The icy ground rang like iron beneath his frozen boots. Echoes sounded from the barn and machine shed, hard-edged, like winter shadows. The nearly new moon had long set. Only the cold glitter of stars refracted sparks through the dry snow.

Harry liked the cold. It sliced through the foggy membrane of the dream, forced back the dark eyes that mocked him, into the shadowed corners where he did not go. The bite of the wind brought tears and he blinked them away. In the dark corral, the steaming cattle stirred and jostled towards the feeder, certain there would be fragrant hay and some grain with a little molasses. Their warm, sweet smell rushed at him in waves, modulated the chill breeze.

He broke bales of alfalfa, rich with late-summer blue flowers. He used a two-pound Yuban can to sprinkle the soft hay with cracked corn from the steel barrel where they laced it with blackstrap. With his gloved hand he shattered the ice that skinned the round galvanized stock tank.

As the hungry cattle sorted themselves out along the pine-board feeder, Harry could see the results of his family's careful weaving of bloodlines. Patterns of skin markings ebbed and flowed through generations. As he watched them he scooped up a handful of the snow, let it melt on his tongue.

The hides were the visible witness of the subtle advantages sought by a good breeder. Tiny details of confirmation, feed usage, disease resistance and calving ability, were gently coaxed into dominant traits, as the animal adapted to its particular matrix of seasons and pastures and uses and markets.

None of that counted anymore. All that mattered was price. Corporate feedlots bought the calves cheap and fed them cheap, on by-products or industrial wastes. With the right mix of hormones and antibiotics, they could be kept alive the necessary few months while their sickened bodies bloated up to market weight. Well-marbled, the packers liked to call the flabby meat.

The Old Man, his grandfather, would not touch commercial beef. He had preferred to fatten and slaughter his own. A point of pride had been his freezer perpetually full of homegrown beef.

Now that the Old Man was gone, Dad didn't care how their food was grown. He would rather make the money to pay high grocery store prices for feedlot beef.

Harry was tempted to hold one of the yearling calves aside, hide it up at the old place and tell the banker they had counted wrong. If he split the meat with his parents, it would last them all a year. He would give his half to Judith. For the kids.

He gently pulled the ears of a couple of the new calves. They shook their heads in irritation. He whistled, and a ragged ball of fur he called Reject slid to a stop beside him. Harry had saved the brown and black and white Australian Shepherd from starvation and hand raised him. He was a good one.

The dog shivered with cold indignation that he had overslept, missed the start of the morning ritual. He cocked his head to the side and gave Harry that odd stare which came from his one brown eye and one blue eye, the badge of his mixed breed. Reject was always ready to chastise a runaway calf or bring the horses to be saddled. When it came to stock dogs, these half-breeds were the best.

Harry headed towards the far corral where they kept the last few horses. The dog danced around him, a patchwork tornado. The new snow squeaked low in protest beneath each step.

Wisps of the dream trailed across his vision. Eyes died in the flames, questions unanswered. The eyes became Long Joe's, accused, "You have killed our mother." The eyes were Judith's, crying, then Rebecca's, little Joe's, and he could not answer them.

He pulled up the collar on his faded field jacket, turned his back to the wind.

Harry's heavy beard and moustache stuck together with the icing of his breath. He passed the empty pig shed where the sweet scent of Old Manure drifted between the silver boards. The hogs were gone, sold in the early fall when prices were up, so they could save the cost of feed.

They had put the horses in what they still called "the Old Man's corral" five years after his death. Their death, Harry thought. His father's parents had died only a few months apart. Harry was sure that grandma had simply decided to follow the Old Man, as always.

Judith's mare, Shadow, stood in the far corner of the pole corral with the Old Man's last draft horse, an old, powerful mare. Shadow watched Harry calmly, eyes shining over the back of her yearling colt. Harry thought of Judith, saw her slim wraithlike figure cling to the racing mare, at dusk, as she made a wild and dangerous game of corralling the cows for the night.

He rubbed the soft nose that probed at him and automatically dug in his pocket for a sugar cube. Shadow's dark eyes calmed him like Judith's.

He thought again of that last time he had seen Judith's healing brown eyes. That foggy fall morning they had gone together to take little Joe to daycare for the first time and Rebecca to her new school. Then he had dropped Judith at a bus stop so she could go to work. The Seattle traffic was heavy and he hadn't really been able to say good-bye. She hurried from the pickup and he had lost sight of her in the crowd. Suddenly she had turned, and her eyes met his for an instant. She smiled, was gone, her small form indistinguishable among the hustling commuters. He shook off a feeling of vertigo and gave Reject a pat.

And now Shadow, too, would be gone. Auctioned!

Harry reached across the mare's back to give a cube to the spotted colt who begged from the safe far side of his mother. The yearling jerked the sugar away and dropped it on the ground. He nervously retrieved it and skitted to the other side of the pen to eat it. Shadow munched contentedly while Harry rubbed her strongly molded neck.

The Old Man had given Shadow to Judith. He always gave her things. If he had been younger it might have made Harry jealous. Not that the Old Man didn't give everyone things. But he had felt something special for Judith. They all saw it and wondered and were happy for her and for the Old Man.

Shadow was a fine horse as all the Old Man's things were fine. She was the well-crafted result of selection by a hundred generations of humans from a thousand generations of horses. She was an Appaloosa, descendant of the Palouse horses bred by the Nez Perce. Even as a two-year-old she had been fierce and independent, led the other horses in the wild upwind charges they loved.

When the Old Man had told Judith the horse was hers, he had said he was returning Shadow to her rightful owner. The family had all agreed as Judith began to train and ride the young mare that no one had ever looked more natural on a horse. Harry knew the Old Man was proud that Judith's grandmother, from Nespelem, on the Colville Reservation, was said to be descended from Thunder Rolling In The Mountains, Great Joseph himself, who had died there in exile.

Shadow tossed her head and probed for another sugar cube. "Stop it," he said gently and pushed her away. Her look quizzed him, one ear then the other aimed. He slapped her flank with a loud pop and she whirled, flashing into the dark.

5:27 his watch said. It sure didn't take long to feed the stock anymore. He had time to make coffee and still spend an hour at the old place before breakfast.

He'd have to eat breakfast with Mom and Dad, though. He was going to see the thing all the way through. He could have found an excuse, like his sister, Meg, although it was hard for a single, separated man to find real good excuses like parents of young children always have. Or he could take his brother, Jack's, route\\a151 promise to be there, then just not show up. He was sure Jack would not show up. Jack didn't have the guts. He would have an appointment, a showing or closing he just couldn't avoid, for the money\\a151 last minute thing. Unemployed people run short on excuses, too, so Harry would just have to see the thing through, and maybe feel better about it.

He whistled Reject to heel and circled the horse corral. He passed the barn with its ample, long empty stalls that had served the Old Man's Percheron teams. Those placid giants, too, were gone. The Old Man had found homes for them all, sold them for good money. He obviously had known that his time was short and that no one in the family had any real interest in draft horses. He'd put out the word through the Draft Horse Association Newsletter and soon a stream of prospective buyers appeared in various dilapidated trucks to chew straws and point at the horses and make their offers or suggestions. Soon all seven of the working horses were gone, scattered but secure. Only the ancient mare remained to carry the Old Man's spirit when it finally departed.

Harry could feel the temperature drop as always on winter mornings before dawn. The restless breeze steadied into a northerly ten knots and cut at his bare wrists with its icy blade. Skiffs of fresh powder licked his ankles. Stars reflected brightly from the dry snow, burst apart into colors against the hard crystals, and each step stirred stardust.

He walked behind the buildings, past his parents new house, past the deserted pad where Jack and Diane had lived in their mobile home, to the basalt studded acre up against the rocky bank of the canal where he had put his own trailer. The bank's trailer.

It hadn't seemed like a mobile home when Judith and the kids had been there with him, it was just home. Now he noticed the mill finish aluminum window-frames with their flecks of mildew, and the remnants of plastic wood-grain paneling, copied from the wood of some alien planet.

He heated water in an aluminum pan on the bright yellow electric stove, and got out his thermos, the coffee cone and a filter. He had a little Colombian left in a foil lined bag, roasted fresh daily some months before and hand-picked by Juan Valdez God knows when. It would still beat hell out of Folgers. One thing he disagreed with the Old Man about. Folgers was lousy coffee. He could hear the Old Man's chuckle of disagreement.

The dark rush of the coffee warmed his wind and star-chilled brain back to reality. He still had work to do and he was determined to walk around the old place once more. He'd already put the new canopy from the bank's three year old Ford onto the faithful 1972 International he had thought he would never need again. But it was paid off, they couldn't touch it, so he'd taken the canopy and the stereo and even the slick three-way side mirrors and switched them onto his old rig. The International didn't look too bad cleaned up, and it would carry his remaining possessions easily.

Almost everything was already gone, in Seattle with Judith and the kids. He had his own stuff... clothes, dishes, sleeping bag, a few books and pictures. He hadn't traveled so lightly in a long time, but old habits and the old truck were distantly familiar and he felt a little excited as he loaded up, almost as if he had somewhere to go.

He had loaded his guns earlier, as soon as he got up. He put the rifle and the shotgun behind the seat and the .357 in the side pocket. He hated this habit of always having a weapon in close reach, but he hated worse the dry-mouthed nakedness he felt when he was without one. "Guns," the Old Man said, "always lead to trouble."

Harry had no romantic firearms collection. To him, guns were tools. He made no pretense of hunting or target shooting or investing in the classics. He bought good, used, businesslike pieces. He shot them occasionally, without joy, cleaned them often, and waited.

He left Judith's loom to the last. He was almost afraid to touch it. She had broken it down the night she left, secured all the loose ends and wrapped it in the rug on which she always worked. He had loved to watch her at the loom, softly humming as her rhythmic hands ran through the ageless patterns. "The design is already there," she had told him, "I just have to put the threads in the right order. But the pattern is already there, if you can see it."

He couldn't, and when she had tried to teach him, his suddenly clumsy hands had found the movements difficult. He often had wished their fates could be in her sure, unhurried hands which always knew which thread came next. A family needed order and direction. Each day should not need to be created from nothing. An underlying pattern was required, a warp for the thread of your life.

It was almost ten years since they first had assembled her loom. She had wanted the legs left off. She always worked on the floor, Navajo style, in the center of a green Bolivian rug that crawled with embroidery of flowers and birds and furtive animals. At the loom, as she worked, she seemed to be in intense prayer and he had always kept a sacred distance.

Judith had saved for some really fine thread for a special project, for the family, just to remember. She had collected some brightly colored silk, red and blue and green, and some plain linen and proud Mexican cotton. She had carried in her mind for years, she said, an intricate pattern she longed to weave, and finally the time seemed right. She worked on it for several weeks, mostly when no one was around, and then last year had made it a family Christmas present. She had wrapped it and presented it to Harry to open while the kids watched. Rebecca and Joseph, too, knew it was something special.

It was just a length of fabric, a couple of yards, of linen and cotton mostly, but suffused with a rainbow glow of silk. He could see that a larger design floated like a shadow within the bright colors, but he did not want to tell her that he could not see what it was. He had looked at it and touched it and did not know what to say.

It was as if in that spectral tapestry, she had loomed their lives. It was not the fabric that mattered, or the design, but the motions of her hands in the air, again and again, as she inscribed the shadows and reflections of time. And the web of her loom had thralled them in the raveling of its pattern beneath her blessing hands.

Now, of her rainbow family, only he remained behind to pick up the pieces, a broken thread, tied off. He opened the top of the folded rug, to check the loom, and saw that Judith had wrapped her special weaving in a length of plain cotton, and left it there in the center for him to find.

Harry carefully loaded the loom on the back of the pickup. He wasn't sure what to do with it, but he had promised to care for it until Judith had room. He would not ask Meg or Jack to store it. And there was no room in the 36' 5th wheeler Dad had stashed at Uncle Paul's, the title in Paul's name to protect it from the bank. The whole family traveled pretty light, now.

He rolled Judith's weaving and buried it in the center of his old duffel bag, the closest thing he had to luggage.

Both the International's tanks were full and it seemed to run okay. He warmed it up for a few minutes and checked the oil. It was ready.

He went back inside to have another cup of coffee before he walked up to the old place. There would be some daylight by 6:00. He hadn't taken time to preheat the thermos and the coffee was half cold, steamed weakly with a taste like copper. He sipped it and unconsciously traced a number on the gold-flecked melamine table. He looked through his reflection in the window, stared into the vacant shadows along the canal bank.

When his finger began the number a second time, he became aware of the treachery and nearly spilled the coffee as he brushed the ghost number away.

He knew what the number had been. $585,000. In a way, that was better than the columns and reams of numbers there used to be. He struggled to put the offending numbers out of his mind. If he could concentrate on just this one number, $585,000, the others receded in their tributaries and backwaters. There was only one number that mattered now, the negative sum of all the family's knowledge and skill and effort, $585,000. That number had become a desperate goal. It tantalized him in bloody dreams, winked at him from scraps of yellow paper.

Usually, now, he saw the number in the young banker's handwriting, with a circle around it, written with a fine silver pen on a sheet of gold-embossed letterhead.

"Washington First National Savings Bank. $585,000." The final total of their lives. The young banker had looked at them with a faint smile as he drew the circle. "We'll work with you all we can," he'd said.

The four of them had filed out of his office, their shock hushed by the Whisper-Soft carpet Washington First had installed after the merger. They had walked stiffly out to the parking lot through a minefield of smiles and hellos from bank employees they had known for years.

That was in October, when they had hauled in the last of the corn crop at ruinous prices. They still had been left with a $47,000 operating deficit accumulated over two years, besides the land and machinery loans. Then there was the loan on the new house the young banker had encouraged Dad to build five years ago, to upgrade the place, he said, and to impress the investors he brought in from the coast to buy the loans he made to farmers. All together, there was no mistake about it, it added up to $585,000.

For a while it had seemed that the young banker always had more rabbits in his hat. He always found a way to borrow against something to pay off something else. The fee he had received each time seemed small enough, when you considered the service.

The Old Man had warned them before he died. "Don't mistake cleverness for intelligence," he'd said of the banker, "A dancin' dog is clever. This guy just has a routine."

Copyright © 2003 by Larry L. Bailey