Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner

The tips of his horns had been trimmed to blunt points but could no doubt still go through a man with all the greater wreckage. Each bull was monstrous and beautiful, animal gods incarnate, their balls hanging like sacked stones between their legs.

      —What’s his name? said Seth.

      —I’d have to see his tag and check the records.

      —How many’s he got in there, about twenty?

      Jack nodded and spat.

      —Why don’t he run um no more?

      —Don’t know. Elmer used to do it. Was his thing. He failed at it and here they sit.

      —Which one has killed a man?

      —It’s the white one there, or is he cream-colored.

      —What’s his name?

      —Little Boy Blue.

      —Did they retire him when he killed that cowboy?

      —I believe so. I never went with um for that stuff. I had to stay back to milk and feed.

      —I watch these bulls from my window, said Seth. It’s part of the mental preparation. Eighty percent of the ride is mental, Balls says. You got to find your peaceful center, your spot of balance on his back, right up on the rope, riding on your hand almost. That’s the peaceful spot. Stay out of the house of pain and stay off his crown. You got to anticipate what the bull will do. Most guys get out there and it’s just a blur, a whirlwind and they’re on their ass and scrambling for their lives. But if you can slow time down, then you got it. The bull, he can only do so many things. He can buck, twist, or spin or throw any combination at you. He can throw his-self all four legs up in the air leaping like a frog and bending like a banana. So you got him then. I sit on three stacked bags of rolled barley with a piece of twine wrapped around um in the barn where the old lady can’t see, and I grab hold and close my eyes, and then I just sit there and imagine, lean in and out, back and forth, with what the bull’s going to do.

      —They give a buckle for that?

      —Piss up a rope, said Seth. We got to get a watch. He dug in his mouth with an index finger and flung the wad of chew onto the ground like an animal had shit in his mouth. His tongue worked to gather the fine remnants. Where you figger we can pick one up?

      —Town someplace.

      Jack looked over the herd. The air cooled further and wild stars began to come out with no moon to dim them. Lights had appeared in Seth’s house across the field and he left for dinner. Jack went back to the farmhouse dragging an anxiety he couldn’t shed. His thoughts ranged in his head and overran one another. His blood was agitated and roaming.

      Talk of drought sounded in murmurs like the rustling of dry corn stalks and it was not new talk. Blair preached about the management of the reservoir above them some hundred miles, told of great and scheming water wars waged silently, methodically, and with evil intent between farmers who sucked the reservoir nearly dry by summer’s end to carry water to their crops. He said the field for a farmer was like his child, and the worry and anxiety that overtook him concerning his field was not unlike that of a father striving to provide bread for his little ones, for it usually translated into as much. Smoke from desert fires hung above the horizon and seen through it the distant ranges were blue and thin like ragged fins. Third crop alfalfa was paltry and the general feeling was that fourth would not be worth the diesel required to harvest it. One arid hot morning as they drove back to the barn after breakfast Blair remarked how tenuous a thing was farming in the desert. A livelihood in which everything depends on uncertain rainfall and unstable prices. He said if someone would have put it that way before he started he wouldn’t have done it. He just thought people drank milk, and he could give it to them. He licked his chops clean of remaining breakfast juice and stared stoically out the windshield. They raised dust along the dirt lane and it came in through their windows and filled their noses and settled on their clothes. He said who knew what Brigham Young saw when he came through the canyon and viewed the Salt Lake Valley below him, but it couldn’t have been much. People likened him to Moses, but he led his people out of the Promised Land instead of into it. Brought them to the desert where they now claim not to wander. He said it was worth wondering if the old boy stuck his cane there in that patch of dirt for no other reason than it looked like the most godless land he’d come to yet. A means for proving his people, and his people shriven. Raise something out of nothing. Turn the devil out of his playground and make the wilderness as Eden, her desert as a garden, and comfort all her waste places. He said it was a testament to human will, whatever else. It couldn’t have been a trivial thing to turn this region into productive farmland and the same could be said for the keeping of it now. So much depended on the precarious turn of the seasons. Time was a man couldn’t make it here without the Lord’s help, he said, and that’s the way he’d have it yet.

      He rubbed a rough hand across the stubble on his face and it made a rasping sound.

      —But now look at us, he said. Don’t you ever forget, boy, that the Lord give us this land as a stewardship, and we can lose it in a blink, same way others did, this whole damn nation.

      They picked Elmer up and Jack sat between them. They drove back down the lane past the McKellar house and across the paved road to where the corn grew. They talked of the pond as they unloaded from the truck, how it would be too low to pump from in a week or two, and the river was low too, the flow of the ditches drying up. Jack only listened while the two men discussed whether they would have to harvest the corn sooner than usual or whether they could wait and gamble for rain. They sent him into the tall crop and he walked the narrow trench between rows, from the front end of the field where the stalks were tall and deep green to the end some quarter mile distant where less water reached and the crop was short and thin and yellowing. He examined the ears and shucked some along the way. They didn’t look as bad as he had feared. They had a month left to grow.

      Down in the riverbottoms there was a fire going within a ring of stones. The dog came panting along the dirt track, happy with the result of her effort and wagging her tail, and he scratched her behind the ears and told her she was a good dog. Her breath was hot and foul in the air, her tongue stretched out like pink taffy. She tried to lick his shrinking scabs and he pushed her away. Heber peered into a tackle box on the tailgate of his Bronco. They were on Blair’s land, below the farmhouse. In most spots a man could throw a stone across the river. The water flowed between sheer and crumbling dirt walls in places, its water brown from manure pollution and from the shifting sand beneath and the dirt it ate with its ever-expanding width. It ran clean and swift in the steeper land to the north, in Idaho, but slowed and muddied through this plain. Sandbars surfaced and disappeared as the river chose to build and destroy them. It wound an inefficient, tortuous course through the land, kissing the town of Juniper Scrag briefly and passing one clustered settlement after another before it spread out in an alluvial plane like the veins from arm to hand on its way to the dead sea that was the Great Salt Lake. A furtive dumping ground, it contained various refuse. Downriver, the arm of a disc-plow stood, rising stark and black above the water. Farther down the hood of a car could be seen when the river was low. Below him on the sandbank lay a rotting sack of dead puppies, washed unaccountably upon the shore and still tied to another torn sack that had held the stones. The corpses were decomposing in their slicked down muddy fur, their tiny white teeth bright in contrast, their dull skulls shown through in spots and their bodies picked at by scavengers. There was always wondering what else was under these muddy waters.

      —Forgot the chairs, said Heber.

      —That’s all right, said Jack. It’s good to stand and fish.

      They searched the deep spots where the surface curled and eddied and where small whirlpools appeared and disappeared at random, Heber’s hook perhaps fishing also for the ghost of his drowned father. Jack remembered the time they’d sat around an evening fire like this and Heber’s father had placed a beer in the hands of both his sons and offered Jack one as well. When Jack turned him down Heber’s father asked him if he was a man or a pussy and kept on until he had stirred up enough confusion and emotion that Jack felt tears sting his eyes. Heber, eight years older, sat at the fire smiling, and his little