“Thunderhead” by Gregory Spatz appears in the Fall 2023 issue of The Kenyon Review.
Set on a dairy farm in the height of summer, “Thunderhead” by Gregory Spatz begins ominously, in the middle of a fight between two boys, David on his back, pinned down and “bucking against Scott to no avail, twisting, writhing, his wrists squeezed in the viselike grip of Scott’s hands.” Instead of telling us what is going on—and it doesn’t sound good at all—Spatz interrupts the moment. Since David can’t escape physically, he escapes mentally: we see him and Scott’s younger brother, Raymie,
roaming the fields together and calling the cows in—Come, boss! Come, boss! Soo-eey —and never failing to find good things to riff on and laugh about and also never failing to locate and round up all fifty-eight cows with their bonging neck bells and their hooves sucking in and out of the muck, their tails twisting up unabashedly and sphincters pulsating wide to emit mounds of greasy manure as they ran from the pasture together, mooing and shitting all the way; later, pausing in the work of shoveling shit and sawdust postmilking (the only tasks he and Raymie were to be entrusted with at their age, aside from roundup) the game continued, the two of them singing into their shovel handles like they were mic stands and swinging and swaggering around each other, laughing, scraping up shit and throwing down new sawdust and hay for the next round of milking as the lake of cow shit at the back end of the barn simmered with flies and humidity in the late August heat.
In this single gorgeous sentence, we understand David’s relationship with Raymie, and the more unpleasant workings of the farm. Details that might otherwise be flat come alive as David, trapped under Scott, imagines his chores. I still don’t know what’s going on with him and Scott, but I do know exactly where this is taking place. As I read, I can feel the humidity, smell the cowpies, swat the flies. Not a single detail is extraneous, including the “late August heat.” It’s the end of summer. Raymie will stay on the farm, but David will be returning to Connecticut with his mother and sister. Maybe.
And then the mystery: David is confused: “What was the fight between him and Scott about, and how had he done so badly, so fast?” The milk tank failed its inspection; David watched his grandfather scold Scott’s father. In that sentence, we understand the complicated hierarchy on the farm and that Scott, despite his physical advantage in this moment, ranks below David. But what has David done to deserve this thrashing?
What I love about this story is how Spatz creates suspense while giving us a complete view of the farm and its people as the point of view shifts from David, to his grandmother, to David’s sister Linda, then back to David. The question of why Scott and David are fighting won’t be answered until the end of the story, not until after we’ve seen David’s grandmother standing at the window of her kitchen, smoking and thinking vaguely about the day’s lost income, wondering if her daughter and the kids, David and Linda, will be staying on the farm at the end of the summer or returning home. As the story progresses, we see Scott’s older brother down by the creek with Linda, enjoying the one day when they can be alone together. With each new viewpoint, we come to understand a little bit more about what has happened to bring David and Scott to this moment.
At first glance, this story might seem only nominally about food. But isn’t the production of food as important as the food itself? The complicated class politics between the grandparents, the hired help, and the vacationing family highlights the precariousness of farm life, where a day’s lost income can have huge consequences. In the end, we’re left feeling a bit like David, who doesn’t like milk and can’t “square all of that” he’s seen on the farm—the shit, the flies, the mechanics of suctioning milk—with the “glass of fresh, cold, mostly scentless milk from the store-bought carton in the fridge.” Neither can we.
