Greenville by Dale Peck

Author:Dale Peck [Peck, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61695-557-1
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

6

Covered wagons must have gone this slow, the boy thinks. Third gear, hauling a full load—a half ton of tarp-covered manure capped by the fifty-pound bundle of Flip Flack—and his uncle’s 1934 John Deere can do no better than three, maybe five miles an hour; certainly no faster than a man walking. He tries to imagine crossing the continent at this pace, the mountains and rivers, endless plains yielding to relentless deserts. Gold Rush? Gold Crawl is more like it. He’ll take a brand-new Chevy any day of the week.

The four-cylinder engine protests its heavy load with a sound like a match dropped in a bottomless bag of firecrackers, an endless series of tiny explosions that vibrate their way into the boy’s body through his numb bottom and out his tingling ears and fingers. If he concentrates on the noise itself it seems deafening, but long hours mowing fields and hauling loads of hay and manure have taught him to tune it out. Now he inches his way west on 38 in a bubble of sound, peaceful, protected. Though the soundless world is visible all around him, it seems to exist at a conceptual remove, like a three-dimensional silent movie. Inside the bubble there is nothing but the boy and the pedals and knobs and wheel of the tractor, and Flip Flack. Or Flip’s voice at any rate, which, though muffled, is still perfectly audible.

I wish Kenny wasn’t working road crew this summer. That means I’m gonna have to do all his chores and mine too. I practically do as much as he does anyway, so that means I’m gonna have to do twice as much as I do now. Two times. I don’t know why Kenny wants to work road crew anyway. All that stinky old smelly old tar. I’d rather clean up after the ladies any old day, wouldn’t you, Dale?

A pair of passing crows seems almost to leave contrails in the sky, a honeybee bounces along like a poorly flicked yo-yo bobbing at the end of its string. The muggy air is bright blue, so thick with moisture that the tractor could be a boat on the river. Chicory blossoms seem almost to be floating at the end of their stems like water lilies. The fluid sunlight pulses through the trees like liquid amber, outlining everything, separating objects one from another. Each tuft and wisp of vapor, each twig and leaf takes on a gilded edge. The film of sweat that covers the boy’s body seems part and parcel of the same effect, as if the boy is coated in a residue of sunlight. As if he has been dipped in it. Though it is only the second week of June, the thermometer read 94 degrees at the noon meal, and the radio said the humidity was about the same.

Kenny says he don’t want to be a dairyman at all, Flip goes on. Says it ain’t no kind of life for a man in this day and age, being chained to a udder.

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