Читать книгу Pale Harvest - Braden Hepner - Страница 9

2

THE MILKING WAS DONE EARLY AND IT WAS DONE THE same, those stark hours of darkness just before dawn the barest of all. But they were changed for his thoughts of the girl. When they were finished he drove them past the McKellar house and was struck with a mood as from a dream, a nostalgic emotion from that same nameless range. Blair began to hum some old love song, supplementing it with fragments of half-remembered lyric.

It was the twenty-fourth of July and they were back at the barnyard just past eight o’clock. The thermometer on the barn neared ninety. They walked to Elmer’s lawn where they sat in the shade of the short pine trees and waited for Elmer to come out of his house.

—If you ain’t going to the celebration this morning you ought to gather up the pipe from the lower field, said Blair. Bring some up to this field here where we could run it from both ends. If we don’t get rain it won’t be enough to run water from one end to the other in one line.

—I could. Or I could just take the day off.

—And do what?

—Get the hell out of here.

—You member when I used to clean up a tractor and drive it in the parade, and you’d sit on my lap up there and throw out candy? When’s the last time we did that? Must of been when we bought the Thirty-Twenty, and how long ago was that?

—Long time. Cause I was young enough to let you talk me into sitting up there with you.

—Careful, boy. I could still whip you and put you up there with me. Roll through the square now, the two of us.

Blair spat soundlessly and said, You fix that old John Deere yet?

—They’re all old.

—The Thirty-Twenty.

—The smoke pipe?

—It’s rattling like hell and killing me with diesel fumes.

—Am I supposed to weld it?

—If you can get to it.

—What if I can’t?

—Then get to it anyways.

—I’ll take it to the co-op.

—No you won’t. Milk prices are low. If you can’t get to it with the welder use wire.

—Listen, said Jack. Is the farm paid off?

—No, the farm ain’t paid off. I wished it was.

—The tractors?

—They’re paid off save for the new loader. About time for anothern though, soon as one of these older tractors gives up the ghost. Take your pick from the Thirty-Twenty and the little one there and then we’ll be back in the red. It’s a never ending cycle, I tell yuh.

—Where do you see it in the next year or two?

—Oh hell. It’s hard to make a terrible amount of progress in just a year or two. So much depends on the weather and the crops. We don’t have room for much expansion. Land prices’ve gone up some recently, Lord knows why. And with it, taxes.

Elmer came out and loped toward them with a consternated grin on his face and they watched him approach.

—Hullo Pa, said Elmer when he reached them. He was already sweating. Hullo Jack. Hot enough for yuh?

—Jack’ll take the pipe out of that lower field there and bring some up to this one here, said Blair. Run it from both ends.

—That sounds good. That’s sandy down there anyways. It gets sandier every year, it seems.

—Farming gets harder every year, said Blair.

—I need you to help me move that welder, Jack, said Elmer. Better yet, why don’t you just take it over to that east side where the dry cows are and weld that broken top bar. That way I won’t get all sweaty fore the parade. You know which one I’m talking about?

Jack spat.

—I got to get ready, said Elmer. I’m taking Edward Elmer and Carrie. We’re staying for the lunch and all. Can I bring you back anything?

—Like what? said Jack.

—Oh, I don’t know. A sloppy joe or something. Have Eddie grab some candy for yuh. You want to come with us Pa?

—Maybe I will. It’s already too hot for work.

Two hours later Jack was thirsty. He sweated when he stood still and when he moved it poured out of him. He had welded the bar on the fence, dripping sweat into a puddle at the bottom of the welding mask, and then had gone into the cool dim barn where he drank a cup of thick frothy milk cold from the tank and slowed the push of his sweat until it stopped. He got in the truck and drove toward town, and because the main road was closed took a grassy track that ran behind a string of houses. He went to the co-op and bought a Pepsi from the machine and headed back. He parked in the shadow of the big red barn behind his old house and walked toward the parade that was making its way through the square. He stood back at a distance and watched. It was a pathetic parade, a few utility trailers turned ragged floats, boys on bicycles with cards tapping their spokes and trailing crepe paper streamers, tractors pulling implements, some not washed, people proudly leading farm stock along. He could see a swath of streetside folks, but no girl that looked like the one he had seen the night before, indeed no girl anywhere close to her age. But there was Roydn Woolums coming along on an old lawnmower, a rusting sputtering hulk that lurched forward on four bald tires, its seat covered with a pillow taped to the frame. Colorful streamers hung from its handles and completed the spectacle. He pulled a small wagon and in it sat his youngest brother, the one they called Rapscallion, too old to be in a wagon in a parade but throwing homemade hardtack candy to the crowd with strangled enthusiasm. Roydn had given himself space and drove in figure eights and circles, shoving his glasses up and taking his hat off to wipe his brow with a forearm. Sweat climbed upward and outward from the seam of his hat brim and his shirt stuck to his torso. He ran the throttle up harshly in clouds of popping blue smoke and the mower leapt forward in its transition through the gears. His face was a tortured mixture of public humiliation and some small rustic pride.

Jack spent an hour gathering empty grain sacks and blown garbage along the east fence. The wind had run over the barnyard the night before and the close hayshed looked askew on its poles as if it had been pushed by the wind, leaning eastward. Later he was in the lower fields pulling a pipe trailer with his truck and gathering the sunbaked sprinkler pipe onto it. He had forgotten gloves and found those he kept in the glovebox taken, so he took off his shirt and used it as best he could to guard his hands, but still they were burned. He worked alone and it suited his mood.

In the evening when the work was done he drew milk from the tank into an old tin pail he had cleaned with hot water and soap. He balanced it cold between his legs on the seat of his two-stroke three-wheeler and opened the throttle on the lane and looked through the soft light ahead. He smelled the swamp water as it pumped from the pond below the barn and through the sprinkler lines. The sprinklers, drowned out by the whine of his machine and the gravel beneath its tires, turned in stuttered circles with each beat, pounding crops and soil with water. His stomach lightened and his blood surged and not from his speed. If no one answered he didn’t know if he would leave the milk on the doorstep or if he would pour it into the wild barley at the side of the lane. But as he rose over the last crest and came down he locked up both brakes and slid out of control toward a heifer standing dumbly in the middle of the lane. The rear end of the three-wheeler swung around and ran parallel with the front wheel, and he slid toward the animal sideways, pushing a spray of gravel ahead of him and bringing with him the roar of dragged stones. The machine grabbed and flipped and in a splash of hurled milk he catapulted onto the road where he slid to a stop and curled into a ball to wait for the pain, his flesh torn and dusty, his breath knocked out somewhere on the road. When the pain came it rolled up and down his body and he could get no air. He tried to swear but sounded like a deaf man croaking out a guttural demand. His three-wheeler was on its top behind him, its wheels standing in the sky like an abstract sculpture. He smelled gasoline in the dust.

When he could get up he rose and limped over to the machine, muscled it onto its side, and flipped it back over. He climbed aboard and kicked the starter. He kicked it again and again and got nothing, and when he was sure it was flooded he pushed it off the road and looked out across the hay field toward the riverbottom fence and saw three more heifers wandering around in the green hay. He looked at his arms and hands, the skin gray and dirty, the blood holding sheens of dust and patches of tiny rocks. He picked at his torn shirt and pants. Blood ran down his left arm, down his fingers, and dripped into milk still puddled in the dust in globular patterns, the blood breaking apart first in smaller spherules and then spreading in trails as it dissolved into pinkness. That image stayed with him. He looked for the pail and found it dented in the late sun near the fence and found its cap upturned on the road behind the wreck with beads of milk still holding to it. He capped the pail and hung it on the handle of the three-wheeler and cursed the animal as he walked toward her. She’d been tame this way since she was a calf. She followed him with her head until he slapped her rump with his good arm, and then she moved to the side of the road and grazed in the grass there. He walked toward the McKellar house.

There was no answer at the front door so he went around back between the lilac bushes. As he stepped into a yard surrounded by a border of tall pines he met the gazes of two women on the porch. A woman he recognized as Martha Rainsford rose from her seat beside her daughter and met him in the middle of the yard. They were surrounded also by the strange playground toys Tom McKellar had built in the heyday of his bizarre creation. As Jack explained how he had rolled his three-wheeler and asked to use her phone, Martha took his left arm and studied it. She instructed Rebekah to call Blair Selvedge and tell him his cows were out, and the girl rose and disappeared into the house. Two glasses of lemonade sweated on a table between chairs. Martha took him inside and sat him at the kitchen table and disappeared around a corner.

—What’s the number? said Rebekah from behind him.

He turned and looked at her. The soft fragrance of shampoo and soap lifted from her and floated toward him. She wore shorts and he could see her bare thighs without looking at them. She was tall and full bodied, her skin having taken a healthy color from the sun. Her dark hair was pulled up loosely and her posture listless, unaffected by his plight. He gave her the number and she dialed it and handed him the phone. It took effort to keep from arguing with Blair. The old man was unable to take simple orders. Rebekah stood in the doorway to the kitchen, listening to him talk.

—No, he said. There’s at least four. You need to get Elmer to help you.

—I don’t know where they got out. I wrecked. I’m at Tom McKellar’s house. I’m bleeding.

—I did fix the fence. I don’t know how they got out.

—No. I’m telling you, I’m bleeding all over the place.

He looked down at his left arm and saw that blood was dripping off his fingers onto the linoleum in bright, coin-sized droplets. They had splattered, each surrounded by its own series of moons. He hung up the phone. This was a situation the old man would have to see with his own eyes to understand. He had a small imagination. Rebekah came for the phone and after hanging it up brought him a glass of lemonade with a paper towel for his arm and sat down at the table with him. She regarded him with bright limpid eyes and asked him if it hurt. It burns, but it’s not too bad, he said. She said she’d never seen so many scrapes, and that he must have been driving too fast. He told her there was no speed limit on this road and she said it was twenty-five unless otherwise posted. He said if he knew there was a heifer standing in the middle of the road he might have slowed down. She asked him if it was the cow’s fault and he said it was always the cow’s fault.

He was aware of his smell in the kitchen. Martha returned and set gauze, tape, creams, bottles, scissors, and tweezers out in a line on the table. As she did her work he could feel Rebekah’s presence beside him like a hot stove. Her eyes clear as running water in the light and burning dark otherwise. She had a shallow cleft in her chin that he did not remember. The kitchen was clean and small. The refrigerator clicked on and hummed in the corner. The house seemed kept with a simple pride, its modesty and tidiness creating a calm, wholesome feeling, something absent at the farmhouse. The farmhouse was a dwelling shades above a cave, the upper room he slept in akin to a child’s treehouse. Scab carpet unfastened and without padding covered most of the wooden floor, drab brown, curled and frayed at the edges. His narrow rank bed bent from use and the wallpaper flyspotted and yellowed, wallpaper whose maddening pattern, circles and lines, lines and circles, ran down the wall like strange liquid, wallpaper he had stared at for long periods until it had come to represent the toil of his young life, the convolutions and implications of his existence, his faith, and farther until it traced the wild, entwined history of humankind in its lines, for so many years its presence like an unpleasant friend become tolerable through relentless visitations, the sharp edges of its desperation worn round, a certain acquiescence or submission granted. The whole dim room tilting one way and the delirium of his simple life draining out the window. The place where he now sat was a home, and within it her slow beauty worked on him like liquor.

Martha cleaned and dressed his knee, an abraded area above his hip, and returned to his left elbow, all the while asking questions about the town she and her daughter had left, the people there. He answered her questions and his voice seemed thick and bucolic in the room, a stark and roughhewn contrast to the honey that spilled from the throats of the women. He tried for clearer, more enunciated language and his words came out stilted and foreign.

Rebekah got up and returned with another wet cloth. She set his right arm on the table and began wiping his elbow. She became involved in this task, and underlying the pain that throbbed through the torn skin, shooting along nerve tracks and reaching into strange parts of his body, he was awash in warmth at being touched and cared for by these two women, having their sole attention this way. The pain Rebekah caused was tremendous, her hand not as careful as her mother’s, and it traveled to his heart. Her face gathered into a scowl of focus and the pink tip of her tongue stuck out from the corner of her mouth. Once he hissed and she looked up at him from her crouch, dark-eyed and guileless. As he admired the clean line of her neck he noticed what could have been a tattoo on the nape, though from his angle he could not see it well.

Wrapped up, with a stale pain warming under each bandage, he pulled his pungent shirt on. Martha put a good sandwich and a pitcher of lemonade in front of him and left him alone. When he was through he went outside and walked across the lane and looked into the field. It was almost dark and he couldn’t see any heifers. Inside Martha’s car he smelled dried sweat, cow manure, old sun, all wafting from his skin and clothes and mixing with the scent of antiseptics. As he climbed out at the farmhouse the warm feeling from before was gone and beneath it lay only the pain of his stiffening wounds and the dark knowledge of work the next morning. Blair called out when he entered the house. Jack ignored him and went toward the stairwell. As he rounded the corner he heard a noise in the darkness and was suddenly face to face with the old woman. Her bedroom door was catercorner to the opening for the stairs, and it was from there that she had emerged like a wraith. She staggered forward malodorous, her white eyes open in the dimness, her heavy arms outstretched and feeling, and he sidestepped her and climbed the squealing stairs to his room.

He slept badly that night, no position comfortable and the plea of his wounds breaking any stream of slumber into fragments. When he got up predawn, stiff with surface pain, a few of the bandages had bled through and others were yellow with wound seepage. He tried to rewrap one of them and did a poor job. Blair came into the kitchen and took the jar of peanut butter from the cupboard.

—Happened to you? he said.

—I told you. I wrecked.

—Only a matter of time with one of them.

—Would of happened with anything, said Jack. The hell do you know about it.

—Can you milk?

—I’m up ain’t I.

Blair took a spoon from the drawer and probed around in the jar.

—That storm knocked a branch down from the big tree on the corner there, he said. Crushed the fence. They just stepped right over it, pretty as you please. Didn’t take um long to find it. We’re lucky more didn’t get out. We left Elmer’s truck there, but you’ll need to get to it today and fix it up.

—If you want it done today you can do it yourself, said Jack. I ain’t doing it today.

—Well it’s got to be done. They’ll bully it till they can squeeze between the truck.

—You or Elmer can do it. I ain’t doing it today.

They rode to the barn in silence, passing his three-wheeler in the weeds. It was a cool morning with a drizzle of rain. Rain in July was fickle as it was rare and he guessed it would barely dampen the dust and be gone with the sun. The cows were wet, fetid, and kicking, their udders like things that should not be seen. They swung their tails into his face and lathered him with rank rainwater and urine. Some tails were clotted with smooth ovals of manure worn hard with age, and the cows swung these like medieval weapons. He tasted warm shit in his mouth when the cow he was working on lifted her tail and dropped it from above. It hit in sections and shot outward and upward from the waist-high milking deck. He spat and swore, and after sticking the hose in his mouth he washed the hot mess down the grate. He lost the bandages on his palms and his raw hands stung. The bandages on his arms became wet and hung and flapped until they fell off. One cow kicked like a machine set to do so and he tried again to guide the milkers to her swollen teats. Her leg moved mechanically, lifting and kicking at his arm, swiping blindly at the milkers. He had placed all four on her udder when her hoof came up and pulled the apparatus down to the concrete with a clatter. He grabbed the sensitive skin of her udder between his knuckles and twisted hard in a place where she could not reach him with her hoof, and she raised her trembling leg and held it as though it were struck with palsy. He tried to place the milkers again. Her hoof rose and tore his bandage off, opening up part of the wound on his left elbow. His face grew hot and he reached for one of the metal weights they kept on the milk tubes below the splash guard—a cylinder of solid steel five inches long and thicker than a shovel handle, a thing Blair used often to beat at their legs when he wasn’t up to employing his fists or the splintered axe handle that leaned against the back wall. But the girl had whetted his spirit and therefore his nature. The memory of her calmness and composure coated his mood and he felt some warm longing in his chest, some fierce hope budding. He set the weight down and tried again. When the cow continued to kick he went up the steps at the rear of the barn and walked down the exit alley to where she stood. He feinted at her and pointed his finger within inches of her enormous head and she flinched and jerked in alarm.

—Not today bitch, he growled. Not today.

He walked down and tried again and she took the milkers. His arm bled and dripped thickly until it congealed to a clotted crust over his elbow and the pain subsided to a hot throb. He worked on the animals with Blair, who used epithets improvised and traditional like only men who work with dairy cows can. The old man didn’t embark on his journeys of violence so often anymore, those trips where he methodically grabbed the axe handle, his serenity sticking to him like an odor as he walked up to her level and fleeing as he wielded the stick against her huge head and neck until the other cows were spooked and he was satisfied. He’d once knocked a half-grown heifer over the head so hard with a two-by-four that her eyeball fell out. She lived a long one-eyed life, her milk production among the best in the herd. His booming voice from below was often enough to scare a cow into cooperation. Sometimes he loved these cows with the diligence and duty of a good father tending to his handicapped children. Other times they were only a dirty, stinking living, nearly too brainless to exist within their own mapped hides but producing a white product he could sell.

Then they were through it and the sun was well up, bursting through the dispersing clouds in slanted pillars. The rising sun was the redemption of milking in the morning. As Jack unrolled the hose to wash down, Carrie walked through the side door. She was dressed so far as he could tell in Elmer’s clothes. She wore one of the yarn hats she knitted herself. Her large pale face, its skin prone to purpling in the cold and burning in the sun, twisted now into a shallow greeting. He handed her the hose and they exchanged rote words and he got in the truck with Blair and left.

Sunlight fell onto the table and the kitchen was busy with the sounds of the two men eating and the low, unheard mumble of the local news as a third companion. The old woman had not appeared from her bedroom. Blair left and came out with her on his arm. He guided her gently to the table like she was made of blown glass and set dry toast, bacon, and scrambled eggs in front of her. Her wiry hair was matted in some spots and stuck up crazily in others, like a play doll whose specialty was a stiff workable thatch on its pate.

—Do you need me to feed you dear, er… said Blair.

She mumbled something, her lower lip sagging to reveal a collection of narrow, crooked teeth, some twisted, some leaning against another, all yellow and worn, not unlike the teeth of the aging horse they kept. She picked up the fork fist-over and leaned above the eggs. Jack watched her. Her hand trembled so that her first effort at bringing eggs up failed when they fell off the fork and it reached her mouth empty. She did this twice more, slurring words neither man could make out. Blair looked at Jack with a slight smile and a twinkle in his eye, his mouth full, his jaw working. The old woman set her fork down and her fingers descended like spider legs onto the plate and picked up a mess of eggs and brought it to her mouth. She blinked her milky eyes as she chewed. One of them ran. Jack stopped watching her and watched Blair instead, who ate steadily and shared his attention between his wife and Jack’s own reaction to the spectacle. She ate her eggs, feeling out the last curds with her fingers, and then ate the toast in methodical bites and took small sips of milk. In all she tried to say she hadn’t spoken a clear word and when she finished she sat in silence with her head bowed in fatigue.

Jack gathered the dishes to the sink and climbed into the tiny shower in the wash room and bumped his raw elbows as he cleaned himself, some wounds opening again and bleeding a thinned pink onto the floor. Since he did not have what it took to dress his wounds he put on clothes and searched for his good boots. The scrapes had scabbed over and felt tight and they burned until he was nearly comfortable with it. When he passed the living room the old woman was on the couch in her nightgown. Blair had put Matlock in the VCR and she sat listening to it, perhaps recalling the scenes from memory.

It was past eight o’clock by the time he came to the three-wheeler. He could see deep tracks in the hay where Blair and Elmer had driven through, evidence of their laziness, and Elmer’s long Chevrolet parked across the field beneath the big tree. The machine started on the third kick and he killed the engine and sat on the seat awhile looking toward the McKellar house. He drove his truck to the barn to refill the dented milk pail and then returned to the McKellar house and got out with his heartbeat filling his ears. There was no answer at the front door. He walked toward the back yard and found no one there. He knocked on the door, called out. Then he entered the house, called again, and walked into the kitchen, his boots sounding heavily on the floor. He put the milk in the refrigerator. After taking a quick look around, feeling what seemed some kind of reverence for the place, he left.

She was blue water in a yellow land. In the days that followed, she flavored his life. He waited for those times he saw her outside her house, or walking the lane, stepping off into the wild barley that brushed her thighs with heavy heads as he passed. And when he touched a cow, ready to drain the milk from her swollen udder, he touched her more gently, his reckless mind insisting that somehow Rebekah could be connected to this action.