When my mother moved us to Osceola County after finishing graduate school in Oxford, Ohio, she asked her brother Lee to indoctrinate us into what we’d been missing. We were foreign to him: stark white gentrified little boys who had spent the previous two years playing with the children of English professors.

The xenophobia ran both ways. At 6’4”—6’6” with boots—Lee loomed over us like a giant neon cowboy. He wore stained straw hats that he shaped using the steam from a boiling teakettle. He drove a diesel truck that was always coated inside and out with a blanket of dust, tobacco juice and dog hair. When he patted one of the other of us on the back, it felt more like a 2×4, and the pitted calluses on his hands were like knots in a tree rubbing through a cotton tee-shirt.

Lee didn’t have any pets, only four cattle curs that would rip the lips off your mouth. But once, Lee had a rat infestation and was in dire need of exterminators. Would we like the feed barn to ourselves to bash at anything that moved?

Our first time in the barn, Sam and I hunched to avoid contact with the sticky Banana spider webs. Lee followed us inside, oblivious to the webs which wrapped around his hat. He explained that the rats hid everywhere, and that we had to find them and club them with the splintery oak limbs he gave us.

“Are they like our rats, Mike?” Sam whispered in my ear.

“These ones are different. We can kill these,” I whispered back, unsure as to whether or not the creatures we were hunting would resemble the pet shop variety we had kept in Ohio.

Sam and I had named the two girls Purdy and Blackie, and the two boys Gus and Jack. Blackie seemed to relish surprising my mother by climbing into her box spring during the day—normally while my mother was busy writing—and then climbing out of her hole in the box spring and onto my mother’s face during the night. And whenever neighborhood kids rapped on our screen door, Gus would lope down the carpeted stairs, a fattish ball of yellow fur with a long pink tail. Visitors would see my mother or Sam or me first, and then Gus at our feet, his pink nose pressed against the mesh screen, his whiskers trembling in anticipation of our visitors.

Worried as I was about killing pets, I was even more reluctant to disappoint Lee, who I suspected was a harsh taskmaster. Despite our best attempts, but to our relief, we found only vandalized bags of feed and droppings.

* * *

Lee paid for my first speeding ticket, and then allowed me to work it off by setting posts and stringing barbed wire over a half-mile of pasture. While my friends prepared for the junior prom, I spent the day laboring in the May sun, wiping blood and cow shit on the thighs of my jeans, smelling my neck and forearms burn and biting splinters out of the raw palms of my hands.

We worked steadily, trekking back to the truck only at noon to sip my aunt’s sweet iced-tea out of a sweating orange cooler, and to eat a lunch of deviled-ham sandwiches and chilled and salted cucumber and tomato salad. By the time the fence was finished, and I had bathed and gently eased into a rented tuxedo, the prom was two hours in. I fell asleep on the living room couch after realizing that my fingers were too swollen to fiddle with cuff links.

* * *

Lee and I haven’t spoken again until now, the spring of my sophomore year at college, where I am actively working to forget where I came from by hanging out with people who came to Florida for its beaches, and have no knowledge of its agrarian history and present.

Lee doesn’t call me himself, but asks my grandmother to relay a message: He is short handed for the spring drive. As my grandmother waxes about how much my uncle has done for me, I admire the shiny pink palms that have grown smooth since the last time they operated the levers of a squeeze chute or fought to hold a flailing hoof.

* * *

Years before, he had stumbled into my grandmother’s house, a red-stained towel wrapped around his left shoulder, his clothes black with dirt. Behind him were my cousins.

“Daddy, slow down and let us look at it.”

“What’s the matter Lee?” my grandmother had asked, rising from her recliner. “What did you do?”

I could only stare.

Lee ignored the girls and my grandmother and me, and crashed down at the kitchen table. He pulled the towel from his shoulder. The skin was dirty like his clothes, and blood flowed from a number of deep lacerations. Splinters of wood stuck out from raw patches of flesh, and bruises were forming in the places where he still had skin. His breathing was fast and punctuated by forced sighs. His face was set in a permanent wince.

“Momma, if you could just give me some aspirin and a glass of tea, I think that would about do the trick.”

While Lee bathed his shoulder in the big porcelain kitchen sink, my cousins told us in hushed voices that a colt they had been breaking had spooked and took off, my uncle in the saddle. He fell off to the side, but—caught in the stirrups—was dragged against a stretch of fence and into the side of the barn. He had stood up on his own, walked into the house and wrapped his shoulder in the towel sling, and driven to my grandmother’s, all without asking for help.

* * *

That was back when the cows brought in money; when he owned the land on which they grazed; when it was acceptable—not a waste of feed and medicine—to eat the beef he had raised. Over the course of a decade, the small time ownership of cattle came to be interpreted by the community not as fierce independence, but an inability to assimilate into the changing economic landscape.

After I speak with my grandmother, I visualize the movements which I have forgotten in the course of working at the student newspaper: Stand to the left of the cow’s head, my back to the animal, reach over the skull (but in front of the horns so as not to have the arm pinned against the gate of the chute), and quickly shove the right hand into the right side of the cow’s mouth. Once in the crevice where the lower and upper jaws meet, pull up, and, at the same time, grab the cow’s nose to gain the animal’s cooperation. Hold tight and wait for the long tubes to snake down the cow’s
esophagus and squirt cobalt and worm medicine into its guts. Release the head, step aside as the cow is released from the chute, and repeat.

I imagine Lee and the girls off in the cypress swamps, on horseback, moving the cows towards the pens with yips, yells and whistles while the ground is still wet and there is a warm fog.

I see the group of us working until the hottest part of the day, stopping for an hour to cook fatty pork steaks, which Lee carves into manageable slabs with the same pocketknife he uses to castrate bull calves. We drink from a battered cooler, cut our appetites on sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and hearts of palm marinated in lemon juice. We tear at the steaks while they are still hot and use our fingers. We do not say anything about manners to each other when juice drips out of the corners of our mouths, down our throats, underneath the fronts of our shirts, where the pig’s
lifeblood mixes with our sweat.

I know the day will end around six o’clock, when the last calf’s ears have been marked. I will go to my mother’s house, which I seldom visit anymore. My fingers are rigid and purpling; my arms and face stained with scrotal blood; my clothes stiff with mucus and cobalt.

I pull into a driveway crowded with abandoned automotive projects. I open the front door and hear the whir of an old ceiling fan. A caravan of scents greet me: Patchouli, sandalwood and pine, old dog, motor oil, turned-up earth, fried venison.

I hug my brother Sam, who has grown into a young country man, and I listen to him play through his bluegrass repertoire, as he switches back and forth between a battered hand-me-down fiddle and a slick black flattop guitar with engraved butterflies, which seem to fly down the fret board after his fingers. I join my mother in the kitchen, where she is swaying, slowly, in her navy blue shawl, barefoot. I whisper to no one in particular, “It is good to be home,” and I mean it.