As a midwestern child, she had gotten to know food in its sentient state right in her grandparents’ chicken-scratched yard. Joan had loved the white hens with their meditative clucking, red combs and yellow legs, rhythmic, bobbing way of walking. Twenty feet beyond the chickens began the dirt field where the hogs were kept, the pink rubbery noses poked through the fence, the tiny wicked eyes, the little lean-tos they called home. The pigs had babies that Joan’s grandfather would hold for her to pet, which she did, panicked and sorry, as they squealed in abject terror, the same syllable over and over, while their mothers snuffled and bit each other. In the next enclosure were the cows, standing on low mountains of manure, staring between the chewed planks of the fence, bright metal tags stapled into their ears. The color of the tags indicated at what future date the cow would be evicted from its body.

Joan’s grandfather was a part-time butcher who drove a panel truck to people’s farms and killed their animals for pay. It wasn’t told to Joan, who had a hard enough time petting a baby pig that didn’t want to be petted, but once she had glimpsed something strange: a group of blood-smeared shaved sheep in a dejected clump; a lost calf, tall with rickety legs and twine around its neck; and a lamb on its side in the dirt, woolly legs bound together. The lamb had lifted its head and stared at Joan as she walked toward it, but right at that moment her grandmother began calling her, urgently, in a false lilting voice, the way you might call a puppy away from a busy road.

“Dearie, come here!” she cried gaily. “Come to Grandma!”

There had to be a rope around somewhere. Where? Joan was starting to feel the adrenaline leave her body. He had tried to kill her. For a second she almost swooned—her grandmother had called her dearie, she had been a little girl in a ruffled midriff top, somewhere she had a picture of herself in it squinting at the ground while someone in baggy trousers held a long fish up next to her. The fish was being held by the gills, and its tail was flexed just enough to show it was still alive; it was the same height as Joan. On the back of the photo, her mother had written Keepers.