a bale against the south wall. This way she didn’t have to worry about her mother walking in on her while she was reading and telling her to go take care of Aldah. Alice already gave Aldah more time than her mother did, so it seemed only fair that she should steal some reading time while the steers were eating. She deserved private reading time—for her mind, for her education, for her future—and for Miss Den Harmsel who, perhaps even more than Lydia, knew that Alice was destined for bigger and better things than hog and cattle feedlots.
Being a model student was still no defense against the creeping fear that visited her at night when she tried to sleep. Worse than the fear that she looked like a country hick, she couldn’t keep the fanatical talk from sinking in: What if those wackos are right? What if the worst is yet to come? What if something really big was going to rain down upon them? She pictured clouds of fire coming from nowhere, devouring the wicked but leaving believers untouched as all of their friends and family rose from the grave incorruptible. Did she have to be on the reverend’s side to be among the incorruptible?
Alice wasn’t sure what she believed. She prayed because it gave her a feeling of relief and acceptance. Her prayers were sometimes pleas for whatever she wanted at the moment, but more often they were prayers of thanksgiving because in spite of everything bad going on in the world, she was the recipient of amazingly good fortune, though she wouldn’t use that word around the Rev because he said fortune was a heathen idea. Still she prayed, “Thank you, God, for giving me the strength and mind to deal with this big messy world.”
When she finished a prayer like that, she could hear her mother’s voice: “Thanking God for your superiority? When will you ever learn humility?”
6
By five in the afternoon of September 1, Alice was in a same-old same-old place in farm-girl hell. The scene was their cattle feedlot. Seventeen years on planet Earth and this is what it added up to: feeding two hundred thousand-pound steers on a sweltering afternoon. Horseflies buzzing through the stench of baked manure. Her copy of The Grapes of Wrath sitting on top of the control panel, tightly wrapped in plastic to protect it from corn and feed-supplement dust.
She stood at her workstation, a six-by-six-foot cubicle next to a towering white silo. This was the kitchen, the preparation room with its panel of switches on plywood boards. Switch number one started the rotating arm that scraped the corn silage from the silo, and switch number two started the auger that sent the silage rolling into an elongated mound down the center of a cement feed bunk. The odor of corn silage was not tantalizing but was lemon bath oil compared to the stench cloud that roamed the farmyard.
The moan and clatter of the augers brought the steers lumbering shaggily forward. They nudged themselves into rows to become intimate diners facing each other across the feed bunk. Silage was their first-course salad with its own vinegar dressing of fermented corn juice. The steers flicked each other’s ears while their noses smeared each other’s cheeks.
Switch number three started a smaller auger that corkscrewed a mixture of minerals into the cracked corn, and switch number four sent the combination streaming like crumbled corn bread over the silage. Enriched cracked corn equaled pounds gained equaled dollars. What she was doing was supposed to create the miracle that could save their farm: thick, juicy, expensive steaks for the rich.
Switches number five, six, and seven turned on the barn light, the silo light, and the big searchlight that could pull the curtain on darkness to expose any sick animals in the far corners of the feedlot. Switch number eight turned on a space heater directed at her feet and legs. She didn’t need the lights or the heater. The midday sun had driven the temperatures into the high nineties and was holding them in the mideighties. A scorcher of a day draped in a heavy blanket of humidity.
The churning auger spit bits of cracked corn in her face as it spread the golden color down the bunk. When she wiped her lip on her sleeve, the yellow dust mixed with her sweat looked like the slime collecting on the steers’ noses. She pulled at her shirt. Her sweat had plastered it to her neck and shoulders. She wiped her face again, then smeared what she’d gotten from her face onto her jeans. The heat heightened the scent of everything, but the smells of the silage and cracked corn were no defense against the hogyard stench that swam through the thick air and spread its sickening flavor a hundred yards from the hogyards to the cattle feedlots where she worked. A whole farmyard under a dome of bad air. She inhaled a mouthful with every breath. Hot stinky air. The smell would stay in her wet shirt like a bad aftertaste, and her breath would smell like hog crap.
She was quite capable of handling this scene without resentment. The agony came only when she imagined herself being watched by someone her age who attended an Eastern prep school. The preppy would see a gangly country hick, a measly laborer who at best listened to corny religious music and entered the Rice Krispies bar competition at the county fair. She watched her hands working—the grime under her fingernails and the hard calluses on her fingers. No wonder people who worked on farms were called farmhands. The hands said it all: her hands were who she was.
Looking at her hands led her to the rest of the stinky truth of her life. Sweat had turned her light blue shirt into a dark blue. Sweat dripped off her lip and trickled down her neck under her ear. Sweat was a friend and a bother. She gave it credit for opening her pores and keeping her skin cool, but it was also busy soaking things in. Sweat as sponge. It sucked in dust. Dirt dust. Corn dust. Mineral dust. Dried steer manure dust. Steer dandruff dust. And it sucked in smells, the whole barnyard smorgasbord of vaporized manure and silage and tractor diesel fuel. It probably sucked in the smell of steer breath. Then that awful itch when the intense heat slathered them all together. The back of her neck itched. The top of her head itched. She resisted scratching her head because she didn’t want her dirty hands to make her hair dirtier. Trying to think of something besides the itch just turned it into a herd of ants moving down her back. The worst thing was that she knew the tracks of sweat were leaving tracks of bad smells all over her body. Her only comfort—and it was an uncomfortable comfort—was knowing she wouldn’t be near any Romeo in the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps things would change in the romance department once school started and she’d given herself a good fall cleanup.
The steers had settled down to their slathering and munching. She checked out the long mound of silage mixed with cracked corn and minerals that the feed augers had delivered down the bunks. The steers had kicked up dust when they came toward the grinding sound of the augers, but once they had settled down to their chomping, they were a pleasant sight, a consolation prize for her sweaty efforts. The steers were their own kind of beautiful, even though their mission in life was to gain weight, and gain it fast. All those fat backs lined up on either side of the feed bunk rippled away from her in mounds of prime meat. The strange symmetry of it all. The innocence of it. She didn’t harbor a silly love for them. She knew they’d be steaks and hamburgers in a few months, but she didn’t fight these moments when, hearing them chew in unison, she could imagine music that would be a perfect complement to the whole scene. She could funnel Bach’s Art of Fugue played on a harpsichord into the canopy over the feed bunk. Bach would make the steers’ hair ruffle. The steers would be so content they’d gain four pounds a day.
She climbed the fence and walked around them looking for the big three—listlessness, runny nose, and cough. The steers were surviving the heat in good form but didn’t have the sense to know that a pressure-cooker day like this guaranteed bad weather. These hoof-footed meat carriers. She reached out to rub the shag-carpet back of her favorite tame black steer. A gray mound of dust rose at her touch, then clung to the moisture on her hand. She couldn’t find an unsoiled spot left on her jeans, so she dipped her hands into the steers’ egg-shaped drinking tank and shook them off.
As she left the swelter of the feedlot, a dozen swallows dove and swirled over the dry alfalfa field. They were doing what swallows do—swallowing—though she couldn’t see what insects were on the menu on the first
