After the buckets have slapped to the ground ten feet below, they look like two of the many tawny-colored rocks that bulge through the unruly grasses and wildflowers of the meadow surrounding. This place, this farm, seems like some sort of promised land, before things got ruined, before money and greed, before pollution, before floods and fire and disease and war, but he feels too hot and hungry to wonder more about it. He has never been anywhere so hot. He has never been anyplace where the color green burned his eyes. His arms have never hurt this badly. But the woman with I BRAKE FOR PEACE and MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR on her old green car has promised him fifty dollars on Monday and a ride back to the city. Though he doesn’t know what city, or when Monday is, he knows what he will do with fifty dollars. He will send it for the window that he broke.

Once more an airplane drones just beyond the narrow wedge of sky above. As the woman has instructed him to do, he ladders down and conceals himself where his backpack rests beneath the shaggy eave, under drooping grass and wildflowers. Anyway, he needs to escape to shade and let the numbness recede from his arms. The buckets are heavy. The work he was hired to do has turned out to be hauling water from a stone cistern along a path that corners several mud-block buildings, one structure to the next, each half-buried into the bluff that climbs through thick buzzing forest to the sky. He hauls full buckets up a homemade ladder onto the roof over the main house, where he gives water to the parched sod. From up on the roof, the collection of grown-over buildings and weedy gardens almost disappears into the meadow.

The woman, Faith, toils inside the structure next door, a low lean-to that stoops her almost double as she guts out plum tomatoes and drops them into glass jars. She pauses at the snarl in the sky and swings her head to find him. She is making sure that he has come down off the roof, he thinks. She stares exhaustedly through him while a small yellow plane gaps the valley, flings its oversized shadow down the near bluff, across the meadow, then up and out.

But she still stares as the buzzing engine recedes, her face sagging, her hands hanging heavy, wetly red. He gives her a peace sign, then a plus sign, then makes a heart with his two hands paired. She drops her head and snicks her blade across a whetstone and resumes knifing tomatoes.

Sammy Lamb of God. He likes it. Best yet. It sounds like the spiritual answer to exploding sheep. Cassie said that fighting for the future, for all living creatures, was a spiritual duty.