Greenville (7 page)

Good practice, huh?

The boy tries not to jump at the sound of Donnie Badget’s voice but he feels his cheeks turn as pink as the udder before him.

Squirt squirt squirt. You been practicing upstairs? Maybe up in the hayloft? Milking it to get ready for the girls?

The boy tries to concentrate on his task but he jerks the tender teat and the black-faced Ayrshire looks up from her feed. She stamps one of her hind legs, nearly upsetting his pail.

Careful there, Amos. Don’t want to pull too hard. You’ll give the lady blisters.

The boy gets up from his stool, heads toward the vat room. His pail is hardly half full and the Ayrshire’s udder isn’t completely drained, but he wants to escape Donnie Badget’s insinuating tone.

The holding vat is an enormous stainless steel cylinder that can take five thousand gallons of unpasteurized unhomogenized whole milk—twenty thousand quarts, or twelve hundred dollars—which his uncle’s ladies produce every ten or eleven days. The duct is sealed by a valve that has a handle like the handles on submarine doors to emphasize how valuable the farm’s sole commodity is—a gallon of milk costs four times a gallon of gas, as his uncle has pointed out—and when he unscrews the valve it opens with a buttery hiss so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it on toast. After he flips back the hatch the boy lays a rusty screen atop the opening to catch any flies that might have drowned in the milk pail. Of all the implements involved in the
milking process, this screen is perhaps the most precious to the boy. Through it pass a thousand quarts of milk every morning and evening, and yet it is tiny, less than a foot across and nearly weightless. Even the grease guard Aunt Bessie lays over the top of the skillet has a handle and a metal rim, but the screen is unbordered, its edges unraveling like an old blanket. And yet it is indispensable, a vital link between the ladies and the vat. His uncle has spoken ominously of the one time his milk was rejected by the pump man for too much matter—flies mostly, and flecks of greenery that might or might not have passed through a lady first—and the entire contents of the vat had to be dumped in the barnyard.

The boy lays the screen carefully over the valve, then pours the pail through and leaves the seal open. By now the milking machine has finished the first ladies, and he and his uncle and Donnie unhook them from the claws and cart the oversized buckets of steaming milk from the milking alley to the vat room. The milking machine’s buckets are rectangular, with soft edges, like a suitcase stood on end. They hold ten gallons apiece and, when full, weigh seventy-five to eighty pounds—the boy himself only weighs a hundred thirty but, like his uncle and Donnie Badget, he carries them two at a time, for ballast. The work is backbreaking but over in just a few minutes, and when they are finished the boy dumps the screen and its dozens of dead flies and seals up the vat again. Immediately he grabs a shovel and wheelbarrel, and he’s about to clean the manure gutters when he sees his uncle standing in the open door of the barn looking down at the barnyard. The only time the boy has ever seen his uncle stand still is the day the old man dropped him off, and the
sight is so unsettling that the boy sets his shovel down and goes to see what’s wrong. He hopes it is nothing he’s done, but his breath is tight in his lungs as he passes the black-faced lady and her half-full udder.

His uncle glances down at him when he comes up, then turns back to the fields. The boy relaxes then, but only a little. He knows his uncle is waiting to see if he can spot what’s amiss. But even though he scans the barnyard and the hill to the north and the pasture to the east he sees nothing but the sun, which has just cleared the stand of new-growth oak and chestnut and maple trees at the southeastern edge of the pasture. The boy watches its diagonal ascent for a moment, then turns back to his uncle.

His uncle remains silent another moment. Then:

Fence is down.

He points to a line of fenceposts just beyond the scrubby willows and poplars that clot the muddy crease between the barnyard and the hillside pasture. Several of the posts lean at angles as sharply pitched as the barn’s roof and two, defeated, lie flat on the ground. Slack ribbons of wire curl with the wild arcs and loops of some futuristic roller coaster, catching sparks of morning light.

Been so wet the ground’s a swamp. Gonna have to move the posts to drier land, rewire em. Means pasturing the ladies in the south field today. His uncle points again, this time at the rising sun. Best finish them gutters before the bus gets here and get your shoes on. You can help me and Donnie after school.

The boy returns to his wheelbarrel, fills it with manure he scoops from the narrow gutters with a square-bladed shovel. He works faster now, not because of the manure, whose grassy sweet
odor he hardly notices, but because the task reminds him of the old man. Wheelbarrels full of shit, he’d said the day he took the boy away from his mother and his seven brothers and sisters. The boy tries not to think about any of them as he pushes the flat edge of the shovel across the concrete, the sound a mechanical rasp he feels in his ears and his fingertips. There is only the boy and his uncle in the house down the hill, and Aunt Bessie in the evenings, and even though he goes to sleep in the center of his empty bed he always wakes up at the edge, and sometimes he lies down in his clothes because not even an entire blanket is as warm as Lance’s belly pressed against his back.

He is emptying the tenth load when he hears the bus in the hollow at the bottom of 38 where it curves around his uncle’s land. His uncle looks up from the liniment he is rubbing into the neck of a particularly tall brown Guernsey with a face like the sole of an old leather boot. The Guernsey’s neck has been chafed by the boom collar, and his uncle pushes the salve into the patches of pink skin with fingers as blunt-tipped as the shovel in the boy’s hands.

Go on, get your shoes on.

Just a couple more loads, Uncle Wallace.

Donnie’ll get em. Don’t keep the bus waiting. Hold up a minute, his uncle says then, and when the boy turns back his uncle is digging in his pocket. His hand emerges with three quarters, two dimes, more pennies than the boy can count at a glance. Who’d you end up with this morning?

That black-faced Ayrshire, the boy says. The one with the white ears, he adds, not sure if his description is adequate.

The one with the nigger lips? How much you get from her?

Two gallons maybe. Maybe two and a half.

His uncle hesitates a moment, then plunks two quarters in the boy’s hand.

Gotta be more selective when you set the ladies up. Ayrshires ain’t the best milkers. High milkfat, and they tend to last a year or two longer than the other ladies, but if it’s volume you want go for a Holstein every time. The boy is not sure but he thinks his uncle winks at him. Who knows, maybe you’ll get Dolly one-a these days.

Aunt Bessie has packed the boy a lunch and left it with his books on the kitchen table. He drops the quarters in the shoe can—$3.60!—and grabs his lunch and his books and his old shoes and runs out the front door just as the bus pulls up to the T-intersection of 38 and Newry Road between his house and the Flacks’. As he dashes under the line of elms in front of his uncle’s house he sees that their branches are dotted with leaf pips as pale as lima beans and curled like … like orecchiette, he remembers, one of the twenty-seven different pastas he’d stocked at Slaussen’s Market. Babies’ ears, Mr. Krakowski called them. Smaller than conchiglia but bigger than orzo.

The memory stops the boy in his tracks. He is standing there looking up at the leaves and trying to remember the names of other noodles—linguini, capellini, tortelloni, lasagna, manicotti, ravioli over in frozen foods—when Kenny and Flip Flack come around the front of the bus. Kenny has his younger brother in a headlock and is administering an Indian burn.

Hey hillbilly, Kenny says, looking at the shoes the boy is carrying. They go on your feet.

Hey hillbilly! Flip squeezes out of his brother’s grip and runs onto the bus.

The boy shakes himself and gooses Flip as he walks past him down the aisle, and it is only when he gets to his seat in the middle of the bus that he realizes he has forgotten socks, and he curses the old man for the thousandth time. He doesn’t realize he’s sworn aloud until Julia Miller turns around and regards him over the back of her seat. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, pale brown, not blonde like Joanie’s—and not half as pretty to the boy’s mind.

They might talk that trash down in New York City but we use clean English up here.

I’m not from New York City. I’m from Long
Is
land.

Well you
sound
like Jimmy Cagney and
he
was from New York City.

I’m from
Brent
wood. It’s on Long Island.

Well
I’m
from Greene County. My people used to own
your
uncle’s house.

The boy pauses. He knows this has something to do with the metal sign that is posted in front of his uncle’s house just east of the driveway—the pole he’d taken for a fencepost when the old man had nearly run it over on the day he left him here.

SITE OF
EARLY TANNERY
ERECTED BY DANIEL MILLER
WHO CAME FROM EAST HAMPTON

is what the sign says in butter yellow letters painted on a midnight blue placard, and although the boy’s uncle has never commented on the sign the boy senses its importance, else why
would his uncle let it remain on his land? Still, the boy has never asked his uncle about it, and he doesn’t ask Julia about it now. All he does is stare Julia down until she tucks the same lock of hair behind her ear and turns around. Then he squeezes his feet into Jimmy’s shoes and laces them as loosely as he can. Still, by the time he gets home that afternoon the backs of his heels and the tops of his toes are covered with blisters, some of them broken open, and as he limps off the bus it’s all he can do to hold back tears of pain and frustration. Ahead of him Flip skips down the stairs and dashes toward his house, but the boy descends so slowly that Kenny comes up hard behind him and steps on the back of his left foot. When the boy whirls around with his fists clenched his neighbor throws up his hands, palms open.

Whoa there hillbilly. It was an accident, honest.

The boy stares at him as the doors of the yellow Bluebird close and the bus heads east down 38. His fists remain drawn for a moment, then all at once he throws his books on the grass, plops down and unlaces his boots, chucks them into the ditch. There is a splash as one of them lands in a puddle and at the noise the boy throws himself on his back and stares up into the pale green five-fingered leaves of the silver maples in the Flacks’ front yard. Star pasta, he thinks, but he can’t remember its proper name.

Criminy hillbilly, Kenny says. Looks like you been walking on hot coals or something. He is silent for a moment and then he says, Heard about you in gym today.

The boy arches his head back, looks up at Kenny’s inverted body. He is not as old as Duke and not as tall, but he has Duke’s manner of looking away when he has something to say. He is looking up at the leaves where the boy was just looking.

What’d you hear?

Heard you threw your shoes at Coach Baldwin, then beat Billy Van Dyke in the four hundred.

Billy Van Dyke runs like a girl.

Billy Van Dyke is the fastest kid in eighth grade. Kenny looks down at the boy. Or he was.

The boy rolls over on his stomach, pulls a few blades of grass from the ground and shreds them into pieces one by one.

It wasn’t nothing. I was mad.

The screen door of the Flacks’ house bangs across the yard.

Kenny! Mom says to get your butt up here and eat your cookies and go help Dad with the cows!

Aw jeez. Flip, you little Nerf ball, you better run!

As Kenny lopes up the yard Flip squeals and disappears around the house. Kenny turns and jogs backward.

Billy Van Dyke does run like a girl, but a really fast girl. Way to go hillbilly.

Kenny sprints around the corner of his house then, and a moment later the boy hears Flip’s screams of delight. At the sound he feels a sharp pang of homesickness. Flip’s squeals sound so much like Lance’s that the boy can feel his little brother’s heaving ribs beneath his fingers. He pretends that the girls are holding Lance down and torture-tickling him, that he is heading off to Slaussen’s Market and that in six hours his brothers and sisters will be pulling the apples and bananas he has stolen for them from the lining of his jacket. He gathers his books and shoes slowly, but as he crosses the road he notices his uncle’s ladies in the south pasture and remembers the downed fence behind the dairy barn. In a moment he’s forgotten his siblings. He dumps his shoes on a
bluestone flag outside the kitchen door and drops his books on the kitchen table and grabs an apple and heads up to the barn at a trot. He is trying to run and eat his apple and roll up his pants all at the same time—Duke’s pants, a good six inches too long for him—and just as he goes through the barnyard gate he falls, his face narrowly missing a cow patty, his half-eaten apple rolling away into the mud.

Nice one.

The boy looks up to see Donnie coming out of the barn. He is shirtless and his stomach and jeans are covered in cakes of mud and he carries a short-handled shovel in each hand. As the boy scrambles to his feet Donnie throws a shovel to him one-handed, and when he catches it he feels the sting of Donnie’s strength in both his wrists.

What’s the rush Amos? Fence ain’t going nowhere.

It’s already four. Milking time’s in an hour.

Donnie uses his empty hand to scratch at the dried mud on his stomach.

Jesus, Amos. You ain’t been here but three months and already you’re an expert in dairy farming? The ladies won’t curdle, relax.

Donnie has only a fourth-grade education and is ten years older than the boy, and the boy has seen with his own eyes that he is a hard worker. But he has a short temper too, as short as the boy’s, and for some reason the boy’s presence has riled him since he arrived. It is an antagonism that feels edgier, more personal than that of Vinnie Grasso and Bruce St. John and Robert Sampson, who always beat on the boy as if he were the perennial loser in some game they played. Donnie has never actually hit the boy,
but he communicates his antipathy nonetheless, and now, with the shovel in his hands, the boy feels years older. If his uncle wasn’t waiting down at the bottom of the barnyard he might. He just might. But his uncle is waiting, and the boy turns away from Donnie still picking mud flecks off his stomach as though they were blackheads and hurries down the hill.