It happened when she was very young. He spent an afternoon in the shed with a hammer and nails and two long two by fours he’d traded a litter of pups for. Then later that day when the earth’s turning had erased the face of the sun, but broad swatches of color still lay across the sky burning through the haze, he dragged the two by fours up the hill behind their house. He chose a spot amid a collection of skeletal sage brush. Crows wheeled overhead, silent, and watched him lift the heavy headed iron shovel and plunge it repeatedly into the ground. After a while he stopped and wiped the sweat off his brow with a bare arm, breathing hard. He stared with an expression of longing mixed with hatred at the hole he had made. Sweat dripped off his body into the silent gaping hole. The air was utterly still, laying between earth and space like furniture in an attic, collecting dust. He took a deep breath and let it out in angry exaltation, tossing the shovel off to the side. He dragged the two by fours over to the hole and paused above the raw upturned face of the earth. “Now look!” he said, looking pained. “This is how it’s going to be.” Then he drove the end of one of the two by fours into the hole with all the force he could muster. The crows looked away embarrassed by the look on his face. He filled the hole back in with the used and wasted earth then he stepped back and beheld what he had done. The cross looked down on the barren valley where, on other hill tops crosses stood, turning blind faces to the world.
