"You want to tell me who you think it was."
He had thought of Dieter Kasper at the sale barn, sitting beside his father with his hands in fists on his knees. He had thought of the boy sitting up all night with the heifer and the salve. He had looked at Ed Vlasak, who had known him for fifty years, who had been one of the pallbearers at Ilse's funeral, and who was looking back at him now with something very tired and very careful in his face, and he had understood that Ed knew exactly who it was, and was waiting to see whether Arne would make him go and do something about it.
"No," Arne had said. "I don't."
Ed had nodded slowly. "All right."
"I'll paint over it."
"All right, Arne."
He had painted over it that afternoon with a can of barn red he had had in the shop since 1977. The paint had not quite matched. In the morning, when the sun came in low across the yard from the east, you could still read the word underneath, faintly, the way you can see the ghost of a sign on an old brick wall in town. And the next night he had taken his father's Winchester out of the hall closet and put it in the rack by the back door, and he had told himself it was for the coyotes.
Notch got up again, groaned, and lay down. Her tail was up and she had begun, now and then, to strain a little. Not long now, he thought, or a good while yet; with a heifer you never knew.
He looked up at the ridge. He did not know why he did it, again. The roof was talking louder now, the wind gone from a steady roar to a series of long shoves, each one leaning against the north wall of the barn like a man putting his shoulder to a stuck door, and with each shove the whole frame answered, a deep creak running down the length of the building and back. That was normal. That was wind. He had heard that sound in every storm of his life. But there was another sound under it that he could not quite pick out, a small dry sound high up and somewhere toward the east side, like a knuckle cracking, and then a pause, and then it again.