Rose remembered, as a rule, very little:
A sheepdog drowned in the swimming pool in the year her hair was pixied.
She remembered her hair in a pixie.
She remembered a moose with removeable wounds, meaty pieces you could lift out and stick back in again.
Rose carried the baby out through the garden, feeling in her feet, her feet were bare, how the ground dipped and cooled in the beds, dampish where she had run the hose where she and Libby had dug up the iris.
She called, “Here, boy. C’mere, boy.”
The dog came to her, smelling of sage, and walked along at her heels. They walked across the flagstone and over the shrivelled grass.
Where the grass stopped, the hogback began to slope away. At the foot of the slope were heaps of slag that grew, year by year, beside the concrete plant. A few lights went off in the concrete plant.
The baby fumbled at her, hungry.
“Are you hungry?” she said.
The dog whimpered.
“Not you,” she said to the dog.
But the dog bucked and jumped at her feet to show that it was hungry. It trotted back to the house with its nose to the ground, looking for its bowl.
Rose pulled her robe across the baby. She started down over the hogback. Goatheads grew on the hogback, low along the ground. They had pale stems and narrow leaves you never saw until you walked into a patch of them, which is what Rose did. She tried walking first on the sides of her feet, where the skin was thick, and then on tip-toe. She tried stopping and standing on one foot to pull a few thorns from the other foot, feeling with her fingers for the thorns that had worked into the tendcrest places. The baby cried, and the thorns on the foot Rose was standing on pushed in even deeper.
She went on. Behind her, a door squeaked open. The dog arrived with its bowl in its mouth and, picking its way among the thorns, walked along with her down the hill.
She was walking to a flat stone she remembered having sat on. The stone had been painted white, and the air around it looked lighter. It looked bigger, the stone, than it really was, as big to her as a smallish boat moored against the heaps of slag the chalky dust blew off of.
The dust was in her mouth, her eyes, she couldn’t see quite. She saw the rim of the plains grow lighter, and the stone seemed to move away.
The dog dropped the bowl in the path they had walked and walked to the stone to watch her. She remembered the meat in her pocket. She had Big Bear’s fork in her pocket.
“Watch me,” she said to the dog. She walked into a patch of cactus, a cluster of pale, puffy crowns whose spines broke off in her arches.
She sang, “Baby, baby.”
Her sister appeared in the light from the house and held her hands over the rim of the hill.
Rose took the baby’s harness off, tossed it over her shoulder. She tossed the meat down the hill to the dog. Rose minced around in the cactus and then could not think what else to do.
The wind had begun to blow as it does when day begins in this part of the world. Her robe was flapping open. The baby was sucking at her, a bony, gummy mouth.
Libby called out.
Rose heard her. She could barely hear her.
She was thinking of the baby against her, how small she was and silky, and silky and creased and round.
She thought the baby would weep soon. It would look up and speak her name.
Rose found she was counting heartbeats. She was thinking she could feel her heart beat as you do sometimes in your fingertips, behind your knees, in your teeth sometimes. She could feel that. But she could not keep up, counting — it was too fast, thready, the ragged, shallow, quickening pulse not of her own heart, she realized, but of the baby’s heart, the dent on the top of the baby’s head twitching against her arm. Her arm felt weak and tingly.
He came over the yard in his boxer shorts. He had hair all over his body.
Rose felt herself starting to pee, or bleed, she couldn’t tell which. She saw him start down over the hogback and she squatted with the baby in the dust as he came. She felt the shudder he caused in the ground as he came, in her knees, in the bones of her hands — she swore that she could feel that — a blunt, heavy, bear of a man running down to her through the cactus, the goatheads, his wide flat feet winging out.
rooster, pollard, cricket, goose
We could do with him what we wanted. The old people left and left Goose here and what they left was ours.
They’d have taken him if they could. They took the glass from in the windows, they took the crib from the bend in the road. Our pa would have to drag a new crib out to keep the corncobs in. They took the cow in the wet field lowing. They took the blind pig beating the barn.
Down from the house where our ma stuck tight it went barn and barn and barn and crib and next the pond-bridge over the pond next the brocade couch in the pond where they had gone and dragged it. They left us the couch and the road paint sure from wherever cheap they had got it. They left the washer machine with its top torn loose down on its side beside the creek.
They took the knobs from the doors and the rods for towels and what bulbs that burned they could reach out to and loose them from their sockets. Anything much they could loose they took and everything they left behind we got to keep between us. I got the doll I saved from the johnnie that simpered when I hit it. I got the trees and the wind in the trees and the pond with the couch and the muskrat traps and the green gone garish on it. Pa got the horse and the hills.
The horse, we found between the barns where it had gone up and over. It had knocked its thick head on the road, Pa said. We were sitting in the truck.
We had checked the coop for chickens. We had seen that the crib was gone.
It went Pa then me then Ma in the truck with the baby asleep on her bosom.
They had hit it with a pipe, Pa said. Else it had gone up and over.
Ma got out like he told her to and went up the hill with the baby. I heard her high shoes on the road when she went and I heard when she stopped and rested.
The horse, I heard and would hear again the queer high birdish sound he made. It hung between the barns. He was laid out between the barns.
I got the barn and the hay in the barn and the dust coming slatted through the rafters. I got the pail for corn I beat to spook the rats from the crib when I fed when I came from the bus from school. It was my job to feed the animals, to fatten Maggie cow. I got the hay and the smell of the hay and the light snapping on on the barn.
The horse was Pa’s and the hills he rode and the bees he dug that clouded him when he dragged the hooked plow with the tractor. The rabbits he dug he gave to me, I kept in the bowl in the washer machine thrown out where the creek ran through.
I stretched the come-along out like Pa told me. Because the others never did have a come-along to crank the horse over the gravel with to take him off on whatever it was they had brought to move away on. So they left him laid out on the hump of our road between the high walls of our barns.
The horse was dead, Pa said, or good as dead but what was the thin long sound he made, what were the lifting moons of his eyes when Pa came close with his gun? So he was good yet good for something.
A horse is worth something, easy, Pa said, you could sell him off handsome on the hoof in a blink. They would buy him from Pa by the pound. We could haul him up on the bed of Pa’s truck, sell him off quick down the hill from us to pay for what they loosed from us the hooks and bulbs and sockets. And yet I thought to ride him. Yes. I thought to him: Hum up.
I looped the steel loop around his pastern first as quick in the dark as I could. I walked the slack out. I worked the handle some.