By SHANE CASTLE
Laughlin learned to hear on the hobby farm in Montana. One late afternoon, the summer he and Cassie bought the five hillside acres outside Helena, he was setting wood posts for the new corral when he heard a sound among the ponderosas toward the top of their property. It was like nothing he’d heard before. He walked up the drive toward it. A breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, and he heard it again and imagined some kind of Mylar weather balloon, blown off course, deflated, stuck in a tree. That’s what the sound was like: someone blowing a taut edge. He remembered being a kid, his family visiting Meema and Peepa at their old place on Animas Creek. He remembered Peepa teaching him and his little brother, Tyler, to blow blades of grass like kazoos. Laughlin looked and looked but found nothing. He walked a while among the tall ponderosas, at times certain he was right under it, only to look up and see nothing, and it went on this way until that moment when dusk turned to dark, when, abruptly, the sound stopped.
A couple days later, when he got home from work late, he heard it again, only this time he looked even higher and actually saw something: a bird, mid-dive. He watched it rise and dive again and heard the strange Mylar sound and wondered how a bird could make it. He got on the computer, typed in bird diving strange sound. That’s how he learned about nighthawks. That evening, he told Cassie all about the males’ mating “boom,” how to identify them by their erratic flight patterns, the white bands on their wings. From then on, he heard nighthawks diving for bugs all during the warmer months, and sometimes saw them, too.
Laughlin didn’t mention the part about the balloon to Cassie. Ignorance shamed him, always had. He was always feigning familiarity with new places, imagining skills he didn’t have. He wasn’t sure why his mind had conjured weather balloons, or why he’d think they were made of Mylar—or, for that matter, what Mylar was. He thought maybe party balloons, or those crinkly silver emergency blankets, but wasn’t sure he was right. So, he looked this up on the internet, too. That’s how he learned in school and now on the farm. They weren’t from the country, and it’s how he learned to set wooden fence posts by hand that first spring and what kind of nails to use to hang the treated rails: sixty-penny ring shanks. It’s how he’d learned to garden organically and stake tomatoes and make beer and care for a flock of secondhand chickens and reroof a derelict shed and raise a pole barn for the animals she insisted they get, a couple old last-chance horses and a miniature donkey, Beatrix. And it worked pretty well, too. Right up until it didn’t.
Two summers into their time on the farm, which would turn out to be their last years together, Laughlin came home early from work—he had an important-sounding title, but all he did was organize health screenings for companies, nonprofits, schools—and found Cassie in bed with the dogs and one of the cats, watching a documentary about the Holocaust on her phone. Right away, he knew. If she was into the genocides again, she was sliding into another depression. He asked about her day. The lawyers she worked for were lining up expert witnesses to challenge a mine permit, nothing but calls and emails all day. About like his day, he said, then went to the refrigerator, poured a Hefeweizen from one of the growlers. He asked if she wanted to walk the dogs. She said okay, but he could tell she didn’t. He told her it was fine and called them to the door, and they went for a walk around the property.
They’d crossed the drive and started into the trees on the game trail beside the big juniper, Hodge bolting ahead of Lemon, not after anything, just to stretch out and run. Laughlin crunched through the thick mat of pine needles, down into the dip where the stand of ponderosas was thickest, and took another sip of his beer. That’s when he heard—what was it? At first, it was just a subtle shift in the ambience, a primal tingling, as if he’d felt someone was there who shouldn’t be. Then he recognized it for an absence—no, the absence of silence—a something. He would look back years later and remember it as a sub-rosa gnawing that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, so that, for a moment, he actually wondered if the sound was coming from inside him, like he’d awakened himself, grinding his teeth in a dream.
Beetles. It was beetles, pine-bark beetles—thousands, maybe millions, gnawing their way through the brittle red bark of his trees. No, he said as if to someone.
Already, it was too late. Nothing could save them, but he ran around in a panic for ten minutes, looking at the small black beetles burrowing into the bark, leaving tiny piles of red shavings around burrow holes, not falling away—even gravity was sideways and wrong. Where beetles had already made it through, globs of sticky pitch bubbled out of holes to shove them out, but he could see the static defenses of the trees were already overwhelmed: for every milky glob of pitch that had pushed a beetle out and swallowed it, hundreds bubbled up out of the bark without stopping anything, so that the trees all around were oozing. A message written in boils. The earth’s cipher, ancient and unambiguous.
Driving, Laughlin had seen the swaths of forest between Helena and Butte gone gray and dead. He had read in the paper that it was coming. Millions of acres in southern Colorado, a couple-hour drive from where he’d graduated from high school in New Mexico, had already been wiped out. An expert said it was drought due to climate change. Trees suffered, beetles thrived, swarms multiplying exponentially. Each infested tree meant seven times as many next year and so on. Laughlin had hoped it wouldn’t reach this far, but here it was. All the trees would die. Fire would sweep through, torch the house, the barn, the corrals he’d worked so hard to raise, the lovely chicken coop with the glass-brick windows that he and Cassie had made together one weekend, blackening the land, scorching it sterile, driving them away. Or, worse, taking only the trees, leaving them in a house on top of a bald hill in the parched Scratchgravels. Might as well be Mars.
In his panic, he ran around with a roll of twine, marking affected trees: of the five acres, a little over one. He tried telling himself they were lucky it hadn’t been more, but he’d grown up in houses on small lots in medium-sized towns and lived in apartments in midsized cities during college, so even six years in, an acre still seemed an impossibly large piece of land. He returned to the house. He wasn’t going to compound Cassie’s problems with this, not yet, not until he had a full grasp on the situation and his response. He thought she might still be in bed, but she was up making coffee, reading something on her phone. He hadn’t even told her, but already she looked like the biomass of an entire dead forest weighed on her.
He could still hear the beetles, practically feel them inside the cavity of him, gnawing through nerve endings. He didn’t have time to get her there. She depressed the plunger on the press, asked if he wanted some. He didn’t have time. She poured herself a cup, returned to reading whatever she was reading. He went online in the living room, searched pine bark beetles prevention and deleted prevention and added containment. He found something from a Forest Service employee who’d given a talk. Before he told Cassie, he wanted to have a plan.
But it turned out she knew about it already, more than him. The law firm where she worked had been fighting the Forest Service over logging permits they claimed would reduce fire danger even though evidence didn’t necessarily support that. Trees would dry out, insides becoming marbled with blue, a fungus. This he already knew. He’d bought some lumber with the blue streaks to make the bookshelf in the hallway, but he could never afford enough books to fill all the shelves from all the wood he would have now. He told her some people were mitigating the impacts by cutting down affected trees, sawing them into chunks, covering them with clear plastic sheeting, burying the edges with dirt, trapping the larvae, starving, cooking.
But he didn’t have a chainsaw, not one good enough for a job this big. They didn’t have the money after everything else they’d shelled out for in the past couple years, but what choice did he have?
Want me to come? she asked.
You don’t need to.
She neither nodded nor didn’t nod. He looked at her another moment and went. By the time he got back, it was dusk. The neighbors’ peacocks were calling out their good nights, echoing through the coulees. It was too late to start sawing now, but he had his chainsaw, two extra chains, a chain sharpener, blaze-orange chaps, gloves, ear protection, and—from the hardware store—three huge sheets of ten-mil clear plastic. The dogs rushed him at the door, and he heard Cassie call from the bathroom: Back here!
He set his armload on the mat and went through their bedroom to the bathroom door. Inside, a tinny, British voice, something about Eichmann.
He tapped the door twice with a knuckle.
You can come in.
She paused her podcast.
He sat on the edge of the tub, told her not to ask how much it all cost. She didn’t. He didn’t know what he’d expected while he was gone, what miracle transformation, but what he saw was capitulation. Already he’d been wondering if any of this would be worth it. Maybe he ought to just return the stuff. But seeing her this way, so flat? She wasn’t giving him anything. Sure, he’d read about depression. People couldn’t will themselves out of it. The parts didn’t connect or exist or whatever. But come on. Maybe something? He told her he guessed he was calling in tomorrow.
Should I? she asked.
She’d already asked some version of this question three times this evening, and he couldn’t tell for sure if it was a Can I please pass? or a Do you want me near you? The answer to both was Seriously? but it would take too much effort to explain, and she’d just keep looking flatly at him. Just below her breasts, her body seemed to come offset, for the refraction, like two pieces of a centerfold badly taped together. Better in an office than tearing apart their land.
I think I’ve got it, he said.
Your call.
Laughlin hadn’t thought it was his alone, but of course it was. Anyway, that’s how it was going to be. He reached out and patted the crown of her head. He left the bathroom and, as soon as he shut the door, heard the British voice resume: something something sickening efficiency.
He’d never cut down a large tree before, but he got up at six and saw Cassie off to work, then sat at the table drinking coffee, watching YouTube tutorials. His first cuts were tentative, but the learning was quick. Halfway through the day he felt, if not good, then at least competent. He got the trees to fall almost where he intended every time. Each time he felled another, he’d limb it, loop a cable around the thickest part, drag the log out of the copse with Cassie’s truck and up the drive. Up top, on the big, level area by the aluminum hay shed, he sawed the log into six-foot chunks and heaved them up in a stack. He gulped water or coffee and headed back down the hill to start the process all over again.
When all was said and done, Laughlin would cut down fifty-two trees, including two old ponderosas with trunks so big he couldn’t wrap his arms around, lower limbs big around as his waist—at least 155 rings for the larger of the two. But that first day, cautious and slow, he managed only six trees.
He wore the bulky hearing protectors while he sawed, but the high whine cut through, dull, muffled, like voices through a thick wall, or down through the water of the lake. It was hot out, and the thought of the cool water stuck with him all day. After Cassie got home, he asked if she wanted to go for a swim with him.
Not really, but thanks.
This was no surprise. Lake water worried her. One of the attorneys she worked for had this sister down in Texas representing a client whose kid had gone tubing in a river and died of some kind of amoeba that started devouring his brain. Laughlin told her the water was better here, and she looked at him like he was stupid, reminded him of the mine tailings. Not to mention the whole lake of poison over in Butte. Thousands of snow geese floating dead in the rusty water.
Yeah, that, he said. But water’s not all dead white geese.
He filled a travel mug with an amber he’d made with hops from a guy in Missoula, drove over to Spring Meadow Lake to swim back and forth a few times to heal his muscles and cool off. He dove down through the bands of colder and colder water, in the darkest of which he saw a snapping turtle stir up some muck. When he returned to the surface, his ears popped, and he swore he could hear the sky.
The next day he was back at it, and the next. He got used to the splintering and the final crack before the fall. The work was brutal, but within a week all the infested trees were stacked in three long piles almost as tall as he was, covered in plastic, dirt mounded down the edges. He stood on the level spot where they parked their vehicles, looking over his work. There were still trees, ponderosas the size of his thigh or smaller, that the beetles hadn’t bothered with, as well as some small Scotch pines, junipers, two firs, clumps of sage, and stumps, so many stumps, piles of limbs he’d have to wait for winter to burn, and any number of new paths, scrapes, gouges where he’d dragged the logs through. No birds were singing. There’d been a couple robin’s nests among the boughs, and old blue eggshells.
As evening came on, he walked over and stood on the deck, looking out over the valley. It was very peaceful now, in the absence of the saw. He took off his gloves, set them on the bench, removed his chaps, put them on top of the gloves. He was right in front of the window and thought he heard Cassie behind him in the kitchen. He bent over at the waist to stretch his back, his lower vertebrae popping, a dull thud deep inside, bone against wet bone. When he stood again, he felt two inches taller.
Then the dogs clattered up the steps onto the deck, and then there was a clanking, and he looked along the house to see Cassie coming with an empty five-gallon water bucket, which she set under the corner of the deck closest to the hydrant for next time. He’d been sure he’d felt her watching inside, so what had it been? He turned to see. A hornet was walking up the inner pane of glass.
He turned back. She smiled that closed-lip smile, the one she used for pictures she didn’t want to be taken. Which was all of them.
All done?
All done.
The donkey brayed down the hill, demanding dinner, and he laughed, though he no longer found the absurd calamity of her demands funny.
Hold on! he called.
They sat on the bench, looking out over the valley. He hadn’t thought about the view in a while, but it still blew him away: from the Divide, sweeping down to the city, across the plains, to the Elkhorn Mountains. He’d tried to take pictures to capture it, but none quite got it, how far it went, how many colors, golds, greens, mountains of indigo and some days violet. A long train chugged silently across the valley below.
The neighbors next door, Cliff and Leanne, said this had been part of a massive sheep farm back in the day, before they’d moved here in the seventies. No one settled on hilltops way back when. Theirs was a beautiful view, but the nearest surface water was three miles away, a small creek that would nearly dry up come August. Their view was of the land the farmers would have wanted way back, a symptom, really—the breathtaking consolation of sprawl.
Cassie was fidgeting with her fingers again. Everybody got bored sometimes, but she was constantly fidgeting, popping her knuckles, playing a game on her phone, something. He took her hand, held it still, trying to look past the newly scarred part of their land, out and out. The sun was low in the sky, the light softer. With the evening light and blurring his eyes a little, the property didn’t look too bad. He could almost imagine it had always been this way, that in truth they’d arrived in its ascendance. He was overtaken by a tremendous sympathy for the land.
He released her fingers, stroked her back through the thin cotton of her tank top. The lean muscle of her back. The clasp of her bra. The wisps of hair on the back of her neck. He turned to kiss her. She didn’t move away, but neither did she kiss him. She went still, and when he pulled back, she laughed like he had at the donkey. He laced his fingers with hers, more to stop her from fidgeting than to connect, looked out for a while longer, said he thought he might go for a swim.
What’s wrong? she sighed.
Just worn out.
If you’re going, could you run by the store?
Sure. What for?
Oat milk? A couple other things?
He was looking at the top of the nearest hill, as if something might come over, a dog, a person, a deer. His eyes trailed along, down into the coulee by the trashy neighbors’ place. He’d been blinding himself, but now that he was done, it struck him with the full weight of reality. He wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.
If the neighbors do nothing, he said, trailing off.
She sighed again.
It affects you, too.
Believe me, I know.
What’s that supposed to mean?
He looked out at the rest of the pines on their property, the pines on the neighbors’ properties, the big hill beyond Cliff and Leanne’s with its pines, and the valley, and the small city with its tiny-huge cathedral and Shriner minaret, and mountains beyond, and pines and pines and pines. A nighthawk dove high above but didn’t make a sound. It reminded him of her. Not making a fuss, not saying a word. Lying in bed. Listening to shows about genocide. Worrying about fucking oat milk when the world’s about to burn down to black dirt. He didn’t say any of this.
She stood, and he felt bad.
Don’t go.
The dryer, she said.
Sorry. It’s just….
She stopped, touched the door frame.
I don’t know what you want from me, she said.
You were supposedly so into all of this.
All what?
He gestured to the land, the animals, the vista—all of it.
You didn’t exactly put up a fight, she said.
Maybe not, but I didn’t ask for….
He was thinking of her detachment—from what was happening to the trees, even from the accumulating animals, of which Beatrix was only the most recent. The donkey’s wild braying. The way it echoed. A manifestation of the deepest, direst need imaginable, and she’d decided for them that they were going to hear it several times a day for however long.
What? she said.
Maybe you could try.
To not have depression? she snapped. Okay.
She went inside, and he sat a couple minutes more, looking out. All the layers, the hills, the mountains, the sky had flattened into a single layer. He reached out and tried to poke his finger through it and, when that didn’t work, he drove alone to the lake.
After work for the next few days, Laughlin talked to neighbors, finding out how hard their trees had been hit, telling them what he’d learned. It seemed a simple enough proposition: cut down infested trees, cover them to stop the exponential spread. Some said it wasn’t too bad. Just an infected tree or two. He tried to explain how two became fourteen the next year and fourteen became ninety-eight the next. He brought data. They said they’d heard a cold winter would kill them, and they were due. Was it guaranteed? Others believed some trees would survive. They didn’t care what so-and-so from the damn Forest Service had to say on the matter.
Others said they’d get on it, but when and how? Among these were Cliff and Leanne, whose property adjoined theirs and whose trees were most definitely infested. Laughlin had walked the property line. Cliff lived his entire life between his La-Z-Boy, his wheelchair, and the conversion van he still drove to town once or twice a week. Leanne could hardly walk a few steps to her garden, where she had to lean on her tall garden boxes to catch her breath. One of their kids lived down in Belgrade, another in Boise. Cliff said thanks, but they didn’t need charity.
Patricia, the ancient lady down the way, said her son could do the work, but her son would never come.
Over beers, Michael, the old hippie ironworker in the corner cabin at the base of the hill, gave Laughlin a knowing look and said mystically, Gaia’s got her ways.
Clink. End of conversation.
A couple people did accept some help, but the properties were pretty far apart, too far to make any difference. Laughlin busted his ass over three brutally hot weekends in August. He knew what an aerial map would show: three thumbprints of treated properties in a forest that basically stretched to Mexico. Cassie’s depression usually ebbed and flowed. This one only ebbed, week upon week, the rest of summer. She was going to therapy again, and her therapist prescribed a couple things that seemed to keep the lows from being quite so low, but also dulled the highs, which for her were never all that high to begin with. He knew what he was avoiding, but he allowed himself. There were just so many beetles, so many they could envelop their home, their property, swallow all the properties hereabouts, an enormous black chancre covering the hillside, all the hills to the Divide, the mountains, everything.
Then, one Saturday morning in early September, he looked out the kitchen window to see an ambulance down below, backed up to Cliff and Leanne’s door. It was quiet enough in the house, or else his voice was foreign enough that, when he said Shit, the dogs came tearing into the kitchen, barking.
What is it? Cassie called from the bedroom, her voice panicked, startled out of a dream.
There’s an ambulance at Cliff and Leanne’s.
Oh, she said. Oh.
I’m going down, he said.
He cut through the part of the property where he’d cut down the trees, climbed the rail into the corral where they kept Lulu and Beatrix, their oldest horse and the little donkey. Beatrix thought it was breakfast time and brayed that first long morning bray. As he went past, she trotted over, and he told her to hold on, that breakfast was on its way. She was gray with a black cross down her neck and shoulders. He liked to touch the cross, and as he went past he reached out to do so now, but she pinned her ears back, like she might bite, did one of her tight little turns, pitched away in the dust.
He went to the far fence abutting the neighbors’ drive and saw a couple EMTs carting a body out on a gurney, obviously Leanne’s. They were in no hurry now.
Laughlin didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. They didn’t know their neighbors well, had talked over the fence, been over for dinner once. She’d made a casserole, slices of yellow squash with cheese melted over the top, buttery rolls. She’d seemed a nice enough lady, polite, loved talking over the fence about gardens and hummingbirds, but when they’d met her granddaughter, up visiting once a couple years back, the granddaughter had laughed.
Yeah, nice, she’d said. Flicked a cigarette butt in my face when I was like eight.
There were good reasons some people didn’t have kids or grandkids, Laughlin and Cassie among them. The state of the world. The carbon footprint of your typical American. Her depression. His anxiety. And then all the real reasons, like not caring, like not thinking about it, like the echo in the cavern of the self that had always been whispering No before the question was even asked. Maybe if it accidentally happened, you could overcome all of this with a simple life and love and openness, but who could ever know for sure? No one thinks they’ll flick a cigarette in a kid’s face, but life takes its turns.
One of the EMTs closed the doors, noticed Laughlin leaning on the fence, shrugged sympathetically. Laughlin imagined this happening to them: Cassie being carted away from their place, down the hill, watching as the red taillights disappeared and the dust settled, and the sun set and rose and set. He could see the EMTs, the gurney, the ambulance, the oven accepting her rigid body, the fire that consumed her. He turned away, looked up the line of the fence running between properties. You didn’t even need the fence to see the line. There were more trees on Cliff’s side, but the needles were yellow and a burnt orange, and some had already begun falling off. This time next year, all the rest of the trees on his property would look like that, and the ones he was looking at now would be bare and gray. Eventually, a gust of wind would topple them one at a time down the line.
They attended the funeral at the Lutheran church on this side of town and drove in the procession to the burial at the military base. Cliff, they learned, had been in the Navy. On the way, they found themselves in their little white Honda, wedged between several black and other darkly colored SUVs.
Looks like we’re being escorted to a cell, Cassie commented.
At the burial plot, a young pastor—too young, still a boy, really—tried to drum up emotion among the small crowd, but it was obvious he didn’t know the first thing about death, about anything, even her name, since he called her Luanne until someone corrected him. They wanted to bolt home as soon as the service was over, but the way the military liaison made everyone park meant they had to wait their turn in the procession, which meant driving out the same way they’d come in, stuck between the dark SUVs and the drivers in dark glasses, miles home, all the way to the fork in their hard-packed road where Laughlin and Cassie turned up their hill and everyone else continued to Cliff’s property, for the wake.
That night, Laughlin had a horrible, portentous dream. In it, he didn’t know what, but something was coming for them, and soon. He’d barricaded the house and fallen back onto the deck, overlooking the neighborhood and the wide gold valley and hazy indigo mountains beyond. And soon enough, they came. Several black SUVs, trundling up the dirt road, no friendly procession, but an onslaught, mercenaries of what force he wasn’t sure. What he did know was they were coming to take it all away. From below on the dirt road, they opened fire. Wood splintered along the face of their home. The front windows shattered. Laughlin looked at his hands and found a rifle. He sighted them in. Fired a shot. He worked the bolt, fired another. His aim was true both times. Nothing happened. Like his bullets were made of air. Cassie was behind him in the kitchen. Sitting at the table beside the big window with the sewing machine out. She hadn’t worked on a quilt in forever, it seemed, but she was back into it now, all in. He yelled for her to get down. She looked up from her work, grinned knowingly. Like, It’s time. No, he wasn’t ready for that—not yet. He fired again, but still the shots were useless, worse than useless. The SUVs kept coming, seemed to multiply, more and more—too many, an impossible many. They weren’t only on the road anymore. They were coming from every direction. Shiny black vehicles roaring between the trees on the hill beyond Cliff and Leanne’s house, kicking up great clouds of dust and debris. Leanne was down there, standing in her garden with her yellow watering can, watching them pass. She looked up the hill to Laughlin and grinned.
He’d been thinking about it all wrong. The road wasn’t the only way in. Neither was it the only way out. He and Cassie and the dogs and all the other animals could have escaped down the back side of their hill even a few moments ago. But they weren’t the types to run. However bad things got, they’d dig in. They’d made the decision to be here and would be. It was too late. The first of the swarm of shiny black SUVs was turning onto their property like so many black beetles come to devour their land, steering between the rough-hewn gateposts at the bottom, past the number and the gateposts that never held a gate. As it started racing up the drive, a passenger leaned out the window and shot Beatrix in the neck, their poor girl, just shot her, like death was nothing at all, and that’s what woke him, a final bray so long and forlorn it could have withered the sun in the sky—or rather he woke himself, because he was the one dreaming an apocalypse and making that godawful sound.
That winter was a long, blisteringly cold one, but it came as a relief, knowing the hard freeze might wipe out the larvae. There were three consecutive weeks well below zero, constant wood fires in the stove, too-green ponderosa that had been split down to kindling but couldn’t burn hot enough, so much creosote in the stovepipe that it had to be brushed out several times to keep the whole works from going up in flame. Slowly, this gave way to warmer days and then the lean times of early spring when everything was brown, and warmer days yet and a couple days of light rain and the first buds blooming and little shoots of grass emerging to feed passing deer. A fox or coyote or neighbor dog snatched their little banty rooster one afternoon, leaving a ring of red feathers around an empty space and an unsettling, parallel silence that announced itself periodically throughout the day. He’d sacrificed everything for his hens without their asking. No one cared, and now he was gone.
One afternoon late in May, one of the lower fence rails came down, and little Beatrix walked right out of the corral. It wasn’t a big deal. They found her right away, grazing up near the biggest ponderosa, the great red-barked grandmother tree, which had somehow made it through, right about where Laughlin had imagined the Mylar balloon those years ago. The donkey let them get within ten feet of her a few times before pinning her little black ears back and tearing off across the hillside, staying always just out of their reach, like this was all a big game, stopping now and then to nibble grass, watching them while she chewed.
The dogs followed them as they followed her through the trees, such an improbable little terror, all ears and teeth and attitude, but they couldn’t help but laugh when she snorted again, whirled, raced up or down the hill—once straight between them and the dogs like they were a playtime gauntlet to run.
Fun as this is, Cassie finally said.
She walked down to the shed to fill a bucket with grain, the dogs in tow. Laughlin stood not too far away from Beatrix. She kept grazing the hillside with one eye on him, and he looked out over the nearly denuded swath of their property, which had taken so much of him last summer. For the first time, he thought it wasn’t so bad after all. The smaller trees and saplings were drinking in more sunlight and water now, and raw tips of green grass were poking through the thick mats of pine needles. How long had the seeds been lying under there, waiting for this chance?
Cassie stepped out of the shed and shook the purple bucket. Beatrix jerked her head up, turned to Laughlin.
Not me, goofball.
Be-a-trix! Cassie called, shake-shake-shaking the bucket, the rattling of the grain perfectly in sync with her name: Be-a-trix! Be-a-trix!
That was all the freedom their proud little donkey needed. She trotted down the drive, passing half an arm’s length from Laughlin, head held high. As she passed, he reached out to touch the black cross on her back but missed. Her little black hooves went clip-clopping down the hard-packed drive.
Laughlin and Cassie would stay another three years, losing a couple dozen hens over that span and three more roosters, a rabbit with vertigo, a guinea pig who liked to lick Popsicles, their dog Lemon slowly so they could see it coming and Hodge all at once with no warning at all, all the smaller pets buried up on the hillside in their unmarked cemetery below the shale outcrop, and their then-ancient horses, who finally gave in to the draw of the earth, gingerly lowered by a neighbor’s backhoe into big square holes dug on the far end of their corral, and even Beatrix, down in the flat spot of clay below a cluster of new plum trees. By then, they’d have stopped adopting animals to fill holes, moving as they would into a period of waiting. All the loss would eventually be too much for two tenderhearted people to take. By the time he started seeing the whole experience as something morbid rather than sweet, they’d be selling the land to a young couple who’d stand on the deck Laughlin built, the four of them looking out at the spectacular view, the valley, the hills, the mountains—a view no picture could ever truly capture.
Man, the young woman would gasp. From here to forever.
Not too shabby, her husband would say, leaning his weight into the corner of the deck rail to check how sturdy. Maybe a cellar over there. And lay some sod down to the garden?
Definitely, the young woman would agree. For the kids to run and play.
Laughlin’s shoulders would wear out just thinking of digging a cellar into that sandstone and shale, and he hoped they’d give up this silly lawn business, just leave the sage be. Those scraggly little bushes were probably thirty, forty years old and could survive the next drought and the next, anything but industrious young humans still in the throes of denial.
But, for now, he and Cassie couldn’t yet see the end of it, either the time on the farm or together. They were getting a second wind but wouldn’t get a third. He started down toward his wife and their dogs, watching Beatrix shove her face into the grain bucket. Cassie took the bucket away and started for the corral, and the little donkey followed, angrily swishing her tail. Cassie probably didn’t realize Laughlin had caught up, but he heard her singing a little tune under her breath that he’d never heard before:
O, what a beautiful don-key, O, what a beautiful bray….
It was a little off-key and flat, but she’d never professed to be a singer. Neither had he. She jerked round when he offered a second round, like she’d been caught in a mortal moment. But her embarrassment quickly broke into an embarrassed smile, not the fake one for edification, but a real smile, like everything was as it was always going to be and she was okay with it. The weird little dead-end family made their way down to the corral. Cassie led Beatrix under the top rail and dumped the rest of the grain in her feeder. Lulu, their old chestnut mare, sidled over for a sniff, and Beatrix shot her a murderous look. Laughlin jogged up the hill to the shed, grabbed the drill, the hammer, and two of the six-inch ring shanks in case he bent one. Cassie held the rail in place while Laughlin drilled a new hole, half an inch from where the previous nail had snapped off. He tapped the head till the point bit into the post, steel ringing out with the small hum of a mosquito. Once the nail was set, he let go and pounded away in quick succession: one, two, three—ending with a solid thnk that drew the works tight together. He didn’t even bother tugging the rail. For now, he believed it would hold.
Shane Castle is a writing professor and a senior editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. His stories have appeared in West Branch, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Santa Monica Review, Salamander, and elsewhere.
