His shepherd, Buster, came bounding out of the apple orchard to his right. He remembered how the dog had chased the truck to the chapel, dashing with tongue lolling the whole way. It was the farthest Buster had ever followed him, and while the priest gave his eulogy, Buster stood outside barking and scratching at the door. Everyone heard the dog but ignored him. Guadalupe was mortified, and in any other situation he would have given Buster a few good smacks, but he knew the dog was suffering some kind of trauma. Buster was up on the seat next to him now. 

He turned the tractor onto a dry path between the rows and headed west of the house, to the open fields. He passed her vegetable garden.

The burly guttering of the tractor put him into a trance and he barely noticed Buster jump down. He let his mind ease into the exhaust stack's smoky incantation. It hypnotized him, droning in his bones and churning up more memories of Matilda when she had planted the windscreen of bamboo along the southern border of the fields. After that, she laced honeysuckle vines into the chicken wire, and it weaved completely until you couldn't see the wire, leaving only a boundary bursting with aromatic flowers. The horses lounged next to it, tails swatting at the honeybees and ears perked alertly on the dazzling hummingbirds flitting in the blossoms. The headlights shone on water gushing through a break in a furrow at the end of the field. He reached back to feel for the shovel behind the seat.

The light crept up on the mountain crest to the east. Everything was waking up. It was Matilda's spirit in the plants. Sometimes before sunrise Matilda would sit in the semidarkness on the back porch steps and her eyes would glow with a brilliant sheen when she saw the mallards, red-tailed hawks, and crows gliding in at daybreak and congregating in the fields. It gave her a joy few other sights scarcely came close to-after meditating like that, she'd enter the kitchen, cheeks flushed and chilled, her eyes brighter than the morning sun, humming an old country song clear as the cathedral bell, ringing throughout the rooms with the immense pleasure of being alive.