twitching. She considers the calf for a moment, sniffs it again, regards it suspiciously. It steps toward her and lets out a meek bawl. She moves forward then, slides her tongue over the calf’s face and ears, and stands still as it teeters toward her bag of milk and sucks.
Renny and Ben smile, catch the other doing so, and turn toward each other, still smiling.
“At least,” Renny says quietly, “we can still do that.”
Ben nods, then holds out his hand toward the barn, an invitation for her to walk with him. They move together to the bench where the remains of the calf are piled, covered with a thin layer of snow. Ben picks up the trunk of the calf by the head and starts for the truck. Renny follows, a hind quarter in each hand. They throw the pieces of calf into the bed of the pickup, then turn to face each other.
“Wait,” Ben says, though Renny hasn’t moved. He wipes his bloody, orange-tinged hands on his jeans, inspects them, and reaches behind Renny. Gently, with the tips of his fingers, he takes the lone curler from her hair. She receives it with a good-natured scowl, starts to say something, then stops. He sees in her shrug what she intended him to, that she has no words that can begin to close this space. He nods his understanding and offers a sad smile in return. They turn, then, she toward the old farmhouse and he toward the truck, each ducking into the circling snow.
A FINE WHITE DUST
RAY’S HANDS SLIDE THE black, greasy rag along the barrel of his shotgun. That’s what he reminds me of, grease. His face and hair and clothes are greasy, like he’s been coated in a fine layer of oily dust. The only thing that doesn’t look like Ray are the soft white feathers poking through the duct-tape patches on his red down vest. His dark eyes spot one, the same feather I’m looking at, which makes me think he can read my mind. He pinches the white down between his fingers and pulls it out. “Damnit,” he says, squinting at it. “Let’s go, Billy. Speed it up.”
Billy’s hurrying to put on his cracked tennis shoes, which are full of hay and caked with manure. His fingers look so thin, I can’t believe that one day they’ll be big like Ray’s, that a body can grow until it reaches such a size. That my body will someday be as big as Mom’s. I don’t know how bones get long and skin stretches and fingers thicken, and sometimes I wish we could just stay small.
“Jess, you come too,” Ray says, looking from the feather to me. “It’ll be fun.” I don’t want to argue, so I pull on my old moon boots. Generally I only use them for chores, but they’re faster to get on because they don’t have laces and Ray, I guess, is not in the mood to wait.
Billy and I follow Ray out of the front-porch door and into the cold. I cross my arms to hold my jacket tight to my chest because the zipper doesn’t work. Billy looks back at me and slows down until I have time to catch up, then winks at me as I jog along beside him.
There’s a fine dusting of white that disappears when our feet touch it, leaving footprints of earth showing through the thin layer of snow. The sun should be close to setting behind the mountains but I can’t see it because of the clouds, and having the sun covered makes the whole world seem cold and gray, but in a beautiful way, like everything is just a little silver.
We go through the back pasture and the wheat stubble, which the cows have been trampling, toward the empty irrigation canal. Billy helps me jump down. The canal is deep and narrow here, and frozen earth surrounds us on both sides, tiny ice crystals gleaming on the walls of dull brown. As we near the small pond, the canal gets flatter and wider, so we start crawling on our knees, then snaking along on our bellies. Ray points the gun ahead, holding it tight, moving with his elbows. Billy follows with his .20 gauge, and I’m last, clutching the cold earth close in order to stay low, because I don’t want to be the one to spook the birds. Though I’d like to. But I’m not brave enough, so instead I concentrate on the mist clouds I make each time I breathe.
Ray raises his head, brings the gun up, slides his chapped finger to the trigger. Billy copies him, only his hand is smaller and browner and it’s shaking. There’s a long moment of quiet as they aim, quiet suddenly shattered, and I hold my hands to my ears as I jump up to watch.
The mallards take off from the calm water, honking and slanting up into the frozen sky. Ray moves like a crazy-fast machine: pump, aim, shoot, pump. Billy just has a double-barrel, though, and he only gets two shots off in the time Ray finishes seven.
But I’m mostly watching the ducks drop from sky into pond. Seven dark figures spinning down against a gray sky, spinning until they smack into the water. The rest escape fast, their scared, crazy noise growing dimmer as they fly toward the distant mountains, and I think, yes, that’s where I would go too, toward those blue towering peaks where you can hide.
“Hot damn!” Ray says. “That was some good shooting.”
“I thought the limit was three,” Billy says.
“Yeah, the goddamn limit’s three,” Ray whines in a sissy voice. Then he says, “You go fetch those birds.” Which surprises me, but I guess I already knew that’s how it happened before. Because once I walked into Billy’s room and saw him sitting on the mattress on the floor, rubbing his small foot, which was gray-white instead of brown, and shaking so bad I thought he would crack apart.
I watch Billy unzip his jacket and pull off his shirt as he kicks off his shoes. He’s facing away from me, looking at the floating ducks scattered across the lake.
“Won’t he get cold? I say it real soft, hoping maybe Ray won’t even hear me.
But he turns and squints down into my eyes. “Not too much, honey. Though we should get a good hunting dog, shouldn’t we? You talk Rachel into that, how about? Save your brother from having to go in there next time.”
“Sure,” I say. But he already knows I’d love to have a dog, a yellow Lab to be specific, because they’ve got that soft fur that’s almost white. He also knows my mom will say no. No, because we’re saving every cent so we can move, so we can get on with our lives. Move to our land, build a new house, and get ourselves together.
That’s why Billy is wading out into that cold water. His shoulder blades jut out from his skinny back. I think Ray is staring at those little triangles under Billy’s skin, too, and he says to me, but in a voice loud enough that Billy can hear, “Gonna make a man out of him yet. Don’t know who the father was, but he didn’t leave Billy with much, now, did he?”
Billy hunches his shoulders and sucks in his breath as he steps into the water. When he’s in as deep as his stomach, my eyes blur, so I just see the colors—his tiny skin-colored back in this big expanse of gray-blue. He starts swimming and I blink away the water in my eyes so I can watch him, watch his little head and revolving arms.
“Get the furthest one out,” Ray hollers. “Then get the others.”
Billy swims from one side of the pond to the other, and by the time he has all seven ducks, you can tell how heavy they must be, because he’s struggling to tug their floating bodies to shore. Finally he stands there, dripping, handing the ducks to Ray. Ray starts whistling as he grabs them by their feet, holds up the bundle of birds, and eyes them up and down. I’m looking at the birds, too—at the wounds, how some are in the neck and some are in the chest, and how the blood makes its way down the glistening feathers and into the dark dead eyes. That’s where it pools before dripping down.
When Billy’s got his shirt and jacket and shoes back on, Ray hands us each two ducks to carry. Ray and Billy carry the birds in one hand, their guns in the other, but I hold one bird in each hand, away from me, thinking how sorry I am that they were alive a few minutes ago and now their blood is dripping at my feet. I want to get home fast, but the ducks are heavy with death, slick with water and blood, and they keep slipping from my hands and thudding on the thin layer of snow.
“Damnit,” Ray says when I drop another one. “Billy, give me your shoelaces.”
Billy bends down and pulls the laces out of his shoes and hands them up, and I’m thinking, I was