The word “boy,” and the scorn in Max’s voice, inflamed Zachary. Fists clenched, shoulders hunched, Zachary started toward his father.

Max braced, prepared to defend himself. Close behind him, Jose waited, ready to fend off any assault on Max.

Spittle showed at the corners of Zachary’s lips; veins throbbed in his neck. He saw Jose, knew he couldn’t take them both, and the men with the vans were standing there, arms crossed, staring at him. Zachary stopped and backed away. “You’re damned right, I don’t want your confounded, lousy dairy or your stinking animals.”

Breathing hard, his face flushed, Max’s voice came hard and bitter. “What the h———did you come back here for? What the devil do you want?”

Zachary staggered backward. For a moment it seemed he would fall, but he grabbed a post by the barn to steady himself. Then he leaned forward, his eyes steely, and hissed. “Land.” He stepped forward. His tone changed to almost pleading. “I want land. Twenty acres, that’s all, just twenty acres of your precious land.”

Max placed his hands on his hips. “And just what are you going to do with my twenty acres, if I may ask?”

“Build houses, I want to build ten rental houses for income.”

“Rental houses for income?” Max slapped his thighs and bent, laughing. “So you can sit on your fat lazy butt and collect rent?” He turned to Jose. “You hear that, Jose? My prodigal son returns to turn my hillside into a development, into another Loring Valley. What does he care about erosion, traffic, or anything else that impacts the environment?”

“Ten houses won’t hurt your confounded environment,” Zachary said. “You can put whatever restrictions you want on them, size of the houses, their shape, color, the type of roof, whatever you want.”

Zachary’s bellicosity and his abusive language had unsettled Max. Pulled by the smell and sound of cattle as they moved in melancholy silence from the barn and up the ramp, their hoofs scraping metal before they vanished into the cavernous maw of the van, and by his angry son’s demands, Max could hardly think clearly. Every swish of tail sounded like the buzzing of bees. He looked about, hand raised as if to ward off a swarm of the furious insects. There were no bees.

He pointed in Zachary’s direction and looked at Jose. “He would, if he could, turn our quiet Covington into a noisy, polluted metropolis. Well, over my dead body.”

It flashed through Max’s mind, then, that Zachary had deliberately chosen this moment for this confrontation, knowing that although his father had decided to sell the herd, it saddened him deeply to lose the cattle. Had he hoped to embarrass his father in front of strangers? The thought further enraged Max.