Free Greenville by Dale Peck Page B

they make eye contact an expression flickers over his uncle’s face—a frown, it looks like to the boy, but whether he’s frowning at the boy or the swampy soil he labors over is hard to tell. He lifts the diggers up and drives them into the hole between his feet, but the ground is so wet that little more than a pinch of mud comes out in the blades, and on the next downward thrust the diggers strike a rock. His uncle sighs then, lets the diggers sit in the hole, which is less than a foot deep. By then the boy has reached him, and he looks up the crease between the barnyard and the hill of the north pasture. He counts eighteen new fenceposts. His uncle and Donnie have been at it since seven this morning, and it’s only just past four. There are still six more posts in the pile.
    The boy can tell from their bark and from a pile of twigs thathave been stripped from them that the fenceposts are fresh-cut cedar, their sawed ends marbled brown and white. Cedar’s scarce on this side of the river. The abandoned house just west of his uncle’s is surrounded by them, but that land doesn’t belong to his uncle, who would have had to range far and wide over his own property in order to find this much cedar. But it’s a hardy water-resistant wood, well suited to the wet ground it’s going in—worth the effort, his uncle would say. Do it right the first time and you won’t have to do it again.
    The back of his uncle’s shirt is soaked with sweat and his pants all the way up to his thighs are splattered with mud. Useless work, he says now, taking a folded handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt and refolding it in an effort to find a dry patch. He wipes his forehead and eyes and puts the handkerchief back in his pocket. Useless place to put a fence.
    Since his uncle has spoken first the boy feels justified in asking a question.
    Why don’t you move it further up the hill?
    Wire won’t reach that far.
    What about closer to the barn?
    Barnyard’d be too small then.
    The boy is wondering if he should ask his uncle why he put the fence here in the first place when his uncle says, Wouldn’t never have put a fence here myself, but you make do with what you find. He is about to start up with the posthole diggers when he sees the boy still looking at him, and he lets go of the diggers and wipes his face with his handkerchief again. He looks down at Donnie, who is digging up one of the old fenceposts at the other end of the barnyard, and then he looks back at the boy.
    What do you know about where you come from?
    The boy looks at him, his fingers brushing at his chest.
    I’m from Brentwood? he says. Long Island?
    But his uncle is shaking his head.
    Long Island, he says, scowling, is not a place people come from. It’s a place they end up. They come from somewhere else. You, he says, and then he corrects himself. We are from further north. Your grandfather, mine and Lloyd’s father, had a farm in Cobleskill.
    The boy can’t imagine what a farm twenty miles to the north and west has to do with his uncle’s fence, and all at once he stabs his shovel into the ground and reaches for his uncle’s posthole diggers.
    Here, I’ll help.
    His uncle puts a hand on his arm.
    You should know this, Dale.
    The boy lets go of the diggers reluctantly. He looks around, finds his shovel again, holds it with both hands between himself and his uncle.
    Me and my father didn’t get along so well, his uncle is saying. Which is why your father inherited our farm.
    My father is a cook? the boy says, but he isn’t even sure of that now. He works at Pilgrim State Mental Hospital?
    Your father is a farmer. Just not a good one. He ran our place into the ground. Or didn’t run it you could say. Drank it away’s more like it, sold off the cows one by one and traded the land acre by acre for a couple of dollars or a bottle until finally the government seized what was left for taxes, while all the while I spent years working for other people until I