Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner

his father’s uncle at thirty-nine. He’d heard of others up the tree when he’d cared to listen to the old woman tell it. She told it no longer.

      At four in the morning he drove his grandfather to the barn and listened to the sloppy sounds of peanut butter smacked around in a soft maw as the old man tongued it off his palate and dug it out from the recesses of his mouth. The smell of it filling the cab of the truck was a thing to hate each morning. The dog met them as they parked, wagging her tail in the darkness. Clotted blood stained her white ear and as Jack bent down and fingered the fresh tears she whined and nipped at him. The two men did their work without enthusiasm. They worked in an open-ended concrete pit with six cows above them on both sides. Stairs at the rear led to the holding pen, and the open end diverted to the tank room and front entrance, the office, and the side entrance. The milking barn was a plain cinderblock structure built into an incline of earth, painted white with red trim, a fading wooden sign announcing Blair Selvedge and Son on the front above the landing. Raccoons lived in its roof. With milking at four in the morning and again at four in the evening Blair had been married to his farm for fifty years, and there was no vow stronger than his devotion to his cows. Five hours a day these animals required, coaxing from them a spare living, and only gathering their milk at that. Everything they did on the farm led to this task, which was as much a part of their lives as eating. Before the milking was through, the faulty front gate on the east side broke open while the last of the cows still had their milkers on and the trundling fools surged forward and around the corner and, goaded on by Blair’s angry yells, ran like heathens down the exit alley where they mixed with the others in the corral.

      Back at the farmhouse Jack fed the heifers and when he came in Blair told him to say hello to his grandmother. The old woman had long haunted him with her stubborn presence, her waning refusal to submit to the grave. Her dim room near the staircase smelled of death’s encroachment. He moved slowly, his left hand outstretched, feeling for the footpost as he sought her shape. He made out the white slits of her eyes, her hair, thin and matted like an ancient pelt, her pale face. He said hello, and when her wrinkled mouth cracked open and issued a cloud of foul breath he said it again. She murmured something. The haze of her breath and the smell of bitter beads of sweat along her hairline caused his mouth to tighten. He took a step back and watched her. Her mouth opened farther, then closed, then opened, as if he had roused some cave creature in its death throes. He left her there gaping.

      In the kitchen Blair stood over the stove, a tall man, taller than Jack’s six feet by a few inches and thickening from the toes up, his body building to a neck that rose in a straight line up the back of his head, and that line rising farther through the rooster tail that ever shot up from his stiff white hair. His face was gritworn from wind-driven dirt, everlastingly tanned and deeply lined like the palms of his cowhide gloves. That was a face well worn, or badly worn, those great wrinkles. There were men in town who had their occupations in Willow Valley thirty miles away whose hands didn’t know callus, whose faces were soft and kindly worn with wrinkles like those found behind a child’s knee. Blair’s face looked like a gnarled tree at timberline and he seemed one of the last in a long line of something. It had spent the majority of its existence exposed to the elements. Bristly hair crept from his nostrils and spiraled from his ears like coughs of frost.

      In the mornings they took bricks of sausage or bacon from the freezer and sawed off thick slices and laid them on the hot skillet where they spat and sizzled, a pig they had raised in the shed behind the house. Jack worked bread in and out of the toaster. He placed a large tub of butter on the table and peeled the lid off to reveal a scarred mess sprinkled with toast crumbs, smears of jam and peanut butter. They settled into their chairs and Blair dished a bit of scrambled egg and sausage onto a plate for the old woman. He took it to her and returned and the two ate slowly and enjoyed it.

      Around them hung off-kilter and dusty photos of family, one of father wife and son, Elmer not twenty years old, grinning like a dimwit in a baby blue suit, and one of Jack and his parents when Jack was twelve. There were clothworks stitched by the old woman when she was well that declared maxims too simple for thought. The carpet was littered with food refuse and crumbs, bits of straw and hay from their socks, and was worn bare in the doorways and thinned in their main pathways of travel, thinnest into the living room where sat a broken couch and each man’s own chair which would never be used by the other anymore than would the other’s soiled underwear. Into these chairs at night they would sink like stones in a bog, hardly moving, dozing, Jack often falling into a hard sleep and waking alone in some odd hour of the night. Horrid smells came from the kitchen sink and lingered even after a thorough dish-doing at Jack’s hands. In the small bathroom the toilet sat seat-up, its rim stained with dried urine, long twisted hairs trapped in dark yellow cakings. The tub held a black halo of filth and a gutter of dregs like the tail of something unsightly gone down the drain. The sink and counter were discolored with general use and peppered with whiskers caught in evaporated puddles of anonymous remains, the Lava soap they used to clean their hands lying cracked on the sill. The soap itself was dirty. When women from the church came to clean and saw this primitive hovel in a state of squalor and semi-ruin they wore masks and elbow-length gloves and remarked afterward how all their effort seemed to come to nothing. It had been this way since the old woman became sick, bedridden and blind, some four years before.

      The sun already hot on the back of his neck, the muscles in his shoulders and back sore. Jack’s damp skin bloomed goose bumps as he pulled his shirt off and shook it out, ridding it of fine hay leaves. The dog got up from where she’d been drowsing near the haystack and trotted after him and he walked the corridor between the west manger and the hayshed and listened to the chewing of the animals as their rough tongues pulled at the hay and gathered it in to be mashed, later to be brought up and chewed on again as cud. So much these cows ate and so much they shit, massive solid animals, nimble as planets, passive as stones.

      He stopped at the corner of the hayshed when he saw Elmer come out of his house and sit on the back steps to put his boots on. Elmer made it twenty feet before his sprig-eared boy slipped out the door behind him and trailed him furtively like one of the wild cats of the barnyard. Elmer turned and walked him back to the house and shut him inside. The boy’s name was Edward Elmer, named after Blair’s father and his own father respectively. Elmer the elder’s underslung chin sloped down to his neck in a long curve of soft flesh, giving him that single resemblance to a pigeon, and his stride was uneven across the barnyard as he walked toward Jack, a disarming lope, not carefree, for in forty-one years he had not known a full week of wellness. It was said he suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, among other things. It was said he also had irritable bowel syndrome. Jack walked across the straw-littered gravel and squatted on his heels.

      —What do you got going today? said Elmer.

      Jack squinted up at him.

      —Scrape the corral, straw the stalls, he said. Then I was going to start on that thirty-acre piece.

      —Well, you mind taking them weaned calves up the house and give um their shots fore you swath?

      —I won’t have time for swathing if I do that. You don’t want that field to blossom.

      —No, I don’t think it will. Them calves need to be taken up the house though. I guess you could do that.

      —I guess I could. But that field needs to be cut.

      Elmer stared at the ground with a half-smile. Jack picked at the torn sole of his boot.

      —Take them calves up and you can start on that field tonight or tomorrow, said Elmer. Thank yuh kindly.

      Jack grunted and walked to the tractor. He remembered once when he was a little boy and his mother had taken him out to the fields to find his uncle. Jack had spotted him far off in the field discing the soil and his mother had driven him over the field and Elmer had stopped and lifted him up onto the tractor to ride on the wheel well. This had happened dozens of times, but he remembered this one time, the sight of the tractor pulling the discs slowly in what seemed then to be a large field but what he knew now was not so big.

      The work in the corrals took him into the afternoon and not another word nor sign from anyone. When he was done he backed the truck up to the calf pen and threw three calves in the bed and hogtied