Summers, his young summers, belonged to his uncle and aunt. They were farmers, more full- than part-time, part-time because his uncle worked at the county’s only farm supply business to help them make a living while maintaining the farm. Hanley moved in with his aunt and uncle each summer, beginning when he was twelve years old and each year thereafter until he left for college in Ohio.
Small, perhaps eighty-five acres of rolling land in southern Indiana, the farm was divided into twenty acres of grazing pasture, sixty acres for crops, mostly corn and wheat with a new crop, soy beans worked in and a small bit for the farmhouse and buildings.
He remembered that his farm life began at five o’clock each morning, starting the morning after he arrived. Mending fences, bailing hay and tending to his aunt’s large garden along with the many other things involved in keeping a farm going, kept him busy and tired each day. The work was hard, but he enjoyed it, for the most part, knowing it helped two people he loved and knowing it made his parents proud, The mornings were actually the hardest part, getting up while it was still dark, the chill of his room, the window open as there was no air-conditioning, rolling up in the thin blankets and the nubby quilt, shivering, thinking of how nice another hour in bed would be, hearing his aunt in the kitchen, the muffled bangs and crackle of paper, the smell of coffee and the small resentment of relenting to this ritual of forced responsibility. Lying in bed back then, he thought he knew what responsibility meant, now he knew it was meaningless. Growing up, he believed, was taught, that being an adult was a state, an age that bore a title earned through the ritual of progression and effective development. It was, he came to realize, only the experience of being an older human being. Nothing accomplished so much as having survived day after day, accumulating enough experience to successfully dodge misery and pain, to find a bit of happiness among the harsh times and disappointments. Lying there, he never realized the importance of that moment, or of any of the moments that had passed since his youth. His life seemed like water to him, running through his hands, sliding away, the clear and sweet, the painful and embarrassing flowing freely, out of any control. As much as he tried to remember the important moments, they were often as vague as his dreams, only not as frightening. His life passed without his permission. He thought his life had been rude to him, in spite of all his good fortune, like someone handing him a hundred-dollar bill and then shoving him to the ground. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way.
He had a large bedroom all to himself for the first two years and then shared that bedroom with one of his cousins, Rick, fellow summer laborer. He remembered Rick, blond, slim and smart but without direction. Rick was his aunt’s favorite; she protected him from his uncle at those times when Rick’s day-dreaminess got in the way of the work. When Hanley was in college, Rick was killed in Vietnam, shot in Saigon by another American soldier, a kid from Stockton, California, drunk or stoned, carrying a cheap, throw-away 32-caliber he thought he needed for protection. Rick had looked at the prostitute the kid from Stockton was feeling up at the bar and was shot for that look, one month to the day from setting foot in the country.
He still remembered much about that time, remembered that first morning, standing on gravel, shivering in the early morning light, mist obscuring the fence lines and the cattle, lowing out their presence, calling to each other and to the house, getting some reassurance from the other cattle lowing back and from the echoes coming back to them from the buildings. He stood, head down, staring at his new boots, a gift from his parents that year and each year thereafter, boots that would last through the fall and be discarded sometime around Christmas. The boots were always a reddish brown, with a low gloss to them, the toes of these boots that first morning showing a beading of moisture from the dew. Almost daily, his uncle would remind Hanley that hard work was the glue that held the world together. His uncle, lean and farmer-strong, had a thin face, with deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, their effect heightened by his deep tan which never faded, even in the winter when Hanley would see him again at Christmas. They liked each other, but showed little affection at first, but grew closer as Hanley became a teenager. His uncle began his discussions about responsibility that first summer. Over the years, especially the last two summers before Hanley left for college, his uncle talked a great deal about what he called the debt.
***
“Did you finish fixing the wire down by Indian Rock?” his uncle asked.
“Yes sir, it’s fixed.”
“Will it hold?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did Rickie help you?”
“Yes, he helped me.”
“Did he?
