would be out looking for grass again soon enough, so Mikesh needed to check if the fences were damaged by snow or falling trees. Water was rushing through the creek bottom, and out beyond, in the alfalfa field and the band of woods at the back of the acreage, Mikesh could hear the “cheer-up” trills of robins, gone for a whole season, mixing with the whistle of cardinals in the trees. At the edge of the woods, signs that it had been a grim winter were clear. Starving rabbits had gnawed the bark off scrub, saplings, and fallen limbs. An early crusting of winter ice and later layers of snow buried anything else beyond easy reach. Blood and feathers marked the place where a hungry pheasant strayed far enough from safety to become prey for a fox. Back at the stream Mikesh turned Ziska toward the clump of black willows that ringed a bend where the water swirled in its deepest pool. One of the willows grew parallel to the ground: a large limb stretching along the bank, the other projecting out less than two feet above the water, the half-exposed roots of its fallen trunk reaching upward like a hand. Mikesh jumped down from the saddle, dragging the toes of his boots as he walked through the gravelly snow. Just up the slope from this swimming hole, far enough in elevation that the soil was thin, he had found, eight years ago, a stone projectile point in soil he pulled up with a boxelder seedling. The point was early Archaic. Mikesh kept the narrow wedge of chert in his desk drawer, lifting it occasionally against his flattened palm to register its weight, considering the over-two-thousand years it had lain in the soil. Mikesh valued the skill in its symmetry and the sharpness of its two knapped edges. Since he raised beef cattle, it was his reminder that others had culled animals from this patch of ground before him, that he was not the first to draw his living from the place, that he should take care of its soil, assuming that others would need to make use of it after every trace of him was gone.
Mikesh rode back to the barn, unsaddled Zisca, and checked the hay feeder. Since he appeared without feed bucket or new hay, the mass of silver-gray cattle watched him with black eyes as impassive as the Buddha’s. One, however, walked toward him, releasing a high but resonant “ooom!” It was Rosie, Mikesh’s favorite in the herd, now carrying her first calf. The cattleman inside Mikesh would have said it was the straight line of her back, her classic Murray Gray dun color, the favorable configuration of her pelvis for calving that earned his favor. But congeniality was the quality that most separated Rosie from the rest. Mikesh chose, with Rosie’s first breeding, to try something new, a Square Meater bull. He already had a bull, and the frozen semen sent all the way from Australia cost plenty, but the offspring would be shorter at the shoulder and more compact in configuration than the rest of his herd, a look Mikesh guessed would be the future of this breed in the U.S. market. Rosie nosed the sleeve of his coat and pushed her weight gently against him. Mikesh took off his glove and ran a hand over the springy winter hair of Rosie’s neck and back, pressing more firmly as he rounded her flank and belly. It was in part the return of a friendly gesture, but also a check of his investment, making sure the calf still configured as it should, and that the temperature thrown off by Rosie’s skin did not feel hot. Mikesh grew uneasy with the thaw, knowing that the health of heifers and bred cows near calving time would get touchy when the afternoons were warm, the nights cold, and the weather damp around the clock.
Mikesh felt prickly himself. The raw air, the snow, the damp smell, even the sound of Zisca’s or Rosie’s breathing—any of it planted the same tension at the base of his neck, the same tingling in the back of his nose he had felt in the fog a few hours before as he directed his flashlight on my brother’s battered face. Mikesh still hadn’t gotten rid of that headache. Just a few miles from the place where he was going through his daily chores, my brother’s life had ended, but not before Josh asked Mikesh to join him in infinity. As Mikesh finished his chores the thought came into his head of Paul Fox, sitting in his swivel chair, asking if Mikesh might not have edged Josh off the road. Mikesh thought of his coat deposited in a plastic evidence bag. He kicked a dirty hump of ice for the pleasure of watching it spray across the cattle pen. Instead he tripped. The ice didn’t move.
The edgy mood made him glad to get to his security guard shift again as the afternoon sun dipped low in the sky on Saturday. On the weekend at the community college where he worked, most of the buildings were locked and quiet by the time he arrived. The only places he was apt to encounter anybody were the dairy center and the three apartment buildings that housed the school’s handful of resident students. Mikesh knew that people associated the word security with beefy weightlifters who carry a gun or a Taser. Where Mikesh worked, security meant making sure everything was locked up, that the lights were turned off, and the heating plant was running as it should. He could hand out violations, call the Calmar cop or Seegmiller’s office, but his most common night run-ins with students involved telling them to clear out of a computer lab or keep the noise down in an apartment, lifting them up in the hallway when they passed out, or cleaning after them if they heaved in the stairs. For Mikesh, while calling the police was part of an interesting night, he dreaded calling an ambulance. He drove to work hoping no one was going to miss a curve on the campus, that his watch would, like most others, prove uneventful.
The night was quiet, but foggy. After a few quick words with the janitor whose shift was closing down, there was no one. Checking the buildings, walking down dark corridors whose locks and switches and vents he had memorized, usually calmed Mikesh. Not that night. He turned on more lights than usual, but couldn’t turn down the fog. As he drove his rounds, parked cars swam up at him as he passed. In the parking lot of one rental unit a figure stepped out from the last vehicle in a line of cars and pickups. The eyes glinted in Mikesh’s headlights. He laid on the horn and braked. One terrified kid with a pizza box hurried off to his apartment and Mikesh nosed the security van back to the office. There was an odd pressure in his chest. He told himself to slow down his breathing. Enough patrolling for one night; the campus was secure until half past one.
By the time Mikesh was driving home his head was pounding, though he had taken aspirin steadily over the course of the day. He made sure to take a different route than the night before.
At home he felt restless, his brain like the target of an afternoon’s batting practice. He turned on his computer and cruised the Internet. In a room where the only sounds were the fire settling in the woodstove and a clock ticking, the screen shone and blinked as he clicked on each new site: Duke losing in a basketball upset to West Virginia, cattle prices soft, the Australian grain market pegging itself to ethanol prices, the definition of the word infinity. That was his word, wasn’t it? “Infinity . . . Join in infinity.”
“An assumed limit, increasing without end,” but before that, a different definition: “within a boundary.”
The last words my brother heard were Mikesh telling him he was going to be okay. What had my brother meant with his last requests? To go someplace without end? To join him in that tight crushing space where he was finding it harder and harder to breathe? And what kind of help did Josh think our mother would need? Mikesh remembered the cold of my brother’s cheek. He replayed scenarios of the accident where he didn’t fail my brother: scenes where he had a blanket in the cab, a flask of warm coffee, scenes where an adrenalin surge helped him lift the hulking car with his shoulders. A scene where he pushed underneath the crushing weight of the hood to administer CPR even if it meant he, too, was crushed in trying. Not one of Mikesh’s imagined fantasies was as real as his failure.
He turned off the computer and went to bed.
chapter 5
A few restless hours later Mikesh gave up on the prospect of a night’s sleep, and instead baked the dinner rolls he was under orders to bring to his neighbors’ house for Easter lunch. Smelling the working yeast, punching dough, and working near the oven’s heat blunted the toothy edge of his headache enough to allow him to doze off in his chair before waking for chores. As he walked through the barn and pens, hollow and distracted, enveloped by the smell of fresh manure and hay, his consolation was that he was looking at two days off and a Sunday meal with friends.
That noon, setting the fresh rolls in the roomy kitchen of Dale and Barbara Murphy’s big four-square
