Greenville (17 page)

I wish Kenny wasn’t working road crew this summer. That means I’m gonna have to do all his chores
and
mine too. I practically do as much as he does anyway, so that means I’m gonna have to do
twice
as much as I do now. T
wo
times. I don’t know why Kenny wants to work road crew anyway. All that stinky old smelly old tar. I’d rather clean up after the ladies any old day, wouldn’t you, Dale?

A pair of passing crows seems almost to leave contrails in the sky, a honeybee bounces along like a poorly flicked yo-yo bobbing at the end of its string. The muggy air is bright blue, so thick with moisture that the tractor could be a boat on the river. Chicory blossoms seem almost to be floating at the end of their stems like water lilies. The fluid sunlight pulses through the trees like liquid amber, outlining everything, separating objects one from another. Each tuft and wisp of vapor, each twig and leaf takes on a gilded edge. The film of sweat that covers the boy’s body seems part and parcel of the same effect, as if the boy is coated in a residue of sunlight. As if he has been dipped in it. Though it is only the second week of June, the thermometer read 94 degrees at the noon meal, and the radio said the humidity was about the same.

Kenny says he don’t want to be a dairyman at all, Flip goes on. Says it ain’t no kind of life for a man in this day and age, being chained to a udder. Our dad says real freedom comes from
knowing your place but Kenny still says he’s gonna do something else with his life, be a carpenter or maybe even join the armed services. Something that won’t tie him to one place. Dad said dairy farming was good enough for three generations of Flack men, it should be good enough for Kenny, but Kenny said carpentry was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for him. I thought Dad was gonna pop him sure. Your butt’s sweating.

The boy nods his head; then, when his brain catches up with Flip’s words, squinches a little on his perch. The tractor’s seat is bare metal, its cushion—leather, vinyl, cloth, whatever it might have been—long since worn away. Sitting on it in the summer is like simmering on a hot stove, and he himself has seen the sweat drip off Donnie or his uncle through the tiny holes drilled in the seat. The holes, as fine as those on a spaghetti strainer, are arrayed like a Jewish star. He doesn’t know if they were drilled there to let the sweat out or not.

Kenny says he’s taking off after the letter ceremony next week. You lettered, right? Are you going to the ceremony?

The boy nods his head. The letter ceremony. It is why he is driving this load of manure to Shepherd’s Bush. He is trying to earn enough money to buy a letter jacket. He finished the year with eight medals to his credit, and by the time his sophomore year begins in the fall he wants them all on his chest, spangled and loud.

Ew, gross. Looks like you peed your pants.

I wouldn’t talk, the boy calls back. You’re sitting on a pile of shit.

The last half mile of 38 to Shepherd’s Bush is one long if not
particularly steep incline, and when the tractor reaches the top it’s nearly crawling. It takes the two boys almost three hours to unload the half ton of manure by the resort’s kitchen garden, and Flip continues to talk the whole time. For the most part the boy lets him prattle without answering, occasionally identifying tender shoots of basil or onion or kale in response to the younger boy’s inquiries, asters, vinca, yes, Flip, those
are
morning glories, but they bloom all day. The boy finds Flip’s garrulousness soothing, comforting even, the absolute lack of anxiety the ten-year-old has about his family, his future, everything else he doesn’t know. When I grow up I’m gonna do exactly what my dad does, Flip says, I’m gonna milk cows and live in our same house, and the boy has no doubt that he will.

When they’re finished the boy collects three dollars from the gardener. A letter jacket is fifty dollars, the boy thinks, pocketing two of the dollars and giving one to Flip, who sweeps out the trailer with a push broom. Three months of vacation, four loads of manure each month at three dollars per, a dollar to Flip, say, every other time, and … the math gets lost in his head. He spreads the tarp over the ripe-smelling planks and Flip tosses his broom and the shovels on top and climbs in. The trailer, almost as old and infirm as the tractor, bounces from one wheel to the other as they rattle back down 38’s smooth tarred surface, and once he’s got the tractor going the boy drops it into neutral and, freed of the gears’ restraint, the wheels pick up speed down the long hill. Flip lies down and lets himself be tossed from side to side, his laughter constant, punctuated only by cries of Faster, faster! The freshly hayed fields on either side of the road are studded with crows and seagulls massacring the field mice whose homes have been
mown into bales. The crows and gulls straggle over the fields like two chess teams too busy to notice each other.

At first the boy doesn’t recognize the straw-haired girl with the baton walking between the road and the line of elms in his uncle’s front yard. She is walking away from him marching-band style, the baton resting on her shoulders like a soldier’s rifle. From the back she reminds him of Julia Miller. Sunlight streams through the leaves on the elms, which are still small and pale, none bigger than a silver dollar. In a few months they will be as big and dark as dollar bills, the shade beneath them as thick as pea soup, but right now the sun can still sneak through the half-grown, half-green leaves and glint off his sister Joanie’s hair, and the first thing the boy thinks when he realizes who it is is that Joanie’s hair isn’t blonde at all, but brown, hardly lighter than his. Then Joanie turns around, and almost immediately jumps up and down and points at him with her baton.

It’s Dale! It’s Dale!

The boy can’t hear her inside the tractor’s noise. He still hears nothing besides Flip’s giggles and screams as he rolls from side to side in the rattling trailer, but he knows that’s what Joanie is saying. He is thinking that the truck must have driven right past Shepherd’s Bush on 38 when he and Flip were unloading the manure and he didn’t hear that either. He would have thought he’d have heard it—would have thought he’d have sensed his mother’s approach like a cold wind on his neck. But he had no idea.

He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he nearly rolls past the driveway, and he makes the hard left without braking, nearly tossing Flip from the trailer. Then he has to slam right to avoid running into the back of the old man’s truck, and even over the
roar of the tractor’s engine he can hear Flip’s body slam into the other side of the trailer. When he pulls up short he finds himself staring right at the truck’s broken taillight, and he turns and looks at the big sugar maple that stands across the road in the northwest corner of his uncle’s south pasture. Flip is lying in the trailer, his limbs askew, his belly still shaking with laughter, and when the boy cuts the motor a backfire makes Flip jump and scream and then giggle again, but to the boy the sound is nothing so much as the sound of his bubble bursting. Flecks of grass and manure cling to Flip’s sweat-wet cheeks and his eyes are closed. Seventeen months ago the boy had gazed at the broken panes of the garage door on Long Island without knowing why the sight filled him with a sense of loss, but as he looks down at Flip’s dreamy smile and quivering stomach he knows full well that he will never see him again, and his only consolation is that Flip is himself unaware of the impending separation.

That was
fun
.

Without the sound of the tractor’s engine Flip’s voice is more distinct but thinner, and quickly dissipates in the hot afternoon air. Giggles still bubble out of him like bubbles from frogs hidden under water.

I think I’m
broken
.

A shriek rends the air.

Dale! Dale!

Joanie jumps up on the trailer even as Flip sits up and they miss butting heads by inches. Joanie falls backwards but by then the boy is behind her and he catches her. The rubber tip of her baton hits him in the eye as she whirls around but he binds her to him in a bear hug anyway.

Dale!

It’s Dale! It’s Dale! he hears behind him then, and he turns and sees Edi and Lois running down the hill, each holding the arm of a little boy he thinks is Lance at first, until Lance pushes open the door of the dairy barn behind them, and he realizes that Edi and Lois are carrying Gregory. When the boy left, Gregory wasn’t a year old, still more infant than child, but now, nearly three, he seems like a real person, his tiny legs leaping down the hill, one step for every three or four his sisters take.

Dale’s back! Lance calls into the dairy barn before sprinting after his older sisters and little brother. Dale! Dale! He runs awkwardly in a pair of shoes much too large for him, trips once, nearly falls, then keeps on running. Dale! You’re back!

Oh gosh, my baton left a mark! I’m sorry!

Joanie is rubbing at his cheek and eye even as Edi and Lois come close, panting. They let go of Gregory and throw their arms around the boy. They’re still screaming Dale! Dale! in his ear, but Lois manages to squeeze in a conspiratorial whisper:

Joanie’s always carrying that thing around!

Dale, look! Lance is calling beyond their shoulders. Look, Dale, I got your shoes! They’re almost too small for me, look!

When he reaches the boy Lance squirms in between his sisters and wraps his arms around the boy’s stomach and jumps up and down so vigorously that one of the boy’s old shoes flies off his feet.

Dale, look! Joanie says then. She has stepped back a few feet, and now she releases her baton into the air, pirouettes once, and catches it.

Look, Dale! Lance says. Your shoes are almost too small for me now! I’m almost as big as you!

Lois has a boyfriend, Lois has a boyfriend! Edi says. She is holding Gregory in one arm now, and when the boy looks at his littlest brother Gregory turns his face and hides it in Edi’s wavy brown hair. Beyond them, Lois is dragging a startled-looking Flip Flack up the hill toward the dairy barn.

Don’t be shy, honey, Edi says to Gregory. It’s just your bother, honey. It’s your big brother Dale.

You took my drawers! Lance says, pulling at the boy’s cut-offs as if he might be wearing them now. You can’t wear my drawers, Dale, they’d be too small for you!

Flip is looking back at the boy with an expression of mock terror on his face as Lois drags him like a sled up the hill.

Dale, look! Joanie says. He turns, and she tosses her baton in the air.

Joanie was spinning her thing in the truck! Lance says. She hit me on the arm, look!

Lance holds out his arm and the boy pretends he can see a bruise. He licks his thumb and rubs the spot and Lance giggles and says, Gross!

Just say hi, Edi is coaxing Gregory. Come on, say hi to your big brother Dale. A muffled Uh-uh comes from her hair and Edi smiles helplessly at the boy. He don’t remember you, she says. You been gone practically as long as he’s been alive.

You took Jimmy’s football jersey too! Lance says now. You took
everything
!

Up until now the boy has felt like a spoon in a sugarbowl in the midst of his brothers and sisters, but now he speaks for the first time since he shut off the tractor.

What are you, the family record keeper?

No! Lance says, dodging the punch the boy throws at him.

You think you’re almost as big as me? the boy says. Come on, pipsqueak, let’s see what you can do. Put em up.

The five-year-old giggles and throws his arms around the boy’s bare stomach again, then steps back and looks up at the boy.

Jimmy said he was gonna kick your butt for taking his football jersey but I don’t know. You look different. Bigger. Thicker.

The boy is looking at Edi over Lance’s head.

Is Jimmy here?

Edi is rocking Gregory in her arms.

Oh, he’s with Ma and that uncle person.

Uncle Wallace.

Jimmy’s with them in the barn. Look at Joanie. She fixed her feet walking with that baton.

The boy turns and sees that Joanie is walking in the dappled light of the elms again. She walks in a straight line and stares fixedly at her formerly pigeon-toed feet, which now run as parallel to each other as the double yellow line on 38.

When the boy turns back to Edi, Gregory is staring at him with curious eyes.

Hey there, little fella. He reaches a hand toward Gregory’s cheek but before he can touch him his little brother blushes and buries his face in Edi’s hair again.

It’s okay, Edi says, and the boy isn’t sure to whom she is speaking. You two don’t hardly know each other, do you? She smiles at the boy, strokes the back of Gregory’s head.

What about Duke?

Edi nods toward the truck behind him. The slatted panels are up in back, encasing the bed like a giant egg crate.

Says he’s gonna join the marines. Says he ain’t even gonna finish high school, just join the marines and this family will never see him again.

By then the boy has scaled the panel at the back of the truck. The first thing he sees is Duke’s shorn head, gold fuzz glinting in the sunlight. Duke is sitting with his back against the cab, busily pulling slivers of wood from the bed of the truck, and his shaved head looks as bright as the rising sun to the boy. He glances over at Joanie. Never mind Julia Miller—how could he have remembered Joanie’s hair as blonde, compared to Duke’s?

He steps over the back railing and Duke says, Nice pants. Or should I say shorts?

The boy looks down at his legs. Although he never managed to outgrow them—Duke’s four years older than he is, after all—he did manage to wear them out, and Aunt Bessie cut them into shorts for him after the last day of school this year.

It was Dad—

Your
Dad. Duke throws a sliver over the wall of the truck.

Anyway. Sorry.

No skin off my ass.

In the silence the boy can hear his siblings scatter like a flock of startled pigeons. He looks at Duke until Duke gets up and walks past him, throwing a mock punch as he goes. His fist touches the boy’s jaw and pushes it lightly to the side, like a revolving door.