She turns to go back into the barn, then glances out the garage door and doesn’t. Milo stands beside the slurry, jars and pails of spirits next to him. He pours bucket after bucket over the pit and tosses a match to it. Blue and fierce — alluring like the bug zapper in summer. He means well; he won’t be able to help himself.
The mattress in the spare room is shiny, grey-silver with royal-blue floral stitching, and the woven vines and leaves make the bed look like a Dutch plate. He and Kendra stretch a faded mint sheet over it. The creases stay even when the edges of the sheet are tucked under the foot and sides of the mattress. The bedspread, at least, is happy — lively orange and pink and blue. South American, maybe. Wool. Kendra tosses a pillow on it.
“You going to be okay sleeping here?” she says.
“I’m good.” He sits, traces a stripe on the blanket, then touches his swollen eye.
Kendra reaches down and opens a cardboard box from a stack of boxes along the wall. Feathers. Bells. Leather. Envelopes of unlabelled photos.
The skin around his eye is taut, not soft like he’d expected, more like his thumb when he slammed it in a car door. “I’m going to wash.”
“Sure. This will take a while anyway.” Kendra sits cross-legged on the floor and picks out a skull. Her hair is braided again, and now that they’re inside and the cold has gone from her skin her freckles have returned to her face, neck, and hands. They’ll be the rest of the way down, too — breasts, butt, thighs, toes. She balances the skull on her fingertips. “Crow. Neat, hey?”
In the hall, he stops at the phone. Her machine answers. “Mom. I know you’re there.” Maybe Aunt Jen is there too, baking apples, or curry, and they’re both around the stove and the fan is drowning out the phone. “Mom.” Nothing. “Mom I know you’re listening.” If she is, she’ll be in the bathtub or curled next to a heater in the dark. There’s no way Aunt Jen is over. “Pick up, please?” She doesn’t. “Well,” he says. After another minute of silence he hangs up.
The bathtub is full of Axel’s soaking clothes. But there was that shower outside.
He strips down, folds his kilt and sets it on the toilet. Can he even ask Axel to take it to the dry cleaners? Underwear, jeans, shirt, and sweater get added to the tub. He takes the biggest towel from the bathroom closet — one that reaches from his armpits to his knees when tucked around him — and puts boots on. Axel sits with his back to him, absorbed in hoods.
He walks down the drive to the hatchling barn and the outside stall. The shower’s hot. A damp cloud forms instantly, thickening the air and hanging. The heat and steam clear his nose. He washes loose scabs from his nostrils.
Up the mountain yesterday. He drops the soap. He was stupid to show her the postcard. What can she do? He shuts off the shower and immediately shivers. There’s a sense of urgency to the dark as he crosses back to the house. Like, shifting. Like it has pieces, like a great glom of ants. Like he might shake apart in the cold. He climbs the porch steps and stops. He’s going to have to live across from that girl.
The power’s on, but he sits in the rocker with the light off. Him and his old man and a lingering jug. There’s fragility to the alcohol in the Mason jar; the way it sloshes makes it seem clearer than water. He sets it on his knee. Out the window the clouds have pulled back entirely, and the light from the moon, circling low above the highway, will soon breach the room. “I’m here.” He runs his thumb over the lid and metal band. The old man breathes under the quilt. “You got me.” He leans back, rocking the chair, and bumps the bookshelf.
Though, what if the old man never wanted him here? The hospital called him, not his father. What if, instead of being added to the old man’s pyramid, he’s the looter? Robbing the tomb before the body’s cooled.
The old man’s throat catches and gargles. Milo tips the chair forward and hugs the Mason jar against his gut. “What are you waiting for?” The skin around the old man’s eyes is collapsed and purple. His hair — what’s left of it — is overgrown, and it occurs to Milo that his father’s on a different plane. For all he knows the old man is in pain, or, what if he’s not even lucid? Not even there.
Melanie knocks on the door frame.
“I didn’t see you,” he says. He sets the jar beside the rocker and stands, careful to move slowly. All the light comes from the porch lamp through the window and casts her shadow out into the hall. Her nose is pink, from crying or cold he can’t tell because her glasses obscure her eyes, and he doesn’t know her well enough, he realizes — standing there she’s a petite, blonde stranger in a shitty coat — to guess how she’d react to this morning.
“I know,” she says.
He nods. Well, at least she’s talking. At least he’s quit. The first time he quit was because of his daughter, too, after — a few years ago — her old school had called about her attitude.
“She’s ending everything with ‘yawn,’” the teacher back in the city had said. “I’ll ask her what’s the definition of a city-state, and she’ll say, ‘A city-state? Yawn.’”
“How can she have an attitude?” he’d asked.
“She’s twelve,” the teacher explained. “And I think she doesn’t know the answers. I haven’t seen any homework.”
“Homework? Since when does she have homework? Kids don’t start homework till grade four.”
“She’s twelve,” the teacher repeated. “That’s grade six.”
What a loser he’s been. But now, with Melanie waiting in the doorway, here’s his chance. Apologize. “This isn’t the worst thing,” he starts.
Melanie folds her arms. “You want to know my worst?”
Her worst? She’s never done anything. How can she think that? How can he respond to that? “Maybe we’ll find him a home.” He gestures to the old man then rubs his hand over his own chin and facial hair. Should shave. Should shave the old man, too. “A care home.”
She uncrosses her arms, rests a hand on the door frame, then asks, “Can you help me with the cow?”
They go out. Under the moon the field becomes a stark, open bone. Beneath his feet the ground is swollen and full of air and space, the dirt pulling apart from itself — expanding. The ice around the slurry, where he lit the booze, has melted and exposed a tangle of flat grass.
He hooks the tarp to the tractor and drags the cow to his pit. He pushes, Melanie beside him, and they tip the animal in, sliding it off the tarp.
“So long, Bess,” says Melanie.
“This one’s Bess?” he says.
“They’re all Bess.”
She tugs her collar closer around her neck, a small neck, like her mother’s — her mother, he has no idea where, with her new daughter and new family. The old man dying. In the bigness of the pasture, he and she are all of it. Solo.
The pit smells of good dirt. The night is wide — over the dairy, over Axel’s. Kendra’s truck — why wait till tomorrow? He leans back against the tractor. Why not start now.
At the table he traces the pattern pieces and cuts the leather. Halfway down the crest, he cuts a hole for the beak, then uses a sponge brush and daubs the pieces with brown dye.
Kendra adds another box, lugged from the spare room, to the pile in the living room. She dusts off her hands on her jeans. “You want this in the attic?”
“Mostly junk.” He’ll sort it later. He sets the wet leather aside and selects pieces he left to dry this morning — forest-green eye panels paired with crocodile crest. He circles their edges with a line guide and stitch marker. “Can bring me a water cup if you want.”