by Callan Wink
“What?”
“I can say this because I recognize my symptoms in you. You and I, we have a capacity for work, dedication, all that. It’s just that we suffer from the diffusion of desire.”
“I have a lot of things I want to do.”
“I understand. And we should do something before you move to Alaska or New Zealand or Korea. We should go to Montana, do a little fishing. Maybe we’ll take a day and look at some land.”
—
After the brochures, the rest of the papers in my father’s desk were inscrutably impersonal. He had a whole drawer full of receipts for gas, lunches, and travel expenses. He had another drawer full of warranty statements for every appliance in the house dating back to the first microwave he and my mother ever purchased in 1979.
I ended up just throwing everything away, brochures and all, and sitting in his chair with my feet on his desk. I thought about how you could tell a house was empty, even a big house like this one, just by how it feels when you’re quiet. A house can give a sense of emptiness that moves beyond mere silence. It’s a hollowness. You can be more alone in an empty house than anywhere on earth. And now, the house was mine—all the stuff and all the absence, the empty dark matter between the stuff. I realized for the first time what it must have been like for my father here, and this, too, was something I’d inherited—a newfound awareness that nothing amplifies the emptiness of a place like ownership.
I got up from the desk and went to the gun cabinet, opening the door on the neatly aligned regiment of English and Italian shotguns. I ran my fingers over the blued barrels, the glossy hardwood stocks. The Purdey was there, the one I’d tried to pawn all those years ago. I took it out and swung it like I was following a low-incoming grouse. I sighted down the barrel at the Tiffany lamp on my father’s desk. I broke the gun open, and smelled the tang of Hoppe’s 9 oil. I snapped it shut and the barrel reseated with a satisfying click. I stuffed some shells in my pocket, and headed out to the woods behind the house.
IN HINDSIGHT
I
1.
Lauren followed the drag mark for a mile down the gravel road and then another half a mile down her dusty driveway—and then parked her truck and cried. The bastard had shot one of her steers—of which she had six, red Texas longhorns—and dragged it down the road by its neck and deposited it here for her to find, practically on her front step.
She’d gotten her taxes done that day at the free tax preparation kiosk in the County Market. Lauren hadn’t filed a tax return since Manuel died, two years before. She wouldn’t have this year either, but she was in the store and had just gotten her mail and she had the W-2 forms in her pocket, and thought, what the hell? It was free. As it turned out, she had almost one thousand dollars coming to her as a refund. Manuel’s death had put her in some sort of different tax bracket.
She’d left with her groceries and was feeling pretty good all the way home. And then, the drag marks. None of the cattle were to be seen except for the dead one. Its tongue hung from its mouth. Its eyes were open and skimmed with white. Its neck was twisted strangely and one of its horn points was buried in the dirt. That was what had made the groove all the way down her road. The poor animal’s beautiful, ivory-colored horn scraping through the dirt as he dragged it to her doorstep.
Lauren wiped at her eyes with her shirtsleeve and got out of her truck and sat on the animal’s massive flank and cried some more. And then she wiped her eyes on the other sleeve of her shirt, opened the back door to let her dogs out, and went to track down the rest of her cattle.
There was a section of fence down, and she followed the tracks leading through the gap—and there they were, just over the first rise, on the vacant lot next to hers where there was a small creek and the grass was tall and green. They watched her approach, and she talked to them like she always did. She didn’t have names for them. She called them all Red.
“Hey there, Red. You goddamn Reds. Let’s go now.” She was behind them, waving her arms and hazing them back toward the fence. With some reluctance, they left the creek bottom and trudged in single file to their own rocky pasture. Lauren twisted the wire fence-ends back together. It had already broken once, and her mend had failed—and so she pulled the wire a little tighter to overlap the ends and then twisted. Fixing the fix. The definition of insanity was continuing to fix the fix.
Her dogs sat and watched her work, two small brown mutts of indeterminate breed. They’d shown up together a few years back and decided they would stay. They were two neutered males and they seemed to be good friends, old traveling companions. She’d named them as a unit, not separately, because they were never apart. Elton John. That was their name.
—
With the cattle back in the pasture, she stood and looked some more at the dead steer. She pulled on one side of its horns to get its head straightened so its neck wasn’t in such a gruesome position. It was getting close to dark, and she thought about driving down to Jason’s house. He had a big German shepherd that he let roam and it was pure black and didn’t ever bark, just growled, a wet rumbling deep in its chest. She didn’t like that dog and she didn’t like Jason and Jason didn’t like her and she knew damn well it was him who’d shot and dragged her steer. She didn’t want to go down there because it was dark. She didn’t want to go down there at all, really. But, she was going to make herself go down there, because a dead steer was not just something a person could turn a blind eye to. She wasn’t going to go down there now, though. She’d wait until morning and then she would do it.
She called in Elton John and fed them and put out two bowls for the cats. She heated up soup for herself and crushed half a bag of saltines into it and ate standing over the kitchen sink looking out the window into the dark, thinking alternately about her dead steer and her one-thousand-dollar tax refund. That’s how it had always gone for her, her whole life, one fortuitous turn of events followed by equal or greater amounts of heartache and tragedy. Her life was one of those electronic poker machines, rigged for the house. Feed you enough sugar to keep your hopes alive and then crush-crush-crush; a little more sugar, and then, crush some more. Elton John sat and looked at her expectantly. She put her soup bowl down and they licked it, each on separate sides, noses nearly touching. Now she wished she had just gone right down to Jason’s and confronted him first off. She would think about it all night long and wouldn’t sleep at all.
—
She and Manuel had been married for only two years. They hadn’t been particularly good years. But, during that time, her life had been occupied by another person. There was something to be said for that, even if that other person was just Manny, wheelchair bound toward the end—and mean, even at the beginning. Since Manny’s passing, she’d filled her life with the animals. She had the cattle, a miniature pony, three hogs, three Nubian goats, two peacocks, Elton John, two alpacas, several cats who existed as cats tend to do, on the periphery, and an ever-changing number of chickens.
She cared greatly for the animals, but sometimes she missed a weight on the mattress next to her at night. There were times when the sound of her cattle muttering in the yard and the snoring of Elton John wasn’t enough to make her fall asleep.
—
She did her chores in the early morning gray. It was the weekend, and she didn’t have to go to work. She was a custodian at the high school in town, a job she neither liked nor hated. It was just what she did for a set number of hours a week to feed her animals.
She tried to avoid the red mound of the steer on her front lawn but she had to scatter feed for the chickens, and as she walked by the dead animal she saw that something, a magpie probably, had pecked out an eye. The hole yawned at her. She went back inside and climbed into her bed and pulled the covers over her head.
—
Lauren had ten acres of land upon which grew not a single tree. At some distant time, it had been a riverbed, and her pasture was cobbled river rock sparsely covered with grass. When the wind
blew, great swirling clouds of dust rose and sifted into her house forming deltas of grit under the doorways. There wasn’t enough forage for the cattle, so even in the summer she had to buy hay.
The land and the small house that sat upon it had been left to her by Manuel. It was half of a twenty-acre plot, the other ten acres belonged to Jason, Manuel’s son from his first marriage. Jason worked at the Stillwater mine and was gone for long periods of time. He had a trailer house on his section and a jeep up on blocks. When Lauren hadn’t seen any sign of his presence for a while, her hopes would rise slightly and she would think fondly about explosions, tunnel collapses, equipment failures, and then when eventually he returned and she saw his truck parked and that evil-looking shepherd dog stalking around in the burdock, she’d feel vaguely ill, as if he were the returning symptom of some chronic disease.
Jason begrudged her the land Manny had left to her. He and Manny, the way it often is with father and sons, had hated each other every day of their adult lives and toward the end didn’t speak for months. That much hate takes almost as much work as love and, in the end, the two might be nearly indistinguishable. With that in mind, she tried not to hate Jason. She just wished he didn’t exist.
She lay in bed until nearly noon when Elton John’s whining at the door forced her to move. She let the dogs out and watched them sniff around the dead steer. After a while, still in her flannel pajamas, she put on her boots and went to the shed. She rummaged around and found a length of chain and a flat nylon tow strap. There was a large greasy rag on the workbench and she grabbed that as well. She pulled on her gloves and with the rag covering the steer’s head—its gaping, vacant eye-socket—she looped the chain around its neck, snugging it up behind the horns. After hooking the tow strap to the chain, she secured the other end around the hitch on her truck. She opened the door for Elton John and they jumped in and sat next to her on the bench seat.
She drove slowly, looking behind her once, to make sure the steer was hooked up tight, but not looking again because she hated the way the steer’s neck stretched under the chain and the way its legs crossed all akimbo and its tongue lolled in the dirt like a huge pink mollusk pulled from its shell.
A half a mile down the road, she turned off and drove to the edge of a coulee that ran through a section of fallow pasture. She didn’t know who owned the land but there was a real estate sign at the corner of the property. She’d heard that the piece had been subdivided but as far as she knew not a single plot had sold. She drove parallel to the coulee, as close as she dared, until the steer swung in behind. She stopped and let Elton John out. They stayed close, raising their legs occasionally on clumps of sagebrush. She’d brought a piece of two-by-four, and, with a rock as a fulcrum, set to work levering the huge animal off the edge of the coulee. The wind was up, as usual, and she had grit in her teeth. The animal was as obstinate in death as it had been in life. She was grudgingly appreciative of this quality. When it went, it went slowly as a sinking ship, hindquarters first. It landed in the sand, some six feet below, with a wet thud she could feel through the soles of her boots.
It was early evening now. Spring, according to the calendar, but the wind still carried with it an edge of snow, and she was headed down to have it out with Jason right then and there. Still in her damn pajamas with her barn coat over them.
As she drove by her place and saw the drifts of wind-driven dust rising from the pasture, she had an idea. She pulled her truck around and sat visualizing the way it would look. Trees. Her tax return. A whole line of them planted close together, some kind of hardy pine. A shelterbelt. She grew excited and went inside and spent an hour making drawings on yellow legal pads. She drew her house, and then a series of different tree placement configurations. She found a number for a nursery. By that time it was dark and she had to do her evening chores.
—
She stood on her porch just after dawn and watched six turkey vultures spiral through a thermal, their wings motionless. The crows and ravens had shown up as well. She could hear them, a dark flock rising and settling in the coulee, black as dumped coffee grounds against the backdrop of dried grass. She thought maybe she should have shoveled some dirt over the carcass, but then again, maybe this was better. A Buddhist funeral. She’d heard this was how the Tibetans did it.
Yesterday, the sight of the birds feeding on her steer would have debilitated her, but today things seemed better. A project was all a person really needed in the world to keep her going. A task, a goal, a pursuit, an objective: these had always been truer husbands to her than Manny or even her animals. And who was to say, maybe Manny and her menagerie were just variations on the same theme. Do a job, and lose yourself in the doing of it. Animals were guarantors of perpetual tasks. A man like Manny, even more so.
She did her morning chores and thought about trees. Elton John followed her around as they always did, respectfully sniffing the chickens, steering clear of the cattle, engaging in mock standoffs with the cats.
When the pigs had been slopped and eggs gathered and feed tossed to the chickens, Lauren walked her property boundary. The wind came predominately from the east, and she stood leaning on a shovel imagining the way it would look. A border of trees, close planted so their branches intermingled into a net that would catch the wind and bring it to the ground. She could hear how it would sound, the wind screaming into the trees, the branches fringed with soft needles opening like welcoming arms, smothering, softening, subduing so she could stand on the leeward side, her hair barely tousled. She wanted the trees now. She wanted them ten years ago. To plant a tree one had to be fairly certain that one was going to be around long enough to eventually enjoy it. Otherwise, planting a tree was—what? A symbolic ritual? A gift to a future generation, one that probably wouldn’t give a damn about you in the first place? To hell with that. If Lauren was going to plant a tree, she was going to reap the benefits. After she was gone, the world could do what it wanted. She needed trees that grew fast.
—
The cattle got out again. Lauren was making herself and Elton John lunch and she saw a red rump walk by her kitchen window. She put down her sandwich and went out to scream and plead the cattle back into their enclosure. They’d broken through the fence, a different spot this time. One of her mismatched poles had just been pushed over. Probably, the animal had been scratching itself and unwittingly knocked it down. Still, she was worried about this. Two escapes in one week. The fence was flimsy, that was true, but it wasn’t the physical fence that kept the cattle in anyway, it was the idea of the fence. She had to wonder if maybe the cattle had come to believe less and less in the magic of the wire. She reseated the toppled post and stacked rocks around its base. The cattle watched her balefully. She tried to read their blank eyes for signs of insurgence.
—
She didn’t go speak to Jason. She was in a good mood and figured that they were hard enough to come by so she shouldn’t ruin it. That night, she heard coyotes howling down in the coulee. Elton John whined to go out early. It was still dark. She rose and opened the door for them. They filed out like normal and set to their routine sniffing of the yard. She went back to bed. When she woke several hours later to start her chores, Elton John weren’t at the door. They weren’t in the yard either. She never saw them again.
She blamed herself. She never should have let them out with coyotes around that close to the house. She blamed Jason, for shooting the steer that brought the damn coyotes in the first place. She blamed Manny for dying and leaving her alone. She called in sick for work and spent a morning driving all the back roads calling their name.
—
It was a full moon, fat as a tick stuck to midnight’s flank. The coyotes worshipped it faithfully. They made their home in the coulee for a week and she could hear the snapping and popping of their teeth. If she had owned a gun, she would have left the coulee littered with their corpses. If she had a gun, she would have gone down and shot Jason and his black dog. If she had a gu
n, maybe she would have sat down on her couch and never gotten up from it again.
—
Her refund check came. She ordered her trees, two dozen blue spruces, and spent a weekend with a pick and shovel digging holes. Two dozen pits, neatly spaced, with the piles of dirt and rock next to them, like little graves awaiting occupants. At night, she had long conversations with Jason during which she showed him the error of his ways in a multitude of devastatingly articulated reproaches. She didn’t go down there and actually face him though, and each day that passed it seemed less likely that she would.
—
The trees came. Much of her excitement was gone but she planted them carefully, tamping the loose dirt around the roots, sinking them deep so the wind wouldn’t blow them over. She spent a whole afternoon watering each one of them in turn, standing with the hose, looking out over the backs of her cattle, to the mountains that hunched white and silent over the valley. The trees were small. She had no idea they would be so expensive. To get the number she wanted she had to settle on spruces that were only slightly larger than seedlings. When planted, her shelterbelt, her brilliant idea, only came to just above her knees. The trees themselves seemed fragile. She wondered if she should have used her money in some other more responsible way. That one thousand dollars would have bought a lot of feed. She watched the trees pitch and blow with the wind, the strong gusts nearly laying them flat.
—
It was early summer now. Lauren watered the trees every morning before she left for work. She watered them again in the evening. They all seemed to have taken root just fine. She sometimes plucked a green needle from a tree and chewed it as she did her chores. She liked the taste of pine. It was astringent and clean. It seemed like she’d had a bad taste in her mouth for as long as she could remember.