Читать книгу Pale Harvest - Braden Hepner - Страница 8

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IN THE EXODUS WEST SOME CAME IN BORROWED WAGONS and some pulled handcarts. Abandoned by their government, exiled and driven by their countrymen, these pilgrims trod a harried trail across the Midwest, seeking asylum and isolation enough to build the kingdom of God. A people proud without reason, tormented by God, and self-chosen. In winter, mothers lay infants without names in the frozen soil along the way and these graves were not marked but for piles of stones placed on the mounds to deter carrion feeders. They crossed a wild land in search of one wilder, carrying their peculiar ways, strange doctrines, their faith, sorrow, and hope. They crossed the mountains and arrived gaunt and clothed in rags like a sect of vagrant scarecrows wandered from the fields of the civilized world and come to behold a land of desert grass and salt, their new promised land. They carried what civilization they knew, and the land, unclaimed by methods of the world they’d fled from, was deeded according to infant law, and they tilled the earth and planted seed and claimed it for their own. They dug ditches and channeled water that flowed from snowbound peaks. Their prophet foretold glory as Bridger did doom. They multiplied, and the children of the first generation expanded their holdings. They moved about between the mountains, uprooting sage and planting grain, replacing desert grass with crop. They raised industry. They enlarged their borders until all land was accounted for in records they had fashioned. They built kingdom and commerce. They increased faith and wealth. Later generations lost the land, it was deeded again, lost again, most not a hundred years from the time the progenitors broke the first furrow, and it was a portion of this land that John Blair Selvedge worked now, twenty years old, without parents, unknowingly come back to the land of his forbears in the sixth generation, a diesel tractor and a shaftdriven implement with which to work, not an owner of the land, but a daily toiler of it.

The summer solstice had passed and these bright days led him toward the darkness of December. He rarely failed to notice the solstices. When he came into his adolescence and first felt the foreboding the summer solstice brought on, the subtle realization that although the days were as bright and long as they had ever been they would now begin to grow shorter and the dark would come earlier and stay longer, he did not want to go into the darkness alone without the warmth of another beside him, someone with whom to spend the crepuscule of the long evenings and the dark cold nights that would follow. This feeling of apprehension and loneliness recurred each year but had lessened as he fell farther into his solitude and his drawn out days on the farm.

On a summer night when the temperature dropped and the last light drained from the sky, this tractor work was therapeutic, meditative. The field he cut lay between the railroad tracks and the road. He was alone with the beat and hum of the swather and with the dog that followed behind, gulping down freshly killed gophers and mice spewed through the back of the machine until she puked. The machine sang a song that evoked his deeper thoughts and the vibrations beneath him shook some themes loose from others, settling them among their kind. A freight train appeared in the distance, its headlight like a slow comet. It shook by with no whistle, for there were no crossings near, and from his seat he watched the cars glide through the darkness and disappear. In the open field he felt a pull. His lights caught the reflections of feral eyes, carnal creatures slinking under the blanket of night to appease basic appetites. Were it not for the low thrum of the swather he might have held a hand out flat and watched it shake at what chaos could roil inside him, a young man, tried and found wanting, alone in this field under the black sky.

When he had done enough he left the tractor and drove the mile into town. He drove past the small park, through the town square, over the railroad tracks and to the co-op, where he took a Pepsi from the machine. From the town square a man could walk in any direction and be in the open in minutes, the open that surrounded the town and pressed it together into a bleak huddle, that reached in like tongues to the center. There was the concentration of houses on a few fragmented grids set up around the square, but the puny town proper had never warded off the tremendous open, never established itself with any conviction on the landscape, and the open threatened now to overturn what had been done, to restore what had been altered. The town had begun its demise as soon as it was called a town, and sat in its demise now, no running businesses, no fresh paint. No upkeep but the old brick church. Beyond this, fields stretched into the black open of night.

Within sight stood the house he had grown up in before his parents were killed coming back from a temple service in Willow Valley, before his move to his grandparents’. His father was thirty-eight, his mother thirty-seven, and they had left this world together. A run of premature death narrowed his father’s line, his father’s grandfather dead at thirty-two, his father’s uncle at thirty-nine. He’d heard of others up the tree when he’d cared to listen to the old woman tell it. She told it no longer.

At four in the morning he drove his grandfather to the barn and listened to the sloppy sounds of peanut butter smacked around in a soft maw as the old man tongued it off his palate and dug it out from the recesses of his mouth. The smell of it filling the cab of the truck was a thing to hate each morning. The dog met them as they parked, wagging her tail in the darkness. Clotted blood stained her white ear and as Jack bent down and fingered the fresh tears she whined and nipped at him. The two men did their work without enthusiasm. They worked in an open-ended concrete pit with six cows above them on both sides. Stairs at the rear led to the holding pen, and the open end diverted to the tank room and front entrance, the office, and the side entrance. The milking barn was a plain cinderblock structure built into an incline of earth, painted white with red trim, a fading wooden sign announcing Blair Selvedge and Son on the front above the landing. Raccoons lived in its roof. With milking at four in the morning and again at four in the evening Blair had been married to his farm for fifty years, and there was no vow stronger than his devotion to his cows. Five hours a day these animals required, coaxing from them a spare living, and only gathering their milk at that. Everything they did on the farm led to this task, which was as much a part of their lives as eating. Before the milking was through, the faulty front gate on the east side broke open while the last of the cows still had their milkers on and the trundling fools surged forward and around the corner and, goaded on by Blair’s angry yells, ran like heathens down the exit alley where they mixed with the others in the corral.

Back at the farmhouse Jack fed the heifers and when he came in Blair told him to say hello to his grandmother. The old woman had long haunted him with her stubborn presence, her waning refusal to submit to the grave. Her dim room near the staircase smelled of death’s encroachment. He moved slowly, his left hand outstretched, feeling for the footpost as he sought her shape. He made out the white slits of her eyes, her hair, thin and matted like an ancient pelt, her pale face. He said hello, and when her wrinkled mouth cracked open and issued a cloud of foul breath he said it again. She murmured something. The haze of her breath and the smell of bitter beads of sweat along her hairline caused his mouth to tighten. He took a step back and watched her. Her mouth opened farther, then closed, then opened, as if he had roused some cave creature in its death throes. He left her there gaping.

In the kitchen Blair stood over the stove, a tall man, taller than Jack’s six feet by a few inches and thickening from the toes up, his body building to a neck that rose in a straight line up the back of his head, and that line rising farther through the rooster tail that ever shot up from his stiff white hair. His face was gritworn from wind-driven dirt, everlastingly tanned and deeply lined like the palms of his cowhide gloves. That was a face well worn, or badly worn, those great wrinkles. There were men in town who had their occupations in Willow Valley thirty miles away whose hands didn’t know callus, whose faces were soft and kindly worn with wrinkles like those found behind a child’s knee. Blair’s face looked like a gnarled tree at timberline and he seemed one of the last in a long line of something. It had spent the majority of its existence exposed to the elements. Bristly hair crept from his nostrils and spiraled from his ears like coughs of frost.

In the mornings they took bricks of sausage or bacon from the freezer and sawed off thick slices and laid them on the hot skillet where they spat and sizzled, a pig they had raised in the shed behind the house. Jack worked bread in and out of the toaster. He placed a large tub of butter on the table and peeled the lid off to reveal a scarred mess sprinkled with toast crumbs, smears of jam and peanut butter. They settled into their chairs and Blair dished a bit of scrambled egg and sausage onto a plate for the old woman. He took it to her and returned and the two ate slowly and enjoyed it.

Around them hung off-kilter and dusty photos of family, one of father wife and son, Elmer not twenty years old, grinning like a dimwit in a baby blue suit, and one of Jack and his parents when Jack was twelve. There were clothworks stitched by the old woman when she was well that declared maxims too simple for thought. The carpet was littered with food refuse and crumbs, bits of straw and hay from their socks, and was worn bare in the doorways and thinned in their main pathways of travel, thinnest into the living room where sat a broken couch and each man’s own chair which would never be used by the other anymore than would the other’s soiled underwear. Into these chairs at night they would sink like stones in a bog, hardly moving, dozing, Jack often falling into a hard sleep and waking alone in some odd hour of the night. Horrid smells came from the kitchen sink and lingered even after a thorough dish-doing at Jack’s hands. In the small bathroom the toilet sat seat-up, its rim stained with dried urine, long twisted hairs trapped in dark yellow cakings. The tub held a black halo of filth and a gutter of dregs like the tail of something unsightly gone down the drain. The sink and counter were discolored with general use and peppered with whiskers caught in evaporated puddles of anonymous remains, the Lava soap they used to clean their hands lying cracked on the sill. The soap itself was dirty. When women from the church came to clean and saw this primitive hovel in a state of squalor and semi-ruin they wore masks and elbow-length gloves and remarked afterward how all their effort seemed to come to nothing. It had been this way since the old woman became sick, bedridden and blind, some four years before.

The sun already hot on the back of his neck, the muscles in his shoulders and back sore. Jack’s damp skin bloomed goose bumps as he pulled his shirt off and shook it out, ridding it of fine hay leaves. The dog got up from where she’d been drowsing near the haystack and trotted after him and he walked the corridor between the west manger and the hayshed and listened to the chewing of the animals as their rough tongues pulled at the hay and gathered it in to be mashed, later to be brought up and chewed on again as cud. So much these cows ate and so much they shit, massive solid animals, nimble as planets, passive as stones.

He stopped at the corner of the hayshed when he saw Elmer come out of his house and sit on the back steps to put his boots on. Elmer made it twenty feet before his sprig-eared boy slipped out the door behind him and trailed him furtively like one of the wild cats of the barnyard. Elmer turned and walked him back to the house and shut him inside. The boy’s name was Edward Elmer, named after Blair’s father and his own father respectively. Elmer the elder’s underslung chin sloped down to his neck in a long curve of soft flesh, giving him that single resemblance to a pigeon, and his stride was uneven across the barnyard as he walked toward Jack, a disarming lope, not carefree, for in forty-one years he had not known a full week of wellness. It was said he suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, among other things. It was said he also had irritable bowel syndrome. Jack walked across the straw-littered gravel and squatted on his heels.

—What do you got going today? said Elmer.

Jack squinted up at him.

—Scrape the corral, straw the stalls, he said. Then I was going to start on that thirty-acre piece.

—Well, you mind taking them weaned calves up the house and give um their shots fore you swath?

—I won’t have time for swathing if I do that. You don’t want that field to blossom.

—No, I don’t think it will. Them calves need to be taken up the house though. I guess you could do that.

—I guess I could. But that field needs to be cut.

Elmer stared at the ground with a half-smile. Jack picked at the torn sole of his boot.

—Take them calves up and you can start on that field tonight or tomorrow, said Elmer. Thank yuh kindly.

Jack grunted and walked to the tractor. He remembered once when he was a little boy and his mother had taken him out to the fields to find his uncle. Jack had spotted him far off in the field discing the soil and his mother had driven him over the field and Elmer had stopped and lifted him up onto the tractor to ride on the wheel well. This had happened dozens of times, but he remembered this one time, the sight of the tractor pulling the discs slowly in what seemed then to be a large field but what he knew now was not so big.

The work in the corrals took him into the afternoon and not another word nor sign from anyone. When he was done he backed the truck up to the calf pen and threw three calves in the bed and hogtied them and drove to the farmhouse where weaned calves grew until pregnant. The house was a hundred years old and had stood once at the edge of the barnyard. Near the top of the south gable was his bedroom window and above that a small hole into the attic, broken open from the years. The house sagged like an aged face and had bald patches of veneer and leprous paint that bulged, cracked, and fell. Sunburnt aluminum shutters hung beside the windows, one tilting, one gone. Low juniper shrubs claimed ground from the ragged lawn in a low and steady surge from the front and back sides of the house. The whole structure looked blown out at its bottom, as if a jack had given way at the lowering onto this, its second foundation, and the house had fallen.

He was surprised to see the old woman sitting outside in a lawn chair as he rolled by the house and toward the pens out back. When he was finished with the calves he walked up. It was easier to approach her in the out of doors in true light than in her room or as she wandered the house like she haunted it, spectral in her nightgown, feeling her way through familiar doorways and touching walls with outstretched arms that hung and swayed with loose flesh. She turned her wrinkled face toward him and he squatted next to her chair. She asked if it were him and he said it was. Her voice was slow and measured, witnessing her years.

—How do you like being home? he said.

—It’s good to be back, she said. Have you been taking your grandfather to church?

—We go to church.

—The church is true, she said solemnly.

He took in her creased hands, splotched and purple-veined, where they lay in her lap. He let his eyes move slowly over her as he would spotting deer on a hillside. Blair had dressed her in a shirt of red gingham and maroon pants. Done up in fresh clothes she nearly looked as she had years ago in his boyhood when she sat at the kitchen table with him and they played Go Fish.

—I been meaning to talk to you about my wages, he said. I wanted to wait till you felt better. Grandpa won’t give me a straight answer. Keeps saying he needs to talk to you when you get feeling better.

—These rare days are a blessing, she said. They nearly give me hope.

—Are you afraid of what’s coming?

—Not afraid.

A robin chirped in the near tree and she tilted her head toward it. Her suffering seemed to have brought her wisdom, perspective. She suddenly seemed regal to him.

—So what do you think about the wages? he said.

—Since your parents passed on, we’ve taken care of you, and we always will, she said.

—I don’t know what that means.

—I was there the day you were born. Seven pounds, nine ounces. A full head of dark hair. You were a beautiful baby.

—What can you tell me about my wages? he said.

—Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, where thieves break through and steal, she said.

He thought a moment and said, An idle soul shall suffer hunger.

She said, Before ye seek riches, seek ye the kingdom of God.

—I’ve sought the one already, now I’m seeking the other, he said. And I will come near to you with judgment, and I will be a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages.

—That’s enough, she said mildly. The farm is a fickle thing. It doesn’t make much money. Riches is the last word to describe it. I would think that by now you’d have learned that this is no way to make a living. Haven’t you learned that?

—It’s all I know.

—Go to town. Get an education.

—Town and college ain’t for everybody.

—Aren’t.

Her breath had grown heavy.

—This is no way to make a living, she said.

He picked up an old leaf from the grass, curiously intact from the ravages of seasons past. It was worn thin, threadbare, the veins brittle and the skin transparent. He held it up to the lowering sun and squinted.

—What does the sky look like right now? she said.

He looked around. The land spread out in all directions except farther behind the house where the river took it down into itself, and beyond that the Sisters range built upward like a mammoth fortress of stone and dirt, the massive cliff bands no longer than a little finger from where he viewed them. Crown-lifted cottonwoods grew in stands on the landscape farther down, along small creeks, some of them already dry, and big pines stood as windbreaks around homesteads. From the panorama he tilted his head skyward and looked into its depths. Dusk was still an hour away, that time when the scratching in the south gable would begin and the nimble bats that caved there would drop one by one into the night. The house had been placed on the edge of the hillside above the river but had no view of the river because of the pens and sheds behind it. The old woman, young then, had requested only a clear view to the east and west when fifty years before they dragged the house there from the barnyard. She believed the Savior would appear in the east when he came, and she loved the smoldering sunsets over the sage plain to the west. A farmer’s wife, she’d had an obsessive habit of watching the sky before she lost her sight, anticipating weather patterns sometimes better than the Doppler radar, and like everyone in that dry region she welcomed rain when she could get it. She forecast now by her bones, her eyes like boiled eggs turned to the wind.

—It’s blue, he said. It’s the deep blue that comes after the solstice. There’s jet trails crossing the sky. One’s being made, and the others are fading. All of um’ve caught the sun.

—A jet plane?

—That’s it.

—Where is it going?

—Too high for Salt Lake. Looks like it’s going straight up, say to the moon.

—My what man has done.

Her voice trembled with age. Gravity had pulled her head low and she spoke these last words into her lap. Her shoulders strained at the weight. She was born before the Great Depression and he guessed she’d seen some things since then, had marked both progress and regression. She was dwindling, but not in unbelief. He remembered her steel will well enough, this righteous fearless matriarch, heard without clamor and powerful without menace, upright before her god but wavering now in the flesh, and this weakness made him ambivalent toward her, a mixture of embarrassment and pity, as if such degeneracy should be hidden away rather than seen, displayed even as she was in her own back yard. What loathing did he possess toward the weak and dying. What latent dread. Yet this woman, even now on her deathbed, old and venerable and immovable, wielded a power that was hard to understand. She was an oracle, a quiet might to be reckoned with, and he was unsure how to approach the battle. She was as good as slain by the diseases that troubled her, yet her control was in place and would outlast her.

He looked back up at the sky, finding the jet again and watching it bloom a dual contrail behind it, watching closer as the vapor shot out the back of the engines, slowed, held, and expanded. Some of the contrails that crossed overhead were sheer wisps like fragmented cirrus clouds. He imagined the tall cities like clustered stands of trees around the curve of the earth in all directions, the places he had never been and would perhaps never see, the places these jets were going. Blair came out of the house and approached them.

—Come on dear, he said. Let’s get you back inside.

Adelaide, her head bowed lower now and shaking with bared nerves, the fixed smile of the aged on her lips, tried feebly to raise her arms like a child would as her husband of fifty-two years approached.

He spent the morning of the next day and part of the afternoon with the dog, shirtless, sweating in the sun and repairing the long fence line that edged the hillside above the river bottoms. It was their largest field, sprawled out like a lake, lapping up to the barnyard on one end and the farmhouse on the other. It was from this field that they harvested the bulk of their alfalfa crop each year. He rolled alongside two miles of serpentine fence in his truck. In the back lay a spool of barbwire and what Elmer called the neck stretcher, a pile of steel fence posts and a post driver, tie wire, a sack of fence staples, a hammer, and a shovel. He took a pair of fence pliers from the glovebox and stuck them in his back pocket and worked at tightening and splicing loose or broken sections of wire. It was quiet, careful work, the only sounds his breath around soft execrations and the clatter and tweak of his tools. He mended the fence and enjoyed the solitude of it, the time to work slowly and do something well and completely. There were still many wooden posts on this line. The fence had been built with wooden posts entirely, denuded crowns of trees, as big in girth as a man’s shoulder and tapering off toward the top with the nubs of cut branches natural supports for the wire, but each year before sorting the heifers he ran this line and when he found a post rotten or leaning or suspended in the air he dug it up and replaced it with a steel post. He stretched the hours also and finally at the far end climbed through the fence and sat a few minutes with the dog at the edge of the hillside overlooking the slow river. He lifted her ear and looked at the healing tears. She was just past a pup, a Brittany mix, her ears already tattered like the edge of old newspaper, faint lines of gathered scars across her nose. He ran his hand over her soft fur, feeling with his fingertips where bone gave way to muscle, gently kneading while she dozed with her head on her paws.

On the other side of the river and up the hill a vacant dairy operation stood like an emblem of a former time. It had gone under three years before, the cows sold, the barn stripped, the corrals left empty and the manure turned to dust. The place looked sunbleached as cattle bones. It seemed that most dairy barns in the area held corrals of weeds instead of cows anymore. Milk prices had been low that year. Another outfit across town sold its equipment and livestock the year after but was sitting on the land, waiting for the rumored money to show up. Something about that abandoned place across the river made him want to go there, because it would be strange and secret to walk around it, nothing but birds for company, and maybe not even them, since there was no spilled feed for them anymore. His father had foreseen this. He had broken with the farm at eighteen for a college degree, leaving Elmer to sit at their father’s feet a lone disciple. Jack’s father had not worked another day on that ground because Blair forbade it. When the old man saw his eldest son forsake his birthright he hefted a chip to his shoulder that he’d not shrugged to this day. Jack’s view of this schism was more seasoned now, and he suspected that his father’s unorthodox views of the church had something to do with Blair’s paternal hostility. Jack’s father taught him to respect physical labor, to love it even, but not to rely on it, and had disapproved of his slow gravitation toward that lifestyle. His father said that if a man had the option, physical labor was to be more of a balance and a release than a livelihood depended on for basic sustenance. A man should have two sets of practical skills, that which he did with his hands and that which he did with his mind, and Jack felt what would have been his father’s disappointment that his only child had never acquired an obvious skill of the mind. Never mind that he knew each cow by her udder, knew her number and the number of her mother, could quote milk records and birth lines. Never mind that he knew how to harvest hay and corn at its highest yield, that at age twenty he was confident he could run this entire farm by himself if he had to. He could hear his father saying that some were meant to be simple men but some chose to be fools, and some were meant to do greater things than pull the teats of another man’s cows and wait for an uncertain inheritance whose tacit promise brought ambivalence at best.

In some dead hour of the afternoon he walked through the oppressive sunshine and dragged his feet in the gravel of the barnyard. Elmer called to him from where he rested, post-lunch, in the shade of his trees and told him all four tractors needed greasing. Jack walked on like he hadn’t heard. He worked on his back beneath the tractors and by the time he ran out of grease and made a run to the co-op for another box it was nearly time for milking. Looking out from under the biggest tractor he saw dust, and when it settled, an old blue Cutlass Supreme parked alongside the diesel tank, and when its door opened, Roydn Woolums. The farmhand stepped out and walked up the incline on his way to gather the cows. He stopped at the tractor and Jack looked out at his manure-caked boots and kept working. Roydn never washed his boots. He either lacked the perception that this small crumb of dignity might be had in this profession or he didn’t care. He stood there for a full minute before he spoke, spitting once in a while on the gravel.

—Hello Selvedge, he said finally. Hot bitch, ain’t it?

—Didn’t Blair tell you? said Jack. You’ve been fired.

—What’d you do today, said Roydn. Beat off and sweat over it?

Jack scooted over and saw the kid swiveling his bean-shaped noggin around in the afternoon sun. A large round chin and bulbous forehead made up the balance of weight above bony shoulders and a sunken chest, and they bent toward each other as if they hoped to touch someday. There was a lump in his throat like he’d swallowed a knotted tree branch, a knuckled growth that moved up and down when he spoke or swallowed. He held in his hand a bottle of Pepsi and pulled out a wrinkled package of corn nuts and threw some in his mouth.

—Give me a few of them corn nuts, said Jack. I ain’t ate yet.

Roydn handed over the bag and Jack shook some into his mouth and immediately regretted it. He slid beneath the tractor and found another grease zerk.

—So what’d you do today? said Roydn.

—Fixed fence.

—Where abouts?

—This one here that runs to the house.

—That’s a long one. Say, is Blair ever going to sell any of that piece? I been looking to buy a little land to start my operation.

—Why don’t you talk to him.

—Well ain’t you going to get half?

Jack grunted. He was sweating freely and smears of black grease covered his arms and old grease was packed under his fingernails, so he couldn’t wipe the sweat from his face nor away from his eyes where it ran in and stung them.

—What’s that supposed to mean? said Roydn. I bet you get half. This place is as good as yours. You was born into it. When you share the place with Elmer you let me buy some of that piece for my operation.

—What operation is this now, Woolums?

Roydn came down on his hands and knees close to Jack, trying to look him in the face, but Jack wouldn’t allow it.

—Well you know, he said, when I was in Nebraska I seen hog farms all over. I knew some real well-off hog farmers. So it’s a hog farm I got in mind.

—What happened to the turkey farm?

—The turkey farm? He sat back on his haunches and let his head drop and stared at the ground. He rubbed his whelked chin as he considered. Well, that failed about a year ago it must of been. Bout the time I got back. Pa wanted to make um free range, but we lost money that way somehow. We’re tending compost piles now, and that ain’t going nowhere. And by the way, Pa wants to know if he can come get some manure with his pickup. Wants to know if you got any drier stuff available.

—What’d you do with the bull calves you bought?

—One died, and the other I sold to that halfwit Wrink Poulsen.

—Make any money?

—I made a little.

—How much?

—Enough.

—How much?

—Seventy bucks.

—That after feed?

—Nah.

—So you lost money.

—I don’t member how it went.

—That ain’t worth the effort, said Jack.

—Would be though, if I was to run a feed lot and made a small profit on every bull.

—That’s a better idea than the pig farm. The town should have a problem with a pig farm.

—I’ll get um to change their minds on it then, said Roydn. His eyes squeezed up in hurt and frustration. Guy’s got to make a living. I’m a grown-ass man, and what am I going to do with myself, work for Blair the rest of my life? You know that ground behind my house is worthless. It’s full of clay. Can’t get nothing but a few rows of half-assed raspberries to grow on it.

—There’ll be community opposition too, said Jack. That stink carries for miles. It’ll become the town’s new identity. And you sure as hell can’t put it in the field out there.

—Ain’t nobody’ll give me a good price. And my pa ain’t got the money to lend me. He’s trying to save for me to go to college. I’ll just wait it out for you to get some land and sell it to me. I know you’re good for it.

—You better go get the cows, said Jack.

—Hold up. I tell you I’m going to college?

—Somebody let you in?

—I ain’t in yet. But my pa thinks I oughta go. He never got the chance to go, and he wants his sons to have the chance. Thinks they got something to teach me, but I ain’t so sure. Probly be the other way around.

—No doubt.

—When he gets the money saved up I’ll go. Plenty of girls at them colleges, you know.

—So I’ve heard. But not a one of um’ll be interested in an ugly bastard like you.

—Plenty of girls. One for everybody. Sometimes two. He looked up at the tractor. You just greasing or you repairing something?

—Do you see any tools around?

—No.

—There’s your answer.

—Two of these tractors are pieces of shit. I ain’t got to tell you which ones. They need to get rid of that Thirty-Twenty at least. Jumps like a mule and the smoke pipe’s busted.

—They’ll drive it into the dirt, said Jack. The Selvedge way.

—My pa told me they about got this place paid off. That true?

—If you heard it, it must be true.

—That’s an accomplishment. Takes most guys two generations to start a dairy farm from scratch and pay it off, and Blair’ll do it in one.

—That’s what shafting your hired help will do.

—Aw, you’ll get what’s coming to you. And you don’t see no brand new toys around neither. All old worn out stuff here. Frugal outfit. Pennywise and niggardly, my pa says. You agree?

—That’s one way to put it.

—Hm. This is one big-ass tractor. Wonder will Blair or Elmer ever have me drive it. I’m going to ask one of um if I can drive it in the parade tomorrow.

Jack slid himself under another grease zerk and cleaned around it with his fingers.

—You’re going to be in the parade?

—Only if I can get this tractor to drive. I ain’t interested in the usual bullshit my ma puts me up to. Wonder which one I should ask. Which one you think I should ask?

—Either one. They’re both liable to say no.

Jack looked at Roydn and his eyes were unfeasibly large behind his glasses.

—Now why is that, you suppose?

—Cause you could go into a fit any minute and kill somebody.

—That ain’t true. I ain’t got it that bad. I got a damn driver’s license. That oughta count for something.

—You know how they are about their tractors.

—They shouldn’t be. It ain’t like they’re nice or nothing. Just thought I’d ask. Can’t hurt to ask.

—Hand me another tube of grease from that box there, will yuh.

—I think I’d ask Blair. But he’s a hard old sumbitch. I’d ask Elmer, but he says no to everything. Took him two years to upgrade me from the four-wheeler to the danged farm truck.

Jack scooted on his back under a set of zerks near the front wheels.

—Why don’t you go get the cows in the barn, he said. You’re late now. They’re dripping milk into their shit.

—Hold up, said Roydn. I tell you I just saw something nice down the lane here?

—What was it, Woolums, a goat stuck headfirst in the fence?

—A girl. Saw her walking down along the lane. You know who it is?

—I don’t.

—Rebekah Rainsford. Thought maybe she was coming back from here. Did you talk to her or something?

—What?

—Did you talk to her or something?

—Rebekah Rainsford?

—It’s what I said. She’s back in town.

—Since when?

—I don’t know. But she’s back in town with her mother. They’re on the run from their old man, holed up at the McKellar place down there. She was about my age. Still is, I guess.

—She was younger than you. Younger than me even. What the hell do you know about anything?

—You don’t know nothing about it? All right. I suppose I could tell you. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. Look here, I’ll tell you what my pa told me. They’re running from trouble. It’s her and her mother moved here from Salt Lake cause their old man left um in financial frig all. Left um, flat out. He’s gone. And now they’re here.

—How’d he go about it?

—Gambling is what I heard. Probly a little whorin on the side. They usually go together.

—Gambling, huh?

—It is what I heard. Over in Wendover. So what do you think of her?

—I never knew her that good. She was always kind of snobby.

—Well I’d like to know her. Like Isaac knew Rebekah, you read me?

—You irreverent frigger.

—Well let me know what you think of her once you see her. Should be at church I suppose, and there’s a good reason for you to come back. I told you I’d get you back to church someway, and it looks like I got one. Yes sir. She’d make a man a good wife. I’d like her to bear my children and be waiting for me when I got home from milking these whores. That’d make it all worth it. This here’s the summer of opportunity.

Jack pulled himself out from under the tractor and stood up. Roydn didn’t step back and they were face to face with Jack pinned against the engine of the tractor. The lenses of Roydn’s glasses were thick and dense and his black eyes wandered wetly behind them.

—Welp, he said, looking up at the sun again. Guess I’d better go off and gather them cows. They ain’t about to milk themselves. He leered ugly over his shoulder as he walked away. And you know, buttwipe, he said. You might put in a word for me about this tractor, huh? This big one here. I don’t want to drive nothing else. Cause if so, I got to come tonight and warsh it. Tell him I’ll warsh it for him. See what he says.

Roydn tilted his head back to see him rather than push the heavy glasses back up his nose. He grinned and shuffled off through the gravel toward the corral.

—Going to college, he said to nothing in particular, and started to whistle.

When he was gone Jack walked to the far edge of the west haystack where he could get a good look at the lane across the field as it led away from the barnyard. It was empty as far as he could see. After feeding he left the dog on the ground while he climbed up the supports and under the open-sided hayshed. The stack was uneven near the back. They had hand stacked bales in something like a broad staircase on top of what the bale wagon had brought, and the stack was higher there than the bottom of the tin on the sides and dim. It was a good place for respite and hiding. He’d been going up there since he could climb, always careful where to step, because the way the bale wagon stacked several loads side by side in row after row, holes were sometimes created where stacks met that went all the way to the ground. He had taken many naps under the shed, drowsed away afternoon hours, hidden from his grandfather and uncle. He listened to the pigeons cooing their soft dialogue from the rafters. From where he sat in a throne of haybales he could look out over the west field and see the top of the McKellar house where it sat shrouded in a fortress of pines.

That night he took his boots off and trod the footworn path on the carpet into the washroom where he shed his stinking clothes and stepped into the shower stall. The smell from handling cows clung to him like a second skin. Sometimes he bathed twice a day to stave it. Most nights bathing seemed senseless since in a matter of hours he would rise and undo the effort, but he did it daily; it made him feel connected to a greater civilization than what he daily saw. Blair was never without the smell. It lingered on him and moved with him from room to room. It was on him even as he sat in his church pew on those singular occasions of attendance, and if a man couldn’t get clean for church he couldn’t get clean. For them the smell of cows was like the grease in the knuckle lines of a mechanic or the thick arms of a mason. It was a symbol of identity Jack tried each night to shed, because while his blood cried for the field work he did, milking cows held no dignity. Anything but standing beneath the dumb beasts and gathering milk from their pink, thick-veined udders while their golden spray and heavy excrement fell from above like unwanted boons. Blair had picked the worst kind of farming when he bought the first Holsteins. A man could work his whole existence out upon a small dairy farm and provide this obscure service to humankind and be always near sunk. But the smell was an unpleasant thing, possibly the worst thing, surpassing even the endless burden of twice-a-day milkings. If Jack showered hard and vigorously and scoured every inch of his skin and ran a fingertip through the geography of his ears to check for stray manure, dirt, tractor grease, he came away clean, but he was never certain the smell was gone. Smelling it on his grandfather when he should have been clean made him doubt that anything but a permanent departure from the trade could rid him of it. There was the cramped shower off the laundry room or the tiny bathtub, and he took the shower. Blair chose the tub where he sat in a rank stew of his own molting, and in this way they coexisted at nights when both needed to be clean before bed.

Jack walked into the kitchen and found his grandfather sitting alone at the clothless table eating dinner, which was leftover lunch, fried hamburger molded by hand into crude patties, and buttered potato slices, the way the old woman had made it day in and out in her better days. Blair never looked so weary as at nights in the kitchen, shoving food into his mouth under the fluorescent lighting, when it seemed like he could hardly hold his head up and move his jaw. He was lifelong fatigued in his off time. They said nothing as they ate, the elder sitting, the younger standing, both watching an old Eastwood western play out on the television across the room.

When they were done eating Blair said, Go say hi to your grandma.

—Where is she?

—In the other room.

Jack walked in the living room to see her sitting like a stone on the couch, her blank eyes half open and turned toward the television where black and white static hissed on the screen. He asked her if she wanted him to put something on and she didn’t respond. He watched her for a moment, waiting for the rise and fall of her sloped breast, and when he saw movement he turned and left the room. He grabbed a misshapen chunk of hamburger from the plate and walked out the door and jumped in his truck and drove in the long light of the evening to find Heber at the park under the trees. Stars appeared above him like the firmament was being shot at.

He felt the loneliness of being twenty years old on his grandfather’s farm, womanless, with but a couple friends to watch what small events befell their moribund town. His father used to tell him that a man made his destiny with whatever he was given and that he should not depend on luck. He said that men wait their entire lives for luck. He promised that opportunity would pass a man by if he didn’t learn to act. These days Jack wondered when those opportunities had come, for he had never recognized them as such, and such things seemed as vanished now from this town and from his life as his childhood. On this night he felt nostalgia for things that had never happened, pining for things he could not name, and when these anxieties took him he felt in tune with something larger than himself. They were a sober component of his disposition. In these moments, with voices from the dead murmuring a susurrus through his mind, it seemed nothing less than fate speaking to him, some low piercing voice of vague origin, and he could not understand it. And so he only listened to the strange tongue speak in mutters and went on.

He came to the park. In the soft obscurity between dusk and dark a girl was on the swing set. She made the chains of the swing groan and took them nearly to their horizontal limit. She looked to be his age, too old for the swings, but swung upward, her toes pointing to the sky, then tucked them back as she fell, and each time she reached the apex her dark hair lifted and fell. It startled him, and some strange hunger moved inside him. He slowed. His fingers found the knob to turn the radio off. She looked toward his truck through her flying hair. She was alone, and he didn’t dare watch for long, so he drove a little farther and turned into the grass-sprung parking lot and left his truck beneath the denuded basketball rims. The swings were no longer visible because of the pine trees and the pavilion in between.

He found Heber under the trees regarding the evening generously and nursing a bottle of beer. The querulous moaning of the chains floated across the park to them, and when he told Heber what it was Heber rose and they went to find her out, to discover her mystery, to put to rest their slow thudding blood and their mad wonderings. When they rounded the pavilion she was gone. The swing still moved, and as they reached it Jack put a hand out to steady it and felt the seat still warm with the heat of her body. The two of them looked around. Jack gave the seat a push and it swung askew and they turned and walked back to the trees.

Heber rubbed his blond red beard and said, Who was it?

—Might of been Rebekah Rainsford.

—No.

—It’s what Woolums said.

—The hell does he know?

—Who else could it be?

—How beautiful was she?

—Hard to say.

—That girl was always beautiful and would be now. Why’d you come to me first? You need someone to show you the way?

—She’s too young for you. And she’s wholesome. You’d corrupt and defile her. You’d ruin her.

Heber laughed from his belly.

—How do you know she’s wholesome? She’s been gone a long time.

—She always was. She was untouchable.

—This is good for morale, said Heber.

They sat together under the shivering stars, among the rubbing crickets. Heber sat against the tree and picked up the beer he’d left behind. He wore a strange shirt that fit his broad shoulders and soft gut well. It was garish and outrageous, intricate sketches of tiny pale flowers overlaying the white fabric. Down the middle of the front on both sides of the buttons ran vertical lines, some thin and some thick, of red, brown, yellow, and blue. Down either side of this lay heavily embroidered patterns of large blue flowers with small flowers filling in between.

—You ever wear that shirt when you sold real estate? said Jack.

—I bought it for that.

—That’s probly why you never sold anything.

—I wish I could blame it on the shirt. But I’ll redeem that failure and you’ll see a picture of me on my business card wearing this very shirt.

—Get the picture taken from the neck up then.

—Selvedge, if I die before you I promise you can have this shirt.

—I could probly use it to wipe my butt.

Heber drained the last of his beer and reached into the pack for another. He pried the lid off with his pocket knife and said, How’s your grandmother?

—They couldn’t do anything else, said Jack. Said she’d be more comfortable at home.

—You know, there are accounts of Eskimos sending their aged out to sea in a canoe. Shoving them off and that’s that. There comes a time when they’ve served their purpose, things get worn out, and death is the best thing for everyone. They’ve done you wrong to wait this long. What do you think you’ll get?

—No idea.

—They haven’t said anything?

Jack shook his head.

—And you haven’t asked?

—It’s a hard thing to ask about.

—How would you feel about taking a drive to town, refill on drinks? said Heber. I’ll fill up your tank.

—What’ve you got there?

Heber shook the box on the ground and five empty bottles rattled against one another. He stuck out a dry warm hand and Jack got up and pulled him to his feet. He walked tenderly to the truck, leaving the bottles beside the tree as if to save his place.

—Feet hurt, he said. I don’t know how much longer I can lay brick of a day.

The wind came to them across the desert and through the town like a clean hot exhalation and the trees sighed with it. As they got in a sudden gust rocked the truck on its springs.

—Storm coming, said Heber. From the heat. Could be the real thing, bring us some rain.

—Be only wind, said Jack. Heat lightning.

Jack drove them through the derelict town square, the two of them the only life in it. Heber said, What built this place? And why didn’t whatever built it keep it going? My old man was going to set fire to this square. When he found he couldn’t resurrect it a little, revive a business or two, he wanted it all gone. Burned to the ground and leveled. Thought it would never be reborn otherwise. I was poking around in the back of his little vet shop the other day and found forty gallons of gasoline under some canvas tarps. The town knows he was a fine mayor, whatever other problems they had with him, but they would’ve lynched him for that.

—That’s all the character the town has left, said Jack. You might see it come back.

—When things leave here they don’t come back.

—You did.

—Because I was kicked out of college. And out of the world in general.

—To hear you tell it.

—How does it go. Let’s see if I can remember. Had it once… In this town the last house stands as lonely as if it were the last house in the world. The highway, which the tiny town is not able to stop, goes deeper—slowly goes deeper out into the night.

He paused for a moment and thought.

—The tiny town is only a passing-over place, worried and afraid, between two huge spaces—a path running past houses instead of a bridge. And those who leave the town wander a long way off and many perhaps die on the road.

—Have you talked to her lately? said Jack.

—This thing is seven years running, broken and spliced as it is. It’s become tradition. She’ll be back.

—Who was the other one?

—You don’t know her.

—If you’ve lost her… Things ain’t as plentiful as they was once. I don’t know how you end up doing it time after time.

—Same as every man before me has done it and every man after me will do it.

Jack knew what Heber would speak before he spoke it, this holy hymn that fell often from his lips.

—But she was a strange woman at first, he pre-empted. And the one before was the familiar.

—Indeed. Heber nodded. That’s always been the trouble, and it always will be. There will always be other women. What to do about that stark fact is up to you.

He cracked the quarter glass and produced a cigarette and lighted it.

—They ain’t as plentiful as they once were, you say, he said. He squinted through wreaths of smoke and tried to wave them out the window. It is the opposite that’s the trouble. My old man knew it. Most men know it. Sometimes it takes a shift in perspective, but we adjust and see new beauty all around. But I’d be lying if I told you this one didn’t seem to hold more weight. I do indeed regret it. I think I love that girl.

—She was a good girl, said Jack. She probly just finally wised up. Saw what she was dealing with and lit out.

—Maria is back, too, said Heber. It’s just raining girls these days. Our own little Juniper Scrag renaissance. Plenty of things are coming back.

Jack reached forward and turned the large tuning knob and Dwight Yoakam became a murmur in the dashboard. Heber spoke with the energy of alcohol in his blood.

—It’s a revival of sorts. And she’s got the finest ass I believe I’ve ever seen.

They rolled along through the dark sage desert, the radio playing quietly, listening to and feeling the smooth growl of the truck beneath them. Driving in the old pickup at night with its rumbling motion on the road and the spacious cab and the dark all around felt right. The truck was comfortable. Jack slumped forward on the big wheel, his foot steady on the gas, and the whore lights he’d put beneath the dash in high school shone soft blue onto the floor.

—Every time I think I’ve got it, a stranger comes along, said Heber. And lo, there’s a stranger. He rolled his window down and let his arm hang out. There will always be other women, he said. My old man knew it. But he was tied up. So he broke the institution like a stick on his knee and started a flame with it that he couldn’t manage. Couldn’t keep it steady. He suppressed it too long. If you don’t pretend it’s not there, it can’t surprise you.

—I’d like to get tied up with that girl at the park, said Jack.

—Since I was a boy and began to notice the girth and curve of a girl’s thigh, or the perspiration on her chest in the summer, or the taint of spent air once it’s been in her lungs, I’ve studied them and loved what I’ve found. They are marvelous, beautiful creatures. I love them.

—No one questions that.

—I’m weak against beauty, said Heber. And it’s everywhere. But you can’t tell whether a girl is beautiful until you’ve watched her for a while and considered on her flaws. Let her grow on you. One of the most amazing girls I was ever with, a Mexican girl, she was a little plump and she had these stretch marks on her thighs where the skin was a lighter color, like tiger stripes. Couldn’t get enough of that. He shivered deeply. I wonder where she’s at now. When a woman has the native knowledge in her of what she has, that’s the true sublime. It’s her sex that makes the world go round. Not love, not money. The women who know this rule the earth, and the men that pretend to serve them. Everything men do is to get to the women—and it’s what’s between their legs that is the nexus of the universe, whether God likes it or not. Think on it a minute.

They did.

Jack’s eyes were raw and their lids heavy. He found the lighted liquor store on the close edge of Willow Valley and parked. Inside the store Heber looked haggard under the fluorescent lighting, his sharp blue eyes crowded with blood vessels, his hair thin and tousled, his beard scraggly, his clothes badly wrinkled and spotted with crust and stain. His shirt was outrageous.

—You okay? he said. He ran his finger along a shelf of bottles while Jack followed behind.

—Yeah.

—A beautiful store, this, said Heber. You want some?

Heber browsed the hard liquors and made his way to the refrigerators at the wall. He removed a pack of longnecks and carried it toward the front of the store where a tall balding clerk with a curved back stood behind the counter.

—That’s it? said Jack. We came all the way into town for a six pack?

—You’ve got to moderate your acquisition. That’s the difference between me and an alcoholic. An alcoholic takes a bottle to keep in his cupboard. Or his closet. You should know that.

He set the drinks on the counter, leaned back on his heels, and squinted wisely at the man.

—You own this place? he said.

The man shook his head.

Heber nodded.

—I wonder how much money a place like this pulls in of a week. Do you know?

The man shook his head again. Heber chuckled.

—Can you speak?

Heber looked at Jack and flashed his strong teeth. They left the man and walked outside and the hot wind moved around them.

—Summer storms, said Heber. You feel the energy?

—I’m tired. I got to milk in the morning.

—You know how much money I make laying brick?

Jack looked at him.

—Take what you make an hour and times it by four and you’re still not there.

Jack grunted.

—I can get you a job any time. Does Blair know the calendar year? Does he know what minimum wage is? He pays Captain Dipshit over minimum, don’t he?

—Probly.

—What are you doing?

They climbed in the pickup and shut the doors.

—What are you doing? Heber said again.

—I’m working. What do you want me to say?

—I want you to tell me that you believe something’s coming your way, that this is some means to some better end.

—He’s only told me that those things’d be decided once the old lady passed on.

—That’s vague, said Heber. As if it will take care of itself. If you do not want to lay brick with me there are plenty of jobs here in town.

—Farm work is better than desk work, said Jack. He started the truck and backed into the street.

—You know, you’re wasting away the best years of your life.

—No, I don’t know that.

—Best advice I ever got was to spend my youth like I’d die at thirty, said Heber. My best years are behind me, and I can’t believe how fast it went. You live to maximize the moment, you spend more time doing than considering, than balking, and you’ll have fewer regrets. But if you dally, why then you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking of what you could’ve done.

—I haven’t lived a dull life.

—But you’ve become complacent. Stagnant. You’ve stopped living. All you do is work. Where’s the opposition you used to entertain. Where’s the excitement. You brood too much lately. Blair’s a wily old fucker. I’d just have other options if I were you. Let’s do a business together. Once upon a time you wanted to. We could be masons. I can teach you.

Jack grunted.

—I need you, said Heber. I’ve been saving, but it’s taking too long.

—You want to spend a little money to get us something to eat? said Jack.

—Take us there.

They rode in the pickup on clear streets beneath stoplights. On occasion a tumbleweed blew in from the desert and rolled across the road with the wind. They turned in at Beto’s and pulled up to a menu of ill-lighted and drab dishes.

—A good choice, said Heber. A good choice, my friend.

The wind hit the truck like a shoulder and whipped it with a few hard raindrops as they ate their food, but that was all, and in the sudden lightning the rolling clouds above them looked like the serried underbelly of a great beast. There was energy in the storm, but no rain.