Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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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, pining for things he could not name, and when these anxieties took him he felt in tune with something larger than himself. They were a sober component of his disposition. In these moments, with voices from the dead murmuring a susurrus through his mind, it seemed nothing less than fate speaking to him, some low piercing voice of vague origin, and he could not understand it. And so he only listened to the strange tongue speak in mutters and went on.
He came to the park. In the soft obscurity between dusk and dark a girl was on the swing set. She made the chains of the swing groan and took them nearly to their horizontal limit. She looked to be his age, too old for the swings, but swung upward, her toes pointing to the sky, then tucked them back as she fell, and each time she reached the apex her dark hair lifted and fell. It startled him, and some strange hunger moved inside him. He slowed. His fingers found the knob to turn the radio off. She looked toward his truck through her flying hair. She was alone, and he didn’t dare watch for long, so he drove a little farther and turned into the grass-sprung parking lot and left his truck beneath the denuded basketball rims. The swings were no longer visible because of the pine trees and the pavilion in between.
He found Heber under the trees regarding the evening generously and nursing a bottle of beer. The querulous moaning of the chains floated across the park to them, and when he told Heber what it was Heber rose and they went to find her out, to discover her mystery, to put to rest their slow thudding blood and their mad wonderings. When they rounded the pavilion she was gone. The swing still moved, and as they reached it Jack put a hand out to steady it and felt the seat still warm with the heat of her body. The two of them looked around. Jack gave the seat a push and it swung askew and they turned and walked back to the trees.
Heber rubbed his blond red beard and said, Who was it?
—Might of been Rebekah Rainsford.
—No.
—It’s what Woolums said.
—The hell does he know?
—Who else could it be?
—How beautiful was she?
—Hard to say.
—That girl was always beautiful and would be now. Why’d you come to me first? You need someone to show you the way?
—She’s too young for you. And she’s wholesome. You’d corrupt and defile her. You’d ruin her.
Heber laughed from his belly.
—How do you know she’s wholesome? She’s been gone a long time.
—She always was. She was untouchable.
—This is good for morale, said Heber.
They sat together under the shivering stars, among the rubbing crickets. Heber sat against the tree and picked up the beer he’d left behind. He wore a strange shirt that fit his broad shoulders and soft gut well. It was garish and outrageous, intricate sketches of tiny pale flowers overlaying the white fabric. Down the middle of the front on both sides of the buttons ran vertical lines, some thin and some thick, of red, brown, yellow, and blue. Down either side of this lay heavily embroidered patterns of large blue flowers with small flowers filling in between.
—You ever wear that shirt when you sold real estate? said Jack.
—I bought it for that.
—That’s probly why you never sold anything.
—I wish I could blame it on the shirt. But I’ll redeem that failure and you’ll see a picture of me on my business card wearing this very shirt.
—Get the picture taken from the neck up then.
—Selvedge, if I die before you I promise you can have this shirt.
—I could probly use it to wipe my butt.
Heber drained the last of his beer and reached into the pack for another. He pried the lid off with his pocket knife and said, How’s your grandmother?
—They couldn’t