Читать книгу Pale Harvest - Braden Hepner - Страница 10

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HE WATCHED THE OLD WOMAN EXPIRE IN INCREMENTS. It was impossible to say what went on when he left the house to the two of them, but he reasoned that there might be a side to his grandfather he’d never seen, that such a thing must have been there in the beginning even if it had been tempered or diluted by the years. Blair had started writing Jack’s paychecks himself in a chaotic back-slanting scrawl. When Jack came upon the aged two together in the living room watching Matlock, her favorite show, or outside on lawn chairs under the tree, or at the kitchen table, Blair serving spoonfuls of soft food into her mouth, it seemed the old man was letting her down slowly to the grave. It was strange to lend any pity to a man who seemed indestructible and who would have none of it outright, so he didn’t, but he wondered what toll her death would take on him. This woman was a zombie and as unsightly, the grandmother he’d known all but gone in spirit and the flesh only a failing receptacle waiting to be shed. Her imminent passing meant she would be relieved of her pain here, of her muddled mind and the stupor of her fading mortal existence, but it also meant that the matters of the farm would be decided. He did not know where his heart was on the matter, how much or how little he wanted what seemed to be coming his way. But he had waited and he felt ready for whatever would come. His father had said a man could only fashion his fate with what he was given, and fashion he must, but so far it seemed he had not been given much with which to work.

Early twilight and he drove the loader tractor to the bull pens carrying a one ton bale of hay on the forks. As far back as he could remember they had kept rodeo bulls, incredible beasts even in decline, like stoic gods when dormant, like the demiurge when in the violent throes for which they’d been bred. They were fed by a round metal feeder at the edge of their pen. He dropped the bale into it and cut and pulled the baling twine from around it. Seth McQuarters came across the field from his house and the two leaned on the plank fence and watched the big animals eat. Seth was of medium height with a slight wiry body muscled from a life of farm work. Dirty blond locks of hair curled from beneath his Peterbilt ball cap around his ears and his hair in the back was a little longer than the rest, a thick pad bulging from the band of his hat. His close-set eyes moved over the herd. The muscles of the bulls moved like hard rolls of earth beneath their hides. They looked agile, despite their size. Seth wrestled a hard pack of Reds from the pocket of his jeans, and throwing a glance at his house he wiggled them back in and took out instead a can of Copenhagen and plugged his lip. He held it out in offering and Jack took a pinch and worked it down with his tongue between gum and cheek, minty, rank, and comforting. He told him the can would leave a ring on the pocket and expose his new habit to his mother and Seth said to hell with the frazzled woman, he didn’t care. Jack told him about the wreck, about Rebekah, and they spat dark streams into the dust and the evening was wide all around them. Darkness and coolness replaced light and heat and from where they stood, fields of crops spread to the foothills in one direction and toward the smoldering horizon in the other. It was a gentle night, and it felt right to be leaning on this fence, engaged in gentle vice, examining these bulls from a distance.

—Which ones can I ride? said Seth.

—Any you can get in the chute, except the one that killed that guy in Evanston. The old man said he’d need to talk to your dad first.

—No worries. He used to ride broncs.

—Bronc riders are different.

—I already talked to him about it. My mom forbid it, but she ain’t approved of a thing I done since I got weaned off her nipple.

—These bulls are dangerous.

—I know it.

Seth tilted his head down in thought. It was only a matter of time with these bulls, a law of probability. Who did Jack know who had ridden bulls for a time and didn’t still carry the visible proof in a limp or a vulgar scar or a wandering focus? He felt dread curdle like old milk in his stomach and fear coursed slowly through his veins. He admitted that he was afraid. It wasn’t fear as long as they were stock in the pen, but to agitate them, to provoke them and pretend even for a few seconds to dominate them was more, and the consequences could be grim. He guessed that the fear he felt now was similar to when he first started fighting in high school. Once he was hit, the fear left and there was only the thrill of the fight and an abundance of violent energy to be dispensed. It seemed a similar purity that drove Seth, some design of courage, but it wasn’t all courage. It took a measure of guts to get on a bull, but also a measure of willful ignorance, and a good amount of recklessness, and this became Seth’s brand of originality.

Seth leaned his body against the fence, his arms folded on the top rail and his chin resting on them.

—That one there, he said, and spat into the dirt of the pen. You see the brown one with the dark neck? He’s looking at us now.

The bull’s bleary eye regarded them indifferently as he chewed hay, his hump massive and solid, his chest the girth of an oak tree. Great wrinkles hung about his neck. The tips of his horns had been trimmed to blunt points but could no doubt still go through a man with all the greater wreckage. Each bull was monstrous and beautiful, animal gods incarnate, their balls hanging like sacked stones between their legs.

—What’s his name? said Seth.

—I’d have to see his tag and check the records.

—How many’s he got in there, about twenty?

Jack nodded and spat.

—Why don’t he run um no more?

—Don’t know. Elmer used to do it. Was his thing. He failed at it and here they sit.

—Which one has killed a man?

—It’s the white one there, or is he cream-colored.

—What’s his name?

—Little Boy Blue.

—Did they retire him when he killed that cowboy?

—I believe so. I never went with um for that stuff. I had to stay back to milk and feed.

—I watch these bulls from my window, said Seth. It’s part of the mental preparation. Eighty percent of the ride is mental, Balls says. You got to find your peaceful center, your spot of balance on his back, right up on the rope, riding on your hand almost. That’s the peaceful spot. Stay out of the house of pain and stay off his crown. You got to anticipate what the bull will do. Most guys get out there and it’s just a blur, a whirlwind and they’re on their ass and scrambling for their lives. But if you can slow time down, then you got it. The bull, he can only do so many things. He can buck, twist, or spin or throw any combination at you. He can throw his-self all four legs up in the air leaping like a frog and bending like a banana. So you got him then. I sit on three stacked bags of rolled barley with a piece of twine wrapped around um in the barn where the old lady can’t see, and I grab hold and close my eyes, and then I just sit there and imagine, lean in and out, back and forth, with what the bull’s going to do.

—They give a buckle for that?

—Piss up a rope, said Seth. We got to get a watch. He dug in his mouth with an index finger and flung the wad of chew onto the ground like an animal had shit in his mouth. His tongue worked to gather the fine remnants. Where you figger we can pick one up?

—Town someplace.

Jack looked over the herd. The air cooled further and wild stars began to come out with no moon to dim them. Lights had appeared in Seth’s house across the field and he left for dinner. Jack went back to the farmhouse dragging an anxiety he couldn’t shed. His thoughts ranged in his head and overran one another. His blood was agitated and roaming.

Talk of drought sounded in murmurs like the rustling of dry corn stalks and it was not new talk. Blair preached about the management of the reservoir above them some hundred miles, told of great and scheming water wars waged silently, methodically, and with evil intent between farmers who sucked the reservoir nearly dry by summer’s end to carry water to their crops. He said the field for a farmer was like his child, and the worry and anxiety that overtook him concerning his field was not unlike that of a father striving to provide bread for his little ones, for it usually translated into as much. Smoke from desert fires hung above the horizon and seen through it the distant ranges were blue and thin like ragged fins. Third crop alfalfa was paltry and the general feeling was that fourth would not be worth the diesel required to harvest it. One arid hot morning as they drove back to the barn after breakfast Blair remarked how tenuous a thing was farming in the desert. A livelihood in which everything depends on uncertain rainfall and unstable prices. He said if someone would have put it that way before he started he wouldn’t have done it. He just thought people drank milk, and he could give it to them. He licked his chops clean of remaining breakfast juice and stared stoically out the windshield. They raised dust along the dirt lane and it came in through their windows and filled their noses and settled on their clothes. He said who knew what Brigham Young saw when he came through the canyon and viewed the Salt Lake Valley below him, but it couldn’t have been much. People likened him to Moses, but he led his people out of the Promised Land instead of into it. Brought them to the desert where they now claim not to wander. He said it was worth wondering if the old boy stuck his cane there in that patch of dirt for no other reason than it looked like the most godless land he’d come to yet. A means for proving his people, and his people shriven. Raise something out of nothing. Turn the devil out of his playground and make the wilderness as Eden, her desert as a garden, and comfort all her waste places. He said it was a testament to human will, whatever else. It couldn’t have been a trivial thing to turn this region into productive farmland and the same could be said for the keeping of it now. So much depended on the precarious turn of the seasons. Time was a man couldn’t make it here without the Lord’s help, he said, and that’s the way he’d have it yet.

He rubbed a rough hand across the stubble on his face and it made a rasping sound.

—But now look at us, he said. Don’t you ever forget, boy, that the Lord give us this land as a stewardship, and we can lose it in a blink, same way others did, this whole damn nation.

They picked Elmer up and Jack sat between them. They drove back down the lane past the McKellar house and across the paved road to where the corn grew. They talked of the pond as they unloaded from the truck, how it would be too low to pump from in a week or two, and the river was low too, the flow of the ditches drying up. Jack only listened while the two men discussed whether they would have to harvest the corn sooner than usual or whether they could wait and gamble for rain. They sent him into the tall crop and he walked the narrow trench between rows, from the front end of the field where the stalks were tall and deep green to the end some quarter mile distant where less water reached and the crop was short and thin and yellowing. He examined the ears and shucked some along the way. They didn’t look as bad as he had feared. They had a month left to grow.

Down in the riverbottoms there was a fire going within a ring of stones. The dog came panting along the dirt track, happy with the result of her effort and wagging her tail, and he scratched her behind the ears and told her she was a good dog. Her breath was hot and foul in the air, her tongue stretched out like pink taffy. She tried to lick his shrinking scabs and he pushed her away. Heber peered into a tackle box on the tailgate of his Bronco. They were on Blair’s land, below the farmhouse. In most spots a man could throw a stone across the river. The water flowed between sheer and crumbling dirt walls in places, its water brown from manure pollution and from the shifting sand beneath and the dirt it ate with its ever-expanding width. It ran clean and swift in the steeper land to the north, in Idaho, but slowed and muddied through this plain. Sandbars surfaced and disappeared as the river chose to build and destroy them. It wound an inefficient, tortuous course through the land, kissing the town of Juniper Scrag briefly and passing one clustered settlement after another before it spread out in an alluvial plane like the veins from arm to hand on its way to the dead sea that was the Great Salt Lake. A furtive dumping ground, it contained various refuse. Downriver, the arm of a disc-plow stood, rising stark and black above the water. Farther down the hood of a car could be seen when the river was low. Below him on the sandbank lay a rotting sack of dead puppies, washed unaccountably upon the shore and still tied to another torn sack that had held the stones. The corpses were decomposing in their slicked down muddy fur, their tiny white teeth bright in contrast, their dull skulls shown through in spots and their bodies picked at by scavengers. There was always wondering what else was under these muddy waters.

—Forgot the chairs, said Heber.

—That’s all right, said Jack. It’s good to stand and fish.

They searched the deep spots where the surface curled and eddied and where small whirlpools appeared and disappeared at random, Heber’s hook perhaps fishing also for the ghost of his drowned father. Jack remembered the time they’d sat around an evening fire like this and Heber’s father had placed a beer in the hands of both his sons and offered Jack one as well. When Jack turned him down Heber’s father asked him if he was a man or a pussy and kept on until he had stirred up enough confusion and emotion that Jack felt tears sting his eyes. Heber, eight years older, sat at the fire smiling, and his little brother Henry took forceful drinks from his own outsized can. Jack and Henry had been young, maybe eleven or ten. Heber’s father had been a true son of a bitch at his core, that was the bald truth of it. And even though Jack later began drinking in a way that made refusing a single beer seem silly, he didn’t regret refusing it, because it had been a clear choice. And after Jack’s parents died and Heber’s mother had taken Henry and absconded, leaving Heber alone with his father, and Jack started drinking with Heber, and then began drinking more alone—that surging, muddled time when he hid bottles of whiskey in his closet even though neither Adelaide nor Blair would ever climb the stairs to his room, had sat on his narrow bed every night he was not still sick from drinking the night before, pulling long from the bottle’s bitter mouth or taking shots from a plastic cup until he was reeling, alone, once or twice waking in cold urine to having pissed the bed blindly—that had been a choice, and it had been his, not because some bigmouth in a red checked flannel jacket, mayor of this puny town, said it was time, and he had made the choice on his own timetable. No one but Heber seemed sorry when the elder Rafuse was found in the river, not far from this spot, not a stone’s throw, but it had worked a dark spell over the town and transfixed them all for some time. A ragged and frayed man he had been, unable to exist in his own skin. Heber put it that he couldn’t manage the flame and it had spread forth and burned him up. He was always talking about that flame like he was always saying there were other women. Jack had seen Heber’s father slap him once, soon after they’d been left. The man had slapped him, openhanded, like a woman would. And somehow that, the sound of it, was worse than if he would have struck him outright with a closed fist. Sometime after that Heber had set fire to the old paintless barn behind the Rafuse house. It was said that he would be shipped off, but there wasn’t enough money. Jack had not witnessed that blaze, but it must have been something to see the barn burn. He had always wanted to see a barn burn.

Heber’s pole dipped and his taut line swam in the water. He watched its movement carefully, his cigarette spent and forgotten, his eyes probing the river, sounding its depths and contents. He reeled in, let off, reeled, tested the weight of his catch, and finally the dirty snout of a carp broke the water. He reached out and grabbed the line, dropped his pole, and used both hands to haul the fish to shore where it flopped heavily in the grass. Then he wet his hands in the river and returned to the fish and spoke to it softly. He grunted as he pushed the hook, reversing it out of the flesh with an audible tear that echoed in the fish’s open mouth. It was nearly two feet long and its yellow brown scales writhed and shone in the late sun. Its gills worked slowly. He walked to the edge of the river and tossed it in like a stone, then he dropped down to the sandy shore and bent over the moving water.

—This damned river, he was saying. It don’t always make sense where it’s going but it always gets to the right place, ain’t it?

Jack lay in the grass, staring up at the deep sky, the smell of cooking hamburger and onions coming from the fire. Heber came to sit crosslegged, smoking a cigarette thoughtfully, as if it were a new thing, smiling faintly and watching the river like he was contemplating its age and creation. He said, You remember that time Dad brought me, you, and Henry down here to fish? He loved this river. He’d go up and down it in his motorboat, trolling, ruin the engine on the hidden sandbars. It’s good to have a river running through your town. This town wouldn’t be here, would it, without the river.

When Jack didn’t answer, Heber said, I miss drinking with you. I never thought you’d stop like you did. It’s not much fun getting drunk alone. He paused. Are you happy with your life?

—Not everyone wants to be happy, said Jack.

—Not everyone wants to be happy, said Heber. But you strive for it, don’t you? And feel it come close at times? Tell me, are we meant to eat in sorrow all the days of our lives, or do we exist that we might have joy? And is that joy found in righteousness or in sin? Is it a balance between the two? I would that every person did according to his own conscience, sought his own joy, whatever that is to him, so long as it doesn’t harm others or himself. Who is anyone to take my brand of joy away from me, to tell me it is a false joy, when my experience shows otherwise? Some of us don’t want safety and peace, which is born from willful ignorance anyway, or we find a wiser peace in natural courses and from experience refuse to believe that there is no peace to the wicked, such as they are defined. A balance, then, an opposition in all things, a perpetual cycle. Each force needs the other, and each man needs both forces to work upon his life if he is to be satisfied. The ancient Greeks used to have pools of hot and cold water. They’d jump into the hot to open their pores, then into the cold to close them, and do it again and again, but it was the shock of the contrast that was invigorating. God bless the culture of morality. Without it, the primitive instinctual life would become common. It wouldn’t hold the mystery and satisfaction it does. It’s only when we resist it that sin becomes so delicious. But if you believe happiness lies only through some traditional brand of righteousness then you must sacrifice the full enjoyment of what that brand calls sin and in its place experience perpetual guilt at perpetual failure. Is that happiness?

—Only fools and the simpleminded are happy, said Jack. But even a good man does wrong throughout his life. He doesn’t have to seek it out.

—But it’s not enough to be always resisting, said Heber. That’s an imbalance. He must give in once in a while. Let it go. Pick one urge, a good one, and yield. The man who is faithful to one woman despite the allure of another will not allow himself the thrill of falling in love with the other, of taking her as a lover, of having her for a time, of freshening his soul that way. He won’t feel the burden of an unreasonable task leave his shoulders, even for a season, but will toil beneath it for whatever reward he envisions in some life to come. He will not be happy so long as he holds himself to the standards humankind has given him in the name of God. He must redraw those lines once in a while, and he does. He must keep a little vice in his life if he is to be healthy in body and spirit. If he doesn’t find a balance his ability and desire to rejoice and live free will always be impeded by a heavy heart because he knows he’s never truly beaten his own nature, wretched man that he is. God’s path to happiness often stands in its own way. It is a snake eating its own tail.

—If God exists, then he’d know best, said Jack.

—A man can believe in God and still not know what he’s up to, said Heber. Who he is. Read the scriptures. This is a god of a thousand faces, and an intelligent and good man can’t agree with what this god’s done while wearing some of them. We can’t begin to know even ourselves, how can we pretend to know God? I suppose we all face our own times of crisis, but you’re a grown man. A man needs things beyond farm work and loose promises.

—You mean a wife? said Jack.

—I mean a woman. A man needs a woman, or he might go to cows and work unseemly things. How long’s it been since you had a girl around?

—A few months, said Jack.

—It’s been over a year, said Heber.

—What am I supposed to do about that? This place ain’t a capital for eligible women.

—Then search elsewhere. You never go with me to town anymore.

—I got tired of it. There was no substance to it.

—And that’s the cycle, said Heber. You needed a change, sure. But the cycle must continue, like a boy climbing all his father’s trees, swinging back down, and his father’s trees are endless. You want to live a life of no regrets and you’re setting yourself up for a glut of them. You’re missing a large part of what it means to be a young man in this rich world. Nearly all the things I regret are things I never did. Experience teaches me this, against the empty rhetoric that is its fabricated counter. It’s rarely what I’ve done that brings remorse, it’s what I’ve failed to do.

—It depends on how you define regrets, said Jack. One man’s satisfaction is another man’s regret.

—Well said, said Heber. That is well said, damn it.

—What about Geneva?

—If she comes back it’s a temporary remedy. I haven’t met the woman yet who can be the end of everything and I doubt she exists. Monogamy is a compromise on both parts, a paradox acceptable to most. But until I get there I must take what each woman gives as I encounter each and build myself that way, live that way.

—You’ve given up living any commandments but those you’ve wrote yourself, said Jack.

—You’re goddamn right! said Heber, and his body went rigid and stiffened forward and his face suffused with blood. He settled back again in a slouch and smiled and said, You’ve got a good heart, John. A very good heart.

—I used to have a good heart, said Jack.

—This change happens to most men, said Heber. But you’ve evolved is all. Like an animal in a circus, you were taught the tricks. But at some point you lost the show. You kept performing for a crowd that wasn’t there, and though your tricks lost their fine edge and you blundered the steps here and there in an ever loosening ritual, you still retained the basic shape of things. The only thing left for you to do was fall, and that was the natural step to your evolution. After the fall you remake yourself.

Jack said he wasn’t sure what had happened.

Heber said, As a boy you cursed God, and as a man you wait in the lee.

—I don’t know what that means, said Jack, but I like the way it sounds. Write that down, I’ll put it on my gravestone.

Heber said, What happens when a man abandons the religion of his upbringing when he was so close to it, when he asks: Is what I’ve been taught my whole life of God, or is it the contrivance of man? and finds an unfavorable answer? There’s a vacuum to fill, and you have nothing to fill it with. Where do you look for a moral compass? Not society. Only a fool lets the shifting fashions of society teach him how to live. A man must look within himself in order to see beyond himself, and he must look beyond himself in order to see within himself. You’re still holding on to remnants, even if you can’t see them.

—The death of my parents, bad as it was, was not the beginning of my situation now, said Jack. I’ve lost some things and I don’t know where or when I lost them. But I haven’t lost everything.

—A man has nothing to lose but his chains, said Heber. They say peace with God requires strict servitude. But why must we be slaves? God frees his people only to enslave them to himself. One slavemaster is traded for another. Who is this despot we give our devotion to? Are we not the progeny of deity? What end does it serve to receive the greatest gift only to give it right back?

—Belief in religion and belief in God can be two different things, said Jack. It’s hard to say sometimes.

—You’ve still got a good heart, said Heber. You’ve only buried it, let it shrivel a little. Let it expand with new blood and you’ll be reborn. Your entire life could pass this way if you’re not careful. You know what the Lord said about being lukewarm. He will spue thee out of his mouth.

—Am I lukewarm? said Jack.

—Weeds overrun a garden left untended, said Heber. I’ve heard you say you’d like to get back to the way things were before your parents died, and just after. It seems like it was a good place to be, you say. But the past nearly always seems that way. You had a measure of innocence then, but some questions, when asked, cannot be unasked. You have asked those questions. You seem to be encountering the same doubts as your father, those you read penned in his journal after his death, the ones that shook you to the core, the ones that have never left you.

—Don’t worry about that, said Jack. You didn’t read them. I did.

—His wonderings were not uncommon, said Heber, and the answers that used to trip off our tongues are insufficient. We had those answers ready once, but they broke down, as they will for anyone once he gives them serious thought. Sunday school answers cannot abide this weight. This plan, this organization of religion, replete with the confusion of a tradeshow with each huckster calling out his brand of ware, in a world of billions of inhabitants, God’s children all—are we to believe that God’s one true way will be known by so few? That this is the plan of a generous and loving God? Look at the world. Things aren’t going well for God, so why does he stay hidden? If he has the ability to manifest himself, why does he allow the world to remain in confusion? He should show himself from time to time in better ways than vague impressions, reward us for our faith. Show your gospel, Friend, don’t puff at it like a poisoned dandelion and watch its dead seeds scatter.

—Faith, said Jack. There’s something you can think on your whole life and not understand. It’s an abstraction. I guess it has something to do with it, if it’s anything at all. But damned if anyone can say exactly what. They start talking about faith in church and you might as well be listening to a lunatic talk about his pecker.

He stirred the coals, readjusted the dinners. Heber stared at him, his eyes wide and sober, worried, his expression one of utmost gravity and earnestness. Jack burst out laughing. Heber’s visage softened and he smiled, though his eyes remained wide and his voice intense and prophetic.

—There are no answers, he said. The more you probe the more elusive the answers become. The more you know the more you realize you don’t know. We’ll just have to wait till we die to see what the big show was all about, and even then we might not know.

—That ought to be something, said Jack. I’d give my dad’s silver dollar to find out what’s going on over there.

—Look at me, said Heber. Where have I gone? You remember when I used to be good, don’t you? Who knows what happiness is? Who can define it? But I guess I’m comfortable and content, and there’s a legitimate brand of happiness in that. I’m happy right now, in this moment. I have the river, the grass, the hillside throwing good shade. I have good food cooking and a good drink in my callused hand. I look at you and I only want you to be happy, whatever that is to you. You are the most important person to me. Did you know that? Dad’s gone. That bitch of a mother… You’re it, brother. All right. We’ll find new blood for you, and it will change your life.

—Already found it, said Jack. It’s up over that hill there.

—You don’t think I can do that for you? said Heber.

—It’s not too much to ask, is it? said Jack.

—No it’s not, said Heber. We’ll get you there, buddy. We’ll get you there. She’s got the blood you need.

—You going to work some spell that makes a proud city girl fall in love with a stinking dairy farmer? said Jack. I’d owe you. I’d owe anything that made that happen.

—All good things come at some price, said Heber.

—I need something, said Jack. I feel like I’m about to go buckwild. If nothing comes, it’ll be buckwild for me.

—Buckwild’s a good place to go, said Heber. Be the wild man of the woods for a while. I’ve been there a few times myself. You need something. Some expansion, some catalyst for revival.

—Right now I’m just hungry, said Jack. I need food.

Heber regarded him evenly from across the fire, looking wise in his tattered clothing, his beard, his holey shirt and frayed pants, like some river guru in the wilderness, ready to take him down to the river for baptism.

—I am the bread of life, he said.

—You are a blasphemer.

—Let’s partake.

The river moved by. They burned their fingers opening their dinners.

The dry days passed into late August and what little grain they had was harvested by a hired combine and the stalks spewed out in straight rows. Then the baler did its own work behind the tractor, its rolling teeth gathering the rows, the auger and claw carrying the straw to the press chamber where the plunger shook the whole machine with its motion and created a rectangular bale that was bound with two lengths of orange twine and dropped neatly into the field. The hit of the plunger rocked the tractor and swayed him in his seat in a steady rhythm and his eyes were red and worn from the diesel smoke that escaped prematurely from the broken muffler. He thought he would get a spell from either Blair or Elmer, and he thought one would bring him food and water, for he’d been on the tractor since morning and had broken down twice and had repaired the baler both times with tools and bolts found in the baler’s toolbox, but so far no one had come and he now believed no one would. By evening he still baled golden rows on golden stubble and watched his shadow grow longer before him when he moved away from the sun. His vision was filled with the rows shining on the field. He thought he would get most of this field done and quit, but as the long solitary hours grew longer he worked like he needed it and knew he would finish the field. He baled straw in the soft gloaming and was finished when the light was a wash of pale blue in the west. As he drove away pulling the dusty implement he looked back at the clean field and the yellow bales studding it.

Down the darkening lane his lights caught a figure walking ahead and a jolt coursed through his tired body and ebbed away slowly. She swung the empty milk pail as she walked and turned back once to see him approaching. He rolled up next to her and nodded to the wheel well and she climbed up. The night was dry and warm and she was strange on his tractor, a craved apparition appeared to fulfill his longing.

—Coming to steal some milk? he said. I should charge you.

—What will it cost me? she said.

They were close enough that his dusty arm brushed her knee as he ran up the throttle on the tractor, and he rolled the big machine forward. She wore shorts and after setting the milk pail down on top of a piled chain put her feet on the armrest of his seat and scratched at her shins with both hands, providing a good angle of her full thigh. She scratched indulgently, hissing breath between her teeth and grimacing. He looked at her.

—Eczema, she said.

At the barn he led her through the front doors and into the tank room. The last pale light of the day gleamed dully off the silver surface of the big oval tank. He bent at its base to unscrew the drain cap and she stood close.

—Have you done this before? he said.

She shook her head.

—I’ll show you how, so next time you don’t spill milk all over.

He set the cap and its center on the concrete floor with the inside facing up to keep it clean. He tilted the pail under the mouth of the drain and turned the lever a little. White milk gushed out in a twisted stream and made the pail ring. Exhaustion settled over him and he relaxed with a sigh.

—Don’t ever turn it more than this, he said. He looked up the length of her body to her face. This is like a fire hydrant. Much more than this and you’d have a hell of a mess. Knock the pail right out of your hand. Knock you over maybe.

When the frothy head reached the top he closed the lever and set the pail down and screwed the cap back on the drain.

—There you go.

She thanked him and bent for the pail and turned to leave.

—I haven’t seen anybody come get milk in a while, he said. Tom used to.

She looked down at the dented milk can.

—This is the milk you got from your cows this morning?

—Yes, he said, standing. And tonight. But they aren’t my cows.

—Why not?

—I work here. They aren’t mine.

—Well don’t ever sell one for a handful of magic beans, she said. Or maybe you should. She gave a soft laugh, barely smiling, and its oddness was fetching. She was a consistent series of pleasant surprises and he watched her like she was something new and wholly unusual.

—Come in here for a minute, he said.

He moved across the room and opened the door to the milking parlor and waited for her to come through. The barn was dark and cool and blue light fell from high windows that dimmed farther with each minute gone. Their movements echoed. He didn’t bother with the lights.

—Is this where the cows come? she said.

—Twice a day. They never stop coming. Sit up there.

She inspected the milking deck to see if it was clean and jumped up.

—It’s cool in here, she said. Feels good.

He came to her with a small tin box.

—This is a salve medicine we use on the udders when they get dry and cracked, he said. I’ve heard women use it sometimes too, on their fingernails. But it might help your legs. Where does it itch?

She pointed to several areas on both shins, and as he bent and examined them he saw patches of troubled skin, irritated from the assault of her fingernails. Her bare thighs had flattened on the ledge. How tender the skin was where they pressed together he could only guess.

—Stop swinging your legs, he said.

She stopped. Her eyes were like dark teardrops on her face and when he looked up at her he saw in them the reflection of the windows. He wiped the yellow clear balm on each spot and after setting the tin down began to rub it in with his thumbs. His fingers pressed into the limp flesh of her calves. He waited for her to speak, to object, or to say it was enough, but she only watched him with that calm stare that heated his blood so slowly, and her legs shone faintly in the failing light.