Sometimes, in summer, when we’d cut the alfalfa and run the bailer over the cutting lines, the rains would start in the distance. We’d hitch the flatbed to the truck and traverse the ditch bank to the pasture to load the bales before the skies opened. Sandy in mechanic’s gloves, Dad idling the truck, mosquitos going at our ankles. We’d heave the bales into the flatbed, and one of us would shove them into neat geometric stacks. The clouds loomed, approached, smeared bruisily over Bernalillo. We couldn’t afford another mildewed cutting, fobbed off on the steers, and we moved as fast as we could while not slipping a disk or sending a foot into a gopher hole. About technique Dad had thoughts: This is how I like to do it—one of his phrases. Frying an egg, sinking a posthole digger into packed earth, fingering a major-seven chord. You’d think by now he’d know we knew, but he was a person who never missed an opportunity to reiterate. 

We called them monsoons, or maybe that was just Mom, lending the chronic drought a seasonal blip imbued with drama. When the drops started—early warning shots—Dad would jump out of the truck while it was still in gear, corner of a toolbox depressing the gas pedal ever so, the steering wheel propped straight with a tire iron, and he’d join us throwing the bales, his expert lift, kneeing the bale onto the truck, grunting, the tails of his shirt pulled from his Wranglers. Sandy would start pulling a tarp over what we’d stacked, fixing it with orange twine to the hooks on the trailer’s frame. Pinpricks of blood bloomed on my forearms—the alfalfa so sharp and irregular it was impossible to imagine anything eating it. The bailing wire dug into my palms, curled my fingers, and with every drop of rain I felt on my skin I thought each exposed, uncollected bale was spoiled, like rolls of film betrayed by light. 

We went until it was coming down in sheets, the gaps between drops smeared into one continuous presence. Inside the truck cab the sound was as though being attacked, drops pelting the windows like darts—and that’s when we drove it in, back up Applewood Road to the clear ditch, past the Montaños’ crumbling adobe with the speedboat on cinderblocks in the driveway, past the Whittiers’ denuded vineyard, past the Kellehers’ two black cows, stooping under a cottonwood by the fence line, trailer rattling and bouncing like a rhythm section gone haywire, the tarp flapping behind us, my forearms bright pink and steaming, pulse high in my ears.