A girl I’d seen the previous day, the girl with the tattoo, woke me before dawn the next morning, when the black trees were just a slight perturbation on the blue-black sky. She brought me a cup of cream, like sweet white grease. “They’re heading off,” she said, “so you’ve got to help me with the milking.” She said her name was Queen. I again examined that tattoo down the center of her throat and into her shirt collar, a thick dark line, finger width, so it looked like she was sliced in two. She was young. My age.

A school bus idled in the courtyard, and the family members hustled out to it through the clouds of exhaust, lit orange and red. Before I’d blinked the blear out of my eyes, they were gone: the bus, Dice’s truck, and Bay’s car. Now I could hear the cowbells and the sheep bells, the rooster.

Queen wouldn’t tell me how long they would be away. She had pink cheeks, a round face, lank hair grown-out pageboy length, perfectly round nostrils, and a slow, dazed way of talking. Queen roused the enormous, sleepy cows and showed me how to clean their rears with a stiff brush, how to wash their teats with a sponge and warm water. I asked her what the cows thought of us, and she said they could tell I was nervous. The sun came in, and the hay-clotted air became, abruptly, a gold mine. Queen showed me to a thirteen-year-old cow, and instructed me to set down my stool and bucket in the straw, and to grip the bucket firmly between my legs so she wouldn’t ruin the milk by kicking it over. “Good,” Queen said as I pinched and squeezed the cow’s warty teats. But within a few minutes, pain wore out my tendons. Meanwhile Queen had milked a whole bucket.

She glanced over at me. “Not everyone can get the milk out,” she said. She seemed to be assessing what to say next. “You can just rest. We won’t be in any rush till they all get back.”

I knew I shouldn’t want to rest, remembering Sara saying earn our trust when she held out her clothes to me, but with Queen’s permission, I stopped. I rubbed my forearms in relief. The patient cow gave me a brown-eyed look. I asked Queen about her tattoo. “I was on drugs,” she said. I watched milk issue from her fists. “I came here to be free,” she said, “freedom in the mountains.” She flushed and patted the cow’s flank.

“And you found what you wanted?” I said.