My favorite job is irrigating. Not moving the metal pipes out on the flat pastures which are too heavy for me but irrigating where Father and I both wear tall black rubber boots and over his shoulder he has a sharp square shovel and an orange plastic tarp wrapped around a wooden post. At the stream I pull the tarp unwinding and then he lays the post across the stream and we take heavy stones and weight the tarp down underwater. He cuts with the shovel pieces of sod to block the water better even though we have to let some past so it flows down to the next farm. We share. But our dam spills water mostly down over the slope into the grass all the way almost to our bunkhouse. We move the dam twice a day and the grass grows in wedges that are green where we've already been. It shows how long we've been here.
Up close to the stream is a stand of aspens that are loud in the wind and that I climb. From them I can see our house and my bedroom window and I know Randy is safe inside on the dresser. I can see the horses out in their corrals and pastures. There is no direction to look where there is not a road or building.
"I like it here," I say. "Don't you like it?"
"They want you to like it," Father says. "This way they can know where you are at all times."
"Who?" I say. "What?"
Father wears a straw hat on his head since we cannot stay in the shade like we used to and most of the trees have been cut down on the farm a long time ago. The sun still finds its way through the woven straw, sliding yellow needles down around Father's eyes and the skin of his cheeks as he stands with the muddy water sliding around his black boots. He points down to the road half a mile away, his head turning to follow each car.
"You see how they slow down as they pass?" he says. "And look at the size of these ladies' trucks. Who would need a truck like that?"
The wealthy ladies are riding their horses. Horses smell thicker than I expected them to. Dustier. But it's okay and they hardly make me sneeze after the first few times.
The ladies are beautiful. They ride with their backs straight and their whips in one hand. They wear tall black leather boots and white shirts buttoned up tight to their necks. Their hair is usually blond and straight and swings when they corner or jump a jump. They wear black helmets in case they fall but they never fall. They circle for the next jump and lean down to pat their horses' long necks. They whisper into their horses' sharp ears.
I have never seen a helicopter up close, only far away over the river and the freeway hovering over the colored lines of traffic. In the war, Father says, the blades of the helicopters which are called rotors spit sand in everyone's eyes and whipped their hair around. The helicopters rose up and came down and chopped branches off trees. They brought injured bodies and threw out papers to tell living people what to do next. Ever since I've known him Father has dreamed of helicopters and they come thick in these nights on the farm. He cries out and kicks and wakes up and I wake up to gentle him, talking about other things and talking him around to where I want to go while he is still sweating and slowing down.
"If you could be any animal," I say. "What would you be?"
"Not a horse," Father says. "Definitely not a horse. Maybe a bird."
"What kind?"
"Any kind that could fly," he says. "A small bird, but not a hummingbird."
"Why not?"
"Too much sugar," he says. "Too weird, all that darting around."
"Horses," I say. "Did my mother ride horses?"
"How did you guess that?" he says.
"And that's why you got me Randy?"
"Partly. Yes."
I pull up the sheet and fold the top up over the blanket so it won't be rough on our faces.
"In the building," I say, "they talked to me about mother, they asked questions. They wanted to know if I remembered her."
"Your mother wouldn't want you to be worrying about her," Father says. "That's thinking backward. Your mother would want you thinking where you are, and not too far ahead."
The red squirrels wake us, running across our roof and up and down the walls outside. They scrabble down under the floor and Father stamps so they get quiet for a moment and then even louder. We laugh.
Even if it's not the forest park, there are animals all around and I don't mean horses. A bird flies in the open window and Father says an abode without birds is like a meal without seasoning. It just takes a different way of looking to see these animals and sometimes that is listening. In the ceiling over the kitchen a pack rat has his nest. Father lifts me up with his headlamp on my head and I see the bright lids of tin cans and broken pieces of mirrors, all shining things. Mice are even quieter, darting across the floor when you look another way. The mousetraps that Mr. Walters gives us we put under the bed but we don't even pull back the springs. Even bigger traps go outside, underground to intercept moles and gophers in their blindness. Father shows me how he sets them wrong so they're already tripped like the animal somehow escaped.