Greenville (21 page)

The boy gives Joanie a little kiss on the forehead before he heads off to the market.

You’re prettier, he whispers.

Gregory, don’t you dare throw that cereal at Lance! Lance, what did I just tell Gregory! She looks up at the boy. What’d you say?

Nothing. I’ll see you later, sis.

Joanie squeezes his hand.

I’m glad you’re back, Dale.

The boy squeezes back, but doesn’t say anything.

At the market nothing is heavy enough. Nothing tires him out. Crates of Florida oranges and Long Island cabbages, jumbo cans of pineapples and peaches and peas. They’re so light he could juggle them. They don’t seem worth the trouble of moving from the truck to the storeroom, the storeroom to the floor. He can hardly believe people are willing to pay for them. There is nothing in the market with the real weight of a pair of milk pails, one in each hand, or a bale of hay as big as he is. Nothing that could possibly exhaust him, so that when he goes home he will be able to sleep through another night of his mother and the old man. Even though he pulls nine hours—he was only scheduled for four—he still feels he could run a half marathon. Not that that would do him any good. His mother has already told him he won’t be taking up that foolishness when school starts in the fall. The family needs his earnings from his job at the market and he won’t be taking time off for practice. His earnings today consist of a bag of oranges. Seven of them. Mr. Krakowski, the produce manager, knows that there are eight children in the Peck household, but he doesn’t know Duke has joined the marines. Sorry
Dale, he says with a smirk when he pays him. Guess someone’s gonna have to share.

And now he cannot walk home slowly enough. For a year and a half he ran from one task to another on the farm, never enough time to get everything done in a day. Now he doesn’t know how to stretch out the minutes, the blocks. Before he knows it he is standing in front of his ridiculous house. In a street of identical single-story rectangles sided in asphalt shingles, the one-and-a-half story wooden octagon his family lives in juts out like a guard tower on the edge of a prison wall. The house had been Brentwood’s first school, years and years ago, before they built the modern brick building around the corner on First Street. It had been falling apart even before his family moved in, suffered from its middle-of-the-last-century construction: no electricity, no plumbing or gas, no interior walls. Just one room with eight sides, each a little bit shorter than a regular-sized couch. Over the years, in brief fits of sobriety, the old man had built the kitchen and bathroom wing, turned the attic into a loft for the kids, plumbed and wired it, even built the garage, and it occurs to the boy as he turns up the driveway that the old man must have some natural ability besides drunkenness. The materials he worked with were cheap and not particularly sturdy, but they’re still standing after more than a decade of hard use. The appliances work, and the fixtures. At some point the old man must have showed a lot of promise, the boy thinks, even as he gets ready to climb up the soft incline of the shade tree that has lain in front of the garage door ever since the old man cut it down five years ago. Five good-sized saplings have sprung up from the base of the tree. They ring the stump like candles stuck into the edge of a
birthday cake, and even as the boy pushes them out of his way he remembers how one of the cedar fenceposts he’d planted with his uncle last year had sprouted up the same way. As soon as he saw them his uncle sheared off the saplings with a hatchet. Let it keep growing, he said, and it’d pull your whole fence down. The fencepost had put out seedlings all through summer and fall that his uncle had diligently excised until the frost set in, and the following spring—this spring, the boy reminds himself, just a couple months ago—it had admitted defeat. That’s what you want, his uncle had said. You don’t want it to grow. You just want it to
be
there.

The boy is climbing onto the slanted trunk when he sees a red plastic ribbon tied around one of the saplings, and even as he is fingering it he realizes he saw several such ribbons on his walk home. He looks over at the big tree in the Slovak’s yard next door, notes first that there is a ribbon tied around its water heater–sized trunk and then that it is an elm, and then he looks further up the block. Almost every yard has an elm in it, and every elm is belted by a bright red ribbon. The boy doesn’t know what they’re there for but he knows it can’t be good news.

The boy pushes the saplings aside, mounts the slanted trunk and works his way up the rough bark from branch to branch. About halfway up the trunk one of its branches lies alongside the window to the loft, and the boy, following Duke’s example, has often used it to sneak out at night, and sometimes, as now, to sneak in. But today he needn’t have bothered. Gregory and Lance are upstairs playing with a set of Lincoln Logs, and they scream when the boy crawls through the window, abandoning their tiny unroofed cabin to jump up and tackle him, almost
tumbling him back out the window. The boy barely has time to set down his bag of oranges before they knock him to the floor, and he is lying beneath them pretending to be pinned when his mother’s voice cuts through the warped plywood the three boys are piled on.

All right, enough-a that nonsense. Get on down here.

She doesn’t say his name but she doesn’t have to.

We got him Ma! Gregory calls. We got him pinned!

I can hear that honey, but let him up now. He’s got work to do.

The boy kicks off his shoes before heading downstairs. He takes the bag of oranges with him, so he won’t have to come back up for it. The first person he sees is Jimmy, sitting at the kitchen table in Gregory’s stool. His mother is sprawled on the couch with a
True Confessions
in one hand, which she rolls up and points at the bag.

What do you got there?

The boy gives her the bag and she sits up and dumps it out on the floor, using her magazine like a shepherd’s staff to keep the oranges from straying too far, then counting them. She counts them twice, touching each orange with the tubed magazine as if she were conferring benediction or playing duck-duck-goose, then looks up at the boy.

What, you couldn’t wait until you got home, eat with your family?

The boy doesn’t say anything.

Well then. Since you already had yours. She picks up an orange. We’ll say this one was Duke’s. The sharp nail on her thumb punches through the rind and peels off a section.

Jimmy, come get you an orange.

Jimmy doesn’t get up from the table.

Thanks Ma. Not hungry right now.

His mother pops a fragrant segment of fruit into her mouth.

Suit yourself. Now then, she says, pausing to spit a couple of seeds into her palm. Listen up. There’s gonna be some changes around here. With Duke gone. You’re gonna have to pull your own weight around here. No more sneaking in and out the upstairs window thinking I don’t hear you, thinking you can hand out your little oranges and bananas to your brothers and sisters to get them to do your chores and such. That stops right now.

The boy still doesn’t say anything. Just stands there and watches his mother rip his orange into pieces and devour it. He
had
been going to give them to his brothers and sisters, but not in exchange for doing his chores. But now the first orange is gone, just a few fragments of peel on the floor and a handful of seeds in his mother’s left hand, and the rest are piled up between her feet where she sits on the couch.

Additionally, she says, you’re gonna start going with Jimmy when he collects your father’s pay.

The boy turns and looks at Jimmy, who refuses to meet his gaze. He turns back to his mother.

But Ma—

The magazine catches him full on the side of the cheek. It’s not that he doesn’t see it coming—his mother is heavy and slow, and sitting down to boot—but he knows dodging will just lead to worse.

Don’t you sass me unless you want the real thing. She smacks the other cheek for good measure. Now. It don’t do no
good for just one of you to go tramping through the Barrens trying to find that drunk. Maybe you’d like it if I sent one-a your sisters?

She points at him with the rolled-up tube. It is only inches from his face. So close he can smell the ink. And you might think he’d have to fight back the urge to hit her, or flee. But it’s the opposite. He is so rigid he thinks he will fall over—fall into the tunnel of her magazine and disappear into its well of words.

Good boy. Now get on out there and find him. Six oranges ain’t gonna feed seven kids no matter how you slice em.

Isn’t Dad working right now?

I called Billy, he said he never made it in. Now stop wasting time and get out there before he drinks up his whole paycheck. The boy continues to stand there, and his mother waves the magazine in front of his face. What, you want me to get the hose? What’re you waiting for?

The elm—the shade tree.

His mother half raises the magazine.

I swear to Christ Dale, don’t make me get off this couch.

The shade tree. It’s got a ribbon tied on it. There’s one on all the elms in the neighborhood. Do you know what they mean?

I don’t know nothing about no ribbons. Now get out of here, unless you want me to get the hose. Get!

As they leave Jimmy grabs an orange from the pile on the floor and eats it as they walk toward the Pine Barrens. He peels the rind back like a candy wrapper, exposing the globed top of the orange and biting into it, spraying juice on his cheeks and hands. The boy isn’t sure if the sucking noises he makes are meant to be lewd, or are simply greed, or hunger. The boy knows his parents
think he dislikes his half brother, but they’re wrong. He dislikes only the fact that Jimmy wears his mother’s maiden name like a suit of armor, that he has never been strong enough to shirk off her favoritism nor smart enough to see that his beknighted status is an oppression, not just to the boy but to himself. On his own he is a happy-go-lucky sixteen-year-old in brand-new boots, and within a few blocks the two boys have settled into a silence that, if not exactly easy, is not strained either, punctuated only by Jimmy sucking on the orange and boisterously spitting his seeds into the street. Then:

You want half?

Jimmy is holding out the mangled remains of the orange, which is noticeably less than half.

No, thanks. I’ll eat later.

Suit yourself.

They pass another elm. In the falling light the ribbon tied around its trunk looks like a mourning band.

They got some kind of disease, Jimmy says then.

A disease?

Yeah. Dutcher’s disease, dutchie’s disease. Something like that. City’s gotta cut em all down to keep it from spreading.

For some reason the boy suddenly thinks of the cow that had died beneath his head from a piece of wire he’d failed to pick up from the field, and then he thinks of Dolly’s last calf, marked at birth for the veal pens. And then he thinks of Gregory.

Can’t they save em. Give em some kind of medicine?

Jimmy spits the last of his seeds into the street, drops the rind into the gutter. He wipes his cheeks with his hands and his hands on his pants and sticks his hands in his pockets.

Guess not. All they can do is cut em down to save the other trees. What was it like on that farm?

Jimmy’s voice changes when he changes the subject. There’s an edge there, but the boy can’t tell if it’s aggression or just nervousness. He looks over at his half brother, but Jimmy is looking down at his feet like he always does.

Why you wanna know?

Jimmy shrugs.

Just asking.

In answer the boy sticks his arm out and flexes his biceps.

It’s hard work day and night. The kind of work that makes a man of you.

He brings his bicep close to Jimmy’s face, as if forcing him to acknowledge the truth of what he says, or daring him to defy it. But all Jimmy does is shrug again.

Ma says farm life beats the man out of you. Says farming makes you a slave to the elements, and dairy farming makes you a slave to a cow to boot. A dairy farmer ain’t no more free than one of his cows, Ma says. That’s why she made your dad give up his farm and move down here.

The boy has a sudden vision of Flip Flack in the trailer behind the tractor, saying almost exactly the same thing—saying
his
mother had said almost exactly the same thing as the boy’s mother had. The image of Flip orating from his perch atop a pile of tarp-covered manure fills the boy’s brain in crystalline detail, almost at the same time as the realization that it is an invented image, as false as his mental picture of the dead cow he never looked at before he ran out of the hay barn that morning: Flip was behind him. He never turned around. He never saw
him, just as he never saw the cow—an Ayrshire? a Holstein?—after it was dead. Then he says,

What’re you talking about? Ma didn’t even know Dad when he had his farm. It was gone by then.

Hey, I’m just repeating what she told me. She said she only married your dad because of you, but only on condition he give up farming. Jimmy shrugs yet again, his lack of interest in the boy’s father’s biography apparent. Anyway, it’s ancient history, right? Nothing to do with us. We weren’t there, right? Or not really anyway.

The boy muddles this as they walk on. He knows the first part of what Jimmy has said is true. His mother tells him as much every chance she gets—don’t you go thinking you’re any better than
my
sons, you’re a bastard just like they are—but the second part contradicts what his uncle told him. His uncle had said nothing about his mother’s demands, had said only that the old man drank their ancestral farm away, cow by cow, acre by acre. Renunciation not for love but for drink. If Jimmy had said this to him two weeks ago the boy would have dismissed it out of hand. But in his banishment he is less inclined to accept his uncle’s words as gospel. Still, what is he to do with the discrepancy?

And even as he thinks back to his time on the farm, all he remembers is hardship, struggle, a series of small failures. A life whose rhythms were indeed tailored to the ladies’ needs rather than their keepers’, as witnessed by the fact that the boy still wakes up at five in the morning, still gets antsy at the same time every evening. But no, he realizes, that’s not true. He wakes up a little later every day—today it was nearly six before he opened
his eyes, as if proof that any habit, no matter how deeply ingrained, can be eroded by the same process of repetition that produced it. But he still feels that the problems he faced on the farm were smaller than the ones down here, simpler. Surmountable. The questions Upstate had answers—all of them except the last, that is, the choice put to him by his uncle and his mother—whereas the questions down here are not even questions, but conundrums, enigmas. For example, why did his mother marry the boy’s father, rather than Jimmy’s, or Duke’s? And why does she hold this fact against the boy, and not Joanie or Edi or Lois or Lance or Gregory? Of all my children, she has told him point-blank, you are the only one I regret. You are the only mistake. You are the cause of my lost freedom. He can understand why his uncle was hurt that the boy wanted to see his family again, but if his mother really does regret having him then why did she insist he come back? Certainly not for the occasional bag of oranges or apples.