The next few days pass quietly and unremarkably; we settle into a routine that works for all of us. Up early, no dawdling over coffee, breakfast from some fast food joint between here and there, work the morning, break for lunch, work until early afternoon. Duane joins us when he can, between paying jobs.
We’re making progress. We’re on our third dumpster, but the house is noticeably emptier as we hurl more and more of our past into the dented and graffiti-ed metal container. The house even smells cleaner as decades of mildewed clothing and mold-spattered detritus are shoveled into trash bags. Behind us, Duane decants his many bottles of chemicals into buckets and does his best to clean the place up; the smells of lemon and pine overpower the fusty and cloying odor of my mother’s life. I expect fully to wake up one day with a second head growing out of my shoulders or some strange rash creeping slowly up my leg; all of the house’s windows are open, and I wonder that neighbors haven’t called the EPA on us.
Teresa and I speak to each other when we have to, as near-strangers, people forced by circumstance and necessity to communicate. We are polite with each other. That night, the night of the funeral, does not come up in our day-to-day interactions, nor does Tom.
—
“She’ll be okay,” Duane says to me, one night, after I propose apologizing to my sister. Teresa’s gone to bed, claiming exhaustion; Duane and I are making our way steadily through another bottle of very good bourbon, sitting side-by-side on the expanse of the deck, watching the moon and its water-mirrored twin glitter and dance their celestial tango.
“She thinks that people will be angry with her, with you… that it’ll affect your job.”
Duane snorts, waves a hand, dismissively. “Don’t worry. People will forget, if they even remember in the first place. And nobody trusts those guys anyway. They’re crazy.”
“I’m sorry I… ”
“Don’t worry,” he answers. “I understand.”
I stare into the smoky depths of the bourbon. “You’re doing better than I am, then.”
He chuckles. “Years of practice.”
“How was she, around you?”
Duane understands that I’m talking about my mother, now. He’s quiet for a long moment. Then, “We… got along, I guess. Made our peace with each other. The kids helped.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine her as a grandmother.”
“She did okay. Not the best, maybe. Not a pie-baker, your mother. But she tried. I gave her whatever space she needed; sometimes she and Terri’d get into it and we wouldn’t see her for weeks at a time. I ended up being a… oh, what do you call it? Go-between, I guess, between the two of them.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help.”
“Ah… it wasn’t that bad. Terri always blew it out of proportion. Don’t tell her I said that, by the way. But she did. She and Nancy were a lot alike… more’n Terri would admit, but it’s true. They kinda played off each other until it just got out of control.”
“Must have been tough for you.”
Duane chuckles. “Years of practice,” he repeats. He lifts his glass of bourbon. “This helps.”
I smile, lift my own glass up in a silent salute. A pang of something—regret? remorse?—shivers through me as I realize how much I’ve forsaken with this self-imposed exile from my family. Was I wrong to do it? Have I, in my vanity and hurt pride, already lost too much? I understand the deeper nature of Teresa’s anger, knew that she was biting back much more than she spoke, and that I deserved all of it and more.
But… I’d had my reasons. They seemed good at the time.
“I know you’re tired of me apologizing”—at that, Duane chuckles again—“but I’m really sorry for all of this. Maybe I shouldn’t have come back.”
To my surprise, Duane turns to me, a serious look on his face. “No. You should have. I’m glad you did.” He makes a face. “Believe it or not, so is Terri. I don’t think she could have gotten through this if you’d stayed in New York. It means a lot that you’re here.”
“Well, okay… ”
“Which reminds me.” Duane raises his hips off the chair, digs around in a pocket for something, surfaces with a set of keys, tosses them to me.
I look a blank look at him.
“Well,” he continues. “I realized that you’re kinda stuck here without a car, and all you’ve been doing is going back and forth from here to Nancy’s. Keys are for Terri’s old wagon—it’s in the garage, at the end. Wasn’t worth trying to trade it. May not look like much, but it’ll get you around if you, uh… well, if you’re in the mood to go visit anybody.”
And I realize that I am, indeed, in the mood to go visit somebody. “Thank you, Duane. I, uh… ” We stare at each other; even now, even though Duane knows what I am, I’m a little embarrassed.
“He’s a good man, Mark. A lot of people are sorry that things didn’t work out for him.” Duane looks at me; his expression is… interesting. “Maybe something needs to work out for him.”
—
Despite its age, the wagon is clean and in good running condition, much like I am; the family had simply outgrown it when Grace came along and rather than trade it, Duane had chosen to keep it as a backup vehicle, and perhaps, one day, a first car for Corbin.
Memories of driving these roads come back to me as I go along; navigating these twisting country lanes is far, far different than navigating the implacable but supremely logical grid of New York. The way to Tom’s dairy seems to reveal itself as necessary: turn here, turn there, turn here. Some of the roads are so narrow that if I meet an oncoming driver, we both have to ease onto the shoulder to pass; as we do, we wave thanks to each other and continue on.
The countryside is at its most beautiful now: the lazy green hills are criss-crossed by miles of crisp white fencing or low stone walls that are a hundred years and more in age. I have forgotten what this landscape meant to me as I have forgotten what I experienced here, so many years ago.
With the man I am on my way to see.
Tom doesn’t know I’m coming. Even I’m not sure that I’m coming; my actions seem directed by someone else who perhaps knows me better than I know myself.
Thoughts of Tom have dominated my… well, thoughts, for the past few days, ever since that night. I’m not sure my thoughts know what they’re thinking; they seem to be running independent of my logical side, which has so far failed to acknowledge the most basic issue sitting athwart any idea of making this a real thing: that Tom is here and I am not.
What do I want?
—
I’m here before I know it; one last turn and there it is, the old red brick house on top of the hill, long a symbol and touchstone to this part of the country. The sign at the road is another long-cherished thing: a fabulous fifties concoction of ivory, teal and orange paint and enthusiastic cursive script rendered in neon: Hanna Dairy. The neon sleeps at this point, will waken as the day turns over into night.
I pull to a stop outside the gates, which are opened, even though this isn’t the real entrance to the place; that lies about a mile down the road. The bulk of the dairy lies nestled in a valley that slopes down from the house towards the river.
Even here, though, placid cattle dot the fields between my idling car and the house, munching placidly on grass, conversing placidly with each other about all things bovine, behaving generally placidly. The surprisingly not-unpleasant scent of manure drifts past my open window.
Tom is somewhere in there, I tell myself. I wonder what it must be like for him, now, having to unreel his family’s business, a concern that had gone on for well over a century. Generations of people in these parts grew up with the products of the dairy; I remember my own grandparents going out each morning to a little metal box on their front porch and plucking out the glass bottles full of cold, fresh milk, replacing them with empties.
I turn into the tree-lined road leading up to the house.
—
The house seems deserted when I walk up to the front door, is locked when I rattle the black iron handle. A small sign at the steps leading up to the porch is clear enough: Visitors please continue on road around house to Welcome Center. A winsome and smiling cartoon cow accompanies the request.
I peer into windows, into a room furnished with period pieces that I remember from my childhood; this is a room we were never allowed into. More family-friendly parts of the house are located in what the family referred to as the new wing… new in this case meaning an addition that was tacked onto the house sometime in the 1910s, turning the rectangular block of the house into an L-shaped structure.
I walk around the house, peering into more windows, more history, more memories. I figure at some point that the security that must be watching this place and my actions will come to introduce themselves in person.
The house and its new wing frame two sides of a formal garden that Tom’s mother had planted in a variety of wildflowers and which Tom still nurtures. Zinnia, coreopsis, rudbeckia, daisy, lavender all nod their showy heads sagely under the morning sun. Tom and I spent many hours here as boys, talking of boy things in the dusk. Away from here, down at the river, we talked of darker things, and then made them real, under the stars.
A scratchy, buzzy, whiny sound—brassily mechanical—intrudes upon my reverie. It’s coming from the other side of the house, the side that faces the dairy proper, and I go towards it. I know what I’ll see before I see it: hummocky barns and outbuildings painted in more of the ivory, teal and orange, everything crisp and clean.
And it’s there, as I remember.
Surrounded by a sea of trucks.
More trucks and some cars ply the entrance I should have taken when I arrived. I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s going on—this isn’t the normal operation I remember; I don’t see any dairy trucks in the traffic—until I do figure it out, and my heart falls a little in my chest.
I’ve stumbled onto an auction. Tom’s selling everything. The scratchy, buzzy, whiny sound is the auctioneer performing his own sort of rap, parceling off the family’s life bit by bit with his fluid and practiced patter.
—
I choose to walk across the bit of field separating house from dairy. I know that I can leave the car parked in the drive because no one will care; there is no one to care anymore.
I clamber over a black-painted fence separating the house from the rest of the property, into a no-man’s-land of pasture dotted with more cattle and pocked with bovine land mines. I have to be careful. The irony of that is not lost on me. Stepping in piles of shit seems to have become my current predicament in many ways.
Cattle watch my progress idly, unconcerned, as I thread my way through the field towards the crowd of people arrayed around the braying auctioneer. His voice gets louder and louder as I approach; his nearly incoherent controlled stutter reminds me of the worshipers at my mother’s church.
I duck under a fence, metal this time, hot under the palm of my hand as I thread my body through the rails and stagger upright. I am at the back edge of the crowd and am content to stand there for a bit, watching this thing unfold around me. This is not an uncommon event in these parts, as farms’ fortunes rise and fall with the economy. Around me are people, most of them fellow farmers by their attire, some not, perhaps some like me, watching.
Those who wish to bid each carry a numbered bit of card stock attached to a stick; as each auction progresses, arms raise these sticks up silently. A youngish man standing next to the auctioneer scans the crowd, noting bidders, recording them.
At some point, I remember that auctions are, for the most part, boring things to witness, and I strike out around the periphery of the crowd, trying to see if I can find Tom. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he was back at the house, watching this unfold from a discreet distance, locked inside, nursing a drink, contemplating his future.
Shortly, I find myself at the other edge of the semicircle of people; the crowd spills over into a barn, a vast space I remember being full of the trucks that ferried the dairy’s product throughout the county. It’s empty, now, save for row upon row of plastic-topped church tables, on the tops of which are arranged smaller items grouped together in plastic trays—lots, I tell myself, that’s what they’re called—and numbered sequentially. People wander these aisles desultorily, picking items out of the trays, inspecting them, putting them back, talking to each other. Young men, dressed inexplicably in suspenders, plaid shirts and driver’s caps, looking like something out of a 1920’s movie, stand watch over the ranked tables. I presume it’s a sort of uniform, this organization’s little shtick to set it apart. Some of the boys are cute.
I, too, wander for a bit, looking at tools in one lot, office supplies in another, dusty milk bottles stamped with the dairy’s logo in a third. There’s the usual sadness attached to things like this; we are all vultures circling a dying thing, hoping for some special morsel or two. At the end of the aisle, I turn back; I don’t feel like going through the rest of it.
I’m facing the back of the auctioneer’s platform; he’s still plugging away. This thing’s going to take most of the day to get through. Signs flash silently up and down as the auctioneer hectors and cajoles the crowd into bidding.
And there’s Tom.
He’s pacing back and forth, head bowed, hands in pockets.
I could leave. I should leave. I can’t. It’s not a watching-a-trainwreck kind of thing; I don’t do that. It’s a realization that, twenty years on, this is a man who still has the power to move me. I watch Tom for a long moment; I understand, now, in his silent and relentless pacing, that the boy I left is a man, with a man’s responsibilities weighing on him, twenty years of fighting to keep a failing thing going, giving up and trying to deal with it.
I, too, have my history and my own responsibilities, but I’ve had others to share it with me, share the burdens as well as the rewards.
Something, some noise or flicker of motion, jerks Tom’s head up and in my direction, and then he sees me. I’m caught. We stare at each other across the thirty feet or so stretching between us. The noise of the auctioneer fades away.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, a smile kinks up one side of his bearded face and I smile back. He jerks his head to a door leading out to the back of the barn—follow me—and I do.
—
The noise of the auctioneer is less intrusive, here, and there’s no one to disturb us. Tom turns to me. “Duane tell you about this?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No. I had no idea. I, uh… went up to the house to see… well, if you were there.”
“I—oh,” he responds. “Uh… okay.”
I smile again, gesture vaguely at the barn. “This is… interesting.”
Tom sighs. “It’s a fucking nightmare, is what it is.”
“I bet.”
He runs a hand across his black-stubbled scalp. “I didn’t think I’d mind it, but… ”
“Reminds me of vultures, circling overhead.”
He snorts a quiet laugh out. “Yeah.”
“Do you… have to stay?”
“I don’t, really… but I need to see this through, you know?”
I nod my head. “Yeah, I think so. Like getting through all this shit of my mother’s.”
“Yeah.” Tom looks down at the ground, puts his hands in the back pockets of his denims, shuffles a toe through the gravel and dirt. “You, uh… you busy? Later?”
Something, some imagined rising chord plucked once, and strongly, echoes in my head and my imagination. “All the time in the world, Tom.” My voice is quiet, fumbling around in the dark tentative.
He looks back up at me. “Good. Good.” He pulls a hand out of a pocket, glances at his wrist. “Just a few more hours of this, and I’ll be done.”
“Okay.” The chord lengthens, calls forth others, a minor symphony of deliverance.
“Hey—you remember Kelly’s? That bar down by the courthouse?” I do. Teresa worked there, briefly, when she was going to school. I nod my head. Tom continues. “Well, it’s not called that, any more. I think it’s Flynn’s or O’Riley’s or some other name like that. Anyway, food’s not bad and the beer’s cheap. You want to meet me there? Sevenish?”
“Absolutely.” The chord is joined by others in an aleatory, seat of the pants kind of improvisation.
Tom smiles again. “Good. Good.”
Posted 14 December 2024