Yellow Mesquite Read Free

Harley said, wondering why his daddy hadn’t come at him with the belt for touching Darlene. He scrambled out of bed, pulling on his Levi’s and the stiff-ironed khaki shirt and worn-out tennis shoes. Was it possible his mother hadn’t said anything? He combed his hair back and went out through the kitchen, glancing sideways at his daddy spearing slices of tenderloin, swiping it through the red-eye gravy, snapping it off the fork.  
    His mother had set out plates for the twins, though they were never up this early except during the school year. She gave him a reassuring smile as he passed through. “Morning, Harley Jay.”
    “Morning.” He glanced again at his daddy and went out the back door toward the barn.  
    Wind sighed through the broom weeds. He thought of the toad somewhere there among the weeds, the thin hairline slit in its underbelly, wondering if it was deep enough to have killed it.
    He took a leak behind the barn where the two remaining cows stood flat and gray against the dawn, crunching on the bundled sorghum his daddy had thrown over earlier from the stack-lot. He thought how he might draw such flat shapes, showing what something was without detail. When he finished, he buttoned up and headed back to the house. Wind fluttered his shirt, hummed in the windmill.  
    In the kitchen, he poured hot water from the kettle into the enameled pan, added a little cold from the bucket and washed up for breakfast. His plate was already made with scrambled eggs, hot biscuits, red-eye gravy and fried strips of tenderloin. His mother poured him half a cup of coffee, poured herself some and took her place.
    They ate in silence, the mood subservient to that of his daddy. Harley watched him without seeming to watch, apprehensive glances, little more than a blink of an eye from a lowered face.  
    His daddy finished, dumped his knife and fork on his plate with a clatter, shoved his chair back and went out. The screen door slammed after him.
    Harley hurried.
    “Don’t swallow your food whole,” his mother said.
    By the time he got out to the tractors, his daddy was working the lever on one of the guns, pumping grease into the little metal nipples on the disk harrow behind the Farmall Regular.
    “I already gassed ’em,” his daddy said, not looking up from where he knelt under the Regular’s toolbar. “You get that old Twelve greased.”  
    Harley grabbed the other grease gun from off the five-gallon can and slid down under the Twelve’s toolbar. He had made many drawings of the farm machinery, always impressed by their massive power—the big buzzard-wing sweeps, the steel disks, how they tore up the earth.
    His daddy finished, put his grease gun away and went up alongside the Regular, where he set the magneto, the spark and the gas. Then he went to the front, fit the crank in and gave it a sharp twist. The tractor coughed a puff of smoke out the stack. The second time it fired and died. His dad went around and set the spark back some and this time it fired right up, rattling rich and throaty, shattering the stillness of the soft tangerine light, the sun beginning to wobble up behind the long, dark horizon.  
    Harley sneaked a look at his daddy, saw the little light there in his eyes, and figured it was about as near to joy as he could get. That was something he would never be able to paint. But he tried to imagine it, what the light would show behind his eyes.
    His daddy turned toward him. “You about through there?”  
    “Yessir. Just finishing up.”
    “Okay now. You watch that old harrow. You cut them wheels too short, that toolbar’ll catch on them old knobby tires and it’ll pick that sucker up and land it right on your back. So you watch it, hear?”
    “Yessir.”
    Harley greased the last fitting on the harrow and turned to slide out from under the toolbar.
    He stopped.  
    The horny toad dragged its great black-bloated belly through the dirt, its wide mouth gaping, watching him with its little