all damn day

LAUREN ROBERTSON

The fence wasn’t but two wires running parallel down the hill, aluminum veins coursing with an electric current. Pete wanted to show me a trick, and he clamped his fist around one of the wires.

“See? Can’t hardly feel nothing.”

He showed me his palm, calloused and leathery. His eyes drifted towards the tree line and narrowed. It was quiet now, but I could see him listening.

He sighed. “You’d never hear a calf bawl so loud like I did the other day. Came out too late with the gun. The coyote had the runt by the back leg. Dragged it all the way into the woods.”

He didn’t look at me as he said it, just watched the tree line like a shadow might move. I turned towards the field, where his fifty-something cows were grazing, unbothered. A calf sucked on an udder, its tail flicking back and forth with saccharine delight.

It isn’t like watching National Geographic on TV, sitting on your couch, wondering when the cameraman will intervene from the cruelty, stopping the prey from being dragged off-screen. Out here, there’s no editing. No screen for the grotesque to hide behind. You’re mesmerized. Then, you’re horrified.

The gun rested against Pete’s side, barrel digging into dirt. He nodded, his jaw
tightening, “Oh yeah, it’ll be back.”

“You’re really going to wait here for it?” I ask, even though I already know his answer.

The fence, the gun, the long hours, this was a kind of prayer. A ritual. I thought about the inefficiency of his fence, his gun jammed with dirt, the long hours in the hot sun. I sighed, looking to the tree line, too.

The things we do for love are strange, and the things love makes us overlook are
stranger.

“All damn day.”