Free Greenville by Dale Peck Page A

six inches too long for him—and just as he goes through the barnyard gate he falls, his face narrowly missing a cow patty, his half-eaten apple rolling away into the mud.
    Nice one.
    The boy looks up to see Donnie coming out of the barn. He is shirtless and his stomach and jeans are covered in cakes of mud and he carries a short-handled shovel in each hand. As the boy scrambles to his feet Donnie throws a shovel to him one-handed, and when he catches it he feels the sting of Donnie’s strength in both his wrists.
    What’s the rush Amos? Fence ain’t going nowhere.
    It’s already four. Milking time’s in an hour.
    Donnie uses his empty hand to scratch at the dried mud on his stomach.
    Jesus, Amos. You ain’t been here but three months and already you’re an expert in dairy farming? The ladies won’t curdle, relax.
    Donnie has only a fourth-grade education and is ten years older than the boy, and the boy has seen with his own eyes that he is a hard worker. But he has a short temper too, as short as the boy’s, and for some reason the boy’s presence has riled him since he arrived. It is an antagonism that feels edgier, more personal than that of Vinnie Grasso and Bruce St. John and Robert Sampson, who always beat on the boy as if he were the perennial loser in some game they played. Donnie has never actually hit the boy,but he communicates his antipathy nonetheless, and now, with the shovel in his hands, the boy feels years older. If his uncle wasn’t waiting down at the bottom of the barnyard he might. He just might. But his uncle is waiting, and the boy turns away from Donnie still picking mud flecks off his stomach as though they were blackheads and hurries down the hill.
    The barnyard slopes steeply down the hill behind the barn until it meets the even bigger hill that stretches up for a quarter mile to the north end of his uncle’s property. The crease between the two hills muddies up each spring but has never run water according to his uncle. The moss-covered remains of a collapsed stone fence run down the center of the crease in a tangle of poplars and willows, blackberries and wild rose and fiddlehead ferns he picked a few weeks ago with Aunt Bessie, and just on the other side of it is the wire fence that actually divides the barnyard from the pasture. The boy runs over steppingstones laid in the hoof-churned mud and slips as one of them spins beneath him. He would fall but for the shovel in his hand, which makes a sluicing noise when it stabs the earth.
    Watch it there Amos. Wouldn’t want you to get your pants all dirty.
    When the boy looks up the first thing he sees is that Donnie’s fingers have left red marks where he scratched the mud off his stomach. The marks are almost as bright as the skin of the boy’s half-eaten apple, which is the next thing the boy sees. The apple is pinched in a pitcher’s grip between Donnie’s thumb and first two fingers.
    Hey Amos, Donnie half coos, half sneers. You forgot to finish your after-school snack.
    The boy is still off balance, more of his weight supported by the shovel than his splayed feet, and he can only watch helplessly as the red ball streaks toward him. It strikes him squarely in the chest, erupts in flecks of mud and apple meat. A hollow ringing fills his ears as though his chest were an empty metal bell, and when it clears he finds himself standing with the shovel held in both hands like a bat. Donnie is walking past him on the steppingstones, moving lightly from one to the next.
    Little late on the swing, Amos, he says, pushing the shovel off the boy’s shoulder with one hand. Strike two.
    The blade of the shovel smacks the wet earth a second time, and mud squirts from beneath the stones Donnie steps on with a squishing sound. The boy jerks around, ready to lunge after him, but the first thing he sees is his uncle standing spraddlelegged by a small pile of fenceposts. He is staring at the boy, a pair of posthole diggers in one hand, and even as