Half Wild (12 page)

My brother learned to walk, eventually, with a crutch and a cane, but he never learned how to clean a stall or drive a tractor. My brother's heart was weak also—that's what we called it,
a weak heart,
and I knew no other medical details. My father, in turn, never learned to love my brother. My father who supposedly, once upon a time, courted my mother with wild roses, and sang, though I never heard them, French love songs. But by the time Ross came along, that sweetness was gone. My father was disgusted by him, as people sometimes are by those whose bodies reflect their own human weakness. He used a pronoun, never a name, to refer to Ross. “You're not bringing
him,
are you?” Or, “What's
he
doing?” Ross, who learned quickly how to make up for his weaknesses by making the people around him laugh. He made spot-on impressions and told absurd and crass jokes and learned to do cartwheels and land on his stronger leg. He had a sweet streak
none of the rest of us had. He would limp across the yard, bringing me and my sisters and our mother fistfuls of daffodils and baskets of wild blackberries. He liked giving gifts, and he liked making other people happy, most of all my mother and me.

I open the bag of white bread and slather a slice with peanut butter. I chew and swallow and then do the same with another. “You eat food like it's a chore,” Helen said not long ago. “Don't you ever enjoy it?” And I did enjoy Helen's food: wine, oysters, warm, thyme-scented stews. “You eat the same way you make love,” she said, her brown eyes laced with tears, and in the moments when I think I may still be lovable, still capable of love, not yet ruined by my father's unloving, that line rings in my ears and in an instant I am back on this farm, no matter where I am.

I down the rest of my coffee, throw my shoes and coat on. I need to leave this kitchen. I stand in the open doorway and breathe. The air is warm against my face, and I let sunlight soak into my aging skin. Spring is everywhere—rotting manure, mud, dirt, pollen, the sugary smell of sap running through trees. I pick up a rock and toss it into the air. It hits the grass with a
pock
and settles back into the earth. I could go inside and start drinking; I could get in my car and leave here; I could go into that barn and light a match to a corner of old hay; I could call Helen—no, I cannot do that. I look at the driveway and think of that summer, of the yellow dust that settled everywhere, of the way it streaked
across stones and dirt and wood every time it rained, so much so that my mother said, “Strange, so strange.”

I was nineteen, Ross was twelve, and I was already leaving, though I didn't know it at the time. I wanted nothing to do with this farm, or anyone on it. Unlike half my friends—Jack, Danny, Clem—my draft number hadn't been called, so I hired myself out to work at the slate quarry in Jacksonville. By doing so I passed up not only the war but working on the farm like a good son. To add insult to that particular injury, I had done well in school and so instead of working with stone, where my father could at least respect my hard muscles and long days, I was put to work in the office helping with the books. I added numbers while my friends died in jungles and swamps and my father toiled alone in these fields.

I got paid well that summer. Half of it I gave to my mother, who stored the cash in a tobacco tin in her underwear drawer, but the other half was my own, and I spent it on things my father thought frivolous and sickening. I bought leather dress shoes and Levi jeans and, worst of all, a secondhand Volkswagen Bug that my father was ashamed to see parked in his yard. I dated a girl whose parents owned a summer home, a girl who went braless and whose brown hair smelled always like oranges, a girl who was on her way to Wellesley College. By that fall I had secretly applied to the University of Vermont. I thought the world was mine for the taking; I thought at that young age that the self could exist where the body resides.

That summer Ross hit puberty. His cheeks and mouth became fringed with mouse-soft hair, and he started having wet dreams, and my mother, whose hair had turned a solid silver-white by then, took me aside one day on the porch and in a quiet and steady voice said, “Do for him what I can't and your father won't.”

So for a few weeks I tried. I helped my brother shave and took the sheets off his bed and washed them in the new General Electric washer we had recently installed on the back porch. One afternoon in early June I invited him up to a deer perch in the woods and we walked up there slowly, him stepping over rocks and logs with great effort and determination, to that spot at the top of the field with a view to New Hampshire, where I handed him his first beer. It was a hot day and he drank it silently and with relish. We were both quiet, simply sitting there in the hot afternoon sun taking gulps of the cold beer, sweat running down the backs of our legs, our eyes looking down on our haphazard farm, littered with broken machinery and little rectangular barns, and out over Round Mountain to Whiskey beyond.

Eventually I asked him about school.

“It's awful,” my brother said, then turned away toward the view. I knew he was an outcast in school, and I knew he had lost the older brother who had once been the only friend he needed. It had changed him. He no longer made a fool of himself in order to make us laugh. His body became both a thing to hide and a place for hiding.

“It'll get better,” I told him, unsure, and my brother nodded and I opened us each a second beer, which he accepted with a nod, and we listened to the motors and birds that resonated up there on the mountain.

The beer made us sleepy, so we leaned our heads back on the stand and lay there for a while in the sun with our eyes closed, listening to our father's Farmall down below, and to a wood thrush, and to a blue jay's racket, and to a two-stroke engine farther off back in the woods, and I looked over at one point and saw my brother smiling, his face radiating a sleepy, half-drunk peace, and I will always remember that afternoon for the subtle brotherly sweetness that was there, and I will always regret that it was just that one time, and that the rest of the summer I was too busy making cash and fucking a rich girl to ask my brother up to that spot in the trees for a beer again.

The sun is bright now, lighting the whole yard. From where I stand I can hear Jane's farm down the road—the low groans of cows, the clank of a metal gate swinging closed, a tractor engine starting up. I think about who I would be if I had taken over this farm, as I was expected to do, about how regular and comforting the mornings of my life would be—the clock of milk-full udders keeping me from the ponderous fits of melancholy that mornings so often send me into—and right now, for this one moment in the sunlight, I long to hear a cow's desperate bellow from this barn before me so that I have somewhere I
must be, something I must do. But there is no one who needs me, no cow or child or woman waking up and turning over in search of the tender release of touch.
Forgive me, Helen.
I sit down on the porch steps with my elbows on my knees, my face in my hands. I breathe in the scent of mud, that dank and harrowing smell that wants, every year, and with such determination, to break things open.

It was not a good summer for farming. Milk prices were in the dirt, and our first cutting had been rained on and lay in the barn starting to mold. The fields were ready for a second cutting, but it rained through the rest of July, and when, in early August, the radio predicted a possible dry day or two, my father decided to risk it. On the fifteenth of August he cut the hay, and two days later he came in from the barn, past these very steps, stood in this doorway, and looked at my mother and me eating breakfast.

“Need your help today,” he said, nodding toward me.

“Can't,” I said, not looking at him, shoveling a forkful of my mother's eggs into my mouth.

“Need your help. Got to get the hay in.”

“I can't,” I said again. “I have a job.”

My father stood still and looked out the window. He cleared his throat and then said under his breath, “No-good goddamn pansy job.”

My mother went to the stove and laid a cast-iron pan down hard.

“At least I make money,” I said.

I saw my father's left hand start to shake. That hand had smacked me across the face many times before, but I knew we were beyond that now. “Goddamn spoiled son of a bitch,” he said quietly, to which I shrugged, the worst insult I could have given him, and then my father turned and went out this door, slamming it behind him, and I saw my mother, still turned toward the stove, flinch, and I put my empty plate in the sink and mumbled thanks to her and went out this door also, and stepped into my Volkswagen, and drove away.

It's a terrible thing to have been the lucky one. And even worse for that luck to have led you to an insolence and arrogance that you will spend the rest of your life regretting. I did not even have to work that day—I had made a plan to pick up my blue-eyed Wellesley girl whose hair smelled like oranges and take her to an abandoned quarry, where we made love the rest of the day on some rocks in the sun and then, once it began to rain, in the backseat of my German car.

And it is a terrible thing, too, for the pleasure of sex to be poisoned forever by the guilt of one day.

I leap up, rub my cold hands on the legs of my jeans, and start walking across the yard to the road. My limbs are weak from caffeine, and the breath coming out of my lungs burns. At the road I stop and look in both directions: uphill into the woods where it dead-ends; downhill toward Jane's farm and the road that leads away. “Goddamnit,” I
whimper, but only the birds can hear. It's a spot I stood in many times as a boy and, later, as a teenager, a place where you can see the clean streak of Silver Creek and beyond it the gentle swell and tip of Monadnock's breast-shaped peak, a place that offers the gift and promise of distance. South of me I can see Jane's husband driving east on his shiny new John Deere across what we always called Stink Pasture for the way it smelled of skunkweed and wet cow shit, and I begin walking, almost running, down the road toward that tractor for a reason I can't explain. From the crest of the hill I see Jane's house, and I pause to look at the new white vinyl siding on the old structure, making it look tidy and durable, and the blue-gray double-wide a quarter mile downhill, a Chrysler parked in its front yard, and then I catch a glimpse of red hair through the window of the barn and for a moment I am fifteen again and it is Jane—Jane, a year older than I, with long, coltish legs and full lips and a way of teaching boys things in haylofts that they will never in all their lives be able to thank her appropriately for—but then I realize that Jane's hair is chopped short now and losing its color so it must be her daughter's hair I see through the dusty glass, and I slow down.

My father never spoke of what happened, so it is my mother's and my sisters' stories that I have pieced together into history. My mother told me later, much later, that after I left that day my father came into the house and said, “Get the other boy.”

My mother turned to him. “Jake, he can't.”

“He will,” my father said. So my mother went upstairs and woke Ross, who dressed and ate the biscuit my mother handed him and followed my father out into the field.

My mother stayed in the house for an hour, washing the breakfast dishes and starting bread, then went outside to feed the chickens. Back inside she woke my sisters and told them they had to go to the field too, to help get the hay in. They woke up slow, took their time getting dressed. The sun by that point had already disappeared behind some clouds, and there was a thick, dark bank rolling in from the west.

At around ten my mother filled a jug with cold spring water and walked out toward the farthest hayfield, where my brother and father worked, the field just visible to my left now, if I turn my head to see it. My sisters were still in the kitchen eating breakfast. My mother could hear my father shouting before she could see the field, and so she walked quickly. When she got there she saw my father leap off the tractor and yell at Ross, who had a bale in his arms, which he was slowly and painfully trying to roll toward the truck. Dark, charcoal clouds gathered in the sky, and my mother felt a drop of rain on her cheek. My father must have felt one too, for at that moment he looked up toward the sky and yelled “Goddamnit!” to my brother, who was at that point straining with his upper arms and torso, while balancing on his unstable legs, to lift the bale
up toward the back of the truck. “Goddamn useless!” my father yelled. And my mother told me that forever after those words could be heard in her head if she allowed them to ring there.

I turn my head to the east, toward the field I have tried not to look at for twenty years: Stark's pasture. A flat field gently sloping, a long birch in its center. I cannot move, looking at that just-visible field. I kneel down, there in the grass at the edge of the road, and feel the mud soak through the thin denim knees of my jeans. I put my face close to that mud and think for a moment I may stay there forever, and then I hop up and rub my face with my sleeve and start walking, as fast as I can, until I reach the edge of the Cole, no, Clement barnyard. My breath is uneven; my legs shake. No one is in sight, and the yard smells of tractor oil and cow shit and hay, and the combination is a smell as familiar as a damp wool coat or Helen's just-washed hair. I go to the barn and pause in the doorway and look into the darkness my eyes have yet to adjust to. I can hear a shovel in the far end of the barn, and the radio is playing someone who sounds like Reba McEntire but probably is not, as it's been a good fifteen years since I last listened to this station.

It was this barn my mother ran to for help. I don't know the details of that moment—whether she encountered Jane's father in the doorway and told him to call or whether she found the phone in the house herself. And
I don't know what her face looked like, or whether the words she said to the operator were garbled by terror or whether they came out matter-of-fact and plain, as shock will sometimes make them come. I know that the local firemen were the first to show up, and that they drove out into the field in their red truck, and that one of them, a friend of mine, knelt in the damp and freshly cut hay where my father had lain my brother's body, and checked his pulse, and I know that the fireman did not look in my mother's eyes when he told her that her son was dead. Adelaide told me all of that. She had just been cresting the hill with Dell when my father screamed at my brother to move his “goddamn legs,” and so Ross had spread his legs and put his chest up against the bale and wrapped his arms around it and leaned his head back, trying in vain to heave the bale four feet up onto the top of the stack, and as he did so he screamed, a scream that was not a scream of effort but of anger and anguish, and still the bale did not make it even halfway up. And then my sisters watched as my father, in a rare moment of acquiescence, saw the raw misery of his deformed son and so called out, “Stop
,
” and said, for perhaps the first time, his youngest son's name—“Ross, stop”—and my sisters watched as my brother either didn't hear my father over the noise of the tractor or ignored him and continued to lift and scream, and my sisters stood there, still watching, as our brother's screaming suddenly stopped and his face went white and his body, like a doll's, began to slowly tip sideways, and
the bale fell by his side, and they stood there at the top of the hill, half blinded by the soft rain that now fell, as our mother dropped her jug of water and ran to him, and as my father stood there unmoving in terror and disbelief, before running toward his son, his son with the weak heart, whom he picked up and carried to the shelter of that single birch tree. It was his weak heart. That weak heart he was born with that did him in.