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Boar

Luke Sholer

    Earlier that night Matthew’s father told him if he took the car, he would report it stolen. “Do it,” Matthew said. “I’ll tell Mom how I got my fracture.” The splint had been removed so recently that his biceps and triceps were still abnormally thin, as if his elbow had healed itself by taking their tissue.
    In Modesto Matthew pulled into the parking lot of a rent-to-own furniture store, where he now waited. Sarah had said they needed to meet, tonight. A woman tilted back in a recliner. Rising from cylindrical concrete bases, lampposts gave off light the color of cantaloupe flesh. A mini-van was parked nearby. The driver—a man with a moustache—was shouting at a second- or third-grade boy, leaning over him, slapping the dashboard. A song finished.
    Sarah’s car stopped alongside Matthew’s. As he got in, she told him not to put his seatbelt on. She had chosen not to lie to her parents about the crack in her windshield. Her neck still hurt from when he shook her in the fight, even if he did save the punch for an inanimate object. Matthew’s shame scalded him.
    “I don’t feel safe with you,” Sarah said. “Which means I can’t be with you.”
    Then he was standing on the asphalt.
    It was pathetic, he knew, but as her car rolled forward through the empty parking spot, he ran three steps and opened the passenger door.
    “No, Matthew.”
    Her tone was enough; he let go.
    She pulled the door grip, and the automatic locks sank in unison. She was behind glass. Visible but no longer available. In the shower he had knelt in front of her with shaving cream and a disposable razor. They had lain skin to skin, hours passing quickly as breaths. He had written her letters so many pages long they couldn’t be folded into an envelope. Once, talking about the death of his favorite aunt, he had said sorry for crying. “Don’t be,” Sarah said. “It means she’s alive in you.” The memories mocked him now. They filled him with scorn for himself.
    Brake lights going dark, Sarah turned onto Oakdale Road, vanished.
    At a liquor store whose employees accepted any ID you handed them as long as you paid half again sticker price in cash, Matthew bought a fifth of rye and a two-liter bottle of cola. In the next strip mall he poured half the soda out, all the whiskey in.
    He drove through the countryside taking long swallows. He loathed everything. The odor of the dairies seemed to stay in his nostrils, pungent, dark brown. Lifted pickup trucks with shoved-out tires came up to his rear bumper then passed him in roaring arcs, as if to dominate him. On the asphalt, hit skunks lay like cast-off T-shirts.
    The car wasn’t new, but it had cost more than he would make in a year and a half of full-time work. After Matthew drove home drunk a month ago, his father excluded him from the family auto-insurance policy. He had yet to get insurance of his own.
    In Hickman, Matthew turned off Lake onto Lampley. A yellow diamond-shaped sign read NOT A THROUGH ROAD. His parents lived on it. Driving north past an almond orchard, he approached the main canal. He felt the way he had as a child, after spinning too fast on the merry-go-round. His tires drifted onto the dirt, raising dust. In the moonlight it looked like vapor. A mailbox with a lowered red flag knocked off his side mirror, the faceted steel pole of a transmission tower flickered by the passenger window, and the up-sloping earth bank launched him—not with an exhilarating glide, but with a sudden grinding tip down—into the canal, which ran high with water diverted from the Tuolumne River.

*


    In the days that followed, the only person Matthew wanted to talk about the accident with was Sarah. She answered his first call. After saying she was glad he was all right, she asked him not to phone again. The conversation lasted less than a minute. Her parents answered his next calls. Then no one did. The final time he tried, a message informed him the number was no longer in service.
    What would he have told her about? The burst then punch of the airbag. The acrid powdery smell it released. Black water rose fast and gargling from the floor of the car, engulfing his knees, his waist, while large bubbles slid up the windshield. Then he was unfastening his seatbelt, kicking in his obscenely heavy jeans, shoes clunking and catching on the seat and steering column, left arm weak from its time in the splint. Through the lowered driver-side window he thrust himself. He swam across the current away from the sinking vehicle, glancing with fear at the supports of the beam bridge and hoping he wouldn’t be carried under the deck, which rested just inches above the water. He reached the concrete bank—steep as a jersey barrier and chipped along the edges—and lifted himself out. Later the police cars, fire truck, ambulance. Their blue, red, yellow, and white lights revolved and blinked with an unsynchronized brilliance that multiplied shadows and made them jitter. On the way home from the police station, Matthew saw his car for the last time. It dangled from the hydraulic boom of a tow truck, twisting counterclockwise then clockwise, dripping water, dead headlights pointing straight down at the dirt. But embedded in his memories of that night was one he would keep even from Sarah. It was much older. And to it he owed his survival.
    The emergency-crew workers said Matthew had been extremely lucky. He had. He lost sight of his luck, though, as the consequences became clear.
    Matthew now owed his father thousands and thousands of dollars. Not just for the wrecked car, which his family’s insurance refused to cover, but also for the ambulance ride, the hospital examination—even for the tow truck. The DUI added several thousand more to the debt. To pay it off, he had to work.
    “Where?” Matthew asked bitterly at the dinner table. His license was suspended and his parents had said they wouldn’t chauffeur him. They lived in the country. To get anywhere, you had to travel miles of hot shadeless roads with no sidewalks or public transportation. He was stranded.
    “Here,” his father said, driving his forefinger into the oak tabletop with a flat hollow sound.
    He meant the pig farm. Matthew had worked on it before, when he needed spending money, but had only done basic chores: mending fences; cleaning the pens, barns, and trailers; feeding the sows, growers, and boars. If it had been up to his father, Matthew would have worked eight hours a day on the farm from the age of twelve. His mother, however, insisted that Matthew give his energy and attention to school. For years she had had the final word. But in the last month or so her voice had begun to carry less authority. And money had become critical. Matthew understood the two things were related.
    His father laid out the terms while his mother sat in silence. They had agreed on the punishment in low voices in the master bedroom. It couldn’t be appealed. Matthew would labor on the farm. He would begin at sunrise and end at sunset, weekends included. When school started again—Matthew had recently finished junior year—he would work before and after class. He would earn minimum wage. But he would not be paid. Each hour worked would be subtracted from his debt.
    “For how long?” Matthew said.
    “Long as it takes to reach zero,” his father said.
    “I’ll be in college by then.”
    “You’ll be college age by then. But you’re not getting in a new hole until you’ve climbed out of this one.”

*


    The farm sat on 19.75 acres. To the south, between concrete-lined banks, flowed the Turlock Irrigation District’s main canal. The Tuolumne River ran between bluffs to the north.
    Grant raised Durocs, Yorkshires, and crosses. Born and suckled in the farrowing barn, the pigs were moved upon weaning to the grower barn, where they lived in multi-litter pens divided by age. He sold most of the hogs to packers, who paid by the pound and turned them into meat. FFA and 4-H members bought show pigs from him at two-to-three months. The very best animals he brought into his breeding herd.
    Breeding. That was where the money was, and where Grant stored his hopes. If pigs from his farm won the right prizes—Grand Champion at county and state fairs, Reserve Champion or even Class Winner at the World Pork Expo—he would become famous again in that world. And from Hawaii to Montana to New Mexico, ranchette hog farmers, big-business pork producers, and ambitious high-school students would acquire boars and gilts from him at prices thickly muscled with profit. Because profit had always been the problem. When he took hogs to market, he had no control over the price. The buyer at the packing plant stated a figure. And while in theory Grant was free to accept or reject it, in practice his farm needed the cash and he couldn’t afford the time or risk involved in hauling the animals to one of the few other packers in the area, who would offer nearly the same price anyway. Most trips he broke even or made a loss. Which left him hundreds of hours older if not thousands of dollars poorer. He owed the feed company enough money to buy a house. If not for Linda’s job, he would have had to sell the farm a long time ago. They had nothing saved for retirement.

*


    For nearly two decades, Linda had worked as a certified public accountant in downtown Modesto. In that time her salary had helped Grant pay the feed bills, finance the building of the second pig barn, and buy the animals with the genes his herd needed. But she had to force herself to do her job. Every year it took a greater effort. This tax season she had been assigned a retiring co-worker’s clients, on top of her own. In her windowless office, Linda added down and across on ledger after ledger, making sure everything balanced. She initialed and dated the corners of so many statements that at times her handwriting presented itself to her as both familiar and alien, like a sibling’s. The brass lamp with the green shade burned day and night, her coffee going room temperature, her ten-key calculator printing endless columns of light-purple figures onto rolls of paper, the bookcase looming at her back while the stacked boxes of client records crowded in on her like the hungry children that pressed and followed her a decade earlier in Tijuana. She met the March 15th and April 15th deadlines. But to do so, she forwent her weekends, swallowed prescription pills, and cried in private. The pressure helped her see what she wanted to do with her life. It wasn’t other people’s taxes.
    She and Grant had the conversation six weeks before Matthew’s car accident. They were in the master bedroom, early morning, mouths sour with sleep and coffee.
    “You’re not listening,” he said harshly. “Listen. Listen.”
    “Stop giving me orders.”
    Linda longed to write and illustrate children’s books. In her nineteen-year marriage to Grant she had completed one, made notes and sketches for several others, published nothing.
    “I make my name as a breeder—one, two years at most. Then you quit.”
    “So only your dream matters.”
    “Your dream doesn’t pay the bills.”
    “Most years,” she said, “neither does yours.”
    He jolted coffee onto the comforter. He brought his mug down hard on the nightstand and the porcelain opened out into curved shards, the handle still in his hand, coffee browning the carpet.
    He breathed jerkily. Blood threaded over his fingers and palm like yarn over a knitter’s.
    “I’m going to make it work.”
    “You’d better,” Linda said. “I’ve already given notice.”

*


    It was now mid-July. At the dinner table, Matthew’s mother said, “Myopic.”
    “Short-sighted,” Matthew said.
    His father’s fork and knife screeched on his plate as he cut his pork chop.
    “Exacerbate,” she said.
    “To make worse,” Matthew said.
    His father cleared his throat with a sharp grunt.
    “Repudiate,” she said.
    “To refuse to accept or continue with something.”
    “Talent show’s over,” his father said, reaching across the table and taking the flashcards from Matthew’s mother.
    “They’re for—”
    “Worry about getting into college,” his father said to him, “once you’ve worked off your debt.”
    Under that, Matthew sensed the other warning: Don’t think knowing fancy words makes you better than me.

*


    Grant’s best boar was also his newest. Yesterday he hauled it onto the farm in the single-axle trailer and guided it into an isolation pen, where any diseases it might have couldn’t spread to the rest of the herd. In the pen the boar would also come into contact with the farm’s resident germs, and build up immunity.
    The boar was six-and-a-half feet long, and had cost as much as a car. It had an auburn coat, drooping ears. A Duroc. Its feet were large, its eyes wide set, its sides superbly deep. As the boar walked, a curving shadow outlined its hams, emphasizing their mass and promising an abundance of meat—not from the boar itself but from its offspring, the ones that didn’t become breeding stock. Many would, though. The boar’s pedigree was certified by the National Swine Registry. And it had come from a big, fast-growing litter. At the Summer Type Conference, the boar had emerged as Champion, while two of its littermates won first place in their respective classes. Genetics you could bank on. The boar would bring Grant’s farm renown, its offspring profitability.
    But isolation seemed to be affecting the boar. It wasn’t eating. So Grant now went to the grower barn, picked a two-month-old barrow.
    With a red plastic sorting board, he kept the young pig tight to the fence and moving ahead. He led it into the isolation pen and latched and wired the gate, hoping the new pen mate, by giving the boar companionship and competing with it for feed, would awaken its appetite. The size difference would keep them from fighting.
    He strode to the house. Inside, Matthew—seventeen and no respect for work—was already eating lunch. “Not noon yet,” Grant said.
    Matthew chewed, said nothing.
    “You break early, you get back to work early.”
    Rising, Matthew slid his unfinished sandwich—ham, from a hog Grant had raised—into the trashcan. “It was fatty anyway,” Matthew said. He set his plate in the sink and walked out.
    Grant ate alone.

*


    Matthew followed the perimeter of the pasture, moving the trimmer from side to side under the bottom wire of the electric fence. If the grass grew too high, it would short it out.
    His father approached, swiveled his wrist, fingers flat.
    Matthew pushed the stop switch. “What?”
    “I need to run some errands in town. Once you finish with this, clean and disinfect the farrowing barn.”
    Matthew squinted. It was early afternoon, the sun white with a hue of sulfur. “That’s an all-day job.”
    “Lucky for you it’s summer.”
    Matthew pulled the starter rope and walked away amid the plasticky whir of the trimmer line.

*


    The new boar grunted. It stalked toward Matthew, hams swaying, the muscles along its spine like the twin barrels of a shotgun.
    At the rear of the isolation pen, in the boar’s bedding, Matthew crouched to scoop the feed out of the trough and rose to pour it over the wall. The feed was mainly ground corn, supplemented with soybean oil meal, vitamins, minerals. It looked like pale sand. As he shifted it, it loosed dust. He finished emptying the trough. The back wall came up to his collarbones, and between it and the corrugated-metal roof stretched a gap. Lifting himself, Matthew lay on his chest on the top of the wall, swung his left leg over, and eased himself down the other side. He had done it this way to leave no tracks. But now he saw the depressions his boots had made in the pine-shaving bedding.
    The boar grunted again, bossily.
    “Involuntary hunger strike,” Matthew said.
    The boar slammed into the two-inch-thick wall. He started. The young pig—his father must have put it in there—trotted to the gate at the opposite end of the pen.
    Matthew returned with a broom. After sweeping up the feed, he leaned over the wall and was stirring the pine shavings with the broomstick when the boar thrust in a swift upward curve, the side of its lower jaw just missing Matthew’s cheek as he threw himself back. The ground stunned the breath from him, and he was on his feet moving in a circle before he could draw and expel air again.
    Front hooves sticking over the wall, the boar squealed. Matthew heard stress, ire: the demand that he replenish its trough, and stay out of its pen. He spit between the boar’s eyes. It dripped. Only later did he realize he didn’t have the broom.

*


    A eucalyptus windbreak. A dairy where a hill of silage was covered by a white tarp weighted down by tire sidewalls. A cornfield, the tassels blurring atop the stalks. As Grant drove, his eyes moved over the landscape, but his thoughts traveled inward and forward, to the terrain of dreams. When he became a famous breeder, pig farmers throughout the West would admire him, and even the people who looked down on his occupation would have to respect the money he was pulling in. But that was only the outside of his dream. The inside was more important, harder to talk about. It had to do with the solitude of the work he did each day, with the continuance of the farm—and of his name. He wanted Matthew to stay. Not in the house necessarily, but on the land, with the animals. Which was why, after Matthew wrecked the car, Grant gave him the punishment he did. Now Matthew only performed low-dollar tasks, and grudgingly. In the two years it would take him to pay off the debt, though, Grant would be there working beside him. Matthew would learn the operation slowly and thoroughly, laboring with the humble grit of a hired hand while developing the long-range vision of an owner. Together the two of them would build the farm into one of California’s very best. And one day Matthew would take it over.
    The first vehicle to be stopped by the dinging bells and lowering arms of the Milnes Road railroad crossing was Grant’s truck. A pedestrian he had passed—a young man Matthew’s age—came treading along the shoulder and stood even with Grant as the locomotives went by. The air smelled of heat, metal, oil, smoke. Boxcars rolled past. Then hopper cars, the chutes along their undersides like sows’ teats.
    Here, where the country began, pedestrians were uncommon. Grant looked over at him. Neat hair, slacks. Headphones covered his ears. Probably getting off work, summer job at a gas station or restaurant, the polo shirt with his nametag folded in his backpack. He was enterprising, straightforward, and not above sweating—likely had two or three miles left to walk. Why couldn’t Matthew be like that?
    Grant rolled the window down and asked the young man if he needed a ride. He didn’t seem to hear. His headphones, the passing train.
    Grant extended his arm, raising his fingers. This didn’t gain his attention either.
    The gate arms swung up. Grant crossed and parked on the shoulder directly ahead of the young man. Making the offer clear. Threatening trouble. Though Grant didn’t realize it could be seen this way until the young man gave him a mistrustful look, turned sharply to the left, and started walking in the rocks that paralleled the tracks, where no cars could go. For some reason, Grant felt it like a blow to the stomach.

*


    The dirt lane led from the yard to the pig barns. Between the ruts the ground rose in a long, round-topped strip. Weeds bristled on it. Grant was heading to the farrowing barn to check Matthew’s progress, but as he passed the new boar’s pen something snagged his eye. The boar was alone. Reddish-brown smears on its snout, its lower jaw.
    No, not alone. In the corner, forelegs folded, lay the young pig. An ear had been ripped off. Its throat was a burst fruit.
    In the bedding was a broom. It didn’t belong there.

*


    Grant stepped into the footbath to disinfect his black rubber boots, then entered the farrowing barn. It smelled of rinsed concrete, diluted bleach, old manure. Matthew wasn’t there. Because Grant had weaned the previous litters and the next sows weren’t due to give birth for a week, there were no pigs either. All in, all out—only way to do a thorough cleaning. If you didn’t, the babies would catch diseases and die. But dribbles of feed stuccoed the feeders. Shit was mashed into the flush-gutter grates. Apparently Matthew thought this was good enough.

*


    Matthew lay reading on the black vinyl bench seat, sweat on his forehead. He had hurried his chores but he needed to improve his SAT score, and the paperback in his hands now—by an Englishman who had spied for his government during World War I—supposedly contained more SAT words than any other book in the Hughson High School Library. So Matthew had stolen it. The call number was taped to the spine.
    The pickup Matthew lay in was from his father’s glory days, when he had shown a Grand Champion pig at the San Francisco Cow Palace, run the 20,000-head swine operation of a famous Italian-American rancher, and taken his mother dancing in the hotels and roadhouses of Visalia. On this seat, Matthew’s parents had kissed for the first time. One night, on her third glass of Cabernet, his mother had hinted at another milestone. His father interrupted, curtly telling her to switch to water. That was his role during meals: censor. Picking at his fingernails, tensing his eyes, he half-listened while Matthew and his mother talked. But as soon as one of them brought up a neighbor’s uncomfortable secret or discussed a violent news story, he broke in. Find something nice to say. Change the subject.
    The pickup sat in the old horse-and-cow barn. The barn smelled of dust and sun-warmed wood. The knots had fallen out of some of the wall planks, leaving ovals of daylight.
    Once bright, the pickup’s paint was a faded blistered yellow. The chrome bumpers had pitted and rusted. The tires held no air. Now and then his father talked about restoring it. But the farm ate his money, his time.
    Matthew didn’t want his father’s life: entering through the laundry room after dark with cuts on his hands and grime under his nails to drop his manure-daubed jeans on the floor; walking angrily toward the bathroom in his briefs, the leg bands loose on his skinny thighs; sitting with shower-damp hair at the dinner table with nothing to say and all curiosity worried or frustrated out of him; falling asleep on the couch immediately after eating; rising again at dawn to scoop all his energy into the mouths of a throng of pigs that would scream or die if he was late but never see him as more than the man who fed them, the man who imprisoned them.
    But that was the life his father was driving Matthew into. And when Matthew imagined himself in it, years and decades of it, he felt as if he was being locked into an air-tight trailer and left to suffocate. What life did he want? To get off the farm, and out of the Central Valley: that was as clearly as he could see it. College seemed like the best way to accomplish both, while giving him time to figure out a plan. If he won a partial scholarship, there was a chance his mother could persuade his father to put off repayment of Matthew’s debt. But with his current SAT score he wasn’t going to win anything. Part of the reason it had been so low was the night before the test. First Friday of May, just after his mother quit her job. He had swum naked with Sarah in Turlock Lake and come home after curfew smelling of bourbon, dried saliva, and drugstore perfume. His father snatched the car keys from him and pushed him back out the door. He told him he wasn’t welcome until he was sober. With a shout and sarcastic salute, Matthew said, “Sober and ready for duty, sir!” Before he knew how, Matthew was lying on his back on the concrete walkway. His left arm—he wrote with his right—moved as awkwardly as a stretched-out wire hanger. In the emergency room, the doctor-in-residency spoke with a Russian accent, his fingers scented with cigarette smoke. “Fracture. Head of the radius. Did you fell off your bike?” “I tripped,” Matthew said. “I was drunk.” It was the story he would have to tell his mother, too. A promise enabled him to uphold the lie: He would never again allow his father to use violence against him.

*


    Paying no attention to the jumping spider on the weathered wood-plank door, Grant pulled and walked into the dimness of the old horse-and-cow barn. The floor was packed dirt. A rusty chain dangled from a beam. Above his ’69 Chevy short-bed stepside pickup burned a light bulb. And there was Matthew: lounging in the cab as if it was his. As if he had paid for the truck with his calluses, his backaches. His short dreamless nights and bone-on-bone mornings. His tight-lipped absorption of insults: shit farmer, dirty Okie, white Mexican. What was Matthew doing? Reading. Like a spoiled, daydreaming girl.
    The cannibalized pig and Matthew’s half-assed job in the farrowing barn had primed Grant’s temper. But it was this evasion, this disregard, of real life—Grant’s life—that set it off.
    He approached Matthew, who pretended not to notice. For a moment Grant felt the way he had decades ago, acting in a school play. All momentum pushed him to perform the role. Yet somewhere between gestures, between lines, he sensed it was possible to walk off stage.
    “What cute shit were you doing in the boar’s pen?”
    Matthew turned a page. “Finished my chores for the day. You can ask me about work tomorrow. Till then, I’m not your employee.”
    Through the lowered driver-side window Grant seized the book. Startled, cursing, Matthew clutched Grant’s forearm and tugged; his cheekbone and temple slammed the roof. Left palm on the windshield, Grant braced himself, shot his arm forward to break Matthew’s grip, then snapped it back. Enamel on enamel.
    Matthew swore louder, incoherently. He was cupping his mouth. He drew his hand away, gingerly opening his jaw, which popped. With his tongue he nudged his lower lip out. A cord of saliva and blood fell onto the bench seat.
    Regret and shame and fear rushed through Grant. And anger—at Matthew for making this happen. In his hand Grant clenched the front cover and first half of the book. It had ripped apart at the binding.
    Matthew stepped out holding the steering-wheel lock, which Grant had kept under the seat ever since the engine quit turning over. “Give it back.”
    “Put that down,” Grant said.
    Matthew threw the door closed, rocking the truck. “Give it back!”
    “That was your warning.”
    Matthew raised the steering-wheel lock above his head. Bending his knees, he exposed only his side to Grant. Grant recognized the stance: he taught it to Matthew nine years earlier when he was getting beaten up at school. Despite himself, Grant took a step back.
    “Who’s warning who?” Matthew said.
    Then, spinning to the side, he brought the hardened-steel rod down across the windshield. It cracked as easily as an iced-over puddle.
    Before Matthew could smash in the hood, Grant had tackled him and was pressing his forearm against his son’s occipital bone, forcing his face into the dirt. Dust rose, thick as incense. Under it he could smell Matthew’s unwashed hair. “You excel at fucking things up, don’t you? Save it for your own life, you’ll have plenty of opportunity. Here, you’ve used up your mistakes.”

*


    “Bury it.”
    Matthew held his father’s stare.
    “Dig,” he said.
    Shovel at a slant in his left hand, Matthew touched his tongue to the inside of his bottom lip. The salty heat of swelling, blood. A lower incisor was loose. He kept his eyes on his father’s.
    “You live in my house,” his father said fiercely. “And you will do what I say, when I say, how I say. Until your debt’s paid off.”
    I declare bankruptcy, Matthew thought. Like you’d have to if it wasn’t for Mom. As Matthew said it, his father’s stiffened hand would explode across his face, leaving a mark nobody could believe was an accident. His father’s words were arranging and rearranging themselves in his ears. A choice needed to be made. Matthew saw himself in the underbrush on a riverbank. Rocks studded the water’s surface. If he jumped to the first, the bank behind him would vanish and the rocks would grow larger, but he wouldn’t know if they would roll out or hold firm until he landed on them. The far bank remained just out of view. He chose.
    Thrusting the blade into the ground, he stepped on the shoulder to drive it deeper, and lifted out a shovelful of dirt.
    “Throw it over there,” his father said. “And go down three feet. Don’t want it getting dug up.”
    Matthew looked again at the wheelbarrow. It was the one they carried manure and old bedding in, a fluorescent-orange X spraypainted on the tray. In it lay the young pig. Its throat was bitten out, an ear missing. A bite also cratered its rump. This wasn’t what Matthew intended when he took the boar’s feed.
    He dug and said nothing, now and then loosening the earth with the pick. The soil was sandy. As he tossed it, weeds shook. The chirp of the crickets pulsated dryly, as if it was the land’s heartbeat. Sprinklers hissed in the neighbor’s almond orchard. To the north, along the bluff above the Tuolumne River, the valley oaks and Fremont cottonwoods resembled smoke.
    The sun set.
    “That’s far enough,” his father said.
    The blade sank, flung dirt out; sank, flung dirt out. Matthew listened to its rhythm.
    “I said you can stop.”
    Matthew thrust down again, scraping shale.
    “Stop,” his father said roughly.
    Stabbing in a half-circle to cut through and under it, Matthew raised the blade, and before pitching the dirt onto the pile saw the bones. The tiny ribcage. The vertebrae like charms on a bracelet. From a runt his father had buried. Too slow growing, too prone to illness, the runts were clubbed in the skull only yards from their mothers. Matthew knew the dead pigs ended up in graves, but had thought they were closer to the property line. Nothing hinted that this area of ground, near cracked lengths of PVC pipe and stacked sheets of rusty corrugated metal, held secrets.
    “Now you see why?”
    The stench—real or imagined—made Matthew gag. He took his T-shirt off and tied it around the lower half of his face. Sweat bonded grit to his skin. He kept going.
    Standing over him, his father spread his feet and crossed his arms. “You’ll get tired before I do.”
    Night came down. The hole was waist deep. On the dirt pile rested shoulder blades, shank bones, aitch bones. Although his blisters had torn open, Matthew refused to ask for gloves.
    A car horn blasted four slow notes: the beginning of the “Charge!” rally call played in baseball stadiums. His mother did that sometimes to summon them to dinner. She had gotten the idea while the family, as a fluke, was watching TV together. A San Francisco Giants game. “That way you can’t say you didn’t hear me,” she said, laughing, her voice glossy with a euphoria that was probably caused by the rare sight of Matthew and his father choosing to be in the same room. Now the horn and its echo of lighthearted togetherness struck Matthew as more forced, more wishful than ever.
    He pushed the blade down, snapping a jawbone off. He told himself what he was doing was no worse than breaking branches off a dead tree, something he did nearly every time he went down to the Tuolumne. He swung the shovel out; on the way back it caught.
    “Climb out,” his father said.
    Matthew pulled hard, freed it.
    Each time the blade bit dirt, sweat dripped off him.
    The horn sounded again.
    His father let out a disgusted breath, kicked something into the hole, and turned away.
    The night grew shades blacker. The halogen lamp on the back of the farrowing barn had been switched off.
    Alone, Matthew picked up the first half of the book.

*


    “Don’t pretend you don’t notice me,” Linda said.
    With a pick, Matthew broke up the earth at the bottom of the hole. The mouth was level with his armpits. He took hold of the shovel.
    “I brought you dinner.”
    Still he said nothing to her.
    She set the lidded plastic container on a pallet. “Beef stroganoff.”
    “Feed it to your husband. That’s his favorite, not mine.”
    In the distance, on Lake Road, a vehicle sped over the asphalt. It sounded like a long strip of tape being pulled off.
    “I also brought you this,” she said, clicking the flashlight off then back on.
    “Yeah? You going to post one of your angels here, too?”
    Linda tried not to lose her patience. Her faith was deeply personal, yet as near to her skin as blood, or joy. A few years ago, she told Matthew about her guardian angel. It saved her life twice. The first time was when she almost bled to death giving birth to him. The second, a voice commanded her to get into the right lane a moment before an oncoming car burst through the screen of oleanders dividing Highway 99 and killed the driver behind her.
    “Do you want to tell me what happened?” she said.
    Far away, a dog barked at an opossum, a trespasser, a memory.
    “You married the wrong man,” Matthew said. “Twice.”
    In college, Linda had been married to a man named Rick. Matthew had never seen him. Grant made her cut up and throw away all the photographs from that relationship a month before Matthew was born. I don’t want my son asking who this other man is. That other man was the first who told Linda he loved her, the first who slept with her, and the first—and only—who beat her. She ended up on her back on the bathroom linoleum, Rick above her, and when she finally managed to protect her face he switched from his hands to his teeth, biting her forearm then her breast, tearing the skin of both. Afterwards she picked an oil painting up off the floor. California poppies. Her signature curled in the bottom right corner, but the canvas was now slack, the wooden stretcher it was stapled to broken. In bed that night, Rick wept for forgiveness. It would never happen again. She stayed with him, and took her final exams wearing sunglasses, explaining she had been in a car accident. Never was three months later. Linda called her sisters and when Rick was at his job making cabinets, they moved her out, moved her 253 miles north to San Luis Obispo, where she enrolled at a new college and swam under fog in the cold green ocean the day she got her maiden name back. She changed her major from art to accounting so that even with one salary she would be financially secure. For over a year she kissed no one. She was working inside herself to grow outward, like a tree. A sense of smallness remained, though, and worthlessness. She returned to the Catholic Church. She made herself promises. No man would put a hand on her in anger. If she married again, it would be after a courtship long and varied enough to ascertain the man’s true character. She would always earn her own money.
    One way not to see a half-kept promise is to avert the gaze. She laid the flashlight on the pallet, turned away from the thought, and walked wordlessly through the dark toward the house.

*


    Linda entered the master bedroom and walked past the bed as if she didn’t see Grant. In the en-suite bathroom, water started running. Then he heard the bristles of the toothbrush against her teeth, followed by the squirt of solution into her contact-lens case, the screwing on of the lids.
    She got into bed. After turning off her lamp, she lay stiffly on her side, back to Grant.
    He finally broke the silence. “Aren’t you going to say good night?”
    Without warmth, she repeated his last two words.
    He waited, then turned off his lamp as well.
    When he closed his eyes, his thoughts were too fast, too numerous, and too troubling. So he watched the black square of the ceiling. This gave him some control over them.
    What had Matthew told her? That Grant had hit him for no reason? Grant would explain it was an accident, one that Matthew caused half of. And there were three reasons. Disobedience, disrespect, and a dead animal. A single one of those, when Grant was growing up, would have called his father’s belt down on him, or his mother’s switch. Boys needed to be disciplined. If not, they talked back, grew soft, refused to work, and broke the law. Matthew did all of these. Not because Grant’s methods had failed, but because he hadn’t been able to apply them consistently enough. Linda had interfered. Matthew had also had too many things handed to him. Like the car. The night he drove it into the canal, he shamed Grant and Linda. He was atoning for it now. Two years of manual labor would sweat the mouth and laziness out of him. They would also teach him the cost of grown-up mistakes. If nothing else, Grant wanted his son to stop looking down on him, and to stop encouraging Linda to. Because he had overheard Matthew yelling at her after other punishments, taking out on her the anger he dare not direct at Grant. “You’re a smart, educated woman. What the fuck are you doing with a redneck like him?” Linda must sometimes ask herself the same question. Grant’s greatest fear was that one day she wouldn’t be able to find the answer.

*


    Matthew lay on his back at the bottom of the hole, one hand over his navel, the other over his diaphragm. He looked up at incomplete constellations, the stars like bone dust from a meat saw. Mice scrabbled. A barn owl flew overhead, noiseless as a shadow.
    Closing his eyes, he tried to see himself moving through the next day. What came instead was a day from his childhood. It was a Saturday. His mother had to work: tax season. Matthew asked to stay home playing with his action figures, but his father needed to run errands and couldn’t leave Matthew by himself.
    They started at the bank, where Matthew’s father ordered him to wait in the truck. Getting back in, his father said “fuck,” slammed the door, and drove in a silence that meant if Matthew talked he would be yelled at, hit, or both. At the nursery, his father spent a long time looking at apricot and nectarine trees; he wanted to plant some in the yard. Matthew wandered.
    Bored, curious, he jabbed holes in bag after bag of potting soil. It spilled out dark, moist, and crumbly, with little white balls like spider eggs. He imagined baby albino spiders crawling out in every direction, climbing up the wooden boxes of the young trees, and pausing on the leaves to weave themselves silk parachutes that carried them on the breeze into the wild.
    Fingers like pincers grasped his neck from behind. His eyes watered. Matthew’s father walked him like that across the gravel, past customers and employees, to the owner. The man and Matthew’s father knew each other.
    “Tell him sorry,” his father said.
    Matthew shook his head, not to slight the owner but to oppose his father.
    “Tell—him—you’re—sorry,” he said, squeezing harder.
    “I’m sorry,” Matthew said, lips trembling, “that my dad’s a dickhead.”
    In the parking lot, his father watched Matthew load every punctured bag of soil into the bed of the truck. They got into the cab. His father rolled the windows all the way up, locked the doors; he breathed in, out, in. Hoping to somehow prevent what he knew had to happen, Matthew turned slightly to his left to buckle his seatbelt. At the same instant, his father jerked toward him and the heel of his hand struck Matthew’s skull, driving him powerfully into the seatback without marring his appearance.
    “Don’t you ever disrespect me in public,” his father shouted. His words seemed to bounce off the glass and dashboard, expand in hot ripples on Matthew’s face, press deadeningly down from inside his head. “That man talks to half the farmers in the county. What do you think they’re going to be saying now? That I let you smart off to me? That I let you destroy other people’s property? You think we can afford all that shit I just bought? God damn it. All you do is cost money.”
    Home. Matthew’s mother was still at the office. He walked down the hallway to his room and his father followed. After taking off everything but his underwear, Matthew lay facedown on the bed and sensed his father move to the closet, the carpet softening his heavy footsteps. Wire coat hangers jangled. One was lifted out, its neck unwound, body straightened. It was taking place with the slow unstoppable quiet of a sacrament. If Matthew tried to run, his father would catch him—he always did—and then it would be ferocious. Only a month before, his mother had screamed that if his father ever hit Matthew again she would leave him. And when she screamed it, Matthew saw her dragging her suitcases along the main canal, past walnut orchards, laser-leveled alfalfa fields, and creosote-blackened utility poles, in a lonely trudge west that would disintegrate her into particles of dust and sunlight and leave him, until release at adulthood, to be beaten and to starve for love in the prison run by his father. At that moment an impossible hope surged through Matthew. Despite what had happened in the truck, his mother’s threat would now protect him. His father would suddenly remember, hesitate. If he didn’t, Matthew’s mother would get home at the last second, and the sound of her opening the laundry-room door, keys tinkling in her hand, would halt his father’s arm in mid air. But the sound was an electric whoosh followed by an astonishing crack. And before Matthew felt pain he already seemed separate from it, a watcher somewhere in the room, foreseeing or recalling what was happening to the boy even as it was happening. A splitting of perspective and time. And related to this, a disbelief—stubborn, inexplicable, self-betraying—that this was occurring at all, or that it mattered. The boy’s father was working methodically. He had started on the buttocks, then traveled down to the backs of the thighs, behind the knees, the calves. The boy had promised himself he wouldn’t cry but when the hanger struck his ankles it felt as if they were shattering under the skin and ricocheting up inside his legs and tears moistened his face, which tingled with the heat of humiliation and rage.
    Afterwards, alone, Matthew returned to himself in gasps. He had received many other beatings from his father, some worse. He had been chased furiously across the house and thrown into a dresser, the brass handles knocking as his father’s belt—the one with GRANT tooled into the leather—leaped in scuffing slaps out of his jeans, rose high, and came down, came down, on Matthew’s arms, back, butt, and legs and he clutched his head to his knees on the carpet until his father stomped through the opening and uncurled Matthew with a kick to the stomach. He had been backhanded across the mouth by the matchhead-red cast that covered his father’s hand and forearm one summer, then held down and muzzled by it on the tiled hallway, the fiberglass shredding Matthew’s lips and making his gums bleed while his father asked him if he still felt like smarting off. He had been hurled to the living-room floor and hit repeatedly on the ears, elbows, and kneecaps with the same cane his father had shown pigs with, and when Matthew tried to get to his feet his father yanked them from under him with the hooked end, twisted, and dragged; Matthew ended up with rug burns even on his face.
    These things had happened all throughout his childhood. And until his mother’s threat, he had always believed that she allowed them. Even then—he was eight—he sensed that her words meant more and less than they seemed to. If you ever hit our son again, I’ll leave you both; you’re too much for me. If I find out you’ve hit him again, I’ll have to choose son or father—and I’ll choose father. If our son tells me you’ve hit him again, it will take me days to leave you and in that time you’ll catch him alone and beat him deaf and blind. Which was true? Which would happen? Matthew didn’t know, and he couldn’t bear the risks. Talk was slow, intangible, untrustworthy. Violence was swift and physical. So Matthew decided to tell his mother nothing. Not only out of fear, but out of shame. One way to live with the humiliation was to silence it. Another was to swear an oath: Years in the future, when Matthew had the strength and the coldness, he would pick a moment in which his father suspected nothing, had no time to defend himself, and he would murder him.

*


    Matthew raised himself out, dirt drizzling from where his hands pressed the surface and his toes grazed the side.
    Pre-dawn. He shone the flashlight into the wheelbarrow. Flies darkened the young pig like peppercorns. Tip it into the hole or drop it off the shovel? Neither seemed right. He waved most of the flies away then set the flashlight on the ground. Lifting the pig out, he laid it at the edge of the hole. He lowered himself back in.
    The pig now level with his hairline, Matthew slid his forearms under it and as he brought it toward himself it rolled, yielding a glimpse of subcutaneous fat around the inside of the throat wound and dripping clotted blood onto his skin before stopping at his chest. He squatted, and rested the pig between his feet.
    He climbed out. After shoveling in three feet of dirt, the depth his father had said, he left the rest of the hole unfilled. The sides were rough. The exposed roots of weeds looked like unraveling twine.
    As it rose, the sun seemed to burn a saddle into the Sierra Nevada. He tossed both halves of the book into the hole. No distractions until it was over. He walked toward the house.

*


    The sow must have given birth just before dawn. Six days early.
    One piglet had died, nostrils and mouth clogged by its placental envelope. In the corner lay another. Alone, not nursing, it weighed one pound thirteen ounces at most—Grant could tell it would never thrive. He would have to kill it, hit it behind the head with the concrete-filled pipe.
    First he needed to move the sow and the rest of the litter into the farrowing barn, where a crate would keep the mother from accidentally crushing the piglets, and fans and heat lamps could regulate the temperature. Here in the open-air receiving pens, the morning coolness was already wearing off. Any minute the July heat would be stressing the newborns. Any minute more could die.
    But the farrowing barn wasn’t ready. Because of Matthew. And after digging all night—a perverse show of pride and resistance—he crossed the kitchen, ignoring Grant, and went to bed. Today, when chores had to be done in parallel and Grant needed a second man.
    The growers and finishers were squealing. Their feed was late. It would have to be later. The youngest—the most vulnerable—took priority.

*


    To get to Saint Anthony’s Church, in Hughson, Linda had to drive past acres and acres of orchards, the trunks of the walnut trees, almond trees, peach trees, falling away in long parallel lines that converged in the distance.
    On the ground floor, the exterior walls of the church were brick, painted tan. The stuccoed walls of the clerestory were the same color. The doors, in contrast, were oxblood, as were the edges of the lower flat roof and upper gable roof. On the ridge stood a cross. Each of its arms ended in three rings.
    From the outside, the stained-glass windows looked like dark jigsaw puzzles, with lead strips and joints where the pieces fit together. Inside, the pieces of glass cast red, blue, orange, purple, and green shadows. Linda was sitting in an oak pew. Eight-o’-clock Mass. The priest, a man from the Philippines who spoke with an accent but sang without one, was delivering the homily.
    Though Linda heard his voice, the words she thought about were Matthew’s. You married the wrong man. Had she? Sometimes it seemed she had said yes to Grant in spite of herself. They had met near Visalia at a nightclub frequented by stockmen, vinedressers, feed-mill workers, and bikers. She was sitting with her sister at a table sticky with spilled beer, and the first two times Grant asked to join them Linda told him no. Her sister was visiting from college. They had gone out to catch up, not meet men. But when Grant returned a third time, a walleyed drugstore manager was talking into her sister’s ear and Grant said, “If he can sit here, I can too.” Linda didn’t think Grant was handsome. And it didn’t impress her that he ran the swine operation of a man whose surname could be found on the labels of dozens of products in supermarkets up and down California. To elude conversation, she danced with him. He moved eagerly.
    For weeks afterwards, Grant phoned her. Linda made her housemate answer, instructing her to tell him she was in the shower, or swimming at a friend’s pool. It was summer. Finally Grant said, “In the water again. What is she, a mermaid?” Linda answered his next call, and agreed to go out to dinner. Out of guilt. She took her own car, to start the date later and finish it sooner.
    At twilight outside the restaurant, the air smelled of eucalyptus and tar. The parking lot was freshly paved. Grant got out of his yellow pickup, shook her hand, and in the pressure of his gaze she felt his desire for her. His moustache was shaped like a horseshoe. Waist-size 30 jeans. Western belt buckle. It was silver plated, with engraved filigree and twisted-rope trim. Two menus in her hand, the hostess led them to a window booth with a speckled Formica tabletop. Linda ordered chicken breast strewn with sautéed mushrooms. Grant had the sirloin.
    Without the din of the nightclub, she heard the idiosyncrasies of his speech, the mistakes. He pronounced “Tuesday” like “Tuesdee” and “toilet” like “toe-lit,” said things like “We was livin’ in Indio then.” She had gotten As in every English class she had taken. She felt embarrassed for him. “Where’s your family originally from?” she said. “We’re Okies,” he said. “I mean where in Europe?” He didn’t know. But he did know—he said he could tell—that Linda had been married, and divorced. He was polite. He spoke softly, listened with care. When he missed a few words, he said “pardon?” The waitress he addressed by name and with kindness, as if she was an aunt who had a smaller income and greater burden than he did. Although he had been raised without church, he possessed faith. He valued honesty, and family. He wanted children. He would devote time and attention to them, the way his own father hadn’t. In all the years Grant was in elementary school and junior high, even his first two years of high school, his father didn’t attend a single one of his events. It wasn’t until Grant started appearing in the local newspaper for winning purple and blue ribbons with the show pigs he had selected, raised, trained, and groomed, that his father went to the fairs Grant spent all his free hours and dollars preparing for. That was also when his father began to ask Grant questions—real interest in his voice—and to retain the answers. It felt good. Linda understood then that that recognition had been more decisive in Grant’s choice of occupation than any career counselor or graph of projected lifetime earnings could have been. And at that moment she stopped seeing him as a pig farmer. He was a man who needed love, a man willing to give it.
    In the months that followed, she also found herself overlooking his tendency to impose his will on others, two examples of which were the night they met and the persistent phone calls afterwards. Sometimes he had to domineer—just to get his job done. He was responsible for thousands of hogs and many men, all of whom, in one way or another, set their wills against his every day. Under that, though, was another reason. He hinted at it one night when he was talking about competing, first as a teenager who could never afford the best show pigs, then as a jobseeker with less than a year of junior college on his application form. “I figured out the only edge I’d ever have was that I worked harder.” Which made Linda see that if he pressed his will down onto others, it was only because he did the same thing to himself, crushing the resistance of his own fatigue, pride, anger, and doubt, and forcing the larger part of himself to carry out the orders given by the smaller part.
    When did she begin to sense she could marry him? They had been dating for a year, and to celebrate they were going to camp at Yosemite National Park. It was a Friday. Grant got off work late—scours was decimating the piglets in one of the farrowing units at the hog ranch—but he wouldn’t hear of canceling their plans. They arrived after nightfall. Every good site was taken. So they drove the dark curving roads until they found a clearing in the pine trees, no campers. “Good, privacy,” he said. “If nobody’s here, there’s probably a reason,” Linda said. They would be fine. He insisted. From a rectangle of ground they swept the fallen needles and removed the stones. Together they pitched the tent, pushing the poles—hollow segments connected by an elastic cord—through the sleeves and staking the guylines into the earth. Stars glittered. They lit the camp stove. Grant ate a whole can of chili, plus the beans and ground beef Linda couldn’t finish. With water from a clear plastic jug they rinsed the pot and cans and bowls and spoons, and returned them to his hiking backpack, which he hung from a high tree branch far from the trunk.
    It was late when the bear came. After making love in the two sleeping bags that Grant had zipped together into one bed-sized one, they had fallen asleep, Grant right away and Linda so much later—she hadn’t climaxed, and something about the clearing still troubled her—that when she heard the padded footsteps and deep rough breathing she believed she was still waiting for sleep to enfold her. She whispered Grant’s name and what she somehow knew it was, terror in her voice. Instantly he raised his head. The canopy seemed to suck inward; the bear must have only been testing it, because under a swipe of its claws the nylon would tear as easily as tracing paper. Grant groped for something, darkness inside and outside the tent. He slipped his keys into her hand. He felt for something else. Whispering he said, “When I go out, run to the truck.” He zipped open the entrance, crawled out, and rushed—arms up, flashlight glaring, throat roaring. Bounding, high-rumped, the black bear fled. Grant approached the pickup. Linda opened the door and he sat on the bench seat. For a while he just breathed. He was still naked from being inside of her, from sleeping with his chest against her back. “What if that didn’t work?” she said. “You’d still be safe,” he said.

*


    Scraping, brushing, Grant removed the shit and feed Matthew had missed yesterday, then soaked the surfaces and fittings in detergent. As it took effect, he checked on the newborn litter. They were nursing. He switched a few of the largest piglets—ones he might later use as breeding stock or sell as show pigs—to the front teats, where they would receive more and better milk, and headed back toward the farrowing barn. No time for anything else. All over the farm, pigs were shrilling with hunger.
    After pressure-washing the farrowing crates and troughs, he started on the floor, the water hissing white against the concrete and blowing forward mist. He noticed a movement beyond the doorway. Matthew.
    The gladness that leaped in him was immediately pushed down by his memory of what had happened between them the day before. He felt guilty, stiff. He stopped spraying.
    “You’re late,” he said, not making eye contact.
    Matthew said nothing.
    “You help me with everything that needs to get done, I’ll log you a full day.”
    Matthew tilted his chin up in surly acceptance.

*


    The most urgent chore was to feed the pigs. As instructed, Matthew started with the sows. They were clamoring. When he scooped the feed into their feeders, they stood up, came over, and chewed vigorously, drooling and grunting. Matthew hurried, and before the sows lay down again, shoveled out their soiled bedding and threw in fresh pine shavings, making a layer two-to-three inches thick on the bottom of each pen. Then he fed the starters, growers, and finishers. The boars ate last.
    In its isolation pen, the new boar paced. Its front legs moved forward in long powerful reaches. The hairs above its spine shimmered golden. Its testicles bulged.
    The boar saw Matthew and went at the gate, rattling it, mouth foaming.
    Ignoring the display, Matthew let the wheelbarrow down onto its legs and from it scooped five pounds of feed into a white bucket. The trough rested on the ground. If he leaned over the shoulder-high wall to pour the feed in, it would create a skirt of dust, spilling particles into the bedding and dirt. This caused waste, which his father strongly disliked. Today Matthew had determined to do every chore his father assigned him, and to do it well. He would prove he knew how to work, to make the withdrawal of his labor more painful. He had to enter the pen.
    To lure the boar away, he dropped feed in the corner. He shut the gate behind himself and walked to the rear, free hand gripping a sorting board. It was a portable wall between himself and the animal.
    In the bedding, sideways to the boar, he hunched over the trough and took his eyes off it only while pouring out the bucket. And in that moment, quicker than Matthew would have believed, the boar struck the sorting board and came down on it with its forelegs, pinning him beneath it, the board spreading the weight but the pressure still great enough to squash the air from his chest and stop its return. The boar’s jaws clashed, dripping spit. Its tusks hadn’t yet grown into weapons—it was only ten months old—but its teeth could take off his fingers. Something his father did years ago played in his mind like a safety video. “What’s the most sensitive part of a pig’s body?” he said. Matthew shrugged, then flinched as his father’s knuckles tapped his nose bridge. “Right there. One ever attacks you, that’s where to aim.”
    Working his arm free, Matthew rammed his fist into the boar’s snout. It backed up screaming. On his feet now, he pounded the dirt with the sorting board, stamping as he did so. The boar didn’t retreat, but didn’t charge. If at that moment Matthew had had a weapon, he would have struck its skull with all his strength.

*


    The smooth concrete lanes glistened. To the undersides of the farrowing-crate bars clung drops of water. Moisture darkened the divider panels.
    Fans spinning, doors open, the farrowing barn would soon be dry enough to move the newborn litter in. But now with no sows or piglets in it—the thought crept into Grant’s mind and proved hard to drive away—the building made no sense.

*


    “You got that?” his father said.
    Matthew nodded once. Throughout all the chores he had done that day—sweep the passageway in the grower barn, flush the manure pits beneath its expanded-metal floor, pour mosquito killer on the lagoon the manure flowed into—he hadn’t spoken to his father. So far his father had refused to acknowledge it. Now they were in the farrowing barn, standing over the newborn litter. Bars confined the sow to the middle of the pen. It could lie down or get to its feet, but not turn around, not flop over.
    “Show me,” his father said.
    The piglets were Duroc-Yorkshire crosses. Matthew hesitated, then lifted one out by the hind leg, hand under its chest, the throbbing against it like a drumhead tapped from the other side. The piglet was writhing, shrieking. He pressed the corners of its jaws to coax its mouth open, and glimpsing its ridged palate he tilted its head so the fragments wouldn’t fall into its throat, and clipped its needle teeth off at the gum line. He trimmed its umbilical cord with the same sidecutters, and in a clumsy continuation of the movement snipped two-thirds of its soft-gristle tail off. It would never grow back. Next he stuck an 18-gauge needle, the tip denting the skin before piercing it, into the piglet’s neck and injected the iron. Veins branched through its ears. Notcher in place, he squeezed, cutting triangles out of the edges that would identify the animal for life. He sprayed iodine on the wounds and put it back in the pen. Matthew had processed his first piglet.
    Together he and his father did the rest, disinfecting the tools each time. A runt was left. Matthew caught it. It felt colder than the others, struggled less.
    “Give me that one,” his father said.
    He knelt, holding it still on the passageway floor. “Bring the pipe.”
    On the cart, beside the tool tray, lay a rusted steel pipe. Matthew picked it up. Concrete scabbed its sides and filled its center. Designed by his father, who had measured and cut the steel tube himself then stood it on a wooden block and poured in the wet concrete, the pipe had one purpose. Though Matthew had often seen the pipe, he had seldom handled it, never used it. Its heaviness surprised him, as it had in the past. He approached his father.
    “What?” his father said.
    Matthew was holding it out to him.
    “Right behind the head. You’ve seen me do it before.”
    Matthew didn’t move.
    “Like hammering a nail.”
    Matthew shook his head. Although he had planned to do everything his father told him, he couldn’t do this.
    “All this pig’s going to do is waste feed and medicine and man-hours, and I don’t have a minute or dollar to spare. You want to play mute, fine. I like you better with your mouth shut. But you’re not deaf, so don’t make me repeat myself.”
    As if it understood, the runt began to wriggle harder, screech louder. Matthew kept his eyes on his father’s. Still kneeling, his father restrained the piglet with both hands.
    “Cry about how it made you feel afterwards. Right now, you better put that pipe to work.”
    One swing, Matthew thought, and it’s over.

*


    Dinner was ground-pork tacos. As Grant chewed pieces of soft corn shell and slivers of fried onion, he realized it didn’t matter that Matthew had refused to kill the runt. In spite of his sulking he had done a good job all day, the best Grant could recall him ever doing on the farm. He swallowed, and was getting ready to compliment Matthew on this when he glimpsed—with such clarity it made him yearn—the way it could one day be. He and Matthew would run the swine operation as partners, as men who trusted and respected one another. Together they would formulate feed rations, decide which boars bred which sows. They would wear ballcaps emblazoned with the farm’s logo and their shared last name, giving orders to hired hands in simple repetitive English and by-ear Spanish. They would haul trailer-loads of hogs to market and afterward eat at all-night diners where they would talk in voices mellowed by honest exertion while beyond the windows eighteen-wheelers filed down the highway and slabs of overhead lights whitely illuminated empty gas-station forecourts. Just then, Linda and Matthew started with the flashcards.
    “Impecunious,” she said.
    “Habitually broke.”
    Linda picked up another. “Benighted.”
    “Ignorant,” Matthew said, looking at Grant.
    The words hadn’t been chosen on accident. Grant felt dazed, betrayed, as if Matthew had somehow seen the pictures in his head and torn them up.
    “Fetid.”
    “Having a stench, like pig shit.”
    Grant slapped the table so hard his glass of water fell over, an ice cube gliding across the oiled oak surface. Ever since he had started raising pigs at fourteen, people had mocked and humiliated him. At school pretty girls used to pinch their nostrils shut as he walked through the hallways. The sons of wealthy dairymen would call out “Fifty-yard line” and gang up on him, punching, tripping, and spitting, if he crossed it. For stinking up their air. And to remind him that even young farmers had a hierarchy. The more expensive the animals you raised, the more land your family owned, the higher up you were. Grant’s parents had five acres and an arthritic horse. His father drove on the California Highway Patrol; his mother clerked in a doctor’s office. After high school—Grant had done badly in English and hadn’t been put on the college-bound track—the slights continued. At nightclubs, the girls he desired most found out within the first dance what he did for a living and thereafter became unavailable. Linda herself hadn’t returned Grant’s calls for weeks. He sometimes thought that if her confidence in herself and in the world hadn’t been cracked by her first husband, she never would have met Grant for dinner at that restaurant in Visalia with the toffee-colored booths and dull steak knives. After all, she had a university degree. Something she and many others seemed to believe turned you into a higher breed of human being. To this day, her co-workers enjoyed imitating his grammar and Oklahoma accent: “Bono sings good”; “wash” pronounced like “warsh.” Beneath the caricature of his voice, Grant recognized the reminder. Only now, they weren’t rich dairy boys; they were certified public accountants. Even Linda’s siblings found ways to put him in his place. Once, in a game of Scrabble, her architect brother said, “No, I’m not missing a letter. The ‘cella’ was where the god was kept in a Greek or Roman temple. I can’t believe they didn’t teach you that at pig-farming school.” People who at birth received privileges, people who ornamented their minds with book learning, might choose to treat Grant as less than them. But the one person he would never allow to diminish him was his son.
    “Give me the cards.”
    “Next word,” Matthew said to Linda.
    “You disobeyed me once today. Don’t do it twice.”
    “Matthew,” Linda said, “we’ll finish after dinner.” She set the stack on the table, between her plate and Grant’s.
    “I’m done eating,” Matthew said.
    Grant eyed him.
    Matthew looked away, wiped his mouth with his napkin.
    He lunged, one hand coming down on the rim of a bowl and flinging salsa onto the floor, the other managing to seize the top of the stack before Grant caught it and forced Matthew’s thumb to his palm and they fell like playing cards dropped mid-cut. Linda cried out to stop.
    “Leave them there,” Grant said.
    “Let go,” Matthew said.
    “Leave—them—there.”
    Matthew fake-smiled. “Consider them left.”
    Grant couldn’t tolerate the cleverness in Matthew’s voice, the sarcasm. But Linda was there. He loosened his grasp. Matthew pulled his hand free and sat down.
    They were silent. Scattered over the floor-tiles lay diced tomatoes, kernels of corn, bits of cilantro. Water dripped.
    “Despotize.”
    Matthew said it without touching the cards, without looking at them. “You should know this one. Big man.”
    “Stop talking.” Grant’s hands were shaking.
    “To oppress. See, you did know it. Ex—”
    “Stop talking.”
    “Expurgate. Something the head of this household just loves to do.”
    Hands like C-clamps, Grant held the lip of the table. The red wine in Linda’s glass rippled. When he drove on the highway there was sometimes a moment in which, though he hadn’t yet passed an off-ramp, it was too late to veer onto it. He was going too fast, didn’t have enough distance. And as the paved slope rose alongside him, it was as if he was watching a possibility become impossible. Carried forward now by his own shouting, Grant had a similar feeling. “You smart off to me with your belly full of food I provided. Calling me words you learned sitting on your ass while I work sixteen hours a day to make sure you have jeans to wear and a double bed to sleep in. And you want me to send you to college? So you can come back on visits and rub your superiority in my face? You don’t know shit about discipline; you can’t even kill a runt when I’m there watching. No supervision, you’d flunk out and blame the school. I’m not giving you a goddamn dollar.”
    “You don’t have,” Matthew said, “a goddamn dollar to give.”
    Something hot and white as electricity flowed through Grant, creating deafness in his head and making his body light and quick and numb; it discharged, it had to; his forward lurch shifted the table with a rattle of cutlery on ceramic, and the slap came down at so powerful a diagonal it knocked Matthew to the floor still sitting in his chair. Linda was screaming their names and no and don’t. Wine had spilled over her white napkin.
    “You’ll live in my house until you clear your debt,” Grant said. “Not a day longer.”
    “No fear of that,” Matthew said. He was on his feet, words smeared as a drunk’s. Rancor twisting his mouth, he spat; blood landed on the table, and a tooth. A lower incisor. It came to rest on a knot in the oak that was the brown-black of a Duroc’s snout.
    “This,” Matthew said to Linda, “is the man you married. But don’t worry, I don’t expect you to follow through on your threat. Just stop lying to yourself.”
    Righting his chair, he pushed it against the table as if no one had been or would be sitting in it, and left.

*


    Matthew couldn’t rinse the taste of blood out of his mouth. In the bathroom mirror he pulled his lip down. There was now a gap in his bottom row of teeth. It was as wide as the clip of a mechanical pencil. The gap made him look less intelligent. It made him look poor.
    “You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life,” his mother had said when he refused to be taken to the hospital.
    “Then I regret it.”
    And what he thought was, You’ll see it every time you look. You’ll never be able to tell yourself it didn’t happen.

*


    In the darkness, Matthew set the shopping bag on the dirt and unlocked the shed door.
    He entered. It smelled of dust, the insides of toolboxes. A post hammer and a sheaf of T-posts leaned in the corner. A level hung from a nail. In the yellow-green liquid that filled its tube, a bubble floated imprisoned.
    He had come for two things, one made of wood, the other made of steel and concrete. The latter was heavier. Before leaving, he swung it at the level. The glass tube was crushed, its contents released.

*


    Matthew was kneeling behind the back wall of the boar’s pen. On the ground lay the cane his father used years ago to guide pigs around the show ring. Later he beat Matthew with it.
    Matthew had already scooped the feed into the white plastic bucket and now from the shopping bag he removed the carton of skim milk, the jar of molasses, and the bottle of vodka. With a wooden spoon he stirred in their contents. He had learned the recipe from his father, who used it on the hogs he allocated to the family’s chest freezer. Stupefied, the animals wouldn’t dodge. And the slaughterer that Matthew’s father hired could imagine a diagonal line from right ear to left eye, another from left ear to right eye, and place the .22-caliber bullet just left of where they crossed.
    On tiptoe, Matthew reached down over the wall, his hand around the bottom of the cane. Its hooked end held the handle of the bucket. Setting the bucket in the trough, he twisted the cane against the handle and tilted the bucket onto its side. Mush poured out. He re-hooked it and turned it mouth down.
    The boar still slept, legs out, body jiggling. Matthew brought the bucket up. It made a dull cylindrical sound as it struck the boar’s ham. The animal started, grunted a warning. Matthew backed away. As if to ensure the bucket couldn’t move on its own, the boar pushed it, then snuffled, put its snout in.
    The moon shone. Pine shavings lay on the dirt like hair on the floor of a barbershop.
    Soon the boar approached the trough. It sniffed the mush, tested it with its mouth. It began eating.
    Matthew waited. For the bottom of the trough to show. For the boar to go back to sleep.
    Carefully he scaled the pen wall.
    Between each step he let a minute pass. Mud gave under his black rubber boots, feces. The boar dozed.
    He was now near enough to pet it. Under its bristles its skin would be warm and firm, like a man’s face under a beard. Matthew bent his knees. At the small of his back, between the waistband of his jeans and leather of his belt, slanted the concrete-filled pipe. He drew it.

*


    The floor was carpeted. Matthew wore socks, no shoes. With each step he eased down his heel, then gently lowered the ball of his foot, his toes, advancing through the dark with such weighted slowness that the air around him seemed to throb, to set off an alarm that wouldn’t be heard but sensed.
    Matthew’s father was breathing evenly, a short silence following each intake and outlet of air. But countless things—a creak in the plywood under the carpet, the grumble of a truck on the road, the scrape of a chain against a gate—could break his sleep. He depended on the farm for his survival. Part of him always watched over it.
    The numbers on the clock radio tinged his face red, the way a stoplight reddens the leaves of a nearby tree. Matthew’s mother’s side of the bed was empty. In the corner, in her reading chair, she slumped. Her chin rested on her collarbone.
    What Matthew was viewing felt as private as sex. He had never seen his parents willingly sleep apart. Still, she hadn’t left him.
    Matthew clenched the shaft, rough with rust and flecks of concrete. Slowly he neared the bed.
    On his father’s nightstand lay dozens of credit-card receipts. A life too overgrown with debt, only bankruptcy could clear it. No thinking. The next step would bring Matthew close enough.
    As he took it his ankle made a popping sound.
    The breathing remained even, but his father’s face seemed to tighten.
    Matthew stood motionless.
    His father’s eyes were in shadow, the dim red light falling on his cheekbone, his nose. They were the prototypes of Matthew’s.
    At last his face relaxed.
    Knees bent, Matthew raised the pipe above his head.

*


    The hiking backpack had belonged to his father. Wearing it, Matthew crossed the pasture. Dark. Moon in the east. A rodent tunnel collapsed under his rubber-soled shoe, making him stumble. Overhead a shadow moved. The barn owl. Its face, he knew, would resemble a cut-in-half apple.
    At his family’s property line, he folded the backpack over the top of the electric fence and lifted himself. The wire gave, swayed, and he tumbled into the weeds and dirt on the other side.
    He walked Lampley Road. Past blackberry bushes where spiderwebs hung concave as mesh strainers, past a house with a bale wagon and gooseneck trailer parked in the yard, past an orchard of English-walnut trees grafted to black-walnut bases.
    A gap appeared in the fences. Here he turned. He stepped over broken-off tree branches, sundered trunks. Beyond them, blocks of concrete lay in a rough line, all seeming to have come from a square column that had fallen and cracked apart. A ribbed metal drum stood in a skin of rust. Light was entering the sky.
    He descended the bluff, going beneath valley oaks and dying cottonwoods, glimpsing in the distance the stark ponds of gravel-mining pits separated from the Tuolumne River by dikes. He startled a brush rabbit, pushed through willows and sedges. He reached the south bank.
    After laying down the backpack and unzipping it, he looked at what it held. The pipe. He gathered rocks. Some were the color of wet cement, others of rain-darkened sand. He placed the largest and heaviest at the bottom, burying the pipe, and continued adding rocks until he couldn’t make the tabs of the zippers meet. He positioned the pack upright. He sat against it. Putting his arms through the shoulder straps, he got to his feet with difficulty, and clipped the chestband and waistband.
    He stepped into the river. It covered his knees, his thighs. Bass swam. He was walking over large stones and small boulders when something wobbled, shifted, and his ankle tore like a steaming-hot rag, his foot sliding down, a rock the size of a curled-up child settling on top of it.
    Limping, he continued toward the pool. The bank was undercut there, the earth moist and dark, the roots of a white alder dangling. The water barely moved. Six feet deep, Matthew estimated, though looking into it was like looking through a magnifying glass. A chain of bubbles rose.
    Arms relaxed, he let himself fall forward into the pool, cheek and ear smacking the surface. Underwater he rolled, pulled onto his back by the mass and density of the pack, which, finding no active resistance, went like iron to the bottom.

*


    The hall bathroom was the one Matthew used. In it, with the door locked, Linda was running the shower on cold but not showering. Instead she looked in the mirror. The perimeter was beveled, and in the middle, dried, were the burst and downward tracks of spat blood. It lay over her reflection.
    A truth developed in her mind, and if she had let herself fix it in words, they would have been these: She had known, on some level, for years. And she hadn’t ended it.
    She understood something else then, the dried blood like a web over her face. When Grant was unable to control her, part of him wanted to hit her. Because he couldn’t—she would divorce him, no second chances—he hit her son.
    The knowledge had consequences.

*


    After checking that his and Linda’s vehicles were still there, Grant had searched for Matthew in the buildings closest to the house: the dilapidated milk barn, the old horse-and-cow barn. Now he trod the dirt lane toward the pigs. To his left lay the pasture, enclosed by the electric fence. Two days ago Matthew had walked away along it, trimmer in his hands, the drone of the spinning nylon line seeming to blur the air around him, giving him the look of someone being erased.
    The sun was rising from behind the Sierra Nevada. A rill of dust stretched along the bottom of the rut Grant walked in, his boots stirring it, the scent reminding him of what he had smelled on his son two hours earlier, when Matthew had entered the master bedroom. The turning of the door handle awakened Grant. Instantly his senses sharpened. But as Matthew crept toward the bed, something mysterious happened. A billow of sorrow and remorse rose inside of Grant, cresting in an all-giving, all-allowing love, and, overwhelmed by it, he made a decision. He made it in the receptiveness of night, would be unable to defend it after daybreak. The night, though, was when he had to act. He would feign sleep. He would let Matthew do whatever he had come to do. In this way Grant would humble himself, show his regret. Keeping his eyes closed, he made each breath as slow and deep as the one before it. How long did Matthew stand over him? Each second seemed to contain many, the way a shotgun cartridge contains pellets. Matthew’s presence weighted the air. He gave off an odor of dust, sweat, manure. Grant’s head told him to dive to Linda’s side of the bed, switch her lamp on, and shout for Matthew to leave the room. But he obeyed his heart. The weighted stillness continued. Then, as quietly as he had approached, Matthew backed away. A few minutes later there was a rustling in the hall closet, where Grant kept old coats, hats, and hiking gear. After that, the latch bolt of the laundry-room door clicked into the strike plate. Night amplified the sounds. Grant lay awake until the walls began to lighten. He was alone in the bed and, though Linda slept in her chair, alone in the room. The unconscious offer no companionship. Without showering, Grant stepped into a pair of jeans, settled a t-shirt over his head. He walked through the house, to be sure Matthew hadn’t returned. He tried to wake Linda. She pushed his hand off, turned her face away. He said her name once, then louder. She rose, not giving him her eyes, and walked swiftly to the hall bathroom and locked the door. Maybe that was better. Before upsetting her more, Grant would search the farm. Matthew might not be gone.
    The first pen the dirt lane passed held the new boar. It lay in the bedding. Noticing the white plastic bucket near it, Grant halted. He went around the pen, found the empty vodka bottle. The pigs were only given alcohol on one occasion. Grant studied the boar. Pine shavings hung from its rust-colored coat. Flies, drawn by the molasses, crawled over its snout and lower jaw. On its ears and anus flies also gathered. The boar was drunk, but unscathed.
    When a slaughterer or a hunter fires his rifle, the bullet that doesn’t enter flesh will dig into the earth or speed far beyond the target. What Grant feared when he heard the laundry-room door click shut was now confirmed. Matthew was gone. And Grant saw that between what he felt and what he did, between what he desired and what took place, there seemed to have always stood a sheet of Plexiglas. It had holes, but they were small. What got through was deformed by the force and pressure of having to fit.
    Alone, in the dawn, Grant faced the boar in its isolation pen.

*


    Lying at the bottom of the pool, not letting in breath or water, Matthew felt as if the world outside him had paused. There was a high-pitched humming in his ears. In the blackness behind his eyelids thoughts pushed, images glimmered. He saw himself holding the concrete-filled pipe. He raised it twice, desisted twice. Why? He had entered the pen resolute as any slaughterer. Compassion didn’t save the boar’s life. It didn’t wake from its stupor in the final instant and look at him with eyes animated by a scared intelligence. No, what stopped Matthew wasn’t the realization of what his swinging the pipe would do to the boar. It was the realization of what it would do to him. It would turn him into what he loathed: a man who used violence against a weaker being; a man who mistook that being for the cause of his anger. Violence had been bred into Matthew. And that violence sought nothing other than the breeder. Shoeless, Matthew crossed the carpet of the master bedroom to his father’s side of the bed. Like a pistol, the pipe was heavier than its size suggested, the extra weight seeming to correspond to the gravity of the deed it was made for. The alarm clock glowed red. It lighted the knoll of his father’s cheekbone, the ridge of his brow. He looked watchful even in sleep, and Matthew knew as he lifted the pipe that one blow was all he would have a chance to deliver. He summoned his rage, trusted its strength. But in the flush of power, in the thrill of imminent violence, he saw the one blow endlessly repeating itself on his conscience and body and life. True power wasn’t violence. Violence occurred in a chain reaction and couldn’t stop itself. True power chose its actions. In that moment, Matthew realized he had done enough. In raising the pipe above his father’s skull, he proved he could have done it; and this freed him from having to do it.
    The river that ran above Matthew had begun as snow. It had come down on the crumpled granite slopes of the Sierra Nevada, trickled in the sun into pine-needle-flavored creeks merging at Tuolumne Meadows, rushed through a ramp-bottomed canyon, poured into Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and found a way through the convex barricade of the dam, done the same at Don Pedro. Its energy had been taken, its flow diverted and regulated, but still there was enough to reach him, to close over him.
    In stronger and stronger waves, pressure buffeted the inside of his head. His heart scooped insistently at his chest, like a hand trying to dig in packed clay.
    The river would wind west. As it did, the riprap lining its banks would confine it. Beyond Modesto, it would empty into the San Joaquin but its water would keep flowing, past the rust-streaked concrete piers of highway bridges, through a channel deep enough for oceangoing ships and their bleary trails of diesel, into the drowned river valley of San Francisco Bay, and there, in an unstoppable movement, it would course through the strait to the Pacific.
    Matthew’s head was burning, his torso tight. A gas lighter than air seemed to rise, to spread irritatingly along the ceiling of his chest and stomach. He had one urge: to breathe. The same urge had jolted through his drunkenness after his car plunged into the canal, water pressing up along the windshield and boiling up from the pedals to cover his calves, his hips. How did he know what to do? This was what he wouldn’t admit even to Sarah. When Matthew was eight years old, a woman crashed through the white wooden guardrail of the bridge that spanned the canal south of their farm. She drowned. To drive in to or home from town, Matthew’s family had to cross that bridge. For months, every time they did, Matthew’s father ordered him to go through a drill, and as quickly as he could, Matthew had to say, “Seatbelt, window, out,” mimicking the unbuckling, the rolling down, and the climbing out.
    The need to breathe ousted all thought. Matthew knew the drill. It was his. Unclipping the bands, slipping the straps, and leaving the backpack in the depths of the pool, he surged with a gasp into the air and light, where he waded across to the north bank of the river and on his sprained ankle trespassed through an orchard to State Route 132. He hobbled across it, off it, up smaller roads his father was less likely to drive. When enough land lay between Matthew and the farm, he turned west. He limped with his thumb out. Trucks blew past him.



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