Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner

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      —What?

      —Did you talk to her or something?

      —Rebekah Rainsford?

      —It’s what I said. She’s back in town.

      —Since when?

      —I don’t know. But she’s back in town with her mother. They’re on the run from their old man, holed up at the McKellar place down there. She was about my age. Still is, I guess.

      —She was younger than you. Younger than me even. What the hell do you know about anything?

      —You don’t know nothing about it? All right. I suppose I could tell you. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. Look here, I’ll tell you what my pa told me. They’re running from trouble. It’s her and her mother moved here from Salt Lake cause their old man left um in financial frig all. Left um, flat out. He’s gone. And now they’re here.

      —How’d he go about it?

      —Gambling is what I heard. Probly a little whorin on the side. They usually go together.

      —Gambling, huh?

      —It is what I heard. Over in Wendover. So what do you think of her?

      —I never knew her that good. She was always kind of snobby.

      —Well I’d like to know her. Like Isaac knew Rebekah, you read me?

      —You irreverent frigger.

      —Well let me know what you think of her once you see her. Should be at church I suppose, and there’s a good reason for you to come back. I told you I’d get you back to church someway, and it looks like I got one. Yes sir. She’d make a man a good wife. I’d like her to bear my children and be waiting for me when I got home from milking these whores. That’d make it all worth it. This here’s the summer of opportunity.

      Jack pulled himself out from under the tractor and stood up. Roydn didn’t step back and they were face to face with Jack pinned against the engine of the tractor. The lenses of Roydn’s glasses were thick and dense and his black eyes wandered wetly behind them.

      —Welp, he said, looking up at the sun again. Guess I’d better go off and gather them cows. They ain’t about to milk themselves. He leered ugly over his shoulder as he walked away. And you know, buttwipe, he said. You might put in a word for me about this tractor, huh? This big one here. I don’t want to drive nothing else. Cause if so, I got to come tonight and warsh it. Tell him I’ll warsh it for him. See what he says.

      Roydn tilted his head back to see him rather than push the heavy glasses back up his nose. He grinned and shuffled off through the gravel toward the corral.

      —Going to college, he said to nothing in particular, and started to whistle.

      When he was gone Jack walked to the far edge of the west haystack where he could get a good look at the lane across the field as it led away from the barnyard. It was empty as far as he could see. After feeding he left the dog on the ground while he climbed up the supports and under the open-sided hayshed. The stack was uneven near the back. They had hand stacked bales in something like a broad staircase on top of what the bale wagon had brought, and the stack was higher there than the bottom of the tin on the sides and dim. It was a good place for respite and hiding. He’d been going up there since he could climb, always careful where to step, because the way the bale wagon stacked several loads side by side in row after row, holes were sometimes created where stacks met that went all the way to the ground. He had taken many naps under the shed, drowsed away afternoon hours, hidden from his grandfather and uncle. He listened to the pigeons cooing their soft dialogue from the rafters. From where he sat in a throne of haybales he could look out over the west field and see the top of the McKellar house where it sat shrouded in a fortress of pines.

      That night he took his boots off and trod the footworn path on the carpet into the washroom where he shed his stinking clothes and stepped into the shower stall. The smell from handling cows clung to him like a second skin. Sometimes he bathed twice a day to stave it. Most nights bathing seemed senseless since in a matter of hours he would rise and undo the effort, but he did it daily; it made him feel connected to a greater civilization than what he daily saw. Blair was never without the smell. It lingered on him and moved with him from room to room. It was on him even as he sat in his church pew on those singular occasions of attendance, and if a man couldn’t get clean for church he couldn’t get clean. For them the smell of cows was like the grease in the knuckle lines of a mechanic or the thick arms of a mason. It was a symbol of identity Jack tried each night to shed, because while his blood cried for the field work he did, milking cows held no dignity. Anything but standing beneath the dumb beasts and gathering milk from their pink, thick-veined udders while their golden spray and heavy excrement fell from above like unwanted boons. Blair had picked the worst kind of farming when he bought the first Holsteins. A man could work his whole existence out upon a small dairy farm and provide this obscure service to humankind and be always near sunk. But the smell was an unpleasant thing, possibly the worst thing, surpassing even the endless burden of twice-a-day milkings. If Jack showered hard and vigorously and scoured every inch of his skin and ran a fingertip through the geography of his ears to check for stray manure, dirt, tractor grease, he came away clean, but he was never certain the smell was gone. Smelling it on his grandfather when he should have been clean made him doubt that anything but a permanent departure from the trade could rid him of it. There was the cramped shower off the laundry room or the tiny bathtub, and he took the shower. Blair chose the tub where he sat in a rank stew of his own molting, and in this way they coexisted at nights when both needed to be clean before bed.

      Jack walked into the kitchen and found his grandfather sitting alone at the clothless table eating dinner, which was leftover lunch, fried hamburger molded by hand into crude patties, and buttered potato slices, the way the old woman had made it day in and out in her better days. Blair never looked so weary as at nights in the kitchen, shoving food into his mouth under the fluorescent lighting, when it seemed like he could hardly hold his head up and move his jaw. He was lifelong fatigued in his off time. They said nothing as they ate, the elder sitting, the younger standing, both watching an old Eastwood western play out on the television across the room.

      When they were done eating Blair said, Go say hi to your grandma.

      —Where is she?

      —In the other room.

      Jack walked in the living room to see her sitting like a stone on the couch, her blank eyes half open and turned toward the television where black and white static hissed on the screen. He asked her if she wanted him to put something on and she didn’t respond. He watched her for a moment, waiting for the rise and fall of her sloped breast, and when he saw movement he turned and left the room. He grabbed a misshapen chunk of hamburger from the plate and walked out the door and jumped in his truck and drove in the long light of the evening to find Heber at the park under the trees. Stars appeared above him like the firmament was being shot at.

      He felt the loneliness of being twenty years old on his grandfather’s farm, womanless, with but a couple friends to watch what small events befell their moribund town. His father used to tell him that a man made his destiny with whatever he was given and that he should not depend on luck. He said that men wait their entire lives for luck. He promised that opportunity would pass a man by if he didn’t learn to act. These days Jack wondered when those opportunities had come, for he had never recognized them as such, and such things seemed as vanished now from this town and from his life as his childhood. On this night he felt nostalgia for things that had never happened, СКАЧАТЬ