Greenville (8 page)

The barnyard slopes steeply down the hill behind the barn until it meets the even bigger hill that stretches up for a quarter mile to the north end of his uncle’s property. The crease between the two hills muddies up each spring but has never run water according to his uncle. The moss-covered remains of a collapsed stone fence run down the center of the crease in a tangle of poplars and willows, blackberries and wild rose and fiddlehead ferns he picked a few weeks ago with Aunt Bessie, and just on the other side of it is the wire fence that actually divides the barnyard from the pasture. The boy runs over steppingstones laid in the hoof-churned mud and slips as one of them spins beneath him. He would fall but for the shovel in his hand, which makes a sluicing noise when it stabs the earth.

Watch it there Amos. Wouldn’t want you to get your pants all dirty.

When the boy looks up the first thing he sees is that Donnie’s fingers have left red marks where he scratched the mud off his stomach. The marks are almost as bright as the skin of the boy’s half-eaten apple, which is the next thing the boy sees. The apple is pinched in a pitcher’s grip between Donnie’s thumb and first two fingers.

Hey Amos, Donnie half coos, half sneers. You forgot to finish your after-school snack.

The boy is still off balance, more of his weight supported by the shovel than his splayed feet, and he can only watch helplessly as the red ball streaks toward him. It strikes him squarely in the chest, erupts in flecks of mud and apple meat. A hollow ringing fills his ears as though his chest were an empty metal bell, and when it clears he finds himself standing with the shovel held in both hands like a bat. Donnie is walking past him on the steppingstones, moving lightly from one to the next.

Little late on the swing, Amos, he says, pushing the shovel off the boy’s shoulder with one hand. Strike two.

The blade of the shovel smacks the wet earth a second time, and mud squirts from beneath the stones Donnie steps on with a squishing sound. The boy jerks around, ready to lunge after him, but the first thing he sees is his uncle standing spraddlelegged by a small pile of fenceposts. He is staring at the boy, a pair of posthole diggers in one hand, and even as they make eye contact an expression flickers over his uncle’s face—a frown, it looks like to the boy, but whether he’s frowning at the boy or the swampy soil he labors over is hard to tell. He lifts the diggers up and drives them into the hole between his feet, but the ground is so wet that little more than a pinch of mud comes out in the blades, and on the next downward thrust the diggers strike a rock. His uncle sighs then, lets the diggers sit in the hole, which is less than a foot deep. By then the boy has reached him, and he looks up the crease between the barnyard and the hill of the north pasture. He counts eighteen new fenceposts. His uncle and Donnie have been at it since seven this morning, and it’s only just past four. There are still six more posts in the pile.

The boy can tell from their bark and from a pile of twigs that
have been stripped from them that the fenceposts are fresh-cut cedar, their sawed ends marbled brown and white. Cedar’s scarce on this side of the river. The abandoned house just west of his uncle’s is surrounded by them, but that land doesn’t belong to his uncle, who would have had to range far and wide over his own property in order to find this much cedar. But it’s a hardy water-resistant wood, well suited to the wet ground it’s going in—worth the effort, his uncle would say. Do it right the first time and you won’t have to do it again.

The back of his uncle’s shirt is soaked with sweat and his pants all the way up to his thighs are splattered with mud. Useless work, he says now, taking a folded handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt and refolding it in an effort to find a dry patch. He wipes his forehead and eyes and puts the handkerchief back in his pocket. Useless place to put a fence.

Since his uncle has spoken first the boy feels justified in asking a question.

Why don’t you move it further up the hill?

Wire won’t reach that far.

What about closer to the barn?

Barnyard’d be too small then.

The boy is wondering if he should ask his uncle why he put the fence here in the first place when his uncle says, Wouldn’t never have put a fence here myself, but you make do with what you find. He is about to start up with the posthole diggers when he sees the boy still looking at him, and he lets go of the diggers and wipes his face with his handkerchief again. He looks down at Donnie, who is digging up one of the old fenceposts at the other end of the barnyard, and then he looks back at the boy.

What do you know about where you come from?

The boy looks at him, his fingers brushing at his chest.

I’m from Brentwood? he says. Long Island?

But his uncle is shaking his head.

Long Island, he says, scowling, is not a place people come from. It’s a place they end up. They come from somewhere else. You, he says, and then he corrects himself. We are from further north. Your grandfather, mine and Lloyd’s father, had a farm in Cobleskill.

The boy can’t imagine what a farm twenty miles to the north and west has to do with his uncle’s fence, and all at once he stabs his shovel into the ground and reaches for his uncle’s posthole diggers.

Here, I’ll help.

His uncle puts a hand on his arm.

You should know this, Dale.

The boy lets go of the diggers reluctantly. He looks around, finds his shovel again, holds it with both hands between himself and his uncle.

Me and my father didn’t get along so well, his uncle is saying. Which is why your father inherited our farm.

My father is a cook? the boy says, but he isn’t even sure of that now. He works at Pilgrim State Mental Hospital?

Your father is a farmer. Just not a good one. He ran our place into the ground. Or didn’t run it you could say. Drank it away’s more like it, sold off the cows one by one and traded the land acre by acre for a couple of dollars or a bottle until finally the government seized what was left for taxes, while all the while I spent years working for other people until I managed to scrape
up the money to put the down payment on this place. Not exactly the best land in the county but it’ll buy you a pair of shoes, eventually. That is, he finishes, if we ever get this fence up and get the ladies in the barn.

He lifts the diggers and brings them down hard and the blades strike the rock they struck before and sing like a tuning fork. His uncle shakes his head and almost under his breath he says, Damn Lloyd. Drank away the farm and Nancy and—

He stops when he sees the boy is still standing there, his eyes wide, the shovel gone slack in his hands.

Aw no. You never heard of Nancy neither?

The boy can only shake his head, not trusting himself to speak. He has never heard of their grandfather’s farm and he has never heard of Nancy either, but while the former is intriguing and scary and mostly very far away, there is something about the way his uncle had said the word
Nancy
—something about the way he’d said the word
and
right after it—that reminds him of the way the old man had said
not again
that day in the truck.

His uncle’s handkerchief is too wet to do any good but he uses it anyway, and after he’s swiped at his forehead he holds it in his hands.

Well listen. You know how your dad wasn’t the first man your ma was married to? Duke and Jimmy?

Ma wasn’t married before she was married to Dad. Dad says that makes Duke and Jimmy bastards.

Right. Well, your dad
was
married before he married your ma. He was married to a girl named Nancy Mitford. He married her right out of high school, was with her a good six, seven years before she left him.

If his uncle had told him to get to work he would have. But he doesn’t. He just stands there wringing the handkerchief in his hands. The boy wishes his uncle would tell him to get to work but he doesn’t, and so he says, Dad says Duke and Jimmy are double bastards because they don’t even have the same old man. Jimmy’s last name is Dundas just like Grandma and Grandpa but Duke’s last name is Enlow. We don’t even know anybody named Enlow.

Mitford, Dale. Your dad’s first wife was Nancy Mitford.

Dad says Ma ain’t nothing but a whore.

Don’t you talk about your ma that way, unless you want me to wash your mouth out with lye.

The shovel is shaking in the boy’s hands. He has to drop it to the ground for fear he will strike his uncle with it.

And?

His uncle catches his breath before replying, one hand reaching for the diggers in the hole.

What do you mean, Dale?

You said
and
. You said Dad lost the farm and Nancy
and
. And what?

His uncle shakes his head.

It’s not important. Nancy’s long gone, your dad’s built a life with your ma now.

You said
and
, Uncle Wallace. You
said
it.

His uncle shakes his head. The boy remembers how his uncle had shaken his head at the old man when they first came to the farm. That shake had meant no but this shake means something else. His uncle lets go of the diggers, reaches instead for his handkerchief. He starts to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand,
then stops when he sees the boy holding out the napkin that has been in his front pocket all day.

You said and, Uncle Wallace.

His uncle takes the napkin, wipes his forehead, eyes.

They had a son, Dale, he says. Lloyd and Nancy had one son. There is still something incomplete about this information, and the boy waits until his uncle puts the napkin in his pocket and says, Named Dale.

The boy doesn’t understand at first.

You mean I’m—

No, no, you’re Ethel’s son all right. But there was another Dale before you. Another Dale Peck. Nancy took him away with her when she left and when you was born your father give you the same name.

All of a sudden the boy is out of breath. He feels like he has carried two full milk pails the length of the alley, only to discover the vat is missing from the vat room, and the barn missing when he turns around. Shaking with his burden, all he can do is nod at his uncle, and then he takes his shovel and goes to help Donnie dig out the old posts, and the work is so exhausting, the wet earth so heavy and full of stones, that he barely has time to think of this other Dale, the first one. The old man’s firstborn son.

Most of the old posts are so rotted that their trunks can be twisted off by hand, but his uncle wants each post’s root dug up and the hole filled in so that one of the ladies doesn’t break a leg on her way to the barn. The boy goes at it methodically, driving his shovel through the root and grinding the fibrous wood to bits, then shoveling dirt into the holes and tamping it down with
his bare feet to make sure the earth is packed solid until at one point Donnie calls out, It ain’t a cemetery, Amos. Pick up the pace a little, it’s after six.

In the silence after he speaks the boy can hear the lows of the ladies on the other side of the barn and the house and 38. It’s another half hour before all the old posts are out of the ground, and even as the boy lets the shovel fall from hands almost as blistered as his feet his uncle is putting a pair of pliers into them.

Gotta get the wire off the posts.

The boy and his uncle work at opposite ends of the barnyard fence, Donnie in the middle; and so it is Donnie who an hour later says to the boy, Aw Jesus Christ, Amos, I don’t believe it.

The boy ignores him. He opens the pliers wide and closes the sharp metal shears at the back of the pliers’ jaws over the wire right next to the staple. He squeezes and twists and just as the wire snaps Donnie slaps the pliers out of his hand. They skitter into the mud and disappear like his apple three hours ago.

What the hell do you think you’re doing Amos?

The boy launches himself at Donnie’s waist. Donnie grabs him by his shirt and belt and throws him backward and the boy lands on his bottom in the mud, feels some of it spill like thick cold water into his drawers. He is scrambling for a second lunge when his uncle says,

All right, all right, what’s going on here?

Will you look at this, Wallace. Amos cut the wire off the posts, it’s in pieces. It’s ruined.

The boy bites his tongue because this is indeed what’s he done, and as soon as Donnie says it aloud he senses he’s done something wrong.

That right, Dale?

Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?

Jesus, Amos. Donnie reaches a hand into his breast pocket and pulls out a handful of rusty bent staples, which he throws into the mud. You were supposed to pull the staples off the old posts and leave the wire whole so we could restring it on the new ones. We’re gonna have to buy a whole new roll of wire now.

The logic of Donnie’s argument shames the boy—and the fact that it comes from Donnie’s mouth makes it that much worse. How could he have been so stupid? He watches mute as his uncle digs into the same pocket that had produced his quarters earlier in the day. Now he pulls out a few wrinkled bills and hands them to Donnie and his voice seems to sink into the mud like the pliers.

Best see if there’s anything in the milk can. I’d just as soon not put this on credit.

The milk can is in the vat room. It contains the change their neighbors leave for a quart or two of fresh milk. It is his uncle’s equivalent of the shoe fund: he uses it for incidentals, spare parts for the milking machine, patches for a leaky tire, chicken feed, and occasionally he takes a quarter from it to buy the butterscotch candies he likes to suck on in the afternoons.

Milk can’s empty, Donnie says. I used it yesterday to gas up the tractor.

His uncle frowns. He takes the napkin from his pocket but it is nothing more than a wet ball, and he throws it on the ground. The boy stares at the white spot on the dark earth because he finds it hard to look at his uncle. He would like to crawl under the mud himself. But how can he be expected to know about
moving fence when he doesn’t even know the old man was married before he was married to his mother? That there is an earlier incarnation of him out there somewhere—a first try, perhaps even a better one. Someone who knows how to take down a fence without cutting the wires like they were so many lengths of spaghetti.