Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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got to get ready, said Elmer. I’m taking Edward Elmer and Carrie. We’re staying for the lunch and all. Can I bring you back anything?
—Like what? said Jack.
—Oh, I don’t know. A sloppy joe or something. Have Eddie grab some candy for yuh. You want to come with us Pa?
—Maybe I will. It’s already too hot for work.
Two hours later Jack was thirsty. He sweated when he stood still and when he moved it poured out of him. He had welded the bar on the fence, dripping sweat into a puddle at the bottom of the welding mask, and then had gone into the cool dim barn where he drank a cup of thick frothy milk cold from the tank and slowed the push of his sweat until it stopped. He got in the truck and drove toward town, and because the main road was closed took a grassy track that ran behind a string of houses. He went to the co-op and bought a Pepsi from the machine and headed back. He parked in the shadow of the big red barn behind his old house and walked toward the parade that was making its way through the square. He stood back at a distance and watched. It was a pathetic parade, a few utility trailers turned ragged floats, boys on bicycles with cards tapping their spokes and trailing crepe paper streamers, tractors pulling implements, some not washed, people proudly leading farm stock along. He could see a swath of streetside folks, but no girl that looked like the one he had seen the night before, indeed no girl anywhere close to her age. But there was Roydn Woolums coming along on an old lawnmower, a rusting sputtering hulk that lurched forward on four bald tires, its seat covered with a pillow taped to the frame. Colorful streamers hung from its handles and completed the spectacle. He pulled a small wagon and in it sat his youngest brother, the one they called Rapscallion, too old to be in a wagon in a parade but throwing homemade hardtack candy to the crowd with strangled enthusiasm. Roydn had given himself space and drove in figure eights and circles, shoving his glasses up and taking his hat off to wipe his brow with a forearm. Sweat climbed upward and outward from the seam of his hat brim and his shirt stuck to his torso. He ran the throttle up harshly in clouds of popping blue smoke and the mower leapt forward in its transition through the gears. His face was a tortured mixture of public humiliation and some small rustic pride.
Jack spent an hour gathering empty grain sacks and blown garbage along the east fence. The wind had run over the barnyard the night before and the close hayshed looked askew on its poles as if it had been pushed by the wind, leaning eastward. Later he was in the lower fields pulling a pipe trailer with his truck and gathering the sunbaked sprinkler pipe onto it. He had forgotten gloves and found those he kept in the glovebox taken, so he took off his shirt and used it as best he could to guard his hands, but still they were burned. He worked alone and it suited his mood.
In the evening when the work was done he drew milk from the tank into an old tin pail he had cleaned with hot water and soap. He balanced it cold between his legs on the seat of his two-stroke three-wheeler and opened the throttle on the lane and looked through the soft light ahead. He smelled the swamp water as it pumped from the pond below the barn and through the sprinkler lines. The sprinklers, drowned out by the whine of his machine and the gravel beneath its tires, turned in stuttered circles with each beat, pounding crops and soil with water. His stomach lightened and his blood surged and not from his speed. If no one answered he didn’t know if he would leave the milk on the doorstep or if he would pour it into the wild barley at the side of the lane. But as he rose over the last crest and came down he locked up both brakes and slid out of control toward a heifer standing dumbly in the middle of the lane. The rear end of the three-wheeler swung around and ran parallel with the front wheel, and he slid toward the animal sideways, pushing a spray of gravel ahead of him and bringing with him the roar of dragged stones. The machine grabbed and flipped and in a splash of hurled milk he catapulted onto the road where he slid to a stop and curled into a ball to wait for the pain, his flesh torn and dusty, his breath knocked out somewhere on the road. When the pain came it rolled up and down his body and he could get no air. He tried to swear but sounded like a deaf man croaking out a guttural demand. His three-wheeler was on its top behind him, its wheels standing in the sky like an abstract sculpture. He smelled gasoline in the dust.
When he could get up he rose and limped over to the machine, muscled it onto its side, and flipped it back over. He climbed aboard and kicked the starter. He kicked it again and again and got nothing, and when he was sure it was flooded he pushed it off the road and looked out across the hay field toward the riverbottom fence and saw three more heifers wandering around in the green hay. He looked at his arms and hands, the skin gray and dirty, the blood holding sheens of dust and patches of tiny rocks. He picked at his torn shirt and pants. Blood ran down his left arm, down his fingers, and dripped into milk still puddled in the dust in globular patterns, the blood breaking apart first in smaller spherules and then spreading in trails as it dissolved into pinkness. That image stayed with him. He looked for the pail and found it dented in the late sun near the fence and found its cap upturned on the road behind the wreck with beads of milk still holding to it. He capped the pail and hung it on the handle of the three-wheeler and cursed the animal as he walked toward her. She’d been tame this way since she was a calf. She followed him with her head until he slapped her rump with his good arm, and then she moved to the side of the road and grazed in the grass there. He walked toward the McKellar house.
There was no answer at the front door so he went around back between the lilac bushes. As he stepped into a yard surrounded by a border of tall pines he met the gazes of two women on the porch. A woman he recognized as Martha Rainsford rose from her seat beside her daughter and met him in the middle of the yard. They were surrounded also by the strange playground toys Tom McKellar had built in the heyday of his bizarre creation. As Jack explained how he had rolled his three-wheeler and asked to use her phone, Martha took his left arm and studied it. She instructed Rebekah to call Blair Selvedge and tell him his cows were out, and the girl rose and disappeared into the house. Two glasses of lemonade sweated on a table between chairs. Martha took him inside and sat him at the kitchen table and disappeared around a corner.
—What’s the number? said Rebekah from behind him.
He turned and looked at her. The soft fragrance of shampoo and soap lifted from her and floated toward him. She wore shorts and he could see her bare thighs without looking at them. She was tall and full bodied, her skin having taken a healthy color from the sun. Her dark hair was pulled up loosely and her posture listless, unaffected by his plight. He gave her the number and she dialed it and handed him the phone. It took effort to keep from arguing with Blair. The old man was unable to take simple orders. Rebekah stood in the doorway to the kitchen, listening to him talk.
—No, he said. There’s at least four. You need to get Elmer to help you.
—I don’t know where they got out. I wrecked. I’m at Tom McKellar’s house. I’m bleeding.
—I did fix the fence. I don’t know how they got out.
—No. I’m telling you, I’m bleeding all over the place.
He looked down at his left arm and saw that blood was dripping off his fingers onto the linoleum in bright, coin-sized droplets. They had splattered, each surrounded by its own series of moons. He hung up the phone. This was a situation the old man would have to see with his own eyes to understand. He had a small imagination. Rebekah came for the phone and after hanging it up brought him a glass of lemonade with a paper towel for his arm and sat down at the table with him. She regarded him with bright limpid eyes and asked him if it hurt. It burns, but it’s not too bad, he said. She said she’d never seen so many scrapes, and that he must have been driving too fast. He told her there was no speed limit on this road and she said it was twenty-five unless otherwise posted. He said if he knew there was a heifer standing in the middle of the road he might have slowed down. She asked him if it was the cow’s fault and he said it was always the cow’s fault.
He was aware of his smell in the kitchen. Martha returned and set gauze, tape, creams, bottles, scissors, and tweezers out in a line on the table. As she did her work he could feel Rebekah’s presence beside him like a hot stove. Her eyes clear as running water in the light and burning dark otherwise. She had a shallow cleft in her chin that he did not remember. The kitchen was clean and small. The refrigerator clicked on and hummed in the corner. The house seemed kept with a simple pride, its modesty