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fell.
    Steve stood over him. “It’s not a good idea to try assaulting an officer of the law,” he said. “But I’m going to forget this happened. I don’t know what that girl told you. I can understand your anger, why you might try to hurt me in the heat of the moment.” He paused, made a sound in his throat, and spit to the side. “What I don’t understand is your boy. I mean his pockets were full of ammunition, Grizz. Took his time sawing down that shotgun. I can’t imagine such coldness.”
    Even if Grizz wanted to rise, he couldn’t. It felt like there was a saw working in his gut, an old hernia tear he had torn again. He breathed in the dust where he had fallen and tried not to cry. How had he not seen this moment coming? Of course they would do this. They couldn’t just let Seth be dead. They had to find some further way to punish him, send him on to hell.
    “This town’s had a terrible shock. They don’t feel safe. The world is changing, and they don’t know their place init. Let go of your anger. If you want to be angry, be angry with your son.”
    Grizz put one hand over his eyes. It was good advice. He should have been furious with Seth, but when he searched himself all he felt was the shock of his boy’s death. An emptiness, chaff in his palm.
    Grizz didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his voice. Steve knelt in the grass beside him. “A group of us will come this fall and combine your crop. No charge.”
    “I’ll pay for it.”
    “We both know you don’t have the money. Probably don’t have enough for Seth’s funeral services. You’re going to need help to get through this.” Steve extended his hand, but Grizz didn’t take it.
    Grunting, Grizz climbed to his feet and picked up his shovel and the rest of his things. Steve shrugged and walked away. A moment later his car started. Only after the sheriff’s car disappeared up the driveway did Grizz allow himself to lean over and vomit up what he’d drank last night. He let the sick come up, all liquid and no solids, until he was scoured out.
    Then he walked to the broken place in the fence line where one post had been shattered in half. The bull must have been shocked by the electricity, enraged. The fence repelled him once, but the next time he charged it he must have hit the old post at full speed, splintering it. Grizz admired how the bent wires twisted and curled into space.
    Grizz drove the staves into the ground and wound wire around the makeshift post, clamping it in place. The bull lifted his head from the dusty grazing pasture and studied his work. It was a jerry-rigged operation, and they both knew it. Just this small effort sapped Grizz’s remaining energy, and he had to sit for a moment in the waving grasses to catch his breath. And even as the work drained him, it also renewed him, quenched his ache for a spell.
    A boisterous cloud of blackbirds burst from the oaks as the sheriff drove away. The flock gathered into a swirling pinwheel that carried them high above the pasture, the line breaking and re-forming before arrowing toward the mountain, where they landed in the waving grasses and went silent as though they had never been. Grizz was left alone again in the hot sun with the cows chewing their cud.
    In this year of drought the leaves fell early, small and brown and skeletal. The canary grasses were tawny in the light, bending under a hot wind, and the woods stretched toward town, dry as kindling.

LONE MOUNTAIN
    O nce there was a mountain, a bald grassy place that looked like the skull of a man, all brow and crown, because long ago a giant had trampled the valley before sinking up to his eyeballs and drowning. The little ponds around it were his footsteps, the mounds beside it his shoulders as he shrugged underground. Maybe he was not dead. Maybe he was only sleeping. The wind off the river was his breath. Night in the valley was sentient with his dreaming. Cows that escaped pasture fences went to the mountain and