Greenville (10 page)

If I didn’t know better I’d think she enjoyed that, his uncle says. I’d almost say she had a spring in her step.

The boy cleans the hose and coils it up and then he and his uncle drive to the supply store to pick up a fuse to replace one that had blown in the boom collars that morning. The fuses come in packages of two, and it takes his uncle a couple of minutes to talk the counterman into splitting the package and selling him just the one he needs, and after they’ve screwed the housing back on the collars’ motor his uncle drops the glass fuse in a jar next to his jars of nails and screws and staples, and the coils of wire hanging on the willow switch. He uses the fuses as insulators, he tells the boy, on the electric fence he runs around the hog pen, when there are hogs in it.

Before they leave the barn the boy notices that there are two C’s hanging above the shelf of jars—the shelf itself is one of the horizontal joints in the barn’s frame, and the nails the C’s hang off poke through from the other side, meaning they’re part of the barn itself, not nailed into the wall for the sole purpose of holding them up. But he cannot imagine what use the C’s once had, or will have again. Perhaps they’re remnants of a sign that once spelled
WALLACE PECK
? The C’s are carved from wood in Gothic style and painted gold, most of which has long since flaked off, and the boy is about to ask his uncle about them when he hears the tractor pulling up outside. It turns out to be Donnie, hauling a cube of hay bales piled on the two-wheeled trailer behind his uncle’s old John Deere. Donnie waves to the boy’s uncle with his cap even as he whirls the tractor around and backs the trailer up to the hay barn. He pilots the tractor smoothly, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearshift, and the boy watches his performance intently, but it isn’t until Donnie shuts off the tractor that the boy remembers the ease with which the old man used to back out of the alley behind the Jew’s pharmacy. There is something else that links their activities—something about the finesse that the truly impoverished bring to behavior in lieu of property—but the thought is half formed, finds its only expression in one of the boy’s bare feet, which lifts off the ground and scratches the top of the other; and then a backfire makes the air between the barns and the house vibrate like a fly buzzing too close to his ear; and there is Donnie, hopping off the tractor and running his fingers through sweat-wet hair to separate it from his scalp.

The boy’s uncle pulls off his own cap and scratches his head
as Donnie puts his back on. A thick red line rings the older man’s nearly hairless scalp like the orbit of a moon.

Thought I gave you weekends off.

Donnie looks without blinking into the boy’s uncle’s eyes.

Just happened to be driving by that field on 81 and noticed it was ready to mow. Thought I might as well get on it.

Donnie continues to stare at the boy’s uncle for another moment, and then his eyes drop and he traces a circle in the dirt with his boot. The boy’s uncle rubs at the red line circling his head and then puts his cap back on.

Guess we best unload it then.

The cube is rectangular actually, its shape a magnification of the bales that compose it—ten bales wide, ten long, ten high. It takes a good hour to loft it into the hay barn, and on three separate occasions Donnie calls out Hey Amos! and throws a bale of hay at him. The first two times the fifty-pound bales knock the hundred-and-thirty-pound boy down, but the third time he manages to catch it and remain on his feet—at which point Donnie throws him another bale and knocks him to the floor. When they’ve finished the boy’s uncle invites Donnie to take the noon meal at Aunt Bessie’s house in town, and after they’re gone the boy eats a few slices of cheddar and a couple of last year’s apples—a tart Granny Smith, a sweet Macoun—and changes into his running shoes and sets off for his first eight-mile run.

The route he’s planned will take him up and around the Alcove Reservoir, which he drives past when he goes to church with Aunt Bessie. It’s almost ten miles roundtrip in the car, but he figures the back roads he’ll take will shave a couple miles off that. Still, eight miles is a big jump up from four and he tells
himself before setting out that it’s okay if he has to stop and walk part of it. But Coach Baldwin has also said he wants the boy to compete in the half marathon next year—thirteen miles—and the boy looks on this run as a test of his mettle.

He starts out east at an easy trot. Thirty-eight is a broad dirt road with no shoulder, just two shallow ditches that are mowed twice a year to keep the tree growth down, and so he runs on the right side of the road until he reaches the bottom of the hill where 38 curves north and a narrow rutted lane continues on to the east. His path takes him between the two parcels that make up his uncle’s land, the grass in the pastures long and fronded with seed and already yellowing as the June heat dries up the last of the spring runoff. At the boggy eastern edge of his uncle’s land the pasture has reverted to a strip of forest, and the boy thinks of the twenty-year-old trees as a miniature arboretum. Poplars seem to spring up the fastest, reaching head and shoulders above their neighbors. Their bark is still almost as smooth as a birch’s, just beginning to hoar up on the lower part of the trunks, but they’re weak trees, and scattered few and far between the hardier slow-growth oaks and maples and chestnuts. A row of black locusts is bunched at the side of the strip like a crowd waiting to get into a movie theater, and the spindle-branched sumacs that grow under the locusts look enough like the larger trees that they could be their children. The sprays of sumac leaves, already tinted red along their seams, make a thin but effective wall that hides the undergrowth deeper in the forest—which is mostly itch ivy anyway, as the boy found out a few weeks ago when he ventured in barefoot to retrieve one of the ladies. Here and there a constellation of white leaves marks a dogwood, and earlier in the
year he’d seen a lone redbud, glowing in the shadows like a barber’s pole.

It takes him just as much time to tick off these names as it does to run past his uncle’s land, and something seems fitting in that, as if a true correspondence existed between the land and language, the living trees and the forest taking root in his head. The damp soil, rich but rocky, the flume of silver and brown trunks erupting from it, the thousands and thousands of leaves as different each from the other as snowflakes. He notes the way a chestnut’s teardrop leaflets radiate from a common point like the spokes of a wheel whereas a locust’s smaller ovals are lined up along its stem like a string of Black Cats, sees how a maple’s leaf is five-fingered like a hand and how an oak’s is that same hand gnarled by amputation or arthritis. And he notes also his own limbs, his muscles and breath. It only takes a dozen paces before the soreness has melted out of his hamstrings and calves, a few more before his breathing falls into a rhythm with his feet, two steps per inhale, two per ex, as Coach Baldwin directed him. He listens to the sound his feet make when they strike the hard earth. Coach Baldwin—who despite his horn-rimmed glasses and permanent-press shirts has a mouth like a drill sergeant on the field—has pointed out that his feet are flatter than a whore’s back, and he has to take extra care to make sure he lands on the balls and not the heels. It’s all in the sound. Coach Baldwin told him that a hammer makes an awful racket when it pounds a halfpenny nail into a two-by-four but the nail makes almost no sound at all: the boy wants his feet to be nails, not hammers. What the boy thinks is that running is like giving milk. Something else does all the work and he is just pulled along in its
wake, and by the time he leaves the asphalt his mind has separated from his nearly silent feet and follows along like a balloon on a string. When a car honks and swerves past him he jumps a little, because he hasn’t heard it coming. By then he has left even his body behind, has given himself over to the land, this land that his uncle knows with a respect that goes beyond love. The boy wants to learn its language fully, wants to read it as his uncle does. Not just road signs and historical markers that hint at the past, but its moods, its temper. There are days when it seems to the boy that his uncle is tied to his farm as surely as he is to his shadow, and the boy hopes that if he surrenders to it as completely as his uncle has then perhaps the land will replace his own unwanted shadows, the old man, his mother, his brothers and sisters and especially the boy who walks around in his name just as he walks around in Kenny Flack’s boots. But it is hard to run away from something when all you know is that it has the same name as you.

Once he leaves 38 behind, the landscape darkens. To his left there is an old hemlock forest, to his right a younger stand of white pine. The hemlocks are grizzly but still shapely trees, the pines neater but more variegated in appearance, their soft wood easily molded by wind and weather. The splinter road has no ditches and the two forests crowd its track, dusting its northern edge with feathery hemlock needles and its southern with longer pine pins, and the peaty brown soil stretching out from both sides of the road is nearly devoid of undergrowth, just a little horsetail and gorse and here and there the occasional laurel still in bloom. He doesn’t know who owns the hemlock forest but the pines are part of his Great-Uncle Felter’s land. He planted them
himself, by hand, more than a quarter century ago. Great-Uncle Felter is the old man’s mother’s brother, and though Mary Felter Peck is long dead Great-Uncle Felter lives on in a white house on Route 32 on the southern side of town. He splits his own firewood with a sledgehammer and iron wedge and sows the seed corn in his garden with a soup of chicken guts, and he considers everyone from the boy’s uncle’s generation hopelessly lazy and everyone from the boy’s generation enslaved to machines, if not simply robots clothed in human flesh. The boy has only met Great-Uncle Felter twice, and on neither of those occasions did he see the man sit or stand still, even to eat, and he imagines that he sleeps on the run, mowing his lawn or reshingling his house or vetting a hog for the next morning’s bacon. His uncle only took the boy to see him once, out of duty. The second time they ran into him at the feed store, and they spoke fewer words to each other than they did to the man behind the counter.

His uncle has never volunteered an explanation for his distance from Great-Uncle Felter and the boy hasn’t asked, but snippets have come out in the same way that the story of the old man’s first wife and son came out. Apparently Mary Felter Peck had continued to live with Lloyd and Nancy and the first Dale Peck after they took over the farm in Cobleskill, and when Lloyd lost it, lost farm and wife and child, she had moved into Great-Uncle Felter’s house because the boy’s uncle wouldn’t take her in. This had something to do with the fact that his uncle’s first wife, Ella Mae, was dying of cancer at the time—died right there on that couch, his uncle told him one evening after supper, giving the boy a queasy feeling because he happened to be sitting on the couch—and Mary Felter Peck, who suffered from her
own host of ailments, was a burden he wasn’t prepared to accept. But still, it seems like ancient history to the boy, and he can’t understand why they don’t bury the hatchet while there’s still time.

Actually Ella Mae wasn’t his uncle’s first wife: she was his only wife. Aunt Bessie is not actually married to his uncle, which is why she keeps her own house in town and returns to it every morning to feed the two cats that still live there, and tend to the small garden from which she is always bringing radishes and carrots and tomatoes and cucumbers. Aunt Bessie also has a dead spouse, a man named Irving van Clouton, and she has two sons, Joel, who lives out in Rochester, and William, who grows organic vegetables in greenhouse pontoons on a farm in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. On this list of never-seen relatives there is also his uncle’s child Edith. In six months all he has learned is that she was widowed at the age of twenty-seven by the Korean War and is now raising a son whose name his uncle has yet to mention. It was Donnie Badget who told the boy that Edith had met her son’s father at a dance in Coxsackie just before he shipped out, and there is some doubt as to whether he gave her the wedding band she wears or if she bought it for herself when she found out she was pregnant. At any rate, her son’s father’s name is on his birth certificate, but his uncle has never said that name aloud either. Donnie said Edith lives in South Westerlo, less than twenty miles away, but for all his uncle has spoken of her she could be as lost as the old man’s first wife and child.

This time it’s a truck that rumbles past the boy, a flatbed Jimmy like the old man’s—a farm truck he understands now, where before he’d always thought the old man drove it because
there wasn’t a car big enough to carry his entire family. Two boys sit in the back of the truck as different in age as Kenny and Flip Flack but as alike in all other things as ears of corn cut from the same stalk. They stare at the boy and he stares back at them, and when the truck has put a little distance between them the older of the pair raises his hand and waves and turns back to his younger brother. By now the boy has left the pine and hemlock behind, and a pasture stretches out on the south side of the road, the fleur-de-lis shapes of a field of knee-high corn on the north. And why
is
this field pasture—freshly mowed, purple clover swirling low over the soil like heavy smoke—that field planted in corn? Is it because the former has poor drainage and tends to swamp up in the spring, a condition that doesn’t bother the ladies but doesn’t particularly agree with tractors; or is it because the latter belongs to the Kahalens, who think dairy farming is common and dirty? There is so much to learn.

His breath is still as smooth as when he started, his feet strike the earth with the clean sound of Aunt Bessie’s hoe clearing spidergrass from the front walk. They are fifty-four years old, Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie both, and have been together for nearly a decade, and sometimes Aunt Bessie jokingly asks his uncle if he’s ever going to make an honest woman of her. He will, his uncle jokes, the first day the ladies let him have off he will.