Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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absent at the farmhouse. The farmhouse was a dwelling shades above a cave, the upper room he slept in akin to a child’s treehouse. Scab carpet unfastened and without padding covered most of the wooden floor, drab brown, curled and frayed at the edges. His narrow rank bed bent from use and the wallpaper flyspotted and yellowed, wallpaper whose maddening pattern, circles and lines, lines and circles, ran down the wall like strange liquid, wallpaper he had stared at for long periods until it had come to represent the toil of his young life, the convolutions and implications of his existence, his faith, and farther until it traced the wild, entwined history of humankind in its lines, for so many years its presence like an unpleasant friend become tolerable through relentless visitations, the sharp edges of its desperation worn round, a certain acquiescence or submission granted. The whole dim room tilting one way and the delirium of his simple life draining out the window. The place where he now sat was a home, and within it her slow beauty worked on him like liquor.
Martha cleaned and dressed his knee, an abraded area above his hip, and returned to his left elbow, all the while asking questions about the town she and her daughter had left, the people there. He answered her questions and his voice seemed thick and bucolic in the room, a stark and roughhewn contrast to the honey that spilled from the throats of the women. He tried for clearer, more enunciated language and his words came out stilted and foreign.
Rebekah got up and returned with another wet cloth. She set his right arm on the table and began wiping his elbow. She became involved in this task, and underlying the pain that throbbed through the torn skin, shooting along nerve tracks and reaching into strange parts of his body, he was awash in warmth at being touched and cared for by these two women, having their sole attention this way. The pain Rebekah caused was tremendous, her hand not as careful as her mother’s, and it traveled to his heart. Her face gathered into a scowl of focus and the pink tip of her tongue stuck out from the corner of her mouth. Once he hissed and she looked up at him from her crouch, dark-eyed and guileless. As he admired the clean line of her neck he noticed what could have been a tattoo on the nape, though from his angle he could not see it well.
Wrapped up, with a stale pain warming under each bandage, he pulled his pungent shirt on. Martha put a good sandwich and a pitcher of lemonade in front of him and left him alone. When he was through he went outside and walked across the lane and looked into the field. It was almost dark and he couldn’t see any heifers. Inside Martha’s car he smelled dried sweat, cow manure, old sun, all wafting from his skin and clothes and mixing with the scent of antiseptics. As he climbed out at the farmhouse the warm feeling from before was gone and beneath it lay only the pain of his stiffening wounds and the dark knowledge of work the next morning. Blair called out when he entered the house. Jack ignored him and went toward the stairwell. As he rounded the corner he heard a noise in the darkness and was suddenly face to face with the old woman. Her bedroom door was catercorner to the opening for the stairs, and it was from there that she had emerged like a wraith. She staggered forward malodorous, her white eyes open in the dimness, her heavy arms outstretched and feeling, and he sidestepped her and climbed the squealing stairs to his room.
He slept badly that night, no position comfortable and the plea of his wounds breaking any stream of slumber into fragments. When he got up predawn, stiff with surface pain, a few of the bandages had bled through and others were yellow with wound seepage. He tried to rewrap one of them and did a poor job. Blair came into the kitchen and took the jar of peanut butter from the cupboard.
—Happened to you? he said.
—I told you. I wrecked.
—Only a matter of time with one of them.
—Would of happened with anything, said Jack. The hell do you know about it.
—Can you milk?
—I’m up ain’t I.
Blair took a spoon from the drawer and probed around in the jar.
—That storm knocked a branch down from the big tree on the corner there, he said. Crushed the fence. They just stepped right over it, pretty as you please. Didn’t take um long to find it. We’re lucky more didn’t get out. We left Elmer’s truck there, but you’ll need to get to it today and fix it up.
—If you want it done today you can do it yourself, said Jack. I ain’t doing it today.
—Well it’s got to be done. They’ll bully it till they can squeeze between the truck.
—You or Elmer can do it. I ain’t doing it today.
They rode to the barn in silence, passing his three-wheeler in the weeds. It was a cool morning with a drizzle of rain. Rain in July was fickle as it was rare and he guessed it would barely dampen the dust and be gone with the sun. The cows were wet, fetid, and kicking, their udders like things that should not be seen. They swung their tails into his face and lathered him with rank rainwater and urine. Some tails were clotted with smooth ovals of manure worn hard with age, and the cows swung these like medieval weapons. He tasted warm shit in his mouth when the cow he was working on lifted her tail and dropped it from above. It hit in sections and shot outward and upward from the waist-high milking deck. He spat and swore, and after sticking the hose in his mouth he washed the hot mess down the grate. He lost the bandages on his palms and his raw hands stung. The bandages on his arms became wet and hung and flapped until they fell off. One cow kicked like a machine set to do so and he tried again to guide the milkers to her swollen teats. Her leg moved mechanically, lifting and kicking at his arm, swiping blindly at the milkers. He had placed all four on her udder when her hoof came up and pulled the apparatus down to the concrete with a clatter. He grabbed the sensitive skin of her udder between his knuckles and twisted hard in a place where she could not reach him with her hoof, and she raised her trembling leg and held it as though it were struck with palsy. He tried to place the milkers again. Her hoof rose and tore his bandage off, opening up part of the wound on his left elbow. His face grew hot and he reached for one of the metal weights they kept on the milk tubes below the splash guard—a cylinder of solid steel five inches long and thicker than a shovel handle, a thing Blair used often to beat at their legs when he wasn’t up to employing his fists or the splintered axe handle that leaned against the back wall. But the girl had whetted his spirit and therefore his nature. The memory of her calmness and composure coated his mood and he felt some warm longing in his chest, some fierce hope budding. He set the weight down and tried again. When the cow continued to kick he went up the steps at the rear of the barn and walked down the exit alley to where she stood. He feinted at her and pointed his finger within inches of her enormous head and she flinched and jerked in alarm.
—Not today bitch, he growled. Not today.
He walked down and tried again and she took the milkers. His arm bled and dripped thickly until it congealed to a clotted crust over his elbow and the pain subsided to a hot throb. He worked on the animals with Blair, who used epithets improvised and traditional like only men who work with dairy cows can. The old man didn’t embark on his journeys of violence so often anymore, those trips where he methodically grabbed the axe handle, his serenity sticking to him like an odor as he walked up to her level and fleeing as he wielded the stick against her huge head and neck until the other cows were spooked and he was satisfied. He’d once knocked a half-grown heifer over the head so hard with a two-by-four that her eyeball fell out. She lived a long one-eyed life, her milk production among the best in the herd. His booming voice from below was often enough to scare a cow into cooperation. Sometimes he loved these cows with the diligence and duty of a good father tending to his handicapped children. Other times they were only a dirty, stinking living, nearly too brainless to exist within their own mapped hides but producing a white product he could sell.
Then they were through it and the sun was well up, bursting through the dispersing clouds in slanted pillars. The rising sun was the redemption of milking in the morning. As Jack unrolled the hose to wash down, Carrie walked through the side door. She was dressed so far as he could tell in Elmer’s clothes. She wore one of the yarn hats she knitted herself. Her large pale face, its skin prone to purpling in the cold and burning in the sun, twisted now into a shallow greeting. He handed her the hose and they exchanged rote words and he got in the truck with Blair and left.
Sunlight fell onto the table and