“Vitamin powder,” Kendra says. “Remember?” She feeds a handful into a tray and slides it through a slot in the plywood nesting pen. “For the hatchlings — remember I told you about the hatchling room? You’ll see them in spring.” She furrows her forehead, scanning his sweater and scratches.
“For the hatchlings,” he prompts.
“For them, you start the same. Toss the feeders in the cement mixer and get these guys.” She taps the bucket. “Then everything goes through the meat grinder — Axel will show you — and next the blender. It’ll all come out grey and tufty, but that’s normal.”
“How many chicks have you gone through?” he asks. “Over the years.”
“Over the years.” She laughs once, then looks at him and takes back the bucket. “This bother you?”
“Does what bother me,” he says, before she can ask what happened to him, or if he’s going to be all right here by himself. “Feeding birds birds? Cannibalism?”
She puts a hand on her hip. “Cannibalism,” she says. “Good one.”
The light in the training yard is on, shining through the curtains, and Cody and Kendra are feeding the birds. Kendra feeds the birds. The boy hugs himself. Beyond them, in the distance, the light of the tractor digging a pit.
Kendra — she has pictures. Undeveloped film he needs for the records: the white, centre of the training yard on a post in the snow. And she’ll have snapped one of the bird on his glove, unhooded, as he walked her around getting her used to the fist. Only took him a lifetime to breed out the brain.
He lets the curtains fall. He’ll have to bring himself to ask before she goes.
Night’s calm. No point in rushing. She hops the falcons to her fist to feed them. Wipes the green fluff of the chicks from their beaks and hands them to Cody, who sets them on a perch-scale and calls the weight to her. Returns the birds to their mewses, crops full, lazy. They tuck a blue or yellow leg into their feathers.
The birds each carry their own beauty; if she could sneak a speckled male, or even Lola. No, she laughs to herself, Axel will be at the window. And she doesn’t want a bird that way. Not stolen. Nothing that will give her hesitation every time she lifts it.
She’s going to miss this place, she realizes. She’s going to miss this kid and his kilt. His fear of snorkelling. She’s going to miss Axel.
He climbs off the tractor at the far side of the pasture, slaps his hands on his thighs, and claps the blood back into his fingers in the dark. The drop in temperature that arrived with evening has solidified the ground. The half-frozen dirt has risen like yeast, is full of air and gritty with ice crystals; he stomps his feet at the edge of the pit he’s backhoed. The ground crunches crisply. Five or six feet deep. The first two feet good, fertile, grass field, and under that roots and rock. The tractor cools beside the pit, the exposed hydraulic metal of boom and dipper glint oily blue-black, although the rest of the tractor’s and world’s colours are lost in the night. The cow can wait until morning. So can Kendra’s truck. He should close the garage.
He starts to follow the tractor path back then stops. The barn looms, even at a distance. Melanie will be there, she likes it better than home. He plans to apologize, has an apology idling in his head, has this big sorry ready, but when he talks to her he only gets as far as the shit he’s done, and then thinks what’s the point? He wants to say, What I’m doing to you is worse than the stories I’m telling. Worse than squeegee-ing out the boxes in the morgue. He wants to tell her he wanted to care for her even before she lived with him, before her mom got involved with that nurse and started another family. Remember, he wants to say, when you were little and I picked you up for breakfast — you were so excited you threw up all over your birthday dress. After you finished crying and got changed we drove out of the city instead. Through the suburbs and the big ranches — there were cows then too. But he can’t get that far. Not even in his mind. Only gets as far as, A few nights back I shaved your head, and then he gives up.
Melanie. What was she like back in the city? Can’t recall. Instead what comes to mind is the loner whose hand burned when he was a teen. That kid running a stick along the chain-link fence every lunch hour, and one particular time when — a month or maybe a year after the fire thing — the kid broke. The kid had stayed out past the bell, and the teacher had gone to fetch him. Milo’d watched through the window as the kid yelled and ran. Looping around the monkey bars, the swings, then sprinting out into the field. The teacher frozen — surprised, probably, like the rest of them, that that timid kid could tear around so fast. Yelling, hollering like his life depended on it. A real roar. That kid, a boy with parted hair and sweaty pits — possibly born cleft palate, one nostril was larger than the other — that’s what Milo remembers: staring through the school window. The whole class fascinated. Filled with a weird mix of fear and curiosity. His daughter is that kid, now, he realizes absently. His fault again.
Earlier the clouds were like a tarp, hung low over the field; now they drag south, blackening the moon above the river and leaving for light only the stars and the open barn door. The glow breaks over the snow and mud and on the tufts of bent grass in the pasture. Melanie, setting up the night’s milking. The power’s fixed.
And suddenly, standing alone in the black expanse of the field so far from his daughter, he’s not alone. The cows. Shocking to notice, to remember those huge beasts, their bulk and breath so close in the dark, having been so close all along. Only now they move, a shift like a tide, passing him by on their way to the barn. The heat of them as they walk by in the dark. They were right there, are right here, then they are gone.
VIII
Again, all she has to do is vacuum the milkers to the teats, then there is the grind of chewed cud and the flick of tails and the soft drop of cow pats. She runs her hand over the hip bones of the animals as she walks by their stalls. So big. They’ll keep them inside now, for the winter. The grass is snow-covered, and she learned about laminitis last year. So there’s those reasons. But also, inside, the bus can’t scrutinize them every morning on its way to school.
She climbs up onto the rail of the last stall, swings a leg over, and straddles it so that one foot hangs in the pen. The cow raises its head. Big brown eyes and light hair. Tan down the muzzle, grey on the nose. She scratches its ear.
“Why so sad?” She swings the other leg over the rail too, so that she sits facing the cow, and runs both her hands down its face. There’s blood on her knuckles. The garage door rumbles open beyond the wall. Milo. That girl, the one who puked, afterward Candice had whispered, I know you were in there, I know you left her. All she did was deny it. Kept spouting self-defence — I didn’t see her, I didn’t.
“I hate myself,” she says. She waits for Milo’s clunks and scrapes beyond the wall to stop before she hops off the rail and opens the adjoining door. The still sits dormant at the back of the garage. The boiler, with its polished copper and circular window, is thankfully off. When active, it looks like a bathysphere, only the water roils around the window on the wrong side.