Tommy hesitated. Then he said, “He was assigned to the camps, at the end of the war, he was in the corps that went to the camps in Buchenwald.” Tommy looked up at the sky, reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses and slipped them onto his face. “He was changed after that. I can’t say how, but he was changed.” He walked over and leaned against his car, next to Pete.
After a moment, Pete Barton turned toward Tommy. In a voice without belligerence, even with a touch of apology to it, he said, “Look, Tommy. I’d like it if you didn’t keep coming over here.” Pete’s lips were pale and cracked, and he wet them with his tongue, looking at the ground. For a moment Tommy was not sure he heard right, but as he started to say “I only—” Pete looked at him fleetingly and said, “You do it to torture me, and I think enough time has gone by now.”
Tommy pushed himself away from the car and stood straight, looking through his sunglasses at Pete. “Torture you?” Tommy asked. “Pete, I’m not here to torture you.”
A sudden small gust of wind blew up the road then, and the dirt they stood on swirled a tiny bit. Tommy took his sunglasses off so that Pete could see his eyes; he looked at him with great concern.
“Forget I said that, I’m sorry.” Pete’s head ducked down.
“I just like to check on you every so often,” Tommy said. “You know, neighbor to neighbor. You live here all alone. Seems to me a neighbor should check in once in a while.”
Pete looked at Tommy with a wry smile and said, “Well, you’re the only man who ever does that. Or woman.” Pete laughed; it was an uncomfortable sound.
They stood, the two of them, Tommy’s arms unfolded now; he slipped his hands into his pockets, and Pete slipped his hands into his pockets as well. Pete kicked at a stone, then turned to look out over the field. “The Pedersons should take that tree away, I don’t know why they don’t. It was one thing to plow around it when it was standing up straight, but now, sheesh.”
“They’re going to, I heard them talking.” Tommy did not quite know what to do, and this was an odd feeling for him.
Still looking toward the toppled tree, Pete said, “My father was in the war. He got all screwed up.” Now Pete turned and looked at Tommy, his eyes squinting in the sunshine. “When he was dying he told me about it. It was terrible what happened to him, and then—then he shot these two German guys, he knew they weren’t soldiers, they were almost kids, but he told me he felt every day of his life that he should have killed himself in return.”
Tommy listened to this, looking at the boy—the man—without his sunglasses, which he held in his hand in his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know your father was in the war.”
“My father—” And here Pete unmistakably had tears in his eyes. “My father was a decent man, Tommy.”
Tommy nodded slowly.
“He did things because he couldn’t control himself. And so he—” Pete turned away. In a moment he turned partway back to Tommy and said, “And so he went in and turned on those milking machines that night, and then the place burned down, and I never, ever forgot it, Tommy, it was like I knew he had done it. And I know you know that too.”
Tommy felt his scalp break out into goosebumps. It continued, he felt the bumps crawling across his head. The sun seemed very bright, and yet it seemed it shone in a cone around only him. In a moment he said, “Son”—the word came out involuntarily—“you mustn’t think that.”
“Look,” Pete said, and his face had some color to it now. “He knew the milking machines could cause trouble—he’d talked about it. He’d said it wasn’t a very sophisticated system and they could get overheated in a hurry.”
Tommy said, “He was right about that.”
“He was mad at you. He was always mad at someone, but he was mad at you. I don’t know what happened, but he was working at your place, and then he stopped. I think he went back eventually, but he never liked you after whatever happened had happened.”
Tommy put his sunglasses back on. He said with deliberateness, “I found him playing with himself, Pete, pulling on himself, behind the barns, and I said that was something he couldn’t do there.”
“Oh, man.” Pete wiped at his nose. “Oh, man.” He looked up at the sky. Then he looked at Tommy quickly and said, “Well, he didn’t like you. And the night before the fire, he went out—sometimes he would just do that, go out, he wasn’t a drinker, but sometimes he’d just leave the house and go out, and that night he went out and he got back around midnight, I remember because my sister couldn’t sleep, she was too cold, and my mother—” Here Pete stopped, as though to catch his breath. “Well, my mother was up with her, and I remember she said, Lucy go to sleep, it’s midnight! And my father came home. And the next morning when I was at school— Well, we all heard about the fire. And I just knew.”