Greenville by Dale Peck Page A

uncle divides the food between the two plates while the boy pours them each a cup of coffee. He doesn’t fill the cups beyond the halfway mark or there won’t be enough left for Aunt Bessie. Aunt Bessie will cook her own breakfast when she gets up but she will only reheat whatever coffee is left on the stove. In fact the boy doesn’t really like the taste of coffee. He only drinks it for the cream he can put into it, cream he skims from a galvanized tin pail that has hung during the cool night from a nail just outside the door and, like Aunt Bessie’s plate, has a cloth laid over it to keep the flies off. The cream has a sweetness no sugar can improve, a sweetness that has replaced all-butter French loaf in both mouth and mind. He splashes a drop of coffee in his cup and overwhelms it with cream, and he drinks half the dun-colored custardy concoction before he wolfs down his bacon and eggs and half when he is finished, so the thick taste will linger when he heads out to the barn. A few drops dribble down his chin, and even though he catches them with the back of his hand his uncle sees, and as he stands with his plate in one hand he uses the other to pull a napkin from the holder.
    Use it if you need it. Put it in your pocket if you don’t.
    It is the first thing his uncle has said this morning, and the boy stuffs the napkin in his pocket and hurries after him, trying not to feel too disappointed that he has already caused him to speak. His uncle speaks less than any man he has ever met, and the boy has set himself the challenge of seeing how long he can save him from the need to use words. In order to do that he must perform all his chores as quickly and efficiently as he has been taught, wasting neither time nor, more important, the farm’s precious resources. He catches the screen door so that its bang doesn’t wake Aunt Bessie and then sets off at a run up the hill to the dairy barn. The grass is long and damp, cold and silver in the gray light, but the boy’s pants are rolled up almost to his knees and only his feet and ankles get wet. At the barn he grabs two more pails from their own nails. There are two rags in the bottom of one and he takes them out and takes the pails to a spigot and fills them with water. He rinses dried manure and mud out of the rags and drops one in each pail and turns off the tap.
    By then his uncle has reached the barn, and he holds the spring-hinged door for the boy so he doesn’t spill any water. The boy steps over the foot-high threshold and sets the pails down just inside the door, and by the time the rusty half-sprung coils have pulled the door shut with their vaguely electronic screech—
rrrrrreeeeeeaaaaaakkkkkkhhhhhh
!—he has run the length of the barn. Faint columns of light dissect the far wall. The dairy barn’s siding is called board-and-batten but much of the latter is missing, arid sunlight leaks in between the boards, and rain and snow, and, now, the urgent lowing of the ladies. It’s been twelve hours since their last milking, and their udders are so swollen that the teats spit milk when they bounce against arock or log, and the weight of them is a strain on the ladies’ backs. It’s as if, his uncle has told him, they get pregnant twice a day, and does he remember what Ethel was like when she was carrying any of his younger brothers and sisters? The boy can—Lois, vaguely, and Lance, and more recently Gregory—and it seems to him that the ladies behave much better than his mother. When he slides back the doors to the barnyard they make their way slowly and surprisingly graceful and quiet on the barn’s cement floor toward the troughs, their half-ton bodies rubbing against each other with a sound like thunder attempting to slip on a suede jacket. The first few times the boy had to do this he ran out of the way as soon as he’d opened the doors, but now he scratches the ladies’ coarse hides as they glide by, nudges this or that one toward one or another trough