Postcards. Annie Proulx

is a hell of a thing to do,’ said Dub. ‘That is a hell of a thing to do.’ Jewell shuddered, her fingers across her mouth, watched Dub go out to the entry, jerk his coat off the nail. Back through the kitchen to the woodshed door.

      ‘Be careful,’ she said, hoping he knew what he should be careful about. Mernelle started to snivel, not over the cows, but because of Mink’s rage that was spurting out of him like jets of water from a kinked hose. He could chop them all with the axe.

      ‘Get hold of yourself and go up to bed,’ said Jewell gathering the plates from the table. ‘Go on now, I got enough trouble without you blubberin’ around the place.’

      She was sitting at the table when Mink came in. She saw how a little burst of greyed hairs had grown on his cheek since morning. He threw the rifle up on top of the cupboard without cleaning it and sat across from her. His hands were steady. The streaked hair stuck out from under his cap, the bill like a menacing horn over his eyes.

      ‘By god, that’s two of them we don’t have to milk.’ There were fine drops of blood across the front of his overalls.

      Mist rose from the brook like a stage curtain. In midmorning the trees still bent wet and silent. Every surface was coated with beaded drops that paled bark, wood, paint, soil. The coming and going of Dub and Mink made dark paths across the porch, through the grass like stiff hairs with seed pearls at the tips. The top of the barn dissolved, the pigs rooted in the manure pile, heaving bubbles on the surface of a black swamp.

      Mink was out before daylight. Jewell struggled from sleep to the sound of the tractor dragging the Holsteins down to the swamp where the dogs and foxes and crows would find them. The engine echoed and dotted through the fog.

      ‘We could of at least took the meat,’ she thought, and Mink’s anger seemed to her so wasteful he would have to burn for it in a hell as crimson as the landscape seen through the red cellophane strip on cigarette packs. Not a new thought.

      He had done a hundred things. She could not forget all of them. The knock-down slaps, the whalings he gave the boys, same as he’d had himself. Loyal, maybe three years old, stumbling across the muddy barnyard in his little red boots, bellowing like a lost calf but still hanging onto his empty milk bucket. It was a quart cream can, really. The milk all spilled when he did in fresh manure. Mink had slapped him halfway across the barn. ‘I’ll learn you to watch your goddamn step! Don’t spill the milk!’ Loyal’s broken nose had swelled up to the size of a hen’s egg by the time he got to the porch steps, the cream can hanging, and for two weeks the kid had slunk around dodging Mink, looking like a raccoon with his double black eyes. When she’d run out to the barn in her own fury Mink’d been astonished. ‘Listen here. We got to start him young. We got to. It’s for his own good. I went through it. And guarantee you he won’t spill no more milk.’ Nor had he.

      And Dub, too, who’d got to eating under the table with the dog when he was what, five or six, until Mink hauled him up by his hair and held him screaming in the air, ‘Will you eat off’n your plate or not! Will you?’

      But she couldn’t hold it against him because he came off the fire as fast as he heated up. The Blood temper. Loyal had the same flash temper. And mild as milk afterwards.

      Mink and Dub were late coming in from the barn. It was nine by the kitchen clock when Dub went for the speckled coffeepot on the back of the stove, relishing the hot chicory taste. He poured some into a chipped cup for Mink. Shifting weights and counterweights of regard shot back and forth between them like abacus beads on wires. Animosity and bridling softened. Mink tried to smother his contempt for Dub’s wandering habits, hopeless taste for nigger music, those sly records by Raw Boy Harry he brought back from distant places. He went for the Kong Chow restaurant in Rutland, too, where he’d eat three dollars’ worth of vegetables in a ratbrown sauce at one sitting and the Comet Roadhouse where he got drunk on Saturday and pawed the women with his grimy hand.

      Dub, in his turn, swallowed the remarks under his breath about Mink’s monotonous ideas and narrow corridors of toil, his pathetic belief that cattle auctions were the height of entertainment. Dub could even choke down the way the old man had shot the Holsteins.

      Working in the dim lantern light, their calloused hands touched like pieces of wood as Dub dipped for the handle of the full milk pad and passed a new one to Mink, as Dub went ahead, wiping down the flanks and udder of the next cow, soothing Myrna Loy who tossed her head, still nervy. They fell into the companionship of work. The weight of the work without Loyal pressed them close. Dub hustled; Mink milked on and on, fourteen, seventeen cows, his forearms aching, his back cracking, and Dub saw it was a prodigious job. For the first time he felt sorry on Mink’s account that he’d lost his arm.

      Now that Loyal was gone some kind of hunger for his father’s affection came up in Dub, an appetite he hadn’t known he had, that had lain quiet and flat under his joking and travels, and that could never be satisfied at this late date. It did not displace the ancient hatred and what he murmured like a charm against fate, ‘won’t never be like he is.’

      They worked without speaking, listening to the farm report and egg prices and War news coming from the crackling, chaff-coated radio that ran off the big farm battery, on its shelf beside the milk room door. For a while, in those hours of carrying, of spurting milk, they passed from being father and youngest son, became two equals subordinate to the endless labor. ‘We’ll get it tuned up, all right,’ Mink said, the muscles in his arms swelling, falling, as he milked.

      ‘Three and a half hours of milkin’. I done the milkin’. Dub lugged the goddamn milk, and it adds up to seven hours a day on milkin’ alone, add in grainin’ and hayin’ ’em, clean out the barn, got to spread some of that manure before the snow comes, tomorrow we got to get the cream down to the road by seven, plus the rest of life’s little chores like diggin’ the potatoes we got to get dug, we ain’t got the wood hauled down yet. The butcherin’s got to be did this week if we stay up all night doin’ it. If I was to make a list of the things that got to be did right now it would take every piece of paper in the house. I don’t know if I could hold a pencil, don’t know if I can get my hands around anything but cow teats. You and Mernelle will have to take care of them chickens and get in what apples you can, dig the potatoes. Mernelle will have to stay out of school for a week or so until we get on top of it. There ain’t no way we can do it unless we give up sleepin’.’ What he said was true. But the set of his furious mouth got Jewell’s back up.

      ‘You’ll put up with scratch suppers if we got to do outside work. I can’t kill and pluck chickens and lug potatoes and apples and then come in and make a big dinner. Can’t you get one of your brother’s boys there, Ernest or Norman, to help?’ She knew he could not.

      ‘Be nice if I could slack off on the milkin’ just because I got to haul wood. Goddamn it, I need a good dinner and I expect you to fix it for me.’ Now he was shouting. ‘And no, I can’t get Ott’s boys to help. First place, Norman’s only eleven and got about as much strength as wet hay. Ernie’s already helpin’ Ott and Ott says he puts about as much into it as he would into takin’ poison.’

      She’d like to see him take poison, he knew it.

      There was the threshing sound of a car coming up the lane. Jewell went to the window.

      ‘Might of known she’d be along; it’s old Mrs. Nipple and Ronnie.’

      ‘Be out in the barn,’ said Mink, hitching at his overalls. The argument had brought up his color, and Jewell had a flash of how he’d been when he was young, the milky skin under the shirt, the blue flashing eyes and the fine hair. The vigor of him, the swaggering way he walked and hitched at his overalls to free his private parts from the chafing cloth.

      He and Dub went out the door to the woodshed, moving like a matched team. The porch door hissed. Mrs. Nipple’s heavy fingers crooked around the door edge.

      ‘Don’t just stand there, Mrs. Nipple, come on in and Ronnie too,’ shouted Jewell, putting on water for tea. The old lady had burned her mouth with hot coffee as a baby and never touched it again, let her tea stand until it went tepid. ‘Thought