So Much Pretty (17 page)

She was rooted in that town. Hell, her roots
were
that town. She had grown up in a house around the corner from the house she lived in now, so similar the two places could have shared architectural DNA. Houses built by the same workers.

She and her husband, Jim, had been together since high school, and even then they were living the dream, as Jim liked to say; she was a cheerleader, he a football player. She was Beverly Tamarack then, of Tamarack Road. Jim was a kind of rowdy boy, she thought then, filled with school spirit and a spirit about life that just made him so charming. They were engaged before they graduated—she had to say yes that night while they still wore their crowns and corsages. They were married before they were twenty. And there was no doubt about how they fit together. There was just no one else.

People got married younger then. She didn’t really know why that had changed; it seemed to her people didn’t make so many mistakes back then. Didn’t confuse themselves. Trusted more—or knew who not to trust. Or just didn’t expect the world from one person, so there didn’t have to be disappointments, divorces,
people handing their kids back and forth from one broken home to the other. Not like her family.

It’s like she was saying to the Homegals, Jim wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. He came off kind of gruff sometimes. But he got things done and said what he thought, and she was proud of what they’d made together with all those years. And let’s be honest, you’re not going to have a strong family without those “pick yourself up and get it done” values. Everyone knew that was how the Haytes had always lived, which was why she couldn’t bear the rumors she was hearing about her boys.

And neither could the Homegals.

“What I don’t understand is why people turn on their own in a time like this,” Charlene Puitt had said that afternoon at the golf course. “My mother used to say that newcomers bring nothing but everything you don’t want when they move in. And if you ask me, it’s the outsiders who are causing all the problems. You take this reporter who’s been asking all these questions.”

“Oh, her,” Beverly said. “She was up to look at the dairy. I’d never seen anything like her. Some kind of shiny shirt with horses all over it like it was her pajamas, and those glasses, and that hair hadn’t seen a brush in I don’t know how long. I think I saw maybe two smiles the whole time she was there.”

“Probably wishing Dale was after her,” said Ruth with a sniff.

“Now, I wasn’t going to say that,” Beverly said, although she
had
thought it.

“What I’m saying is,” said Charlene, “people like her, they’re restless. They come here looking for trouble because they aren’t settled themselves. They want to stir things up. And they’re the ones people are listening to.”

“People are stupid,” said Ruth, not reminding them that she was a newcomer once.

“We’re not talking about people like you,” said Beverly, giving her a nod. She knew Ruth was sensitive about that.

It was like what Jim said, and Beverly had to agree, that when you have the Department of Social Services providing trailers over on Route 34 for people who are going to come and go like a revolving door, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. She wasn’t saying all those people were bad, and Lord knew no one understood better than she did how hard it was to be low on money. But some people just didn’t want to work, and she didn’t have any sympathy for that. None. And if there was one thing her boys knew how to do, it was work. They might not have liked it all the time, but they did it. And how could anyone even wonder who it was out there doing bad things when you compared boys like hers to those children who didn’t even have a real home or a mother and father right there for them?

True, sometimes bad people came out of good families. Like that boy in Dryden who took those two girls right out of their house. That family was good people. But the boy had been taking steroids, which was something his mother should have put a stop to. Beverly would have. Her boys were raised on a dairy. They did not take drugs. Where would they even get them? It was like she was telling the Homegals, “I don’t know how much more wholesome you can get than a glass of milk.”

Everyone knew she and Jim had given their boys everything. When they’d had nothing, she’d given them good values and time. When they expanded the herd for the second time, and got all that money from Groot, their toy closet was packed to the ceiling. And it was a pleasure to do it for them, give them a reward for being good boys and see the joy on their faces. See them looking sharp at school. Which people don’t think farmers can be. They wore Adidas, Levi’s, whatever was in style, but tasteful, not too flashy. Beverly gave them traditions, too. Every Fourth of July, the family went golfing together. They’d take the flags off the green and replace them with small replicas of American flags.

Even now she could see them all out there, rosy-cheeked in the sunshine, competing in their matching striped shorts and white shoes. Bruce so little but wanting to look just like his big brother. It had been a comfortable life, good nutrition and the strength to compete and a tight family. She remembered sitting on the bleachers drinking hot cider and cheering while her boys played football, first Dale, then later Brucie, and making the boys dinner when they came home. Dale was cute even then, and later, so handsome. If he’d ever had any problem with girls, it was that he had too many choices and never wanted to pick. She guessed this waitress was the closest thing to a farm girl around the corner for Dale. She guessed he thought this Wendy was the girl for him, like she’d been for Jim. She guessed he loved her, like he’d been saying for almost half the year now.

It was obviously all lies and gossip, what people were saying. So why was she still bothered? Well, because you got bothered when people were saying things, no matter how hard you tried not to listen. If there was one thing you had to learn in a small town, it was not to care what other people thought. But they were asking Dale questions about Wendy White. Where he last saw her. How long had he known her? Implying that he, who could have had any girl he wanted and was traveling around half the globe because of the dairy, would have gone and done something to a girl from this town. A girl he wanted to marry. It was ridiculous. And if it was someone in this town that took the girl, Dale sure wouldn’t know who that would be, because he just didn’t associate with that kind.

She’d met Wendy White once or twice—her father had some kind of handyman business—but she could hardly say she knew her. Dale had his own apartment, attached to the house with a separate entrance. But truth be told, the girl hadn’t impressed Beverly. She seemed bland. Not stupid but not real motivated, either. She seemed a little coddled, like she came from one of
those soft families, not too many expectations, trying to make up in hugs what they couldn’t provide for the kids. She’d seen it before. Bad for the child.

Beverly couldn’t respect that. She loved her boys, and they knew it. But she always told them to be something. Have an attitude. Attitude is much more important than facts. She’d also noticed that the girl had no problem parking her daddy’s car by the apartment all night long.

Like everyone else, she didn’t like it when the girl disappeared, just took off and didn’t tell Dale, didn’t even tell someone to fill in her shifts at work. It gave you a bad feeling when something like that happened. But Beverly had heard of that kind of thing before. Her great-uncle had wanted to marry a girl from Elmville way back when, and she ran away and was never seen again. Left him so brokenhearted, it was no wonder he took to drinking now and again.

People liked to talk then and they liked to talk now. Beverly felt bad for the girl’s family, of course. What they were going through was terrible. Unthinkable. And if she could help them, she would. But she had no idea where their daughter was. She wasn’t a police officer. She’d heard Jim say to Dave Fawcett, “Between the trailer trash and the tree huggers buying up a few acres here and there, there’s sure to be drifters. They’ll pick up someone who’s not rooted in the community as sure as you’re alive and take her away.”

Well, she didn’t know if that girl was rooted or not. The family’d lived there a long time of course but she knew their troubles had started long before. The mother had to take a job at Wal-Mart, and the girl’s brother got some very poor girl pregnant after high school, and now that girl did hair over at Cut Above.

“I want you to leave it, and I don’t want to hear another word,” Jim said. “I’ve been hearing all about that girl all over town, and she ain’t any kind of saint. She had her eye on more
boys than Dale. And she wasn’t as dumb as she acted. This’ll all blow over, so don’t make yourself crazy.”

“I just don’t like people talking about our boys,” she said.

“Beverly!” her husband said. “I told you to shut it. Who cares what a bunch of ignoramuses gossip about. Dale ain’t got nothing to do with White Wall’s daughter going off to New York to become some prostitute.”

The way he said it startled her out of her worry, almost made her laugh. She knew he didn’t mean it about the girl being a whore, but he did mean Beverly was being ridiculous. Farming was a hard and dangerous job, and over time, it had made them not care what anybody thought. She was going against him by worrying so much. They both knew how they felt about Pollyannas who wanted to drink their milk but were angry about how it got to their tables. People who thought farms were quaint but didn’t want to smell shit or think of animals not getting treated more special than most people. How they felt about snobs who thought farmers were dumb. Men growing up in the country, like Jim and her boys, knew a lot more about life and death than those who didn’t. That was the nature of it. She needed to remember who she was.

“Now, Beverly,” Jim said, “you’re going to be sleeping alone in this bed if I get woke up at three in the morning again because of your tossing and turning. Now rest your gray head on your old man’s chest and quit thinking so hard.”

He put his arms around her, and she folded in to him. Even getting older and stouter, they fit like puzzle pieces. She closed her eyes and thought only about how proud she was of Dale. Dale when he was three, when he was four, when he was five, helping her around the farm and looking after his brother. His stocky little body. Telling her jokes from the time he was just little. Dale being shy his first day of school, how he looked so handsome like her uncles. Dale all grown up, walking with his clubs across the green, his shoulders broad and strong in the shirt
she bought him for his birthday.
Attitude
, she thought.
Attitude is more important than facts
.

As if Jim was reading her mind, feeling her fight against that doubt again, he said, “Dale didn’t do nothing different from any other red-blooded boy growing up in the country, and a lot of things he did a hell of a lot better.”

Flynn

A
CCORDING TO MY
research, the Haytes dairy stopped being what was traditionally called a dairy at some point in the sixties. The Haytes were the first farmers in the area to become an industrial farm. Later, in the 90s, they signed a contract with Groot, a firm out of Holland, and increased the size of their herd by a whole order of magnitude. Most of the people they employ are outside contractors, other companies that plant corn and spread the cow shit. There’s a handful of people who deal with the cows in the milking parlor. Yet somehow there is still a sense that they are the biggest employer in town. They are not. That honor belongs to Home Depot.

The thing the Haytes dairy produces most of is shit, chemically treated, pharmaceutically contaminated shit, which is spread on fields throughout the entire county, leaches into the water table, causes blinding headaches, nausea, and skin rashes in those living close to where they “fertilize,” and is suspected of causing nitrate contamination of the local drinking water and massive fish kills. There are several weeks in the summer when the countryside and parts of the village smell of methane and ammonia—not the organic smell of hay and cow shit and silage, more like the smell of concentrated sewage.

I managed to get on the property “officially” for a piece I was doing on local employers in 2005—I got a tour from Jim Haytes and his husky little son Bruce. It was the only angle I could think of to get in there. I pitched it like a series we were doing in conjunction with the Chamber of Commerce. And that was what I’d write about for the paper, but it was not what I was looking for. At this point I had filed Freedom of Information requests with the DEC and the EPA and had environmental-impact studies for
all the industrial farms in New York. I’d also found that Groot had contracts with corporations downstate dealing in municipal waste and purchase of a new “liming agent” that was an unregulated by-product of human sludge. In other words, they’d found a way to repurpose the countryside as a toxic-waste site. I had just begun to dig, but until that day I hadn’t seen where the big players buried things. I hadn’t seen how it worked up close.

Despite the smell surrounding the place, the inside of the buildings was like an operating room. All stainless steel—big high Plexiglas windows—with an observatory overlooking the milking parlor. The cows were kept in a kind of cow parking lot. They stood partially on cement floors with their hind legs on metal grating though which their shit fell directly into a drainage pit below.

I sat in the milking parlor observatory with Jim Haytes and talked about Haeden and the dairy and about Bruce playing Small Fry football while we watched the cows. It was air-conditioned and quiet, and the concrete was painted pale yellow, like cream. The whole milking process was something from a science-fiction film. The cows walked in a straight line and were attached to the multipronged suction apparatus of an industrial milking machine. Workers swabbed their teats with a sanitizer and then attached the hollow prongs to the udder. The cows did nothing but stand there, and then when the suction was taken off, each one walked forward, following the cow in front of it. They didn’t need to be shoved or hit or led. They just kept walking in this line, stopping, then walking back to their stalls on the cement. The whole process was hypnotic. They did this nearly around the clock.