Tully walks into the cool of the barn from the summer sun of Imperial Valley. Southern California. Hundred-degree heat. The top of peach trees burnt brown. A lover had pressed his face to the earth, and scorched her mildly. This is where he comes to in the late afternoons when it is too hot to stay on the stepladder, prunes in hand, claws of metal snapping foliage, to gather breath, to eat his lunch of rotis, dal and lassi.

The three cows he keeps eye him steadily and mow in low voices. He touches their white faces. That secret coolness of skin. With such tactile responses he satisfies his hunger to touch something living other than his own face in front of a mirror every morning. He must get a dog he keeps telling himself. But after abandoning the stray bitch he had kept in that season of sawmills in Oregon, even through two hard winters when they had to ration coal for heat as well as cooking, feeding it warm rotis off his own plate, he can’t bring himself to act on this wish.

As he moves further into the barn – someone watching from the door would see a man claimed by the dark put out by hay, by the odor of manure, by something within himself – he senses that someone had just been in there, no less that an hour before. A distinct ghost of human scent, his nose rattle-snake alert, as if listening to the approach of rain. He looks for the key concealed above the rafters to unlock the deepest sanctum of the barn, the room where he stores sacks of seed, of fertilizer. And steps into symbols of struggle, a scattering of grain, the unmistakable odor of semen, now a white stain on the spread of grain sacks.

He steps out thinking of that person would have known of the exact location where he hid the key, a slender piece of patchy rust wedged into a gap in the wood. Outside his hundred acres of peach orchard, a patch quilt of brown and green, perhaps still holding these two, whoever it was who has passed through. It must have been two of the Mexican iterant farm workers from the group that he was forced to hire in the previous season of abundant harvest and family death.