Every spring, back on the farm, the barn swallows build their nests in the same places in the rafters. About the time we turned the cows out after a winter inside the barn, the swallows swooped through the top of the Dutch door, jinking around the post and leveling out just under the mow floor, stirring the cirrus clouds of cobwebs. Then they peel off, flapping their wings once, back out the door. I am scraping the shit into the gutters and plowing it toward the far door to shovel into the spreader. The yard is already mud, the cows mired, moo, their skins twitching and ears flapping. The swallows shoot in and out, daubing the beams with mud and straw. There will be one nest right over the stanchion of Jean, whose black back weathers the summer of droppings from above as if her coat is wearing away.
My parents thought I’d never come home.
If you farm a dairy, you can never get away. That is, if you are milking cows, you have to be on the farm all the time. Milking is twice a day. When I first came back to the farm after quitting school, I tried milking three times a day to increase the yield. Slowly, I broke the herd’s habits. The production fell way off. That’s to be expected. There was nothing scientific in my methods. I weighed the cans before I poured the milk into the holding tank and marked a piece of scrap paper with the pounds of each. If I had the time between the milkings, I’d draw a line to connect the dots on my rude chart. It looked like a cardiograph. Molly came on in the afternoon, when Clover was falling off. Amy made a sawtooth pattern, like she was singing scales. The vacuum pumps breathed all the time. I was inside the heartbeat of the barn. And I’d hear the cows’ big heartbeats through their sides as I rested my head against them, hooking up the claws. Over time, the weight came back up. I could feel it in the cans as I lugged them up the alley. They got used to the new routine, the extra scoop of sweet oats. But I gave it up. I was milking all the time. When I had a chance to sleep, I dreamed of the purple iodine dip I used to disinfect the teats. My whole body was stained. I fell asleep twitching, dreaming about the wet warm muck of the brown paper towels I used to massage the bags to get them to let down.
Now that I am on the farm working, I don’t like to ask my dad to do the chores. His knees are bad from the stooping he did all his life. But sometimes I have to get away. I like to take the Continental into Peru. It is the same blue-black topless model that Kennedy was riding in when he was shot. It has the backward-opening suicide doors. I nose into the line of hot rods cruising in downtown Peru and imagine those rear doors popped out, scooping up a bystander off the street into the backseat, surprised but ready to go. Instead, the high school kids always say my car turns the loop into a funeral procession. Watching from the parking lot of the Come N Go, they see the Zapruder film. A creepy car. I am too old for this anyway. I end up buying some cigarettes for my dad and then point the endless hood of the car back to the farm and get home in time to muck out the stalls.
Those nights after I’ve come back home from those silly trips to town, I hear my parents worrying about me. Their whispers come up to my bedroom through a floor grate there to conduct the heat. I never heard words but sighs that have nothing to do with passion. My mother never changed my room when I went away to school. All the silver model airplanes are still tethered to the light fixture on the ceiling with yellow, rotting string. I never had enough patience to paint them. The glue on my fingers had fogged the clear plastic canopies. The decals are dry and peeling. The planes twist above me, in that rising updraft of worry, like compass needles looking for a true north. On the walls are posters of prize-winning 4-H cows. Behind the planes, they look like a backdrop of clouds, billowing thunderheads, dappled skies. In those pictures, the cows are posed with their front legs resting on little hills that are covered over with turf. They are supposed to look more beautiful elevated slightly like that. But I always think the step-up hill takes away from the picture no matter how artfully it is hidden. I hung up my sketches of the new calves. I ripped them from the herd book. In the shadows, they could be mechanical drawings of camouflaged transport planes. My mother taped up the drawing Annie did when she visited the farm, the butt ends of the herd in a row of stalls at milking time, their pinbones forming a range of snowcapped mountains.
That night after the planes buzzed me in the alfalfa field, I asked my parents if I could go into town. I called them from Peru, from the phone booth in the parking lot of the Come N Go. Pilots from the base still in their green nylon flight suits, perhaps the ones who flew over me that day, got into the midnight blue van. A National Guard unit on maneuvers. The four of them had Popsicles. I told my mom I thought I’d head on down to Purdue, maybe stay a night.
“Whatever,” she said. She wrote down the feeding instructions I gave her for Dad to use. I told her who the vet had treated for mastitis. Her milk would go to the calves and cats.
I said, “I hope this isn’t too much trouble.” Moths were batting at the light in the booth, so I opened the door to turn it off. I heard the sound of jets taking off over at the base, a sound like ripping cloth.
“You know your father likes to keep his hand in. I’ll keep him company.” I could see her that night. She would tune the radio to one of those magic stations where the songs have no words and then spread the lime thicker than I do in the alleyway. When I got back it would look like it had snowed inside the barn.
“Say hello to Annie for us,” she said.
I brought Annie home to the farm once for a weekend when we were both in school. She was from the Region, in northern Indiana, and had never been on a farm. I went up to Hobart once with her, back then, and she took me to the dunes. We stared at Lake Michigan. I remember it looked like it could be farmed, flat and dusty. We huddled on some riprap and saw the lights of Chicago flare up where the sun set. It is the only body of water I’ve been to where I couldn’t see the shore on the other side, and it scared me. Annie said she felt the same way walking the lanes around the farm. The land just seemed to go on forever.
“When I was a kid my mother told me to not go near the corn,” I told her. In the late summer you can get lost in it and panic. It swallows you up.
The weekend she visited the farm, I helped Dad clear out some scrap wood piled next to the barn. We all stood around while he decided what to move where. My mother teased Annie about the rats that would be hiding underneath the lumber.
“Stick your pant legs inside your boots, Annie,” she said. “They’ll go right up your leg. It looks like a burrow to them.”
Dad jiggled a two-by-four. I stood back a ways with a pitchfork. Annie curled over and stuffed her jeans inside her boots neatly. She did this straight-legged like she was stretching before a morning jog, her hair falling over her head. The rat broke out from beneath some barn wood and window frames, parting the dried grass, faking first toward my father, who tried to club it with a stick, then me, then my mother, who was stomping, but then it angled straight toward Annie as if it had heard my mother’s prediction. Annie stood perfectly still, her legs pressed together. I saw her shiver. The rat spun around toward me, standing between it and the woodpile. I pulled the fork back above my shoulders aiming at it as it sliced through the grass. I hesitated because I didn’t really want to kill it in front of Annie. The rat should have been killed. Its burrow was beneath the grain bin. I just couldn’t be gleeful about it. My mother was squealing. I sensed Dad lumbering toward me, thrilled by the chase. Annie stood like a post, as if she had rammed her boots into the ground when she had taken care of her cuffs. Her face was pale and blank. At my feet, I could see how fat the rat was, how sleek and brown, like a bubble of earth was squeezing along under the dead grass. Then, surrounded, the rat stopped dead still. And then, it jumped. It took off straight up, reaching the peak of its climb at my eye level, where we looked at each other. It hung there it seemed for a long time. The rat’s little legs were stretched out as if they were wings. It flashed its teeth then ducked its head and dove through my hands. I was twirling the pitchfork like a propeller, trying to find a way to bring the tines or the handle around to defend myself. I yelled. The rat disappeared again in the junk by the barn. We all stood there panting, clouds of dust wound round our faces. Our eyes were fixed on the spot in the air where the rat had hovered between us. I couldn’t get Annie to come into focus again. She was a blur a few paces beyond the clear empty space.