Entreat me not to leave you,
Or to turn back from following after you;
For wherever you go, I will go;
And wherever you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people,
And your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die,
And there will I be buried.
The Lord do so to me, and more also,
If anything but death parts you and me.

RUTH 1:16–17

‌One

Percheron

Once, here, on this high plain, there were only Horse, Bear, Rhino. No words to put to things, no call to put them. But today? Ginny and Dan in the barn, and words like this: “You fucked me over. You fuckin’ fucked me over.”

Ginny behind the heaving mare said, “Her water’s broke. I broke it.”

“He was fucking her while you were fucking him and thereby fucking me over,” said Dan. “Now that foal’s too big for her.”

She swatted flies. Her hat was filthy from mucking. Her coveralls were unzipped to her waist. One arm hung free folded to the knee, the other was stuffed inside itself. Her flannel shirt was rolled up her elbow. The dust filled the doorway like the bees and flies.

“That foal will turn her inside out,” Dan said. “That foal will bust her.”

“No one knows how things go.”

“How they go, how they go,” he said. “Look at her belly.” He spit and stirred the dirt with his boot. “Behold the suffering of an innocent creature.”

Ginny spat too. “Behold?” she said. And: “I’ve got things to do.”

Out at dawn, Ginny was in the barn as midwife. Dan saw to the cows. Most of the herd already speckled the south field to the east, burned two weeks back and quickly regreened. The cows ate the grass. Dan was a punctual rancher. He’d slapped them through the gate with his stick, one black, one white, then a tricolor bull calf. The calf turned his head and paused at the ongoing ruckus in the barn: a hoof to a stall and a bucket kicked over. “Easy, easy,” Ginny cooed.

The calf ran on to mingle with the herd in the boulders and grass, grazing, shitting, swinging tails. They would cut off his balls in a week. Dan listened to the barn, which was red and peeling, the shed too, the corners a quarter-century off-plumb. When the hoof kicked the stall again, the gutter shook to the loft that yawned black, empty of hay. The cat slipped out of a raccoon’s hole. Morning is the very best time for reproductive suffering. This is well-known.