Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner

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СКАЧАТЬ but not in unbelief. He remembered her steel will well enough, this righteous fearless matriarch, heard without clamor and powerful without menace, upright before her god but wavering now in the flesh, and this weakness made him ambivalent toward her, a mixture of embarrassment and pity, as if such degeneracy should be hidden away rather than seen, displayed even as she was in her own back yard. What loathing did he possess toward the weak and dying. What latent dread. Yet this woman, even now on her deathbed, old and venerable and immovable, wielded a power that was hard to understand. She was an oracle, a quiet might to be reckoned with, and he was unsure how to approach the battle. She was as good as slain by the diseases that troubled her, yet her control was in place and would outlast her.

      He looked back up at the sky, finding the jet again and watching it bloom a dual contrail behind it, watching closer as the vapor shot out the back of the engines, slowed, held, and expanded. Some of the contrails that crossed overhead were sheer wisps like fragmented cirrus clouds. He imagined the tall cities like clustered stands of trees around the curve of the earth in all directions, the places he had never been and would perhaps never see, the places these jets were going. Blair came out of the house and approached them.

      —Come on dear, he said. Let’s get you back inside.

      Adelaide, her head bowed lower now and shaking with bared nerves, the fixed smile of the aged on her lips, tried feebly to raise her arms like a child would as her husband of fifty-two years approached.

      He spent the morning of the next day and part of the afternoon with the dog, shirtless, sweating in the sun and repairing the long fence line that edged the hillside above the river bottoms. It was their largest field, sprawled out like a lake, lapping up to the barnyard on one end and the farmhouse on the other. It was from this field that they harvested the bulk of their alfalfa crop each year. He rolled alongside two miles of serpentine fence in his truck. In the back lay a spool of barbwire and what Elmer called the neck stretcher, a pile of steel fence posts and a post driver, tie wire, a sack of fence staples, a hammer, and a shovel. He took a pair of fence pliers from the glovebox and stuck them in his back pocket and worked at tightening and splicing loose or broken sections of wire. It was quiet, careful work, the only sounds his breath around soft execrations and the clatter and tweak of his tools. He mended the fence and enjoyed the solitude of it, the time to work slowly and do something well and completely. There were still many wooden posts on this line. The fence had been built with wooden posts entirely, denuded crowns of trees, as big in girth as a man’s shoulder and tapering off toward the top with the nubs of cut branches natural supports for the wire, but each year before sorting the heifers he ran this line and when he found a post rotten or leaning or suspended in the air he dug it up and replaced it with a steel post. He stretched the hours also and finally at the far end climbed through the fence and sat a few minutes with the dog at the edge of the hillside overlooking the slow river. He lifted her ear and looked at the healing tears. She was just past a pup, a Brittany mix, her ears already tattered like the edge of old newspaper, faint lines of gathered scars across her nose. He ran his hand over her soft fur, feeling with his fingertips where bone gave way to muscle, gently kneading while she dozed with her head on her paws.

      On the other side of the river and up the hill a vacant dairy operation stood like an emblem of a former time. It had gone under three years before, the cows sold, the barn stripped, the corrals left empty and the manure turned to dust. The place looked sunbleached as cattle bones. It seemed that most dairy barns in the area held corrals of weeds instead of cows anymore. Milk prices had been low that year. Another outfit across town sold its equipment and livestock the year after but was sitting on the land, waiting for the rumored money to show up. Something about that abandoned place across the river made him want to go there, because it would be strange and secret to walk around it, nothing but birds for company, and maybe not even them, since there was no spilled feed for them anymore. His father had foreseen this. He had broken with the farm at eighteen for a college degree, leaving Elmer to sit at their father’s feet a lone disciple. Jack’s father had not worked another day on that ground because Blair forbade it. When the old man saw his eldest son forsake his birthright he hefted a chip to his shoulder that he’d not shrugged to this day. Jack’s view of this schism was more seasoned now, and he suspected that his father’s unorthodox views of the church had something to do with Blair’s paternal hostility. Jack’s father taught him to respect physical labor, to love it even, but not to rely on it, and had disapproved of his slow gravitation toward that lifestyle. His father said that if a man had the option, physical labor was to be more of a balance and a release than a livelihood depended on for basic sustenance. A man should have two sets of practical skills, that which he did with his hands and that which he did with his mind, and Jack felt what would have been his father’s disappointment that his only child had never acquired an obvious skill of the mind. Never mind that he knew each cow by her udder, knew her number and the number of her mother, could quote milk records and birth lines. Never mind that he knew how to harvest hay and corn at its highest yield, that at age twenty he was confident he could run this entire farm by himself if he had to. He could hear his father saying that some were meant to be simple men but some chose to be fools, and some were meant to do greater things than pull the teats of another man’s cows and wait for an uncertain inheritance whose tacit promise brought ambivalence at best.

      In some dead hour of the afternoon he walked through the oppressive sunshine and dragged his feet in the gravel of the barnyard. Elmer called to him from where he rested, post-lunch, in the shade of his trees and told him all four tractors needed greasing. Jack walked on like he hadn’t heard. He worked on his back beneath the tractors and by the time he ran out of grease and made a run to the co-op for another box it was nearly time for milking. Looking out from under the biggest tractor he saw dust, and when it settled, an old blue Cutlass Supreme parked alongside the diesel tank, and when its door opened, Roydn Woolums. The farmhand stepped out and walked up the incline on his way to gather the cows. He stopped at the tractor and Jack looked out at his manure-caked boots and kept working. Roydn never washed his boots. He either lacked the perception that this small crumb of dignity might be had in this profession or he didn’t care. He stood there for a full minute before he spoke, spitting once in a while on the gravel.

      —Hello Selvedge, he said finally. Hot bitch, ain’t it?

      —Didn’t Blair tell you? said Jack. You’ve been fired.

      —What’d you do today, said Roydn. Beat off and sweat over it?

      Jack scooted over and saw the kid swiveling his bean-shaped noggin around in the afternoon sun. A large round chin and bulbous forehead made up the balance of weight above bony shoulders and a sunken chest, and they bent toward each other as if they hoped to touch someday. There was a lump in his throat like he’d swallowed a knotted tree branch, a knuckled growth that moved up and down when he spoke or swallowed. He held in his hand a bottle of Pepsi and pulled out a wrinkled package of corn nuts and threw some in his mouth.

      —Give me a few of them corn nuts, said Jack. I ain’t ate yet.

      Roydn handed over the bag and Jack shook some into his mouth and immediately regretted it. He slid beneath the tractor and found another grease zerk.

      —So what’d you do today? said Roydn.

      —Fixed fence.

      —Where abouts?

      —This one here that runs to the house.

      —That’s a long one. Say, is Blair ever going to sell any of that piece? I been looking to buy a little land to start my operation.

      —Why don’t you talk to him.

      —Well ain’t you going to get half?

      Jack grunted. He was sweating freely and smears of black grease covered his arms and old grease was packed under his fingernails, so he couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ