Chapter 7.
Long before sunrise, Renee tied her hair in a tight ponytail in the dark and put on her rubber boots. In a zipped sweatshirt, she braced herself for the touch of cold air waiting outside of the house. She commanded Ray one last time to return to bed, but he hobbled into the kitchen after her, thinking he would perform his usual day's work.
"Lay down, you damn fool."
"I can walk," he said, leaning against the wall.
"Think it's the first time I've milked cows?"
Ray laughed and said, "No." Renee had spent the night nursing his injuries and in the latter hours they became playful.
Ray eyed his wife's boots. "Still the best looking girl in boots I've ever seen."
A nearly tender moment passed between them, until Renee noticed the clock behind Ray, and she said, "Go to bed." She pushed open the screen door and stopped, turning her eyes to him as she teased, "You can have me later."
"Can I hold you to that?" Ray said, laughing and reaching for a cane that hung on the wall near the laundry. For the past few months, with Ethan away at college, and Jacob involved with football, Ray and Renee found their time together reminiscent of their first months dating in tenth grade, perhaps better. Free from the cloud of debt, they softened toward each other, even facing one another while they slept.
Renee stepped out the door. Through the yard she followed the cone of her flashlight to the shed, where the 4-wheeler was parked. She drove it to the pasture fence and stopped, dismounted, opened the gate, climbed back on the 4-wheeler, then drove through the gate, dismounted, stopping again to shut the gate, then on to the pasture to herd the cows for the morning milking. The old yellow dog barked and nipped at the tires, as it had for fourteen years, ever ready to give chase.
Soon she was in the parlor, letting a handful of cows in at a time, washing udders, attaching the milkers, pulling hoses from the vacuum lines, slapping hides with her hand, shouting ladies names at the cows. For twenty minutes, she swayed from udder to udder while a string of oldies played on the manure-spattered radio that hung from a wire.
When the last cow exited the parlor, she walked the lingering herd out of the barn toward the open air, where the cows gathered for breakfast, tossing hay as they yanked it from a round bale inside a metal cage.
Inside the milkhouse, she filled twelve pails with powdered milk and water, whisking until the lumps disappeared. She carried the pails to the calf hutches outside and set them into hangers. Long hungry tongues of clean calves lunged at the pail, drinking greedily, noses submerged and coming up for air. The new calves wailed as she walked past to retrieve more pails and bottles. They bleated wildly and sucked on the hutch gates while she filled the bottles. Once the bottle reached their mouths, the calves bucked against the bottle as if feeding on their mothers. The milkhouse pump blared. The pipes and lines sloshed with water as Renee punched buttons on electric boxes.
For a moment she panicked – she had forgotten to check if the milk tank outlet had been plugged before starting to milk. Eight years ago, that same mistake caused the firing of Joachim Frye when he let a day's worth of milk run down the drain. Ray had gone to church that Wednesday morning to gain control over himself. God forbid she incur the same wrath for lacking attention to detail. But seeing the plug in its place, she sighed with relief.
More chores awaited. She ran silage down from the silo, praying that the unloader inside the silo would not malfunction, since she dreaded climbing the dirty chute and meddling with the dangerous augur that flung feed down the silo chute.
In the house, she untied her ponytail and let her short hair down before getting into the shower. Seven years before she had abandoned her efforts to keep her hair long. No time to spend with the mirror, no one to compliment her, other than Ray.
With a maroon towel over her torso and a white one on her head, she slinked past the bedrooms and shook her head. Jacob was still not home. Ray was gone – the fool of a man was back in the fields, slipped away while she had done the milking. In the laundry room, searching for clothes, she noticed that the cane, which kept the dryer door propped shut, had disappeared. He was a hard-headed fool.
Finally, coffee, and a moment at the table. She sat in her towel, legs crossed, not bothering to dress too quickly, since she had the house to herself, the feeling of an empty nest becoming more real each day. A part of her wondered if Jacob had survived the night. She finished her coffee and considered painting her toenails for a moment, but with winter coming she decided against it. Five months of winter, her toes would not see sun. At the mirror in the bathroom she stopped and pulled on her skin where the wrinkles formed, to smooth herself, but the folds sprung back into crow's feet when she released the tension. Split ends accrued in her hair. Nothing new. The lotion and shampoo from the Avon lady turned out to be yet another snake oil. Now that Ray allowed her enough money to spend on the cosmetics she wanted, she discovered that the fountain of youth was a cruel myth, no matter what the packaging claimed.
She told herself not to worry about Jacob, but when the clock struck seven, suggestive horrors came to mind. In the ditch. In jail. Wrapped his car around a tree. Lost. Got in a fight. On drugs. Eloped. Ran away from home – this time for real. To steady her worry, she swept the linoleum.
After she dressed, she napped on the couch, but awoke in the living room upon hearing one of her sons' voices.
"Hello, Mom," said Ethan, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, observing his mother sitting up on the couch.
"Ethan!" said Renee. "You look older every time I see you. I thought you might be Jacob."
"Do I smell that bad?"
"Did you have breakfast, dear?"
"No."
"I'll make you something."
"I'm not hungry."
"You have to eat something." She pressed his shoulders and examined his face, smiling up at him. "Eggs? Toast? You need to eat something because I'm still hungry and I just had breakfast. Since your dad couldn't walk this morning, I had to milk the cows."
"Toast will be fine," he said, smiling as she touched his cheek. "Where's Jacob? Why didn't he milk this morning?"
Renee frowned. "Whereabouts unknown. He never came home last night. If he's not dead, I'll kill him. I'm starting to wonder."
He shook his head. "How's Dad? Is he in bed?"
"No," she said, shaking her head. "He's out combining again, even though he can't walk."
"It looks like rain."
"Good," said Renee. "Yesterday I prayed it would stay away, today I am praying that it comes. If I knew your Dad was going to be in working order today, I wouldn't have called you last night. You could have stayed at school."
Ethan set a backpack on the table that sagged with books. At the kitchen sink, he washed his hands, looking out the window at the grain bins. A large pile of spilled corn needed to be shoveled into the augur. Out of habit he looked for the dog, who lay outside in his usual spot, curled up on a rubber mat. Before entering the house, Ethan spent several minutes rubbing the dog's belly, until it groaned, and the fur housed so much dirt and grime that his hands reeked by the time he walked inside.
Renee said, "Jacob scored a touchdown last night. We won the game."
"Nice." Ethan thumbed through some mail on the counter, looking for his name, but there was none. The toast ejected. Renee buttered it and motioned to the table for Ethan to sit.
"Mind if I have a cup of coffee, too?"
"You drink coffee now?" asked Renee. She poured a cup and gave it to him. "Not ready for you to be an adult, even if you are twenty now. Milk or sugar?"
"No thanks."
At the table they sat and shared an awkward moment of silence, as they each sought a topic to broach after weeks apart. Ethan took a single bite of toast, but no more. The backpack lay between them and Renee pulled it toward her. "You have a lot of heavy reading."
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"You should write down your jokes," Ethan said.
"Ray always says I don't know how to tell a joke."
"And he does?"
"He thinks he does. But he usually forgets a part."
"Yeah, the punchline."
"Do you remember my fortieth birthday party when he tried to roast me?"
Ethan smiled. "He roasted himself."
"It was the joke about the priest and the three wives, and who could tell the biggest lie."
Ethan smiled.
"At least I made you smile," Renee said, sensing something bothering her son. "How's school going? What classes are you taking?"
"The usual." He unzipped the backpack to show her the book bindings.
She reached into the bag. "May I? Or maybe I shouldn't. I'm hesitant to open anything that's not mine after I looked under Jacob's bed this summer."
"It's just books, don't worry."
Shaking the bag, a stack of textbooks slid onto the table. Renee read the titles. "Chemistry. Genetics. Philosophy. Western Civilization. General Botany. And macroeconomics, oh how exciting. I think I slept through that class when I took it. Six classes? That's a lot, isn't it?"
"It's just right."
"Seems like a lot," said Renee. "A little heavy on the science for my taste."
"The chemistry professor thinks I should change my major."
"And?"
"I'm considering it. It's really amazing, Mom, biology and chemistry. I think you would like it."
"I'll take your word for it. How are the classes going? Getting good marks?"
"Yes, fine."
She said, "As always. I never had to hound you to finish anything, Ethan. You already know so much."
He laughed. "I know nothing, Mom. I knew nothing before going to college. And I still know nothing. Didn't you feel like that when you started at the University?"
Renee said, "Honestly, I don't remember, Ethan. My time there, it was," she scoffed, "it was interrupted from the start. But I regret not finishing. I will always regret that."
"But didn't you feel ignorant?"
"I don't know about ignorant."
"Ignorant about everything? You know I have this philosophy class and I thought it would be a waste of time. But on the first day the teacher jumped right in and talked about Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Do you know it?"
"Cave?" She thought for a moment. "Yeah, that sounds familiar. If I ever heard it, it's gone now."
"I know it sounds silly, but I am in the cave, Mom, because there is always something new, some idea that blows away what I knew before. Like a bomb. The only problem is that by learning more I just become more confused. The world becomes more clear, and much more complicated."
"That's good Ethan," his mother said. "This is why we sent you to college. You know it was very important to your father."
"To Dad? Who are you kidding? He thinks it's a waste."
"I mean you father. Josh."
"Oh," said Ethan. "Josh, yes. Dad, I'm not sure he'd understand."
"What's to understand? He will be glad to hear that you are doing well."
Ethan did not answer and Renee grew suspicious. She said, "What else is going on?"
"Other than school?"
"Something is on your mind. How are things with Tara?"
Ethan sighed. "That's another thing." He stood up and walked to the sink again. "A lot of things happening at once."
"That's kind of how life goes. I should have warned you."
"A girl in history class," he said, turning around. "I find her interesting."
"Interesting?" Renee said, eager to hear more.
"I'm still with Tara, so stop smiling. Nothing's changed. You still don't approve of Tara?"
Renee said, "I have no preference."
"You did before."
"You're a young man – you have opportunity."
"But the farm…"
"The farm will be here until the end of time," said Renee. "It can wait for you. You and Jacob should go out into the world and live for awhile, rather than rush back here."
"This is where I belong."
"You can decide that later. Another girl will come along – sounds like one already has come along." Renee added, "I will stand by what I said before. Forget about Tara, and go forth, to sound profound."
"Easy for you to say." He faced the window again. "You know, Judd Blanks said the exact opposite."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'forget about school – a good girl doesn't come along often.'"
"He said that?"
Ethan nodded.
"That's the worst advice I've ever heard. Judd is not a man to take advice from." Renee pulled Ethan's toast toward her.
"Why? Who's to say he's not right?"
"Because he is all talk, Ethan. He is a backward man. His life peaked in high school and he can only relive it, even after his body has moved on, his mind never did. He's not to be trusted for advice." She took a bite of his toast. "Sorry, I'm eating your toast."
Ethan said, "You don't trust anyone, do you?"
"I do. I trust you and a handful of others. I trust God."
"A handful. What good is that, if you can't talk and discuss things, and be open with your life?"
"You will know someday."
"I hate it when people say that."
"Say what?"
"I've been hearing it for so long. Like adults know everything, but I am convinced that most don't know. In fact, that may be the one thing I am certain of – that you can't really know anything for certain."
"No, adults don't know everything," she said. "But some things become known only by living longer. Things that you can't find in books, but only experience."
"Like losing trust in people, for example."
Renee bobbed her head uncertainly. "Yes, maybe."
"So what is true for you may not be true for me, is that it?"
"I suppose," she said. "But some things are true for all. Or should be. If there is too much room for wondering what is right, then you could slip into the wrong way. A little devil will find you. They find everyone, one way or another."
"A little devil?"
"Bad habits, I mean, that lead to bad things."
"I don't seem to have any bad habits."
"Well," Renee said, "then you'll have a worse habit of thinking you're perfect. Because no one is."
A rain drop landed on the window and Ethan saw the leaves of the plants growing wet in the flower bed.
"Rain," said Ethan, changing the subject. "Looks to be a drizzle."
"Your father will not be in a good mood now. He'll be home soon."
"I was hoping to drive the combine today."
"He said something about de-horning the steers if it rained."
"Oh, wonderful," said Ethan. "Maybe we can clean hooves after that. Do the full manicure." He looked at the spilled corn around the bin again and said, "I'm going to clean up that mess by the bins before it gets wet."
"You may want to take your car to the field. Your Dad may need assistance."
Renee touched her son's hand as he walked past her to the mudroom where he traded his tennis shoes for work boots, grabbing a rain poncho from a hook near the door on his way out.
After shoveling the corn, Ethan drove his car to the Masterson farm. The combine trudged along the far side of the field and instead of driving over to see his Dad, Ethan parked the car and jumped on the tractor that Ray had driven to the field that morning. Ethan hooked the tractor onto one of the wagons. Mist struck his face until it gathered enough water to become drops and then rivulets. The sound of the diesel engine and the tug and jerk of a payload on the hitch put a contentment in Ethan's heart. A half hour later, he reached the Marak driveway. He backed the wagon inside the machine shed and killed the engine.
Standing under the presence of the windmi
ll and silo, he heard a calf braying in one of the hutches behind the barn. These simple smells and sounds affected him, even the feel of the powdered dirt floor of the machine shed that created puffs underfoot with each step, wafting scents of used oil and gas. But while he enjoyed the earthy smells of the farm mixed with spent hydrocarbons, his pastoral thoughts were interrupted when he brushed the rain from his face and caught a whiff of a perfume that clung to him from the night before.
There hadn't been any fooling around. Only a hug upon parting, when he managed to touch her hair. Her shirt met his shirt, leaving a reminder of her with him, along with the impression of her shape against his chest. The girl from history class. Beth. Darkest hair he'd ever seen. American and Asian and completely exotic to Ethan. She had invited him to the lounge in her dorm for a freshman movie night – horror movies. But Beth and Ethan both found the first movie unwatchable, bad enough that they slipped away to her dorm room with a few other sophomores. Her friends smoked a joint, but Ethan and Beth did not. Instead, they leafed through an art history textbook, half amused at the content but soon finding it interesting once the stoned art history major in the room elaborated on her favorites. Beth decided to smoke, but Ethan still declined.
His interactions with Beth started from a class assignment. The instructor paired students off. Initially, the two of them met at the library to discuss their paper, thinking they would divide and conquer the reading, go their separate ways, and then merge their ideas at the end. He found her boring and dull, until she started talking frankly outside of the class. He started talking about the history book, explaining his amazement – that the thousand-page textbook of Western Civilization had only two pages – two – about the life of Jesus.
And Beth said bluntly, "He didn't live very long."
"Yes, but I was expecting much more," Ethan said. "It just seems impossible that so little was covered. The Gospels say that the rocks split and the sun darkened on the day of his death. None of the things are even mentioned. I just don't see how that could be skipped over, since it was, obviously, the most important day in history. It's the day that everything in history changed."
"I don't think miracles count as history, Ethan. I mean," Beth said, smirking, "they are called miracles, so it probably didn't happen that way at all."
"Oh, please." He laughed at her, somewhat embarrassed that she said such things so plainly. "How would you know that? The Gospels have it all written down. Were you there?"
"No," she said. "But I also don't believe that Guatama sat under the fig tree and was tempted by Mara and a bunch of demons."
"What?" said Ethan, unsure of anything she had said. "Who are you talking about? Do you mean Mary?"
"I'm a Buddhist." She declared it. Like it was no big deal. And this captivated him. She said, "I just think people like their stories to have some magic, don't you? I do. But I don't think it's history. I mean, movies are full of magic, but I don't leave the theater thinking those things really happened."
"Buddhist?" he said aloud. "I've never met a Buddhist. You're the first."
"I'm not a practicing Buddhist," she said, as they sat across from one another, whispering. "I only go because my parents do. Tradition, you know, and all that."
And all that. No, he did not understand. The casualness of her tone confused him.
Their first conversation had taken place in early September, and by the end of October, Beth and Ethan had spent many days together at the library, becoming study buddies for all classes. He drilled a thousand questions to Beth, trying to fathom her beliefs and rituals and what she thought of Jesus and who was Buddha. Many times, in the quiet of the library, she burst out laughing at his questions, but it did not deter him from asking another. This other world of ideas, her life at home, the East – strange, intriguing. Her dark eyes were pools of mystery.
What he scoffed at one day, he reconsidered at night, and returned with refined questions after thumbing through the library stacks for more information. He walked along the thousands of bindings, dragging his hands across the volumes, and doing this made him feel small and provincial. He collected piles of books in his hands. Then he would find a corner table to read, but invariably within a short time, he would read a name or a place that made his ignorance plain. Worse than plain – ugly. All too aware of an insufficiency in him, a gnawing lack, he became a glutton for books and information to fill the gap. There were too few hours in a day, not enough time to understand the world around him. In his freshman year, he drank from a firehose of math and science, calculus and organic chemistry, studying rigorously to avoid getting culled from the hard science pack. In his sophomore year, his classes were easier – and the Humanities concepts flattened out in his mind quickly, at least in comparison to understanding protein transforms and differential equations. But these classes that he took only to fill University requirements drew him in, each subject so rich in names and ideas of warring ways of the world – Keynes versus Friedman, Ottomans and Europeans, the Melians and Athenians, Luther in Wittenberg, evolution and creation, germ theory and demons, church and state, Aristotle and Democritus, Hannibal sacks Rome, Hannibal gets sacked, classical physics and quantum mechanics, Aquinas to Hume, Voltaire and the earthquake – and the list continued, lists of lists, ancient places with new names, maps altered with every century. And still, none of his classes covered what Beth taught him about the Eastern world. He could not absorb enough. In bed he tossed, night fires in the brain, dreams intertwined with what he read, math bleeding into philosophy, economics into biology, what gave an object its mass or an idea its legs, what was real, what was truth – was there such a thing at all? And it made him feel far from Immaculate.
One question bothered him most, surfacing in his mind time and again, before sinking again unanswered. Not a question about truth, ideas, or even facts. Rather it was: why had so much been kept from him? Why had none of this ever been presented to him, in any form? Why so unexposed? Why hadn't he heard of Descartes and dualism? Why did he not even know the basic story of the Iliad? What, if anything, had he learned about the world in high school?
To live in the world and be ignorant of it – he could not stand himself, determining that his Dark Ages had ended. He felt it would take years to clothe the nakedness of his education, and in his zeal ignored all that he had learned on the farm, his practical knowledge of animals, plants, machinery, and tools. Overshadowed by a sense of incompleteness, he read continuously and deemed ignorance anathema, keeping a notebook handy to write down names, places, and commonly used phrases in Latin and French that he did not know but were clearly common phrases among the erudite: the raison d'être, the bòn mót, the tabula rasa, the casus belli. These and a thousand others he referenced and noted. An idea led to another idea, one to another, and like a glutton, needing more, and getting more, needing still more. When he spoke to Tara on the phone he wanted to shout and tell her to stop worrying about what happened in study hall, or who said what to who – she was trapped in the lowest level of Plato's cave. But he still loved her – and there was no solution to that.
The defunct windmill in the Marak yard squealed as the wind turned the blades. Ethan crossed the yard toward the shed to dig out the de-horning tools. A box under a long bench in the shed contained all the tools. The v-shaped Barnes dehorner, looking like a medieval torture tool, lay on top. Hair and crusted dried blood remained upon the tool from when Ethan and Ray had dehorned steers two years ago. He tested the dehorner – clacking it open and shut several times to break up the gunk. It had to be sharp. A bad cut meant a God-awful bloody mess. A bottle of quick-clot was clumped from disuse, and Ethan shook the bottle to powderize the contents. On a grinding wheel, Ethan sharpened his knife. He plugged in an iron, a cauterizing iron, to make sure that it still worked. The head of the iron had a thick layer of crimson, too, from the last dehorning. He set down the iron on the dirt flo
or.
The cattle chute needed to be moved inside the barn, out of the rain. He opened a large door on the shed again so he could drive the tractor out. He would gather the steers and set the chute. As he slid the door open along its guiding rail, Ethan glimpsed Jacob's truck turning into the yard, but rather than wait to greet his brother, Ethan returned to the shed and jumped on the tractor, starting the engine.
He drove the tractor out from the darkness of the shed, through the open door. Raining harder now, Ethan pulled the poncho hood over his head. The sound of tires on gravel approached. Rain struck Ethan's back.