Greenville (9 page)

He has to clear his throat before the words will come.

You can use my shoe fund, Uncle Wallace.

His uncle looks down at him with a funny expression on his face. He has seen the first Dale, and the boy wonders if he is comparing them in his head. Wonders how he measures up.

That’s all right, Dale. I’ll charge it, pay it off next time we pump the vat.

No, Uncle Wallace, it’s my fault, I want to pay for it.

His uncle shakes his head then, but he is pointing to the house.

Go on then. But hurry it up so Donnie can make it to the supply store before it closes.

It takes Donnie an hour to return with the wire. During that time there is nothing to do but gather up the staples, the ones the boy left on the old fenceposts and the ones Donnie threw on the ground, and try to ignore the confused lowing of the ladies across the road. As the boy works the sun sets behind the same hill the old man had driven over the day he left him here, and the boy lets himself imagine the red spots of the taillights glowing like an animal’s eyes even though there had been no taillights left on the truck by then, and from there it is easy to imagine that the old man wasn’t driving back to Brentwood but instead to retrieve his other son. His firstborn. The first Dale Peck. The
ladies’ calls float up the hill, gaining volume and depth until they seem to roll over him like snowballs in reverse, chilling his skin inside his clothes—Duke’s clothes, Jimmy’s clothes. He roots around in the mud with his bare feet until he finds the pliers and washes them off in the trough. He washes his face too, to soothe the burning in his cheeks and forehead, and when he sees his dim reflection in the rippled water of the trough he has to wonder if this, too, belonged to someone else before it belonged to him.

He hears his uncle’s voice behind him.

Don’t let him get under your skin, Dale. He’s just frustrated because he ain’t got nothing of his own.

It takes the boy a moment before he realizes his uncle is referring to Donnie. He takes a last look at his face, then swats at the flecks of mud on his chest and the clots on the seat of his pants, and even though he knows he shouldn’t he says,

Neither do I, Uncle Wallace.

His uncle doesn’t say anything so the boy keeps going.

I’ll pack my things as soon as we’re done here. He stares at his uncle’s muddy thighs. I guess Ma was right. I guess military school’s the only place for me.

His uncle’s legs stiffen in their muddy sheaths, and when his knees bend the mud cracks like the crust on a loaf of bread. He brings his green eyes level with the boy’s.

You’re not going nowhere. Anybody can make a mistake but there’s no place for self-pity on this farm. His uncle’s voice softens. I’ll get you those shoes, Dale. Next time we pump the vat I’ll drive you straight to town and buy you a pair of brand-new shoes.

The boy nods his head, unable to meet the watery intensity of
his uncle’s eyes, so like the old man’s. He doesn’t understand how defeat has been rendered victory—cannot wrap his head around the mitigating factor that is his uncle’s love—and so he mistrusts his reprieve, and when Donnie gets back the boy launches himself into the rewiring of the fence to demonstrate his worth to the farm, prove he can earn his keep. The three of them rewire the fence by lantern light, and then, with Donnie helping, it only takes an hour to get the milking done. Even though the boy hurries it’s Donnie who ends up milking the sixty-first cow, and he tells the boy he’ll have to find something else to pull on tonight, and aims one of the teats in his hand at the boy and squirts his foot with a jet of warm milk.

It’s nearly eleven by the time they head in for dinner. The arc of the Milky Way bands the blue-black sky like a spray of water shot from a hose and the dew on the grass washes the mud off the boy’s feet as they walk down the hill. The dew is cold but it stings the blisters on his feet. At the bottom of the hill the little L-shaped house is dark save for the kitchen window, a square of light cut into the wall, a trapezoid where the light angles away on the ground. Dew-wet pebbles glint in the light.

Have to pick up those wire pieces in the morning, his uncle says as he pulls open the door.

Yeah, Amos. Maybe you can make yourself a pair of shoes. Steel toe, Donnie says, and the boy feels Donnie’s boot on his wet butt.

The boy doesn’t answer, just picks up Jimmy’s boots by their laces and lets them thump together to knock the dirt off them. The left one is still wet from being thrown into the ditch, and the boy
winces in anticipation of sticking his blistered foot into the stiff leather six hours from now.

Inside, Aunt Bessie is looking at the
Reader’s Digest
at the table. There is a big pot of something on the stove and the empty can that had contained his shoe fund is missing from the counter. He looks around until he sees it by the door to the hall, right next to a pair of boots he doesn’t recognize. The boots are black and broken in but not worn out, and it looks like someone has run a brush over them to bring up the shine.

Kenny Flack came by while you were out in the fields, Aunt Bessie says, ladling what looks like beef stew into Uncle Wallace’s bowl. Said he thought they might fit you. Said it’d be another couple of years before Flip grew into them and they were just taking up space in his closet.

The boy nods his head, sits down at the table. Kenny Flack, Flip. The names bounce between his ears but his brain is blistered as his hands and feet, too tired to run after them and pin them to their proper faces. And anyway, the boy finds it easier to think of them as empty—easier to think they can be swatted away like flies when they buzz too close to his ears. Kenny Flack. Flip. The words flit through his head, as untenanted as the name Dale Peck has become since his uncle told him he inherited it from another boy.

His old boots are still in his hands and he starts to put them in his lap, then puts them under his chair. He looks at the new boots by the door, the empty can next to them, and then at the empty bowl in front of him, and when Aunt Bessie’s ladle interposes itself between his eyes and his bowl and empties its contents into the bowl he picks up his spoon, and as they eat
Donnie tells Aunt Bessie how the boy cut up the fence wire and had to spend his shoe fund on a new roll.

Looks like Kenny Flack knew just what was going on out there.

The boy’s uncle doesn’t say anything during the meal, doesn’t mention the other farm, the first farm and the first wife and first child that went with it, the first Dale Peck, but it is all the boy’s tired brain can think about, and as soon as he’s finished eating he excuses himself and starts toward the stairs.

Don’t forget your boots.

The boy turns toward his chair, but Aunt Bessie is pointing to the door. She has an innocent smile on her face, and when the boy doesn’t move her smile hardens slightly. She glances down at Kenny Flack’s boots, back up at him. They’re just shoes to her, a neighborly gesture, brotherly love, and the boy looks at them, sitting next to the empty can with their laces tucked neatly inside their hollow ankles. They’re a solid simple thing, but so was his life until a few hours ago. Now the boots seem more substantial than he is, but even so the boy is afraid to claim them, lest they too turn out to be an illusion.

Donnie and his uncle are looking at him now, Aunt Bessie sitting there with her spoon in her right hand and her paper napkin unfolded in her lap, creased into four panes like a curtained window. Under their collective gaze the boy can do nothing but pick up the new boots and turn toward the stairs. They’re a hand-me-down just like his other clothes, his name, his face even, but they’re also all he has, and he cradles them in his arms like a baby, and carries them up to his empty room.

The day after they restring the fence the boy steps off the bus in the shoes Kenny Flack has given him and sees a car parked in the driveway of his uncle’s house. Neither boy had said anything about the shoes that day, but when he ran into Kenny at lunch the older boy had introduced him to his friends. This is the boy who beat Billy Van Dyke in the four hundred yesterday, Kenny told his friends. He talks funny but he’s all right.

The car is a late-model Buick, its creamy underside separated from its red roof by a wide chrome dart, its polish unflecked by age or mud. It is all angles and lines next to his uncle’s bulbous black ’48 Ford, but all the boy thinks is, Town car.

The Buick turns out to belong to Mr. Baldwin, the gym teacher, a fussy man who wears brightly colored ties with his short-sleeved white shirts. He sits with his uncle and Donnie Badget at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him, and as soon as the boy walks in his uncle says, Ernie here says you threw your shoes at him yesterday. Like to knock out his front teeth, Ernie says.

The boy sees Donnie looking between him and Mr. Baldwin, and his gaze seems to link them together, as if the boy is as much a townie as this teacher with the creases ironed into his shirt-sleeves.

Says you want to run track and field, the boy’s uncle says now, and Donnie shakes his head and looks down into his cup of coffee.

That’s not true, Uncle Wallace. He asked me and I said I had chores to do after school. I said I wouldn’t have time for his stupid track team.

His uncle nods his head, his lips pursed as if he is considering a business proposition. Donnie’s shoulders are shaking and the boy thinks he is laughing into his cup.

It’s true you do have your chores, his uncle says thoughtfully. But Ernie here makes the case that a boy should have a sport, especially one he’s good at. He looks up at the boy. I told him you could have an hour after school plus time off for meets. How’s that sound?

The boy looks back and forth between Mr. Baldwin and his uncle while Donnie stares at him with an inscrutable smirk on his face.

But there’s a uniform. Shorts, a tank top. He looks down at his new boots. And sneakers.

Mr. Baldwin covers his mouth with his hand when he coughs.

The school would provide those, of course. If he letters he’ll have to buy his own letter jacket, but we’ll get him started with the uniform. And shoes, as long as he doesn’t throw them at me. He smiles at his uncle. I think he shows a lot of potential.

Again, his uncle nods his head.

Thought that about him myself. I still do.

As he is getting into his car and the boy is about to head up to the dairy barn, Mr. Baldwin says, Nice herd of cattle you have here, and it takes the boy a moment to realize he is talking to him.

They’re not cattle. They’re cows.

Cattle are food, his uncle explains, already heading to the barn.

Donnie knocks against the boy’s shoulder as he walks past him up the hill. Played football myself, he says without stopping. When I was a kid. Always thought track was a bit of a sissy sport myself.

The boy doesn’t say anything, just starts to run past Donnie up to the barn, but his uncle’s voice stops him.

Donnie and me’ll get the ladies. You best go find that wire you clipped up last night. Gather it up before one-a the ladies pokes an eye out.

By then Donnie’s caught up with him, and he bumps the boy’s shoulder again as he saunters past.

See you in the barn, Amos.

The boy gathers the wire as quickly as he can. He finds twenty-three lengths in all, each about fifteen feet long unrolled but the size of a cereal bowl after he curls it around his fist. The individual wires are nearly weightless but when he strips the leaves from a willow switch and spools the twenty-three coils onto it they weigh as much as a gallon of milk. He stores the coils in the hay barn near a row of glass jars that contain rusty nails and screws and the leftover staples from last night’s rewiring, and makes it into the dairy barn just in
time to pull a stool and pail up to the sixty-first lady. There’s no money in it for him, but he can’t resist flashing a smile of triumph at Donnie.

The next day he practices with the track team after school. An hour of drills and weights and time trials, and then he runs the mile and a half home and helps his uncle and Donnie with the ladies. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings he does an additional four-mile loop after the milking’s done, setting off and finishing at the sign that reminds everyone who reads it that this land belonged to the Millers before it belonged to the Pecks. That the Pecks lost their place in Cobleskill and had to resettle here, and on Long Island. His loop takes him east and north along 38 until he cuts west on Daniels Road. Julia Miller lives on Daniels Road, in a house that has no plaque in front of it but has a full second story and a slate-roofed barn the size of the school auditorium and, as well, the uneclipsed magnificence that is the 1956 Chevy. Sometimes the boy sees her when he runs by, helping her mother in the vegetable garden or playing tetherball with her sister, but even when she waves at him he pretends not to see her, so that the next morning on the bus she can lock her hair behind her ear and say, I waved at you yesterday, and he can blush and say, Sorry I didn’t see you. But more often than not he actually doesn’t see her, doesn’t even look for her, preferring to maintain the solitude of running free of Julia or Donnie or the far-flung members of his family. He follows Daniels Road west until it dead-ends in Route 32, and then he follows 32 south back to 38. Shepherd’s Bush sprawls over the four corners of that intersection, and by the end of May the little resort is hosting its first weekend visitors. On Memorial Day
weekend the boy sees a wet-haired girl in a green two-piece bathing suit just as she raises her arms and swan dives off the diving board. He runs backwards until she surfaces at the far end of the pool and climbs up the ladder and presses the water from her hair, and although the boy can’t actually see the water from this distance, he imagines its course down the channel of her spine and into the delta where her hips flare out of her bathing suit.

The following Saturday, the first in June, he has to help his uncle irrigate a constipated Holstein. They tether her to one of the new fenceposts and the boy sits atop the post and holds her tail while his uncle coats the nozzle of the hose with bacon grease and slides it up her as she bleats bloody murder, and when, a few minutes later, water spits out around the hose, they run like hell. Murky water spews out for a good five minutes, and then, when it runs clear and they’ve untied her, the Holstein trots off to join the other ladies under the chestnut trees that shade the top of the hill.