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Meg’s father tow a stalled vehicle from the shoulder of the new interstate. After Dougie was buried, Meg moved back home with her folks, never remarrying and eventually taking over the tow truck service andsalvage yard when her father’s health failed. Both parents were gone now.
    After hanging her dress in the family room, Meg approached the altar, genuflected, then walked to a small rack of votive candles at one side. Kneeling again, she lit a candle, replaced it in the rack, and bowed her head.
    Twenty-some years, and still she came in every morning to light that candle for Dougie. Even as she murmured in prayer, she recalled herself standing at the altar, a young bride with no idea of what life would hold but that God and this blessed church would provide.
    HARLEY HAD NO plans for Christmas. In fact, he did not care for Christmas. He did not hate Christmas. He was not at war with Christmas. As with the old water tower, his sentimentalism was in play: he liked the nighttime glow of the lights and decorations other people put up, he liked to buy a bag of angel foam candy in Farm and Fleet and eat it all in one sitting ( There y’go, Mom , he always thought), and he enjoyed going to the community choir Christmas concert at St. Jude’s when his work schedule allowed it. But as for Christmas Day itself, he could do without it—particularly in the way it disrupted the daily normalcy of things. He simply didn’t care to turn on the radio and hear music he didn’t normally hear, or find his comfortable news and sports talk shows were holiday themed rather than re-chewing the usual well-worn issues of the day. Once Harley found a groove, he liked to ride it, and Christmas Day was a pebble in that groove. There was no mail delivery (although based on his feelings about the mail—or at least the nature of the mail—he’d been getting lately, perhaps that was a blessing), the feed millwas closed, the filter factory shut down, and no one seemed to be where they were supposed to be. Everything was thrown off. All in all he preferred any given Tuesday. Thus, even as Margaret Magdalene Jankowski rose from her prayers and prepared to help Father Carl set up for the service to follow, Harley welcomed the chance to shrug into his chore coat and step outside to feed and water the beefers. In the chores he found the comfort of the everyday.
    Plus, he had to check on that calf. Harley regularly recalled his father—in a rare moment of low-key speechifying—invoking the word “husbandman” and urging Harley to take the term to heart. It wasn’t enough to own animals, his father said. You had to walk among them daily, get keyed into their rhythms so you’d notice if anything was amiss. Harley would never be the husbandman his father was, but he did once pick up on a beef steer with a bad hock while simply watching the animals loaf, and by calling the vet was able to intervene in time to keep the animal on track for the abattoir, ultimately a zero-sum proposition for the steer, he supposed, but still the right thing to do, and he was quietly proud of himself for catching it.
    So before he threw hay bales down from the mow, he walked through the beefers. The barn thermometer was tickling single digits, and a stiff breeze from the west had left patches of the barnyard snow scoured and thin, broken here and there by dark brown knobs of deep-frozen cow pies. The beefers were hunched and bunched behind the corrugated steel half shed that served as a windbreak, dispassionately chewing their cud, neither grateful nor ungrateful for his husbandry as far as he could tell. After a quick head count to verify that everyone was in attendance and upright, Harley turned his attention to the stock tank. Finding it full andunfrozen—meaning both the plumbing and deicer were operational—he turned on his heel and stomped through the deeper snow in the lee of the wind and let himself in the