chatter. The boy feels guilty for even noticing the temperature. The lady at his feet is dying and all he can think of is returning to his bed. But when he thinks about it he realizes it isn’t the empty bed in Uncle Wallace’s house he is pining for, but the body-stuffed bed of his parents’ house, and before he can think himself out of it he has scooted between the lady’s legs and curled up against the swell of her belly.

Its warmth surprises him. It is like pressing against a furry breathing boiler. The boy feels himself rocked by the power of the lady’s lungs. It is a gentle movement, slow but full. Sometimes the bed on Long Island would sway like that, when all four boys breathed in and out in time. But her belly is so warm! He curls into a ball, scrunches as much of his body as he can against her. How can this furnace be sick, injured, let alone near death? She is like a campfire you can hold in your arms or put on like a jacket. He wants to hold her in his arms but settles for holding his own belly. His arms snake inside the torn lining of his jacket and encircle his torso. It’s warm too, but not as warm as the lady’s. He senses her legs on either side of him, holding his curled body like hospital rails. He wants to be held inside like that. He wants to be held inside her belly, be reborn as a calf. He wants to place the soft teeth of his bottom jaw and the gummed bone of his upper around an udder and drink from the well of her body. But he’s a boy. What happens to boys? He feels the pink skin of the udder beneath his right cheek. Warm. Milk
should be drunk warm. Not cold. He never wants anything cold again. Warm and pink from the blood that made it. Pale pink, like a flashlight shining through your fingers. When he was a child he sucked his fingers until his mother put Tabasco sauce on them and they burned his tongue. Lois sucked her fingers but she didn’t put Tabasco on Lois’s fingers because Lois wasn’t a boy. What happens to boys? His fingers don’t burn his tongue now. They don’t taste like veal. His fingers fill his mouth with a warmth that trickles down his throat. He misses his mother but the farm has replaced her. He thinks it would have been better if he had never seen her but at least he has the farm now, the warm farm he has crawled inside, that’s crawled inside him.

Dale.

For a moment he is able to hold on to the whole of the experience: the dying cow, her warm belly, the frozen barn, the memory of the bed he shared with his brothers, the simple sad fact that he loves his mother and wished she loved him too, and then, when he realizes the pink glow behind his eyes isn’t an udder but the glow of the morning sun, the sense of loss he feels is almost overwhelming.

Come on, Dale. Get up from there.

The boy squeezes his eyes tighter.
No
, he tells himself,
it’s not fair
.

Straw rustles. When the voice comes again it is closer, quieter—and, he suddenly realizes, Donnie’s. In a tender voice that marks him apart from the boy’s family Donnie says,

She’s dead, Dale.

All at once the boy is screaming. You can’t make me go! Not again!

He is not sure at what point he opens his eyes, but the first sight he registers fully is the white hill between the barn and the house, and then he sees the bus coming down 38. He runs around the house and throws himself on the bus without a word to Kenny or Flip and when he gets to school he goes to the bathroom and combs the straw from his hair and wipes the dried milk from his chin.

As he gets off the bus that afternoon his eyes fall on the sign next to the driveway. He stares at it as the bus rumbles past in a cloud of exhaust. The letters are obscured by hoar frost, the thin sheet of snow hangs off in an east-southeast line sculpted by the prevailing winds. Kenny and Flip Flack walk up their yard but the boy stands beneath the frozen elms, staring at the sheet of snow hanging off the sign. What he sees now is that the delicate white arc looks for all the world like the polar image of the fence that had gone down in the barnyard last spring, impossibly delicate but resistant—insistent—as well. The sheet of snow is only slightly thicker than a piece of paper, and yet it has endured three months of wind and snow, daytime melts and nighttime freezes. The loops of wire the boy had clipped off the barnyard fence had looked equally delicate, harmless, but now, thinking of that fence and looking at this pole, the boy sees it as a link in a different kind of fence. The sign
is
a historical marker after all, a pole supporting an invisible wire that stretches from his time to a past that seems not very far away. For a moment the entire fence hangs in the air beside 38, reaching back to a past the boy cannot begin to imagine but that he can feel nonetheless, a past as inevitably a part of his life as the future that awaits him. He whips around then, as if he’ll be able to get a glimpse of what’s
in store for him, but all he sees is the glare of the setting sun glinting off the snow-capped hill behind him.

He turns then, shucks his schoolbooks in the kitchen, heads up to the dairy barn. He and his uncle milk the ladies in silence and he shovels out the gutters after they’re done, uses a push broom to sweep a few blown flakes of snow from the front walk, and then he goes inside to do his homework. He comes down for dinner and then he takes his bath and goes back to his room. He hears his uncle and aunt get ready for bed, and then he hears his uncle in the hall outside his door. The floorboards’ creak makes knocking unnecessary, but his uncle knocks anyway.

The boy looks up at his uncle. He is a small man in a small door, but somehow scale doesn’t correct for proportion. They both seem small, a doll in a doll’s doorway, a doll’s hand hanging on to a doll’s doorknob. But beneath his gaze the boy feels as tiny as an ant.

I’m sorry I killed her, Uncle Wallace.

His uncle’s mouth remains level, firm, as does his voice.

I come to tell you something, Dale.

The boy looks at his uncle and knows before he speaks that he is not going to send him away. A feeling of dread fills him then. He has worked so hard to forget all his uncle’s revelations. The image of the sign flashes in his mind: what part of his past is his uncle going to drag up now?

But he is surprised by what comes out of his uncle’s mouth.

Your father was a good boy, Dale. Just like you. Hard working, honest, a bit of a temper maybe, but a good boy.

He stops again. His hand turns the doorknob but the door is already open.

Then one day—

His uncle stops. The latch clicks when he releases the handle but the boy’s uncle stands there as if frozen, but softly frozen—as if cast in soft white wax. He is staring at the floor and the boy studies him. His uncle is looking at the floor and there is a half smile on his face. Later on—in just a few minutes, as soon as his uncle finishes saying what he has to say—the boy will understand what his uncle is looking at, but for the moment he is struck by the awe there, the sense of comprehension. Belated comprehension—belated compassion too—and the boy understands that his uncle is not just speaking to him.

His uncle nods his head. Then:

Lloyd found our father, Dale. In a field, just like you found your lady. I tell you, when I saw the look that was on your face it brought me back. Lloyd was thirteen, Dale, same age as you are.

The boy turned fourteen two weeks ago, but he doesn’t say anything.

Our father was shot dead, Dale. Lloyd found the gun. Nobody knew if it was suicide or murder. Some folks even wondered if Lloyd—

He stops again. It is a long time before he continues.

It ruined him, Dale. Just ruined him. He couldn’t go on—go back to how it was, go forward to something new. So instead he drank. And of course our old man was a drunk and that was the one thing Lloyd said he’d never be. But he just couldn’t face life after he found Daddy like that.

No, the boy thinks. Stop. This isn’t right, this grandfather story. It is as though his uncle has laid the corpse in bed beside him, said, See? Your troubles ain’t so bad. He wants to say to his
uncle, This is your story, not mine. It means something to you, not me. But even as the boy thinks Stop it’s already over. His uncle has told his story and the boy has heard it and neither of them can erase his past.

His uncle turns to the boy and addresses him directly.

You got to put things aside Dale, he says, and the boy has never heard him sound so plaintive before, so unsure of himself. Sometimes all you can do is what’s right. Do what you have to without thinking about it. Put the mistakes behind you, the bad times, because nothing can fix the past or bring it back.

The historical marker beside the driveway flashes in the boy’s mind. No, he thinks again, that’s not true, and his uncle must know it too. He leaves the sign there after all.

It’s a hard life, his uncle is saying, and there is still that plaintive edge to his voice, as if he is not just willing the boy to believe but asking him to confirm his own beliefs. There’s only the future to look forward to, his uncle says insistently. Nothing else. Nothing but. And—His uncle’s voice catches, then resumes. And I just couldn’t take it if you got stuck like Lloyd did.

His uncle stops then, finally, and this time doesn’t start again. He is finished, waits only for some sign that the boy has heard him, understood.

The boy says, I’m fourteen Uncle Wallace, and his uncle nods once, then closes the door.

As soon as he leaves the boy shuts the light off. He lies on the edge of the mattress as he always does, but tonight he’s not making room for his brothers but instead for his grandfather’s body. The boy doesn’t doubt his uncle’s story, but he can find no way to attach any meaning to it either. He tries to imagine the old
man standing over his grandfather’s dead body, and the inevitable happens: he sees himself, standing over Lloyd, the warm barrel of a gun clutched in his hand. He sees the dead Guernsey too, sprawled across the stall. Even after he falls asleep he feels her cold carcass beneath him instead of the mattress, each of her ribs pushing into him like a root pushing out of the ground. Her head is stretched out as if in birthing, her legs stick straight out of her body, two flush with the straw, two poking into the air, and when his uncle raps on his door in the morning he shudders awake, realizing—remembering—that he never actually saw the Guernsey’s body. He had run from Donnie’s alien sympathy without looking back, just as he had forgotten to look back at his house when the old man had taken him away last year. All at once images from his dreams and his life and his uncle’s mouth tumble on him in a rush. The pillowcase beneath his head is stuffed with his brothers’ clothes and the old man’s bottles and the dead cow’s torso, and the pillowcase itself is a net of snow-white wire. The cow becomes his invisible grandfather and he himself becomes the old man, and then Dolly’s calf, sold off for veal. The Guernsey, he knows, is already gone, sold off for dog food. Is
this
what makes history so terrible? the boy wonders. This constant effacement of one real thing by another, yet yielding neither? It is worse than death. It is as if the Guernsey had never lived at all, nor his grandfather—as if someone had made the whole thing up.

His uncle knocks on the door again, something he has never had to do in the boy’s thirteen months here.

Come on Dale, he says through the closed door. Ladies won’t milk themselves.

Covered wagons must have gone this slow, the boy thinks. Third gear, hauling a full load—a half ton of tarp-covered manure capped by the fifty-pound bundle of Flip Flack—and his uncle’s 1934 John Deere can do no better than three, maybe five miles an hour; certainly no faster than a man walking. He tries to imagine crossing the continent at this pace, the mountains and rivers, endless plains yielding to relentless deserts. Gold Rush? Gold Crawl is more like it. He’ll take a brand-new Chevy any day of the week.

The four-cylinder engine protests its heavy load with a sound like a match dropped in a bottomless bag of firecrackers, an endless series of tiny explosions that vibrate their way into the boy’s body through his numb bottom and out his tingling ears and fingers. If he concentrates on the noise itself it seems deafening, but long hours mowing fields and hauling loads of hay and manure have taught him to tune it out. Now he inches his way west on 38 in a bubble of sound, peaceful, protected. Though the soundless world is visible all around him, it seems to exist at
a conceptual remove, like a three-dimensional silent movie. Inside the bubble there is nothing but the boy and the pedals and knobs and wheel of the tractor, and Flip Flack. Or Flip’s voice at any rate, which, though muffled, is still perfectly audible.