“You know, I’ve been cutting up these hogs for three years now. I don’t regret none of it. They were born to die. And I’m just a hammer. Somebody else is using the hammer, I know that. I just don’t know if it’s that dude up there,” he glanced at the sky, slate grey and ambivalent, “or the motherfucker down here.” He jabbed the ground with his boot. “But you see that tree there?” He nodded at a squat yew standing alone between two pastures beyond the silos. “My granddad told me when trees stand on their own, with no other trees around them, their branches grow wild like that. Branches twisted
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