One Sunday morning in January, I overslept and my family left for church without me. Granted, the rest of those Fosters all had reasons to be at the chapel before service started—mom and my three little sisters practicing with the choir, my fourteen-year-old brother Joshua off to prepare the sacrament, my father Claxton gone since first light. Dad would be furious if I was late, so I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, trying for a suitable tie knot, hurrying towards perfection, when I heard someone knocking at the porch door. This was a year before I got married, or better, a year before I had to get married, and ended up leaving the ranch after my eighteenth birthday, just before grain harvest. By the time I got to the door, the knocking had become pounding, and I opened to find Jarrett Buckett—rubber overshoes unbuckled and manure-caked, coat unzipped, a cock-eyed fowler cap brushed with snow and hay sitting slanted on his head—waiting for me. Claxton had hired Jarrett to calve out the heifers on the weekends. Before this, though, I’d only seen Jarrett in town sitting on the tailgate of his jacked-up Dodge, smoking cigarettes and scamming on the trailer park girls. He was a few years older than me, a burnout from Sunnydell, in the foothills out by Herbert.

“Hi-ya Jeremiah,” Jarrett said. “Hoping to catch Claxton before he ran off to the big house.” Then, my father was serving as bishop of our Mormon ward, and he spent most of every Sunday at the chapel.

“He’s not around,” I said. “Won’t be until four or five.”

Jarrett stepped back and leaned against the porch banister. He slipped off his hat, showing red hair askew and sweaty, and rubbed his head with the back of his hand.

“You know if he’s got his cell?” Jarrett asked.

“Not in church,” I said. “Maybe it’s in his truck.”

Jarrett slapped the hat against his knee and replaced it. “You wouldn’t know if the Mexicans were done feeding?”

“I saw them leave,” I said. “They usually go to town on Sundays.”

“That’s what I figured. Just thought I’d ask.” Jarrett looked at me and stood up straight. “What about you? Off to church?”

“Planning to.”

“What if I could talk you out of that?” he said.

“Something wrong?”

Jarrett hum-hawed around. I figured he probably wanted the morning off to go drink coffee in St. Basil or ride snowmachines in Kilgore. Maybe he’d fake sick, I thought, and half-expected a weak cough.

“Well, sort of.” Jarrett said. “Yeah, you could say something’s wrong. I got a little gal at Heise that don’t want to go in the calving pen. Needing an extra hand for a bit.”

“You call Andy?” I said. Andy was our head cowboy.

“He’s in church too,” Jarrett said. “Least I’m assuming. He didn’t answer.” Jarrett put his hands in his pockets.

Everyone was gone, unavailable, leaving me alone. I debated what would cause more trouble: missing church or letting Jarrett sweat it out on his own.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the truck.”

Jarrett nodded and walked across the backyard through his own snow tracks.

I pulled off my church slacks and white shirt and tossed them onto the bed and put on jeans and a hoodie. In the garage, I found my insulated boots, and grabbed a pair of feeding gloves and a stocking cap. Outside, Jarrett leaned against one of the white farm flatbeds and smoked. When he saw me, he flicked the cigarette into the snow and got into the truck.

I jumped in the passenger side, the door grinding shut on uneven hinges. The truck’s transmission whirred beneath us and we reversed out of the driveway.

“You owe me a smoke,” Jarrett said, arm propped on the seatback. He squinted out the back window. “I only had two puffs before you came running out.”

The seat springs squeaked beneath me. I leaned over and adjusted the fan, changing the heat to the dash. Pieces of alfalfa flew out and smacked against the back window like dead flies, and stale air warmed my face. Jarrett turned the truck onto the highway and we accelerated. Between us, inside the truck, sat a small cooler full of cattle medicine. Jarrett fished out a serrated steak knife from under the cooler and stabbed it into the crack between the dash gauges and the air vents.

“Wouldn’t wanna lose good Foster cutlery,” Jarrett said.

I didn’t respond. Outside, ice crept across the road in irregular formations. The morning air seemed brittle but invading, and we drove along in a pocket of our own lonely visibility.

Jarrett reached across the cooler and punched my shoulder. “Shit,” he said. “You don’t owe me no cigarette. I was just messing.”

“You shouldn’t smoke,” I said.

“Correction,” Jarrett said. “You shouldn’t smoke. I do whatever I goddamn please.”

“It’ll kill you.”

“So’ll ranching,” Jarrett said. “So’ll pop. So’ll TV. So’ll driving this shit-box truck. Hell, the u-joints are thin as wire.”

“Fix them then. It’s your truck too. I mean, jeez, I don’t want to die in here.”

“We all gotta die somewhere. We all gotta die of something.”

“Deep,” I said, halfway quietly. This was not how I expected our first conversation to go.

“What was that?” Jarrett asked.

“Nothing,” I said. The ranch hands had told me all this before. Pickup truck philosophers, horse-bound sages. Give a man a coffee thermos and he becomes a modern day Moses.

“If you got a problem with me, speak up.”

“Forget it,” I said, louder.

“Well, I don’t care who you are, boss’s son or not, I don’t like my ideals being drug through the mud.” Jarrett looked at me over the cooler.

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

Jarrett punched me again. “Shit, man.” He grinned and propped himself tall in the seat. “You seriously gotta ease up. You think I got anything figured out? Look at me. I’m just a harelip. I don’t know no better. In fact, you’re probably right. I ought to quit smoking. But I guarantee if everyone had a smoke a day, this world would be five degrees calmer.”

<>

We passed houses huddled among cottonwood trees, the smoke inching out from chimneys and hanging above the homesteads like shawls, and took the old state highway that split the snow-covered fields. Drifts had blown up near the road, rock-hard and tinged dirty, and bare spots of frozen field soil showed through. Jarrett searched around the seat of the pickup and found his pack of cigarettes and shook one out of the box. He held the cigarettes out to me, I waved him a no, and he cracked the window and lit up.

“Figured,” Jarrett said, blowing a stream of smoke out the open window. “Just being cordial.”

“Thanks.”

“Let’s get down to serious business here, Jeremiah,” Jarrett said. “Tell me what it feels like knowing you’re gonna be a prince of mostly eastern Jefferson County, Idaho someday.”

“What?” I said.

Jarrett chuckled. “It’s gotta feel good, I imagine, knowing one day all these trucks, all this land, all of it will be yours.” He patted the pickup’s dashboard emphatically.

“None of it’s mine,” I said.

“You’re Claxton’s kid, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Parents give presents to their kids, right?”

“Right.”

“Then you stand to get all of this. You’re the oldest.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“Sassafras-and-kiss-my-ass you’ve never thought it. Shit, I figure you’re jerking off to the thought on a nightly basis.”

“Seriously,” I said, lying, since I’d considered owning it all many, many times. “I’ll go on a mission, then probably college. Maybe I’ll be a dentist or something.”

Jarrett snorted. “Listen, buddy, I like you. But you’re not fooling no one. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If I had this spread, I’d give the mission double-birds, say fuckaroo to all that, and take over right outta high school. You seem like a smart kid.”

We traveled in silence. Outside: ice blue, blanket white.

Jarrett turned up the country music and tapped on the steering wheel, glancing my direction. We crossed the Snake River and wound around the hot springs, passed the empty camper park, turned down the gravel road. Another slow mile across ruts and snow, and we arrived at the Heise ranch and drove to the yard. Jarrett parked the truck along the bunkhouse and got out. I followed him across the yard to a pole fence.

In the day lot, out beyond the pens, the pregnant cows lulled around the feeders. Trails traced the fence line. The government-leased land where we summered the cattle was white but splotched with the muted green of junipers and sage.

“There’s that ornery bitch,” Jarrett said. “In the corner.” A lone cow paced along a jog in the fence.

Jarrett switched in the four-wheel drive on the pickup hubs, and we got back in and drove out into the day lot. Cows followed us for a time then broke back to the manger. We reached the cow, a small red and white heifer wet with sweat, and Jarrett stopped at a distance.

“I’m gonna go open up the corrals,” Jarrett said. “You push her up the fence.”

I thought about pulling rank, telling Jarrett I’d do the driving and he’d do the walking, but instead I bailed out and jogged through the snow. That cow, full of skitters and venom, bucked when she saw me and bolted down the fence line. Jarrett rodded the truck and cut her off from doubling back. The cow ran dead-force into the barn pen. Jarrett left the truck driving and jumped out for the gate. The truck puttered into a high drift and died trying to push itself through. We dug the truck out with a pitchfork and a board, sweating great clouds of steam, while the cow thrashed around inside the pen.

<>

Once back in the yard, Jarrett and I leaned against the fence and watched the heifer, high-tailed and panicked, move from one corner of the pen to the next, sniffing for a way out.

“Guess you can take me back down now,” I said. I figured I could still make most of the church meetings.

“Like hell,” Jarrett said. “Gotta figure out what’s going on. She’s been acting like this all morning.”

I shivered, compelled by cold. I had calved plenty, or should say, had been with many others who knew what they were doing. I had grown up on the farm assisting, running back and forth fetching tools and medicine, shoveling holes and pulling rye from wheat. It would be a stretch to say that I could diagnose, repair, or manage without help. I couldn’t. I watched the cow bolt around the pen, eyeballing through the cracks in the panel fence. She held her tail high, and she was gelled-up and cat-backed. She was trapped, and she moved from corner to corner as if driven by some inexplicable tornado force.

“You want my coat or what?” Jarrett said.

“I’m fine.” It was my mentality to never take something on the first offer, to let a person bargain and beg me into it. Truth was, that coat looked inviting.

“Suit yourself,” Jarrett said, and left me. I heard the truck start, and turned to see Jarrett backing it up. I walked over to him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.

“Get in and see,” he said.

I walked around and got in. Jarrett maneuvered the pickup around and nosed it up to the fence, facing the cow. He shifted into park and turned the heater on high.

“May as well be warm,” Jarrett said.

“Won’t we waste a bunch of gas?” I said. The truck idled faster then dropped down to a normal rumble.

“Claxton would want you warm right now,” Jarrett said. “Gallon of gas ain’t nothing compared to no help at all.”

We watched the cow through the window. She calmed some, which was good, and for a time stayed in the straw. Jarrett laughed, a sound like a hard hiccup.

“I ever tell you about the time I whupped on that St. Basil boy for calling my sister a whore?” he asked. “Best part, I ain’t even got a sister.”

“Jarrett,” I said, “this is the first time we’ve ever hung out.”

Jarrett said, “I know. Just wanted to see if you were asleep over there.”

<>

Jarrett told me his yarns: dirtbike rides, bar fights, and the Great Montana Bush Company, a strip club in Missoula, only pausing to light another smoke. The cab filled up with blue gray haze. I felt warm within this cloud, dizzy, talking of things that would make my mother blush, topics that my father condemned in all his meetings.

Finally, I egged Jarrett on, saying, “You talk big, but I bet you’re still a virgin.”

Jarrett laughed so hard I thought he’d puke. “You shitting kidding me? You just wanna get your rocks off, hear about some real hot sex. Well, it’s your lucky day, Jeremiah Foster, because I’m just the guy to indulge your dark side.”

“I bet,” I said.

“You’re proving me right by the minute, Jeremiah. We’re all just a bunch of animals.”

“Thou sayest. But you still aren’t talking.”

“So here it is: my cousin and me, right, we got these girls from Archer who tell us—straight to our faces—that they’re ready and willing, alls we gotta do is find a private place. So we had an idea in that my cuz’s old man has a tree stand on the river bottoms he uses for deer hunting. We just have to class the joint up a bit. So we get some plywood for a roof and some walls, some camp mattresses and what not, and we call those girls and take them up there and—”

Mid-sentence, Jarrett plopped out of the truck and went over the fence, not bothering to shut the truck door. I saw the cow down on her side, her back legs rigid. Jarrett leaned down to her, the cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth. I shut the truck off, jumped out, and scaled the fence.

“Get that barn open,” Jarrett yelled.

I ran across the pen and swung open the aluminum gate to the loading alley, unlatched the plywood door to the barn, and went inside and shut the newborn pens. I came back out and Jarrett was pushing against the red heifer, trying to make her stand.

“Get her on her feet,” Jarrett said. We both pushed against the cow’s haunches. She groaned. Jarrett knelt on her, wrapped her tail around his fist, and pried it over her tailbone. At the pressure, the cow stood quickly and bucked. The movement sent Jarrett off the cow’s back in an arc, and Jarrett flew and thudded a few feet away. But he was up like a hare, and we chased the cow down the alley and inside the barn.

The cow thrashed through the moldy straw and crashed against the walls. She seemed gigantic and desperate in that small space, panicked and ready to eat us whole. At the head catch, I pulled the rope and snapped the gate shut behind the cow’s ears. She yanked back hard, stressing the wooden joists, and then stepped forward to take the pressure from her throat.

Jarrett had his coat off. He’d sweated through his checkered shirt.

“Get her tail,” Jarrett said. He rolled up his sleeve.

I grabbed the tail and pulled it out of the way. When Jarrett buried his hand inside the cow, her tail went rigid as a tree branch.

“The hell?” Jarrett mumbled, then slid in further. “Can’t feel nothing.” He closed his eyes, I imagined him visualizing what should be where.

“Not sure she’s got anything,” Jarrett said. He pulled out his arm and shucked off slime. “No face, no front hooves. Nothing.” He picked up some straw and used it to clean his arm. “She ain’t dry. She’s got a bag full of milk.”

“We should call someone,” I said, growing worried.

“Hell no,” Jarrett said. “This is our bad. We should have been paying better attention. Shit. Let me try one more time.” He went bicep-deep again, eyes closed, talking to himself. His face lit. He propped his free arm against the barn wall and strained backwards. The cow contracted, and a tiny hoof emerged. Jarrett pulled again and this time the hoof came free and Jarrett fell back into the straw. Pale, Jarrett stood, holding the calf leg like a club, and looked down at it, perplexed and angry.

“That can’t be good,” I said, pointing to the leg. I’d seen calves come breech. I’d seen calves stillborn. But I’d never seen a calf in pieces.

“What the fu….” Jarrett trailed off, patting the front of his jeans and his shirt pocket. “Where’s that phone?”

“That’s just a leg,” I said. Jarrett dropped the appendage and searched pockets with both hands. “That’s not normal.”

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Jarrett shuffled around the barn kicking wet straw. “Where’s that goddamn cell? Go out and look in the truck.”

I ran out and went through the jockey box and the door panel pockets and the crack of the bench seat and even looked inside the medicine cooler. I paused, stopped for a breather, and I looked down. There, on the seat, were Jarrett Buckett’s cigarettes. I picked up the pack—sleek and bright, red and white—and pulled out one single smoke. It felt solid and sturdy, something I hadn’t ever thought. Cigarettes had always seemed to me so delicate, feminine, like they should disintegrate upon touch. I replaced it in the box and then turned the truck inside out again.

I searched around the yard and re-walked our path to the barn. Finally, out in the pen where Jarrett had been bucked off, I found the cell, squashed in the snow, a crack down the screen. I took it to Jarrett, and he shook the phone a few times as if trying to revive it. We walked back to the pickup, Jarrett swearing all the way.

“You want I should go back down to church and get my dad?” I asked.

Jarrett took a small spiral notebook and half a pencil from the cooler. “No,” Jarrett said. “I’m gonna get my ass canned over this. I know I am. Shit. It’s closer to go to my house. I’m gonna draw you a map and you’re gonna drive down and get my personal cell. Soon as you get it, call everybody you can think of and get us some help.”

Jarrett moved so I could get into the truck. He shut the door and walked off towards the barn. He climbed the fence but waved me down before I could leave.

“And bring my calf puller. It’s in the garage.”

“Isn’t there one in the barn?” I said.

“Yours,” Jarrett said, “is a certified piece of crap. I got us one that worked.”

<>

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the driveway at Jarrett’s. Crystalline flakes fell from the gray sky. I went inside the kitchen and found the cell and flipped it open and dialed the house number. As the phone rang, although a twinge of nervousness invaded me, perhaps warned me, I walked down the narrow hallway of Jarrett’s trailer. I examined the bathroom, the guest bedroom, Jarrett’s own room. This invasion filled me with excitement. What did I expect to find? A tattooed woman asleep in his bed? Fleshy magazines of carnal positions? But all in all, it was clean and private but for a poster above Jarrett’s bed of the Budweiser girls in red, high-cut bikinis. No one answered at my house. I walked out to the truck and called Claxton and Andy on their cells, but both went straight to voicemail. I called the house again as I walked to the garage for the calf puller. This time mom answered, home to put some water on the roast before church let out. I explained the situation. She said she’d go find dad. I left the garage, puller in hand, and went back out into the bleak day.

A minivan sat behind the pickup, blocking its exit. An overweight man and woman took up the front seats. The woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window and I walked to her.

“Jarre…” the woman started. “You’re not my son!”

Inside the van sat the whole family: Jarrett’s father in slacks and white shirt and tie, his mother with her purple flower dress and ski coat, two young carrot-topped boys—miniatures of Jarrett himself— in the backseat, and a skeletal woman, a grandmother, sitting straight-backed beside them.

The father leaned over his wife and grinned goofily. “Cold enough for you?”

“Pretty cold,” I said.

“I was hoping,” the mother said, “that Jarrett was home early so he could come for Sunday dinner. He’s been working so much we never get to see him.”

“You need a coat?” the father said before I could answer. “Got one in here somewhere.” He turned to the backseat, huffing and shifting his weight, the van rocking with his movements.

“No, I’m fine,” I said. I spoke to both of them. “Jarrett sent me down for his phone. We have a, uh, situation. On my way back now.”

“Are you hungry?” the woman said. Before I could answer, she said, “There’s a ham in the oven that I started before sacrament meeting. Should be perfect.”

“No, no. I have to get back.”

“Let me make you a few sandwiches. Done in a jiff.” She nodded to her husband, who turned the van. They drove slowly down the road and pulled into the neighboring driveway, not two hundred feet from Jarrett’s trailer. Jarrett’s mother bustled up the steps and into the house, Jarrett’s father helped the elderly woman across the snow, and the two brothers packing their bibles paused long enough to plaster one another with snowballs. Two heeler dogs rounded the corner and eyed me warily and disappeared under the porch.

Soon came the heavy woman with a plastic grocery sack. “Tell Jarrett we missed him again,” she said. “At church and at supper.”

<>

Back at the corrals, the barn was filled with a mish-mash of urgency and anger and overexertion and the hot foul smell of things gone wrong. Claxton had arrived and was standing behind the cow. He wore the mechanic coveralls that he carried in his pickup—a gray jumpsuit that had seen every job created by his farm and ranch. I could see my father still had on his white button-down shirt and tie and black slacks beneath his coveralls. His shiny dress-up church boots were splotched with excretion and blood.

“Let loose her head,” my father was saying to Jarrett. “She’s got to lay down.”

Jarrett ran to the head catch and flipped free the catch pin and opened the beams. The cow stumbled back and flopped onto her side. I tried to give Jarrett his phone. He shooed me away, shaking his head, saying shit and hell alternately.

“Jeremiah, where’s that puller?” Claxton snapped.

“In the truck,” I said.

“What good is it to out there?” he said. “Go fetch it.”

I went to the truck for it and when I returned, Jarrett had the cow by the tail and Claxton stood waiting for me. He took the puller and knelt in the straw.

“Calf’s been rotting inside,” my father said. “The vet’ll be here soon but for now we’re going to take out the pieces. She’s pushing like she wants it out.” Claxton sunk into the cow, chains in hand. “Think I got another hoof. Jeremiah, come work this.” He motioned for me to take the calf puller.

I took the chains and hooked them to the sliding handle and then began to crank, hesitantly. The chains pulled taut. The cow moaned. I felt tearing on the other end, inside her, bone from socket, muscle from bone. I had pulled a calf once or twice before. Work with the cow. Pull the calf through the narrows. Then, in a release, in a wave of pink and gush, there comes the baby, alive. Break the sack, stick some straw in its nose. Make it sneeze, breath. There is the mother, warming its child, licking it clean.

“Faster,” Claxton said. “Hurry. Work those contractions.”

“Dad,” I said. “Hold on.” This was not the normal sensation. I cranked and—nothing. Nothing resisting, nothing waiting. I reeled in an empty line. The chains floated inside the cow, connected to void. And then I rocked backwards, past my balance point.

“You got to go faster,” my father said.

I sat down in the straw and stopped cranking. “Give me a second,” I said, dropping the puller. I propped my elbows on my knees, made fists, and rested my head on my knuckles.

“Dammit,” Claxton said. “Jarrett, come run this thing.”

Jarrett rushed over and took the puller. My father and Jarrett ignored me, focusing their attention on the metal and the flesh. I went outside, breathing in the freezing air, and leaned against the pole fence to watch the bovine movements out in the lot. So calm and predictable. Colored blobs chewing cuds in the great white cold.

A bright red diesel pickup arrived. It was the veterinarian, a big man with a gray moustache and knee-high boots that lived a few miles from our place.

“Hello Jerry-boy,” he said. “Where’s the action?”

I nodded to the plywood door, even though he was already headed that way, swinging his med box like a brown paper bag. I followed him inside, hoping my father wouldn’t say anything to me in front of a stranger. Claxton conferred with the cow doctor.

The vet injected the heifer with painkillers. He made an incision, coated the innards with anesthesia, and reapplied the chains.

The vet held up his hands, which were coated in slick lubey goop, and said, “Jarrett, you need a vat of this for all that tail you’re getting on the weekends?”

Jarrett smiled weakly, and my father knelt down and pinched open the heifer’s eyelid and gazed at her eyeball for a time.

“Slicker than snot,” the vet said, pulling out the dead calf in chunks and appendages. He flushed out the residual gunk, zipped her back together, and dosed her with steroids and antibiotics. The mother cow, near death, lay in the straw.

“Good as new,” the vet said, as he wiped his instruments clean on his pant leg.

<>

Finally, the four of us left the barn. Jarrett, the veterinarian, and I all climbed over the fence, but my father, thin as he was, went horizontally between the poles, and then cleaned his hands in the snow. I carried the calf puller to the flatbed.

“Claxton,” the vet said, “why don’t you follow me down to the clinic and I’ll get you the doses you’ll need for next week.”

My father got in his truck and rolled down the window. “You coming with me?”

I looked back at Jarrett, who leaned against the wall of the barn with one boot pressing against it, staring off into the hills.

“What are you doing?” I asked Jarrett.

“Push the herd to the night lot, then go home,” Jarrett said.

“Mind if I stay?” I asked him.

“Why not?” Jarrett said. “Can’t screw anything else up.”

My father, who’d been listening, rolled up his window and followed the vet down the road before I could answer him. I walked over to Jarrett and gave him his phone.

“Sorry it took so long,” I said, “but your mom and dad stopped me.”

“Where’d you see them?” he asked, slipping the cell into his front pocket.

“They just got home from church,” I said. “They sent up some food.”

“Let me guess. Ham.”

“Yep,” I said.

“Fucking ham. You’d think that woman would throw in a roast every now and again.”

We walked back to the truck. Jarrett took a soda and drank. I fished out a sandwich and handed it to him.

“I can’t eat that today,” Jarrett said. “You want it?”

“Not hungry,” I said.

Jarrett took the sandwich and did some terrible looking baseball wind up, kicking his lead leg high and pumping the sandwich behind his head, then hurled the dinner roll and meat as far as he could into the snow.

“Mind handing me my smokes?” Jarrett said.

I went to the truck and brought them to him.

He opened up the pack and then said, “Well, shit. Looks like we got us a damn rat, wouldn’t you say, Jeremiah?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

Jarrett held out the pack. One cigarette ... was filter up, the brown end showing like some oil blotch in a field of paper white. “You tell me,” Jarrett said.

“Well, I,” I started. I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to lie.”

Jarrett’s face turned angry, and I thought he would hit me. I braced myself. Then he cracked up. “Shit,” he said. “Think I care? Fact is, now that you touched it, it’s gonna go stale unless you smoke it.”

I stared into the pack. Sermons from my father and mother rattled around inside me. No, I thought. I’d prepared for this moment. Not even once; not even one.

I took the backwards cigarette and stuck it in my mouth. “Now what?” I asked.

“You shitting kidding?” Jarrett asked.

“Now what?” I repeated.

Jarrett rolled his lighter and held the flame out to me. “Now breathe,” Jarrett said. “It ain’t brain surgery.”

I puffed in and ignited the end in embers and coals. It burned, and I coughed and coughed. Jarrett laughed and swore and slapped his tight jeans.

“Today’s the day,” Jarrett barked. “I can finally die peacefully. Jeremiah-mother-Foster, smoking like a chimney.”

I inhaled again. Sweat beaded along my hairline. I exhaled at Jarrett, who waved through the smoke. I hacked some more, tried to laugh, my eyes tearing.

“Your old man,” Jarrett said. “He can be a dick, can’t he?”

“Your dad treat you like that?” I asked.

“Used to,” Jarrett said. “But he’s not too keen on it anymore.”

“You know,” I said, “I met your family, saw your place. Seemed nice. You and me, we aren’t so different.”

Jarrett tried to blow a ring into the shapeless sky, then flicked the spent butt into the snow. “You know what? My forearms are so goddamn tired feels like I spent all day whacking off a elephant.”

<>

We waited until dusk and then went out to the day lot with a broken bale of hay on the flatbed and drove around until the cows followed us into the night pen.

Jarrett turned on the floodlights while I double-checked the gates, then together we went into the barn and made sure the heifer still lived. She breathed shallowly in the shadows.

“She ain’t three feet from death’s doorstep,” Jarrett said, nudging a hoof with his boot. “Come on, let’s clean up this mess.”

Jarrett took the ribs and leg and the hips, I gathered the backbone and ill-formed head, and we took it all to the burn barrel near the bunkhouse. Jarrett dumped in fuel from a gas jug, and then lit a handful of straw off his cigarette and dropped it in the barrel. Flames jumped out.

“I don’t think it’s going to burn,” I said. “It’s all wet.”

“Well, what else is there to do with it?” Jarrett said as we walked back to the truck, “leave it for Andy or the Mexican boys? Forget that.”

<>

Jarrett drove the truck slowly back to the valley. We traveled mostly in silence. I thought about that cigarette, and even considered asking Jarrett to finish his tree stand story. But Jarrett looked tired and unhappy, annoyed, and I didn’t push the subject. About a mile from my house, Jarrett spoke up.

“I think it’s time I uprooted,” Jarrett announced. “I heard a guy can make a grip of cash roughnecking out in Wyoming.”

“What about your family?” I said. “They seemed nice.”

“They’re all right,” Jarrett said. “Just too close.”

“You got to go someplace to eat Sunday dinner,” I said. “That’s what my dad always says.”

“Your dad ever hear of ramen noodles?” Jarrett said. “Or Taco Bell?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is?” Jarrett asked. We pulled into my driveway and Jarrett parked. “Listen, my family ain’t going nowhere. I know where to find them if I need them.”

“Do they feel the same way?”

“Look at me. I’m just a harelip. What would they miss if I hit the road?”

I nodded, then looked behind me to my house, making sure no one was outside. “Hey. Don’t say anything to the other guys about me smoking, okay?”

Jarrett got into his own pickup and started it. “Jeremiah, I’m like a bear trap. Skull and crossbones and daggers and all that shit. I won’t tell a soul.” He grunted goodbye and left.

I walked towards the house. Below zero, for sure, by now. I bent down and took snow in my hands and scrubbed them together. Jarrett hit the highway, the exhaust pipes of his truck popping like gunshots.

In the garage, I stripped off my boots and jeans, caked with barn straw and manure and afterbirth, hung my sweatshirt on the pegs by the back door, and went inside. In the laundry room, I pulled on an old blue robe, then went into the kitchen. I heard mom somewhere in the back of the house, the other kids downstairs. Dad stood at the sink, a plate of food in his hands. He ate and looked out the window.

“Your mother saved you some dinner,” my father said, nodding down to a plate covered with tin foil. Mom usually did this every Sunday for dad, who rarely made it home from his church meetings to eat with us. She’d dish up a plate and mark the foil with a CLAX. The foil from dad’s plate lay crumpled on the counter.

“How’s she doing up there?” Claxton asked.

“She’s breathing,” I said.

“Cows go in okay?”

“Yes sir.”

My father scraped clean his plate. “What do you think of that Jarrett Buckett?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think of him?”

Dad set his plate in the empty sink. “I wish he had a head on his shoulders, that’s for sure. The plight of the cowboy, I guess.”

“You’re not going to fire him, are you?”

“Listen son,” my father said. “The truth about people like Jarrett is that they don’t last, wherever they go.” He paused as if to say more, then walked out of the kitchen.

I unrolled the crinkled foil left from my father’s plate and found that my mother had written JERRY-BOY across the top. Dad had eaten my food. I opened up his plate—CLAX as prominent and evident as a banner—and held it up to my face and sniffed. Mashed potatoes, corn, roast beef, all of it soaked in gravy. Our typical Sunday meal. But as I breathed, I smelled my hands, still covered with that wet dead stench from the calf, and a faint hint of blue tobacco smoke laced beneath. I couldn’t eat this, not today, maybe not ever again. I scraped the food into the garbage can, washed and dried the plate, and went to the basement to shower.

In the stall, I turned on water as hot as I could stand. Why had dad eaten my food? Because of him, a fierce emptiness ached in my gut. I took the pumice stone and scrubbed my hands and forearms and ankles and thighs and the goop beneath my fingernails and the tops of my feet and my cigarette fingers until my body glowed pink and tender, until my skin looked like it belonged to someone else.