Opening the Door of a Barn I Thought Was Empty on New Year's Eve

Abstract

Dusk. The west shot up a red beam. I open the double barn doors and go in. Sounds of breathing! Thirty steers are wandering around, the partitions gone. Creatures heavy, shaggy, slowly moving in the dying light. Bodies with no St. Teresas look straight at me. The floor is cheerful with clean straw. Snow gleams in the feeding lots through the other door. The bony legs of the steers look frail in the pale light from the snow, like uncles living in a city. A barn is a sort of house . . . the windowpanes clotted with dust and cobwebs. The dog stands up on his hind legs to look over the worn wooden gate. Large shoulders watch him, and he suddenly puts his legs down, frightened. After a while, he puts them up again. A steer's head swings to look at him, and stares for three or four minutes, unable to get a clear picture from the instinct reservoir, then suddenly bolts ... But their enemies are asleep, the barn is asleep . . . these breathing ones do not demand eternal life, they ask only to eat the crushed corn, and the hay, coarse as rivers, and cross the rivers, and sometimes feel an affection run along the heavy nerves. They have the wonder and bewilderment of the whale, with too much flesh, the body with the lamp lit inside, fluttering on a windy night.