Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [67]
He ran a hand through his thick black hair. “I don’t think Dad and them is wanting you to get on your knees and beg them or nothing.”
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry for snapping. I didn’t mean that literally.”
“Anyways it wouldn’t matter if you did, since Dad didn’t get sets from Jackie Doddard. There’s prolly none left in the whole county by now, I don’t reckon.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that settles it. My goose is cooked.”
She returned her hands to the cow’s udder and manipulated it gently to submission. There was no sound in the barn but the rhythmic ring of the milk stream against the metal bucket and the syncopated, soggy-sounding drips from the waterlogged joists where the roof had leaked. Every drip reminded Lusa of the barn-fixing money she didn’t have and now would not earn from tobacco.
“Got some leaks,” Rickie said, looking up.
“About three thousand dollars’ worth, I’m guessing. Maybe more, once they get into those rotten roof beams.”
“Hay’s going to spoil.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I probably won’t even get any hay mowed or put up in the barn this summer. The baler’s broken down, and the tractor’s probably going to be repossessed. I was thinking I’d just let the cows eat snow this year.”
Little Rickie stared at her. His big body was a cool seventeen, but his face looked younger. What was wrong with her, why was she venting her ironic wrath on this child? He was only the messenger. She was shooting the messenger.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m real sorry about, you know. Uncle Cole.”
“Thank you. Me, too.” She exhaled slowly. “It hasn’t even been a month. Twenty-seven days. Seems like twenty-seven years.”
He repositioned himself against one of the massive old chestnut posts that held up the upper floor of the barn. Upstairs where they hung the tobacco, the barn was lofty as a cathedral, but down here where the animals stayed it was friendly and close with the sweet, mixed smells of grain, manure, and milk.
“Me and Uncle Cole used to go fishing. He ever tell you about that? We’d skip school together and go trout fishing up on Zeb Mountain. Man, it’s pretty up there. They’ve got trees so big you just about fall over from looking at them.”
“You’d skip school together?” Lusa considered this. “When you were in first or second grade, Cole was still in high school. I never even thought about that. He was your pal. Like a big brother.”
“Yeah.” Rickie looked down, being careful where he put his cigarette ash. “He always told me stuff. How to talk to girls and stuff.”
Lusa raised the heel of her hand against one eye and turned away, unprepared to cry in front of Rickie. “Yeah. That was one thing he sure knew how to do.”
The cow lowed, a small protest in the dripping silence. Her calf in the neighboring stall immediately began to bawl, as if he’d just woken up to the injustice of milk robbery.
“Milking, huh?” Rickie noted.
“Yep.”
“Looks like you’re good at it.”
“Cole taught me; he said I had a talent. Stupid thing to be good at, right?”
“Not really. Animals, you know. They can tell what’s what. You can’t fool them like you can people.”
The calf next door was still bawling, and she crooned to calm him: “Hush now, your mama will be there in a minute.” He quieted, and Lusa returned to the milking. There was comfort in this work. Sometimes she felt flooded with the mental state of her Jersey cow—a humble, unsurprised wonder at the fact of still being here in this barn at the end of each day. Lusa actually enjoyed the company. She’d been tempted to name her, until Cole pointed out that they were going to eat her child.
“Uncle Herb, over at his dairy? Him and the cows is like oil and water, he says. He does all the milking with machines. Hooks up bossy to the tank and sucks her dry.”
“Yikes. Poor bossy.”
“I don’t think they mind it none. They’re just cows.”
“True.”
“How many times a day you milk her, twiced?”
Twiced, they all said. Oncet, twiced. She wondered if that was a vestige of Old English hanging on in these isolated mountain towns.