Pity the Beast E-Book

Robin McLean

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 486

Beschreibung

'I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.' Alden Jones Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy; Joy Williams; and Charles Portis; Robin McLean's Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory. With detours through time; space; and myth; not to mention into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West; masculinity; good and evil; and the very nature of storytelling onto their heads; with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew—if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.

Leseprobe

Praise for Robin McLean andPity the Beast

“Robin McLean sees the world like no one I’ve ever read before. In Pity the Beast, her exacting eye gives us human behavior in all of its beastliness while simultaneously reminding us that it’s not moral judgment that ugliness calls for, it’s even more careful attention. McLean insists that if we face the worst of ourselves, and if we find some way to articulate what we see, we may emerge battered but filled with a compassion we didn’t know we had, and didn’t know we needed.”

Karen Shepard

“Not since I stood in a Washington, D.C. bookstore back in 1992 to read the first few pages of All the Pretty Horses have I known so quickly and surely that I was in the hands of a writer whose skills and sensibilities soared in a direction both thrilling and foreign … But where Cormac McCarthy uses his gifts to solidify the west we have always known—men on the edge, defining and redefining freedom—Robin McLean turns the tables on him (and us) by putting a woman in charge. Though Pity the Beast is, through and through, a feminist novel, there isn’t a sentence in it that preaches, not a word that calls attention to its political undercurrents. Robin McLean may be a literary newcomer, but in years to come we might be calling her a literary master.”

Richard Wiley

“Here is a novel that sets the species down in its proper plain place: talking animal. Late Bloomer to the Big Window. Robin McLean is unafraid of the grand scale, wary of the luxury of mercy. I read Pity the Beast ravenously, stunned by its savage and glorious turns.”

Noy Holland

“Like any Western worth its salt, Pity the Beast abounds in fiction’s elementals: muck and dirt and dust; flies and fire and shit; spirits both mythical and distilled; and, of course, fucking. McLean is a writer of the hardscrabble sacred and well-perfumed profane, and her grotesques cry out from their place there on the page. Behold, the heiress to Cormac McCarthy—her pen to the old man’s throat, her prose blood-speckled and sun-splattered and all her own.”

Hal Hlavinka, community bookstore, brooklyn

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First published in 2021 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Robin McLean, 2021

All rights reserved. The right of Robin McLean to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505141 eBook ISBN: 9781913505158

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Jane Haxby; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting, text design and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Anna Morrison

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

OnePercheronTwoBearThreePioneersFourDogFiveMuleSixTree

For Cindy, to keep a promise. For Marsh, who stayed behind. For Margaret, always.

Entreat me not to leave you, Or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, And there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, If anything but death parts you and me.

RUTH 1:16–17

‌One

Percheron

Once, here, on this high plain, there were only Horse, Bear, Rhino. No words to put to things, no call to put them. But today? Ginny and Dan in the barn, and words like this: “You fucked me over. You fuckin’ fucked me over.”

Ginny behind the heaving mare said, “Her water’s broke. I broke it.”

“He was fucking her while you were fucking him and thereby fucking me over,” said Dan. “Now that foal’s too big for her.”

She swatted flies. Her hat was filthy from mucking. Her coveralls were unzipped to her waist. One arm hung free folded to the knee, the other was stuffed inside itself. Her flannel shirt was rolled up her elbow. The dust filled the doorway like the bees and flies.

“That foal will turn her inside out,” Dan said. “That foal will bust her.”

“No one knows how things go.”

“How they go, how they go,” he said. “Look at her belly.” He spit and stirred the dirt with his boot. “Behold the suffering of an innocent creature.”

Ginny spat too. “Behold?” she said. And: “I’ve got things to do.”

Out at dawn, Ginny was in the barn as midwife. Dan saw to the cows. Most of the herd already speckled the south field to the east, burned two weeks back and quickly regreened. The cows ate the grass. Dan was a punctual rancher. He’d slapped them through the gate with his stick, one black, one white, then a tricolor bull calf. The calf turned his head and paused at the ongoing ruckus in the barn: a hoof to a stall and a bucket kicked over. “Easy, easy,” Ginny cooed.

The calf ran on to mingle with the herd in the boulders and grass, grazing, shitting, swinging tails. They would cut off his balls in a week. Dan listened to the barn, which was red and peeling, the shed too, the corners a quarter-century off-plumb. When the hoof kicked the stall again, the gutter shook to the loft that yawned black, empty of hay. The cat slipped out of a raccoon’s hole. Morning is the very best time for reproductive suffering. This is well-known.

Seven horses—a little cavvy—swayed likewise, in their own time, out into the corral. The palomino first, the chestnut last behind the cob, the gang in the middle biting on each other’s necks. They bunched at the fence and sniffed new air. The little mare followed, a pony, small-framed to begin with, bought at the cannery auction and never fully past the effects of starvation. She lumbered between the crossties, stepped out past Ginny after the herd. She was a mixed breed, brown, with her big belly swinging. Any fool could see Shaw’s Percheron had got her. What’s monogamy to a horse, after all? A rare discipline in the animal kingdom. For millions of years, grazing on these same fields, the primal inhabitants of the Great Plains spared it not a thought. Fretting over infidelity about as much as Horse, Rhino, Sabertooth concerned themselves with the continental plates pushing patient below the earth. In millennia since, we’ve learned that both the earth and a good fuck can turn around and get you killed if you’re not keeping a close eye. But what’s the earth to a horse, after all?

“How could you do it?” Dan said to the barn wall. “You fucked me over.” Ten years married. Ten years in love before that. A young man still.

“Settle down now,” Ginny was saying, following the mare out into breaking day. “I can’t help you if you kick me.”

Dan caught a fly in his palm. He would tell Ginny about the fly, a private joke. The yard will fill with flies when the sun gets in, easy easy, soon, a few hours, but the Mormora Mountains still cast their long blue shadow and these flies were young, cold, dumb from smoke. The last calves shouldered through the gate. Another black, another white, then the acorn calves, more heifers, not impatient or impolite. Dan slapped their rumps and they romped and kicked across the field to find their mothers. The haze sat on the ground waiting for a breeze. He should forget about the fly.

“We’ll get that foal out of you,” Ginny was saying. “I promise.”

Now the horses. Pacing and pawing. The little mare after. Dan turned the first seven out to the south field, the cob going first this time, the chestnut last again, always last, the Old Man, and Dan closed the gate after them. The mare hung her head over the top rail. She watched the herd break free into morning, trotting then halting, drifting by boulders, tossing heads, flicking tails. The young ones galloped the sidehill to the creek. He ran his hands across the mare’s belly, withers to stifles, which bulged under her great weight. He listened at the enormous bulge.

“Still two heartbeats,” Ginny said.

“I’ll burn Shaw’s house down if this comes out badly.”

“You’re not some caveman.”

The mare wanted out the south gate. Dan offered the north. She acquiesced, bobbed out of the corral, and he followed. “Maybe I am,” he said. “You should hear them in town. For days, nothing else. You and Shaw.” He nodded toward the oak. “You should’ve closed his gate. You’re smart. Should’ve covered your tracks. Protected us.”

The mare headed up the north field, the last field to be burned, just yesterday. The ground still smelled strong, black-stubble char the quarter mile up to the old oak. Dan followed.

“I’m sorry,” Ginny called after him.

“I’d like to be a caveman,” he called back. “I’d like to try it.”

“I’ve said sorry a hundred times.” His back was lean and dry and split in the middle.

“Say it again anyway.”

“I’m sorry I did it.”

He bent, rubbed his knees that were always sore now. “I don’t feel better.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve loved you right, haven’t I?”

“Yes you have.”

“What’s he got?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been good to you, haven’t I?”

“Don’t know why,” she called. “It felt good. I couldn’t stop it.”

He held his head. “You should hear them talk and talk.”

“Forget them. It’s only us.”

“Only us?” His grin was wrong. He turned back uphill after the mare, who was on a beeline. He walked with long fast strides, three miles an hour uphill. He’d clocked it. He liked a straight line as well as any. If he stayed to the line past the oak, he’d jump Shaw’s fence, which ran the knob above Shaw’s house and barn, and keep going up Hinton’s Hill to Barryman’s Quarry, two more hours along the ridge to the base of the Mormoras where the land was too broken up for grazing.

“She’s headed for shade,” he called back. “Come on. I’ll need you.”

They made a parade of three up the quarter mile. An oak was a rarity in the region, the seed no doubt delivered in the excrement of birds. “Hurry the fuck up,” he said, but calmer now, praise be.

“I’m hurrying the fuck up,” she said in a matching tone, but hung back in body and mind near the outer range of his mutterings.

What’s the earth to a horse? A place to place the hoof, a cradle of grass, a prop to rest his nose while ripping grass out by the roots. And the Herd would have had no interest in eons. Seasons maybe, days maybe, the change of the wind certainly, the daylight hours on their pelts. No interest in geysers. In salt licks, maybe. Horse was a watcher, a minder of his own business, with eyes screwed in on the side of his tin-can skull, peripheral observer, yes, but what of those objects right in front of his nose? Expert in grass and wind, in the locations where rodents bored their holes, since such pits will break a forelock with one misstep. And then Horse would be left by his Herd. And then Wolf would come.

“Can’t fucking trust anyone,” Dan was saying, flaring again. “Least of all, it seems, our fucking wives and mothers.”

“I’m no mother. What do mothers have to do with it?”

“Mothers start it.”

He listed the usual local bad examples since the past is ever useful for lecturing.

Twelve million years back, we’re talking, with Horse grazing in the walnut’s shade with his clan, his wives bossing him, giving in to him or not while offspring and rivals stood off on distant hills watching for changes in the Herd and wind, for any mistake. Bear rumbling farther off, waiting for the same thing, digging a root to chew, ever hungry, ever exiled for his fearsome looks, and ever more fearsome keeping his own company. The Herd swished their tails at Bear’s scent, also to express the desire to mate, also to say hello to the morning sun on their withers, also to deter Fly, though Fly is never deterred for long, will survive all catastrophe, since he thrives on debacle and disaster: internal bleeding, contagion, volcanic eruptions. What creature doesn’t seek blood? What creature doesn’t keep flesh on with flesh? Bear eats Foal. Foal blood soaks the soil where the grass will grow deep green and thick. Mare will feast in that very place, grief forgotten when her hunger is satisfied.

“Though Ella’s fine,” he was saying. “As mothers go. To be fucking fair.”

“Fuck yeah,” Ginny said sweetly. “Be fucking fair to fucking Ella who’s fucking the fuck fine,” since she had limits too and could out-cuss Dan eight days a week and sometimes you have to kill fire with fire.

Sabertooth crouched. Rhino and Camel ripped branches for berries that blackened their tongues. Earth dervished on the business of planets. The eruption was merely due. When it came, Horse chewed on, blinked, as the sky thrilled black and tall for a thousand miles. Buzzard spied the tower-cloud coming, tipped her wings and flew fast south across many rivers and fat bodies of land, but wings fatigue and clouds do not. The air was full of tiny shards, microscopic glass, and these snowed down on all. Chickadee fell first, the most fragile webbing in the lungs, then Crane, who had flown straight through the cloud thinking oh, it is only a cloud, fell with his throat full, legs a tangled mound of ash. Rat keeled over from a bird’s nest he’d been raiding, an egg escaping from his paws when he fell, no mother to meet Chick when he hatched, no heat, no worm or regurgitated grub. In the few hours he lived, Chick thought the world was a gray and silent place and he its only inhabitant, his kingdom, all he would ever know, and he ruled it from high in his branch, good and fair to all. To him his life was long and full of interest, but for the chill on his naked bumpy skin and the unexplained pain in his belly, his eyes scanning the sky, his mouth panting open with vague expectation.

“Saul’s a goddamned lucky man,” Dan was saying.

“Hell, yes. Since Ella’s a fucking peach.”

Badger fell from a limb, Dog from a cliff, floated downriver.

For Horse, the pain was exquisite, long and thirsty. The Herd marched slow to the water hole. Mud was cool on their hooves, the only soothing possible. They nuzzled the foals, a small comfort for lives so short. Breathing was hard, got harder, more shards in each inhalation, more blood. Weeks went by. Bones decayed as the Herd swayed and waited, organs swelled and pressed into organs that pressed and overlapped and crushed each other, no other place to go, one side wins, the other subsides. It was one of those rare conjunctions of scale, when nature, for reasons of its own, takes time out from the routine of hatching life to make good and sure that a few beloved offspring have been well and truly annihilated.

“Ella, Ella,” he was saying, so—

Rhino was last to collapse, the biggest lungs, the grandest capillaries. From a distance his belly was a smooth round boulder.

“Why me?” he was saying.

The sun came up anyway. Tomorrows are blind and ruthless. With them came humans, rabbits, sweet grass. Then new, strange humans in wagons. Wives already with child, walking with sticks beside the wheels; tins of meat riding under the canvas. The new folk drank from creeks. They saw painted faces in the bushes, feathers and spearheads, and kept their powder dry. Men circled the wagons with the women and children safe in the middle. They drove off the natives, ate the rabbits, chased bison through reeds for meat and tanning. Dan knew the story of westward struggle like everyone, and as he trudged up to the oak in failure, he tried now to gather strength from it, from success, from the men before who’d sweated through troubles, dug wells with picks and shovels a few seasons on when there was time for “leisure,” since a creek was fine for running water. They made gates for their oxen with split trees, ate their oxen when starved. Wives died left and right. Oxen died. The men married sisters off trains from Baltimore who thought they’d come out to see the new babies.

“Cheer up,” she said. “You can always get yourself some other wife. Pick of the litter.”

Dan doubled over and she passed him by. He took up the rear.

“Life moves in mysterious fucking ways,” he said, or asked.

“No it doesn’t,” Ginny said without turning. “It’s all happened ten million million times before this, ten billion times fifty.”

“Not this exactly.”

“Nothin’ new under the sun.”

“You’re fucking wrong.”

“No I’m not and you know it.”

The old folk planted eastern corn that sometimes grew, scrawny and mealy. Potatoes were best against western birds but the elk and bison liked them. Sluices turned mills till drought. Plows broke against hidden rocks. Blades were ordered from St. Louis. They came in three months. Blades and sisters arriving by train. The men built barns and doors of rough-sawn. It was always sunshine, terrible sun, Indians in every crack and crevice, scheming. Girls made wildflower crowns and waited for eastern boys. In other times, in other places, cheating wives fed volcanoes. Fornication versus copulation is a delicate point anywhere, something to do with pleasure or sin? But these mountains were sedimentary, or lacked calderas. For somewhere to chuck a faithless wife you’d need to go south, the Yellowstone region or farther. But wait, didn’t volcanoes want virgins? Virginia, I do take Virginia, for ovulation, ejaculation, insemination, fertilization. Who decided those words should rhyme?

“What in hell are you on about?” Ginny said. Then, “Quit this muttering and march on up.”

She was pointing at the poor little mare up at the big old oak that didn’t belong here, that shouldn’t have set down roots here, not by rights or nature, and the sight of the mare’s suffering moved Dan to action. He rose and walked but talked on still.

No volcanoes here, maybe, but plenty of carbon and flame, plenty of fire worship. Dawn-risers, field burners, Dan’s people, his valley. They burned their fields from low to high, whole families in long pants and steel-toed boots, up and across, up and across, rubbing their eyes from neighbors’ smoke. The valley was wide and dry. The Mormora Mountains east, black cliffs without foothills, mile-high curtains for keeping out witnesses. Keeping out the sun, too, till long after daybreak.

“Fucking’s the crux,” he said. “Fucking’s the beginning. Fucking’s the end.”

“Amen.”

“I do love saying it.”

“Say it all you need to.”

From the oak, all the valley spooled out. Fields burned across its rises and falls. The inheritors of the plain—just specks from here, skittering at the ends of plumes—carried hoes, rakes, and gas cans from their barns to their lowest fences. Ginny and Dan didn’t need to see it close. Far off was fine. Their neighbors uncoiled the hose, paid it out across hard pack, turned spigots on full. The water sputtered then flowed before the weed burners were lit. Last year’s grass was dry and matted. Burned fast and hot with the smallest puff of breeze. The first hills, each year, are a quarter burned before the sun tops the Saint’s Head. Neighbors wave shovels and rakes across creeks to neighbors who wave shovels and rakes. For a hundred years now they’ve marched up and across the fields herding fires. Up and across toward the knobs of knobby hills. For a hundred more they will stamp the flames with their boots on top, then walk down again and start another, till the valley smolders black. Kids will always jump the fire lines. Parents will forever scold—such tedious work—and hot as hell even in morning. These people will drink from hoses and creeks as smoke rises between hills, mixing with sticky spring shoots and new buds, dung on skin, gritty teeth gritty. Tongues and lips will spit as a plane flies over. The plane is counting fires all over the region, this flight from Elkins to Romeo. The commissioner’s report is due Monday, saying, “Burning two weeks near St. Cecilia, mostly small livestock operations, sheep, cattle, and a few equestrian. Two hundred to two thousand acres is average. It will soon be too hot, dry, and foolish for burning. Heat lightning will soon decide ignition: spike down after midnight, skimming west to east over hills and hills, farms and ranches, forking down from time to time to touch off neglected fields, a barn roof dried for decades, an unfortunate home, then exit, the innocent culprit, twenty thousand feet above the highest ridges, off across the Reservations.”

“Except that no goddamned commissioner talks like that,” she said.

The people wave their hoses at the plane. Water arches in sun, nozzles glint. Always the same: their eyes water. They dab sweaty wrists. The plane dips its wings, a friendly stranger. The lines of fire are pretty and memorable. This is modern aviation. The plane banks toward the Saint’s Head Ridge, aims for the Gunsight.

“Quiet, I’m thinking,” Dan said and shaded his eyes. “How’s about I bash him with a baseball bat.”

“You don’t own a baseball bat.”

“I’ll poison his well.”

“You’ve never been mean.”

“I’m mean now.”

On the hills smoke still skimmed the ground. Only lazy ranchers burned this late in the day. Here was an oak that could still remember the settlers’ wagons. Arms out and tired in the air. The mare fell in its shade like a sack.

“Get her off that root,” Ginny said.

Dan sat on a low branch. “She doesn’t feel that root. That root is nothing.”

“Comfort isn’t nothing.” Ginny tried rocking the mare then sat with her.

“Don’t talk to me about comfort.”

They waited for the foal, nothing else to do. A bell rang down at Shaw’s. The villainous Percheron made an appearance at Shaw’s fence. Ginny’s hand was up inside the mare’s back end.

“Almost crowned.” She wiped her hand on her pants. “Come on, darlin’. Come on out.”

“Grab a leg.”

“Not yet.” The sun went on rising and the morning shadow shrunk. Dan threw rocks at the stud, but his aim was poor. The Percheron only flicked his tail.

“Sure, throw rocks if it makes you feel better.”

“Nothing makes me feel better.”

The Percheron kicked the gate. The new steel clanged, coped and fitted, full welds, new J-bolt hinges, all busted in where a truck had rammed it. HORSES KEEP THIS GATE CLOSED hung on the top rail. The stallion was gray and enormous, eighteen hands, a ton and then some.

“Percherons were bred for war,” Dan said.

“Cut it out. Concentrate.”

She pulled her flannel shirt off to a T-shirt. Her hand went back up the mare.

“The French beat the Arabs. Took their horses back to France. Bred them to free French stock. A thousand years.” The gate clanged.

“Task at hand, Dan.”

The mare arched. The stud’s molars were noisy from thirty paces, chewing last year’s dried-up mats, since Shaw’s people, way back, were from Chicago and they did not burn their fields in Chicago.

“This foal’s residual from war and theft,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

“I could use a hand.”

“Grab a leg and pull.”

“Where’s this blood from?” It was her hand she was talking to.

The head came, then the neck. It was a private time. Dan cut a stick and whipped the air. “A Percheron’s the second-biggest horse. Shires win first, largest on the planet. Clydesdales win third. Clydesdale people bicker. Percherons hold all the records. That’s undisputed.”

“Shut up,” she said. “Get over here.”

The mare pawed the air. Dan fanned the flies from her face. The Percheron grazed and grazed. What are life and death to a horse, after all? Unworthy of comment is what.

The foal fell out, gray and enormous. The mare nuzzled its gray ears folded back, licked the face and spindle legs tucked up to the muzzle, tucked down and still. The foal came to them warm but was getting cold. Dan dragged it downwind by one back hoof. He dropped the foal on the far side of the oak in the sun. The mare gave up sniffing and laid her head on stubble. Her belly rose and fell.

“Better think of getting up,” Ginny said and slid her hand inside the halter, didn’t tug, not yet. Tripped to the fence and sat, her face in her knees, in the meantime. Peeled her coveralls off to jeans, flung the coveralls. A young woman still. The Percheron nibbled her hair from over the fence with his big lips. She shoved his face. The wind was hot. Dan walked down to the barn and returned with a shovel. He dug a hole. Ginny raked the afterbirth in. She pried a stone.

“A stone’s just for show,” he said. “Only slows the coyotes.”

“They won’t bother,” she said. “Plenty of food this time of year.”

He set the stone over the hole. Sat back down on his branch. All this was once a tide of stone, rockslides from the Mormoras. Imagine the tumble. The new piles and gorges. How strange the new mountain must have looked after the slide! The little gorges later filled by wind, leaves, and dust, then covered over with roots and sod until even the tallest rocks were buried to their chins: Here Lies a Stone Big as Your Barn. I Will Crush Your Barn at the Resurrection.

“It’s incurable,” he said.

“Silence is the only cure for the incurable.”

They urged the mare up, to no avail. They watched the cows and horses below, the fires blurring the neighbors’ hills, Milton’s and Johnson’s, Baltazar’s and Cortez’s, the Mestizo cluster, though intermarried now, mixed with Bolts, Blakes, and Native clans who’d lightened up and gone to Congress, come back disgusted. Shaws. A plane with pontoons was bound behind the Saint’s Head, to lakes you couldn’t walk to on the Old Swede’s Trail. Dan thinking grin and bear it, sisters again, weddings. “In storms or raids,” he said, “they pushed the oxen in their own cabin doors, shoveled dung out their tiny windows, dried it, stacked it, burned it in winter for baking.”

“Ah uh,” Ginny said.

“It flavored the skin,” he said. “Washed at quiet pools.”

He looked at his wife, thought of women who’d turned their chins from side to side between mossy rocks, their mirrors drowned in Nebraska rivers behind their swimming oxen. Squares of glass twirling away toward the Mississippi, tumbling south, sharpened by stones, till they slit some poor stomach open at the Gulf of Mexico. He liked the thought. For lip paint, berries. It made the women rosy. Good thing those pioneer men weren’t too choosy.

“She’ll have to stand soon,” Dan said of the mare.

“She’ll stand.”

“Or it’ll be two for the pit instead of one.”

“Give her time to get herself collected.”

They dragged the foal to the cow pit. The foal was light, two hooves each down the slope to the corral, around the barn. The backhoe stood at the edge. They swung the foal like a hammock, one, two, three. It cartwheeled down to join new dead calves, also chicks that had frozen and a fox Dan had shot. The walnut shaded the cow pit. They shoveled in lime.

“We’ll need more lime,” he said.

“I ordered it yesterday.”

“That foal was pretty.” He powdered the foal lightly. “Might’ve won a ribbon.” A butterfly skipped so close they heard its clicking muscles and screws. “So many wouldn’t believe one can,” Dan said.

“Can what?”

“Hear a butterfly.”

A little brown with white trim and hardly worth notice. It flew through a lime cloud. They coughed and covered their faces with sleeves and skin.

“It would be easier if you’d died too,” he said next.

“Well I didn’t.”

“Like a splinter. Like a tapeworm. It’s going to bust out of me.”

“Don’t let it.”

“I might feel better if I hit you. It might relieve me.”

“Do it then,” she said. He balled his fist. “Get it over with.”

He slapped the top of her head, but was too upset to aim right. He picked up the shovel, but she took it from him. She threw it in the cow pit. “Enough already.”

They sat on the edge despite the stink. “Am I a good man? Or not?”

“You’re a good man in a bad mood.”

“I’d like to feel better. How can I accomplish that?”

“How should I know?”

“We have to be careful. We have to think.”

“I agree. We need clear thinking.”

He moved closer. “You should be more affectionate. That’s one thing.”

“I know it.”

“You should put your hands on me. Like you did him.” He wrapped his legs around her legs, his arms around her middle. He sniffed her neck. “For peace again.”

“Soon,” she said. “Give me time.”

The butterfly dropped down to the pit. He rocked her on the edge and she let him.

“A horse has the largest eye of any land mammal.”

“You’ve told me.”

“People think lions, people think elephants. People overflow with mistakes and blunders.”

“I know, I know.” She pried his arms off. But gentle. “Let’s get on back.”

They stood and brushed themselves off. The butterfly roamed the high dirt walls between landings on a rump, then a forehead, then an ear with a tag beginning to rot where it sipped, then a hoof to a lip to a sunny flank to a scrotal sac until the lime burned its pinhead feet. It skipped off to cool them. Elsewhere, the planes landed too, spun down the ends of runways, tied down, refueled. Others dropped into blue lakes and scattered ducks, fishing lines off pontoons, rolled cuffs, sunburnt knees, toes swinging cool as bait.

They walked together from the cow pit, stiffly, arm in arm.

Word travels fast over hills and creeks. Saul and Ella were first to arrive in a plume of dust.

“Sister to the rescue,” said Dan.

Their truck nosed in at the rusted saw blade on the barn. Ginny didn’t care to see them walk up the slope with a cooler between them. They also brought a hacksaw, a bag of chips, rum and Coke in an old milk bottle. Saul screwed the top off, drank, passed it.

“Poor gal,” Saul said. Leaned the hacksaw against the oak. Ella passed the chips. The Percheron’s harem of grays had joined him at the fence. They grazed and watched the show.

“Son of a bitch,” Saul said. “Gigantic stud.”

Ginny finished the bottle to backwash. The mare seemed to be sleeping with eyes open.

“Still,” Saul said. “Screwing is part of nature. Foals, etc.”

“True fact,” Dan said. “We all want to screw.”

Ginny flung the bottle.

“Just look at the size of him,” Ella said. “Imagine that thing getting on you.”

“Why are you here?” Ginny said.

“How ’bout a truce,” Dan said. “Just today.”

“We don’t need help,” Ginny said.

“I asked them over,” said Dan.

“It’s private.”

“They’re offering. They’re family.”

“Grannie never turned down help,” Ella said.

“Grannie’s dead,” Ginny said. “Seems like a while now.”

Saul popped a top with his ring. Beer foamed over his hand. He licked his fingers.

“A cock like that,” Ella said. “Split any mare wide open.”

“Seems you’ve put some real thought into it,” said Ginny.

Saul got a kick out of that, but a look from Ella stopped his laugh. “In dogs, this would never have happened,” he said. “The bitch size fixes the size of the pups. A teacup bitch bred to a Saint Bernard stud will produce a teacup Saint Bernard. No trouble with the pelvis.”

“We need to get her up,” Dan said.

“A horse who won’t stand dies quick,” Ella said.

“In a few hours, even,” Saul said.

“She’ll get up,” said Ginny.

“Why don’t you go find Shaw?” said Ella. “Why don’t you run along?”

“Will you shut your everlasting trap?” Ginny said.

“We’re here for the horse,” Ella said.

“What we need is a plan, not catfights,” Saul said. “This is red-light stuff.”

“Let’s get her up,” Ginny said. “Then you two can get on home.”

Now it was time to tug on the halter, push her rump, rub her shoulder, speak into her ears. Dan tapped her with his whip, but gentle, then quit. The sun baked the blackened ground. The men unbuttoned and unpeeled to skin. The women rolled their jeans up. The roofs in town were pebbles. The stadium was a horseshoe. Crowd noise came from time to time.

“I wonder who’s winning,” Ella said.

“Sedalia will win,” Saul said. “Our ropers are better, but our riders are worse.”

“Who cares about roping?” Dan said. “Get her legs under her.”

“Come on, girl,” Ginny said. “Get on up.”

They urged, tugged, rocked her. “Son of a bitch,” Saul said.

“Lift her, goddamn it,” said Ella.

Saul ran down to make calls. The mare lay still. Another truck arrived in dust and parked at the barn under the saw blade. New arrivals climbed the hill with bottles in their free hands.

“I say it’s colic,” said one. He showed his pistol. “For the worst-case scenario.”

He set it in the crotch of the tree while Dan opened more beers with his ring, same as Saul. They talked cows and caliber for starters, then quick about the lawsuit on the Reservation, land claims the Indians were making, ridiculous, then sharpening hand tools—tips and turmoil over hoof clippers—an upcoming cannery auction, woodlots and a box truck with Canadian tags at a car lot in Romeo, looked like a find, kids off to college and empty nests, Shaw leaving town. Ginny sat by the mare and picked at her boot heels.

“How’d your place burn?” Saul asked.

“Fast and hot, thank God.” They chewed ice. “Colic for sure.”

“This ain’t colic,” said the third man, who borrowed a knife to slice buns that had just arrived.

“I’ve seen this before,” Saul said. “The foal presses the nerve during hard labor. Nerve goes numb.”

“Happens in all mammals,” said the neighbor with the pocketknife.

“That’s not it,” said the neighbor with the pistol.

“Get the weight off the nerve,” Saul said. “Stand her up and pressure’s off it.”

“Her intestines are inflamed,” said the pistol.

“They’re tangled with the female organs,” said pocketknife.

“She’s tired,” Ginny said. “That’s all.”

“Can’t be tired if she wants to live,” Ella said. “If she’s weak she’s dead.”

“Broken record,” Ginny said.

“If we could jack her up somehow,” Saul said.

“Hoist her,” Dan said.

“This horse is grieving,” said pocketknife.

“Horses don’t grieve,” said a man with a cold.

“Of course they grieve,” Saul said.

Now here was a neighbor on a white horse carrying a metal detector. The Percheron led his mares away.

“Shaw left yesterday,” the latest guy said.

“She’s thinking of going after him,” Ella said.

“Screw you again and again,” Ginny said.

“She’s not going,” said Dan. “She’s staying.”

“If she doesn’t,” said metal detector, “St. Cecilia is ruined forever for potlucks and bake sales. How will we stand it?”

Ella spun on the man. “Everything’s a joke to you.”

“Let’s get this mare standing,” Ginny said.

“We weren’t talking to you,” Ella said.

“But here I am,” said Ginny, face-to-face with her sister.

“Should’ve gone with him. She deserves more than a slap.”

“Too many years of you,” Ginny said. “Dull, Ella, dull.”

“Dull’s fine. I’ve earned dull. Proud of dull. Dull’s honest. If what you are’s exciting, probably best go be exciting somewhere else.”

“Hold up,” Saul said. “That’s Dan’s decision to make.”

“No one wants you here anymore,” Ella said. “Go catch Shaw. Make a love nest in Pollings or Cheyenne.”

“Hold up,” Dan said. “I haven’t decided.”

“My ranch,” Ginny said. “Get off.”

“Your ranch,” Ella said. She shouldered past Ginny, not a shove exactly, then circled back to the mare, her sister shaking and red.

“That’s what I mean,” Saul said. “That right there.”

The men sipped and smiled. The mare nosed an empty cup.

“This girl needs a bucketful pronto!” Saul called. Kids sprinted down to the well.

“Get on home,” Ginny said, collecting herself. “Me and Dan can handle this.”

But Dan kicked soot. “I think we need ’em.”

“Come on,” Saul said. “Relax. It’s good we’re here.”

Soon both Ella and Ginny were down on their knees with the still mare. Ginny’s face was filthy and dark while the sun lit Ella’s through the leaves in patches. It was a sweet face about to turn old. Lines were only now forming. Saul sucked a piece of straw. They tied ropes around the mare. The flies circled. More neighbors were arriving from across the creek and calling out, “Hey!” They tottered over via boulders, drew up bigger across the sidehill. Ella doled out cups.

“Anyone bring a pistol?” one new arrival said after looking the mare over.

They carried two beams for levers from the barn, dropped them at the mare.

“A Percheron must be black or gray,” Saul was saying, “to hold papers in America. Strong and compliant despite his size. He was bred for plows and wagons.”

“I never knew the name,” said a neighbor just arrived by bike.

“Long before the motorized truck or tractor,” Saul said, “the Percheron and its ilk powered our farms and nation.”

“Good days,” said pocketknife.

They sat on the beams. They cooled their mouths with Fireball. They worked the first beam under the mare’s hind end to lift her. The mare did not kick or care.

“Careful,” Dan said. “She’s tender.”

“This is foolish,” said bike.

Then the second beam. “On three,” Dan said. They levered her. The mare rose a few inches, tumbled, and a water bucket was knocked and spilled all over.

“Failure,” Saul said. “First try.”

“I have better things to do,” said metal detector. He untied his horse and led him away, left the metal detector with a girl who begged, told her to drop it by when done with it. They rolled the beams aside, sat and drank some more. Watched the world, talked of dead cows, lime, and butterflies. The Indian School running out of money, which doesn’t grow on trees, and how a good life comes from hard work, of course, of course. Cheaters and beggars never prosper. They drew schemes in the dirt with sticks, levers, and lifts, erased with hands and heels. “That’s a good design,” Saul said. They catnapped. “Five minutes will do me.” Three went to town for spicy mustard, for more beer, gin. More trucks pulled in. “How long does it take for a horse to die?”

“It all depends,” Saul said, mostly awake.

Smoke rose high. The haze leveled near Saint’s Head Ridge. Dan checked the pulse at the mare’s back leg. Ginny yelled that she was going for more water. The Percheron nibbled Dan’s hat and he pushed the joker’s snout away. He watched Ginny downhill with bucket swinging. On the old ranch, running water was a girl sprinting with a bucket.

“Two girls,” Ella insisted.

She dawdled with tadpoles. Knew every flower. The cabin was made log by log, a two-man saw over piles of sawdust. Draw the knife to strip the bark, watch your fingers, boy. Roll them, scribe them, thump them into place. Mortise and tendon to joists and purlins, block and tackle, tripod and arm. A chisel makes the cleanest notch. Crank the drill for holes, then pound the spikes in. An earthquake won’t sunder these corners though the house may sway. Cut the sod. Size it. Tin will come later. Indians watch the house from the hill. They climb that young oak, crouch in the limbs and crotches. Steal a dog, a horse, a girl. What’s one white man to do? But from Indians there were admirable tricks to learn. They raised their drinks. If the girls were bad enough, for example, if one was handy with a needle, if stones were sewn in a hem just right, if the pond was deep.

“The trouble with women is they have no restraint,” Dan said from the fence post. Ginny stood far below, a girl again with the bucket swinging from a fine strong arm.

“She’s still pretty,” Saul said, and the other men nodded.

Ella looked down at her sister. Refilled the cups without comment.

They watched Ginny to the corral gate, Ginny’s boots through the powder, mixing her tracks with horse tracks and every other creature’s. Sun was high now. She sopped her brow with her sleeve.

“Men always liked her,” Dan said.

“I’d cut off his balls, drop them in quicksand,” said the neighbor with the pistol.

“Waiting in the weeds like that,” said the neighbor with the pocketknife.

“Liars and cheaters prevail,” said a portly neighbor arrived on a dun gelding with a maul over his shoulder. “Survival of the fittest.”

“That’s depressing,” Saul said.

“But true,” said Ella.

“She’s a big girl,” said pistol, fiddling with the hacksaw. Saul said leave it be.

They were happy and peaceful as the breeze pushed smoke around the sidehills.

“She says she’ll never do it again,” Dan said.

“Cheaters don’t stop,” said pistol. “Once they’ve tasted it.”

The mare rocked as if to stand, huffed and kicked. Ginny at the wellhead, to the pump, up and down, up and down.

“Shaw liked that part.”

Dan kicked a tire driven up and parked for tailgate seating.

The gush from the well splattered her boots, one bare ankle then two. The bucket tipped. She bent to drink then left wet footprints over to her grandmother’s porch. Three stone steps. Her hand shielded her eyes. Her boots sat beside her.

“Almost seems like she can hear us talking,” Saul said.

“Too far,” Ella said.

Dan lay on the ground, his hands behind his head, the fingers interlocked.

“Anyway,” said the maul. “There’s no such thing as quicksand. Quicksand’s a lie.”

“’Course there’s quicksand,” said pocketknife.

“Bad news is we’re nearly out of ice,” Ella said.

“That tree might be the trick,” said pistol.

They all looked up into the oak, circled it, pointed up into its branches.

“I’ll run down,” Saul said. “Find a pulley and rope.”

When the rodeo team arrived, they were still in uniform, pale blue with navy piping, bolos ripped loose and white hats with blue. Saul set them to untangling rope. They found a good tarp in the barn for a sling. They folded it and worked it under the mare’s belly.

“Be careful,” Ginny said, still steaming, but bending to the task. “She’s had a day.”

They followed Saul’s directions: sewed the rope through grommets along her spine, snugged the rope to the spine and made loops on each end. Threw the rope to a scrawny rodeo kid on the first good limb. His hat was too big for him. He caught the rope and dropped it back down, then dropped down himself to take his place along the line.

“Listen up,” Dan said. “Saul has some words.”

“Dear Friends,” Saul said, stepping forward. “Bow your heads.” And they did. “Almighty God, Great Spirit, Universe, Whoever You are. Please do bless us and this fine ranch since we all need help sometimes. Lord, Your Honor, Jehovah: help us do right for this beast of the field, this poor angel, in her day of grief and trouble and throughout this frightful life. Amen.”

“Amen.”

“Are we ready?” Dan called.

They heaved like sailors. The rope went taut. The loops, the grommets lifted over the little mare’s spine, the mare lifted. Her head swung. Dirt fell away. She was heavy. The mare whinnied and bucked as they dug in with boots and hips, pulled the rope fist after fist. The rope squeaked on bark. The branch strained and sagged. “Almost got her!” Her hooves lifted off the grass. “A few more inches.” When she dangled well, the line strained and the people held. They leaned on the rope and waited for instructions.

“Ease her back down to her feet,” said Saul. “See if she’ll put weight on them.”

“I can’t hold,” someone said and dropped off the rope.

“Careful!” The mare dangled to the tips of her hooves. “Is she standing?”

When her knees buckled, her hooves tucked under.

“Pull back! She can’t stand!”

They dug their heels in, leaned.

“Haul back!” The branch strained. Legs pressed. Their boots tore into the dirt.

“Haul back!” Puffing, sweating. The rope bit into their palms and forearms. The rope moaned. The mare moaned. Some little kid started crying.

“How’s crying going to help her?”

They pulled and got her up again then tied the rope off to the oak’s trunk.

“Let her dangle,” Saul said. “Get circulation to the legs.”

Some went for gloves. Some massaged her forelock and knobby knees. The breeze turned the mare in a circle too slow to see. The branch bounced. Her head hung as if she might graze. The people walked to the creek to dip their hands. They drank water on their knees and beer on boulders. The kids found the pistol in the crotch and set empties on fence posts for shooting practice. The bottles sprayed Shaw’s grass. When the owner confiscated the pistol, the kids threw rocks. They talked of babies and croup and climbing roses and a star bronc rider from Sedalia who ran off to join the army. Some said he was queer, but that was impossible, a joke. The Percheron had retreated to a clump of trees. Dan massaged the mare’s stifles and said sweet things. Ginny brushed her with a curry comb from the tack room. They consulted a horse book. The tall girls braided her mane and counted boys. When Dan offered Ginny a paper cup, she said, “This isn’t a party,” and slapped it. The tall girls heard the whole thing, told the tall boys and boys told others, so the slap of the cup passed here and there, until everyone later claimed to have witnessed it. Another plane. They fixed the rock ring for a fire later. Ella said she’d wanted to be a teacher, Saul a pilot of a spaceship.

“Astronaut, you mean.”

“No sir, a pilot.”

Ella said it reminded her of a story: once there was a berry picker who strayed from the clearing, ended with a bear for a husband. She’d been warned not to wander far.

“She didn’t listen?” the kids said.

“It wasn’t her nature to listen.” Ella winked.

“Screw you,” Ginny said and kicked dirt at her sister. The kids were fascinated.

Ella brushed off her boots. “She didn’t care for compliance, this picker,” she said. “No fun.”

She winked again, which was when Ginny stepped in and slapped her, which was when capillaries busted in Ella’s nose. It gushed red and she hunched, then Saul got Ginny around the middle, started in at hauling her off, then Dan intervened. “I got this.” He peeled Saul’s arms off and dragged his wife to calm her at the tree. She didn’t calm, but Ella did. Saul handed her a hanky. She dabbed. The white cotton was soon dotted red.

“Gather in,” Ella said. “I’m not finished telling it.”

The same crybaby howled at her description of the berry picker’s wedding to the bear, the animals on the guest list, the buffet line, who sat with who, the minister a turtle in a bow tie, ha ha ha.

“You Samaritans can shove off anytime,” Ginny said, losing steam with each repetition. Now the words were dull and no one heard them. Some strolled down to the cow pit. They came back up with egg salad in a white bowl with blue flowers. Afternoon lazed on. From time to time they lowered the mare to try her.

“Can’t quite yet,” Saul said. “Pull her back again.” He conferred with Dan.

Some went away to check their cows. Dust followed trucks down the road.

“I admire you,” said a pretty widow to Dan, the horse book in her lap. She sat on a blanket with her three kids, her husband dead from melanoma. “Sticking with things.”

He stared at her a long time. He turned a page, leaning across.

“Good people keep trying,” he said, and blushed. “They move on.”

Friends stopped by who had moved away, just in town for a 4-H dinner or for a mother who was dead, trucks loaded with rocking chairs. Stopped by to say hi. Heard what happened to him. They whispered, Ginny in the distance, slapped his back.

“I once had a horse that loved a tuna sandwich,” said an old man.

“Horses are vegetarians,” said the pretty widow.

Dan smiled at the woman. She smiled back. She held herself beautifully in grief.

“I scoff at your book,” said the old man.

The pretty widow closed it, and the old man went home with his cane. He died a week later. He had a good life, they would say, then forget him, forgot him now, talked of sweet grass and killing gophers with dynamite as the widow read captions to Dan: “A Percheron must have command and gravity, attractiveness and elegance. Ideal for modern times. Born of desert and war, then enslaved. Oh, gray chargers. Oh proud African, noble residue of calamity!”

“What’s residue?” the pretty widow’s kids asked. “What’s calamity?”

Ginny stalked over with a little spit on her lip that took too much time to wipe away, saying it was “something big and terrible,” and the widow’s pretty kids asked Dan if he would play sheriff with them. They pointed at the barn, the loft, the weather vane with the cock. He left the pretty widow, romping downhill with the gang; “Tallest of the posse,” she laughed. He hunted after the seven-toed cat with them. A red dog chased them, all in fun. Saul didn’t mind him going. The pretty widow continued reading horse captions to the crowd, turning the pages with a grin that dimmed only when Ginny paced fuming into her periphery, saying, “it’s a show, it’s a big damn show,” from Lipizzaners and Morgans, nearly to the Zweibrücker, every caption in the book, when the branch snapped.

Trucks drove up the hill with lumber for Plan B. The chainsaw sliced the broken branch. They bucked it as the sun dropped west and made a pile. The women shaded the mare with a blanket over sticks planted around her as a lean-to. The men worked on tailgates. Their forearms were thick and sure and drove the nails in one swing. Dan waved goodbye to the widow.

“There’s always a solution,” Saul said, watching her go.

He and Dan clinked bottles. They sang “Erie Canal” and “Yellow Ribbon.” Sawdust stuck to skin. Hotdogs burned. The fire cooled when they dug up, hauled over, and flung on Shaw’s old punky fence posts from the weeds along the new steel ones. Shaw wouldn’t miss them. Who cared if he did? Saul tallied lumber. Dan drew lines for the next design. Ginny sat apart with the mare. Ella wore a crown of tiny flowers her daughter had made, her eldest, who taught her two younger siblings how. They’d all just arrived with Saul’s dippy cousin. The men worked fast. The sun was drooping.

“What you need is a box of snakes,” said the scrawny rodeo kid. “Drop it in his tack room.”

“The potato barn,” said a neighbor with a ratchet. “That’s where Dan caught ’em. Shaw and Ginny.”

“Shaw doesn’t have a potato barn,” said the neighbor with a sledgehammer.

They banged hard and cut. Wood chips flew.

“We’ll double up the legs and cross braces,” Dan said.

“This rig will hold three of her,” Saul said to the worried kids.

“We’ll need bigger bolts,” said ratchet.

Dan headed to the shed. They watched him go.

“If she were my wife,” said chainsaw, “I’d poison his feed.”

“Why punish the animals?” Saul said.

“I’d run him though with a pike,” said the rodeo kid.

“Tie him to a chair,” said pistol. “Drop him in the Gunsight.”

“And pollute the Gunsight?” said the rodeo kid. “No thank you, sir.”

“What’s a pike?” Saul said, winking, passing a bottle of Fireball.

“God, you’re ignorant,” said ratchet.

“I’d say it’s a private matter,” said the neighbor with the maul in his coveralls. The dun had huge haunches to hold his weight. “Stay out of it.”

“Look here, a diplomat,” said the rodeo kid, skinny, a fast talker.

“This here’s the modern world,” said the maul.

Kids offered green apples in quarters but the mare refused. Ginny said, “Git.”

“Bad apples run in families,” Ella said. “In ours it runs in the dark-haired line.” She was tipsy. She passed cornbread muffins and told it: “Way back in sod-roof times, an Indian Spy occasionally came to this farm. Had his way with the mistress. Grannie told me all about it.”

“Never heard of no Indian Spy,” Saul said.

“Why would you?”

“Indian blood,” said pistol of Ginny, out of earshot. “Look at those features.”

“His orders came from the chief,” Ella said. “Kill the man or worse.”

“Steal the wife,” said a neighbor with an ax.

“This Indian tied his horse in the cottonwoods by the creek so the dog didn’t bark. He crouched behind rock after rock and skulked in to survey and plan, silent as shadow, his face painted up invisible. When the dog barked, he dodged between the wagon and outhouse, slipped around to the ox tied in a hole in the hill above that creek. They had no barn yet.”

“Where’s that cave?” said the rodeo kid.

“Rockslide,” Ella said. “Gone now.”

Saul shook his head. The Mormora cliffs were purple. Dan arrived with cotter pins and sat on the tailgate to listen.

“Her man off toiling in the fields,” Ella said. “This Indian circumnavigates the woodpile, spying on the porch every minute. This wife, you see, was nearly always alone.”

Dan sat on the tailgate.

“What she look like?” said the rodeo kid.

“Fine slim hands, an apron tight around her waist. She was shapely and clever with eyes in the back of her head. She could feel the Indian before she saw him. ‘I have knives aplenty!’ she called in her native tongue. ‘Good for slicing the throats of pigs and cows, and savages such as you!’” Everyone laughed. “She had Ginny’s lines about the mouth. I’ve seen the pictures.”

“I’ve never seen pictures from that far back,” Saul said.

“A handsome Indian?” said a neighbor with a chisel.

“I’m guessing angled and tall,” said the neighbor using Saul’s hacksaw. “Half-clothed and pretty. How problems start. Beauty.”

“She was lonely,” Ella said. “He was handsome enough. Striking.”

“Where’d she screw the Indian Spy?” asked the rodeo kid.

“The cave with the oxen, the cabin floor,” she said.

“The tack room,” said the rodeo kid.

“Cuckold is the word they used then,” she said.

“An outdated term,” said pistol.

“Hand me the block and tackle,” said the maul. “We’re losing light.”

The sun dropped west over the Judas Range. They bolted the legs of their latest contraption, pried and shimmed and drank until they stumbled. They talked death: arsenic vs. heart attack. Murder for revenge vs. conviction by jury. Hanging vs. electric chair vs. lethal injection, the latest thing so sure not to last. Bullets vs. knives and how many paces for each? Old-fashioned was best. Your asps vs. your cobras. Poison vs. scalping vs. smallpox vs. how best to drown a man in the Gunsight. “Rocks tied to boots,” Dan said. “A deep lake is efficacious,” and they agreed.

“Effi-what?”

They agreed Dan was just showing off.

“Horny bastard! Horny bastard!” kids screamed at the Percheron, then forgot him.

“Was she ever even pretty?” said a girl with a braid.

“Who cares?” said the boy touching her thighs. “I say we hunt for cows.”

It was easy. They lay in the south field happy and full. The day was nearly evening, and they counted clouds, gauging altitude, which were clouds and which were smoke, guessing depth of snowpack on the peaks: Mount McBolding, Big Stamp, Why Not Valley.

“What a life we have!” they called. “What a place!”

“To think we might have been born in some stinkin’ city!”

They were filthy with soot and sweat but might have kissed each other with joy. Their design was complete and standing—a giant wooden sawhorse twenty feet tall with legs double-braced at the knees and a sawed-off king post for the backbone. The block and tackle dropped from the belly. The rope swayed. They stood between the legs of the now enormous contraption.

“Let’s rig her,” Dan said.

They walked it leg by leg over the mare. The rope dropped to her sling.

“Gather in,” Saul said, swaying from heat, drink, worry. “Bow your heads to any god we agree to.” They did. “Dear Friends, may the Deities protect us, bless us—this beast—over whom He gave us dominion—responsibility—us small and humble—all of us—the ignorant but—this land that humbles us—sorrowful life—” He forgot the rest of it. “Amen.”

They caught hold of the rope. They heaved like sailors. The first chill of the evening, they didn’t feel it. The mare was lighter from the block and tackle. Only five men were needed, Dan, Saul, and three others. The rope went taut. The grommets lifted.

“Whoa!”

They tied the rope off at the oak against the orange-pink sky that Dan claimed was the purest kind of falsehood, a mere optical illusion conjured by particulate drift from fires billowing a hundred miles west, while Saul called bull crap on him. Weren’t all sunsets illusion, after all? Light filtered through dust from somewhere? Sometime?

“Why the hell nitpick, friend?”

Others joined the debate around the Contraption’s high legs that drivers down on the highway saw rise on the hill as a huge, flat-backed, headless creature, withers in the branches of a lone tree.

“The prettiest sunset in all the world!” people called.

“Thank God for pink, orange, and red!”

“Thank God for good neighbors and family!”

“For this magnificent land!”

“For this life for just one hour!”

“She looks strange,” said the girl with the metal detector.

“Like a puppet,” said a bronc rider sitting close to her.

Dan waved Ginny over from her examination of the contraption’s leg. He held her wrist up. “We’ve really done something here today! Me and Ginny thank you!”

They didn’t look at Ginny. “You’d do it for us!”

Evening. The faintest line of pink. At the oak on the hill, kids rubbed their eyes, needed baths.

“Will she live? Can we stay?”

Engines turned over. A few headlights lit the house backing out. Some sat unattended and lit the mare. Her legs made tall shadows that tangled up the slope to Shaw’s fence and across it. They sat by the fire, flung in logs from the bucked-up pile. Their eyes were red, their faces aged to eighty.