SPRING

In a tuck of cottonwoods along a feeder canal stood a sandstone milking barn surrounded by corrals grayed from weather. Bales from long-ago harvests, lined with wire panels, separated the pens from the hay field. There was a small yard with dandelions coming through like bright buttons. At the center of the grass, cement steps led up to a small square stucco house.

Mildred Trafton, widowed, stood at the kitchen sink and peeled carrots. Her stare carried out the window and caught on the seedpods wafting down from the trees. Like big wet flakes of snow…or shreds of quilt batting. Either or…or both. What was it that Sheldon always said? A guy can’t be worth a dang as long as he’s got two choices.

Mildred figured she’d made them wait long enough. She rinsed the carrots and put them in a bowl of water, washed her hands, dried them on her apron, and turned to the kitchen table where Frank Fisher sat with his son Mike.

“How is the arthritis?” Frank asked.

“No worse, no better.” Mildred pulled out the empty chair with her gnarled hands, curved and calloused from many years at the teat.

“How are your girls?”

“Like they all but forget the road home.”

“Give them time. They’ll come around. They still need their good mother.”

“Not according to them.” Mildred watched Frank chew on her words.

“Well,” Frank folded his hands above the table, “let me again express my gratitude for the years I’ve spent renting this property. I still remember the day that Sheldon offered it.”

“Me as well.”

“He was a good man. I miss him. Everyone does.”

“Lordy, Lordy. I’ve seen plenty of death.”

Frank reached a hand on top of Mildred’s fist and gave it a squeeze.

“Alone, it’s a hard row to hoe.” Mildred dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. “This was never a business meant for one.”

“Rest assured that I’ll help out however long you need me,” Frank said. “But from your message I get the feeling it’s time to move in a new direction.”

“So it is.”

“I’ve brought a check to settle any outstanding balances.”

“No, it’s not that.” Mildred’s gaze drifted to the wall. She couldn’t look Frank in the eye. As if that admitted the failure she already felt. “I’m ready to sell.”

“Oh.”

What could she tell the bishop? That her daughters, once her very miniatures, her four sweethearted girls, were hounding her to move to town? That her son-in-law made a special trip out and, rather than bringing Mildred her grandchildren, unrolled the blueprint of a housing development overlaid on her farm? That her casseroles kept spoiling because she couldn’t eat so much food on her own?

“What are you considering, Mildred?”

“That goat married to my oldest thinks that this place, what with the canal up front and the river on the backside, could be zoned for houses.”

Frank stalled before speaking. “I’m no golf course designer, Mildred. I’m not a wildcat. I’m a farmer, plain and simple, with some head of cattle. I don’t have any use for the dairy. The pens maybe, but not the barn. I could grow alfalfa if the price is right.”

“What about the house?”

“It might be difficult to find a renter clear out here.”

Mildred shifted and crossed her legs and folded her arms across her stomach.

“I have to justify the bottom line to Annie. She’s in charge of the books. I’m sure you can understand that. You and Sheldon worked in a similar arrangement for years.”

“We bought this ground for a hundred twenty five dollars an acre. Only the front parcel was clear. Now we have two hundred growing acres, corrals, a milk barn, a stack yard, a garden plot, and a house. We done it all ourselves. So what would you give for it, all told?”

Frank took a day calendar and pencil from his front pocket and worked figures on the inside of the back cover.

“Three-hundred thousand dollars.”

Mildred did the math in her head. Tithing and taxes out first, then divided by four. That left each of the girls fifty grand, give or take. At seventy-four, Mildred wouldn’t need much more than the leftovers to get by. But then there was the resthome to think about…

“That’s with the land at twelve-hundred per acre,” Frank said, “the house and outbuildings rounded up to sixty-thousand.”

“I won’t take less than three-hundred and fifty thousand.”

Frank erased and scribbled some more.

“That I can’t do. But thirteen-hundred an acre gives you another twenty-thousand. Or we could cropshare and get you cash that way.”

“No. I want out. I’m done with all this.”

“Mildred, you don’t have to decide today. I plan to farm until I die. I’ve got Mikey, too, done with school. We’ll be here a long time.”

“If you can’t meet that price, Bishop, I understand. I’ll find someone who will. Not that I want to, mind you, but that I got to.”

Frank leaned back and set his hands in his lap. He breathed in deeply and sighed.

“What’s fair is fair,” Frank said. “I can’t pass it up. I’ll go three five and four zeros.”

Mildred went to her bedroom to get a yellow legal tablet from the dresser. A picture on the wall stopped her. Her and Sheldon on their Massey Ferguson tractor, the only one they’d ever bought new. Sheldon at the wheel; Mildred against him with her feet hanging over the well of the big back tire. Now, that tractor was parked under the cottonwoods, the paint worn off and rust circles cankering the metal panels.

“What could I done?” Mildred asked the photo. “We got a mess of mouths to feed.”

At the table, Mildred dated the paper and wrote out a bill of sale. She drew lines where all three could sign: she and Frank as the interested parties, the boy as witness.

When it was all over, she bagged up the carrots in a grocery sack and gave them to Mike. She walked with the Fishers across the yard to their pickup. As if she couldn’t allow them to leave. She shook their hands. They loaded inside. Mildred waited until Frank rolled down his window.

“Sheldon had a saying about land,” Mildred said. “The first generation earns it, the second spends it, and the third piddles it away. I guess I just done all three.”

SUMMER

Rose Moss, girlfriend to Mike Fisher, trailed her boyfriend and his big hay-cutting machine, the swather, down a dirt lane. Rose was in her Chevy Vega, hazard lights blinking, like she’d done all the way from Poplar. Rose had been on her way to work at the sandwich shop when Mike called to explain he needed her help. But it wasn’t an explanation, it was a demand formed around an emergency. When Rose said she was on shift, Mike said he’d pay her double to come help him. He said Frank had busted his ass for taking so much time on repairs and now the hay was going to get rained on. Rose, seventeen, wanted to protect Mike. His father was too hard on him. Mike was an eighteen year old who barely finished high school because of how much time he spent working on the farm. Rose called in sick and met Mike at the gas station.

Rose hadn’t blamed Mike for hiding her from his parents for so long. Frank, a Mormon bishop, was grizzled and stoic and generally unkind, especially when it came to his son. Annie fell in step behind her husband. Rose was a baptized Catholic who wore a cross around her neck and had a tattoo of a starfish on her ankle. She’d moved from Houston once her dad bolted on her and her mother. That was two years ago; she still felt like a stranger in rural Idaho. She met Mike at a bonfire out in the country, then he started coming by the sandwich shop (Rose later learned Mike didn’t even like tuna, he ordered it because it was cheap then threw the sandwiches away, after he’d seen her), then they started going for late-night drives, and now they were going out proper. Mike finally took her to a Mormon Stake Conference. Rose could see, even from her metal folding chair set up on the basketball court overflow, that Frank had big hands and cold eyes. The man gave her an uneasy feeling.

Rose parked her car on the far side of the haystacks and climbed up the ladder to the swather’s cabin. Mike swung open the glass door and cleared his jacket off his lunch cooler so Rose had a place to sit. He throttled up and trundled the swather along the dirt tracks at the edge of the field. A speckled red fawn spooked in the hay and surged through the emerald lucerne. Mike stopped the machine and they watched the deer stott out and disappear into the trees.

“My god!” Rose said. “It was so fragile. With every jump I thought those little legs might break in two.”

“Ten bucks says its ma will be by shortly.”

Sure enough, the doe appeared. It pawed and huffed until it caught the fawn’s scent spoor and followed it into the woods.

Mike started back up and traveled the swather to the field’s bottom and then navigated up the gravel ramp to the road on top of the levee. The levee was ten feet high and bisected the two Trafton fields. The high-riding swather suspended Mike and Rose ten feet higher than that. Sheldon had built the dike to keep the Snake River—which in wet years swelled with mountain runoff—from flooding his crop. Rose imagined she was riding shotgun on a stagecoach.

“If this isn’t a perfect day,” Rose said, sitting on the lunchbox and hugging her knees, “I don’t know what is.”

Mike slowed the machine to a crawl and inched down the levee and into the field. He put the machine in park and patted Rose’s knee.

“Sit up for a second. I need a sandwich.”

Rose got out two cans of soda, a Mason jar of peaches, and two ham-and-cheeses. Rose ate and watched Mike drive the clunking machine with his elbows and take hurried bites of his sandwich. At the end of the pass, Mike stopped the swather and moved the seat’s armrest. Rose squeezed next to him in the chair and they pressed together and started kissing. Rose thought Mike’s mouth tasted of cheddar and wheat. Beneath that, though, Rose tasted Mike’s desire for her. That made it more palatable.

When static crackled from the farm CB—Frank calling for Otto, the mechanic—Mike jumped to attention. As if Frank himself was banging at the door. He took his arms from around her neck and put his hands back on the steering wheel.

“Better get back to work,” Mike said. Mike lowered the header and engaged the machine and nudged the swather into the hay. It chewed a wide path and behind it left the hay piled to dry in a windrow.

Rose moved back to the cooler. Her mood went from electric to dead. This was the story of their relationship: once Frank showed up, even in static forms through the airwaves, Mike’s fire blew out. Rose had hoped, early on, that this might change. But it hadn’t. Rose fixated on the space between the swather header and the big drive tires. In that open swatch, she saw black flitting mice, running for their lives.

“What happens to all of those?” Rose said. The rodents flitted and zigzagged over the exposed earth.

“Well, first, they die. Then what the hawks don’t pick up gets baled. I’ve seen just about everything in bales. Pop cans. Twine. Bird bones. Badgers. Bunnies.”

“Gross.”

“It’s fight or flight. Running would save them most of the time. But there’s that idea to dig down, hunker in, and see it through.”

“Stop! Now I’m thinking about cows eating mice and me drinking their milk and then all that garbage floating around inside me.”

“It gets pasteurized. All the germs boil out.”

“Please, stop.”

“They don’t feel any pain. I promise. It happens so fast…”

“Everything hurts, Mike. Don’t be dense.”

“I’m dense, huh? What do you know about all of this? Zero. Zilch. Nada.”

Rose hugged her knees and scooted around on the cooler. “This is really comfortable, Mike. Thanks for bringing me along. To sit on your floor and be berated by you.”

“All of the sudden I get the feeling this ain’t about mice at all.”

The swather hummed and rocked. Mike made two passes along the outside and started working back and forth across the field. When Mike raised the header to turn, sunlight glinted off the row of wet knives and sparkled the reel’s steel fingers.

“Does anyone live back at the house?” Rose asked. “I left my CDs on the seat.”

“Just an old lady. Nothing to worry about. She spent her whole life in the milk barn working with her husband. He died last year.”

“And she’s still here by herself? That’s so sad.”

“It’s something.”

Rose looked up at Mike. He had one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the throttle lever. His eyes were on the edge of the header so he could keep his line. She liked it when he concentrated. He pursed his lips and squinted and looked very serious. She regretted what she said. Mike didn’t know any better. And it wasn’t too bad on the cooler.

“That would be a good life,” Rose said. “Waking up together, working side by side.”

“Trust me, it ain’t peachy. Frank and Annie have their days.”

“What other way would you want it?”

Mike started to speak but stopped himself. He turned the tractor and grimaced out the window and leaned his head to listen.

“I can’t be pinned down forever,” he said.

Rose grew quiet, then sad, then mad. Was Mike saying something about her?

“How could you leave a place like this?”

“I’m not so sure I have a choice. Frank has a way of keeping me around. But if I could, I’d buy my own tractor-trailer. A Peterbilt. Base out of Rigby, which would keep Pops and Ma happy, and still see the world.”

“I’ve been on too many highways. No way. Huh-uh.”

“If you were with me, we’d have a good time. Promise.”

Rose thought about the trip that brought her and her mother from Texas to Idaho. The wind had blown so hard that the police closed off the interstate. They waited half a day in Pocatello. When they started again, they passed a semi tipped over in the borrowpit.

“Truckers call a Peterbilt ‘The Celestial Body’ because they ride like a piece of heaven. Pops only has the Kenworth—it’s about as smooth as a bumper car.”

Rose scraped beneath her fingernails with her thumbnail. That truck looked like a turtle on its back, unable to right itself. She imagined herself trapped inside the cabin, belted into the seat, hanging upside down until someone showed up to save her.

“It wouldn’t be like this piece of shit,” Mike said, and knocked the swather’s steering wheel with his knuckles. “Two chairs, both air-ride. I’d get a good mattress for the sleeper and put in a TV and a mini-fridge. We could get white-line fever and go on forever.”

The header bounced, a hard thump interrupted the whirr of the machine. Mike jerked back the throttle and raised the header and shut off the motor. He went down the ladder backwards and jumped the last two rungs to the ground and swished through the hay to the front.

Rose was embarrassed for second-guessing Mike. If he wanted to truck, why shouldn’t he? She felt bad for making him explain himself. Rose imagined that he felt like she had felt when she told her mother she was going to church with Mike. Her mother cried about how her only daughter was going to depart from the only thing that had been the only constant in her lonely life. Honesty, a tricky business, hurt people.

Mike came back up the ladder.

“Slide me that toolbox. And come down. I want to show you something.”

Rose did. Mike took her by the hand and they ducked under the reel to the intake. Thousands of ladybugs teemed inside the machine and made the metal look alive and shifting.

“They eat aphids,” Mike said. “Nature’s own pest control. Pretty crazy, right?”

“So those are in my milk too? Gross. Do you have to kill them or something?”

“See this? I hit a rock and it broke the knives. Looks like someone punched out the swather’s two front teeth. But it’s better than what I thought. I figured that little fawn had come back and I’d hit it. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

Rose went back up the ladder and sat in the chair behind the steering column. She looked out the front window and saw Mike’s feet sticking out of the swather’s mouth. She considered how many years of this she’d have to endure if she stayed with Mike. She loved him, sure, and he was her only real friend in this place. But what if she wanted something different? How could she go to college here? And no matter how perfect her relationship was with Mike, Rose had to consider the drama his parents and the church could cause for them.

Mike climbed up, carrying the two halves of the rock and his toolbox. He dropped them on the outside step. Rose noticed the sweat beaded on his brow, and his pale gray countenance.

“What’s the matter?” Rose asked. She got out of the captain chair and they orbited around each other in that cramped space. Mike plopped down on his seat. Rose crouched on the cooler. “You look like you saw the devil himself.”

“I…I don’t know. Something happened to me down there. Look, I know you’re mad at me. Look, I know I talk too much, and I push things. I was thinking about that, turning the wrenches, and I knew you were up here at the controls. And I thought, ‘What if Rose turns the key?’ I’d be stabbed by the tines and diced by the knives and squeezed through the conditioner and shit out the back end.”

“Oh, baby. I wouldn’t ever hurt you,” Rose stood now, pulled Mike’s clammy head against her neck. “Calm down, everything’s okay.”

Mike pulled back. “I thought, ‘My life is in her hands. What is she going to do?’”

“Nothing happened. We’re both okay. I’ll protect you, I promise.”

Mike wiped his forehead on his t-shirts sleeve. “Shit, I’m sorry. For everything. I know things are weird right now. I’ll make them better. Swear it.”

Rose hushed him and took her seat and they went back to work. They cut hay for hours. They talked and laughed and argued playfully. For twenty minutes, Rose laid her head on Mike’s leg and napped. Later, in the gloaming, when it was dusty and dusky and the lights didn’t make a difference but Mike turned them on anyways, they stopped for a break. Outside, it smelled of pepper. They got out and stretched and grinned at the parallel harvest rows behind them. Rose followed Mike through the poplar trees to the bank of the Snake. They sat in the sedge and watched the dirty rushing water and listened to the red-winged blackbirds.

Soon, Mike pulled off his shirt and spread it behind Rose. He started to unbuckle his belt.

“This is going to be really poky,” Rose said. “Do you have one?”

“Sure.” He pulled the condom from the back pocket of his jeans. “I’m an eagle scout—always prepared.”

Rose cringed but hurried off her clothes and added them to the pallet beneath her. No matter; the twigs and stems stabbed through. She squirmed but couldn’t find comfort.

“Hurry,” Rose said. “Please, baby, come on.”

Mike went hard and fast. Rose waited in the dark for his little moans. When she heard them, even though she was hurting, it was hard not to giggle. He sounded so young, so pristine, when he came. She loved the times they’d done it in the light—just twice—and she could watch his tired and stoic face soften.

Rose pulled Mike to her and matched his breathing and traced hearts on his back. But the moment changed when he pushed up from her and separated.

“It broke,” Mike said. “There’s nothing left of it. It’s just a rubber band.”

Rose did not panic outright. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to her. But, like the times before, Rose thought of her own mother, pregnant at seventeen, now living in a trailer behind Rigby’s lone museum—a place full of taxidermied moose and deer and elk and stuffed bears and mountain lion rugs and rusted plows and black-and-white photos. She did not want to be trophied in Jay County.

They rushed to put on their clothes.

“Can you do something?” Mike asked.

“Like what?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Anything.”

Dressed, Rose went deeper into the woods to relieve herself. She considered walking on, all the way to town and then some. Or hiding until Mike left. She could not face her mother—or god forbid, Frank and Annie—with a taut belly. She could thumb back to Texas and stay with her cousin. There were clinics there, too. But it was night-dark now. She knew ten more steps and she’d be lost until morning. Rose returned to Mike.

“Rosy,” Mike said, and took her hand. “I didn’t mean to. Let’s just wait and see.”

Rose shook loose and marched in a direction she thought led back to the swather.

“If this goes worst-case scenario, I’ll tell my parents and I’ll ask your mom for your hand and my dad can marry us and we’ll live on the farm and, seriously, I’ll take care of you, you’ll never have to worry about a thing.”

Rose stopped. “Worst-case scenario? What are you saying, worst case?”

“I mean. Oh, Rosy, you know what I mean.”

Rose walked right past the swather when they got to it. Mike got in and started it; he’d have to park it back at the house. Rose started to run. She climbed the levee and made it halfway back to the Vega before Mike caught up to her in the swather. The bright halogen lights enveloped her and made ghosts of the dust she kicked up. So bright and otherworldly that Rose thought of the women on TV from the shows her mother watched while she drank herself to sleep. The women who were first blinded by the alien’s UFOs, abducted and whisked away to a life of experimentation and, afterwards, confusion, then shame.

FALL

Frank and Mike trashed the Trafton place. They knocked off fence poles until the strikes from the sledges shook their forearms to a throbbing numb, and wound handfuls of baling twine into oversized skeins, and gathered maverick soda cups, lengths of lead pipe, gunny sacks, and felled tree boughs. They piled everything inside the milk barn, where buzzing flies rose from calf skeletons and bounced against the walls.

The operation was in that few-week September limbo between grain and potato harvest. The leaves from the trees were brown and wisped, the grass a dry dead gold. Other men had started turning their soil for fall work. The moon smoldered orange from stubble burns. Frank thought of all that needed to happen in the next few weeks, but also of what the Trafton place lacked for next year. He had plans, like always, two steps ahead of everyone else.

But lately, Frank waxed nostalgic for the past. Hard to believe that when he was a kid in Poplar, there was a movie theater, a two-story hotel with a manager named Scary Jap Mary, a hardwood rollerskating rink, Sappington’s Drug Store, and a New Year’s Eve Dance that brought folks from three counties. A pool hall suitable for ladies, four grain elevators, and two lumberyards. Even though Poplar got a late start as far as frontier towns went—1914, officially—it boomed when world wheat hit records during the Great War. The railroad sent a crew to lay a spur to the nameless town, and the chief dubbed it after the trees along the river.

The winds of change, Frank thought, blow in quick and sure. Now, without the gas station and the sandwich shop, Poplar wouldn’t have food to buy. And though Beto reminisced of calmer days on the farm, Frank only knew go, go, go. Tractors ran from April until they were stopped by snow. Starting with the first crop of hay, seconding and thirding into August; itchy weeks of cutting and trucking barley; then grain; then a half-month of spuds. Plus cows to feed and calve and keep healthy all seasons in between. Back in the day, the schools let out for Spud Harvest and all the kids got jobs on farms. Now, all of Frank’s farmer friends worked alone, their children off to college to be lawyers or accountants or entrepreneurs with their parents’ money.

That morning, Frank brought Mike to Trafton’s and pointed out what he wanted demolished. Mike hadn’t said a word in response, whereas usually he asked for further detail, wanting to know what Frank had in mind. Mikey seemed to be miles away, in his own head. So Frank didn’t tell his son that he’d build up new aluminum corrals for calving and install a shipping chute. A nice winter calving facility protected by trees. Maybe even buy fifty extra off-colored beefs, or some pigs, just to finish-feed and truck to auction.

What a boy, Frank thought. Looks about as happy as a knot on a tree.

Frank and Mike emptied the tools—two shovels, a pry-bar, hammers, and sledges—from the back of the pickup and started in. There were two sets of pole corrals with cracked concrete mangers. A massive mound of manure climbed the pens. Old shit pushed against the bottom rung. The milk barn with bars over the windows. A horse trailer faded to a lackluster pink and missing one of its four tires, its hitch resting on a piece of cinderblock, parked in weeds. Next to it was a pea-green Dodge, one headlight, rusty rims, no tailgate. An open-cab tractor near an orange pipe trailer, and a broken fertilizer cart.

An hour into the destruction, Frank discovered a bunch of cracked, mismatched, unusable tires. He called for Mike and asked him what they should do with them.

“We could save them,” Mike said. “For the vine roller or something.”

“No,” Frank said. “Let’s burn them. Roll them over to the barn pile.”

“Let’s put them in your pickup and haul them,” Mike suggested.

“I just cleaned it,” Frank said. “Go see if that Dodge’ll run.”

Mike popped the hood and checked the oil and hooked up the battery. It started. They loaded the tires into the back of the truck and drove to the barn door and stacked them there.

Beto showed up in the haying John Deere, four long spears sticking off the farmhand. He revved up the tractor and plowed into the bad fence. He picked up what he could with the forks and dumped it on top the milk barn, and brought down the implement’s heel against the main joist and caved in the roof. The pile grew into a mangled pyramid.

This is the work I need, Frank thought as he pitched on more garbage. Not a tractor jockey. Not a chauffeur. Not three-hour bank meetings. Sweat and ache, like my younger days. Even now, old as I am, I can outwork Mike or Beto or anyone else. That’s power.

But Frank found himself caught off guard when Mildred appeared after noon. By then nearly everything was in shambles. Frank stopped and watched her pull past her former house, vacant now a month, in her powder blue Oldsmobile and, for a split second, he thought to hide himself behind the barn. That old bird was the last person he wanted to see. Frank felt as exposed as that one time Mike came around the shop and caught him pissing in the bushes. Mildred parked and bonked on the horn.

“Mike,” Frank said, “go see what she needs.”

Mike leaned his pry-bar against the truck and jogged over then came right back. “She wants to talk to you.”

All the while, Mildred kept on that horn, blaring it Frank’s way. She didn’t let up until Frank started in her direction. When Frank was close enough to talk, instead of rolling down the window, Mildred threw open the door and stuck out a leg. Tan slacks reached up mid-calf and exposed pasty ankles, sagging socks, worn-out sneakers. Her hard-bitten fingers hooked like claws and rested on the handle. Respirator tubes, connected to a tank on the floor, traced her chin and ended with a fixture that metronomed oxygen into her nostrils.

“I lived a good life here,” Mildred said, her voice a broken green bottle.

Frank shoved his hands into his pockets and scanned across the wreckage. He was exhausted. From being the big bad boss, from being bishop, from trying to show Mike how to be a man. Shit, Mildred. It’s not my fault Sheldon didn’t buy more land, or get his crops to make grade, or finance your daughters. It’s not my fault you two didn’t expand or adapt. I’m not building my mansion overtop your lot or hooking my pickup to your trailer or subdividing this rocky parcel. I’m just doing what I know how, what I judge best. Nothing more, nothing less.

But Frank didn’t speak. He stood there, gruff and quiet. Mildred looked over her bowdlerized plot, a place where she’d clocked thousands of hours, tended to her garden, ate picnic meals spread across the hood of a pickup with her one and only.

“Don’t burn all them tires,” Mildred said. “Someone’s always needing a spare.”

“Mildred, those tires are older than both of us.”

“Set them aside. I’ll get a guy to come get them.”

Frank stared at the slicks. With such thin walls and cracked rubber, they’d blow and put a truck into a tailspin and kill everyone involved. But then, this argument was destined for a dead-end. The goal for Frank now was to frost this deal up, be done with this woman, and move on.

“Sure, Mildred, we can do that.”

Mildred sat with her door open and nodded. Frank hollered instructions at Mike. Mike started to roll the tires one by one and stack them beneath the cottonwoods.

“Tell him to get your pickup there, Frank,” Mildred said. “He’ll be all day doing that. Throw them in back. Work smarter, not harder. Sheldon’s words, not mine.”

Again, Frank hollered instructions. Mike did as told, driving Frank’s spotless pickup through the dust and garbage, and backed up to the garbage pile.

Frank and Mildred watched Mike struggle to rip the tires from beneath the posts and wire. Mildred started honking the horn until Mike jogged back over.

“What? Frank never buys you any tools?” Mildred asked Mike.

Frank felt his face burn.

Mildred popped her trunk. “Dig around back there. Find something useful.”

Frank went with Mike to the back of the Olds and lifted the trunk lid. Tools were scattered across the floor, piled in milk crates, in the seam near the spare tire. Mike and Frank began to sift: pipe wrenches, crescent wrenches, monkey wrenches, hammers; a hatchet, files, zip ties, duct tape; sockets of three-eighths, five-eighths, seven-eighths…and then Mike discovered a pair of shiny, red-handled, slip-jointed pliers. They were stainless steel, long and heavy, and held together by a smooth rivet.

“Those won’t work,” Frank said. “Better get some dikes.”

“They’re fine,” Mike said. He showed them to Mildred for her acknowledgment and went back to the tangled tires.

“Anything else, Mrs. Trafton?” Frank asked.

“You can tell a man by how he works a pair of pliers. Sheldon taught me that.”

“I got to get back to work myself. Take care now, Mildred.”

Frank waited for the woman to get her leg inside the car. He shut the door for her and waited until she fired up the Olds and chuffed and sputtered past the house. Frank grumbled while walking back to Mike. He stood a few feet away, thinking to himself, as he watched his son. Mike gripped the pliers and tried to wrench loose a knobby rim from the wire. But he fumbled the tool. He dropped the pliers more than once and finally resorted to operating it with both hands.

“No, no,” Frank said, talking the pliers from Mike. “One-handed. You know better.”

Frank tried to give them back to Mike but he wouldn’t take them. He kept his arms stuck in his pockets. Frank dropped the pliers in the dirt at Mike’s feet.

“Do I have to do everything around here?” Frank asked.

“You know what, Pops. You do. Because I quit.”

“Oh, you do, huh?”

“This is bullshit.”

Frank picked up the pliers. “Just like you were done when you didn’t move your pipe and I caught you? Or like when you stopped feeding the cows and I found you asleep on the stack?”

“I ain’t spending my life feeling like I’m the goddamn shit on the goddamn boots of my goddamn old man.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“Whatever.” Mike slung his pry-bar deep into the trash pile and started for the road.

“How you going to get home?” Frank yelled. “Whose food are you going to eat tonight?”

Mike never even turned around.

Frank went to his pickup and set out a box of matches and jugs of diesel. He waved Beto out of the tractor and sent him in his pickup with instructions to stop and get Mike and take him to the house. Give a kid an inch and he’ll take it a mile. I’ll figure it all out tonight.

Frank spent the rest of the afternoon digging a firebreak. A few hours before dark, Frank set the debris pile on fire. He threw the pliers in for good measure. Frank looked through the smoke and wondered if Mildred had returned. Or Mike. Of course, neither of them did, and this made Frank feel worse.

Where had he gone wrong with his boy? This boy, who had exited Frank’s life in phases. Out of diapers, out of the house, out of the church, and now right off the farm.

In the last hour of the dim gray day, Frank leaned on his shovel and listened to the canal’s purling, and the pops and hisses of the posts and planks. Frank smelled the smoldering tar, the manure, and his own mephitic reek. He looked to the road and exhaled and watched the smoke dissipate into the dark. Annie would know to come pick him up sometime tonight, he was sure. Mike can leave. Let him. So can Mildred. Both deserve what they get. But one thing’s for certain. I earned this place. All of it—every acre, each machine—is mine. I’ve done it all from start to finish. Lest they forget: It was me who scaled that rotten mess. I sloshed out the fuel and watched it pool onto the boards and soak into the poles. I struck the matches. I set the flame. And while Mike told his sob story to what’s-her-name, and Annie fixed supper, and Mildred wheeled her tank through the rest home doors, I scrambled down the pile and saw the fire lick the sky. I stood alone against the fire and, when the heat grew too strong, I used my hands to hide my face.

WINTER

Mike brushed sheaves off the haying flatbed and backed it inside his parent’s garage. Otto, the mechanic, helped him carry his bed and dressers and boxes of clothing up the stairs. They lashed it all in place on the truck with motorcycle tie-downs. Mike took the backroads to the Trafton house. Otto, in Mike’s Jeep, beat him there. Mike backed to the front door. He and Otto shuffled the items across the threshold and inside the house. Mike kept watching the road for Rose’s Vega. They’d agreed to meet at the house at ten. It was eleven now; she was nowhere to be found.

“You know, life ain’t easy,” Otto said. “It takes a big man to own up to his mistakes.”

Mike nodded and said thank you and watched Otto leave in the flatbed. Mike felt a twinge of shame. Otto had been honest—why couldn’t Mike be honest in return? Mike’s sense of honest had changed; it no longer meant speaking every thought that came into his mind. Silence was honest. Maybe the only honorable thing he could do. So he hadn’t told Otto to mind his own business, that he had no right judging Mike’s life as a mistake.

And, in the same way, Mike hadn’t told Rose about his fears. He was not sure that he loved her. He wasn’t even sure he knew what love meant. But when Rose started to talk about returning to Texas and giving the baby up, or giving up on the baby, Mike panicked. He never discussed with Rose about what exactly this meant—if she was talking Texas because she wanted out, or giving Mike an ultimatum to move ahead—and instead went to a pawn shop in Idaho Falls and bought a two-hundred dollar ring and proposed. They married at the Jefferson County courthouse the following week, Rose’s mother there to sign for her seventeen year old daughter. They found an off-duty cop who agreed to serve as second witness. The four of them stood before the judge. Mike and Rose Fisher, man and wife.

That was two months ago, before Rose really started showing. She continued to live with her mother; Mike with his parents. Mike didn’t tell Frank and Annie. He’d taken a job working for one of the grain elevators in Poplar, unloading trucks and sweeping bins. Everything seemed fine until Annie ran into Rose at Wal-Mart and saw the secret. That night, Mike came home to Frank and Annie waiting in ambush at the kitchen table. There was yelling, then tears, then Frank—the ever-present planner—out with his notebook penciling Mike’s budget.

Frank offered Mike a job that very night, salary with a company truck and phone and housing included.

Mike, seeing the string of numbers he’d have to service—hospital bills and medicines and diapers and electricity and food costs—accepted.

When he told Rose the next day, she flipped out, saying how it was Frank’s way of controlling them. Just another instance of Mike rolling over for his father. Mike slammed an open hand on the table and left steaming. Mike was fucked over one way and boned the other. No winning for him.

Now, in this shit-box of a house, Mike lined the cabinets with a few jars of peaches and raspberries pilfered from his mother’s cold storage, waiting for a wife that might not even show, having to wake up for a job he did not want, working for a man he did not understand. Outside, early December, the first snow still not having arrived but chilly as bull tits.

Mike was searching the walls for the thermostat when he heard a car. He was excited to see Rose, but he knew he’d ask her what took her so long and pout until she apologized. But it wasn’t Rose; instead, Frank and Annie in Annie’s SUV. A surprise visit. Mike watched them park, open up the back, and unload brown bags full of food.

Annie started to fill the fridge with milk and bread and cheese and stacked meat in the freezer while Mike and Frank set up the bed in the back.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Mike said. “I can get by on my own.”

“A guy would never guess there once was a dairy back here. We did ourselves a favor by cleaning up that mess.”

Mike nodded. Just like Frank, to disregard him. In the month following the demolition, men hauled away the Dodge and the trailers but never took the stack of tires. Mike’s job one Saturday had been to take them to town and get stuck with a recycling fee.

“Where’s Rose?” Frank asked.

“She got hung up in town.”

“It’ll be good to have a lady’s touch around here. She’ll doll it up nice.”

Mike and Frank assembled the bed-frame. Mike spun the bolts finger-tight.

“Wish I had those pliers Mildred gave me. They’d be nice right about now.”

Frank moved off his knees and hunkered on the balls of his feet and rested elbows to knees. He took a pair of pinchers from his belt holster and passed them to Mike. “For cripe’s sake. Drop it. You got bigger fish to fry now.”

“You don’t understand…”

“I’ll buy you as many pliers as you want. But move on. What you once had is now gone.”

They finished the frame and lifted the mattresses into place and went to the kitchen. Annie fussed and explained her food ordering, but after a minute threw up her hands.

“Oh, Mikey, what am I saying? You’re a big boy! You can figure it out!”

Mike followed his parents out. He waved to them as they left. He could see his mother crying. As if she had so much to be upset about. As if her pain meant more than Mike’s. He’d given up everything. Now, here he was, alone. Where was Rose? Had she gone in to work? Or was she on the Interstate, headed south? Mike opened a can of soup and drank it like a pop.

Mike felt suffocated in the house. He put on his jacket and his rancher hat and walked outside. Across the dead grass, through the dead weeds, into the naked trees. He kept his hands in his coat pockets and listened for fowl. He found the canal, a feeder that was twenty feet wide and straight as a fenceline, and walked down into its empty bottom. The canal company cut the water a week ago. Large puddles were left. Mike moved upstream and eyed the stagnant water looking for whitefish that might still be breathing.

He walked and wondered. What if Rose didn’t come home tonight? He’d drive to her mother’s house. But then what—make her come home? If she didn’t want to be with him, then fine. But what if she did show up? How mean would he be to her? The poor girl was pregnant, so not too harsh. But it wasn’t fair he was left alone to do all the chores. He’d have to let her know that. Then Mike’s thoughts got away from him. What if Rose miscarried and they were left married and without child and stuck on the farm? What if Rose died in childbirth? What if Rose’s mom got sick and had to come live with them? What if, what if, what if?

Mike was so worked up he didn’t hear the boy until he was nigh upon him. A young kid, maybe ten, standing along a large puddle with a big forked stick. The boy dipped into the shallow pool and flipped a suckerfish onto the rocks. A golden dog latched onto it and shook it dead.

“What are you doing?” Mike asked.

“Fishing,” the boy said. He had a speech impediment, said his Ss like THs. He was freckled with dirty blonde hair and wore an old tattered ski coat two sizes too big.

“No, I mean, what are you doing out here by yourself?”

“Fishing. And looking for my cat, Whiskers. Seen her?”

Mike shook his head.

The kid flung out another fish. The dog ate it, threw it up, lapped up the puke.

“Where do you live?”

“Mom said not to talk to strangers.”

“Does she know you’re out here?”

“She’s at work.”

“What about your dad?”

“He went to hell.”

“It’s almost dark. You want some help getting home?”

The kid stopped fishing and looked Mike up and down.

“You look sad, mister.”

“I am sad.”

“Me too. I haven’t seen Whiskers since last Christmas. She used to hunt mice with Buster. That’s my dog. Buster’s sad too. Look at him.”

The dog had moved into the grass on the bank and was laying his head on his crossed paws, content and asleep.

“Come on,” Mike said. “We better get home. Our moms will worry about us.”

“Help me look for Whiskers.”

“Only for a bit,” Mike said. “But then we have to go.”

“What you got to do,” the kid said, “is put your hands like this and say, ‘Whiskers! Whiskers!’ then make kissy noises.”

Mike did it.

“You’re saying it wrong. ‘Whiskers!’ Whiskers!’”

Mike said it like the kid, with a lisp, and the kid’s face lit up. They walked around the river bottom saying the cat’s name over and over, smacking their lips, for ten minutes. Nothing doing. The kid whistled for his dog and, without saying goodbye, disappeared into the trees.

Mike walked back up the canal toward the Trafton house. Dusk came, then dark. He was calmed some by the kid. As he found footing on the dry moss, he whispered the cat’s name.

He climbed out of the canal and made his way back to the house. Rose’s car was still not there. But he was no longer wound up. Until she arrived, Mike would ready the bedroom. He’d tuck in soft sheets and fluff the pillows and fold the quilt just right. He’d sweep and vacuum and get the television working. He’d boil some water for cocoa. And when Mike would see the round eyes of the Vega coming down the Trafton lane, his heart would beat faster. He would leave the front door open, help Rose out of the car, not mutter one cross word. He would hold her tight until she squirmed. Then, together, they would walk inside their new home.

Rose never did show. Which left the morning chores to Mike, all on his loathsome own.