Postcards

Loyal hardly heard him, but saw the rubbery folds from the wings of his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, saw the cords in Mink’s neck, thought of the glistening strings just under the skin, thought of the arteries swelled with ropes of blood the size of his finger, thought of the crackling sound of rib bones when he kicked in a fox’s chest.

‘You can’t leave us run this farm alone,’ said Mink in his buzzing voice, the self-pity getting into his rage. ‘Jesus Christ, your brother’s only got the one arm and my health is down since the damn tractor laid on my chest. I was up to my health I’d beat the shit out of you. You’re not worth a pig’s patootie. You tell me how in the hell Dub and me can hand-milk nineteen cow alone, two of them damn Holsteins of yours, the one holds her milk back, and kicks. Christ I hate that cow’s eyes. You son of a bitch, we just can’t do it.’

‘Goddamnit, the Holsteins are good-natured cows, better than them little Jerseys you got. They give damn near twice as much milk as any Jersey.’ He tumbled into the relief of the old argument.

‘Yes, and look how much they eat. And half the butterfat of the Jerseys. The Jerseys is made for this country. They can make out on thin pasture and keep a farm going. They’re rugged. Tell you another thing. You just try walkin’ off the farm they’ll have your ass in uniform so fast it’ll take your breath away. There’s a War on, in case you forget. Farm work is essential work. Forget out west. Don’t you read no papers? Don’t you hear no radio programs? Them out west farms dried up and blowed away in the Dust Bowl. You’re stayin’.’

Dub popped a wooden match with his thumbnail and lit his cigarette.

‘I got to go,’ said Loyal. ‘I got to. Oregon or Montana – somewhere.’

‘Put the record on again, Charlie,’ said Dub, ‘everybody likes to dance to that one.’ The smoke streamed out of his nose.

Jewell put her hands to her cheeks and drew down on them, stretching her face and exposing the red inner lids of her eyes behind her glasses. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What about the Army Dinner, we’re puttin’ on the Army Dinner Saturday night, the big beef stew dinner in the cafeteria style, Army style. I was expectin’ you to take me down to the church on Saturday mornin’. You can stay for that. Billy’s one of the ones that wears the chefs hats and ladles out the food. She has to stay for that.’

‘It’s on Billy’s account we got to go tonight. There’s certain reasons. No good to talk about it. I’m goin’.’ He leaned wildly at them, the black hair curling at the opening of his shirt where the blue-white skin showed.

‘Well Jesus Christ, I see the whole thing. You knocked her up. She wants to clear out so nobody don’t know. There’s a word to describe a fella like you lets himself get backed into a rutty corner where he can’t turn around,’ the voice squeezed along, ‘but I won’t say it in front of your mother and sister.’

‘Hey, you leave, Loyal,’ said Dub, ‘you’re finishin’ off this farm.’

‘Well I knew this was goin’ to be like takin’ a bath in boiled shit, but I didn’t know it was goin’ to be this bad. Can’t you understand nothin’? I’m goin’.’

He ran up to the slant-ceilinged room he shared with Dub, leaving the ham on his plate, leaving his chair turned away from the table, leaving the fly-spotted mirror reflecting Mernelle’s face. He hauled out the old valise, opened it and threw it onto the bed. And stood a long minute with the shirts bunched up in his hands, the valise gaping like a shout. Down there Mink was firing up, bellowing now, something smashing and rattling – door to the pantry. Loyal dropped the shirts into the valise, and afterwards believed that was the moment when everything shifted, when the route of his life veered away from the main line, not when Billy dumped beneath his blind rutting, but as the shirts collapsed in their cotton limpness.

He found Dub’s bottle in a boot in the closet, tightened the cap and tossed it in, working the stiff strap through the valise buckle as he came down the stairs double-stride, hearing Mink hammering now, seeing the son of a bitch nailing the kitchen door shut. So he couldn’t get out.

He was across the room in a few seconds. He kicked out the window and stepped over the raking glass onto the porch, leaving it all, the trapline, the rough little Jerseys, the two Holsteins with their heavy flesh-colored udders. Dub’s oily rags, and the smell of old iron in the back of the barn, the wall up by the woods. That part of things was over. It was over in a rush.

Down on the town road he thought it was a sour joke how things had turned out. Billy, always yapping about moving away, getting out, making a new start, was staying on the farm. He, who’d never thought beyond the farm, never wanted anything but the farm, was on his way. Clenching the steering wheel.

Something was sticking in his backside, and he felt around, grasped Mernelle’s ocarina, the swirled novelty pattern of the Bakelite scarred from kicking around the floor. On the sides were decals of donkeys carrying panniers of cactus. He started to crank down the window to throw it out, but the window slipped off the rail again when it was only a crack open, and he threw the ocarina into the backseat.

It was almost dusk, but at the low place where the meadows swept the trees off to the sides he pulled over to take a last look. But jammed the spurting flashes of what had happened. Had happened and was done.

The place was as fixed as a picture on a postcard, the house and barn like black ships in an ocean of fields, the sky a membrane holding the final light, and there were the blurred kitchen windows, and up behind the buildings the field, the rich twenty-acre field propped open toward the south like a Bible, the crease of the water vein almost exactly in the center of the ten-acre pages. He fished in the valise and got Dub’s bottle, swallowed the cold whiskey. Beautiful pasture, four or five years of his work to bring that field up, none of Mink’s labor, his, draining the boggy place, liming and seeding to clover, plowing under the clover three years running to build up the soil, get the sourness out, then planting alfalfa and keeping it going, look at it, sweet good stuff, nutty, full of nourishment. That’s what made those cows give the butterfat, nothing Mink did, but him. Loyal, the best pasture in the county. That was why he had wanted to go up above the junipers, even though Billy didn’t care about the field and couldn’t tell good fields from bad, not to do what she thought he wanted, but to look at his pasture from above.

‘I heard it all, now,’ she said. ‘Looks like any stupid old field to me.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know if I can make something out of you or not. Loyal.’

The field looked like black-green fur in the dull light.

‘That’s your last look,’ he said, laid Dub’s bottle in the glove compartment and threw the car into first. Out of the corner of his eye he half-marked a white dot up in the field. Too big for a fox, wrong shape for a deer. And no stumps in that field.

But he was fourteen miles away from home and half across the bridge, stepping gingerly on the brake to keep from hitting a burrcovered stray, before he figured it out. The dog. The dog was up in the field right where he’d told him to sit. Still waiting. Jesus Christ.

2 Mink’s Revenge

MINK, PANTING IN unsatisfied rage, limped through the house throwing down Loyal’s things, a model airplane impaled on a nail in the front hall, school photos in warped folders edged with gold – Loyal the only one in his class with wavy hair, handsome – standing in a crowd of frames and button boxes on the piecrust cherry table in the front room. The 4-H ribbons, red, white and blue for calves, pasted on a piece of propped cardboard, the high school diploma with its black pointed letters proving Loyal had completed courses in Agriculture and Agronomy and Manual Training, the Dairy Management book from his single year at the agricultural school, dark blue and heavy, the certificate for pasture improvement, a newspaper clipping with a photo of Mr. Fuller, the County Agent, handing the certificate to Loyal, all these things he threw on the floor.

He crammed Loyal’s barn coat into the kitchen stove, scraped the untouched food on his plate in after it. Smoke swelled out of a hundred stove cracks and eddied along the ceiling before curling into the stream of warm air pouring out through the smashed window. Dub fumbled behind the pantry door for cardboard to tack over the window and Jewell, her face red and her eyes narrowed to slits, juggled the stove damper. A roaring came from the stovepipe as the creosote in the bend of the elbow caught and heated the stinking metal to a dull red.

‘Christ, Ma, you’re workin’ on a chimbley fire, damper the goddamn thing down,’ shouted Dub.

Here came Mink, cool now, but with vicious eyes, coming downstairs with Loyal’s .30–.30, limping through the kitchen, leaving the door open. Dub guessed the old man would throw it in the pond. Later he could drag through the mud with a potato fork and maybe get lucky. Probably take a day of cleaning and oiling to get it back in shape, but it was a good rifle and worth the trouble. Laid across the windowsill of the hayloft he could shoot it, get his deer like anybody else. He pieced and tacked cardboard boxes, all dots and creases, to the window frame, holding the cardboard in place with his left knee while he hammered.

‘I’ll cut some glass, put it in tomorrow if somebody’ll give me a hand puttin’ in the points.’ But he was pale.

Jewell swept up the curving slivers, putty chunks and dust, stoutly bending over, her print dress riding up, exposing the ribbed cotton stockings, the flesh-pink dip from Montgomery Ward.

‘There’s glass in the food, Ma, there’s glass all over the table,’ said Mernelle. ‘There’s big pieces on the porch, too.’

‘You can start by scrapin’ the plates, and don’t put it in the pig pail. Have to take it out and heave it. I don’t know about the hens, if they’d pick up the glass, but I suppose they would. Heave it out back of the garden.’

There was the slamming sound of a shot from the barn, then another, and, after a long interval, a third. The cows were bawling like alligators, flat roars, stamping, rattling their stanchions. They could hear Father Abraham’s bellow above all the others.

‘That 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 we might be seein’ you pretty soon.’ Mrs. Nipple had an instinct for discovering trouble as keen as the wild goose’s need to take flight in the shortening days. She was sensitive to the faintest janglings of discord from miles away.

‘After what she had been through,’ Jewell once told Mernelle in a dark tone, ‘she probably knows what ain’t right in Cuba.’

‘What’s she been through, then?’ asked Mernelle.

‘Nothin’ I can tell you until you’re a grown woman. You wouldn’t understand it.’

‘I’ll understand it,’ whined Mernelle, ‘so tell me.’

‘Not likely,’ said Jewell.

‘Ronnie’s gone out to the barn to talk to Loyal and them,’ said Mrs. Nipple sidling through the door, taking in the broken window, the potato peelings in the sink, the woodshed door half open, Jewell’s twisted smile. She smelled the rage, the smoke, sensed some departure. In Mink’s chair she felt the warmth of the seat even through her heavy brown skirt. Nobody had to tell her something had happened. She knew Mink had gone out to the barn when he saw her coming.

The old lady had the look of a hen who had laid a thousand eggs, from her frizzled white hair permed at Corinne Claunch’s Home Beauty Parlor, to her bright moist eye, plump breast, thrusting rear end that no corset could ever bend in and the bowed legs set so far out on her pelvis that when she walked it was like a rocking chair rocking. Dub had snickered to Loyal once that the space between her thighs had to be three hands across, that she could sit on the back of a Clydesdale like a slotted clothes-pin on the line.

She sighed, touched a needle of glass on the oilcloth. ‘Seems like there’s trouble everywhere,’ she said, building up a platform for the news Jewell must tell. ‘It’s a nuisance you have to bring your own paper bags to the stores, and just last month Ronnie got a letter from the milk truck, said they are consolidating the route. Can’t come up to the farm no more. If we want to sell them cream we got to lug it down to the roadside. He’s been doing it, but it’s pretty irksome work, takes a good deal of time. I suppose he’ll lose heavy on it. Don’t know how they expect us to manage. Then my niece Ida’s sister-in-law, you remember Ida, she stayed with us when Toot was still alive, helped me in the garden all one summer, picked berries, apples, I don’t know what, helped Toot and Ronnie with the hay. She was the one got stung by yellow jackets had a nest under a pumpkin. Well, now she’s livin’ over in Shoreham, I hear from her that her sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Renfrew, runs the U-Auta lunchroom in Barton, her husband’s at the War in the Air Force, and she been arrested. I have never ate there and I don’t believe I ever will. She shot this feller, Jim somebody, worked for the electric light over there, with his own shotgun. Seems he come sneakin’ around, peepin’ in the windows to see what she was doin’ and he saw plenty. She got this cook in to help her run the lunchroom, a colored fellow from South America, she didn’t say what his name was, but Mrs. Charles Renfrew was seen by the electric company man kissin’ the cook, and in he comes with the shotgun. See, he was sweet on her himself. She’s a good-lookin’ woman, they say. She gets the shotgun away from him and shoots him. And he died. When they arrested her she admitted it all, but said everything was an accident. Got six children, the youngest one isn’t but four. Them poor little children. It was all in the paper. Terrible, ain’t it.’ She waited for Jewell to begin. Few things could be worse than Mrs. Charles Renfrew’s multiple crimes laid out in public view, and she’d told the story to give Jewell a chance to whittle her own troubles down to size. She leaned forward.

Jewell slid the cup of tea over to her, the string dangling over the edge of the cup. ‘We had a little surprise here last night. Loyal comes in for supper, stands up in the middle of it and says that Billy and him is goin’ out west. They left last night. Kind of took us by surprise, but that’s the way the kids are these days.’

‘Is that right,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘Takes my breath away. Ronnie will be upset. Him and Loyal was tight as ticks.’ There was something awry, she thought, told straight out like that, no details of who had said what. She knew there was something deeper. Mink must have been crazy mad. The way Jewell told it now it didn’t seem like the kind of story that would gather with time, but instead would retract, condense, turn into one of those things that nobody talked about, and in a year or so it would all be forgotten. There were plenty of those stories. She knew one or two herself. It was all serious business. She never understood why Ronnie liked Loyal, no standout, even in the crowd of Bloods with their knack for doing the wrong thing, except for his strength and his sinewy hunger for work. But one man couldn’t bring that farm up again, it had too much against it. Look how it had gone down since the grandfather’s time when it was tight-fenced for the convenience of trotting horses and fine merinos, only three cows then for family butter and cheese on the place. She liked Jewell well enough, but the woman was a dirty housekeeper, letting the men in with their barn clothes on, letting the dust and spiders take over, and too proud for milk room work.