Four days ago my dad used up his chance in a thousand hunting tag and shot himself a big horned sheep. He shot it by the side of a logging road 15 minutes before a snowstorm on the last day of sheep season. He wouldn't probably have shot it if it hadn't showed up so timely. We almost ran into it with our loaded down Plymouth. The sheep, which I keep mistaking for a goat, stood chewing muddy, trampled knapweed while Dad peaked

through the sighting scope from different angles. Lars, my fiancé, who doesn't know hardly anything about hunting either, kicked the tire a little and said, "It's not picture, Tom."

Dad shook his arm, like as if Lars had touched him, which he never would, touch a man with a gun, that is. That moment of shaking made Dad accidentally shoot its stub tail. Then he missed again and hit one of it legs. We stood quiet when the animal tripped once, twice, fell. Dad held the gun down by his side and stared the other direction toward Rock Creek, his favorite summer fishing spot. I know he was wishing it was a different season. But when he turned back the sheep was of course still lying there, looking like it had just woken up and hadn't yet found a reason to get going. Dad rubbed his shoulder and squinted into the blowing show. Lars pulled some splinters out of his fingers. When he saw me staring at him he started ordering me around in a voice I didn't like. He told me I was getting a snowcap and just get back in the car.

So I sat in the front seat and yanked at some stray eyebrows while Dad shot the sheep dead. And then he and Lars dragged it across the frozen ruts of the road, if you could call it that, and rolled it onto Mom's beach towel that she had forgotten under the back seat since Labor Day. It made a sort of sheep hammock.

Once they had lifted the sheep onto the roof of the car they realized the bungies were too short to hold, so they unloaded a bunch of firewood we just spent five hours collecting and chopping, and rolled the sheep over the tailgate into the car.

It's not like I haven't seen dead animals before. My dad has the insurance policy for Superior Meats and gets pictures in the quarterly report. But riding in a car with a dead animal is different. Dad took the bumps real easy, like maybe the animal in the back might mind, and Lars tapped his fingertips on the rim of the glove compartment, which is nothing I've ever seen from him before. I played around with the broken lighter and glanced through the rearview mirror at the stack of firewood that blocked my view of the sheep. We drove home through snow gusts with Lars' window open.

Lars, my fiancé, eats meals with us. He is one of our three tenants, which is how we met. Every morning since he moved into the attic, I've been woken by Lars doing his Air Force Reserve push-up routine. We are going to get married in three months and sixteen days. He is an introvert and I am an extrovert. Those kinds of marriages have good chances.

When he isn't driving a lift at the mill, Lars spends his time in his pick-up driving up and down the street blocks that look like they might have unlisted rentals. He's been driving around looking for five weeks, but I think he's about ready to start reading the classifieds. He wanted the kind of place for us that you wouldn't find in the paper.

At breakfast I mold my oatmeal into the sides of the bowl and watch Lars' socks slide along the kitchen door as he presses up and down from a headstand to a handstand. A vein squiggles down his temple, and his whole face pulsates with his heartbeat. He kicks his feet off the door and begins his one armed, fingertip pushups. I can just see us when we're old in our own kitchen. Me watching Lars in the dark mornings, the coffee pot spreading its silence.

I cook for the whole house, the tenants too. That's my job. Some people wouldn't call it a real job, but then they probably shop in the frozen foods section. I can cook almost everything pretty well, and since Lars moved in I've been working more on my dumplings, pancakes and codfish balls. Most of the recipes come from Lars' mother who is a member of the American Daughters of Sweden. Swedish cooking had more to do with textures and less to do with taste.

I haven't cooked a thing since last weekend though, so Mom has sort of slid into the cooking shifts again. This morning I'm looking at Chapter 10 of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook to figure out what to do with the sheep that is hanging up from the automatic garage door opener dripping juice on the newspapers. I don't know why Dad put down newspapers since there's already oil stains all over the garage. My guess is he's not so sure what all is going to come out of that sheep while it's hanging there.

He hung it because he's seen deer hanging in other people's garages in fall, but unlike other wet things you hang up and come back later to check on, he hung the sheep, walked out of the garage and hasn't been back. He says I can take care of it because it has to do with food.

At the beginning of the meat chapter is a sparse diagram that is shaped like one of the 50 states, maybe Virginia. The diagram is divided into nine sections and labeled things like chuck eye roast, corned boneless brisket and scored flank steak. It's the only section in the whole book where the working hands are men's hands. Whisking, sautéing, kneading and brushing are all done with manicured women's hands. Cutting is men's work.

"Will you sit on my back?" Lars asks from his knees. He licks his palms, one swipe each, and rubs them for traction. I carry over my red and white book and sit where his sweatpants meet his t-shirt. "I'm feeling good. Sit a little higher?"

At the sink my mother is saving bacon fat in an orange juice carton. She is using the special funnel for grease that I keep under the sink that I hardly ever wash. Yesterday I noticed that the funnel makes the drying wash rags in the cupboard smell bad.

I cross my legs and balance between Lars' shoulder blades. He grunts up and down, and I notice his wrists look like rolled flank steaks. My mother makes a face at his noises, then reminds him his breakfast is getting cold.

He stops his routine and washes his hands before he sits down at the kitchen counter. When Mom sets his eggs down in front of him he says, "Thank you, Mrs. Panagus." He is one of the only people I have ever met who calls her that since Deb is so much easier to say.

She smiles when he says her name and says, "Of course, Lasse," which is, according to Lars' mother, the nice way to say his name. I have begun to think that I am not a morning person.

Mom puts her plate on the counter across from me and sits down on her stepladder stool. She eats four pieces of toast, three pieces of bacon, a Ball jar of orange juice and two mugs of creamed coffee. Neither she nor Lars says more than "please pass the this or that" for almost half an hour. All you can hear are forks against glass, deep nose breathing, and Lars' Adam's apple. My mom watches me not eat.

After breakfast everyone goes to work and leaves me with the sheep. Nowhere in any of my books are there directions on what to do with a whole dead animal. Lars' mother sent me a stack of recipes on how to make sausages, pâtés and jellied meats out of sheep parts, but nothing on butchering. I don't think Lars' mother would have a problem with the sheep. It's true that she has her walls lined with blue and white china and never leaves the house without wearing lipstick. But she also checks mousetraps and turns the compost.

To people who are ethnic, food isn't just something to eat. Food ranks right up there with language, history, and family trees. Maybe higher. There isn't a letter that comes from Lars' relatives that doesn't mention what food they're planning on eating, or remembering they ate. If I never learned the difference between Sweden and Switzerland, I would still be a part of Lars' family so long as I could lay out a real Christmas table.

Eva, that's Lars' mother, wrote my mom to say that she thinks the sheep would be fine to serve at our wedding reception. She thinks I should just freeze half of it until then. Meat at Swedish occasions outnumbers all other kinds of food by two to one. If you can't count alcohol as a food, that is.

I poke around in the pantry and stare inside the refrigerator to try to get inspired to maybe cook the evening's dinner. I am not the type to just pick a vegetable and a starch to accompany a protein. I have always been the kind who thinks about extra things like what it might look like on the plate, how to time the temperatures, and what you'll feel like when you're done eating it. My family and the tenants appreciate that kind of thoughtfulness. But today the door to the garage is ajar and the sheep hangs there, waiting . It's waiting for me to do something with it, that dangling shadow of an upside down, headless sheep. Dad sent the head to a taxidermist, or I should say he paid extra to have the guy come get the head. I wasn't here to see that operation. If you aren't from Montana you just can't appreciate how big of a deal it is to shoot this kind of an animal. But believe me, it's big.

Dad hasn't been able to park in the garage for three days now, and each morning that he has to scrape his windshield, we all know that I haven't done anything with the sheep. I make sure I am in the bathroom when he is leaving the house each morning. So now I cross the kitchen to shut the garage door. It is almost winter, after all. But instead I turn on the outside light to get a better look at the three-legged, hanging animal. It stopped dripping yesterday, and the skin is beginning to fold into the wounds like the skin around an old bite of a peach.

Most people never have to cut into meat bigger than a pot roast. I know that's true about me. Pot roasts themselves intimidated me for years, tying them up, keeping them moist while they cook so long, when to add the carrots and potatoes. Big meat is complicated. And the expense! But now I'm good with roasts. I mean, not today, but nowadays I mean. Up till now I have had confidence in myself, really, that I can learn almost anything that has to do with food. But the idea of starting with the animal seems like something out of history. Like the Vikings, even. I know you have to take the fur off first, but nowhere in any of my cookbooks are the directions on how to do that. Like I said, that is not supposed to be part of our world now.

I grab my sharpest knife from my magnet hanger thinking that if I only do a little bit of the sheep every day it won't seem so thorny. I start on the remaining foreleg. I've seen meat that shape before. But I don't make it far because it turns out that the skin is not like chicken skin that peels off. Instead the skin is stuck to the leg with stringy stuff that looks like already chewed gum. The sheep is swinging a bit, and this makes it tough to aim for the fibers.

I find a sturdy looking hand saw from my dad's workbench and grab hold of the sheep's ankle with my other hand. If I can remove the leg from the sheep then I can feel better about working on a familiar part. A leg of mutton. I've seen that.

I am not sure where exactly I should cut, so I rotate the leg to see how the leg connects to the body. The sheep glides around in the air a little, looking like one of those parade balloons that bob around. It's easy to cut through the hide and muscle, but each time I move the saw to try to cut through the bone, the sheep starts swinging again. I lose my grip for a second, and the momentum of the sheep triggers the garage door opener. The sheep levitates to the top of the garage and jams the door half-way open. That's a good stopping point.

"Honey," my dad says to me that evening from the cellar. He is shoving an ancient space heater into the bedrock under the house where the water pipes are. Last year the pipes froze because he couldn't get the heater far enough into the crawlspace, so this year he is using Lars' hockey stick to shove it in. "When are we having my steaks for dinner?" he asks from the hole in the wall. His voice is like John Henry from in there.

The steps into the basement are like those on a ship, deep and slippery. Kids don't like them. I sit on my hands on one of the bottom steps next to my dad's workbench. It's almost cozy down there with the exposed rock and the insulation. Like a castle might feel in the winter. Leaning forward I can see him inside the wall where his head lamp glistens off the green of his glasses' frames. He blinks to stop himself from asking anything else, because clearly he's already noticed the higher altitude of the sheep in the garage.

"Soon," I say, hoping that he will remember that short answers have always been my way of suggesting I don't want to talk about something. This isn't the first event in my life that has totally paralyzed the household. He crawls backwards out of the hole in the wall, the rubber soles of his boots like two snow plows, and steps underneath the light bulb that dangles from the ceiling. I can see his thermal underwear at the little triangle where his flannel shirt can't quite button all the way. I have never dated a boy who didn't wear thermal underwear in the winter. "Your uncle told me that most wedding receptions cost two thousand dollars these days," he says, as though the observation just occurred to him while struggling under the house with the heater. I pick at a patch of dried food on my jeans.

"You mean your brother?" I say. He is always making it seem like his life stopped when mine started, like nothing in the house ever happens and no one exists for any reason but me. But in just three months they will see that their life isn't going to be hardly different at all. They only think that their world revolves around me, but actually I stopped taking up that much space eons ago. They'll be surprised when they find that out, waiting for a big change that won't come.

"Yes," he says, looking kind of confused. "That uncle." I look at his dry fingers wrapped around the taped end of the hockey stick and remember him dragging the sheep by the horns. "Deb," he had called to my mom that cold night from the driveway. "Look what the hunters brought home."

Mom had come out in her terry robe and slip-ons, rubbed her fingers over the long nose, and squatted to cup one of the three remaining feet in her other hand. "Oh Tom, it's really lovely." I just went straight for the shower.

Dad crawls back into the hole, connects the heater up to an extension cord, and crawls backwards again into the basement. He plugs in the cord and smiles at the sound of the whirring motor. "So," he asks, "what's for dinner?"

He has never been a quick one to understand women, even though Mom would never confess to that. Not only did he ask me to describe the size of the sheep downtown in the post office to his friends, but he plans on putting the head in my room after I move out. I know I am his favorite daughter, and not just because I am the youngest, but he hardly even knows me. There's no room on my walls for the head, anyways.

My mom is on her knees in front of the television set with pins in her mouth. She is pinning a pattern onto the evergreen velvet that my bridesmaids are going to wear. I picked a style that would make even my oldest sister look slim and elegant. She has just had her fifth baby and now shops in the women's section. It is important that everyone feels beautiful at weddings, not just the bride.

"I thought I'd cook tonight," I say.

Mom doesn't talk through her pins like usual, but instead sits back on her heels and jams the pins into her cushion one at a time. She's proud of the calluses on her thumb tip the way a kid likes knee patches.

"This could be done tonight if you cook," she says, nodding at the biggest dress. "I set out some ribs to thaw." Ribs. She would have to pick something like that right while I'm having these difficulties. She looks at me like you might watch a head injury patient on a new medication, so I look at T.V.

I saw the news not long ago about clones. With just a little part of you a scientist can make more of you, or just a part of you. It gives me the creeps to think they could make a cow out of things found in my intestines. My mom never watches the news. She's kneeling there still, her hands flattening and flattening the fabric while she outright assesses me with a still stare. Like it is still her job, or something. She has even talked to our minister about me at other times like this. I lie and tell her that I just remembered that I was going to meet Lars at the mill so we could go to Main Street together tonight. A lie to keep your mom from worrying about you is not wrong.

Mom leans over the pattern, takes my fingers and rubs them between her wrinkled hands. My hands have become bigger than hers already, which is too bad. "What is it, honey?"

I like the sound of her dry skin on mine. I turn over her palms and touch them. "You've always had dry hands, Mom."

"Won't you eat a little something?" she asks. "You'll never fit into my dress with your figure."

Mothers and physicians overemphasize the importance of eating.

I am waiting in the employee meal room at the mill for Lars and studying the pictures that they have in the poultry section of the summer issue of a women's magazine. The manager's wife thinks that counts for charity, bringing in all her old housekeeping subscriptions. Like all magazines, poultry is grouped with fish and eggs. These seem to be the in between dishes, not really plants and not really animals. Even vegetarians that I have talked to don't really think of chickens as having feelings. Something in the smallness of their heads or the painful looking way that chickens walk make them seem like they really wouldn't mind being dead.

When you ask a person what he thinks about chicken, he'll probably say something like, "bar-b-qued on a grill," or "a la King like my mother used to make it." Unless you ask a kid on a farm, the only answers you seem to get refer to dead chickens. At least other animals are called a different name once they become dinner.

I think I must have gotten my first idea stuck when I was about three. I decided I didn't need to poop anymore, like my body didn't need to do that. I just kept putting stuff in and leaving it there. I don't remember what gave me the idea and why it seemed so correct, but I do remember the doctor's office visit to fix the problem. And then there was a long period of time when I couldn't get into the car. I know this was really inconvenient for my family, but it isn't like I decided to believe it, I just automatically did without even thinking about it.

A person can't tell at the time what is going to be a bad or good idea, what might embarrass us when we get a little older. That's why I don't tell my ideas, even when Lars asks me what I think about something. Still, the thoughts hold themselves in me like the low clouds on winter afternoons. I stopped trying to get rid of them, because they just surprise my silence with even clearer pictures when I ignore them. They are like indigestion. So that's my problem. Sometimes I wonder if I am stupid, because I imagine stupid people just keep thinking the same things over and over again. It really is a shame that this sheep has come at such an important time in my life.

In the back of the magazine is the six step procedure for cutting up a chicken. I've cut up at least a hundred chickens before, but it's only now that I notice how similar their legs are to ours. The only big difference is that they walk in a squat instead of stretching up to their full height.

On the city's only shopping street, Lars and I wander past the stores to build his appetite. He is the only man I have dated who likes looking at baby stuff. My friends' boyfriends think he's just acting for me. But he is always thinking of inventions for kids, like pants with sewn-in knee pads and shirts with button-on bibs. Most of the inventions have already been discovered though, and we find them on Main.

"Ever heard of a vegetarian baby?" I ask Lars while we wait along the counter at John's Bar.

"No, they die before you hear about them," he says to me, and rubs his eyes. He has been looking at lots of small print in the rental section of the newspaper this afternoon. Lars is obsessed with the housing situation.

"I am having troubles with the sheep," I say when the hoagies and fries arrive. I sip on a Coke and watch Lars eat his dinner. They are the kind of sandwiches that he doesn't have to chew much before swallowing.

He wipes his hands and his mouth with a drink napkin, folds up the packaging like expensive Christmas wrapping, and sets the tray on the floor under the booth. He takes my fingers and holds them in his strong hands. His friends are always asking his advice, and I love the way his smart words don't really seem to go with his thick back. He smiles at me with just one side of his mouth, this love smile that looks like he has the other side Novocained.

"There's a bed I want you to sit on in Sears," he says. I realize that this is probably an example of what the magazines mean by communication differences.

The next morning I decide to get back to work on the sheep. I've been thinking about how there are so many things that get shot in this world every day. Getting shot in a soft part of your body and staying alive would probably be the worst. Getting shot in the ankle or your collar bone probably wouldn't be as bad because I had a broken bone before and it doesn't hurt that much. Getting shot dead is probably not really such a bad way to die. If our sheep got hit by a logging truck, for example, would it have felt better? Probably not. Or if a mountain lion grabbed it by the neck and dragged it backwards through the woods for a long time before actually killing it, would it be better? I get anxious sometimes watching Wild Kingdom's death scenes, but I never stopped cooking because of them. My parents always warned me that if you think too much you don't work. So it makes sense that if you put yourself to work you don't have to think. It's clear what I need to do.

It's easier to breathe in the garage since the door has been propped open all night, but now I have to stand on a stool to reach the sheep. The chain saw would definitely help, so I go into the basement to fetch it.

When I'm down there I notice that Dad has strung the electrical cord for the space heater tightly along the corner of the wall. Every three inches he has pounded in a tiny nail and bent it around the cord so that it doesn't poof out anywhere. He must have spent hours making that cord lie flat against the wall, and he is the only person who will ever see it. He takes his housework seriously.

Starting my dad's chain saw is like starting a lawnmower with no gas. Once I get it going I realize there's no blade on the saw, and no one's ever taught me how to attach one. Standing there with that heavy fuming thing in my arms, staring at the carcass hanging from the garage door, I feel ridiculous, like somebody put me here to see how long I'd stand for it all. I took a tap dancing class once and had to be in a show with purple dyed peacock feathers hanging off my rear end. It wasn't until the feathers started flying off in the middle of "Are You From Dixie" that I realized I couldn't imagine myself doing the dance anymore. There is a point where you run out of clever ideas to keep yourself doing what you're doing.

Lars' mom told me that in her family they had this Aunt Malin who wandered the Swedish boglands while everyone else was doing their jobs around the highland farm. You have to ask yourself why a person would choose to slop around in mushy moss, sinking into her hips here and there, smearing tar on her face and hands to not get mosquito eaten, and then running into mad moose all the time. You have to wonder what she was getting away from. What kind of Swedish farm wife job was she doing when she stopped moving her hands and looked with hope down the hill to the swamps? Lars' mother doesn't seem curious about Aunt Malin at all, just disgusted. That makes me a little anxious. Maybe Malin just wasn't up to the task. Maybe she picked the wrong job when she thought she'd be a good farm wife.

It is our sixth anniversary in months since we've met. We are sitting on Lars' single bed up in his attic room bent over a photo of an antique chest that's in his family. The chest is painted a faded blue of bachelor buttons and swirls of green, yellow and red surround the number 1763 on the side of it. I ask him what the number means, and he says it's how old it is.

"It was built even before steam engines," he tells me in great respect. He sits up and bangs his head on the angled ceiling. "Before shipbuilders used iron, even." His eyes are hoping to find equal amounts of amazement staring back at him, but all I manage is to reach my hand up to touch the back of his head. Machines and metals don't mean so much to me, but it doesn't take me by surprise that he's saying something I don't care about. That is not a sign of trouble in a relationship. It is simply a difference between men and women.

"Your family has been Swedish for a really long time, hasn't it?" I say, rubbing my hand along the back of his neck where the fine hairs make a downhill line. I like it that such a big man can have such tiny hairs on part of his body, probably the same hairs Eva saw when Lars was just a baby.

He rolls his head back to trap my hand, then catches my wrist between his lips like a dog gumming her pups. He's sort of laughing at me, I can see, and I wonder if he knows I've gotten rid of the sheep. Then Lars sits up straight and pulls a receipt from his shirt pocket. It's from the post office for a lot of money. "It's coming, the chest. It's my anniversary present to you."

I can see on the receipt that the insurance for shipping the box is more than I have in my savings. It is too huge of a step to imagine. From having my own bedroom to having a home with a chest.

"But do you know that the garbage men picked up the sheep today?" I say, wanting everything clear between us before I start thinking about a chest that will make me into part of his family.

"What?" he says, and looks at me the way my mom looks at Nanna when she starts talking about marrying the guy in the next hospital bed over from hers. Lars' "what" could mean anything. I can't tell what part of what I said makes him look at me like that. Even though I wasn't great in school, I got by with a great understanding of when to change the subject.

"I bet lots of kids have played in that chest over the years," I say, pointing to the picture. I keep my eyes on the picture until the room is completely quiet. I can hear the water in the radiator working its way up the side of the house, and am ready for the thonk when the heat reaches the attic. Lars picks at the edge of the photo with his nail, stops himself, and then turns to look at me. He's got that Novocain smile on, and he just nods.

"You need to help me find a room for us to put this chest in," he says, just like he didn't even hear me about the sheep, or at least didn't care.

I guess I need to start thinking about what it will feel like to be part Swedish, to have the job of carrying on some traditions from a place that I can't always find on a map. We're going to be starting out with an apartment and a chest, and me with some cooking troubles. From there we have to start making something that I don't even know what it's supposed to look like. With some opinions from Lars I think I can do it all.

There's this end to the Aunt Malin story. One day Malin disappeared forever into the cloudberries and swamp grass. "They did that in those days, you know, just walked away and didn't return," Lars' mom said with mystery. But I can't help but wonder whether Lars' great aunt walked herself into the arctic swamplands or whether she got shoved there. I'm not saying someone would have had to drag her there, but clans have their ways of culling the lineage. This thing that is troubling me right now, it is only big for small reasons. I don't have to think the way everyone else does, I only need to act the way everyone does.

"What do you think my dad is going to say about the sheep?" I ask Lars, just kind of curious what he thinks my evening is going to look like.

"No disrespect intended," he says, fixing the receipt back into his pocket and then putting his arm around my waist, "but the sheep was never your problem."

"It wasn't?"

"That was your dad's job, not yours," he says definitely. Well, now my dad doesn't have to worry about it.