Greenville

by Dale Peck

  But his feet do. The Guernsey’s ear twitches, and then she lifts her face and looks at him. Ice has made two walrus tusks of her whiskers, but other than that she seems remarkably fresh, and for a moment the boy thinks everything will be all right. She has merely wandered off the track, overslept; needs only to be prodded. Indeed, she heaves herself to her feet at the sight of the boy, seesawing up her front end and then ratcheting her haunches up to meet it. Her tail switches free of the twigs. But after she is upright she just stands there, holding her right rear leg at an angle, a patient look on her face. If her expression had been pleading, if her eyes had asked for succor or empathy, the boy feels he might have been able to do something, but the look she gives him is transcendently inhuman. She is merely waiting for him to right the world. To make it worse, her crooked leg is wrapped round and round by a knotted helix of shiny wire.

  He falls twice in his flight down the hill. It is a good half mile to the road, a half mile that takes more out of him than any half marathon he ran in the fall, and by the time he finds his uncle he can barely pant out what he has to say.

  The lady. The hill. Her leg. A wire. I’m sorry, Uncle Wallace, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  The slowness of his uncle’s steps maddens him, and it is with relief that he takes off to the barn when he is told to fetch a halter and lead, a pair of snips. By the time he makes it back up the hill his uncle has reached the injured Guernsey, and he takes the halter from the boy and slips it over her face. The Guernsey stretches her head out eagerly for the halter, her faith in their ability to fix things absolute. She lets his uncle lead her two limping steps to a tree trunk, lets him tie her frozen nose against the rough brown bark. It’s not a birch, the boy thinks. Not a beech either, or a poplar. At least he knows that much. At least he knows what it’s not.

  The Guernsey’s not young, the boy sees now. Six, maybe even seven. You can tell by the udder: at this time of the morning it should be plump as a fully inflated basketball, but instead it’s stretched out, its milk pooling at the bottom like a horde of loose change in the toe of a sock. One of her teats is wrinkled too. Wilted really, shrunken like a desiccated radish.

  Talk to her. Pet her, try to keep her calm. But watch out for her feet.

  The boy doesn’t know what comes out of his mouth. Something: the Guernsey’s ears flick toward him, as do her eyes. He scratches the frost from her hide, attempts to massage her massive shoulders. But mostly he watches his uncle, who squats on his haunches in the snow and deftly snips off the crooked wire bit by bit. He unzips his jacket halfway and folds each little length of wire into the bib pocket of his overalls as if building a heart out of his lady’s suffering, and he works swiftly, silently, until nearly all the wire is gone. And then a sigh escapes his mouth, and he says,

  Aw no.

  It takes the boy a moment to see what has happened. What’s left of the wire is so thin and flimsy there doesn’t seem to be any substance to it. But somehow it has managed to puncture the Guernsey’s leg, pierced it right through like an arrow through a Valentine heart.

  After his outburst his uncle sets his jaw, and then he says, Steady now, and grips the wire in both hands, and then he jerks it free.

  The Guernsey screams. There is no other word for it. She screams like a child stung by a wasp even as her leg buckles and she falls into the boy, who feels the seismic impact of her shoulder then finds himself lying face up in the snow several feet away. A leafless branch is displayed against the low gray clouds like a filament from a torn spiderweb—or like a jab of brown lightning, the boy thinks, and it is as if he is waking up all over again in the old man’s truck on the day he arrived. The branch he’d seen through the windshield that morning had grown from a honey locust, but this one, well, it could be. But it could also be something else. He just can’t tell.

  When he stands up he sees that the cow is hanging now, by the rope that holds her to the tree. Her front legs shred the snow while her back lie as if trapped within the birth canal, and then it seems as if she remembers how to use them and all at once she is up, her front legs spread wide, her head hanging as low as the rope will allow. Her right rear leg doesn’t touch the ground though, but twitches slightly up and down, as though an invisible length of wire still secured it to her hip. A few drops of blood fall from the wound and blot the snow.

  The boy’s uncle heaves himself out of the snow where he too has fallen. He shakes his head, folds the last length of wire into the pocket of his overalls and zips his coat up over the lump of shredded metal.

  Untie her.

  When the boy loosens the rope from the trunk he sees that the lady’s weight has scored a ring in the papery bark, but he still can’t tell what kind of tree it is. He pulls on the lead but his uncle puts out a hand.

  She’ll come if she can.

  They stand about twenty feet from her, downhill, in the direction of the barns, and after a few minutes of heavy breathing the Guernsey lifts her head, looks at them.

  Come on girl, the boy’s uncle says. Come on.

  The boy holds his breath as she takes the first step. Please don’t fall, he thinks. Please, please don’t fall.

  She doesn’t. Her right hip drops as if her leg is sinking in quicksand, but then it rises again, and she walks slowly toward them. Twice she stops, seems to be contemplating lying down, but she doesn’t. A half hour later, just as they make their way through the eight-month-old fence to the barnyard, the boy hears his bus coming round the bend. He turns and sees it sailing up the smooth black river of 38 like a yellow barge, then turns back to the cow.

  Isn’t that your bus, Dale?

  The boy ignores his uncle, turns back to the Guernsey.

  Come on girl. Come on now, you’re all right, come on.

  He stares at the cow as if his sight alone is keeping her upright, and his uncle doesn’t mention the bus again. The Guernsey flounders as they veer into untracked snow. Her head droops from side to side as she walks, her muzzle practically dragging in the snow, and the boy begs her, Come on girl, that’s it, come on, but even as he speaks he remembers the Ayrshire who had tasted the milk from the vat on the day his uncle and aunt got married. Both elements—the injured Guernsey, the endless expanse of snow—seem like the inevitable amplification of that earlier scene; only his uncle’s marriage seems to have disappeared. For the first time in his life the boy has the sense that something, the land, history, time itself, absorbs all the things people forgo and forget. That their lives are running out like milk from the vat, no pump truck coming to redeem it for cash, no valve to close it up again. Nothing but an expanse of wet earth to mark its passing, memories as damp and smelly as a bath towel at the bottom of the hamper.

  They stall the injured Guernsey in the hay barn to keep her away from the jostles of the other ladies, and when the boy runs to the dairy barn for some food he passes the wire he snipped from the fence last April. The wire is still spooled around the willow switch where he left it. Aunt Bessie has ropes of garlic and onions in the fruit cellar that look just like this string of wire coils, but to the boy’s eyes it looks more like an ammunition belt, a string of grenades waiting to go off. The two C’s hang above them, carbon copying some unknown recipient with news of the boy’s crime.

  The injured Guernsey all but knocks the pail of food from his hand when he returns.

  She’s got her appetite, his uncle says. That’s a good sign. He looks down at the boy. You’d best be getting on to school.

  The boy watches her eat for a moment.

  Are you going to call the vet?

  His uncle shakes his head.

  She’s too old, Dale. Probably would have had to cull her the next time she calves no matter what happens.

  The lady lies down to digest her meal. There is the half-full udder, the wilted teat.

  The boy grabs the pail that had held her food.

  I’d better milk her.

  Donnie’ll get it.

  His uncle doesn’t look at t
he boy, and the boy has to resist the urge to grab his hand.

  I picked up all the wire, Uncle Wallace. I know I did.

  The lump of evidence to the contrary bulges in his uncle’s bib pocket like a goiter. It is only a little bit bigger than a fist or an apple. Bigger than a baseball, but not as big as a softball. His uncle doesn’t say anything, and after a moment the boy tries a different tack.

  What’re those C’s Uncle Wallace?

  His uncle’s expression doesn’t change for a moment, and then he surprises the boy. He smiles.

  Game we played when we was teenagers. Used to be a resort down by Cairo called the … the something. The C something. It had a big sign out in front. The Cairo? His uncle shakes his head. Funny, I don’t remember. All’s I remember is that boys used to dare each other to steal the C, when you took it off the sign said something else. Cairo, airo? I don’t remember Dale. But it seemed pretty funny at the time. Guess it was, at the time.

  The Guernsey rustles in the straw beside him, and the smile fades from his uncle’s face.

  Go on. Get Aunt Bessie to drive you to school.

  The first thing the boy sees when he goes into the hay barn that afternoon is that his uncle has put the ball of wire shards into a jar. They sit on the shelf next to the dead fuses and salvaged nails and string of wire coils, as if to suggest that their potential usefulness cannot be overlooked, despite whatever damage they might have caused, and as the boy looks from them to the stolen C’s hanging above them, he wonders which category the latter belong to.

  When he enters the Guernsey’s stall she does not get up, neither to eat or give milk. She will eat, she will give milk: she just won’t get up. She lies on her left side, her injured leg sticking straight out from her body and swollen to three times the size of its healthy twin. The boy’s uncle has applied his liniment to the leg, but that is all he can do for her. It all depends on what the wire hit, he says. Muscle, bone, ligament, tendon. But she walked all the way downhill. She’s eating. Those are good signs. Now all we can do is hope it don’t get infected.

  The boy brings the Guernsey breakfast and dinner in a pail, milks her by hand. Because she is lying down he has to milk her into a frying pan, stopping frequently to empty the milk into a pail. He finds the volume of milk heartening; it is nearly normal, for a cow her age. He cleans the manure from her matted tail and changes the urine-soaked straw twice daily. But even though she seems calm and free of pain she makes no move to get up, and the swelling in her leg doesn’t go down. By the fifth morning the boy notices that the pursed lips of the original wound have begun to ooze a thread of green mucus. The leg is hot to the touch, and soft, like an overripe tomato.

  When the boy reports this to his uncle he nods his head. He looks at the boy with his mouth set in a line as if he is trying to decide whether to say something. Throughout the ordeal he hasn’t mentioned the wire that he pulled from the injured Guernsey’s leg or how it might have gotten there, and he doesn’t mention it now. Instead he says,

  If the fever hasn’t broken in the morning you’ll have to put her down, and then he goes into the house to wash up for dinner.

  The boy cannot taste his food that night. His homework is incomprehensible to him. And yet he manages to clean his plate and fill in the blank pages of his notebook, and after he takes a bath he goes straight to bed. He thinks he is like a cow: his body does what it has been bred to do, leaving his mind free to focus elsewhere. He can hear his uncle and Aunt Bessie talking in the room below his, hears the tinkle of metal and glass echoing up the stairwell when Aunt Bessie washes the dishes from the pie she and his uncle have eaten, and when they go to bed the boy can hear that too: the opening and closing of drawers as pajamas are pulled out, the creak of bedsprings, his uncle’s quick steady snores.

  When he opens his eyes the curtains of his windows are two pale white squares. The moon is nearly full, and the snow-covered world glints and glows darkly. There’s still a light on in an upstairs bedroom of the Flacks’ house so it can’t be that late, and although the boy knows he should go back to sleep he gets dressed instead. The top drawer of his dresser tinkles when he opens it for a second pair of socks: four medals—two silver, a bronze, a gold—and the old man’s bottles. In the moonlit room he can almost see the old man’s ghost opening and closing drawers, hear his admonitions against waking his brothers and sisters, his mother. But this bed is empty, the upstairs hallway completely silent. He walks downstairs in his stocking feet and retrieves the new boots he got for Christmas from beside the banked embers of the kitchen stove and takes scant comfort in the fact that they are warm and soft, and fit comfortably, even over two pairs of socks.

  He eases out the back door. Outside, the darkness is dazzling, the earth a series of sharp shiny curves like the pieces of a broken glass bowl. But the wide-open silence seems like the hush that follows a great noise, and the boy jogs up to the hay barn with a premonition that he is already too late. Inside, the air has a sharper bite than outside, the refrigerator chill of a car first thing in the morning, but it is the darkness that takes the boy by surprise. He is three or four steps into the barn before he realizes he can’t see a thing. He freezes in his tracks, afraid to go forward or back lest a pit open up in the frozen dirt of the barn floor. The vertiginous feeling is not just uncomfortable. It is familiar, and the boy remains poised on the invisible precipice until he remembers the day his uncle told him about the first Dale Peck. He jumps as if someone has touched him on the shoulder in the dark barn, but then he pushes his namesake away rudely, goes back to the door and retrieves the flashlight hanging there on a nail, uses its beam to guide him to the injured Guernsey’s stall. She is holding her head up as he pushes open the door, but the flashlight’s glow isn’t powerful enough to capture any expression in her eyes. When she lays her head back down it lands on the straw with a thud, like something dropped.

  In this light her leg is soft, featureless, as swollen as a wineskin, the hoof shoved into it like a split cork. The boy need only train his beam on it for a moment to see that the situation is hopeless. His anger surprises him. How could she have betrayed his ministrations like this? He has washed the manure and urine from her coat with his own hands, dried her even, to prevent her from catching a chill. He has proffered handfuls of grain unadulterated by augured silage, held them on a piece of cloth to her mouth so that she could lick them up from her prone position. Doesn’t she understand the significance of his efforts? How can she repay him by dying?

  The Guernsey sighs, an almost human wheeze reflecting the pain and boredom of illness, even mortal illness, as if she were eager for it to be over. The sigh blows out the boy’s anger as if it were a candle, and in a moment he is on his knees beside her head, stroking it, sshhing her, willing her to be strong. The Guernsey’s ears twitch but other than that she doesn’t respond to his presence, his caresses. The ladies aren’t like dogs or cats; their neediness isn’t the neediness of pets. She neither tolerates nor welcomes his fingers, but simply lies there, as insensible as the weather. The boy notices he is shivering then. In the dark silent barn with the Guernsey unmoving before him there is nothing to do but feel the cold. Within minutes it is unbearable. A fit of shaking rattles his limbs with the fury of a pot boiling over and he has to clamp his lips between his teeth to silence their chatter. The boy feels guilty for even noticing the temperature. The lady at his feet is dying and all he can think of is returning to his bed. But when he thinks about it he realizes it isn’t the empty bed in Uncle Wallace’s house he is pining for, but the body-stuffed bed of his parents’ house, and before he can think himself out of it he has scooted between the lady’s legs and curled up against the swell of her belly.

  Its warmth surprises him. It is like pressing against a furry breathing boiler. The boy feels himself rocked by the power of the lady’s lungs. It is a gentle movement, slow but full. Sometimes the bed on Long Island would sway like that, when all four boys breathed in and out in time. But her bell
y is so warm! He curls into a ball, scrunches as much of his body as he can against her. How can this furnace be sick, injured, let alone near death? She is like a campfire you can hold in your arms or put on like a jacket. He wants to hold her in his arms but settles for holding his own belly. His arms snake inside the torn lining of his jacket and encircle his torso. It’s warm too, but not as warm as the lady’s. He senses her legs on either side of him, holding his curled body like hospital rails. He wants to be held inside like that. He wants to be held inside her belly, be reborn as a calf. He wants to place the soft teeth of his bottom jaw and the gummed bone of his upper around an udder and drink from the well of her body. But he’s a boy. What happens to boys? He feels the pink skin of the udder beneath his right cheek. Warm. Milk should be drunk warm. Not cold. He never wants anything cold again. Warm and pink from the blood that made it. Pale pink, like a flashlight shining through your fingers. When he was a child he sucked his fingers until his mother put Tabasco sauce on them and they burned his tongue. Lois sucked her fingers but she didn’t put Tabasco on Lois’s fingers because Lois wasn’t a boy. What happens to boys? His fingers don’t burn his tongue now. They don’t taste like veal. His fingers fill his mouth with a warmth that trickles down his throat. He misses his mother but the farm has replaced her. He thinks it would have been better if he had never seen her but at least he has the farm now, the warm farm he has crawled inside, that’s crawled inside him.