About a month after the boy arrived a man had come around with a petition to improve 38. The petition claimed the dirt road was dangerous, impeded commerce, and impassable in winter, none of which was true, but the boy’s uncle, like his neighbors, signed it anyway. That’s the last we’ll hear-a that, he told the boy, and indeed, they all forget the man had been by until the week before the boy is due to start high school in September, when, out of nowhere, a road crew shows up.
The crew fascinates the boy. The precision, the elegance with which the operators use their machines as extensions of themselves: these flannel-shirted men in thick work gloves wield jackhammers and chainsaws as delicately as Aunt Bessie handles needle and thread. Their treadling bulldozers peel away the old road an inch at a time, the arms of their backhoes lift and swivel and stab as methodically as a heron hunting fish in the shallows of the reservoir. The crew rips the old road apart and leaves a new one in its stead, and where cars and trucks once rattled over washboard ruts they now hum over spongy tar; but by then the crew has moved on to the next stretch of road. Bulldozers widen it, backhoes deepen the ditches on either side. Dump trucks stop the gash with tar that a steamroller, its platen as big as the holding vat, presses flat, and then finally a paint truck bisects it with a double yellow line down its center, as if to say: CUT HERE. When the double line is in place the road suddenly reminds the boy of the frozen river he had to cross to get here, the great sheet of ice and the single channel in its center. The line is like the seam in his life, he thinks, the chasm he doesn’t like to remember because he no longer knows which side he’d rather be on, or if he wants the tear open or closed.
The crew works in stages, destroying a stretch of road and replacing it and then moving on, and from the end of October through the middle of November the length of 38 in front of his uncle’s house is in fact impassable, and he and Kenny and Flip Flack have to catch the bus on Newry Road. The pump truck uses Newry Road as well. It’s able to reach the Flacks’ dairy barn via the two-track they drive their tractors on, but even though the muddy wash of 38 is less than twenty feet wide—less river than muddy creek—the pump truck cannot ford it to reach his uncle’s land. When the boy’s uncle protests that it is costing him two weeks’ income the driver says, I’m sorry, Wallace, I get this baby stuck it’ll be my ass, I’m truly sorry. And he does sound sorry, but not sorry enough to risk his job.
Meanwhile there are the ladies, whose udders care nothing about infrastructure or broken axles or two cents a quart, and in the end there is nothing for it but to dump the contents of the vat. The boy’s uncle doesn’t say anything as he hooks a rubber hose as big around as a sewer pipe to the vat and runs it out to the barnyard, but Donnie curses and stamps his feet and seems on the verge of picking a fight with the road crew, until finally his uncle says,
No use getting riled up, Donnie. It’s just the government’s way of helping out poor folks. Raising their taxes and then depriving them of their income in return for the favor.
Donnie kicks at the hose spewing forth a solid column of milk like an endless tube of toothpaste. The column squiggles, straightens out again.
It ain’t right, Wallace. It just ain’t right.
The boy’s uncle continues to stare without expression into the torrent of milk spewing from the hose. Then he looks up, not at Donnie but at the boy.
No use crying over spilt milk. Ain’t that what they say?
His uncle laughs then, but two weeks later, when the vat has to be dumped a second time, he makes Donnie and the boy do it alone, and sets off down Newry Road, where he has parked his car for the meanwhile.
As the boy watches him pick his way across the mess of 38, he realizes the season has changed. Fall is over, winter setting in. The leaves on his uncle’s elms were golden two weeks ago. Now they’re as faded as old newspaper, and fall off the branches like drops of water off a cow’s whiskers. The maple leaves in the Flacks’ yard have gone from red to rust and they too fall to the earth, a brown drizzle that clacks on the frozen soil with a hard mournful sound. It hasn’t snowed yet, but a week’s frosts have left the ground hard as concrete, and when his uncle clears the churned-up road his heels clink on Newry Road as if on metal. The boy listens to them fade away until they stop, and a moment later the slam of a car door shakes him from his reverie, and he hurries off to the barn to help Donnie.
The boy doesn’t like working alone with Donnie, who is always on his back. Grabbing tools from his hand, correcting errors visible only to him with a look on his face like, Jesus, Amos, ain’t you learned nothing yet? But this morning Donnie seems too genuinely angry to affect it, and in a few minutes they’ve hooked the hose to the vat and run it outside, and when the boy opens the valve the milk rushes from the hose as from an open hydrant.
It ain’t right, Donnie says, staring at the milk as it runs down the frozen slope of the barnyard. A man’s honest labor, wasted. I tell you, it ain’t right.
Where the milk spews from the hose it seems so solid you could pick it up like a rope, but five feet on it suddenly disintegrates, rippling and spreading out like a wet bedsheet fallen from the line. It isn’t right, the boy thinks, but it is beautiful. The milk is thick as paint—whitewash, he thinks, Huck Finn, something like that. Its widening ripples are as gentle as ocean waves on a windless day. Whitened stalks of grass stick out of it like upright icicles, stalagmicicles, and here and there a cow patty makes a chocolate-colored island in the alabaster sea. Frost crystals glitter in the cow patties but the forty-degree milk steams as if it were boiling.
Just look at that. It’s no wonder an honest man can’t get ahead.
The boy tears his eyes from the steaming milk. Donnie is standing with his foot on the end of the hose behind the metal coupling, as if it were the head of a poisonous snake.
I heard there’s farmers get paid by the government not to raise crops. They let their fields sit empty and get paid anyway. You think Uncle Wallace could get some of that money?
Donnie looks at the boy as if he is speaking a foreign language.
Shut up Dale, he says finally. He kicks the hose and the boy has to jump to avoid getting sprayed. When he looks up Donnie is stalking toward the dairy barn. I’m gonna clean the gutters, he calls over his shoulder. Keep an eye on the hose, Amos.
Keep an eye on the hose Amos, the boy says under his breath. As if gravity needs his help emptying the vat. As if he’s just a kid, useless to do anything but watch his uncle’s hard work flow toward the crease between the barnyard and the north hill, wetting the cedar fenceposts they’d labored so hard to set in the spring. Why don’t you keep an eye on the hose, the boy says out loud. Don, Don—Donald Duck.
The insult is hardly satisfying, but it doesn’t matter: a new sting has replaced it. Although it’s the second time they have pumped the vat, it’s not until the boy hears the word coming out of his own mouth that he associates this hose with the one his mother used to beat him with, and now the memory takes him over completely. The fear, the pain, the rage. The two hoses are the same, the boy sees now. Black rubber with metal couplings at either end—only this one is larger. The one at home is attached to the washing machine. Foamy gray water drains through it into the back yard at the end of every cycle, and when his mother swings it through the air it releases a clean bleachy smell, as if she is beating the dirt out of him, the impurities, the stain of the old man’s blood.
A cold breeze chills the boy’s neck, and when he pulls his jacket around him he feels the remembered pain in his shoulders and back at first, but then he feels the constriction of the material itself. It’s getting too small for him, just like everything else. The boy buries his hands in the torn lining and wiggles his toes in Kenny Flack’s boots and feels the tips of his toes rub against the worn leather. He kicks the spewing hose, and this time it reminds him of something else. It reminds him of Julia Miller. For two weeks after their meeting at the Alcove Reservoir the boy had avoided her on the bus and at school, and then summer had come to his rescue. All through June and July and August he had kept his gaze focused on the ground whenever he ran past her house so he could tell himself he hadn’t seen her wave; mostly, though, he’d stuck to his new route along the reservoir. He remembers his impression that his love for her was like a thread of milk shot from an udder, and he finds himself measuring that thread against this river, against all the sacrifices entailed by life on the farm. He has been here less than a year, already lost his family and first love to memories that wash over him in waves of heat and coolness. But now he wonders: how much has his uncle given up? And what could he possibly have left?
The boy feels trapped by all these thoughts and he wills the milk to hurry and drain from the vat. It took a good twenty minutes the first time around, and he’s only been out here for about ten. But then an Ayrshire calf trots into the barnyard, her nose high in the air, the smell of milk reining her in visibly, like a lasso. The Ayrshire bleats like a sheep as she runs up to the flood of milk, and even though the boy knows he should chase her away he wants to watch her—wants to devote his whole attention to something that’s no more comprehensible to him than his memories, but at least doesn’t hurt. And besides, he thinks, it would be a shame if no one profited from the farm’s loss.
The Ayrshire wades ankle deep into the pool. She twirls about in a circle, kicking white drops every which way, paws at the milk with one hoof as if trying to get to the ground beneath it. Finally she stands still, panting slightly, head lowered, and then, with the delicacy of a cat, touches her lips to the milk. She weaned more than a month ago, but the boy wonders if she retains some memory, some regressive urge toward suckling, helplessness. But the Ayrshire reacts as if shocked, jerking her head up and running across the barnyard like a colt. The boy can hear her bleating her discovery to the rest of the herd, but if any of the other ladies understand what she is trying to say she doesn’t respond, and when the last of the milk has finally drained from the hose he flushes it with water to keep it from curdling and molding, and then he shakes the water from the hose to keep the rubber from freezing and splitting, and then he rolls up the hose and puts it back in the vat room and heads off to school.
That afternoon as he runs home from cross country practice the boy heads down Newry Road so he can avoid the mess of 38, and as he passes the spot where Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie have been parking their cars he notices that Uncle Wallace’s car isn’t there. Aunt Bessie’s is exactly where it was when he caught the bus that morning, and Donnie Badget’s battered Ford pickup is still there as well, but there’s no sign of any of them at the farm. The cows have wandered in close to the barnyard in anticipation of the evening milking but other than a few calves running through the pasture the fields are silent. In the kitchen both his and his uncle’s breakfast dishes are still in the sink and Aunt Bessie’s plate is still on the table, its napkin still laid atop it. Normally they would be gone, as would the dishes from the noon meal, and the beginnings of supper would be on the counter or the stove. But the house is quiet and the fire in the kitchen stove long extinguished, and so the boy changes out of his sweats, exchanges his school-bought sneakers for Kenny Flack’s boots, and then, not sure what else to do, he cleans the ashes from the stove and builds a new fire, and then he sits at the kitchen table and eats a slice of apple pie and a wedge of yellow cheddar cheese, which is to say New York cheddar, made from New York cows, rather than Vermont cheddar, which is white and mealy. The boy eats his snack off Aunt Bessie’s breakfast plate, but before he starts he fits her unused napkin back in the holder carefully. The fire and his fork scraping his plate clean are the only sounds in the little house. Outside, the light dims perceptibly. Within a half hour of his return it’s nearly dark, and he can hear the first impatient calls of the ladies, eager to be relieved of their burden of milk. It is nearly five.
The boy puts his plate and fork in the sink, and then, instead of heading up to the barn, he turns back into the house, going not into the living room or up to his bedroom, but instead into the west half of the house. The main part of his uncle’s house is divided by a central hallway. The eastern half, which connects to the kitchen wing, contains the living room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, but the western half remains shut up all winter to save on fuel costs. The big room downstairs and two small rooms upstairs mirror those on the eastern side of the house, but the beds and couches and chairs they contain are disassembled or broken or piled over with unmarked boxes and crates and layer upon layer of dust. The boy pokes randomly through a couple of boxes as he has done three or four times before, thinking he might find something that belonged to his deceased Aunt Ella Mae or absent cousin Edith, maybe even a relic of the farm in Cobleskill, but everything he touches is anonymous and empty, Mason jars, brownware crocks, frayed extension cords, and he is about to leave the room when a flicker of light in one of the west windows catches his eye. The light is tiny and winks in and out of the overgrown cedars surrounding the abandoned house that abuts his uncle’s property. The cedars are so thick it takes the boy a moment to realize the light is in fact inside that house. A hundred feet away there is someone standing in a window as he is—smoking.
It turns out to be Donnie Badget.
Well if it isn’t Amos, he says as the swollen front door squeaks out of its frame on crooked hinges. He takes a long drag on his cigarette and the lit end glows brightly. Come to tell me I shouldn’t be smoking here, I’ll bet. That I could burn the place down. Or maybe you just wanted to remind me it’s time to get the ladies in?
Donnie’s words have a force to them, as if he has been waiting a long time to speak them, or some version of them. The boy is glad it’s nearly dark and Donnie can’t see him flush. He had thought of saying both things.
I don’t care what you do. Burn the place down, I don’t care. It ain’t Uncle Wallace’s, it don’t concern me.
What’s your uncle’s is yours. That how it goes Amos?
The boy is about to leave without replying when he notices an ashtray on the narrow mantel above the fireplace, and then, when Donnie crushes his cigarette on a worn pine floorboard, the boy sees a few other butts scattered around his feet. He glances around the tiny room then, but all he can make out in the dim light is that time has stripped it of everything, not just paint and plaster and straight lines but size, space. Although the room was probably the house’s main parlor, the boy cannot imagine it ever being large enough to contain anything besides himself and Donnie and that ashtray. A real ashtray, not a recycled can of tuna fish or green beans but cut glass, gleaming dully in the thin light, and cradling a dozen white butts like eggs in a nest of ash.
Who owns this place?
Donnie’s eyes follow the boy’s, see him looking at the ashtray.
Not your uncle, that’s for sure. Not you. He taps the soft curve of the plaster wall with his foot. Used to think I might buy it someday but it looks like that ain’t gonna happen either, thanks to you Amos. He kicks the wall again, harder, and the boy hears grains of plaster trickling through the lathe. This house was built in seventeen hundred and sixty-one, Donnie says with something like awe in his voice. It is older than our nation.
With a glance the boy takes in the four corners of the room. It seems hardly larger than one of the stalls in the hay barn. He is five feet two inches tall, but he’s pretty sure that if he wanted he could touch the ceiling with his fingertips. Were people shorter then, he wonders, before the Declaration of Independence?
Donnie is lighting another cigarette.
Thought I had my future all mapped out. I did. Work with Wallace until I’d put back enough money to buy this piece, then pick up Wallace’s too, when he was ready to retire. Who knows, maybe he’d’ve even left it to me. It don’t look like he and Edith are gonna bury the hatchet any time soon. But all that was before you come along and decided you wanted to be a dairy farmer. I gotta hand it to you, Amos, you played your cards right. You work hard, keep outta trouble. You’re a regular Tom Sawyer, Amos, a true credit to the family line.
The boy has to stand on tiptoe to run his fingers along the ceiling, but when he does a puff of plaster dust falls on his face, and just before he closes his eyes against the dust he suddenly sees that the little room is not empty, but as full of Donnie’s empty future as the west wing of his uncle’s house is filled by an equally untenable past. When he rubs his eyes it is less an effort to wipe the dust from them than to clear those shadow lives away, and when he speaks his voice surprises him almost as much as it seems to surprise Donnie.
What were you gonna do with two houses?
His voice surprises him because even as he asks the question it occurs to him: he has two houses. Here, and on Long Island.
What?
I don’t understand, the boy says slowly, why you would need two houses. Uncle Wallace don’t even use all of his.
Ten people sleep under one roof in the house on Long Island—nine, with him gone—and although that house has many inconveniences he never once thought it too small. He swipes at his eyes again, clears his throat.
A man can’t live in two houses, he says as forcefully as he can. He’s got to choose.
Donnie drops his half-smoked cigarette to the floor, but when he speaks there is a fire in his voice where the cigarette had been.
I don’t know, Amos. Maybe I wouldn’t choose. Maybe I’d sleep in one house one night and the other house the next. I’d have options. Two beds instead of one. Breakfast here, dinner over to Wallace’s, flip a coin for supper. Maybe I’d tear one down and live in the other, maybe I’d pitch a tent on the front lawn and leave em both empty. Two houses is options, Amos. But thanks to you I don’t have no options no more. Once your uncle finishes teaching you everything he taught me I probably won’t even have a job.
He pauses then, uses his heel to grind out the smoldering cigarette on the floor. In the dim light his face is nearly invisible, his expression inscrutable, his voice as cold as the butt beneath his boot.
But I guess you didn’t figure on Wallace getting married, did you, Amos? That throws a wrench in the works, don’t it?
The boy blinks.
What?
Wallace and Bessie, Donnie says. You might have noticed they ain’t around? They’re getting married, Amos. They’re down at the courthouse this very minute.
As always the boy finds it hard to pull his head from Long Island once it goes back there, and he has to shake it back and forth to empty it.
I don’t understand.
What’s not to understand, Amos? Wallace is making Bessie his wife and heir and this farm you thought was yours is gonna go to her and hers.
Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie …
Who knows, Amos, maybe they’ll even have a kid themselves. Their own boy, instead of a hand-me-down. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Wallace said he’d be back by suppertime. When the boy doesn’t say anything Donnie stamps on his cigarette butt one last time. Guess we’d best get in the ladies, huh Amos?
Donnie pulls the door closed behind them, locks it with a padlock the boy hadn’t noticed when he went in, puts the key in his pocket. As they are pushing through the tangled cedar break—the boy thinks Donnie deliberately lets a branch snap back and smack him in the face—the boy says, How’d you know how old it was? The house?
Donnie doesn’t say anything until they have made their way out of the cedars, then just jerks a thumb back at the house’s roof. The point of the eave sticks above the cedars. Nestled beneath it the boy can just make out four rusted numbers: 1761.
Don’t take a high school diploma to figure that one out, Amos, Donnie says when the boy trots after him. Any more questions?
Technically, Donnie’s prediction comes true. It is after eight when the boy’s uncle and aunt return, but he doesn’t eat until they come in. Instead he goes to his bedroom and does his homework after he and Donnie finish with the ladies, and he stays up there until he hears voices on the front lawn. Just one voice actually, Aunt Bessie’s, punctuated by the shapely silence with which his uncle asks and answers questions.
As if commemorating their new status, his aunt and uncle enter through the front door instead of the kitchen. His uncle is dressed in his work clothes but Aunt Bessie sports the dress she wears to church. A shiny smile cuts her chin as if stamped there by a cookie cutter, but in his uncle’s eyes the boy sees the same defiant cast he’d seen in the old man’s the day they drove up here. For a moment he imagines his uncle is drunk but then he realizes his uncle is afraid. Of himself. Of what he’s done.
They wear mismatched rings—the rings each wore for their first marriages—but Aunt Bessie shows hers off like it is brand new.
Your uncle is a crazy man Dale, she says, holding out her hand. There is a flush to her cheeks, a wild dazzle to her eye. You would think she’d just married a soldier the night before he ships out. She lets the boy examine her ring then heads for the kitchen. Pots and pans rattle out of cabinets behind him, something thumps and wobbles on the warped cutting board.
His uncle is still standing in front of the door, looking at him. His right hand twists the ring on his left for a moment, and then he puts his left hand in his pocket. From where the boy is standing he can see the two doors that open off the hallway: the closed door to his uncle’s left that leads to the unused part of the house, the open one to his right, leading to the empty living room.
Wild, Aunt Bessie says in the kitchen, as if the men have followed her in. Impulsive. Devil may care. Happiness bubbles out of her voice like water from a tap even as her knife clunks through whatever’s on the cutting board.
The boy can see his uncle’s left hand outlined against the thin fabric of his pants, his thumb still playing with the ring on his finger. He stares at the boy with eyes filled with fear and defiance, guilt and pride, and even as he returns his uncle’s stare with his own silent question the boy has a glimmer of understanding about how a man can fail to fill up even the one house he has chosen to live in. How he can empty it, in fact, rather than fill it. Lives pour into houses, pour out again, but in the end only the houses remain: names on signs and dates on walls only remind you of what’s gone before; cardboard boxes don’t hoard the past, they hide it. But all the boy wants to know is, has he outlived his usefulness? Is it his turn to be sent away, just like the first Dale Peck? The boy’s eyes bore into his uncle’s but all his uncle does is twist the ring on his finger inside his pocket, and then he shrugs, as if responding to something someone has said.
You and Donnie get the ladies in okay?
The boy looks at his uncle blankly. It is a question without an answer. His uncle might as well ask him if he lit the hay barn on fire. As if acknowledging this, his uncle strides past him to the kitchen and pulls open the door to the woodstove.
Freezing in here, he says, and puts another log on the fire. He leaves the door open until the log crackles, and then he shuts it and sits down at the table. At the counter, Aunt Bessie’s voice sings through slices of her knife and the sharp aroma of onions.
Just let me get this on, I’m sure you’re both starved.
When the boy sits down in the chair opposite him, his uncle looks up as if surprised he’s there. His eyes dart back and forth. Then:
You and Donnie get the ladies in?
Again, the boy only stares at him, and his uncle’s eyes fall to the table. But almost immediately they lift up, and he breaks into a sheepish grin.
I married her, Dale. I said if the ladies gave me a day off I’d marry her, and I did.
It isn’t just the memory of Donnie’s words that makes his uncle’s unpleasant, alien. They’re an adult confidence, speaking of a freedom the boy doesn’t have. To make choices, whether wrong or right. To take a wife, have children, leave either or both behind.
The boy realizes Aunt Bessie’s knife hasn’t made a sound for a while, and he looks up to see her regarding him and his uncle with a soft, almost glazed focus. When she catches the boy’s eye her smile stamps itself on her face again.
Wasn’t really the ladies gave you the day off, she says. More like the county. Or Dale for that matter. Donnie couldn’t-a got the milk in himself.
His uncle looks up at her, then looks back at the boy. A smile flickers over the corners of his mouth.
Guess you got a point there, Bess. He nods at the boy. Guess I owe you a thank you, Dale.
Behind him the log cracks in the fire, and the boy feels the room has suddenly heated up ten degrees.
Look at the two of you, Aunt Bessie says. Like enough to be father and son. My boys. My two boys. And she touches the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her dress. Must be the onions, she says, and turns suddenly. It’s gonna have to be stew again, she says loudly. If we want to eat before midnight.
The boy turns back to his uncle. What Aunt Bessie says is true: he can see the old man’s shape wiggling inside his uncle’s in an effort to get out, but what does his uncle see when he looks at him? It’s been weeks since he’s thought of the other Dale Peck but he keeps coming up tonight, and the boy suddenly realizes he’s swallowed his predecessor whole. That he lives his namesake’s life as much as his uncle lives the old man’s. For a moment everything disappears then, Aunt Bessie, the house, the table and chairs, and there is just the two of them, his uncle and himself, mirror images folded along a seam like an inkblot, both the original and its paler echo devoid of any identity save what is projected onto them.
It’s the regular thumps of Aunt Bessie’s knife that cut the fantasy away piece by piece: gradually the table resumes its shape beneath his forearms, becomes the same rectangle it has always been. His uncle’s forearms rest on the same rectangle and the thin gold crescent on the fourth finger of his left hand, the only thing new to the room, seems as inconsequential as the dirt under his fingernails. They are who they have always been, two dairymen waiting for dinner: dinner, sleep, morning reveille and sixty swollen udders eager to be drained, world without end, amen. Donnie was lying, the boy suddenly realizes, or he was just wrong: his uncle’s marriage doesn’t have anything to do with him. It doesn’t change his life. With a sigh, he lets out the breath he’s been holding since five o’clock that afternoon, and the air seems to push at the four corners of the little room until everything is back the way it was.
Dolly came in today. Fifteen quarts. That means she’s gonna drop soon, right?
His uncle nods his head.
Before Thanksgiving probably. She’s had two boys in a row, she’s due to give us a little lady. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
The boy’s head nods, an unconscious echo of his uncle’s. But then something occurs to him.
What happens to the boys, Uncle Wallace?
His voice sounds tight to his ears, but his uncle doesn’t seem to hear it. He’s gone back to fiddling with his ring.
Not much use for boys in a dairy herd, Dale.
The boy’s head nods. So what happens to them? The ones you don’t want? What do you do with them?
His uncle looks up then, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. He pauses, then says,
Well, we do keep one or two around, for stud.
The boy realizes his head is still nodding, and he stops with a twitch. But he continues staring at his uncle until the latter’s eyes fall to the table.
Veal, he says, shrugging, just as Aunt Bessie turns with a pot in her hands.
Soup’s on, she says, and, in a gesture whose benevolence will haunt the boy until the end of his days, she serves him first.
The next morning he wakes to find that it’s snowed. Not even an inch, but that first snowfall seems to turn a key in the sky, and for the next several months it snows at least once a week. Shovelfuls of it, from fluffy weightless powder that blows back in his face as fast as he scoops it away to frozen chunks as solid and heavy as broken pieces of granite. Soon enough everything is covered: the front walk, the driveway, the paths to the hay and dairy barns. What had been a thirty-second run up the hill takes thirty minutes or an hour the day after a snowfall, when, for the tenth time that winter, he must shovel the path clear. By the turn of the year the snow has made igloos of everything regardless of its original shape. Donnie’s dream house domes over like a funerary mound and even the spindly sign by the driveway supports a translucent white arc as thin as a section of rollercoaster, as though a sheet has been laid over it.
His uncle and aunt’s marriage seems to disappear too, as though a sheet had been laid over that as well. The morning after the wedding his uncle put his ring in a box on his dresser—the same box he took it out of to get married—and a couple mornings after that Dolly calved. A boy. Her third in a row. The calf got a week on the farm before the road crew finally finished 38 and the panel truck from Carol’s Meats could get in to take him away. The thin asphalt road bisected the newly white fields like a magic marker stripe on a blank sheet of paper, so smooth and quiet that the boy could hear the calf’s confused cries long after the truck disappeared over the hill.
But this morning in the middle of February there has been no new snow. It is too cold for snow, too cold even for fog. The dew is one more frozen sheen of white over the farm, and his and his uncle’s boots ring with a metallic echo as they make their way up to the dairy barn. Even the teats of the ladies feel cold as he hooks them to the milking machines—at least at first they do. After a half dozen plunges into the pail of cleaning water his fingers are so numb it’s all he can do to handle the claw without dropping it. His uncle finishes well ahead of him, and the boy hears him walking the alleys as he struggles to hook up the last of the cows. There are only fifty-seven wet ladies, and the boy is wondering what his uncle is looking for when he hears,
We’re missing someone.
The boy looks up to see his uncle standing with his hands on his hips. Beneath the brim of his hat his brow is wrinkled.
A Guernsey.
The boy doesn’t question his uncle because he cannot conceive of his uncle erring when it comes to the farm. But he also cannot grasp what it means to be missing a cow, and he says nothing.
His uncle pulls his hat down around his ears.
Have to go and find her.
It takes little more than a glance out the barn door to ascertain there is no black-spotted mass amid the sparkling sea of white. There are only two patches of trees on the land where the missing Guernsey could be concealed—the new growth at the southeast edge by 38, and the older stand at the top of the hill. When his uncle sets off toward the road, the boy makes his way uphill.
He uses a cow path to help him navigate through two feet of snow. The depth of the trail testifies to the ladies’ weight, but it is its narrowness that impresses him—though the ladies weigh five or ten times what he does, he must walk Indian style to keep his feet between the snow embankments carved out by their hooves. Their trail parallels the line of honey locusts up the hill, and as the boy walks he peers into their jagged shadows. But though a hundred smooth mounds of snow could conceal a hundred cows underneath, the only things that poke from the wrinkled white blanket are the dark trunks of the trees, creaking in a breeze that picks up as he ascends the hill. The cold wind cuts through his layers, slivers of blown snow sting his cheeks as he looks around. His cheeks throb, as do his hands and feet, and heart, for he dreads both the idea of coming upon a frozen carcass and also the impact a lost cow will have on the farm’s fortunes, especially after the disaster with 38 and the pump truck last November.
He finds her near the top of the hill. She lies on her side in a thicket crowding the base of a slanting tree, and even as he takes in the way her thin legs stick out from her torso like toothpicks from balled melon, he notes that he cannot name either the tree or the bushes of the thicket. Without their leaves they are as anonymous as an Angus without its eartag. He sees how the cow’s breath had carved a box canyon in the snow in front of her muzzle, sees that the fine black hairs at the end of her tail have gotten tangled in the twigs above it so that it looks as if she is hanging by a frayed rope, and he sees also that his observations are useless to both him and the prostrate animal, two facts at either end of its body and somehow divorced from what lies between. The thicket could be hackberry or deerberry, wild privet or mountain laurel, the tree chestnut or ash. Even if he knew, it wouldn’t wake the animal fallen in their thin shelter, her white body blending in with the snow and only the black patches on her coat showing up like splotches of tar.
But his feet do. The Guernsey’s ear twitches, and then she lifts her face and looks at him. Ice has made two walrus tusks of her whiskers, but other than that she seems remarkably fresh, and for a moment the boy thinks everything will be all right. She has merely wandered off the track, overslept; needs only to be prodded. Indeed, she heaves herself to her feet at the sight of the boy, seesawing up her front end and then ratcheting her haunches up to meet it. Her tail switches free of the twigs. But after she is upright she just stands there, holding her right rear leg at an angle, a patient look on her face. If her expression had been pleading, if her eyes had asked for succor or empathy, the boy feels he might have been able to do something, but the look she gives him is transcendently inhuman. She is merely waiting for him to right the world. To make it worse, her crooked leg is wrapped round and round by a knotted helix of shiny wire.
He falls twice in his flight down the hill. It is a good half mile to the road, a half mile that takes more out of him than any half marathon he ran in the fall, and by the time he finds his uncle he can barely pant out what he has to say.
The lady. The hill. Her leg. A wire. I’m sorry, Uncle Wallace, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The slowness of his uncle’s steps maddens him, and it is with relief that he takes off to the barn when he is told to fetch a halter and lead, a pair of snips. By the time he makes it back up the hill his uncle has reached the injured Guernsey, and he takes the halter from the boy and slips it over her face. The Guernsey stretches her head out eagerly for the halter, her faith in their ability to fix things absolute. She lets his uncle lead her two limping steps to a tree trunk, lets him tie her frozen nose against the rough brown bark. It’s not a birch, the boy thinks. Not a beech either, or a poplar. At least he knows that much. At least he knows what it’s not.
The Guernsey’s not young, the boy sees now. Six, maybe even seven. You can tell by the udder: at this time of the morning it should be plump as a fully inflated basketball, but instead it’s stretched out, its milk pooling at the bottom like a horde of loose change in the toe of a sock. One of her teats is wrinkled too. Wilted really, shrunken like a desiccated radish.
Talk to her. Pet her, try to keep her calm. But watch out for her feet.
The boy doesn’t know what comes out of his mouth. Something: the Guernsey’s ears flick toward him, as do her eyes. He scratches the frost from her hide, attempts to massage her massive shoulders. But mostly he watches his uncle, who squats on his haunches in the snow and deftly snips off the crooked wire bit by bit. He unzips his jacket halfway and folds each little length of wire into the bib pocket of his overalls as if building a heart out of his lady’s suffering, and he works swiftly, silently, until nearly all the wire is gone. And then a sigh escapes his mouth, and he says,
Aw no.
It takes the boy a moment to see what has happened. What’s left of the wire is so thin and flimsy there doesn’t seem to be any substance to it. But somehow it has managed to puncture the Guernsey’s leg, pierced it right through like an arrow through a Valentine heart.
After his outburst his uncle sets his jaw, and then he says, Steady now, and grips the wire in both hands, and then he jerks it free.
The Guernsey screams. There is no other word for it. She screams like a child stung by a wasp even as her leg buckles and she falls into the boy, who feels the seismic impact of her shoulder then finds himself lying face up in the snow several feet away. A leafless branch is displayed against the low gray clouds like a filament from a torn spiderweb—or like a jab of brown lightning, the boy thinks, and it is as if he is waking up all over again in the old man’s truck on the day he arrived. The branch he’d seen through the windshield that morning had grown from a honey locust, but this one, well, it could be. But it could also be something else. He just can’t tell.
When he stands up he sees that the cow is hanging now, by the rope that holds her to the tree. Her front legs shred the snow while her back lie as if trapped within the birth canal, and then it seems as if she remembers how to use them and all at once she is up, her front legs spread wide, her head hanging as low as the rope will allow. Her right rear leg doesn’t touch the ground though, but twitches slightly up and down, as though an invisible length of wire still secured it to her hip. A few drops of blood fall from the wound and blot the snow.
The boy’s uncle heaves himself out of the snow where he too has fallen. He shakes his head, folds the last length of wire into the pocket of his overalls and zips his coat up over the lump of shredded metal.
Untie her.
When the boy loosens the rope from the trunk he sees that the lady’s weight has scored a ring in the papery bark, but he still can’t tell what kind of tree it is. He pulls on the lead but his uncle puts out a hand.
She’ll come if she can.
They stand about twenty feet from her, downhill, in the direction of the barns, and after a few minutes of heavy breathing the Guernsey lifts her head, looks at them.
Come on girl, the boy’s uncle says. Come on.
The boy holds his breath as she takes the first step. Please don’t fall, he thinks. Please, please don’t fall.
She doesn’t. Her right hip drops as if her leg is sinking in quicksand, but then it rises again, and she walks slowly toward them. Twice she stops, seems to be contemplating lying down, but she doesn’t. A half hour later, just as they make their way through the eight-month-old fence to the barnyard, the boy hears his bus coming round the bend. He turns and sees it sailing up the smooth black river of 38 like a yellow barge, then turns back to the cow.
Isn’t that your bus, Dale?
The boy ignores his uncle, turns back to the Guernsey.
Come on girl. Come on now, you’re all right, come on.
He stares at the cow as if his sight alone is keeping her upright, and his uncle doesn’t mention the bus again. The Guernsey flounders as they veer into untracked snow. Her head droops from side to side as she walks, her muzzle practically dragging in the snow, and the boy begs her, Come on girl, that’s it, come on, but even as he speaks he remembers the Ayrshire who had tasted the milk from the vat on the day his uncle and aunt got married. Both elements—the injured Guernsey, the endless expanse of snow—seem like the inevitable amplification of that earlier scene; only his uncle’s marriage seems to have disappeared. For the first time in his life the boy has the sense that something, the land, history, time itself, absorbs all the things people forgo and forget. That their lives are running out like milk from the vat, no pump truck coming to redeem it for cash, no valve to close it up again. Nothing but an expanse of wet earth to mark its passing, memories as damp and smelly as a bath towel at the bottom of the hamper.
They stall the injured Guernsey in the hay barn to keep her away from the jostles of the other ladies, and when the boy runs to the dairy barn for some food he passes the wire he snipped from the fence last April. The wire is still spooled around the willow switch where he left it. Aunt Bessie has ropes of garlic and onions in the fruit cellar that look just like this string of wire coils, but to the boy’s eyes it looks more like an ammunition belt, a string of grenades waiting to go off. The two C’s hang above them, carbon copying some unknown recipient with news of the boy’s crime.
The injured Guernsey all but knocks the pail of food from his hand when he returns.
She’s got her appetite, his uncle says. That’s a good sign. He looks down at the boy. You’d best be getting on to school.
The boy watches her eat for a moment.
Are you going to call the vet?
His uncle shakes his head.
She’s too old, Dale. Probably would have had to cull her the next time she calves no matter what happens.
The lady lies down to digest her meal. There is the half-full udder, the wilted teat.
The boy grabs the pail that had held her food.
I’d better milk her.
Donnie’ll get it.
His uncle doesn’t look at the boy, and the boy has to resist the urge to grab his hand.
I picked up all the wire, Uncle Wallace. I know I did.
The lump of evidence to the contrary bulges in his uncle’s bib pocket like a goiter. It is only a little bit bigger than a fist or an apple. Bigger than a baseball, but not as big as a softball. His uncle doesn’t say anything, and after a moment the boy tries a different tack.
What’re those C’s Uncle Wallace?
His uncle’s expression doesn’t change for a moment, and then he surprises the boy. He smiles.
Game we played when we was teenagers. Used to be a resort down by Cairo called the … the something. The C something. It had a big sign out in front. The Cairo? His uncle shakes his head. Funny, I don’t remember. All’s I remember is that boys used to dare each other to steal the C, when you took it off the sign said something else. Cairo, airo? I don’t remember Dale. But it seemed pretty funny at the time. Guess it was, at the time.
The Guernsey rustles in the straw beside him, and the smile fades from his uncle’s face.
Go on. Get Aunt Bessie to drive you to school.
The first thing the boy sees when he goes into the hay barn that afternoon is that his uncle has put the ball of wire shards into a jar. They sit on the shelf next to the dead fuses and salvaged nails and string of wire coils, as if to suggest that their potential usefulness cannot be overlooked, despite whatever damage they might have caused, and as the boy looks from them to the stolen C’s hanging above them, he wonders which category the latter belong to.
When he enters the Guernsey’s stall she does not get up, neither to eat or give milk. She will eat, she will give milk: she just won’t get up. She lies on her left side, her injured leg sticking straight out from her body and swollen to three times the size of its healthy twin. The boy’s uncle has applied his liniment to the leg, but that is all he can do for her. It all depends on what the wire hit, he says. Muscle, bone, ligament, tendon. But she walked all the way downhill. She’s eating. Those are good signs. Now all we can do is hope it don’t get infected.
The boy brings the Guernsey breakfast and dinner in a pail, milks her by hand. Because she is lying down he has to milk her into a frying pan, stopping frequently to empty the milk into a pail. He finds the volume of milk heartening; it is nearly normal, for a cow her age. He cleans the manure from her matted tail and changes the urine-soaked straw twice daily. But even though she seems calm and free of pain she makes no move to get up, and the swelling in her leg doesn’t go down. By the fifth morning the boy notices that the pursed lips of the original wound have begun to ooze a thread of green mucus. The leg is hot to the touch, and soft, like an overripe tomato.
When the boy reports this to his uncle he nods his head. He looks at the boy with his mouth set in a line as if he is trying to decide whether to say something. Throughout the ordeal he hasn’t mentioned the wire that he pulled from the injured Guernsey’s leg or how it might have gotten there, and he doesn’t mention it now. Instead he says,
If the fever hasn’t broken in the morning you’ll have to put her down, and then he goes into the house to wash up for dinner.
The boy cannot taste his food that night. His homework is incomprehensible to him. And yet he manages to clean his plate and fill in the blank pages of his notebook, and after he takes a bath he goes straight to bed. He thinks he is like a cow: his body does what it has been bred to do, leaving his mind free to focus elsewhere. He can hear his uncle and Aunt Bessie talking in the room below his, hears the tinkle of metal and glass echoing up the stairwell when Aunt Bessie washes the dishes from the pie she and his uncle have eaten, and when they go to bed the boy can hear that too: the opening and closing of drawers as pajamas are pulled out, the creak of bedsprings, his uncle’s quick steady snores.
When he opens his eyes the curtains of his windows are two pale white squares. The moon is nearly full, and the snow-covered world glints and glows darkly. There’s still a light on in an upstairs bedroom of the Flacks’ house so it can’t be that late, and although the boy knows he should go back to sleep he gets dressed instead. The top drawer of his dresser tinkles when he opens it for a second pair of socks: four medals—two silver, a bronze, a gold—and the old man’s bottles. In the moonlit room he can almost see the old man’s ghost opening and closing drawers, hear his admonitions against waking his brothers and sisters, his mother. But this bed is empty, the upstairs hallway completely silent. He walks downstairs in his stocking feet and retrieves the new boots he got for Christmas from beside the banked embers of the kitchen stove and takes scant comfort in the fact that they are warm and soft, and fit comfortably, even over two pairs of socks.
He eases out the back door. Outside, the darkness is dazzling, the earth a series of sharp shiny curves like the pieces of a broken glass bowl. But the wide-open silence seems like the hush that follows a great noise, and the boy jogs up to the hay barn with a premonition that he is already too late. Inside, the air has a sharper bite than outside, the refrigerator chill of a car first thing in the morning, but it is the darkness that takes the boy by surprise. He is three or four steps into the barn before he realizes he can’t see a thing. He freezes in his tracks, afraid to go forward or back lest a pit open up in the frozen dirt of the barn floor. The vertiginous feeling is not just uncomfortable. It is familiar, and the boy remains poised on the invisible precipice until he remembers the day his uncle told him about the first Dale Peck. He jumps as if someone has touched him on the shoulder in the dark barn, but then he pushes his namesake away rudely, goes back to the door and retrieves the flashlight hanging there on a nail, uses its beam to guide him to the injured Guernsey’s stall. She is holding her head up as he pushes open the door, but the flashlight’s glow isn’t powerful enough to capture any expression in her eyes. When she lays her head back down it lands on the straw with a thud, like something dropped.
In this light her leg is soft, featureless, as swollen as a wineskin, the hoof shoved into it like a split cork. The boy need only train his beam on it for a moment to see that the situation is hopeless. His anger surprises him. How could she have betrayed his ministrations like this? He has washed the manure and urine from her coat with his own hands, dried her even, to prevent her from catching a chill. He has proffered handfuls of grain unadulterated by augured silage, held them on a piece of cloth to her mouth so that she could lick them up from her prone position. Doesn’t she understand the significance of his efforts? How can she repay him by dying?
The Guernsey sighs, an almost human wheeze reflecting the pain and boredom of illness, even mortal illness, as if she were eager for it to be over. The sigh blows out the boy’s anger as if it were a candle, and in a moment he is on his knees beside her head, stroking it, sshhing her, willing her to be strong. The Guernsey’s ears twitch but other than that she doesn’t respond to his presence, his caresses. The ladies aren’t like dogs or cats; their neediness isn’t the neediness of pets. She neither tolerates nor welcomes his fingers, but simply lies there, as insensible as the weather. The boy notices he is shivering then. In the dark silent barn with the Guernsey unmoving before him there is nothing to do but feel the cold. Within minutes it is unbearable. A fit of shaking rattles his limbs with the fury of a pot boiling over and he has to clamp his lips between his teeth to silence their chatter. The boy feels guilty for even noticing the temperature. The lady at his feet is dying and all he can think of is returning to his bed. But when he thinks about it he realizes it isn’t the empty bed in Uncle Wallace’s house he is pining for, but the body-stuffed bed of his parents’ house, and before he can think himself out of it he has scooted between the lady’s legs and curled up against the swell of her belly.
Its warmth surprises him. It is like pressing against a furry breathing boiler. The boy feels himself rocked by the power of the lady’s lungs. It is a gentle movement, slow but full. Sometimes the bed on Long Island would sway like that, when all four boys breathed in and out in time. But her belly is so warm! He curls into a ball, scrunches as much of his body as he can against her. How can this furnace be sick, injured, let alone near death? She is like a campfire you can hold in your arms or put on like a jacket. He wants to hold her in his arms but settles for holding his own belly. His arms snake inside the torn lining of his jacket and encircle his torso. It’s warm too, but not as warm as the lady’s. He senses her legs on either side of him, holding his curled body like hospital rails. He wants to be held inside like that. He wants to be held inside her belly, be reborn as a calf. He wants to place the soft teeth of his bottom jaw and the gummed bone of his upper around an udder and drink from the well of her body. But he’s a boy. What happens to boys? He feels the pink skin of the udder beneath his right cheek. Warm. Milk should be drunk warm. Not cold. He never wants anything cold again. Warm and pink from the blood that made it. Pale pink, like a flashlight shining through your fingers. When he was a child he sucked his fingers until his mother put Tabasco sauce on them and they burned his tongue. Lois sucked her fingers but she didn’t put Tabasco on Lois’s fingers because Lois wasn’t a boy. What happens to boys? His fingers don’t burn his tongue now. They don’t taste like veal. His fingers fill his mouth with a warmth that trickles down his throat. He misses his mother but the farm has replaced her. He thinks it would have been better if he had never seen her but at least he has the farm now, the warm farm he has crawled inside, that’s crawled inside him.
Dale.
For a moment he is able to hold on to the whole of the experience: the dying cow, her warm belly, the frozen barn, the memory of the bed he shared with his brothers, the simple sad fact that he loves his mother and wished she loved him too, and then, when he realizes the pink glow behind his eyes isn’t an udder but the glow of the morning sun, the sense of loss he feels is almost overwhelming.
Come on, Dale. Get up from there.
The boy squeezes his eyes tighter. No, he tells himself, it’s not fair.
Straw rustles. When the voice comes again it is closer, quieter—and, he suddenly realizes, Donnie’s. In a tender voice that marks him apart from the boy’s family Donnie says,
She’s dead, Dale.
All at once the boy is screaming. You can’t make me go! Not again!
He is not sure at what point he opens his eyes, but the first sight he registers fully is the white hill between the barn and the house, and then he sees the bus coming down 38. He runs around the house and throws himself on the bus without a word to Kenny or Flip and when he gets to school he goes to the bathroom and combs the straw from his hair and wipes the dried milk from his chin.
As he gets off the bus that afternoon his eyes fall on the sign next to the driveway. He stares at it as the bus rumbles past in a cloud of exhaust. The letters are obscured by hoar frost, the thin sheet of snow hangs off in an east-southeast line sculpted by the prevailing winds. Kenny and Flip Flack walk up their yard but the boy stands beneath the frozen elms, staring at the sheet of snow hanging off the sign. What he sees now is that the delicate white arc looks for all the world like the polar image of the fence that had gone down in the barnyard last spring, impossibly delicate but resistant—insistent—as well. The sheet of snow is only slightly thicker than a piece of paper, and yet it has endured three months of wind and snow, daytime melts and nighttime freezes. The loops of wire the boy had clipped off the barnyard fence had looked equally delicate, harmless, but now, thinking of that fence and looking at this pole, the boy sees it as a link in a different kind of fence. The sign is a historical marker after all, a pole supporting an invisible wire that stretches from his time to a past that seems not very far away. For a moment the entire fence hangs in the air beside 38, reaching back to a past the boy cannot begin to imagine but that he can feel nonetheless, a past as inevitably a part of his life as the future that awaits him. He whips around then, as if he’ll be able to get a glimpse of what’s in store for him, but all he sees is the glare of the setting sun glinting off the snow-capped hill behind him.
He turns then, shucks his schoolbooks in the kitchen, heads up to the dairy barn. He and his uncle milk the ladies in silence and he shovels out the gutters after they’re done, uses a push broom to sweep a few blown flakes of snow from the front walk, and then he goes inside to do his homework. He comes down for dinner and then he takes his bath and goes back to his room. He hears his uncle and aunt get ready for bed, and then he hears his uncle in the hall outside his door. The floorboards’ creak makes knocking unnecessary, but his uncle knocks anyway.
The boy looks up at his uncle. He is a small man in a small door, but somehow scale doesn’t correct for proportion. They both seem small, a doll in a doll’s doorway, a doll’s hand hanging on to a doll’s doorknob. But beneath his gaze the boy feels as tiny as an ant.
I’m sorry I killed her, Uncle Wallace.
His uncle’s mouth remains level, firm, as does his voice.
I come to tell you something, Dale.
The boy looks at his uncle and knows before he speaks that he is not going to send him away. A feeling of dread fills him then. He has worked so hard to forget all his uncle’s revelations. The image of the sign flashes in his mind: what part of his past is his uncle going to drag up now?
But he is surprised by what comes out of his uncle’s mouth.
Your father was a good boy, Dale. Just like you. Hard working, honest, a bit of a temper maybe, but a good boy.
He stops again. His hand turns the doorknob but the door is already open.
His uncle stops. The latch clicks when he releases the handle but the boy’s uncle stands there as if frozen, but softly frozen—as if cast in soft white wax. He is staring at the floor and the boy studies him. His uncle is looking at the floor and there is a half smile on his face. Later on—in just a few minutes, as soon as his uncle finishes saying what he has to say—the boy will understand what his uncle is looking at, but for the moment he is struck by the awe there, the sense of comprehension. Belated comprehension—belated compassion too—and the boy understands that his uncle is not just speaking to him.
His uncle nods his head. Then:
Lloyd found our father, Dale. In a field, just like you found your lady. I tell you, when I saw the look that was on your face it brought me back. Lloyd was thirteen, Dale, same age as you are.
The boy turned fourteen two weeks ago, but he doesn’t say anything.
Our father was shot dead, Dale. Lloyd found the gun. Nobody knew if it was suicide or murder. Some folks even wondered if Lloyd—
He stops again. It is a long time before he continues.
It ruined him, Dale. Just ruined him. He couldn’t go on—go back to how it was, go forward to something new. So instead he drank. And of course our old man was a drunk and that was the one thing Lloyd said he’d never be. But he just couldn’t face life after he found Daddy like that.
No, the boy thinks. Stop. This isn’t right, this grandfather story. It is as though his uncle has laid the corpse in bed beside him, said, See? Your troubles ain’t so bad. He wants to say to his uncle, This is your story, not mine. It means something to you, not me. But even as the boy thinks Stop it’s already over. His uncle has told his story and the boy has heard it and neither of them can erase his past.
His uncle turns to the boy and addresses him directly.
You got to put things aside Dale, he says, and the boy has never heard him sound so plaintive before, so unsure of himself. Sometimes all you can do is what’s right. Do what you have to without thinking about it. Put the mistakes behind you, the bad times, because nothing can fix the past or bring it back.
The historical marker beside the driveway flashes in the boy’s mind. No, he thinks again, that’s not true, and his uncle must know it too. He leaves the sign there after all.
It’s a hard life, his uncle is saying, and there is still that plaintive edge to his voice, as if he is not just willing the boy to believe but asking him to confirm his own beliefs. There’s only the future to look forward to, his uncle says insistently. Nothing else. Nothing but. And—His uncle’s voice catches, then resumes. And I just couldn’t take it if you got stuck like Lloyd did.
His uncle stops then, finally, and this time doesn’t start again. He is finished, waits only for some sign that the boy has heard him, understood.
The boy says, I’m fourteen Uncle Wallace, and his uncle nods once, then closes the door.
As soon as he leaves the boy shuts the light off. He lies on the edge of the mattress as he always does, but tonight he’s not making room for his brothers but instead for his grandfather’s body. The boy doesn’t doubt his uncle’s story, but he can find no way to attach any meaning to it either. He tries to imagine the old man standing over his grandfather’s dead body, and the inevitable happens: he sees himself, standing over Lloyd, the warm barrel of a gun clutched in his hand. He sees the dead Guernsey too, sprawled across the stall. Even after he falls asleep he feels her cold carcass beneath him instead of the mattress, each of her ribs pushing into him like a root pushing out of the ground. Her head is stretched out as if in birthing, her legs stick straight out of her body, two flush with the straw, two poking into the air, and when his uncle raps on his door in the morning he shudders awake, realizing—remembering—that he never actually saw the Guernsey’s body. He had run from Donnie’s alien sympathy without looking back, just as he had forgotten to look back at his house when the old man had taken him away last year. All at once images from his dreams and his life and his uncle’s mouth tumble on him in a rush. The pillowcase beneath his head is stuffed with his brothers’ clothes and the old man’s bottles and the dead cow’s torso, and the pillowcase itself is a net of snow-white wire. The cow becomes his invisible grandfather and he himself becomes the old man, and then Dolly’s calf, sold off for veal. The Guernsey, he knows, is already gone, sold off for dog food. Is this what makes history so terrible? the boy wonders. This constant effacement of one real thing by another, yet yielding neither? It is worse than death. It is as if the Guernsey had never lived at all, nor his grandfather—as if someone had made the whole thing up.
His uncle knocks on the door again, something he has never had to do in the boy’s thirteen months here.
Come on Dale, he says through the closed door. Ladies won’t milk themselves.