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By Root 999 0

a dripping sweat, in spite of the new air conditioner. The shades were drawn, and the whirring sound of the machine was like a den I could curl up in, safe from my father’s vagaries, Caroline’s furies, and Rose’s vigilance. And I was not immune to the accruing virtue of the clean, richly colored swathes in front of the cleaning head. It was like combining a field, except what you left behind seemed deeper and more fertile than before, rather than the other way around. I cleaned without a break, and when I turned off the machine, I had worked myself into a rather floating state of mind, abuzz with white noise, effort, and sweat. I stood up, stretched my back in both directions, and pushed through the door into the kitchen, carrying the reservoir of dirty water. Jess Clark was standing in the middle of the floor, smiling at me. I started, and water sloshed. He said, “So, want to go for a walk?”

“How long have you been here?”

“About a minute. I called fifteen minutes ago, but you must not have heard the phone. You want to go for a walk?”

“I’m exhausted, and I’m hungry, too. You do appear suddenly. I’ve noticed that about you.”

“You’re just oblivious. I’ve noticed that about you.”

That irritated me. I said, “Oh.” I pushed out the back door and carried the dirty water across to the hog pens. When I came back in, Jess was still there. I said, “I’m busy and it’s hot, too. Maybe some other time.”

“Half an hour. I need someone to talk to.”

I caught sight of myself in a window. Hair everywhere, black smudges on my cheek and chin. The irritation I’d voiced floated away under the influence of the buzz and the virtue. He said, “Anyway, I saw Ty in Pike at the implement dealer’s. They were having a promotional barbecue, sponsored by John Deere. There were a lot of guys there, and he said to tell you not to bother with dinner. That’s what I was supposed to tell you when I called you fifteen minutes ago.”

“Rose is doing Daddy’s dinner.”

“There you have it.”

“People don’t go for walks in the noon sun.”

“I know a shady place.”

“You must be kidding.” I smoothed my hair and splashed water on my face. It was potent, him telling me that he needed someone to talk to, implying that he hadn’t gone first to Rose.

He did know a shady spot, as it turned out. It was the little dump at the back of the farm, in a cleft behind a wild rose thicket, that we used and Harold used for refuse. The “shade trees” were an assortment of aspens and honey locusts, the latter of which sported thick, needlelike thorns four or five inches long, armoring the trunk from the ground up. The dump was a place I didn’t go often, especially since we had started paying a monthly fee to use the landfill north of Pike. When I saw where we were going, I slowed down, but Jess pulled me forward. He said, “Don’t you love the dump? I spent whole days out here when I was a kid. This is the third time I’ve been here since I got back. It’s still the most interesting spot on the farm.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s fun, I promise. I’ll show you all the native plants I’ve identified. And some of the roses are still blooming, too. They smell out of this world.”

The larger furniture of the dump consisted of a rusted-out automobile chassis, some steel drums, an old iron bedstead, a rusted-out truck bed with a broken-backed vinyl automobile seat in it, a roll of dark reddish brown barbed wire, and a cracked white ceramic toilet tank. Supposedly, we were the only people who had ever used it for refuse, but I didn’t recognize everything there. In the country, trash has a way of attracting other trash. Once Rose found an old hall rack, oak and, after we cleaned it, brass. She sold it for forty dollars to an antique store in Cabot, which inspired us to comb the dump two or three times for other profitable castoffs, but we hadn’t found anything. I said, “I always wonder if other people sneak in here and throw things down the gully. I don’t recognize anything here.”

“I might recognize that automobile seat. It makes me think of Harold’s old ’62 Plymouth Valiant. Remember when he got that?