Simon took my mother’s elbow as they walked to the car, but I continued with Mikesh to his pickup.
“I’m sure you would like to just put this behind you, Arnie, but it might be that talking to all the people closest to Josh could be the quickest way to put the questions to rest.” I put out my hand again. “Can I get your promise?”
Mikesh wasn’t eager to commit. But he remembered Josh and my mother’s request, and gave me his telephone number.
chapter 4
Mikesh was happy to put the airless rooms of the Winneshiek County Law Enforcement Center and us, the relations of Josh King behind him. On the drive home he avoided the route that brought him to the accident less than twelve hours earlier. The fog had almost burned off and the day was turning out sunny, the sort of afternoon people hunger for at the late-March end of a winter in which the first snow came before Halloween.
Mikesh, a convert to land owning, came to farming with more deliberation and zeal than his neighbors. He was progressive: selecting an Australian breed of cattle that did well from calf through finish on grass, and were preferred for flavor by customers who would pay extra for quality. He used a system of intensive paddock grazing developed in France to keep his cows on fresh grass through the warm months. In other ways, he was conservative. He raised animals instead of renting out his land to be cropped by a neighbor. He avoided chemicals basic to crops on every farm but his on Scenic Road. He nursed along his aging truck, and allowed, indulgently, that to manage his stock moving in and out of paddocks and fenced away from most of the creek, he needed the bay horse he kept. His best friend Dale Murphy said that Mikesh played at farming.
It had been a month since he was in the saddle. Once he got home he caught Zisca. The horse’s winter coat was rough and dirty. Mikesh curried him down, talking to him, an act that soothed the horse. Mikesh thought it only reasonable that he get familiar and friendly with the animal before seating himself on his back and ordering him around with the pressure of a metal bit against his soft gums. Once Zisca was saddled, they rode out along the road. Mikesh lived in gently rolling country of wide, fenced fields, broken by small woodlands in the few places where the land steepened as it approached a stream or flooded too often to risk plowing. The sun on the remaining snow was blinding, but felt good. Zisca seemed as interested in the ride as Mikesh. The gelding wanted to break from his walk into a trot down the shoulder as they headed away from the farm. On the wrists exposed between his jacket and his deerskin gloves as he held the reins Mikesh could feel the warmth rising off the horse’s neck, could see the alert tension in Zisca’s ears, and feel the happy release of energy in the quick spring of his gait.
The higher temperature was melting the snow, and water was running off the fields and pastures. The creek, normally a quiet trickle, that ran through his place and past the cemetery on its way to the river, could today be heard from the road. Its water was foaming. The spillway in the middle of Waucoma roared, the riverish smell of water hanging in the air. Cakes of ice bobbed in the channel of the Little Turkey below the falls. Two boys in loose stocking caps were on the park side of the dam, throwing ice chunks from a snow pile into the water. The din drowned out their splash, but the boys shouted as they added rings of spray to the mayhem. Spring yesterday became official, and down along the river bottom, it felt, smelled, and sounded like the season had really arrived.
Once back at the farm, Mikesh rode Zisca to check the fences along the whole perimeter of his domain. In the course of the last four months, the cattle had only gone into the pasture as far as the hay feeders, wearing the ground raw around them, leaving the snow along the far fences unbroken except by deer. With the weather turning, his cows would be out looking for grass again soon enough, so Mikesh needed to check if the fences were damaged by snow or falling trees. Water was rushing through the creek bottom, and out beyond, in the alfalfa field and the band of woods at the back of the acreage, Mikesh could hear the “cheer-up” trills of robins, gone for a whole season, mixing with the whistle of cardinals in the trees. At the edge of the woods, signs that it had been a grim winter were clear. Starving rabbits had gnawed the bark off scrub, saplings, and fallen limbs. An early crusting of winter ice and later layers of snow buried anything else beyond easy reach. Blood and feathers marked the place where a hungry pheasant strayed far enough from safety to become prey for a fox. Back at the stream Mikesh turned Ziska toward the clump of black willows that ringed a bend where the water swirled in its deepest pool. One of the willows grew parallel to the ground: a large limb stretching along the bank, the other projecting out less than two feet above the water, the half-exposed roots of its fallen trunk reaching upward like a hand. Mikesh jumped down from the saddle, dragging the toes of his boots as he walked through the gravelly snow. Just up the slope from this swimming hole, far enough in elevation that the soil was thin, he had found, eight years ago, a stone projectile point in soil he pulled up with a boxelder seedling. The point was early Archaic. Mikesh kept the narrow wedge of chert in his desk drawer, lifting it occasionally against his flattened palm to register its weight, considering the over-two-thousand years it had lain in the soil. Mikesh valued the skill in its symmetry and the sharpness of its two knapped edges. Since he raised beef cattle, it was his reminder that others had culled animals from this patch of ground before him, that he was not the first to draw his living from the place, that he should take care of its soil, assuming that others would need to make use of it after every trace of him was gone.
Mikesh rode back to the barn, unsaddled Zisca, and checked the hay feeder. Since he appeared without feed bucket or new hay, the mass of silver-gray cattle watched him with black eyes as impassive as the Buddha’s. One, however, walked toward him, releasing a high but resonant “ooom!” It was Rosie, Mikesh’s favorite in the herd, now carrying her first calf. The cattleman inside Mikesh would have said it was the straight line of her back, her classic Murray Gray dun color, the favorable configuration of her pelvis for calving that earned his favor. But congeniality was the quality that most separated Rosie from the rest. Mikesh chose, with Rosie’s first breeding, to try something new, a Square Meater bull. He already had a bull, and the frozen semen sent all the way from Australia cost plenty, but the offspring would be shorter at the shoulder and more compact in configuration than the rest of his herd, a look Mikesh guessed would be the future of this breed in the U.S. market. Rosie nosed the sleeve of his coat and pushed her weight gently against him. Mikesh took off his glove and ran a hand over the springy winter hair of Rosie’s neck and back, pressing more firmly as he rounded her flank and belly. It was in part the return of a friendly gesture, but also a check of his investment, making sure the calf still configured as it should, and that the temperature thrown off by Rosie’s skin did not feel hot. Mikesh grew uneasy with the thaw, knowing that the health of heifers and bred cows near calving time would get touchy when the afternoons were warm, the nights cold, and the weather damp around the clock.
Mikesh felt prickly himself. The raw air, the snow, the damp smell, even the sound of Zisca’s or Rosie’s breathing—any of it planted the same tension at the base of his neck, the same tingling in the back of his nose he had felt in the fog a few hours before as he directed his flashlight on my brother’s battered face. Mikesh still hadn’t gotten rid of that headache. Just a few miles from the place where he was going through his daily chores, my brother’s life had ended, but not before Josh asked Mikesh to join him in infinity. As Mikesh finished his chores the thought came into his head of Paul Fox, sitting in his swivel chair, asking if Mikesh might not have edged Josh off the road. Mikesh thought of his coat deposited in a plastic evidence bag. He kicked a dirty hump of ice for the pleasure of watching it spray across the cattle pen. Instead he tripped. The ice didn’t move.
The edgy mood made him glad to get to his security guard shift again as the afternoon sun dipped low in the sky on Saturday. On the weekend at the community college where he worked, most of the buildings were locked and quiet by the time he arrived. The only places he was apt to encounter anybody were the dairy center and the three apartment buildings that housed the school’s handful of