You'd think that someone who'd gotten up at five in the morning for the past six months would be pretty good at it by now. But Mom finally had to shake me awake because I didn't hear the alarm, and she gave me this look saying I shouldn't be out so late with Amber. She didn't say it out loud, but you could tell. When you teach school for as long as Mom has, you get those kinds of looks down cold.
The cows weren't much happier.
It didn't help that I couldn't stop thinking about Brian and his friends laughing at us. It was bad enough that we were from Red Bend and they were from Hawley. And that we didn't have any money and those guys were all loaded. Plus those stupid jokes I've heard a million times about how much farmers smell and how stupid they are, all those mooing noises. What really got me, though, was Brian's whole attitude, that working for us for even one day was the very worst sort of torture he could ever endure and only the threat of being benched would make him show up. Did our farm really suck that much?
And the problem was, I couldn't help feeling that it did. Those guys were class A-1 jerks, but the barn really did smell. This morning especially, and the flies were awful too, because I hadn't been doing so good a job cleaning up all the cow poop. And when I turned the big fans on, the fans that suck air through the barn to cool it off, they were so caked with cobwebs and crud that it's a miracle they even worked. There was so much dirt on the screens that even if the blades turned, they couldn't draw too well.
I hate it when people make fun of me and it turns out they're right.
When I came in for breakfast, Curtis had on his baseball uniform.
"Where's your game?" I asked.
"Eau Claire," he said, not looking up.
"Eau Claire?" I'd never played in Eau Claire. "You nervous?"
Curtis shrugged. He sure had a lot to say.
So they all piled into the Caravan—Mom and Curtis and Dad too, groaning about his hip like he was Joe Namath or something—and went to the game. It's been hard all these years for Dad to see our games with the milking schedule and all, but now that I was doing all the work he went to every single one.
Okay, I know that makes me sound like some kind of slave, and I admit that right at that moment I sure felt like a slave. But before you call the cops to come and arrest him and Mom for child abuse, I should explain that it was partially my idea to take over all the farm work. I mean, it killed me having to quit basketball, and spend all spring knowing track was going on without me. But I started morning milking—well, after Mom asked me to—in January when it got to be too much for Dad to even get out of bed. And then in February, right before our second Hawley game, February 23, Dad came in for dinner just gray, puking almost, from trying to move the manure spreader, and it really scared me, the sight of him so shaky and weak. That night we decided that since Curtis was too young, and Win and Bill were away at college and had basically quit the family though no one mentioned that part, and we sure couldn't hire anyone to do the work, that it was going to have to be me. But let me tell you, I certainly didn't think when I took this on that Dad would take so long to get a new hip and I'd still be at it five months later.
So I sat there on the kitchen steps with Smut and my coffee, feeling really sorry for myself—a feeling I was pretty used to these days—and thinking about how I really needed to unload those two hay wagons. But I was about as interested in unloading that hay as I was in putting myself through the baler. Which, if you're wondering, is not very interested.
Instead I started looking around the farm like, well, like I was seeing it from snotty Brian's point of view. The house wasn't so bad—we'd gotten siding back when Grandpa Warren was still alive, it really just needed a wash. But the milk house and toolshed were all peeling paint. The granary, the old chicken coops we haven't used in years, the corncribs, all looked terrible. The basketball backboard was just a splintery old piece of plywood, the hoop all bent and rusty from when Bill thought he could dunk. Not to mention all the broken-down equipment we never moved, or the weeds growing everywhere like we don't care. Which we don't. It's not just that we didn't have the time for cleaning up, or the money. It's that no one wants to do it, at least not recently. We could have been a "Save the Family Farm" poster only it would have been too depressing.
So, right then and there, like a total moron, I decided to really clean out the barn.
Which was so stupid. I didn't want to clean it. I mean, I wanted to see it clean, but I didn't want to do it myself. I hadn't even finished unloading hay and we'd be haying clover soon, and timothy, not to mention silage in August, and just general farm work was enough, thank you, not to mention stuff like my life and that stupid English class that I couldn't even manage to pass.
But then all my anger at that stupid schoolwork I was going to have to do all over again, and Brian and his friends, and Dad, and the state our family is in, got funneled somehow into cleaning. I dug through the toolshed, looking for supplies. I needed rags and brooms and stuff like that to get the dirt and gunk off the walls, and maybe a scraper; I wasn't really sure. Plus the toolshed looked like it had been in a tornado. Grandpa Warren used to keep the place spotless—you could perform brain surgery in there if you happened to need to perform brain surgery on a lawn mower. If he saw it now it would kill him, but then, he was already dead. Dad used to care, but he's been too hurt to care, and Win cared a bit until he went away, but Bill and Curtis ... Someone needed to clean the toolshed too, but that wasn't going to be me. I knew that much. You had to know which little rusty screws to save and which ones to throw away, and I don't think even God knows that.
So I dug around and got pretty rusty myself, trying to find enough cleaning-up stuff. Then I went to work in the barn, fighting off flies everywhere, trying to get the ceiling dusted, all the dirty old cobwebs knocked down. I didn't do a very good job—mostly I just got dust all over me—but after a couple hours I could kind of tell where I'd worked and where I hadn't. Finally I got bummed out and quit, just as Mom called all excited to tell me that Curtis had won his game. Which was just extra superduper, because as long as Curtis kept winning, it meant he'd be at practice every day, and at games every week, and I'd be stuck working by myself.
That night at dinner I sat down starving, my hands all clean, and Dad handed me this big steaming bowl of puke. I'm sorry, but that's what I thought when I looked at it. Hot vomit. Curtis said grace—Mom gave him that job just to get him to say something but he's so quiet that I'm sure God can't hear him—and everyone else dug in: Dad because he made it, Mom because she's so happy not to be cooking herself, and Curtis as I said will eat anything.
I sat there trying to think of the best thing to say. What someone like Oprah Winfrey on TV would say to be polite. "So ... what is this?"
Dad glared at me.
"It's good, honey." Mom smiled to Dad. "Very innovative." That's just the kind of word Mom would use too.
"It's just macaroni and cheese. With some other stuff mixed in."
I could see now. There were beans and hamburger and some green stuff, maybe peppers I think, all mixed together. It didn't taste all that bad, but I had to close my eyes to eat it, and breathe through my mouth too, because I was so sure it would smell like puke.
"You act like that, you can just eat outside," Dad said.
Oh, that made me mad. There was so much I wanted to say, about how I'd worked all morning on his stupid barn trying to make it look how Grandpa Warren kept it, how if he'd had his stupid operation back when the doctors said, he wouldn't still be in his walker with me flunking English and working like a slave. How if Win and Bill were around, if Dad hadn't started that huge fight that ruined our whole family, maybe none of this would be happening.
I think Dad kind of knew what I was thinking because he looked at me and held on to his fork like it was an ax handle. But no one said anything because, well, even when we fight we're not the world's best talkers. So I just shoveled that puke in and went to bed.