Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

“Sure,” he said, taking a sip, trying not to grimace. “Black and strong.”

His mother mixed his coffee with hot whole milk, dumping in heaping spoonfuls of sugar. She told him that was how she’d learned to make coffee when she lived in New Orleans, in another lifetime, before she married his father. August knew that Lisa would never go to New Orleans in a million lifetimes.

His father came from the bedroom. He had a dab of shaving foam under one earlobe. He put his hand on Lisa’s waist as he got a coffee mug from the cupboard, and she turned and wiped off the shaving foam with her sleeve.

“How long before the eggs are done?” August asked, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

“A few minutes. The bacon is almost ready.”

August sighed, downed his coffee, and took a piece of toast from the plate on the counter. “Well,” he said, “some of us can’t sit around. I have to get to work.”

He got his wrench from the mudroom and slid on his boots, leaving them unlaced, and walked across the lawn with his boot tongues flapping like dogs breathing in the heat. The cows were milling in the pasture, gathered up close to the gate. They rolled their dumb baleful eyes at him and lowed, their udders straining and heavy with milk.

“Shut up, you idiots,” August said. He picked a small handful of pebbles and continued to walk, pelting any cow within reach.

The trees that lined the back pasture were old oaks and maples and a few massive beech trees, the ground around them covered with the scattered, spiny shells of their nuts. There was a barbed-wire fence strung across the trees. It was rusted and had been mended many times, so old that it had become embedded in the trunks. August walked down the line and ran his fingers over the rough oaks and maples and the gray crêpe of the beeches, with their bark that looked like smooth, hairless hide stretched over muscle. He let his fingers linger on the places where the wire cut into the trunks, and then he knelt and sighted all the way down the fence, squinting into the strengthening light, and imagined that he was looking at a row of gnarled old people, the soft skin of their necks garroted by barbed wire, the twisted branches like arms raised, fingers splayed, trembling and clutching for air.

Until last year, August had assisted with the milking every morning before school and every evening after school, and then his mother forbade it.

“Do you like helping your father with the milking?” she asked one evening as they cleaned up the dinner dishes. His father was on the porch listening to a baseball game, and the sound of the play-by-play came through the screen door, garbled and frantic. The announcer spat hoarsely, A hard line drive—he’s going, he’s going, he’s going .

“I don’t mind it too much,” August said, wiping a plate dry. “Most of the time I like it.”

“Huh, well, that’s a problem,” his mother said. She had a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth and ash drifted into the dishwater as she spoke. “You’ll be in high school soon, you know. And then there’ll be girls. They’re going to find you so handsome. And then there’ll be college, and then there’ll be any life you want after that. This is just a small piece, Augie, and if you hate it, you should know that soon you’ll be making your own way.”

“But I said I don’t hate it, Mom.”

“Jesus. I really hope you don’t mean that. Getting up early, the shitty cows, the dullness?”

“What about it?”

“My God, Augie, look at me and tell me you don’t hate it.” She turned to him and held his chin with her soapy hand and her cigarette trembled, and August tried but couldn’t tell if she was serious and about to cry or joking and about to laugh.

“I don’t hate anything. It’s fine. I like everything fine.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m disappointed in you,” she said, turning back to the dishes. “But I suppose it’s my fault, for letting it go on. I’m going to talk to your father. Your barn days are coming to an end. I’ll finish up here. Go and listen to the game with your dad.”

On the porch, his father was in the rocker, his legs stretched out long in front of him. He nodded at August as he sat on the step.

We’re going into extra innings. Hang on as we pause for station identification. You’re not going to want to miss this . The radio crackled and an ad for a used-car lot came on. Bats flew from the eaves, and August threw pebbles to make them dive, and then the game came back on and Cecil Fielder won it all for the Tigers on a long sacrifice fly to center field. August looked at his father. He was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together over his chest.

“Night,” August said, getting up to go inside.

His father yawned and stretched. “Night,” he said.

Later, his parents’ arguing had kept him awake, and the next morning his father didn’t roust him for the day’s milking, and soon after that Lisa was always around, and not long after that his mother started spending time at the old house. At first, just a few nights a week, and then one morning she didn’t come back to make breakfast, and his father burned the toast and slammed the door on his way to the barn.

August tied his boots. He climbed up to the haymow and surprised two cats that had been intently pawing at a dead sparrow on the hay-littered floor. He broke one’s back with a quick chop of the wrench and stunned the other with a jab to the head. The cats were indistinct as they writhed, blurred in the gloom. August silenced their yowling with two more sharp blows from the wrench, and then gave chase to a few more slinking forms that eluded him by leaping to join their wailing, spitting clan in the rafters.

August didn’t curse much. His father always said that no one took a man who cursed too much seriously and it was better to be the type of man who, when he did curse, made everyone else sit up and take notice.

Now, however, in the dark barn with the hay dander swirling around his face and the cats twitching and bristling out of reach above him, he cursed.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “Motherfucking, cocksucking, shitfaced, goddam, fucking cats.”

It was the most curse words he’d ever strung together, and he hoped the cats were sitting up to take notice, trembling in fear at the rain of fire that was about to be visited upon their mangy heads.

At the old house, his mother had the blinds drawn. She had cut a ragged hole in a quilt, pulled it over her head, and belted it around her waist, poncho style. Her arms stuck out, bare, and the quilt ends trailed across the floor when she got up to let him in. With the shades drawn it was dark, and she had lit an old kerosene lamp. The flame guttered, sending up tendrils of black smoke. She had been playing solitaire. There was a fried pork chop steaming in a pan on the table.

“You want some lunch?” she said, after she had settled in her chair, smoothing the quilt down under her and over her bare legs. “I’m finished. You can have the rest.” She slid the pork chop over to August. It hadn’t been touched.

He took a bite. It was seared crispy on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside, quick-fried in butter and finished in the oven. That was how she always made pork chops. Lisa wouldn’t know how to do this, he thought. Perhaps his father would get so fed up with Lisa’s tough, dried-out pork chops that he would send her away and his mother would come back to the new house and he’d start helping his dad with the barn chores again.

“Are you still not eating?” He picked up the pork chop to gnaw at the bone, where the best-tasting meat was.

“Augie, that’s a common misconception about us breatharians. I eat. Good Lord, I eat all the time. Here, actually, let me have one more bite of that.” She leaned over and wafted her hand around his pork chop, bringing the smell toward her, and then took a quick hiccuping breath and smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Meat from an animal you know always has the best flavor,” she said, lighting one of her little cigars. “That’s something city people probably don’t understand. You remember taking kitchen scraps out to that hog every night after dinner? You fed that animal, and now it feeds you. That lends a certain something to the savor—I’m sure there’s a word for it in another language.”