The cattle lay in pyramid stacks like hay. It was a wonder at his age that he could drive the tractor, let alone configure the skulls, and she supposed that’s why she let him do it.
West of the Lawton ranch in the late spring at high elevation, blue and gold light filtered over the range so that the snow was the blue white color of breaking morning, and the pines were black sticks and split feathers strung out like ravens on fishing line. Snowmelt pooled water into mirrors that shone through when looked upon, into the heavens looking back upon them. And the gilded streams threaded themselves between the pools, connecting them like withered lightning.
And following the threads east the light quieted as if covered and there came a red ridge where the untouched mountains split from the plains and the land sloped into green pasture. The houses were clustered like cards mid game, connected by square ranchlands and winding uncolored roads, and the streams were dignified not by light, but by cottonwoods, which rose a brighter green than the pasture.
When Blake Lawton killed the first two cattle, his wife Alice assumed sickness. On the third she’d assumed meat, though Blake hadn’t butchered a cow in thirty-one years and he’d left the body in the pasture. The fourth cow was without any reason that she could figure and when he came in that night with the rifle weighing in his papier-mâché hands, she asked why he had done it. He in turn asked her to take a picture of him next to the carcasses, heads and horns forward, and despite the fact that her husband was born in 1919 and the extinction had begun before he was thought into being, she knew that in his turnstile old mind he was hunting bison. She would not say that her husband had gone senile, he was just out of place. There was no use now in trying to redirect him. Or at least there wasn’t the time. He killed all of their eighty-seven cows in under two months.
After killing the final cow at sunset, he came in and set his rifle in the door frame and clapped his hands together and she stared at him with the garbled shadow of their livestock behind him. He kissed her head and shook her fiercely with accomplishment and fell asleep next to her watching the nightly report.
The next morning the bed was empty and she went onto the porch and stared at the cattle. They looked to be their own mountain now, the ascension of which occurred in its own formation, so that the climb never had to occur. In the distance she saw Blake’s curved speck pacing the perimeter fence with slow steps, where the cottonwoods and the stream their limbs bridged over touched root down on their neighbors’ land. Every few minutes her husband swiveled or raised the rifle and appeared as a scarecrow in the wind.
In the evening the clouds hung low and caved in upon them like a hand pressing downward as the sun set over the range. She continued as she had the day before and before that, heating a meal in the microwave and turning on the television. The clap of the rifle jolted her out of her seat and when she stepped out onto the porch, the sun burned a trail of red between the peaks and the clouds, as though cut open, and the red seeped into the clouds and dripped onto the peaks. There remained a sliver of gold inside the red but its light did not carry. The spring wind blew the clouds, the hidden sounds of the dead plain, the glimpse of the heavens as they began to rain in drops and stones that were red and deep blue. It all came toward her at a slant. She saw her husband walking hurriedly her way, carrying something.
“I found that damn wolf,” he yelled. “The one that’s been killing our cattle.” He hobbled, bewildered and smiling, onto the porch next to her.
He carried a girl, her neck a limp stem, her dress and hair splattered, unruly, and covered in grass.
As her husband looked proudly out across the baptized land, colored copper from the blood and the red sun, Alice looked at the girl’s face. Already the girl’s skin was becoming blue white like the untarnished snow on the mountains, and when the ambulance came and placed the sheet over the girl the blood and rain seeped through like blooming geraniums and Alice remembered: they had a daughter who hadn’t been home in twelve years. She wanted to reach out, touch the girl’s skull, and see if her fingers remembered the bones.
Mackenzie Sanders is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Tucson, Arizona. She received her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work can be found in Variant Literature, Raleigh Review, Unsaid Magazine, and elsewhere. She is passionate about environmental conservation.
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