Dog Run Moon

BREATHARIANS

There were cats in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters — some thin and misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.

“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife? You have it sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board and then after a few days, we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”

The cats — calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny — sat among the hay bales scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but — like most farm boys — he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the same rules of husbandry as those that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain — they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close, in return they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.

A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange martian bank. Fifty dollars at least, maybe even seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.

He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August liked to go there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature deep in the bowels of a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.

In the pole barn there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery. Looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval looking welder’s mask, and, interspersed amongst the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying degrees of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a broadsword-sized mower blade, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it. Then he uncovered a four-foot-long spanner wrench, a slim stainless steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques — the sidearm full-swing golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing axe strike, the short, quick, line-drive baseball check swing — the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat, and then shouldered his weapon, put the pair of gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.

—

The old house was set back against a low, rock-plated hill. A year-round spring wept from the face of the rock, and the dampness of it filled the house with the smell of wet leaves and impending rain. The house was a single-level ranch, low slung like a dog crouching to avoid a kick. August’s mother’s parents had built the house with their own hands, and lived in it until they died. The old house looked up at the new house, the one August’s father had finished the year after August was born. The new house was tall with a sharp-peaked roof. It had white shutters, a full wraparound porch. August’s grandparents had both died before he was born and the first thing his father had done when the farm became his was sell fifty acres of fallow pasture and build the new house.

“He feels like it’s his own,” August’s mother had said to him once, smoking in the kitchen of the new house. “His people didn’t have much. Everything we got came from my side, you know. He would never admit it in a hundred years, but it bothers him.” She coughed. “It’s too big. That was my complaint from the get-go. It’s hard to heat, too, exposed up on the hill like this, the wind gets in everywhere. My father would have never done it like that. He built a smart house for himself and my mother, but, that’s the type of man he was.”

August tapped the door a few times with the wrench and went inside. The old house was built by folks interested in efficiency, not landscape, and the windows were few and small. The kitchen was dimly lit by a single shaft of light coming through the window over the sink. The room smelled like frying bacon, and the radio was on. Paul Harvey was extolling the virtues of a Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed. At my age there are few things I appreciate more than a night of restful sleep. Get this mattress. It was dreamed up by a team of scientists. It’s infinitely adjustable. Your dreams will thank you.

“Augie, my fair son, how does the day find you?”

His mother was at the kitchen table playing solitaire. A pan of thinly sliced potatoes fried with pieces of bacon and onion sat next to her ashtray. She smoked Swisher Sweets cigarillos, and a thin layer of smoke was undulating above her head like a smooth, gray flying carpet waiting for a charge to transport.

“I made lunch and it smelled so good while it was cooking, but then found myself suddenly not hungry. I don’t know, I may have finally broken through.”

August pulled out a chair and sat across from his mother at the small table. “Broken through to what?” he said.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you? I’ve been devoting myself to a new teaching.” She stubbed out her cigarillo, and shook another from the pack sitting on the table. She lit it, a fine network of lines appearing around her mouth as she pursed her lips. Her nails were long and gray, her fingertips jaundiced with tobacco stain. “Yeah,” she continued, “I’ve become an inediate.”

“A what?”

“An inediate, you know, a breatharian?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Air eaters? Sky swallowers? Ether ingesters?”

“Nope.”

“You can attune your mind and your body, Augie. Perfectly attune them by healthy living and meditation so that you completely lose the food requirement. I mean, not just that you’re no longer hungry — that’s not too hard. I’m talking about all you have to do is breathe the air, and you’re satisfied. You get full and you never have to eat. And you can survive that way, happy as a clam.” She took a sip of coffee, smoke dribbling from her nose as she swallowed. “That’s what I’ve been working on.”

She pushed the pan of potatoes and bacon toward him, and August ate some even though Lisa had told him she would make him a sandwich when she got up from the barn. The potatoes were greasy and good. The bacon in it was little pieces of semi-charred saltiness. The onions were soft, translucent, and sweet. August ate, and wiped his hands on his jeans, and put his wrench on the table for his mother to see.

“Dad gave me a job,” he said. “For money.”

“Oh, well I’m proud to hear it. Did you negotiate a contract? Set a salary review option pending exemplary performance?”

“No, I’m just killing some cats.”

“I see. And this is your Excalibur?” She tinked the chrome-handled wrench with her fingernail.

“Yeah. It’s a spanner wrench.”

She made a low whistle and coughed softly into the back of her hand. “It’s a big job, Augie. Is he paying you upon completion or piecemeal?”

“I’m taking the tails. We’re going to settle up at the end of the week.”

“Grisly work, son. That’s the kind of work you stand a chance of bringing home with you, if you know what I mean.”

“The haymow smells like piss. It’s getting real bad.”

“Your father. This is gruesome, even for him. Jesus.” She looked down blankly at the cards in front of her. “I keep forgetting where I’m at with this.” She gathered up her game, her nails scrabbling to pick the cards up off the Formica. “I can get only so far with solitaire before I get stumped. You ever win?”

“I never play.”

“I suppose it’s a game for old women.”

“You’re not old.”

“If I’m not, then I don’t want to feel what old is like.”

“Are you ever going to come back to the new house?”

“You can tell him no, if you want. About the cats. You don’t have to do it.”

“She’s been staying over.”

“I found all Grandma’s old quilts. They were in a trunk in the back closet. Beautiful things. She made them all. Some of them took her months. All of them hand stitched. I never had the patience. She used to make me sit there for hours with her learning the stitches. I’ll show them to you if you want.”

“Sure. I should get to work now, though.”

“Next time, then.”

August ate a few more potatoes and then stood up.

“I wish you Godspeed,” his mother said, coaxing another cigarillo from the pack with her lips. “May your arrows fly true.”

“I don’t have any arrows.”

“I know. It’s just an old Indian saying.”

She blew smoke at him. “I don’t care about the cats,” she said, smiling at him in such a way that her mouth didn’t move and it was all in her eyes. “I look at you, and it’s clear as day to me that he hasn’t won.”

—

The barn was empty. His dad and Lisa were out rounding up the cows for milking. August put on his gloves and wedged the wrench down under his belt. He climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow.

Half-blind in the murk, holding his nose against the burning ammonia stench of cat piss, August crushed the skull of the first pale form that came sidling up to him. He got two more in quick succession — and then there was nothing but hissing from the rafters, green-gold eyes glowing and shifting among the hulking stacks of baled hay. August tried to give chase. He clambered over the bales, scratching his bare arms and filling his eyes and ears and nose with the dusty chaff of old hay. But the cats were always out of reach, darting and leaping from one stack to the next, climbing the joists to the rafters where they faded into the gloom. August imagined them up there, a seething furry mass, a foul clan of fanged wingless bats clinging to a cave roof. This was going to be harder than he had thought.

August inspected his kills. A full-sized calico and two skinny grays, thin and in bad shape, patches of bare skin showing through their matted fur. He pitched them down the hay chute and climbed after them. On ground level, he breathed deeply of the comparatively sweet manure-scented air, and fished his knife from his pocket. He picked up the first cat by the tail and severed it at the base, dropping the carcass on the cement with a wet thud. He dealt similarly with the other two cats, pitched them all in the conveyor trough, and went looking for a hammer. By the time he returned to the barn his father and Lisa had the cows driven in and stanchioned in their stalls. The radio was on, loud enough so Paul Harvey’s disembodied voice could be heard over the muttering of the cows and the drone of the compressor. I don’t know about you all, but I have never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.

August nailed his three tails to a long pine board, and propped it up in the corner of the barn where it wouldn’t get knocked over by cows milling in and out. He could hear his father doing something in the milk room. He passed Lisa on his way out of the barn. She was leaning on a shovel and spitting sunflower seeds into the dirt. She had on blue overalls and muck boots, and her frizzy blond hair was tamed into a ponytail that burst through the hole in the rear of her Seedco cap.

“Hi, August,” she said, scooping seeds out of her lower lip and thwacking them into the dirt at her feet. “You didn’t come up to the house for lunch.”

“Yeah. I ate at the old house with my mom.”

“Oh, okay. I’m going to stick around tonight. I think I’ll make some tacos for you guys for dinner. Sound good?”

August looked at her face, her round, constantly red cheeks. She called it rosacea, a skin condition. It made her seem to exist in a state of perpetual embarrassment. He wondered if she’d been teased about it at school.

She was only seven years older than him and had graduated from the high school last year. In her senior year August’s father had hired her to help him with the milking, and she’d worked before school and after school and on weekends. August’s father said that she worked harder than any hired man he’d ever had. Now that she was done with school she put in full days. She could drive a tractor with a harrow. She could muck out the barn. She could give the antibiotic shots to the cows — and when the calving season came she could plunge her hands in up to her wrists to help a difficult calf come bawling into the world.

“Crunchy shells or soft shells?” August said, knocking at the toes of his boots with the wrench.

“Soft?”

“I like crunchy.”

“Well, I’ll see what you guys have in the cupboards, but I bought some soft ones already.”

“Flour or corn?”

“Flour, I think.”

“I like corn.” August spat at his feet, but his mouth was dry so the spit trailed out on his chin and he wiped at it with the back of his sleeve.

“I asked your dad what kind he wanted and he said it didn’t matter.”

“He likes the crunchy shells too. Trust me. Do you make them with beans or without?”

Lisa hesitated for a moment and tugged at the brim of her cap. “Which do you prefer?” she said.

“Well, that depends.”

“I bought some black beans. I usually put some of those in. But I don’t have to.”

“I like beans. But, I don’t eat black beans. I think they look like rabbit turds. My dad thinks that too.”

“Okay, I’ll leave those out, then. Sound good?” The red on Lisa’s cheeks had spread. A crimson blush was leaching down her neck all the way to the collar of her barn overalls. “All right, August, see you at dinner. Your dad’s probably wondering where I got off to. We have to get these cows taken care of.”

Lisa headed into the barn, and August wandered out to the back pasture, swinging his wrench at stalks of burdock and thistle, stepping around the thick plots of fresh manure.

—

He climbed the low hill before the tree line on the property boundary and sat next to the pile of rocks that marked Skyler’s grave. There was a slightly bent sassafras stick with the bark whittled off jutting up from the rocks. It had once been the vertical member of a cross August had fashioned from two such sticks lashed together with a piece of old shoelace. It was a gesture August had seen performed in all the old westerns he watched with his father. Any time a gunslinger went down his buddies erected a cross just like that. Over the course of the past year the sun had rotted August’s old shoelace so that the horizontal crosspiece had fallen off, leaving just the vertical stick pointing up at the sky like a crooked, accusatory finger.

Skyler had been his birth dog. His father had brought the tiny six-week-old pup home when August had been out of the hospital less than a week. It was something August’s father had said that his own father had done for him. He thought it good for a boy to have a dog to grow up with. And, against August’s mother’s objections, he put the soft, pug-faced shepherd mix in the crib with August—“to get acquainted,” he’d said. “A boy with a dog is healthier, more active, less inclined to allergy and listlessness.” And, it seemed true. August had been a particularly healthy baby, a bright, energetic boy who grew up with a tongue-lolling, shaggy, good-natured four-legged shadow.

At twelve, Skyler had been in remarkably good shape, a little stiff in the mornings, but by noon harassing the barn cats like a dog half his age. And then, one day after school, August didn’t see him anywhere in the barn or yard. He went to the equipment shed and found him, stretched out on his side with a greenish-blue froth discoloring his grayed muzzle. He’d chewed through a gallon jug of antifreeze that August’s father had stored under the workbench.

August and his father had carted the body up to the hill, and they took turns with the pickax and shovel. When they finished, they stood and regarded the cairn of rocks they’d stacked over the raw earth to keep the skunks out.

“I guess twelve is as good an age as any,” his father had said. At the time August thought he’d been talking about the dog. Later, he thought that maybe his father had meant that twelve was as good an age as any for a boy to lose a thing he loved for the first time.

—

August watched the sky in the west become washed in dusky, pink-tinged clouds. Unbidden, the turning sky made him think of Lisa, the crimson in her cheeks that spread like hot infection down her neck and shoulders and back and arms, all the way to her legs. That this was the case wasn’t mere supposition. He’d seen it.

It was an early dismissal day last fall. August off the bus and out of his school clothes, eating a piece of cake from the new house. He wandered down to the barn, the air sharp with the acrid tang of the oak leaves his father had been burning in the front yard. The pile smoldered. There was no one around. Skyler slept in the shade of a stock tank. The cows were yoked up in their stanchions. The whole barn was full of the low rumble of suction, the automatic milkers chugging away.

And then, through the open doorway of the grain room, there was his father. Muck boots on, barn overalls around his legs, thrusting behind Lisa, who was bent over a hay bale, her cheek and forearms pressed down into the cut ends of the hay. Their overalls were around their legs like shed exoskeletons, like they were insects emerging, their conjoined bodies larval, soft and pale. August saw the flush of Lisa then, the creeping red that extended all the way down her back to her thick thighs to her spread calves. She had her underwear pulled down around one knee and their brilliant lacy pinkness was a glaring insult to the honest, flyspecked, gray and manure brown of the barn.

On his way out, August turned the barn radio up as loud as it would go. Golf, Paul Harvey was saying, is a game, where you score a six, yell “fore,” and write down a five.

—

At the dinner table, Lisa and August’s father each had a beer. Lisa cut a lime wedge and jammed it down the neck of her bottle and August’s father said, what the hell, he might try it like that too. They smiled at each other and clinked their bottles together and drank, and August watched the lime wedges bobbing in their bottles like floats in a level held on a surface that was out of true. When they’d finished eating, August’s father leaned back in his chair and belched mightily, wiping taco juice from his hands, his rough, callused fingers shredding the paper napkin.

“Best meal I’ve had in a while. Thanks, Lisa.”

Lisa smiled and said, “You’re welcome, Darwin. I’m glad you liked it.”

“I got three cats today,” August said to break up their stupid smiling competition. “I did it with a wrench. Right in the head. They never knew what happened.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Lisa wrinkle her nose slightly.

His father finished his beer and piled his fork and knife and napkin on his plate. He was a large man, all his joints seemed too big, hard knobby wrists and knuckles, his hands darkened from the sun up until the point where his shirt cuffs lay. He was forty-five years old and still had all his hair, dark brown, just starting to gray at the temples. In the cold months, he liked to wear a bright silk cowboy scarf knotted up around his neck. He smiled at women often, and, August noticed, women often smiled back. His mother used to say that for a guy with manure on his boots he could be fairly charming.

“Come on now, Augie. I gave you a job and I appreciate you getting right down to it. But there’s barn talk and there’s house talk. I’m sure Lisa wouldn’t mind a little house talk now. How about you clear the table and clean up the dishes. And why don’t you thank Lisa for making that delicious meal? She worked all day, and then came up to do that for us.”

“Thanks,” August said and scooted his chair back loudly. He stacked the dishes into a precarious pile and carried them off to the kitchen. He ran the water until steam rose and squirted in soap until the bubbles grew in great tumorous mounds, and then he did the dishes. Clanking plate against plate, banging pots against pot, running the water unnecessarily, making as much noise as possible to cover the low murmur of Lisa and his father talking in the next room.

Through the kitchen window he could see the murky green cast of the yard light, the hulking form of the barn, and, farther out, the long, low shape of the old house, completely dark. When his father came in to get two more beers, August didn’t turn around to look at him. He stood next to August at the sink and took the tops off the bottles. He nudged August with an elbow and August scrubbed at a pan, ignoring him.

“How’s your mother?”

August shrugged.

“I’m not going to run her down, Augie, but she’s not a woman that will ever give you her true mind. You know what I mean?”

August shrugged.

“She’s been disappointed her whole life, probably came out of the womb that way. You don’t disappoint her, I know that. But everything else does, me included — always have always will. She never learned to hold herself accountable, that’s the way her parents allowed her to grow up. She’s very smart, and she thinks she sees things I don’t see but she’s wrong, I’ll tell you that. I see plenty. You hear me?”

August swirled a cup in the dishwater and didn’t say anything. His father slapped him on the back of the head.

“I said, You hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you.” August looked straight ahead out the window.

“Okay, then.” He reached into the dishwater, came up with a handful of suds, and smeared them on August’s cheek. “You’re all right,” he said. “When you think it’s time you let me know and we’ll go find you a pup.”

—

In the morning, the smells of toast and coffee and bacon pulled August from his bed before the sun had even hit the east-facing window. He clumped down the stairs into the kitchen and sat at the table rubbing his eyes. Lisa stood at the stove making eggs. Her feet were bare and she had on the gray long underwear she wore under her barn overalls. They were made for men and were tight around her hips, and when she bent over to get the butter out of the refrigerator, August could see the faint lines of her panties curving across her full rear.

“Would you like coffee, August?” August nodded and she put a steaming mug in front of him.

“I figure you like it black, like your dad likes it?”

“Sure,” he said, taking a sip, trying not to grimace. “Black and strong.”

His mother mixed his coffee half and half with hot whole milk, dumping in heaping spoonfuls of sugar. She told him that’s how she learned to make coffee when she lived in New Orleans, in another lifetime, before she married his father. August knew that Lisa would never go to New Orleans in a million lifetimes.

His father came from the bedroom. He had a dab of shaving foam under one earlobe. He put his hand on Lisa’s waist as he got a coffee mug from the cupboard and she turned and wiped the shaving foam from his ear with her sleeve.

“How long before the eggs are done?” August asked, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

“A few minutes. The bacon is almost ready.”

August sighed, downed his coffee, and took a piece of toast from the plate on the counter. “Well,” he said, “some of us can’t sit around. I have to get to work.”

He got his wrench from the mudroom, and slid on his boots, leaving them unlaced, and walked across the lawn with his boot tongues flapping like dogs breathing in the heat. The cows were milling in the pasture, gathered up close to the gate. They rolled their dumb baleful eyes at him and lowed, their udders straining and heavy with milk.

“Shut up, you idiots,” August said. He picked up a small handful of pebbles and continued to walk, pelting any cow within reach.

The trees that lined the back pasture were big old oaks and maples and a few massive beech trees with low limbs and velvet gray bark. The ground around them was covered with the scattered spiny shells of their nuts. There was an ancient barbed-wire fence strung across the trees. It was rusted and had been mended many times, so old that it had become embedded in the trunks. August walked down the line and ran his fingers over the rough oaks and maples and the soft gray crepe of the beeches with their bark that looked like smooth hairless hide stretched over muscle. He let his fingers linger on the places where the wire cut into the trunks, and then he knelt and sighted all the way down the fence and squinted into the strengthening light and imagined he was looking at a row of gnarled old people, the soft skin of their necks — the throat cords, the veins, and esophagus — garroted by barbed wire, the twisted branches like arms raised, fingers splayed, trembling and clutching for air.

—

Until last year August had helped with the milking every morning before school and every evening after school, and then his mother forbade it and his father had been forced to hire Lisa full-time.

“Do you like helping your father with the milking?” his mother had asked one evening as he helped her clean up the dinner dishes. His father was on the porch listening to a baseball game, and the sound of the play-by-play came through the screen door, garbled and frantic. Someone had made a triple play. The announcer spit hoarsely, a hard line drive, he’s going, he’s going, he’s going.

“I don’t mind it too much,” August said, wiping a plate dry. “Most of the time I like it.”

“Huh, well, that’s a problem,” his mother said. She had a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth, and ash drifted into the dishwater as she spoke. “You’ll be in high school soon, you know. And then there’ll be girls. They’re going to find you so handsome. And then there’ll be college, and then there’ll be any life you want after that. This is just a small piece, Augie — and if you hate it then you should know that soon you’ll be making your own way.”

“But I said I don’t hate it, Mom.”

“Jesus. I really hope you don’t mean that. Getting up early, the shitty cows, the dullness?”

“What about it?”

“My god, Augie, look at me and tell me you don’t hate it.” She turned to him and held his chin with her soapy hand, and her cigarette trembled and August tried but couldn’t tell if she was serious and about to cry, or joking and about to laugh.

“I don’t hate anything. It’s fine. I like everything fine.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m disappointed in you,” she said, exhaling smoke forcefully through her nose and turning back to the dishes. “But I suppose it’s my fault, for letting it go on. I’m going to talk to your father. Your barn days are coming to an end. I’ll finish up here. Go out and listen to the game with your dad.”

Out on the porch, his father was on the rocker, his legs stretched out long in front of him. He nodded as August sat on the step.

We’re going into extra innings. Hang on as we pause for station identification — you’re not going to want to miss this. The radio crackled, and an ad for a used-car lot came on. Bats flew from the eaves, and August threw pebbles to make them dive, and then the game came back on and Cecil Fielder won it for the Tigers on a long sacrifice fly to center field. August looked at his father. He was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together over his chest.

“Night,” August said, getting up to go inside.

His father yawned and stretched. “Night,” he said.

Later, his parents’ arguing had kept him awake, and the next morning his father hadn’t rousted him for the morning milking — and soon after that Lisa was always around, and not long after that his mother had started spending time at the old house. At first, just a few nights a week, and then one morning she didn’t come back to make breakfast and his father burned the toast and slammed the door on his way to the barn.

—

August tied his boots. He climbed up to the haymow and surprised two cats that had been intently pawing at a dead sparrow on the hay-littered floor. He broke one’s back with a quick chop of the wrench, and stunned the other one with a jab to the head. The cats were indistinct as they writhed, blurred in the gloom. August silenced their yowling, each with a sharp blow from the wrench, and then gave chase to a few more slinking forms that eluded him by leaping to join their wailing, spitting clan in the rafters.

August didn’t curse much. His father always said that no one took a man seriously who cursed too much, and it was better to be the type of man who, when he did curse, made everyone else sit up and take notice.

Now, however, in the dark barn with the hay dander swirling around his face, and the cats twitching and seething out of reach above him, he cursed.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “Motherfucking, cocksucking, shitfaced, goddamn fucking cats.”

It was the most curse words he’d ever strung together, and he hoped the cats were sitting up to take notice, trembling at the rain of fire that was about to be visited down upon their mangy heads.

—

At the old house his mother had the blinds drawn. She had cut a ragged hole in a quilt, pulled it over her head, and belted it around her waist, poncho style. Her arms stuck out, bare, and the quilt ends dragged over the floor when she got up to let him in. With the shades drawn, it was dark. She had lit an old kerosene lamp and the flame guttered, sending up tendrils of black smoke. She had been playing solitaire. There was a fried pork chop steaming in a pan on the table.

“You want some lunch?” she said after she had settled herself down in her chair, smoothing the quilt down under her and over her bare legs. “I’m finished. You can have the rest.”

She slid the pork chop over to August. It hadn’t been touched. He took a bite. It was seared crispy on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside, quick fried in butter and finished in the oven. That’s how she always made pork chops. Lisa wouldn’t know how to do this, he thought. His father would get so fed up with dried-out tough pork chops that he might send her away, and his mother might come back to the new house and he’d start helping his dad with the barn chores again.

“Are you still not eating?” He picked up the pork chop to gnaw at the bone where the best tasting meat always lived.

“Augie, that’s a common misconception about us breatharians. I eat. Good lord, I eat all the time. Here, actually, let me have one more bite of that.” She leaned over and wafted her hand around his pork chop, bringing the smell toward herself, and then took a quick, hiccupping little breath and smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Meat from an animal you know always has the best flavor,” she said, lighting one of her little cigars. “That’s something city people probably don’t understand. You remember taking kitchen scraps out to that hog every night after dinner? You fed that animal and now it feeds you. That lends a certain something to the savor — I’m sure there’s a word for it in another language.”

She pulled her quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don’t have in English? It’s like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can’t explain because there isn’t a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”

August wiped his greasy hands on his jeans. He was fairly certain his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn’t mean you understand it any better. Does it?”

“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don’t think things really exist until we can name them. Without names for every living thing, the world is populated by spooks and monsters.”

“Just because you give something a name doesn’t mean you change what it is. It’s still the same thing.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”

“What about it?”

“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”

“Maybe you’re too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That’s an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now — the state of being incapable of formulating concepts of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, due to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I’m not saying you’ll ever understand why the world works the way it does, but you’ll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will absolutely someday come to a grinding halt, as nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”

“No.”

“Huh. Well, in time you will. I’m sure.”

She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, riffling the ends together with a brisk splat, and then condensing the deck back together by making the cards bow and bridge and shush into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound of her shuffling, thinking, knowing she was wrong. He had loved someone who had died.

“How’s the job coming?”

“Not great.”

“Motivational issues?”

“No. They’re just fast. I’ve been thinking about a change of tactics.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I don’t know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”

—

Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split in two distinct pieces. There was the part when Skyler was alive, when his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now, this new part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa’s spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that the whole of his life up until this very point existed in the past, which meant it didn’t exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture next to Skyler.

—

It was dark and cool in the barn and he switched on the radio for company. August hadn’t been able to sleep, and he’d risen early — before Lisa, even — and he hadn’t had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. In the darkness he could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.

The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms, tabbies, calicos, some night black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they’d fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spit, slightly awed, thinking about last night, and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked to the rafters and found them empty except for one, where he spotted a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist so it dangled there, like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.

He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere, and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.

There’s going to be unrest. There’s always going to be unrest but things always get better. Tomorrow will always be better. Just think about it, is there any time in history in which you’d rather live than now? I’ll leave you with that thought. I’m Paul Harvey, and now you know the rest of the story.

August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and stropped it a few times against the side of his boot and set to work separating the cats from their tails. He pushed the cats into the conveyor trough as he worked and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn’t go out to look but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of forms as lifeless and soft as old fruit, furred with mold. Tomorrow or the next day his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.

—

It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board and as he pounded the last one they were already stiffening. The sky was just starting to take on the milky light of predawn when August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom he stopped and listened. There was no sound of his father and Lisa in the kitchen but he knew they’d be up soon. He leaned his board against the coatrack, directly over his father’s barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.

August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house. He’d never gotten the hang of whistling. The best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch he wiped at his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they’d been thrown there.