Greenville

by Dale Peck

  His uncle remains silent another moment. Then:

  Fence is down.

  He points to a line of fenceposts just beyond the scrubby willows and poplars that clot the muddy crease between the barnyard and the hillside pasture. Several of the posts lean at angles as sharply pitched as the barn’s roof and two, defeated, lie flat on the ground. Slack ribbons of wire curl with the wild arcs and loops of some futuristic roller coaster, catching sparks of morning light.

  Been so wet the ground’s a swamp. Gonna have to move the posts to drier land, rewire em. Means pasturing the ladies in the south field today. His uncle points again, this time at the rising sun. Best finish them gutters before the bus gets here and get your shoes on. You can help me and Donnie after school.

  The boy returns to his wheelbarrel, fills it with manure he scoops from the narrow gutters with a square-bladed shovel. He works faster now, not because of the manure, whose grassy sweet odor he hardly notices, but because the task reminds him of the old man. Wheelbarrels full of shit, he’d said the day he took the boy away from his mother and his seven brothers and sisters. The boy tries not to think about any of them as he pushes the flat edge of the shovel across the concrete, the sound a mechanical rasp he feels in his ears and his fingertips. There is only the boy and his uncle in the house down the hill, and Aunt Bessie in the evenings, and even though he goes to sleep in the center of his empty bed he always wakes up at the edge, and sometimes he lies down in his clothes because not even an entire blanket is as warm as Lance’s belly pressed against his back.

  He is emptying the tenth load when he hears the bus in the hollow at the bottom of 38 where it curves around his uncle’s land. His uncle looks up from the liniment he is rubbing into the neck of a particularly tall brown Guernsey with a face like the sole of an old leather boot. The Guernsey’s neck has been chafed by the boom collar, and his uncle pushes the salve into the patches of pink skin with fingers as blunt-tipped as the shovel in the boy’s hands.

  Go on, get your shoes on.

  Just a couple more loads, Uncle Wallace.

  Donnie’ll get em. Don’t keep the bus waiting. Hold up a minute, his uncle says then, and when the boy turns back his uncle is digging in his pocket. His hand emerges with three quarters, two dimes, more pennies than the boy can count at a glance. Who’d you end up with this morning?

  That black-faced Ayrshire, the boy says. The one with the white ears, he adds, not sure if his description is adequate.

  The one with the nigger lips? How much you get from her?

  Two gallons maybe. Maybe two and a half.

  His uncle hesitates a moment, then plunks two quarters in the boy’s hand.

  Gotta be more selective when you set the ladies up. Ayrshires ain’t the best milkers. High milkfat, and they tend to last a year or two longer than the other ladies, but if it’s volume you want go for a Holstein every time. The boy is not sure but he thinks his uncle winks at him. Who knows, maybe you’ll get Dolly one-a these days.

  Aunt Bessie has packed the boy a lunch and left it with his books on the kitchen table. He drops the quarters in the shoe can—$3.60!—and grabs his lunch and his books and his old shoes and runs out the front door just as the bus pulls up to the T-intersection of 38 and Newry Road between his house and the Flacks’. As he dashes under the line of elms in front of his uncle’s house he sees that their branches are dotted with leaf pips as pale as lima beans and curled like … like orecchiette, he remembers, one of the twenty-seven different pastas he’d stocked at Slaussen’s Market. Babies’ ears, Mr. Krakowski called them. Smaller than conchiglia but bigger than orzo.

  The memory stops the boy in his tracks. He is standing there looking up at the leaves and trying to remember the names of other noodles—linguini, capellini, tortelloni, lasagna, manicotti, ravioli over in frozen foods—when Kenny and Flip Flack come around the front of the bus. Kenny has his younger brother in a headlock and is administering an Indian burn.

  Hey hillbilly, Kenny says, looking at the shoes the boy is carrying. They go on your feet.

  Hey hillbilly! Flip squeezes out of his brother’s grip and runs onto the bus.

  The boy shakes himself and gooses Flip as he walks past him down the aisle, and it is only when he gets to his seat in the middle of the bus that he realizes he has forgotten socks, and he curses the old man for the thousandth time. He doesn’t realize he’s sworn aloud until Julia Miller turns around and regards him over the back of her seat. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, pale brown, not blonde like Joanie’s—and not half as pretty to the boy’s mind.

  They might talk that trash down in New York City but we use clean English up here.

  I’m not from New York City. I’m from Long Island.

  Well you sound like Jimmy Cagney and he was from New York City.

  I’m from Brentwood. It’s on Long Island.

  Well I’m from Greene County. My people used to own your uncle’s house.

  The boy pauses. He knows this has something to do with the metal sign that is posted in front of his uncle’s house just east of the driveway—the pole he’d taken for a fencepost when the old man had nearly run it over on the day he left him here.

  SITE OF

  EARLY TANNERY

  ERECTED BY DANIEL MILLER

  WHO CAME FROM EAST HAMPTON

  is what the sign says in butter yellow letters painted on a midnight blue placard, and although the boy’s uncle has never commented on the sign the boy senses its importance, else why would his uncle let it remain on his land? Still, the boy has never asked his uncle about it, and he doesn’t ask Julia about it now. All he does is stare Julia down until she tucks the same lock of hair behind her ear and turns around. Then he squeezes his feet into Jimmy’s shoes and laces them as loosely as he can. Still, by the time he gets home that afternoon the backs of his heels and the tops of his toes are covered with blisters, some of them broken open, and as he limps off the bus it’s all he can do to hold back tears of pain and frustration. Ahead of him Flip skips down the stairs and dashes toward his house, but the boy descends so slowly that Kenny comes up hard behind him and steps on the back of his left foot. When the boy whirls around with his fists clenched his neighbor throws up his hands, palms open.

  Whoa there hillbilly. It was an accident, honest.

  The boy stares at him as the doors of the yellow Bluebird close and the bus heads east down 38. His fists remain drawn for a moment, then all at once he throws his books on the grass, plops down and unlaces his boots, chucks them into the ditch. There is a splash as one of them lands in a puddle and at the noise the boy throws himself on his back and stares up into the pale green five-fingered leaves of the silver maples in the Flacks’ front yard. Star pasta, he thinks, but he can’t remember its proper name.

  Criminy hillbilly, Kenny says. Looks like you been walking on hot coals or something. He is silent for a moment and then he says, Heard about you in gym today.

  The boy arches his head back, looks up at Kenny’s inverted body. He is not as old as Duke and not as tall, but he has Duke’s manner of looking away when he has something to say. He is looking up at the leaves where the boy was just looking.

  What’d you hear?

  Heard you threw your shoes at Coach Baldwin, then beat Billy Van Dyke in the four hundred.

  Billy Van Dyke runs like a girl.

  Billy Van Dyke is the fastest kid in eighth grade. Kenny looks down at the boy. Or he was.

  The boy rolls over on his stomach, pulls a few blades of grass from the ground and shreds them into pieces one by one.

  It wasn’t nothing. I was mad.

  The screen door of the Flacks’ house bangs across the yard.

  Kenny! Mom says to get your butt up here and eat your cookies and go help Dad with the cows!

  Aw jeez. Flip, you little Nerf ball, you better run!

  As Kenny lopes up the yard Flip squeals and disappears around the house. Kenny turns and jogs backward.

&n
bsp; Billy Van Dyke does run like a girl, but a really fast girl. Way to go hillbilly.

  Kenny sprints around the corner of his house then, and a moment later the boy hears Flip’s screams of delight. At the sound he feels a sharp pang of homesickness. Flip’s squeals sound so much like Lance’s that the boy can feel his little brother’s heaving ribs beneath his fingers. He pretends that the girls are holding Lance down and torture-tickling him, that he is heading off to Slaussen’s Market and that in six hours his brothers and sisters will be pulling the apples and bananas he has stolen for them from the lining of his jacket. He gathers his books and shoes slowly, but as he crosses the road he notices his uncle’s ladies in the south pasture and remembers the downed fence behind the dairy barn. In a moment he’s forgotten his siblings. He dumps his shoes on a bluestone flag outside the kitchen door and drops his books on the kitchen table and grabs an apple and heads up to the barn at a trot. He is trying to run and eat his apple and roll up his pants all at the same time—Duke’s pants, a good six inches too long for him—and just as he goes through the barnyard gate he falls, his face narrowly missing a cow patty, his half-eaten apple rolling away into the mud.

  Nice one.

  The boy looks up to see Donnie coming out of the barn. He is shirtless and his stomach and jeans are covered in cakes of mud and he carries a short-handled shovel in each hand. As the boy scrambles to his feet Donnie throws a shovel to him one-handed, and when he catches it he feels the sting of Donnie’s strength in both his wrists.

  What’s the rush Amos? Fence ain’t going nowhere.

  It’s already four. Milking time’s in an hour.

  Donnie uses his empty hand to scratch at the dried mud on his stomach.

  Jesus, Amos. You ain’t been here but three months and already you’re an expert in dairy farming? The ladies won’t curdle, relax.

  Donnie has only a fourth-grade education and is ten years older than the boy, and the boy has seen with his own eyes that he is a hard worker. But he has a short temper too, as short as the boy’s, and for some reason the boy’s presence has riled him since he arrived. It is an antagonism that feels edgier, more personal than that of Vinnie Grasso and Bruce St. John and Robert Sampson, who always beat on the boy as if he were the perennial loser in some game they played. Donnie has never actually hit the boy, but he communicates his antipathy nonetheless, and now, with the shovel in his hands, the boy feels years older. If his uncle wasn’t waiting down at the bottom of the barnyard he might. He just might. But his uncle is waiting, and the boy turns away from Donnie still picking mud flecks off his stomach as though they were blackheads and hurries down the hill.

  The barnyard slopes steeply down the hill behind the barn until it meets the even bigger hill that stretches up for a quarter mile to the north end of his uncle’s property. The crease between the two hills muddies up each spring but has never run water according to his uncle. The moss-covered remains of a collapsed stone fence run down the center of the crease in a tangle of poplars and willows, blackberries and wild rose and fiddlehead ferns he picked a few weeks ago with Aunt Bessie, and just on the other side of it is the wire fence that actually divides the barnyard from the pasture. The boy runs over steppingstones laid in the hoof-churned mud and slips as one of them spins beneath him. He would fall but for the shovel in his hand, which makes a sluicing noise when it stabs the earth.

  Watch it there Amos. Wouldn’t want you to get your pants all dirty.

  When the boy looks up the first thing he sees is that Donnie’s fingers have left red marks where he scratched the mud off his stomach. The marks are almost as bright as the skin of the boy’s half-eaten apple, which is the next thing the boy sees. The apple is pinched in a pitcher’s grip between Donnie’s thumb and first two fingers.

  Hey Amos, Donnie half coos, half sneers. You forgot to finish your after-school snack.

  The boy is still off balance, more of his weight supported by the shovel than his splayed feet, and he can only watch helplessly as the red ball streaks toward him. It strikes him squarely in the chest, erupts in flecks of mud and apple meat. A hollow ringing fills his ears as though his chest were an empty metal bell, and when it clears he finds himself standing with the shovel held in both hands like a bat. Donnie is walking past him on the steppingstones, moving lightly from one to the next.

  Little late on the swing, Amos, he says, pushing the shovel off the boy’s shoulder with one hand. Strike two.

  The blade of the shovel smacks the wet earth a second time, and mud squirts from beneath the stones Donnie steps on with a squishing sound. The boy jerks around, ready to lunge after him, but the first thing he sees is his uncle standing spraddlelegged by a small pile of fenceposts. He is staring at the boy, a pair of posthole diggers in one hand, and even as they make eye contact an expression flickers over his uncle’s face—a frown, it looks like to the boy, but whether he’s frowning at the boy or the swampy soil he labors over is hard to tell. He lifts the diggers up and drives them into the hole between his feet, but the ground is so wet that little more than a pinch of mud comes out in the blades, and on the next downward thrust the diggers strike a rock. His uncle sighs then, lets the diggers sit in the hole, which is less than a foot deep. By then the boy has reached him, and he looks up the crease between the barnyard and the hill of the north pasture. He counts eighteen new fenceposts. His uncle and Donnie have been at it since seven this morning, and it’s only just past four. There are still six more posts in the pile.

  The boy can tell from their bark and from a pile of twigs that have been stripped from them that the fenceposts are fresh-cut cedar, their sawed ends marbled brown and white. Cedar’s scarce on this side of the river. The abandoned house just west of his uncle’s is surrounded by them, but that land doesn’t belong to his uncle, who would have had to range far and wide over his own property in order to find this much cedar. But it’s a hardy water-resistant wood, well suited to the wet ground it’s going in—worth the effort, his uncle would say. Do it right the first time and you won’t have to do it again.

  The back of his uncle’s shirt is soaked with sweat and his pants all the way up to his thighs are splattered with mud. Useless work, he says now, taking a folded handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt and refolding it in an effort to find a dry patch. He wipes his forehead and eyes and puts the handkerchief back in his pocket. Useless place to put a fence.

  Since his uncle has spoken first the boy feels justified in asking a question.

  Why don’t you move it further up the hill?

  Wire won’t reach that far.

  What about closer to the barn?

  Barnyard’d be too small then.

  The boy is wondering if he should ask his uncle why he put the fence here in the first place when his uncle says, Wouldn’t never have put a fence here myself, but you make do with what you find. He is about to start up with the posthole diggers when he sees the boy still looking at him, and he lets go of the diggers and wipes his face with his handkerchief again. He looks down at Donnie, who is digging up one of the old fenceposts at the other end of the barnyard, and then he looks back at the boy.

  What do you know about where you come from?

  The boy looks at him, his fingers brushing at his chest.

  I’m from Brentwood? he says. Long Island?

  But his uncle is shaking his head.

  Long Island, he says, scowling, is not a place people come from. It’s a place they end up. They come from somewhere else. You, he says, and then he corrects himself. We are from further north. Your grandfather, mine and Lloyd’s father, had a farm in Cobleskill.

  The boy can’t imagine what a farm twenty miles to the north and west has to do with his uncle’s fence, and all at once he stabs his shovel into the ground and reaches for his uncle’s posthole diggers.

  Here, I’ll help.

  His uncle puts a hand on his arm.

  You should know this, Dale.

  The boy lets go of the diggers r
eluctantly. He looks around, finds his shovel again, holds it with both hands between himself and his uncle.

  Me and my father didn’t get along so well, his uncle is saying. Which is why your father inherited our farm.

  My father is a cook? the boy says, but he isn’t even sure of that now. He works at Pilgrim State Mental Hospital?

  Your father is a farmer. Just not a good one. He ran our place into the ground. Or didn’t run it you could say. Drank it away’s more like it, sold off the cows one by one and traded the land acre by acre for a couple of dollars or a bottle until finally the government seized what was left for taxes, while all the while I spent years working for other people until I managed to scrape up the money to put the down payment on this place. Not exactly the best land in the county but it’ll buy you a pair of shoes, eventually. That is, he finishes, if we ever get this fence up and get the ladies in the barn.

  He lifts the diggers and brings them down hard and the blades strike the rock they struck before and sing like a tuning fork. His uncle shakes his head and almost under his breath he says, Damn Lloyd. Drank away the farm and Nancy and—

  He stops when he sees the boy is still standing there, his eyes wide, the shovel gone slack in his hands.

  Aw no. You never heard of Nancy neither?

  The boy can only shake his head, not trusting himself to speak. He has never heard of their grandfather’s farm and he has never heard of Nancy either, but while the former is intriguing and scary and mostly very far away, there is something about the way his uncle had said the word Nancy—something about the way he’d said the word and right after it—that reminds him of the way the old man had said not again that day in the truck.