Some summer nights a few years later, when I was home from college, I drove slowly down the lake road past their home late at night, maybe once a week or so. I’m not sure what drew me back so frequently to that path through the birch just a couple hundred feet off the lakefront--lust maybe, but I don’t think that’s the whole reason. Maybe I wanted to know that what had happened was all real.
But what I remember best about that summer is what happened after Cassie and her mother made their afternoon visit to our dairy--what I saw that night in the barn, and what my father said the next day, when he finally opened up.
He caught me once, maybe a year before, beating a cow with a hoe. I don’t remember the provocation anymore, but a milk cow, like a wife or a sister or a brother, can make you feel that bloody kind of hate you can feel only for those you live with, day-in, day-out. He came up from behind and grabbed me, lifted me off the cement and kept me up there until he’d stopped my thrashing.
“You ever do that again, Gary,” he said, “and so help me I’ll use that hoe on you.”
That’s all he said about it, ever.
When Cassie and her mother left late that afternoon, I went out to the barn, maybe a half hour after my father picked up and left in silence. I pulled on my boots just outside the parlor and unlatched the door. I was young then, cocky. I figured I’d take my licks and have it over. But I found him beating a cow that night, whacking away, the milking machine lying awkwardly in the gutter like some overturned turtle. He had a dowel he’d picked up somewhere, thick as his finger, and he was thrashing that cow like I’d never seen him do before.
When he saw me standing there where the rest of the cows were already stanchioned, he stopped, frozen in the act, a vacant, stunned look on his face. We both knew that nothing needed to be said, so we milked beside each other all night long and never spoke a word. I felt almost excused, as if what I’d done with Cassie was lost in some big harvest of sin.
The next morning we were out baling hay at the Trillian place, an old farm with hundreds of acres of land and a sprawling, ramshackle barn with 1904 painted just below the point of the eaves.
Today, the baler my father bought is obsolete because people say a crew of five or six makes baling hay too labor-intensive. Today, with the right kind of equipment, one man can do all the haying and never leave the air-conditioned comfort of his cab. Back then, haying employed our entire family, locked us up in dusty mows, forced us to gulp ice-cold lemonade from a common-cup canning jar, to work long, hot hours in stagnant air, thick with dust, and to talk to each other, even when we may not have wanted to.
When my father came on the job that morning, we’d already started up. I was stacking bales on the wagon when I saw his pickup roll into the yard. My brother Andy was driving the baler, while old man Trillian himself shuttled the first load back to the barn where he and little Jesse unloaded. In a matter of minutes, half hour maybe, Darrell rode out on the empty wagon and told me Dad wanted me to work with him in the barn.
My brothers hadn’t said much to me that morning. They knew what had happened the night before, but on the ride out to Trillian’s I’d found a corner in the back of the wagon and they let me be. Maybe they were disappointed in me, I don’t know. Maybe they were jealous. Whatever they felt, they didn’t say much. Maybe they felt as I did--it was all water over the dam. The way I saw it, Cassie was leaving. Now it was her problem.
__________________
Dad speaks.
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