I saw it on a trip to town, on the flat stretch of road before the change in pavement, before the rise into the village and its sidewalks and signs. The field between the road and the river had been skinned, reduced to raw, scraped gravel, peeled topsoil still furred with grass in a folded heap; then mounds of clean topsoil, fieldstone, and boulders, separated and piled for dissemination. There was also a jumble of rusty metal of the sort that is found by rivers outside of towns, old car seat springs and wheel rims, bullet-riddled barrels.

“They’re building a plant,” my dad said. “It’ll bring jobs,” my mom added, and I understood the matter of fact tone of it can’t be helped, it’s got to be done, the same tone that spoke of the quiet efficiency of butchering day.

Butchering the yearling was an occasion both solemn and cheerful, a celebration of life and of plenty, a time when, even if we didn’t say it, we felt grateful for what we had. Bowls were brought from the kitchen to receive the organs that were eaten fresh, first the liver, cooked with bacon and onion, then heart and tongue sandwiches with mustard. The rest of the meat went into the chest freezers, wrapped in green waxed paper. Dad had a friend who took the hide for tanning. The hooved shanks went to the dogs.

Sometime after that trip, the plant was built, a paperweight placed on the outskirts of town. The bold strokes of its concrete construction were not long contained. The plant was a heavy drop of ink seeping and spreading across drawing paper; plazas mushroomed around the plant and the town itself deliquesced and leaked beyond its own edges. New houses, ranch-style and kit log homes, sprouted up along the road. Familiar trees were felled; familiar fields, like the one that had produced the hay we bought, were now either unmown or transformed into manicured wastelands, clipped green carpets rolling up to the closed-windowed houses with their attached garages. These new neighbors loomed close in advancing encampments of house lots, filling the acreages that had in the past both separated and connected far-flung neighbors whose homes marked old farmsteads or were tucked cozily into second-growth woods. The man who had kept a hayfield and sold the bales to us for Molly, our beef cow, now shared a driveway with the people he’d sold his land to, had to drive slowly past them to get to his house. Dad found some hay but that year we did not keep Molly’s calf through the winter like we usually did, did not have her bred.

We’d never been real farmers; we had some land, woods and pasture, but not enough for hay of our own. But we raised our own beef, chickens for meat and eggs, and always kept a large garden that provided most our vegetables and potatoes that we put up for the winter.

The new houses didn’t have gardens, and even though McCourtney’s general store at the four corners had always served most needs, convenience stores and a chain grocery store also trickled out of town, coursing along the road behind the houses and eventually washing McCourtney’s away.

The next summer, with the neighbors’ complaints of odors along with the rising cost of hay, we butchered for the last time. It was a time of mourning. With no calf to carry through to another season, Molly’s line had ended, and now we ended her life. We did what we had to do, filled the freezers with the green waxed paper bundles, but this time the dogs were kept away and what didn’t go into the freezers Dad buried in the old garden plot. We ate tomato soup that night.

It seemed we all worked more than ever. There wasn’t time for the garden anymore with Dad and me mowing lawns weekends for cash, and Mom working shifts at the plant. Even so, the car she needed to get there, along with the gas, groceries, and everything else, had them talking quiet at the table. Beside the coffee-ringed envelopes and stack of bills, I saw a sketch of our lot. In the middle of the sketch, where the cowshed abutted the garden, a bleeding pen line was drawn, a despairing swath of impoverishment like we’d never known. They both caught my eye, and though no one said anything, that tone was there: it can’t be helped, it’s got to be done. I ran outside.

All I wanted was to erase those pen lines, to stop the assault of new boundaries edging ever closer. I wrestled the rototiller out of the shed, primed it and pulled and pulled the starter rope until finally the motor sputtered to life. Desperately gripping the tiller’s handles, I was pulled along, plunging and bucking through the weed-choked garden plot until they came out, both of them, to stop me, to tell me the garden didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be enough. I turned away from them and that’s when I saw it, unearthed by the rototiller: a skull—Molly’s skull. What hair and skin remained was patchy and pasted; her bottom jaw hung as if in disbelief, her decaying tongue loose but mute, as if on the verge of speech but at a loss for words.