“Let me ask you a question, son. Have you ever had to listen to January nights up here? The silence of that wind? Because there aren‘t words for it. So I‘d hope you wouldn‘t try to find them.”

*

John Schmidt sits at his kitchen table; made of green and white Formica, his mother bought it before John was born, and it has faded, gone a musty yellow from decades of spilt food and cigarette smoke. The kitchen is cluttered, crowded with the accumulations of a fractured mind. Untied trash bags are stacked by the counter, spilling their guts onto the floor. Pans and pots lacquered with hardened grease guard the sink like filthy, weary soldiers. Their stench coats the room. The linoleum floor is a maze of discarded wrappers, unopened mail - bill collectors, glossy coupons - and crusty silverware.

Outside, the January wind howls over the fallow glacial hills of Northern Wisconsin. There is a constancy to the land here that the city lacks. It conveys the mark of methodical creation. The old wooden farmhouse - built by German immigrants in 1898; bought by John’s grandfather in 1926 - creaks and shivers. The furnace sizzles impotently in the basement beneath John’s feet; the cold infiltrates the house like a guerrilla army.

And when the wind calms its voice, John can hear his cows bleating and braying, swollen in pain.

“Doesn’t that just eat you up?” John’s dead father asks from across the table.

John can’t meet the old man’s dead eyes. Instead, he swills cold black coffee - how many days stale? - straight from the pot. He’s not slept in three days. His mind wavers in spasms of despair, and he cries. Then, it falls into alcoves of memory: A funeral - whose? - in the small church graveyard where he found a wounded killdeer behind a headstone and broke its neck; Skinny dipping in the creek with Sara when he was seventeen years old, the shame of his body in the spare, cold water, how clear it was, the slats of shadow and sun dancing on the surface, a kind of benediction; Wandering in the farm’s western field on a sunny, buoyant May afternoon, searching through pollen thick as snow.

He manages moments of clarity, too. Inside their brief sanctuary, he thinks: I’ve been the good son. He apprenticed under his father, learned the dairy business. He knelt in shit in the heart of winter and milked twenty cows by hand. On Sundays, he milked cows and then he went to church: first as an acolyte, then as a deacon. He read the Gospel, and he believed.

When his father’s legs failed him, John maintained the house - shuttered the storm windows in winter, cleaned the gutters in fall, rebuilt the sagging front porch in spring. He was a boy, barely sixteen. He quit baseball and football and woke up at three A.M. to clean the barn before school. While his older sisters fled to Chicago, or Des Moines, he never left Shawano County. When his mother grew bloated and infirm, he slept beside her bed. He swabbed her as she had once swabbed him.

Now when the wind quiets, he can hear his cows, and the shame is like a hammer.

“Now, I had bad times, too. You know that. I didn’t leave my cows fat and crying.”

“It’s different, dad,” John says, quietly indignant.

His father softens. “Well, I certainly know that.” He pulls out a Marlboro red and lights up, the old table pocked and cratered with melted evidence of his habit. “I hear that Fred Meyer sold.”

John nods, taking a long draught from the stained pot. “To Rosendale. Says he’s got somethin’ lined up with Dean as a mechanic. You remember all those junkers he’s got piled up in that field? Fixes ’bout one a year?”

His dead father smiles, takes a drag. “I remember. Fred’s a man who collects things. A lot of shit wasting away out there.“ He takes another drag. “That’ll pay, I’m sure,” he says dryly. “You see him at the auction today?”

Again, John nods. He remembers the afternoon’s auction, a few miles away at the old Schultz farm. The farm had been in the Schultz family nearly ninety years. And all morning, an auctioneer barked and cat-called every last piece of property on the farm, right on down to the kitchen table. It was a bitterly cold, clear morning and the whole community had gathered like a herd of livestock, huddled and stream-breathed. The atmosphere was part circus, part funeral, part church potluck. Cider and coffee was served in Styrofoam cups. The congregants gossiped, and they mourned the premature end of the Packers’ season. And in-between, some placed low-ball bids on tractors, on a vacuum milker, on an old rocking chair Grandpa Schultz had fashioned from walnut. Others foresaw their own, inevitable bankruptcy. The tension between neighbors and old friends, though not palpable, was a nervous murmur rotting in everyone’s stomach. By noon, those who had expended their allowance, and those who had come without a dime, snuck off to spike their hot drinks with a nip or two of brandy.

“Most of them Schultz cows got beefed,” John says.

“Mm,” his dead father intones. “That’s a shame.”

“Better than goin’ to one of the co-ops.”

His father smiles ruefully.

“Spend their whole lives in a stall. Fed all kinds of hormones. The hell do I know ‘bout hormones? Some scientist invents some magic and suddenly cows are spitting milk like its blood. Ain’t nobody can get that kind of yield naturally.”

For a time, his father is silent. John falls into fits of shakes. He wears a t-shirt and boxer shorts. His squat body is slumped and ragged, like an old house whose frame has collapsed.

“I hear you stopped going to church,” his father finally says.

John pulls his own pack of cigarettes from his jeans; it is part of his inheritance. He lights one up and takes a slow drag. He emanates the mournful, pale light of a condemned man.

“It’s got nothing to do with God,” he says. “Though would you really blame me if I said God has abandoned us?”

“You can’t measure God’s intentions by the fortunes of a single life. I tried to teach you some humility. Would seem I failed.”

This jab visibly wounds John. He puts the cigarette out on the floor. “I got tired of seeing Sara, you want the truth of it.”

“It’d be good for your boys to see their daddy in church,” his father says.

They both go quiet, listening to the grave wind as it drives methodically over the rolling hills.

“They’ll find me there begging for food scraps,” John says after some time. “How would that look?”

“Sometimes it’s important for a boy to see his father humbled, too. That is a Godly quality.”

“Like I saw you humbled?”

John’s father unleashes a slow, cruel grin.

“You could say I realized events were beyond my control and I chose to control what I could.”

John remembers the density of the pollen: as if it were drowning him. It was one curtain, or body, and he moved through it, desperately searching.

He surveys the room around him, the mess of his life. The floor tiles warped and water stained. The walls stripped of wallpaper and unpainted. A week old cauldron of chili on the stove, congealed and filmed over. Every so often, a mouse scurries noisily behind the walls. A shotgun, his father’s shotgun, leans against the doorframe. A few dozen boxes of shells are scattered about like matchbox cars.

“You forming a militia with all that ammo?” his dead father asks.

John shrugs.

“What are my options?” he says. “I can’t auction this place. That’d bring what, enough money for a year? Maybe enough to pay off the debt. I’ll get even less if I sell to one of the larger producers. The banks won’t lend to any of us. We’re like tying a boulder to your feet and jumping into a lake. Dead weight.

“I could beg on bended knee for an eight an hour job with one of the processors. Either way, I’m not goin’to beef those cows. I’m not locking them up in some milk factory. I’m going to have my principles on that. I won’t give those bastards that satisfaction.”

“There isn’t some entity that gets pleasure out of our failure, you know. No one knows or cares but you and me, sittin’ here in this cold. We aren’t worth an eye lash to anyone.”

John lights another cigarette; half aborted butts litter the floor, too.

“Have you spoken with Sara about any of this?”

“We don’t talk much,” John says.

“She’s an intelligent woman. A good woman. You know I have a fondness for her.”

“You could say she knew what she was doing when she left,” John says, mustering a horrid, grim laugh. “She always had a solid intuition. She knew, long before I did, that things were falling apart.”

“Don’t forget how much you were drinking, too. She never recovered from the crash, I don’t think. Who would? And then you started selling off cows at half price to pay the bills. ”

The wind wails like a ghost in the walls and in the attic.

“Did you put any money away like your mother told you?”

“Sara got most of it when she left.” He looks around the room again. His eyes are sunken and ringed. He resembles a nocturnal mammal, scavenging. “It’s for the boys, you know. So they don’t grow into this.”

“Well, you just hope your failure doesn’t put the weight of God on them boys. Pull them back all full of some crazy idea that they can save your memory. We‘re stubborn stock. Keep chasing the thing that hurts us most out of some notion of duty. That‘s what we pass along to each other. Stubbornness. Holding onto something that doesn‘t exist anymore.”

John starts to cry again, quietly.

“There isn’t an honest future in this, and I knew it, and now you know it. And this isn’t some kind of tribulation. This is a judgment.”

His dead father watches him, full of pity and full of shame.

Look at me, John thinks, sitting here in the dark talking to a phantom.

“Hey,” his father says. “I’m sorry. I want you to know that. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have pushed you into this. Should’ve sent you to Madison. You mom wanted that, you know. I don‘t think she told you that. Felt guilty about it her whole life. But I saw my end coming and I wanted to know my life wouldn‘t disappear without bearing some mark.”

John himself can no longer bear. He stands too quickly and loses his balance, crumbling to the ground. The weight of the old, linear objects keeps him there: his mother’s table, his grandmother’s pot full of moldy chili, his father’s shotgun. He is surrounded by the antiquated possessions of his bloodline.

“You and I speak a dead language,” his father says. “That of local commerce and of hard, dirty labor. The belief that a man can find some satisfaction in difficult repetition.”

John ignores the old, withered ghost and crawls back to his feet. Moving carelessly, knocking over piles of trash and dishware, he finds his coat. He collects all the shells he can find from the floor, hoarding them into his arms like a child gathering his toys. And then he grabs the old shotgun.

He marches outside, crying along the worn track of earth leading from house to barn. It is a walk he has made thousands upon thousands of times in his life. Most of these journeys blur together into one, unified movement of body: he is a boy, scared of the size of things, running to catch his father. The moon glitters over the few frozen blades of grass. The cold is unforgiving, but it is broken by beautiful memories: He is leaning against his grandfather’s solid, swollen leg while they tap a maple tree (he hasn’t remembered this in years! it is one of the few memories he has of his grandfather); He is smoking a cigarette and laughing with Fred Meyer on any hundreds of forgotten summer afternoons; He is slowly nursing the truck to life on a Sunday morning, his hands worked raw.

There is always too much to remember, and that which is remembered seems so minor. Where is the meat of his life?

He always wanted to flee. But his father was right: Schmidt men have their sense of responsibility. Beyond a certain point, flight is no longer an option. His pride sees to that. And for John, maybe it never was. What does he know other than the farm? Its language and rhythm is worked deep into him, like earth into the skin of a gardener.

He descends a flight of stairs to the barn’s basement. He inhales the fecund, moist-rank stench. The low slung florescent lights hum a monotone supernatural tune. Most of the cows are asleep, grunting their guttural snores. One of them is awake, and she turns her head towards him, lolling about thoughtlessly.

He nuzzles up to her big, vacant eyes. What primordial creatures, he thinks, dominated by pleasure or pain. There is nothing in her eyes, no spark or desire or regret. She wails as he pokes her udder with the gun barrel. He sees himself in her eyes: hulking, dumb, inadaptable.

As a boy, he would stick his thumb into a cow’s mouth and let her pull blithely at his appendage. He does this again for the first time in many years. He feels her coarse tongue tugging instinctively at him. What dumb, primal animals, he thinks, and he starts to laugh through his tears.

It is almost accidental, but he pulls the trigger, and she falls onto her hind legs, bursting into a horrible, desperate shriek. He feels warmth splatter his legs, milk or blood, some viscous residue. The rawness cuts through him, and he has no choice but to put the gun to her skull. He fires another shot. Her heavy, hot body thuds forward against him, and he is pushed back by its dead weight. The ruined carcass flops to the ground, a fountain of blood.

He is naked, the threshold irreparably breached. And now he remembers his boys. He remembers catching Calvin in the legs of Sara’s sweatpants in the hospital lobby. That debilitating terror as he held the sobbing, wailing, writhing but invisible body.

He is propelled down the line. He goes into his pocket, fumbling with another shell. He drops it to the straw-covered floor. The cows are furiously yowling. He imagines they are closing in around him. The carcass beside him convulses, and it is almost sexual; the shivers of pleasure. Again, he drops the shell. His hands are slow and heavy with the cold. Finally, he loads the gun. He places it to her aorta, looks away, and fires.

He remembers watching Luke scampering, naked and flushed with heat, about the house trying to escape his bed.

This shot he notices the concussive noise. It bludgeons him, and reverberates. He feels the echoes in his toes.

He remembers the two of them sitting in the loft and whispering conspiratorially. So they have created their own secrets, he thought.

Another shot, this one beginning to muffle as his ears rouse their dying rhapsody.

He remembers Calvin roaming centerfield like some lovely, remorseless predator. Where did he inherit that easy physical grace? Such divine motion.

His hands are quaking uncontrollably and this shot is imprecise. The beast lurches but does not fall. So he puts the gun to her forehead, more room for error, and fires.

He remembers finding the dead animals the boys would torture: disected frogs and mutilated squirrels. His own shameful curiosity at the ruined anatomy. He remembers their bodies wrapped in blankets at roadside as he ducked his head into the police cruiser.

Fear hurries him. The barn is still half alive. He imagines the animals breaking their bonds and trampling him. So he finds a squalid rhythm. He steadies himself and begins moving with the rehearsed precision of automation. His hearing completely fails into a dull roar: a distant train bearing down on him, rumbling fast and hard through the rails. The blood and viscera ceases to unnerve him, and he understands how a soldier manages war. There is even a perverse satisfaction in the recoil, the annihilation of flesh and bone. How easy it all is. His mind goes blank for a period, absorbed by the quick, horrible repetition.

His fingers fail him, too. He drops a shell, and he remembers first firing a gun with his father. He must have been eleven or twelve. Hunting wild turkeys along the abandoned railroad tracks. The sly smile on his father’s face as John struggled with the recoil.

He flops exhaustedly to his knees. He collects the shell, loads it, and from the ground fires up into the heffer’s chest. The refuse cascades onto the top of his bowed head, fragments of bone and organ.

He remembers the curtain of pollen, and stepping into the open field. The pollen catching the sun and glowing like a precious metal. Running towards the old, broken down truck in the middle of the field. He saw the pair of legs dangling out the other side, and was too afraid to look.

“Dad,” he said, his voice wavering.

And then his father poked his head out.

“It’s a beautiful day,“ his father said.

“It is.”

“I dream about days like this, you know? All year I dream about these days, and then they pass so quickly I never get to appreciate them.” He smiled the same sly smile from when he watched John hunt. And that was exactly what John remembered as his father tucked his head back into the rusted truck’s chassis and pulled the trigger.

There is still another row of cows. Maybe they are yowling or maybe they have gone silent. He can’t hear anything but a high pitch squeal. Suddenly, he wants to be able to hear the wind again. He tries to listen, to will his ears to hear. Nothing. The audible world drowned away. His eyes finally open to the full visual panorama: the blood, the already bloating carcasses. He attempts to stand, but cannot. He slumps against the dead belly of a cow, still warm and soft, and sobs because all he wants is to step outside and to listen to the wind.

*

One of the drivers for Dean is the one who finds his body.

Word spreads quickly from farm to farm. Neighbors call neighbors in hushed, hurried gasps. The local police arrive and take the driver into the station for questioning; they call the state cops for assistance.

“What the hell do we do with all these cows?” one of the cops asks another.

The other cop, who is much older, shrugs. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope to never see anything like it again.”

Neighbors and friends start filtering in, hoping to catch a glimpse. Fred Meyer calls the older officer over - they’re long time friends from church softball -and whispers something in his ear. The cop is tall and lean with a cratered face. He bends to hear the farmer who is no longer a farmer. He nods grimly, and when Meyer is finished, the officer motions towards a group of men clustered not far away. They’re holding shovels, bundled against the cold. Fred walks back, and the small congregation disappears around the back of the barn.

News media trickles in, too, like melt water in spring. First come the local reporters, older men who have retired any dreams of grandeur. They’re sequestered across the street from the Schmidt farm, on a narrow ridge that is exposed to the wind and overlooks the property. As the day passes its half, and the sun begins it fleet descent, reporters arrive from Milwaukee and Madison, one from as far away as Chicago. They’re young men and women, sharply dressed, precocious and aggressive. They harangue the police officers, to no avail.

Across the street, in the vast sweep of field behind John Schmidt’s barn - built by his grandfather in 1929 - a number of stout, stocky figures operate like metronomes, rising and falling in sync.

“What are they doing?” a reporter from Milwaukee asks, to no one in particular. He looks barely older than a boy, his face raw-red with wind and still scarred by acne.

“Digging,” says the reporter from Shawano. He’s rotund and short, a local all his life. His father worked a dairy farm.

“Why?” asks the young reporter.

“Because someone has to bury all those cows.”

The young reporter loses all color, going white as the low-cloud sky. Without saying a word, he walks back to his car and drives away.

Late in the afternoon, the sun a flickering bulb behind the wall of clouds, one of the farmers approaches the knoll where the reporters are gathered. His breathing labors, stertorturous. He rests his body’s whole weight on his shovel stuck deep into the Wisconsin permafrost.

“All I’d like to say,” he says, a wheezing stilt to his words, “is that it’s hard being a dairy farmer in these times. I hope you all can understand that. Now, I’d like to get back to work. There’s a lot of cows out there, and we‘re losing light.”

The small crowd of reporters watches him trudge back across the field, watches as he solemnly takes his place in line and resumes digging. They listen for singing, or some other symptom of hope. What they hear is a low, mournful wail. Almost somnambulant, it is a lament or a spiritual whose words are indecipherable. The words aren’t the point. It is the communion of voices rising together, transcending the long, brutal work.

Or maybe, what they hear is the wind playing tricks, carrying ghosts in its unrepentant, ineluctable tides.