Lobo had buried the gun in the yard years ago, when Mama had moved into the farmhouse with him and was worried about me finding it. She and Lobo had had a big fight, screaming that rattled the windows. I hid in the woods. Lobo buried the gun and then forgot, or said he forgot, where it was, so when things were smoothed over again, when he had won that argument, or when he had exhausted and humiliated her from speaking up about it anymore, Lobo got a new gun at the gun show and duct-taped it under the table in the dining room.

This gun would not be so hidden from me, only from intruders, the sheriff. If a business associate got rowdy, it would be within reach. He needed something for protection, he said. All of the dogs had run away.

I knew where the old buried gun was. A handgun.

I had watched him bury it. The fight about it had lasted all day, and Lobo had buried it at twilight, Mama watching from the house, a shadow in the doorway, slender as a bat. He had buried it in the wild, unmowed yard below the house. I hid a few feet away, screened by whip-thin forsythia and joe-pye weed, prickers that sank their teeth into my legs. The coyote chorus was beginning at my back. Later that summer I would find a calf skeleton near that same spot, in a pile by a stump, clean bones folded like clothes.

But I didn’t know about bullets, where some might be around the farm. I could buy some, if I needed to—at a gun show, maybe at the flea market. Would I need to?

Grayson followed me out to the yard. The wind wormed its way under my collar. I picked up a shovel from its leaning place by the door, Grayson watching as I pushed my heel on the shovel, slicing into the earth. It was more difficult than I expected, more difficult than it should have been for September. The ground was hard. We could see our breath, and even the clouds of our breath seemed to carry snow.

The buried gun waited beneath a jewelweed bush, the plant dead and pale as a puffball, a tumble of sticks beside a stump, the stump that marked the calf’s grave. I remember when I had found those bones, I had thought they were human at first, a child’s bones. I had thought Lobo had done something. I would not, though my mama loved him, put it past him, not the slender, knocking bones, laced with moss.

He was capable of violence. I had seen him smash a man’s nose, blood spraying across the dining room wall. I had seen him punch and keep on punching, kick and keep on kicking.

I kept the jewelweed in the corner of my eye.