Goliath

The main campus of Pennsylvania State University and its bordering town of State College lie in the Nittany Valley, a serene countryside of flowing hills, rural neighborhoods, outdoor malls, and dairy farms, enveloped by the mountains of central Pennsylvania. The name “Nittany” comes from the Indian words meaning “protective barrier against the elements,” and may have originated from the tale of a mythical princess, “Nita-Nee,” who led her people to safety within the Pennsylvania valley. Upon her death, Mount Nittany itself is said to have risen to mark the princess’s grave.

Gunnar Wolfe shuts down the lime green tractor and stares at the mountain range stretched out before him on the distant northeastern horizon. The fading afternoon sun has bathed the sloping landmark in shades of purple.

Closing his eyes, he draws in a deep, intoxicating breath.

The serenity of the mountains soothe Gunnar’s soul as the sea once had, long before it had become a battlefield. Resting his arms on the wheel, his chin on his forearms, he gazes at the hills, imagining them to be a series of majestic tsunamis, their cresting fury threatening to wipe out the valley—and what little sanity his existence has been clinging to over the last seven years, four months, ten days, fourteen hours … .

Gunnar had grown up on the dairy farm back when its borders encompassed more than a hundred acres. He and his cousins had milked the cows by hand back then—sixty pure Holsteins—each animal twice a day. Looking back, he sees it as a happier, simpler time—long before his father had purchased the milking machines—long before his mother had died. Gunnar closes his eyes, refocusing his mind, this time counting the years since the accursed drunk sophomore had run into her as she walked home from church.

Twenty years, three months, sixteen days, two hours … .

During his years in prison he found he could not remember her face, but then he had returned to the farm, and the memories came rushing back.

A cold autumn breeze clears the tractor’s exhaust, bringing with it the smell of hay and manure and, atop them, the indefinable air-flavor of the coming of a long Centre County winter. The leaves have already begun turning, welcoming back the Penn State alumni, whose presence on the eve of a football weekend is already clogging Routes 322 and 26 with thousands of family campers. For the next forty-eight hours, the Nittany Lion fanatics will overrun the secluded campus town, choking the restaurants and blitzing the bars as they frolic along College and Beaver Avenues, reliving the best years of their adolescence, back when the object of getting drunk was to have fun, rather than to dull the senses just to ease the pain of adulthood.

Happy Valley. Gunnar loves State College the way he loves the coziness of a fireplace and quilt on a snowy day. Something about the town has always made him feel safe. Perhaps it is the campus itself, a haven of students nestled within a mountain valley—a place where the memories are good, the pressure limited to studying for exams, or working on Pop’s farm, making sure the heifers have all been fed.

Or maybe it’s that State College is about as far as one could be from the ocean, from Special Ops, and from Rocky Jackson.

The thought of his ex-fiancée causes the bile to rise to Gunnar’s parched throat. Restarting the tractor, he grinds the ancient gears and shifts the plow into first.

Four more rows. Forty-eight minutes. Two thousand, eight hundred, and eighty seconds … .

Gunnar finishes a row and turns, aiming the rickety bucket of bolts in the direction of the barn. Cutting the dried fields yields the hay they will need for the cows’ feed mix, enough to get them through the looming winter. Years, months, hours, days … there are no days off for the dairy farmer. Dawn greets Gunnar each morning in the milking parlor, where he cleans the cow’s teats with an iodine-and-water solution before hooking each animal up to the milking machine. It takes the machine five minutes to drain a cow’s udder. If organized right, the five machines could finish the entire herd in just under two hours. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty … one hundred and twenty cows, each cow producing six gallons of milk a day. Six gallons, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four … the collected milk runs through an FDA-approved tube directly into a temperature-controlled tank, to be transferred to a refrigerated tanker truck that delivers the product to any one of several local processing plants. Milk the cows twice a day, then keep them moving from one grazing field to the next, supervising six and a half hours of their eating and drinking, all the while maintaining a strict breeding schedule for each member of the herd.