Greenville by Dale Peck Page A

tree growth down, and so he runs on the right side of the road until he reaches the bottom of the hill where 38 curves north and a narrow rutted lane continues on to the east. His path takes him between the two parcels that make up his uncle’s land, the grass in the pastures long and fronded with seed and already yellowing as the June heat dries up the last of the spring runoff. At the boggy eastern edge of his uncle’s land the pasture has reverted to a strip of forest, and the boy thinks of the twenty-year-old trees as a miniature arboretum. Poplars seem to spring up the fastest, reaching head and shoulders above their neighbors. Their bark is still almost as smooth as a birch’s, just beginning to hoar up on the lower part of the trunks, but they’re weak trees, and scattered few and far between the hardier slow-growth oaks and maples and chestnuts. A row of black locusts is bunched at the side of the strip like a crowd waiting to get into a movie theater, and the spindle-branched sumacs that grow under the locusts look enough like the larger trees that they could be their children. The sprays of sumac leaves, already tinted red along their seams, make a thin but effective wall that hides the undergrowth deeper in the forest—which is mostly itch ivy anyway, as the boy found out a few weeks ago when he ventured in barefoot to retrieve one of the ladies. Here and there a constellation of white leaves marks a dogwood, and earlier in theyear he’d seen a lone redbud, glowing in the shadows like a barber’s pole.
    It takes him just as much time to tick off these names as it does to run past his uncle’s land, and something seems fitting in that, as if a true correspondence existed between the land and language, the living trees and the forest taking root in his head. The damp soil, rich but rocky, the flume of silver and brown trunks erupting from it, the thousands and thousands of leaves as different each from the other as snowflakes. He notes the way a chestnut’s teardrop leaflets radiate from a common point like the spokes of a wheel whereas a locust’s smaller ovals are lined up along its stem like a string of Black Cats, sees how a maple’s leaf is five-fingered like a hand and how an oak’s is that same hand gnarled by amputation or arthritis. And he notes also his own limbs, his muscles and breath. It only takes a dozen paces before the soreness has melted out of his hamstrings and calves, a few more before his breathing falls into a rhythm with his feet, two steps per inhale, two per ex, as Coach Baldwin directed him. He listens to the sound his feet make when they strike the hard earth. Coach Baldwin—who despite his horn-rimmed glasses and permanent-press shirts has a mouth like a drill sergeant on the field—has pointed out that his feet are flatter than a whore’s back, and he has to take extra care to make sure he lands on the balls and not the heels. It’s all in the sound. Coach Baldwin told him that a hammer makes an awful racket when it pounds a halfpenny nail into a two-by-four but the nail makes almost no sound at all: the boy wants his feet to be nails, not hammers. What the boy thinks is that running is like giving milk. Something else does all the work and he is just pulled along in itswake, and by the time he leaves the asphalt his mind has separated from his nearly silent feet and follows along like a balloon on a string. When a car honks and swerves past him he jumps a little, because he hasn’t heard it coming. By then he has left even his body behind, has given himself over to the land, this land that his uncle knows with a respect that goes beyond love. The boy wants to learn its language fully, wants to read it as his uncle does. Not just road signs and historical markers that hint at the past, but its moods, its temper. There are days when it seems to the boy that his uncle is tied to his farm as surely as he is to his shadow, and the boy hopes that if he surrenders to it as