Greenville

by Dale Peck

  There is another long moment of silence. Though Duke talks of nothing but leaving home the boy has never thought about it before, but now his first clear thought is that he doesn’t want to go back, and he even considers running to the next room to ask if he can stay. But he is held in bed by the same conundrum that held in his tongue when he wanted to ask for Mr. Humboldt’s help: he’s not sure if he wants to stay, or if he just doesn’t want to be sent away.

  Well let’s not be hasty Wallace. I just said it’s not right, what your brother done. I didn’t say he had to go back. He spoke very polite to me when I made up his bed.

  There is a creak from the room behind his.

  Anyway, and the boy can hear the yawn in his aunt’s voice. We can talk about it more in the morning.

  It seems only a moment later that the boy is awakened by a light knock at the door. When he opens his eyes he’s completely lost, and he stares blankly at the strange man whose face emerges in the gap between the wall and slowly opening door. The man opens the door all the way and then just stands there, looking at the boy, and then his eyes shift to the dresser beside the bed. Years later the boy, grown up, will wonder if his uncle was actually looking at him or if he was in fact looking for his only daughter, already long gone, but that morning he only watches warily as his uncle approaches the dresser and drawer by drawer empties its contents in a tattered brown gunnysack. When he has finished he slings the half-empty sack over his shoulder and turns to the boy.

  Ladies won’t milk themselves, his uncle says. You can put your things away later.

  After lunch his uncle burns his daughter’s clothes with the rest of the trash. Dumps them out of the sack and into the burn barrel, and folds up the worn burlap to use it again.

  3

  Now he knows the names of things. He knows the directions: not just the words, but the axes of the earth. The north hill that protects his uncle’s land from the worst of the winter winds and the Catskill vista twenty miles to the south, the ancient abandoned house buried in the overgrown cedar break just west of his uncle’s property and the hundred forty-five acres of pasture to the east. The pasture spans both sides of County Road 38, a hundred ten acres on this, the north side, and thirty-five more on the south, and on this late April morning there are sixty-seven Holstein and Guernsey and Ayrshire and Jersey cows in the north field—the ladies, his uncle calls them, but only among dairymen. The queen of the herd is a four-year-old Holstein whom his uncle has named, sheepishly but proudly, Dolly, and whose teats trail the ground when she walks and yield an average of forty quarts of milk each day. At six cents per, those forty quarts will bring $2.40 from his uncle’s distributor, Sunnydale Farms, assuming they pass bacterial and cream-ratio inspections. The boy knows also that the sharp knock-knock-knock his uncle raps on his door at four-thirty is called reveille, and is what he would have experienced had his mother gotten her way and sent him to military school. That’s all he knows about military school and, his uncle has told him, it’s all he’ll ever know, as long as he does his chores.

  The bacon is done by the time the boy has dressed and washed his hands and face with cold water from the bowl on his bureau and tiptoed his way down the dark narrow stairs; and the boy sets the table while his uncle finishes at the stove. His uncle drains the bacon grease into a coffee can but leaves the meat in the pan, cuts it into pieces with the blackened end of the spatula, and cracks six eggs on top of it. The can with the bacon grease goes back on the counter, next to another can that contains cooking utensils and a third filled with silverware and a fourth that contains coffee and then the fifth can, the newest, the can that contains the boy’s shoe fund. His uncle started the shoe fund when he finished the last can of coffee a couple of weeks ago, and the boy knows without looking that it contains $3.10, and he knows also that a new pair of shoes costs $5.50 at Western Supply. His naked toes curl away from the cold floorboards as he sets three places at the table—three plates, three forks, three cups—and he places the third cup face down and lays a napkin on top of that plate to protect it from flies: the third place is for Aunt Bessie, who will sleep for another hour and be gone to her house by the time the boy comes down from the barn for his books. As he lays the paper napkin on Aunt Bessie’s plate he sees that his damp hand has left four fingerprints on it, and he is about to replace it when he looks up at his uncle’s back. A week after the boy arrived—when he could still hear Aunt Bessie through the wall nearly every night, encouraging his uncle to let him stay on—he had run to the house with a double handful of eggs still warm from the hens’ bottoms; he had dropped one as he struggled to open the door and his uncle had smacked him and served him one fewer egg for breakfast. In just over three months it’s the only time his uncle has laid a finger on him, and he would sooner brave military school or run ten miles in Jimmy’s shoes than give his uncle cause to punish him again.

  His uncle divides the food between the two plates while the boy pours them each a cup of coffee. He doesn’t fill the cups beyond the halfway mark or there won’t be enough left for Aunt Bessie. Aunt Bessie will cook her own breakfast when she gets up but she will only reheat whatever coffee is left on the stove. In fact the boy doesn’t really like the taste of coffee. He only drinks it for the cream he can put into it, cream he skims from a galvanized tin pail that has hung during the cool night from a nail just outside the door and, like Aunt Bessie’s plate, has a cloth laid over it to keep the flies off. The cream has a sweetness no sugar can improve, a sweetness that has replaced all-butter French loaf in both mouth and mind. He splashes a drop of coffee in his cup and overwhelms it with cream, and he drinks half the dun-colored custardy concoction before he wolfs down his bacon and eggs and half when he is finished, so the thick taste will linger when he heads out to the barn. A few drops dribble down his chin, and even though he catches them with the back of his hand his uncle sees, and as he stands with his plate in one hand he uses the other to pull a napkin from the holder.

  Use it if you need it. Put it in your pocket if you don’t.

  It is the first thing his uncle has said this morning, and the boy stuffs the napkin in his pocket and hurries after him, trying not to feel too disappointed that he has already caused him to speak. His uncle speaks less than any man he has ever met, and the boy has set himself the challenge of seeing how long he can save him from the need to use words. In order to do that he must perform all his chores as quickly and efficiently as he has been taught, wasting neither time nor, more important, the farm’s precious resources. He catches the screen door so that its bang doesn’t wake Aunt Bessie and then sets off at a run up the hill to the dairy barn. The grass is long and damp, cold and silver in the gray light, but the boy’s pants are rolled up almost to his knees and only his feet and ankles get wet. At the barn he grabs two more pails from their own nails. There are two rags in the bottom of one and he takes them out and takes the pails to a spigot and fills them with water. He rinses dried manure and mud out of the rags and drops one in each pail and turns off the tap.

  By then his uncle has reached the barn, and he holds the spring-hinged door for the boy so he doesn’t spill any water. The boy steps over the foot-high threshold and sets the pails down just inside the door, and by the time the rusty half-sprung coils have pulled the door shut with their vaguely electronic screech—rrrrrreeeeeeaaaaaakkkkkkhhhhhh!—he has run the length of the barn. Faint columns of light dissect the far wall. The dairy barn’s siding is called board-and-batten but much of the latter is missing, arid sunlight leaks in between the boards, and rain and snow, and, now, the urgent lowing of the ladies. It’s been twelve hours since their last milking, and their udders are so swollen that the teats spit milk when they bounce against a rock or log, and the weight of them is a strain on the ladies’ backs. It’s as if, his uncle has told him, they get pregnant twice a day, and does he remember what Ethel was like when she was carrying any of his younger brothers and sisters? The boy can—Lois, vaguely, and Lance, and more recently G
regory—and it seems to him that the ladies behave much better than his mother. When he slides back the doors to the barnyard they make their way slowly and surprisingly graceful and quiet on the barn’s cement floor toward the troughs, their half-ton bodies rubbing against each other with a sound like thunder attempting to slip on a suede jacket. The first few times the boy had to do this he ran out of the way as soon as he’d opened the doors, but now he scratches the ladies’ coarse hides as they glide by, nudges this or that one toward one or another trough to make sure they’re evenly distributed, slaps the bony haunch of the occasional laggard, Go on, get in there.

  The dairy barn contains four feeding troughs: two on either long wall, and two more running next to each other down the barn’s center. This is called the milking alley, but the boy prefers to think of the long metal bins as two sets of train rails run side by side, and when the ladies stand haunch to haunch between them they form the ties, and once they’re all in place his uncle lowers the electronic boom collars. Each of the four collars is a set of steel tubes curved in a shape that resembles the rounded dentals below the eaves of his uncle’s house, an up-and-down notching that descends from the rafters like a pin changer to slip over the ladies’ necks just behind the flaring of their skulls. The collars were blue when they were new and they’re blue on top still, but their undersides are silver and shiny from years of being abraded by necks as big around as the boy’s waist. Their only function is to keep the ladies from walking away while their teats are hooked to the claw of the milking machine: although the four stainless steel nozzles are supposed to slide off with a good tug they don’t always, and the boy’s uncle has spoken of panicked cows who rip off their own teats in their struggle to free themselves.

  While the boy has been herding the ladies in, his uncle has filled a pile of gunnysacks through a chute that pours down from the silo, and as soon as the collars are in place the boy grabs a fifty-pound sack and pours the shredded corn into a trough. There is a narrow lane beyond each of the outer troughs and another alley between the two center troughs, and the boy walks backward down these alleys to spread the silage evenly and keep it from spilling over the edge of the trough. As he walks, the ladies behind him low in anticipation of his arrival. Their calls make him think that he is a finger running a glissando the length of a giant keyboard, and indeed, it is like music to him, this process—not listening to music, but playing it. The ladies low like a band tuning up, and then, when the troughs are filled, their teeth crunch grain with a regular sound, like a distant marching corps.

  Like the collars, the corn’s only function is to keep the ladies calmly in place while they’re milked; it would be less complicated by far to feed them in the barnyard. Now the boy grabs a stool and one of the pails he filled with water and starts on the nearest lady. There are four teats per lady and four nozzles per claw, but some of the ladies have a shrunken teat and nearly all of them have at least one that is reddened by mastitis, and he lets these hang free, hooking up only those teats that are pale and plump and eager to release their liquid treasure.

  The boy pulls the rag from his pail. In the springtime the ladies’ teats are covered with mud and manure: they feed and give milk and shit at the same time, and even though most of the latter falls into a six-inch gutter located under their tails some of it inevitably splatters onto the swollen udders. At first this repulsed the boy but now he only notices if some spatters a teat he has already cleaned. He uses his rag to wipe the swollen sacks, squeezing lightly so as not to force out any milk, and when the teat is clean he slips the tip into a nozzle and opens the valve and watches to make sure the suction slurps it in evenly, without pinching the tender skin. As soon as the transparent hose running out the other end of the nozzle turns white he drops his dirty rag into his pail and moves on to the next teat or the next lady. Fifteen ladies per trough, four troughs in the barn. Every station is filled, which is unusual, especially at this time of year. His uncle’s herd normally has ten or eleven dries but right now there are only four. There are two bulls as well, meaning there are sixty-one wet cows in the barn: he does thirty and his uncle does thirty, and whichever man finishes first milks the last lady by hand. This is the competition his uncle has set up; this is how the boy earned the money in the coffee can that will buy him a pair of shoes: his uncle gives him the value of whatever milk he gets from the sixty-first cow. The boy knows it is just a game and that his uncle will buy him a pair of shoes as soon as he is able, and he knows also that his uncle could best him without even trying, but, as happened yesterday and the day before, he finishes a half cow ahead of his uncle, and he almost whoops for joy as he runs to find the last of the ladies.

  He locates her where she has nosed her way in at the end of a trough. A few of the ladies he recognizes by their spots or scars: Dolly of course, her udder the size of a medicine ball, and the bulls, and the lady with five teats, but despite his best efforts—his uncle knows every one of his herd individually—most of them remain anonymous to him. This is one of the latter. An Ayrshire whose face is entirely black except for the insides of her lips, which are as pink as a Negro’s, and both her ears, which are white. All of this is distinctive enough, but the boy finds it hard to remember something when it doesn’t have a name. He has never dared ask why they don’t name the ladies, just as he’s never asked why they don’t call them ladies in front of people who aren’t associated with the farm. Cows, they call them, not cattle—cattle are food—but he puts the matter out of his mind as the black-faced lady turns back to her breakfast. He wipes her udder down as though it were a baby’s face, and then, using both hands, lifts up the milksack and tries to gauge from the heft of the warm aqueous bag how much it will yield. This is less game than intermission: the pail holds five gallons, twenty quarts, and only Dolly has ever required a second one. But the boy knows a full pail is worth more than a dollar and he likes to think of the warm weight in his palms as pennies that will buy him a pair of shoes that will cover his feet as softly as warm milk. And, too, he likes the water-balloon shape of the udder, the soft down that covers the pink skin and the slip of the teats through his fingers. Once, just after Lance came home from the hospital, he’d snuck beyond his parents’ curtain and lifted his newborn brother from his crib. Lance was neither as plump nor as warm as a cow’s udder but it is the closest the boy can find to a twin to this feeling, and it is almost reluctantly that he squeezes off two teats between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and begins to milk.

  Good practice, huh?

  The boy tries not to jump at the sound of Donnie Badget’s voice but he feels his cheeks turn as pink as the udder before him.

  Squirt squirt squirt. You been practicing upstairs? Maybe up in the hayloft? Milking it to get ready for the girls?

  The boy tries to concentrate on his task but he jerks the tender teat and the black-faced Ayrshire looks up from her feed. She stamps one of her hind legs, nearly upsetting his pail.

  Careful there, Amos. Don’t want to pull too hard. You’ll give the lady blisters.

  The boy gets up from his stool, heads toward the vat room. His pail is hardly half full and the Ayrshire’s udder isn’t completely drained, but he wants to escape Donnie Badget’s insinuating tone.

  The holding vat is an enormous stainless steel cylinder that can take five thousand gallons of unpasteurized unhomogenized whole milk—twenty thousand quarts, or twelve hundred dollars—which his uncle’s ladies produce every ten or eleven days. The duct is sealed by a valve that has a handle like the handles on submarine doors to emphasize how valuable the farm’s sole commodity is—a gallon of milk costs four times a gallon of gas, as his uncle has pointed out—and when he unscrews the valve it opens with a buttery hiss so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it on toast. After he flips back the hatch the boy lays a rusty screen atop the opening to catch any flies that might have drowned in the milk pail. Of all the implements involved in the milking process, this screen is perhaps the most pr
ecious to the boy. Through it pass a thousand quarts of milk every morning and evening, and yet it is tiny, less than a foot across and nearly weightless. Even the grease guard Aunt Bessie lays over the top of the skillet has a handle and a metal rim, but the screen is unbordered, its edges unraveling like an old blanket. And yet it is indispensable, a vital link between the ladies and the vat. His uncle has spoken ominously of the one time his milk was rejected by the pump man for too much matter—flies mostly, and flecks of greenery that might or might not have passed through a lady first—and the entire contents of the vat had to be dumped in the barnyard.

  The boy lays the screen carefully over the valve, then pours the pail through and leaves the seal open. By now the milking machine has finished the first ladies, and he and his uncle and Donnie unhook them from the claws and cart the oversized buckets of steaming milk from the milking alley to the vat room. The milking machine’s buckets are rectangular, with soft edges, like a suitcase stood on end. They hold ten gallons apiece and, when full, weigh seventy-five to eighty pounds—the boy himself only weighs a hundred thirty but, like his uncle and Donnie Badget, he carries them two at a time, for ballast. The work is backbreaking but over in just a few minutes, and when they are finished the boy dumps the screen and its dozens of dead flies and seals up the vat again. Immediately he grabs a shovel and wheelbarrel, and he’s about to clean the manure gutters when he sees his uncle standing in the open door of the barn looking down at the barnyard. The only time the boy has ever seen his uncle stand still is the day the old man dropped him off, and the sight is so unsettling that the boy sets his shovel down and goes to see what’s wrong. He hopes it is nothing he’s done, but his breath is tight in his lungs as he passes the black-faced lady and her half-full udder.

  His uncle glances down at him when he comes up, then turns back to the fields. The boy relaxes then, but only a little. He knows his uncle is waiting to see if he can spot what’s amiss. But even though he scans the barnyard and the hill to the north and the pasture to the east he sees nothing but the sun, which has just cleared the stand of new-growth oak and chestnut and maple trees at the southeastern edge of the pasture. The boy watches its diagonal ascent for a moment, then turns back to his uncle.