Now here was an animal she could get behind—too small to annoy the sheep and always
on the prowl for the mice that plagued the main
house, their droppings ubiquitous, scattered over
everything in dark little gift-packets of filth and
disease. She made a kissing noise and watched the
fox’s ears come erect. Then, very slowly, she bent to
the pile to unearth the fresh scraps till she found a
wet red fragment of bone and gristle and tossed it
to him. It landed with a soft thump in the wet earth
at his feet and he took it gingerly, as a dog would,
but without fear or concern — people were no threat
to him. He’d been here longer than they had and
he went on eating his mice, insects, the occasional
bird, and if people left food around (or variously,
Francisco’s briar pipe that went missing from the
porch one evening, a half-burned candle, socks salty
with sweat, hung out on the rail to dry), he would
oblige them by expanding the range of his diet. She
watched him worrying the bone a moment, pinning
it with his paws and working it with his teeth, his
fur slicked with the rain and his eyes casting her
adrift as if she had no significance at all, and then
she went back in the house to see to the stew and
slide the loaves into the oven.
Francisco had set the dishes aside to dry and was
plying the mop on the concrete floor now, shifting
the mud from one corner to the other in long yellow-
ish streaks. The floor was always dirty, forever dirty,
but that was a matter of degree — until she’d nagged
Bax to have the supply barge o=load a hundred sixty-
pound bags of concrete and until that concrete was
loaded ten bags at a time in the back of the pickup
and brought up here to be mixed in the wheelbarrow,
poured, tamped, and smoothed in place, the floor
had been actual dirt, literal dirt, trodden and com-
pacted by how many generations of sheepherders’
boots she couldn’t begin to imagine. The other sub-
stantial building on the property—the eight-room
bunkhouse— was of wood-frame construction and
as far as she knew had always had a pine floor, which
was, if anything, even dirtier than the old dirt floor
of the main house, but nothing to worry over. The
hands took turns sweeping it and every once in a
long concatenation of weeks even took a mop to it.
They had their own communal room, a few rough
chairs, a card table, and a potbellied stove, but the
main house was where they gathered for their meals
and where they felt — at least in her presence — as if
they’d come home, the talk at supper of mothers
long dead, of haciendas that no longer existed in the
mind-clouded valleys of Arizona, New Mexico, and
Old Mexico too.
