by Dale Peck
Useless as tits on a bull.
My only boy.
That’s it Lloyd, his mother says, talk yourself to sleep.
I’ll go to sleep when I’m good and ready, the old man says, louder. I’m trying to tell a story here.
And I’m trying to enjoy a few minutes of peace and quiet before I have to head off to the loony bin, so hurry it up already.
The old man doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then:
What were you saying about Dale?
I didn’t say nothing about Dale, finish your story.
Whatever’s on the table jumps and rattles under the old man’s fist.
He’s not going to no military school, I’ll tell you that much. My son is not going to military school.
Nobody said nothing about military school, Lloyd, finish your goddamned story already.
Boy belongs with his family.
Lloyd.
All right, all right. Where was I? Right. So I says to them, I says, Is that any way to call a cat? And they says back to me, Mr. Peck, Mrs. Bonnaducio is very obviously not a cat. And so I says, Yeah, but she don’t know that. And they’re all like, Mr. Peck, don’t you work in the kitchen? And I was like, Yes sir, I do work in the kitchen. I been working in the kitchen for fifteen years and I was a farmer before that, which is why I happen to know that if you want a cat to come you have to give it a saucer of milk. The old man chuckles. Yes sir, I said. If you want a cat to come, you have to give it a saucer of—
Finally! his mother’s voice cuts through the old man’s. I thought these eggs were never gonna cook. A plate settles on the table, and the boy hears her spatula scrape the contents of her pan onto it. A chair slides across the floor.
Pass me the salt, will you, Lloyd.
The salt shaker comes down heavily on the table. For a moment the only sound is his mother’s fork clinking rapidly against her plate. Then the old man’s voice:
She jumped.
The boy’s mother’s fork continues moving rhythmically over her plate.
Okay she didn’t jump. She fell.
Pass me the milk, Lloyd, the boy’s mother says, but only after taking several more bites.
The old man’s chair scrapes across the floor. The refrigerator opens, and when the milk bottle clunks on the table the boy has a sudden vision of them in his head, the milk bottle and the salt shaker, two clear glass containers filled with white and standing beside his mother’s white plate like a father and son at the racetrack, and then, when the old man speaks again, he has retreated to his bed. His voice comes from directly beneath the boy.
Okay she didn’t fall but she nearly did. She would have, if I hadn’t set out that saucer of milk.
Just happened to have a bottle with you? his mother calls across the house. That it, Lloyd? You just happened to be bringing a bottle of milk home to your family?
The boy hears the bed creak beneath the old man’s weight.
Well she wasn’t a real cat, Ethel. Why should I waste real milk? He speaks quietly, but both the boy and his mother hear him.
I know what kind of bottles you had on you, Lloyd. His mother’s plate lands in the sink so loudly the boy thinks she must have tossed it. And don’t think I won’t find em. I swear, sometimes I think I should be the patient at that hospital. I must be crazy, to stay married to a no-good drunk like you.
The bed creaks again.
That’s it, Lloyd. Go to bed now, now that I’m leaving. That’s it, stick your head under the pillow. Run and hide, Lloyd, just like you tried to hide your son. One of these days, Lloyd. One of these days you’re gonna drive me out on that ledge, and no saucer of milk is gonna get me back in. You hear that Lloyd? No saucer of milk is gonna fool me.
The boy waits until his mother leaves and the old man’s muffled snores fill the house before he gets out of bed. He tucks the sheet around Gregory even though it’s hot and stuffy in the loft, and then he fixes the hanging sheet between the boys’ bed and the girls’. Now that Duke’s gone and Jimmy’s taken his place on the far side of the bed, it’s continually bunched up in the center of the rope, Edi’s head visible at one end, her feet at the other, like a magician’s assistant about to be sawed in half.
The old man managed to take off his shoes, the boy sees as he descends the ladder. He lies on his bed spread-eagled, his soiled kitchen whites only slightly lighter than his dark socks and only slightly darker than the pillow over his face. The quilts hang on their ropes on either side of the bed like the curtain at a puppet theater, and the boy draws them around the old man’s crooked limbs before heading first to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, where the coffeepot’s still on the table, still warm, an oaken cutting board beneath it as a trivet. A pair of flies mate on the lip of the open bottle of milk—the salt shaker’s right next to it, just as he’d imagined—and the chairs around the maple table have almost as many names as the family that sits in them: a one-armed Windsor at the far end, an armless at the near, in between a mixture of rickety ladderbacks with unraveling rush seats, uncomfortable straight-backed school chairs, and one kitchen stool, ostensibly Gregory’s, though all the children like to sit in its high seat and use their feet to open and close the hinged steps via which the stool is converted to a stepladder—a convenience the low-ceilinged house has no use for at all.
The boy adds some water to the coffeepot and puts it back on the stove, then sits on Gregory’s stool, holding a bowl of corn flakes in his hands and eating it while the coffee comes back to a boil. He’s halfway through his second cup when he hears tiptoeing in the loft above him. A giggle trickles out from behind pressed-together fingers. The boy keeps his head cocked as though looking down into his cup but peers up through his bangs at the loft. Lance and Gregory and Lois are lying on the floor in a row, only their eyes visible between the edge of the loft floor and the lowest rung of the guard rail. He stares at the guard rail a moment, a pale pine two-by-four, nearly white save for one whorled knot that glows out of it like the eye of a peacock feather. Since he’s come back from the farm he’s noticed things like that, the fact that the cutting board is made of oak, the kitchen table of maple, the guard rail pine. The names of all those chairs. It bothers him a little bit, the fact that his uncle’s and his parents’ houses are built from the same materials. But things seemed to fit together naturally Upstate, whereas here they are merely cobbled together, fastened roughly with half-hammered bent-over nails and waiting to break beneath your weight.
Gregory giggles, and Lois sshhes him loudly. The boy sips the last of his coffee, pretending to ignore the steady stream of giggles and whispers above him, then stands and takes his cup to the sink. Up above him his siblings press their faces to the floor like ostriches, the sleep-tangled tops of all three heads plainly visible. His mother’s plate is in the sink, a white disk eclipsing the black cast iron skillet in which she’d cooked her eggs, and the boy stares at them a moment, then suddenly grabs the wet rag and whirls. His shot catches Gregory on the top of his head, and his scream ignites Lois and Lance. Within a minute they’re running screaming around the loft, and then he’s up there with him, Gregory under one arm, Lois and Lance curled around his ankles like a pair of ball-and-chains, all three of them screaming and laughing at the top of their lungs.
Got me a sack-a feed here, the boy says out loud. Guess I’d better go feed the cows.
No, no! Lois screams. He’s not food, he’s a boy!
The boy drags his feet one after the other toward the edge of the loft. Them cows is pretty hungry, I bet. Liable to eat up a whole sack of feed.
No, I’m a boy! Gregory screams.
Yes sir, I’m gonna pour this sack-a feed into the trough, feed me some cows.
A boy! Gregory screams, I’m a boy, a boy!
The boy holds Gregory by his ankles over the edge of the loft and shakes him like he is dumping out a sack of food. Gregory’s arms flop over his head and then his undershirt rolls down as well, so that only his hands are visible beneath
the hem, like a two-handled umbrella.
Daddy, help! Gregory screams through his laughter. Wake up, Daddy, Dale’s feeding me to the cows! Wake up! Help!
Jesus Christ, Dale, give it a rest already.
The boy looks over to see Jimmy propped on one elbow in bed.
It’s nine o’clock in the fucking morning, some of us are trying to sleep.
In his hands, Gregory is still twitching, even though the boy has stopped shaking him.
Jimmy, help! Dale’s feeding me to the cows, help!
Don’t you have to go to work? Jimmy says, then turns over and pulls the pillow over his face.
When the boy looks back at Gregory he realizes his little brother is wearing the pair of Lance’s drawers he took Upstate with him last year. Lance, all of whose clothes do time with one or two or three older brothers before coming to him, made a big show of reclaiming the drawers and then presenting them to Gregory, the first thing he’s handed down, the first thing Gregory has received. The youngest Peck has worn them every chance he’s gotten since then, even though they’re too big for his tiny waist and thin, thin legs. His ankles are no bigger than a cow’s teats, the boy thinks as he lifts him back over the top railing—a warped pine one-by-six riddled with knots and furzed here and there with strips of bark.
When the boy sets Gregory upright his brother continues to hold his shirt over his face like a lampshade. The boy can see the top of Gregory’s head over the inverted hem, but Gregory stares right into the white field in front of his eyes.
Play! Gregory says in a baby voice. No work! Yes play!
No, Jimmy’s right, the boy says. I gotta get ready to go.
Play! Lance says. He and Lois are still clinging to the boy’s ankles, and they shake him as though he were a coconut tree. Play!
Play! Lois echoes.
The boy tries to step free of them but they refuse to let go.
C’mon, guys, I gotta take a bath.
No bath, play! Lance says. Bath bad, play good!
In front of the boy, something is happening to Gregory’s undershirt: it seems to be spiraling down a drain like bath water. The boy realizes Gregory is chewing on his shirt.
Gregory, what are you doing?
Behind the shirt, Gregory makes a sucking noise.
I’m a baby cow, Dale, he says, his voice muffled by a mouthful of white cotton. He giggles. I’m sucking on my mother’s tit.
All at once the boy grabs the shirt and rips it off Gregory’s head and throws it to the floor.
Enough with the goddamned milk already. The word is calf, Gregory, and boy calves end up in the veal pens. And you’d better not let Dad hear you using language like that or you’ll be sucking on more than an undershirt.
Gregory stares at his brother with a stunned look on his face, not sure if they’re still playing. His naked arms are still standing straight up from his shoulders.
The boy rips his ankles from Lance’s grip, Lois’s.
Let go, I gotta take a bath. You guys can entertain each other for once.
His three siblings stare after him mutely as he heads out of the loft. He is halfway down the ladder when he sees Joanie lying on her stomach on her bed, looking at him.
You okay, Dale?
He pauses on the ladder, his head just above floor level. A miniature mountain range of dust swirls underneath the bed closest to him, his and his brothers’. Jimmy’s shoes are there as well—a brand-new pair, bought just before the boy’s return—and a single white sock.
Yeah, I’m fine. I gotta go to work, I’ll see you later.
The boy runs a few inches of cold water in the bath, telling himself it’s too hot to build a fire in the stove in the basement. But it’s too cold to sit in the water for more than a couple of minutes and he scrubs himself quickly and then tries to rub some warmth back into his limbs with a towel. By the time he’s finished he’s wet all over again, with sweat, and Joanie is in the kitchen pouring bowls of cereal for Lance and Lois and Gregory. Jimmy and Edi are still asleep upstairs, the old man snoring in his quilted-off bedroom.
The boy gives Joanie a little kiss on the forehead before he heads off to the market.
You’re prettier, he whispers.
Gregory, don’t you dare throw that cereal at Lance! Lance, what did I just tell Gregory! She looks up at the boy. What’d you say?
Nothing. I’ll see you later, sis.
Joanie squeezes his hand.
I’m glad you’re back, Dale.
The boy squeezes back, but doesn’t say anything.
At the market nothing is heavy enough. Nothing tires him out. Crates of Florida oranges and Long Island cabbages, jumbo cans of pineapples and peaches and peas. They’re so light he could juggle them. They don’t seem worth the trouble of moving from the truck to the storeroom, the storeroom to the floor. He can hardly believe people are willing to pay for them. There is nothing in the market with the real weight of a pair of milk pails, one in each hand, or a bale of hay as big as he is. Nothing that could possibly exhaust him, so that when he goes home he will be able to sleep through another night of his mother and the old man. Even though he pulls nine hours—he was only scheduled for four—he still feels he could run a half marathon. Not that that would do him any good. His mother has already told him he won’t be taking up that foolishness when school starts in the fall. The family needs his earnings from his job at the market and he won’t be taking time off for practice. His earnings today consist of a bag of oranges. Seven of them. Mr. Krakowski, the produce manager, knows that there are eight children in the Peck household, but he doesn’t know Duke has joined the marines. Sorry Dale, he says with a smirk when he pays him. Guess someone’s gonna have to share.
And now he cannot walk home slowly enough. For a year and a half he ran from one task to another on the farm, never enough time to get everything done in a day. Now he doesn’t know how to stretch out the minutes, the blocks. Before he knows it he is standing in front of his ridiculous house. In a street of identical single-story rectangles sided in asphalt shingles, the one-and-a-half story wooden octagon his family lives in juts out like a guard tower on the edge of a prison wall. The house had been Brentwood’s first school, years and years ago, before they built the modern brick building around the corner on First Street. It had been falling apart even before his family moved in, suffered from its middle-of-the-last-century construction: no electricity, no plumbing or gas, no interior walls. Just one room with eight sides, each a little bit shorter than a regular-sized couch. Over the years, in brief fits of sobriety, the old man had built the kitchen and bathroom wing, turned the attic into a loft for the kids, plumbed and wired it, even built the garage, and it occurs to the boy as he turns up the driveway that the old man must have some natural ability besides drunkenness. The materials he worked with were cheap and not particularly sturdy, but they’re still standing after more than a decade of hard use. The appliances work, and the fixtures. At some point the old man must have showed a lot of promise, the boy thinks, even as he gets ready to climb up the soft incline of the shade tree that has lain in front of the garage door ever since the old man cut it down five years ago. Five good-sized saplings have sprung up from the base of the tree. They ring the stump like candles stuck into the edge of a birthday cake, and even as the boy pushes them out of his way he remembers how one of the cedar fenceposts he’d planted with his uncle last year had sprouted up the same way. As soon as he saw them his uncle sheared off the saplings with a hatchet. Let it keep growing, he said, and it’d pull your whole fence down. The fencepost had put out seedlings all through summer and fall that his uncle had diligently excised until the frost set in, and the following spring—this spring, the boy reminds himself, just a couple months ago—it had admitted defeat. That’s what you want, his uncle had said. You don’t want it to grow. You just want it to be there.
The boy is climbing onto the slanted trunk when he sees a red plastic ribbon tied around one of the saplings, and even
as he is fingering it he realizes he saw several such ribbons on his walk home. He looks over at the big tree in the Slovak’s yard next door, notes first that there is a ribbon tied around its water heater–sized trunk and then that it is an elm, and then he looks further up the block. Almost every yard has an elm in it, and every elm is belted by a bright red ribbon. The boy doesn’t know what they’re there for but he knows it can’t be good news.
The boy pushes the saplings aside, mounts the slanted trunk and works his way up the rough bark from branch to branch. About halfway up the trunk one of its branches lies alongside the window to the loft, and the boy, following Duke’s example, has often used it to sneak out at night, and sometimes, as now, to sneak in. But today he needn’t have bothered. Gregory and Lance are upstairs playing with a set of Lincoln Logs, and they scream when the boy crawls through the window, abandoning their tiny unroofed cabin to jump up and tackle him, almost tumbling him back out the window. The boy barely has time to set down his bag of oranges before they knock him to the floor, and he is lying beneath them pretending to be pinned when his mother’s voice cuts through the warped plywood the three boys are piled on.
All right, enough-a that nonsense. Get on down here.
She doesn’t say his name but she doesn’t have to.
We got him Ma! Gregory calls. We got him pinned!
I can hear that honey, but let him up now. He’s got work to do.
The boy kicks off his shoes before heading downstairs. He takes the bag of oranges with him, so he won’t have to come back up for it. The first person he sees is Jimmy, sitting at the kitchen table in Gregory’s stool. His mother is sprawled on the couch with a True Confessions in one hand, which she rolls up and points at the bag.
What do you got there?
The boy gives her the bag and she sits up and dumps it out on the floor, using her magazine like a shepherd’s staff to keep the oranges from straying too far, then counting them. She counts them twice, touching each orange with the tubed magazine as if she were conferring benediction or playing duck-duck-goose, then looks up at the boy.
