Sound Of Gravel, The (6 page)
Count your blessings;
Name them one by one.
Count your many blessings;
See what God hath done.
By the following summer, I had turned six and I decided I was old enough to help my brother Matt with his farmwork. The alfalfa fields glowed green under the hot desert sun, and the peach trees were covered with green leaves and small, unripe fruit. A dense pecan grove created several acres of cool shadows behind our farm, and although the house still smelled of mice, it was brighter and warmer in the summer light.
That summer had seen two exciting developments on the farm. First, electricity had finally stretched to our corner of the colony. Lane had dug narrow, shallow trenches and buried electrical wires to ferry the current to his shop, where it powered his tools and the irrigation pumps on our farm. He promised that it wouldn’t be long until he would wire our house and Alejandra’s. He had also installed a toilet inside our house. The bathroom was the first door on the left in the hallway, a narrow, gray room that smelled like wet cement. The toilet itself was not new, naturally. The seat was scratched, the tank was missing its flushing handle, and a five-gallon bucket filled with water sat nearby. This, we were instructed, was how we could flush the toilet until Lane could locate a functional handle.
At nine years old, Matt could milk a cow himself. He had been assigned a relatively benign brown ruminant. One evening at dusk, I decided to go with him to the corral behind Lane’s shop, which was about fifty yards from the back of our house, right next to the corral. I wanted to see milking firsthand. “Why are you followin’ me?” my brother said, annoyed by my presence, squinting over his shoulder with mock-menace. “Go back inside and help Mom.”
“I don’t want to. I want to help you milk the cow.”
He ignored me, looking straight ahead, and began to walk faster.
I picked up the pace and could soon hear Lane’s cows mooing and the buzz of the flies that swarmed around the five filthy animals and feasted on the manure-covered ground beneath them.
As I approached, I inspected the cows’ movements with caution, my shoulders tense. Directly in front of the corral lay a large, open well, which also made me nervous. I had always been afraid of it; the black surface of the water was far below ground level. I could never watch when the boys would run straight for it, scissoring their legs wide as they leaped from one crooked edge to the other. Loose dirt would fall into the hole, and it always took a few seconds to hear the hollow sound of a splash.
Resigning himself to my presence, Matt warned me to stay away from the cows’ swinging tails. I watched as he tied his cow’s two back legs together with thin baling wire so that she wouldn’t run away while he milked her. He sat down on top of an overturned bucket and made a big show of his competence, reaching confidently toward the cow’s swollen, pink udder. Then he stopped and looked up at me, his chin pointed out, and his eyes peering from underneath his cap.
“Ruthie, don’t ever stand behind the cow,” he said with a sternness beyond his years. “If it gets scared, it’ll kick ya in the teeth and knock ya flat on your butt. Its legs are skinny but they’re real strong, and its hooves are solid bone—”
“I know, Matt.” I sighed. I concocted an offended face and refused to look at him, sighing again as I waited for the sound of milk to hit the bottom of the empty bucket. Instead, I felt a stream of warm liquid spray my forehead and drip down my sunburned nose and cheeks. I whirled around and slapped Matt, who couldn’t stop laughing, which incensed me further. My face was hot; sticky milk had seeped under my eyelids. I yelled as loud as I could for him to quit it.
“Oh, stop being such a big baby.” He laughed as he returned his attention to the milking bucket.
Eventually, the sting left my eyes and I sat and stewed in silence. Every once in a while I would glance at Matt out of the corner of my eye as he squeezed milk into the bucket. Soon it was three-quarters full and covered with frothy bubbles.
The bright blue skies outside the corral had grown darker, and the clouds above looked as foamy as the milk. The sun had at last set behind yellow bales of dry hay that created a cool, triangular shadow over the cows. Matt outstretched his right arm to balance the weight of the bucket in his left hand as he walked slowly back to the house, taking care that the milk didn’t slosh on his jeans. This made it easy for me to keep up.
Lane’s truck was parked in front of his shop. My stepfather had left the door to the shop wide-open and was sitting inside on an empty paint bucket, his shoulders hunched forward over a wooden workbench. He was welding, something he did all the time now that the shop finally had electricity.
The leather gloves he wore had grease-stained fingertips, and the sleeves of his checkered shirt were tucked inside the gloves. A large, gray welding mask obscured his face, protecting it from blue, orange, and yellow sparks. Matt gave the whole scene a quick glance as he trudged onward with his milk bucket, but I couldn’t resist stopping to watch.
I didn’t say a word, but Lane somehow sensed my presence anyway. He pulled his torch away from the metal and peered at me through the helmet’s rectangular glass, his eyes smiling. He extinguished the torch’s blue flame and lifted up his mask to rest it on his head. He smiled again, his eyes tired and puffy under the mask’s gray rubber strap wrapped around his forehead.
I never knew my father, and Lane was only an occasional presence in our house, so having grown men around was strange and vaguely frightening, but Lane’s smile was friendly, so I walked inside. The shop was dark and reeked of grease and gasoline, which smelled sweet and appealing compared to the corral’s manure-and-cow stench. “What are you making?”
“I’m building a funnel for our grinder motor,” Lane said gently, describing the shape in the air with his hands. “Your mom needs this so she can grind corn and wheat. That’s how she makes our bread. I’ll bet she’ll show you how to use it when I’m finished, and you can learn how to make bread too.” He picked up a hammer and pounded a few times on the cooling metal. “Everybody needs to learn how to help out with the family. Ya know what I mean?” Lane took off his mask and set it on the dusty cement floor.
“Can I milk a cow like Matt does?” I blurted out.
Lane raised his eyebrows in surprise as he peeled off his gloves. “So, you want to help with the cows, do ya?” He sighed. “Well, milkin’ cows is hard work. Maybe you can have your own cow to milk when you’re about ten. By then, your hands will be big and strong enough to squeeze all the milk out of a cow. You know, Ruthie, if you don’t get all the milk out, it’ll dry up inside the cow and it won’t be able to give milk anymore.” He threw his gloves on the ground. “But your mom might need help with other things.”
I nodded.
Lane smiled again and patted his faded jeans. “Come sit on my lap.” The words were tinged with a definite sweetness, but also something else, and whatever that something was, it kept me frozen in place from fear or unfamiliarity, my hands clasped behind my back.
A fly buzzed on my ear in a spot where milk had dried. I shooed it away. “But maybe I can just try it, practice to see if I can do it,” I said shyly. “I’m pretty sure I can milk a cow
and
help my Mom too.”
Lane laughed heartily and jumped up, as if the joke had given him energy. In one motion he reached over and picked me up by the belly. My shirt rode up and his calloused hands felt rough against my skin. Then, he sat back down on the bucket and cradled me—one arm around my back and the other under the back of my knees. I felt my bare lower back against the denim of his pants as he bounced his legs up and down as if I were a baby. A nervous knot grew in my stomach, but I wasn’t quite sure why.
“Well, now. Let’s see.” The bouncing had stopped and he turned his head to look at me. “Maybe you and Luke can come outside in the mornings and afternoons to feed the chickens and pick up the eggs in the chicken coop till you’re both old enough to milk cows.” He put his arm around my neck and brought my face closer to his. His whiskers dotted his jaw, chin, and upper lip. His nose looked bigger and wider up close, shiny, and covered in little white dots.
“What are we s’posed to do with the eggs?” The words nearly got trapped in my throat, blocked by the knot that had formed when Lane put me on his lap.
“Take ’em to your mom. She can separate them so that you guys can have some, and Alejandra and her family can have some too.” He broke into a hollow chuckle. “You have to be careful not to break them, though, because we’ve got lots of mouths to feed around here.” He gave that chuckle again. I felt his arm lift my neck and my face rose even closer. His whiskers grazed my cheek, and I smelled cheese curds on his breath. He looked straight in my eyes, and his voice was barely audible.
“Can I have a kiss before you go back inside?”
I jerked my head back and tried to wriggle out of his lap, only he held me tighter, so tight I almost couldn’t breathe. I suddenly felt sick too, sort of like I’d felt when I’d gotten the flu. But this was a different kind of sick, a kind that I had never before felt, and I didn’t understand where it came from.
“Just one little kiss before you go inside. Come on now, it’s no big deal.”
I stopped wiggling. It wasn’t doing any good. Instead, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and kissed Lane on his rough, unshaved cheek.
I felt his grip loosen, and this time when I pushed, he let me go. I jumped off his lap and scampered away. From behind, I heard that chuckle yet again. “Ya see now, that wasn’t so bad.” Then the chuckle turned into a full-blown laugh. “See ya later, alligator.”
Fearful that he might ask me to sit on his lap again, I put my hands in my pockets and walked quickly out of the garage. The night air made my skin feel cool, and I realized I was dripping with sweat. I made a silent vow to stick closer to my brothers and Mom over the rest of the summer.
Mom smiled from ear to ear as she made the announcement: she was pregnant again and the baby would be born in December. Her belly and bosom began to grow even though her hips and legs remained slender, an incongruity I first noticed on a hot midmorning in August. The two of us were walking together hand in hand out to Lane’s shop, her fingers warm and swollen in mine. We weren’t even halfway there when I noticed sweat running down Mom’s forehead and the front of her neck. She carried a stainless-steel bucket in her free hand, and I carried one in mine.
As Lane had predicted, the baby’s impending arrival meant that I would indeed need to take on more responsibilities around the house. In a few months I learned how to make cheese and butter from the milk Matt lugged back to the house each day. I learned how to whisk eggs, oil, and lime together in precise ratios to make mayonnaise. And most important—now that Lane had finished building our electric grinder—I learned how to make bread.
The shop door was locked when we arrived, but Mom had a key to the padlock, and soon we entered Lane’s world of heat and grease. The stink reminded me of my stepfather and made me queasy. A string hung lazily from a ceramic light socket screwed to the wooden ceiling; Mom yanked it, instantly flooding the room with a harsh, naked light. We made our way through a maze of toolboxes and buckets of bolts and an old, rusted washing machine lying on its side, its guts spilling out onto a grease-stained white towel. At last, in the shop’s back corner, we found them: several black barrels lined up against the wall. Each was twice my size and looked just like the heater in our living room. I asked Mom why we kept beans and wheat in the shop.
“So we’ll have food to last us when hard times come,” she said, “after the United States is destroyed.” Lane regularly rotated the barrels, she told me, so that the oldest grains were the most accessible; the newest were always stored here, in the shop’s far corner.
A cloud of tiny particles rose up like smoke from the barrel when Mom pried off its lid and dipped a pale plastic pitcher into the pile of wheat berries. Then, pounding the lid back onto the barrel with the meaty part of her hand, she told me to follow her out of the shop, where she locked the door before leading me over to the grinder. The contraption was bolted to a small, white table. On the ground below, at the base of the shop’s gray cement wall, a hard, black plastic tube stuck out of the dry dirt—the end point of an electrical wire that Lane had attached to a line on a neighboring farmer’s property, with whom we shared the costs of electricity.
The tube sat open to the air, as did a bare wire bent into a fishhook shape that stuck out of its tip. Mom held the tube-and-hook in one hand, and the loose wires of the grinder in the other, motioning for me to watch closely. I crouched down, my hand on her back.
“Ruthie, always make sure that when you hook these wires together, you don’t touch any of the bare ones,” she said gravely. “You have to be very, very careful. The pieces that aren’t covered with plastic will shock you, and they could hurt you real bad.” She paused for effect. “Do you understand me?”
I nodded slowly and seriously before Mom broke into a gentle smile, her face bright red and dripping wet as she wiped it with a towel. “The black tube has electricity coming through it, but it won’t hurt you if you only touch the hard plastic part. But promise me you’ll never touch the metal bits.”
“I promise,” I vowed.
Satisfied that I understood, Mom stood up and flipped the brown switch Lane had welded to the grinder, which emitted a gentle squeaking noise that made the thin metal table vibrate. I placed my bucket under the grinder’s nozzle while Mom poured the whole grains into the funnel. The grinding began, and a tan-colored dust soon spilled into my bucket, creating clouds that made me sneeze right into the flour. Mom giggled as she reminded me to cover my mouth, then shook the flour from her polyester pants, turned off the grinder, and wiped my face clean with her towel, now soaked through with sweat. She disconnected the grinder, set the black tube with its bare wire on the ground, wiped the grinder clean, and headed back to the cool safety of the house.