Free Greenville by Dale Peck

he’d taken for a fencepost when the old man had nearly run it over on the day he left him here.
    SITE OF
EARLY TANNERY
ERECTED BY DANIEL MILLER
WHO CAME FROM EAST HAMPTON
    is what the sign says in butter yellow letters painted on a midnight blue placard, and although the boy’s uncle has never commented on the sign the boy senses its importance, else whywould his uncle let it remain on his land? Still, the boy has never asked his uncle about it, and he doesn’t ask Julia about it now. All he does is stare Julia down until she tucks the same lock of hair behind her ear and turns around. Then he squeezes his feet into Jimmy’s shoes and laces them as loosely as he can. Still, by the time he gets home that afternoon the backs of his heels and the tops of his toes are covered with blisters, some of them broken open, and as he limps off the bus it’s all he can do to hold back tears of pain and frustration. Ahead of him Flip skips down the stairs and dashes toward his house, but the boy descends so slowly that Kenny comes up hard behind him and steps on the back of his left foot. When the boy whirls around with his fists clenched his neighbor throws up his hands, palms open.
    Whoa there hillbilly. It was an accident, honest.
    The boy stares at him as the doors of the yellow Bluebird close and the bus heads east down 38. His fists remain drawn for a moment, then all at once he throws his books on the grass, plops down and unlaces his boots, chucks them into the ditch. There is a splash as one of them lands in a puddle and at the noise the boy throws himself on his back and stares up into the pale green five-fingered leaves of the silver maples in the Flacks’ front yard. Star pasta, he thinks, but he can’t remember its proper name.
    Criminy hillbilly, Kenny says. Looks like you been walking on hot coals or something. He is silent for a moment and then he says, Heard about you in gym today.
    The boy arches his head back, looks up at Kenny’s inverted body. He is not as old as Duke and not as tall, but he has Duke’s manner of looking away when he has something to say. He is looking up at the leaves where the boy was just looking.
    What’d you hear?
    Heard you threw your shoes at Coach Baldwin, then beat Billy Van Dyke in the four hundred.
    Billy Van Dyke runs like a girl.
    Billy Van Dyke is the fastest kid in eighth grade. Kenny looks down at the boy. Or he was.
    The boy rolls over on his stomach, pulls a few blades of grass from the ground and shreds them into pieces one by one.
    It wasn’t nothing. I was mad.
    The screen door of the Flacks’ house bangs across the yard.
    Kenny! Mom says to get your butt up here and eat your cookies and go help Dad with the cows!
    Aw jeez. Flip, you little Nerf ball, you better run!
    As Kenny lopes up the yard Flip squeals and disappears around the house. Kenny turns and jogs backward.
    Billy Van Dyke does run like a girl, but a really fast girl. Way to go hillbilly.
    Kenny sprints around the corner of his house then, and a moment later the boy hears Flip’s screams of delight. At the sound he feels a sharp pang of homesickness. Flip’s squeals sound so much like Lance’s that the boy can feel his little brother’s heaving ribs beneath his fingers. He pretends that the girls are holding Lance down and torture-tickling him, that he is heading off to Slaussen’s Market and that in six hours his brothers and sisters will be pulling the apples and bananas he has stolen for them from the lining of his jacket. He gathers his books and shoes slowly, but as he crosses the road he notices his uncle’s ladies in the south pasture and remembers the downed fence behind the dairy barn. In a moment he’s forgotten his siblings. He dumps his shoes on abluestone flag outside the kitchen door and drops his books on the kitchen table and grabs an apple and heads up to the barn at a trot. He is trying to run and eat his apple and roll up his pants all at the same time—Duke’s pants, a good