by Dale Peck
I don’t care what you do. Burn the place down, I don’t care. It ain’t Uncle Wallace’s, it don’t concern me.
What’s your uncle’s is yours. That how it goes Amos?
The boy is about to leave without replying when he notices an ashtray on the narrow mantel above the fireplace, and then, when Donnie crushes his cigarette on a worn pine floorboard, the boy sees a few other butts scattered around his feet. He glances around the tiny room then, but all he can make out in the dim light is that time has stripped it of everything, not just paint and plaster and straight lines but size, space. Although the room was probably the house’s main parlor, the boy cannot imagine it ever being large enough to contain anything besides himself and Donnie and that ashtray. A real ashtray, not a recycled can of tuna fish or green beans but cut glass, gleaming dully in the thin light, and cradling a dozen white butts like eggs in a nest of ash.
Who owns this place?
Donnie’s eyes follow the boy’s, see him looking at the ashtray.
Not your uncle, that’s for sure. Not you. He taps the soft curve of the plaster wall with his foot. Used to think I might buy it someday but it looks like that ain’t gonna happen either, thanks to you Amos. He kicks the wall again, harder, and the boy hears grains of plaster trickling through the lathe. This house was built in seventeen hundred and sixty-one, Donnie says with something like awe in his voice. It is older than our nation.
With a glance the boy takes in the four corners of the room. It seems hardly larger than one of the stalls in the hay barn. He is five feet two inches tall, but he’s pretty sure that if he wanted he could touch the ceiling with his fingertips. Were people shorter then, he wonders, before the Declaration of Independence?
Donnie is lighting another cigarette.
Thought I had my future all mapped out. I did. Work with Wallace until I’d put back enough money to buy this piece, then pick up Wallace’s too, when he was ready to retire. Who knows, maybe he’d’ve even left it to me. It don’t look like he and Edith are gonna bury the hatchet any time soon. But all that was before you come along and decided you wanted to be a dairy farmer. I gotta hand it to you, Amos, you played your cards right. You work hard, keep outta trouble. You’re a regular Tom Sawyer, Amos, a true credit to the family line.
The boy has to stand on tiptoe to run his fingers along the ceiling, but when he does a puff of plaster dust falls on his face, and just before he closes his eyes against the dust he suddenly sees that the little room is not empty, but as full of Donnie’s empty future as the west wing of his uncle’s house is filled by an equally untenable past. When he rubs his eyes it is less an effort to wipe the dust from them than to clear those shadow lives away, and when he speaks his voice surprises him almost as much as it seems to surprise Donnie.
What were you gonna do with two houses?
His voice surprises him because even as he asks the question it occurs to him: he has two houses. Here, and on Long Island.
What?
I don’t understand, the boy says slowly, why you would need two houses. Uncle Wallace don’t even use all of his.
Ten people sleep under one roof in the house on Long Island—nine, with him gone—and although that house has many inconveniences he never once thought it too small. He swipes at his eyes again, clears his throat.
A man can’t live in two houses, he says as forcefully as he can. He’s got to choose.
Donnie drops his half-smoked cigarette to the floor, but when he speaks there is a fire in his voice where the cigarette had been.
I don’t know, Amos. Maybe I wouldn’t choose. Maybe I’d sleep in one house one night and the other house the next. I’d have options. Two beds instead of one. Breakfast here, dinner over to Wallace’s, flip a coin for supper. Maybe I’d tear one down and live in the other, maybe I’d pitch a tent on the front lawn and leave em both empty. Two houses is options, Amos. But thanks to you I don’t have no options no more. Once your uncle finishes teaching you everything he taught me I probably won’t even have a job.
He pauses then, uses his heel to grind out the smoldering cigarette on the floor. In the dim light his face is nearly invisible, his expression inscrutable, his voice as cold as the butt beneath his boot.
But I guess you didn’t figure on Wallace getting married, did you, Amos? That throws a wrench in the works, don’t it?
The boy blinks.
What?
Wallace and Bessie, Donnie says. You might have noticed they ain’t around? They’re getting married, Amos. They’re down at the courthouse this very minute.
As always the boy finds it hard to pull his head from Long Island once it goes back there, and he has to shake it back and forth to empty it.
I don’t understand.
What’s not to understand, Amos? Wallace is making Bessie his wife and heir and this farm you thought was yours is gonna go to her and hers.
Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie …
Who knows, Amos, maybe they’ll even have a kid themselves. Their own boy, instead of a hand-me-down. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Wallace said he’d be back by suppertime. When the boy doesn’t say anything Donnie stamps on his cigarette butt one last time. Guess we’d best get in the ladies, huh Amos?
Donnie pulls the door closed behind them, locks it with a padlock the boy hadn’t noticed when he went in, puts the key in his pocket. As they are pushing through the tangled cedar break—the boy thinks Donnie deliberately lets a branch snap back and smack him in the face—the boy says, How’d you know how old it was? The house?
Donnie doesn’t say anything until they have made their way out of the cedars, then just jerks a thumb back at the house’s roof. The point of the eave sticks above the cedars. Nestled beneath it the boy can just make out four rusted numbers: 1761.
Don’t take a high school diploma to figure that one out, Amos, Donnie says when the boy trots after him. Any more questions?
Technically, Donnie’s prediction comes true. It is after eight when the boy’s uncle and aunt return, but he doesn’t eat until they come in. Instead he goes to his bedroom and does his homework after he and Donnie finish with the ladies, and he stays up there until he hears voices on the front lawn. Just one voice actually, Aunt Bessie’s, punctuated by the shapely silence with which his uncle asks and answers questions.
As if commemorating their new status, his aunt and uncle enter through the front door instead of the kitchen. His uncle is dressed in his work clothes but Aunt Bessie sports the dress she wears to church. A shiny smile cuts her chin as if stamped there by a cookie cutter, but in his uncle’s eyes the boy sees the same defiant cast he’d seen in the old man’s the day they drove up here. For a moment he imagines his uncle is drunk but then he realizes his uncle is afraid. Of himself. Of what he’s done.
They wear mismatched rings—the rings each wore for their first marriages—but Aunt Bessie shows hers off like it is brand new.
Your uncle is a crazy man Dale, she says, holding out her hand. There is a flush to her cheeks, a wild dazzle to her eye. You would think she’d just married a soldier the night before he ships out. She lets the boy examine her ring then heads for the kitchen. Pots and pans rattle out of cabinets behind him, something thumps and wobbles on the warped cutting board.
His uncle is still standing in front of the door, looking at him. His right hand twists the ring on his left for a moment, and then he puts his left hand in his pocket. From where the boy is standing he can see the two doors that open off the hallway: the closed door to his uncle’s left that leads to the unused part of the house, the open one to his right, leading to the empty living room.
Wild, Aunt Bessie says in the kitchen, as if the men have followed her in. Impulsive. Devil may care. Happiness bubbles out of her voice like water from a tap even as her knife clunks through whatever’s on the cutting board.
The boy can see his uncle’s left hand outlined against the thin fabric of his pants, his thumb still playing with the ring on his fi
nger. He stares at the boy with eyes filled with fear and defiance, guilt and pride, and even as he returns his uncle’s stare with his own silent question the boy has a glimmer of understanding about how a man can fail to fill up even the one house he has chosen to live in. How he can empty it, in fact, rather than fill it. Lives pour into houses, pour out again, but in the end only the houses remain: names on signs and dates on walls only remind you of what’s gone before; cardboard boxes don’t hoard the past, they hide it. But all the boy wants to know is, has he outlived his usefulness? Is it his turn to be sent away, just like the first Dale Peck? The boy’s eyes bore into his uncle’s but all his uncle does is twist the ring on his finger inside his pocket, and then he shrugs, as if responding to something someone has said.
You and Donnie get the ladies in okay?
The boy looks at his uncle blankly. It is a question without an answer. His uncle might as well ask him if he lit the hay barn on fire. As if acknowledging this, his uncle strides past him to the kitchen and pulls open the door to the woodstove.
Freezing in here, he says, and puts another log on the fire. He leaves the door open until the log crackles, and then he shuts it and sits down at the table. At the counter, Aunt Bessie’s voice sings through slices of her knife and the sharp aroma of onions.
Just let me get this on, I’m sure you’re both starved.
When the boy sits down in the chair opposite him, his uncle looks up as if surprised he’s there. His eyes dart back and forth. Then:
You and Donnie get the ladies in?
Again, the boy only stares at him, and his uncle’s eyes fall to the table. But almost immediately they lift up, and he breaks into a sheepish grin.
I married her, Dale. I said if the ladies gave me a day off I’d marry her, and I did.
It isn’t just the memory of Donnie’s words that makes his uncle’s unpleasant, alien. They’re an adult confidence, speaking of a freedom the boy doesn’t have. To make choices, whether wrong or right. To take a wife, have children, leave either or both behind.
The boy realizes Aunt Bessie’s knife hasn’t made a sound for a while, and he looks up to see her regarding him and his uncle with a soft, almost glazed focus. When she catches the boy’s eye her smile stamps itself on her face again.
Wasn’t really the ladies gave you the day off, she says. More like the county. Or Dale for that matter. Donnie couldn’t-a got the milk in himself.
His uncle looks up at her, then looks back at the boy. A smile flickers over the corners of his mouth.
Guess you got a point there, Bess. He nods at the boy. Guess I owe you a thank you, Dale.
Behind him the log cracks in the fire, and the boy feels the room has suddenly heated up ten degrees.
Look at the two of you, Aunt Bessie says. Like enough to be father and son. My boys. My two boys. And she touches the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her dress. Must be the onions, she says, and turns suddenly. It’s gonna have to be stew again, she says loudly. If we want to eat before midnight.
The boy turns back to his uncle. What Aunt Bessie says is true: he can see the old man’s shape wiggling inside his uncle’s in an effort to get out, but what does his uncle see when he looks at him? It’s been weeks since he’s thought of the other Dale Peck but he keeps coming up tonight, and the boy suddenly realizes he’s swallowed his predecessor whole. That he lives his namesake’s life as much as his uncle lives the old man’s. For a moment everything disappears then, Aunt Bessie, the house, the table and chairs, and there is just the two of them, his uncle and himself, mirror images folded along a seam like an inkblot, both the original and its paler echo devoid of any identity save what is projected onto them.
It’s the regular thumps of Aunt Bessie’s knife that cut the fantasy away piece by piece: gradually the table resumes its shape beneath his forearms, becomes the same rectangle it has always been. His uncle’s forearms rest on the same rectangle and the thin gold crescent on the fourth finger of his left hand, the only thing new to the room, seems as inconsequential as the dirt under his fingernails. They are who they have always been, two dairymen waiting for dinner: dinner, sleep, morning reveille and sixty swollen udders eager to be drained, world without end, amen. Donnie was lying, the boy suddenly realizes, or he was just wrong: his uncle’s marriage doesn’t have anything to do with him. It doesn’t change his life. With a sigh, he lets out the breath he’s been holding since five o’clock that afternoon, and the air seems to push at the four corners of the little room until everything is back the way it was.
Dolly came in today. Fifteen quarts. That means she’s gonna drop soon, right?
His uncle nods his head.
Before Thanksgiving probably. She’s had two boys in a row, she’s due to give us a little lady. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
The boy’s head nods, an unconscious echo of his uncle’s. But then something occurs to him.
What happens to the boys, Uncle Wallace?
His voice sounds tight to his ears, but his uncle doesn’t seem to hear it. He’s gone back to fiddling with his ring.
Not much use for boys in a dairy herd, Dale.
The boy’s head nods. So what happens to them? The ones you don’t want? What do you do with them?
His uncle looks up then, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. He pauses, then says,
Well, we do keep one or two around, for stud.
The boy realizes his head is still nodding, and he stops with a twitch. But he continues staring at his uncle until the latter’s eyes fall to the table.
Veal, he says, shrugging, just as Aunt Bessie turns with a pot in her hands.
Soup’s on, she says, and, in a gesture whose benevolence will haunt the boy until the end of his days, she serves him first.
The next morning he wakes to find that it’s snowed. Not even an inch, but that first snowfall seems to turn a key in the sky, and for the next several months it snows at least once a week. Shovelfuls of it, from fluffy weightless powder that blows back in his face as fast as he scoops it away to frozen chunks as solid and heavy as broken pieces of granite. Soon enough everything is covered: the front walk, the driveway, the paths to the hay and dairy barns. What had been a thirty-second run up the hill takes thirty minutes or an hour the day after a snowfall, when, for the tenth time that winter, he must shovel the path clear. By the turn of the year the snow has made igloos of everything regardless of its original shape. Donnie’s dream house domes over like a funerary mound and even the spindly sign by the driveway supports a translucent white arc as thin as a section of rollercoaster, as though a sheet has been laid over it.
His uncle and aunt’s marriage seems to disappear too, as though a sheet had been laid over that as well. The morning after the wedding his uncle put his ring in a box on his dresser—the same box he took it out of to get married—and a couple mornings after that Dolly calved. A boy. Her third in a row. The calf got a week on the farm before the road crew finally finished 38 and the panel truck from Carol’s Meats could get in to take him away. The thin asphalt road bisected the newly white fields like a magic marker stripe on a blank sheet of paper, so smooth and quiet that the boy could hear the calf’s confused cries long after the truck disappeared over the hill.
But this morning in the middle of February there has been no new snow. It is too cold for snow, too cold even for fog. The dew is one more frozen sheen of white over the farm, and his and his uncle’s boots ring with a metallic echo as they make their way up to the dairy barn. Even the teats of the ladies feel cold as he hooks them to the milking machines—at least at first they do. After a half dozen plunges into the pail of cleaning water his fingers are so numb it’s all he can do to handle the claw without dropping it. His uncle finishes well ahead of him, and the boy hears him walking the alleys as he struggles to hook up the last of the cows. There are only fifty-seven wet ladies, and the boy is wondering what his uncle is looking for when he hears,
We’re missing someone.
T
he boy looks up to see his uncle standing with his hands on his hips. Beneath the brim of his hat his brow is wrinkled.
A Guernsey.
The boy doesn’t question his uncle because he cannot conceive of his uncle erring when it comes to the farm. But he also cannot grasp what it means to be missing a cow, and he says nothing.
His uncle pulls his hat down around his ears.
Have to go and find her.
It takes little more than a glance out the barn door to ascertain there is no black-spotted mass amid the sparkling sea of white. There are only two patches of trees on the land where the missing Guernsey could be concealed—the new growth at the southeast edge by 38, and the older stand at the top of the hill. When his uncle sets off toward the road, the boy makes his way uphill.
He uses a cow path to help him navigate through two feet of snow. The depth of the trail testifies to the ladies’ weight, but it is its narrowness that impresses him—though the ladies weigh five or ten times what he does, he must walk Indian style to keep his feet between the snow embankments carved out by their hooves. Their trail parallels the line of honey locusts up the hill, and as the boy walks he peers into their jagged shadows. But though a hundred smooth mounds of snow could conceal a hundred cows underneath, the only things that poke from the wrinkled white blanket are the dark trunks of the trees, creaking in a breeze that picks up as he ascends the hill. The cold wind cuts through his layers, slivers of blown snow sting his cheeks as he looks around. His cheeks throb, as do his hands and feet, and heart, for he dreads both the idea of coming upon a frozen carcass and also the impact a lost cow will have on the farm’s fortunes, especially after the disaster with 38 and the pump truck last November.
He finds her near the top of the hill. She lies on her side in a thicket crowding the base of a slanting tree, and even as he takes in the way her thin legs stick out from her torso like toothpicks from balled melon, he notes that he cannot name either the tree or the bushes of the thicket. Without their leaves they are as anonymous as an Angus without its eartag. He sees how the cow’s breath had carved a box canyon in the snow in front of her muzzle, sees that the fine black hairs at the end of her tail have gotten tangled in the twigs above it so that it looks as if she is hanging by a frayed rope, and he sees also that his observations are useless to both him and the prostrate animal, two facts at either end of its body and somehow divorced from what lies between. The thicket could be hackberry or deerberry, wild privet or mountain laurel, the tree chestnut or ash. Even if he knew, it wouldn’t wake the animal fallen in their thin shelter, her white body blending in with the snow and only the black patches on her coat showing up like splotches of tar.
