The Business of Naming Things (14 page)

                   
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts
[“that'll be on the quiz—Starkfield,” said Tommy],
you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was
.

                   
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the
“natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two
[“That'll be on it, too—fifty-two.”]
I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line
.

                   
“He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twenty-four years ago
[“and that.”]
come next February,” Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses
.

            
Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien
(What's a mien? Tommy: means how a person looks.)
; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker's face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly away in the direction of his farm
.

                   
“It was a pretty bad smash-up?” I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome's retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape
.

                   
“Wust kind,” my informant assented. “More'n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan'll likely touch a hundred.”

                   
“Good God!” I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a wooden box—also with a druggist's label on it—which he had placed in the back of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself alone. “
That
man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!”

                   
Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek. “Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.”

“Can't blame 'em,” said Tommy. And they both laughed for a bit. And then it wasn't so funny.

Mrs. Newman brought up the cookies and seemed to have been crying, even though she was smiling her bright smile. It's just that Michael noticed her lashes looked dark, wet.

T
OMMY NEVER DID GO BACK TO SCHOOL
. Mrs. Newman told Michael's mother that, first, a fever, and then problems with his eyesight and headaches made it so he'd have to stay at home. Michael volunteered to collect his assignments, with Phillip in charge of turning in the homework. Although Tommy's time in the school was long enough to mark Michael as a friend of “potato head,” it no longer mattered. Everyone in school forgot about Tommy Newman, like he'd never existed. But to Michael, he existed, his only friend.

School was a joke, at least socially. Michael treated it is a joke, a bad, lousy, unfunny joke, and he kept to himself. He even brought out the Norton & Sons wardrobe on occasion, half to please his mother and half to rankle a couple of snickering guys and their attendant girlfriends. Wearing his shirt with a ruffle and narrow-legged pants with the stripe, he got the usual inarticulate comments. “Sit on this and rotate,” he said to Dickie Trudeau, responding in kind and flipping him the bird. Dickie just looked at him like he'd seen something for the first time. He was amused.

Michael's father was just confused. Michael no longer listened to ball games with him on the radio in the kitchen. The World Series came and went in four dull games in early fall, after which Michael decided, by Thanksgiving or so, that organized football was a travesty. Michael still enjoyed throwing the football around with Phillip, teaching him to throw a spiral. But otherwise, he read his assignments, by himself in his room, and then, often, with Tommy in his room, and found that schoolwork was getting both easier and more interesting.

The Newmans treated Michael as more special than even the Dashnaws had. Mr. Newman showed Michael his collection of books: dozens of red leather volumes of Dickens, a whole shelf of green leather-bound Sigmund Freud. In the living room, he read
Life
magazine and
The New Yorker
, which had funny, confounding cartoons.

Although Michael's mother took note—and approved—of Michael's increased studiousness, his father took note—and no doubt disapproved—of his withdrawal from the great outdoors and the world of sport.

The only thing Michael did not withdraw from, with respect to his father, were their trips to feed the cows. He
enjoyed rattling around in the smelly truck; he found his father increasingly amusing—or ridiculous—and treasured the chance to polish his disdain.

“Football's stupid, Dad. No individuals, just armies.”

“An army won the war, wise guy.”

“Baseball's boring. Nine guys standing around in a lot.”

“Willie Mays doesn't just stand around in a lot.”

Maybe this is what men do, Michael thought, toss strong opinions back and forth like a medicine ball.

“I don't trust shrinks,” his father said.

I'm not surprised, said Michael to himself, sensing a power in silence.

Michael liked the barn's dark interior and the ripe smell of damp oats and manure and the comforting sounds of the cows mooing and clanging around, and even his father's animal sounds, the heps and whoas mixed with almost tender ministrations to his “girls.” The girls were dumb and innocent and didn't really want or need much. And yet the little one, the mooley, distressed Michael. Each time his father had to wrestle the other cows, getting bigger and heavier now by the week, away from the salt lick or away from the slop barrel, Michael felt a wave of sympathy for the poor mooley.

“Why don't you get rid of her? Or give her back to someone.”

“Not possible, amigo,” said his father, who had started to roll out certain terms of masculine fellowship, like “pardner” and “boss,” whenever they were at the barn. “You want her?”

Michael didn't answer, and there was nothing to say.

Since he'd turned inward (which is how he saw it, the image of a lighthouse beam reversed), Michael had more to think about these days. There was more light. He and Tommy talked about taxonomies and evolution. They finished
Ethan Frome
and then
1984
. Thanks to this, Michael felt he had a
quieter and enlarged space, with more things to look at. He felt, somehow, furnished, lit within. All this owed something to the conversations with Mr. Newman, who welcomed the young boy's questions, particularly about math problems and the reach of the universe, and he answered them patiently. “You can't add anything to infinity, Michael, and you can't subtract anything from it. It has no quantity. It is nothing,” said Mr. Newman, grinning. But it seems like everything, Michael thought.

II

I
T WAS THE DAY AFTER
T
HANKSGIVING
and my father said there was something special going on at the barn and that I needed to come: He needed a hand. He said he might need two or three hands for this, and that he'd talked to Mrs. Newman about bringing Tommy along. Tommy had been feeling better since he'd gotten back from Burlington, where they'd drained some of the spinal fluid out of his skull. I remember thinking his head looked a little smaller and not as yellow. But he wasn't expecting to resume attending school.

I couldn't figure out what was ahead at the barn—maybe this was to be the day that the cows got sold. Maybe some dairy farmer would be there—or several farmers—and my father would have his big payday. I could see him wanting to share this kind of thing, with me and even Tommy. Show us the ways of the world. Farming, commerce, what men do.

It was a warm and sunny day for November. I remember I was wearing the sunglasses my mother'd gotten me for my birthday—aviators, for skiing, she'd said, though we were skiers only in her mind. When my father and I got to the truck, Ted Farrell was already sitting in the passenger seat. “Ted's
gonna help us,” said my father. He told me to hop in the back. Ted's collie Queenie was already there.

We headed up the hill and pulled into the Newmans'. I thought I'd have to go in and invite Tommy—ask him if he wanted to do this—but he was already on the porch with his mother, who was wearing her apron. He had a red hunting jacket on and the shades he had to wear lately to keep out the bright light. Ted got out of the cab and got in the back, insisting, as did my father, who more or less ordered it, that Tommy sit up front, which he did.

Ted said nothing to me as we headed up the hill to the barns. The wind was whipping his hair and ruffling Queenie's fur. You couldn't hear anything back there. They both had their snouts in the wind. I hunched in the lee behind the cab, trying to listen to what my father might be saying to Tommy, but I couldn't. When we arrived, my father went in the barn, emerged with a couple of items in his hands, and made a little speech, and Tommy and I stood together listening.

“It's the mooley's lucky day,” he said. “Finally. As Mickey can tell you.” My father looked at Tommy now, who glanced sideways at me, like, Why is your father talking to me?

“The little one in there we call ‘the mooley' she's been getting pushed around for six, eight months. You know why? Because she has no horns. Born hornless. That's what a mooley is. A freak. One of God's mistakes. For a cow, hornless means defenseless. Same for any ruminant. But today, boys and girls, the mooley gets even. The mooley has her day.”

He held up, in one red, filthy hand, a large pair of rusty clippers, and in the other what looked like a steam iron with a long cord that dangled like a live snake. He handed that to Ted Farrell. Then he waved us into the barn. It was dark as a dungeon. I remember Tommy and I both dropped our
sunglasses on the floor and had to feel around with our toes to find them. And it was hard for Tommy to do such a thing—bend way down. I gave him his.

The mooley was released from her stanchion, and this is where Tommy and I came in: We were to watch her in the corner and hold her by a rope collar. Then Ted Farrell got on a barrel and with a long extension cord plugged his ironlike tool—it had a handle and a flat square surface of steel—into a socket. My father went around the front of the stanchions and, one by one, clipped the horns of a dozen cattle with a shocking crack, like musketry going off. Each cow nearly buckled with the pain and then set off to bucking. Blood that looked purple in that light gouted from the stumps and spread across their white-and-black faces. Ted Farrell followed, putting one arm around each cow's neck to steady her and apply the hissing iron to each stump of horn. “Cauterizing!” shouted my father at us over the din, by way of instruction. “Stops the bleeding!” More angry squealing. “Stops infections!” The mooley was jumpy in our grasp and confused and she looked at everything but what was right in front of her. She looked at me and at Tommy as if to say, Who's next?

“That's all there is to see,” announced my father, though Ted's iron was still sizzling. He told us to take the mooley out, along with Queenie, and walk her around the pen.