“Didn’t expect you.” He crams a corner of the tarp under a pole. “Thought, after Melanie yesterday . . .”
“Not my business,” she answers.
What she’s really saying, what she must be saying, is, Not my problem. He swallows the urge to tell her he’s stopped drinking.
“Your tractor up and running?” She heads to his garage. He follows her and opens the door. The garage shares a wall with the barn and is an expansion built by his father for the tractor and for his father’s baby, the still. The still isn’t massive — eight feet high including the copper boiler, pipes, and chambers — but it’s a good size, and imported. Blessedly simple to use, as he found when he and Melanie arrived: day before, blend a neutral grain spirit, purified water, botanicals if he’s being fancy, and let it steep overnight. Next day take the wash and get the still boiling — fired by sawdust bricks. Takes a couple hours, then boil the alcohol off through different chambers and the condenser. That’s it — spirits flow. Monitor heads, hearts, tails. His father used a bottler, but that’s too much effort. Mason jars and jugs from last night’s distillation sit on the floor between the still and the tractor.
“I’d have to search out the keys. Clear the snow. I don’t know, with this weather—” he steps over the Mason jars and flicks dried hay and manure off the back tire. Allis-Chalmers 185 with a three-point hitch, orange. Fifteen or twenty years old, but an upgrade from the tank that his old man had before. Some dings, all his. He rubs a dent in the hood.
“Shit,” she says.
“Tomorrow.” He kicks hay off the floor drain. The boy, holding the bird, stands on his toes and peers in the still’s boiler window. “Don’t touch that.” The boy jerks back. Kid shouldn’t even be here — should see this. Hellsake both of them smell of wet feathers, the boy of feather and wool. The kid’s face is pink, no, wait, red now after that reprimand.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Shit. Fine. Yes.” She pinches her chin and adds, “Since I’m here.”
Since she’s here. “How much do you want?”
“How much can you spare?”
“Look, I quit yesterday.” Sounds stupid once he says it. Kendra tucks her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She doesn’t believe him. He clenches his jaw. Why would she believe him? She’s had a great view of his escapades all year. Every time he passed out on the porch or in the field. Chasing cows, whatever gave the tractor the dent — who knows what else. He rubs his hands down his coat. “I quit.”
“You want me to take it all, then?” She says it too quickly, like she was waiting for him to tell her he quit. Like she suspected after yesterday he’d at least try, and like it’s hopeless. Like he’s so hopeless there’s no point berating him.
The jars are scattered over the entire garage — shelves and floor. “Well, I don’t think you can carry it all.”
“Fine.” Kendra smirks and loops her fingers through her camera strap — she better not be taking a picture. She untwists the strap at her neck. “I’ll pick up two on our way back.”
“Fine.” She’s always so damn sarcastic. Or maybe it’s her look: high-bridged nose, closely spaced, narrowed eyes, and those freckles — they seem more like a blemish she’s looking past, or pissily ignoring, than part of her skin. He steps outside with them as Melanie steals from the house. “Look, I’m keeping the farm. You know. After.” After the old man dies. Hadn’t been planning to but, hey, he hadn’t been planning anything.
“Whatever. Tractor tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” As they cross the pasture toward the forest he can feel his energy deflate. Why did he say anything? That shit about the farm, that he quit. Shouldn’t have. A horn sounds, and on the highway the school bus slows, but doesn’t stop, and continues on past. Melanie turns and follows Kendra and the boy through the pasture at a distance. So much for returning to school.
He heads to the house, and makes it to the kitchen in time to grab the phone. Melanie’s school. “I know she missed yesterday,” he says. “And she’ll miss today, too.” He drops his scarf and coat. “I was supposed to call, yes I realize that.” He fumbles his boots off. “Sick? Not exactly.” He pulls on the cord. “I think she’s sad.” Was that too much? There’s silence on the other end of the line. “With her grandfather and all. Yes. Austin. Thank-you.”
After the platitudes the teacher suggests, “Why don’t we come out? The class.”
“Come out?” He lifts a stack of plates. There’s no room left in the sink. The counter beside it is overrun with cups waiting to be washed.
“You’re on a dairy farm, right? Your home property? Why don’t we bring the class, her friends, and come for a tour?”
Not sure he sees the logic in this. They live on farms, right? “Well.” He sets the plates back on the table and opens a cupboard. Full, even though there’s a tray of clean dishes waiting to be shelved.
“Well, she could come back to school with us after that.”
He works through this proposition. There’s something not right about it. Melanie didn’t run toward school, she left it. But the teacher is offering to solve the problem for him, and that’s a good thing. “All right.”
How did the cups ever fit in the cupboard in the first place? How do two people go through so many cups? Three people, Christ. And mostly his cups. All the mess in this place is from him. All the unfinished shit lying around the farm is his. His father completes everything — the garage, the still — the old man would never start something without knowing he could beat it. He made sure that he had the time and resources. As a kid, if Milo wanted a trip, a potato gun, a car, his excitement got stunted by his father. The old man would ask, What would you do with it afterwards? Have you calculated the cost? How are you going to care for it? And Milo never carried through. He lost steam in planning.
He sits at the table and stares over the dishes, through the living room window to the snowy pasture. He rests his head on the table, sicker now. All morning he’s been lightheaded and dizzy. Now he’s sweating. Not puking or shitting, yet, but that’s how it’ll go.
Down the hall his father moans. Milo’s arms ache from demolishing the fence. He hasn’t done any physical labour since the hospital, but he’s handled mess for years. Was that what made him come back after the old man’s stroke? Was that what made him think he could handle his father’s crap? He leans back in his chair and smacks his thighs. “Well, you’ll handle it now, won’t you.” You’ll handle it too, old man.
III
She’s already buzzed the rest of her hair (left it on the bathroom floor) and milked the cows by the time her father sees her. He kicked around the field for hours, knocking the slurry pit’s rail down. Shouting at himself the way that, back home at the apartment, the homeless guys on the street did. People-watching is different here. There, she and Milo lived across from a Liquor Mart, and a group of homeless set up camp under the eaves beside it. Always something to see in the street, as long as they didn’t catch you spying. One guy gave her the two fingers to the eyes — I’m Watching You — every time she left the apartment, until after a month she got tired of the hassle and did the gesture back and he laughed. Like it was the best joke. On the farm, everyone can see everyone and no one thinks it’s funny. Kendra and that boy — Milo followed them into the dairy’s garage only a moment ago. And Axel in his house, he opens and closes the blinds a crack, like he’s trying not to care about what Kendra is up to.
She’s seen Axel and Kendra train the birds — hup a bird from a post to their gloves, fly it back and forth like a game of catch, swing a fur tube into the air and let the bird chase it. The kite is her favourite — they tie a fake duck to the kite string, send it up, and let the falcons dive and drag it down like they’re jet-fuelled. If the weather were clear, that’s what they might be doing now.