第2章 Randolph

One

The boy's grandfather came down off the hill farm above the Bethel road south of Randolph early in the summer of 1862, leaving behind his mother and the youngest girl still at home along with a dwindling flock of Merino sheep and a slowly building herd of milk cows. Norman Pelham was barely seventeen, but he was well built in his homemade fine-stitched suit of clothes. His silent manner and extra height deflected any question of his age. His father drove him in the wagon and neither spoke during the hour trip to the depot in Randolph. The summer dust rose up through the trace chains and settled on the braided bobs of the team's tails. Norman was a serious youth who doubted that the secession of near half the states in the union would be quickly resolved. Still, his death seemed remote and unlikely. He planned to do his part as well as he could, but no hero's blood pumped through his veins. He had no desire for glory beyond traveling back up that same road one day. But he did not speak with his father of these things and his father offered nothing of his own fears that morning. Instead they tracked the course of crows over the valley and watched as men they knew worked at the first cutting of hay in the broad flat fields along the river. Some of those men rested their scythes to lift a hat or arm in greeting, some had sons already at the depot or in Brattleboro and some would soon follow. Father and son would incline their heads to the greetings with no need for words, for all knew their destination. They rode on to the strained creak of harness leather above the heavy wheels crumbling the road dust, the father's heart clattering as if loosed from a pivot in his chest and the heart of the boy also in fearsome ratchet. There had been no argument between them, no discussions of fitness or age. The father would have gone himself but could not. The boy was not going in his place. The boy was going on his own.

In Randolph, they drew the team up away from the depot and backed the wagon around so it was headed home. The team stood with dropped heads, sweat lather foaming around their backpads. The father wrapped the lines once in a loose loop around the brake lever and stepped down out of the wagon. Norman climbed down the other side and reached behind to lift out a valise with twin straps that held a winter coat, canvas pants, a boiled white shirt, a small inscribed Bible, extra socks and a razor. All but the razor had been brought at his mother's urging. Norman had planned to carry the razor in his pocket, confident he could always find a strop and soap of some kind. He thought the army might even provide these things. He didn't know; there was no one to ask.

There was a crowd around the depot, which was strung with homemade bunting. His father reached out, took his hand, and they both grasped hard, then dropped the other's hand at the same moment, as if from long practice.

"Well," his father said, his eyes drifting over the wagonbed toward the team.

"Keep an eye on my sheep," Norman said.

"Yuht," his father said. And then added, "Dodge them bullets."

"I'll do her."

His father nodded. "I'll get on to home then."

Norman raised the valise and held it against his back, with his elbow in the air. He echoed his father. "Yuht." As he turned away and walked toward the crowd, he realized for the first time that he would be around far more people than he was used to, yet knew all he needed to do was keep quiet and he could be as alone as he liked.

He rode the train south to Brattleboro for the rest of the day. Around him, men were eating food out of sacks or bound-up in cloth. Norman opened the valise, intent upon retrieving the razor and leaving the rest behind him, and found there on top a piece of cold mutton, tied up in paper and string, and a loaf of new bread along with a half dozen hard-boiled eggs. As he peeled the shells off the eggs, he thought of her egg money going with him. After he ate all the mutton and bread, he closed the valise and kept it held tight between his feet, razor and all.

In Brattleboro the next morning he signed the muster rolls and was issued a uniform and gun as well as a dozen or more other related items. He lived in a tent with five other men from rare and unknown parts of Vermont and went through a couple of weeks of drills and simple training that struck him as having little to do with anything at all. He learned over time that he was fortunate in having officers who were neither ambitious nor career men, but who had age and experience. In early July, they rode trains south and joined the thronged mass of the Army of the Potomac. Norman now carried only his razor in one pocket and his small Bible in another. He'd saved also his extra socks.

It was late September of 1865 before he passed through Bethel on his way back to the hill farm, months after his fellow members of the 2nd Vermont had returned in pairs or small groups. Although word of him had spread beyond that group of veterans, they would not speak of him; any of them who were approached by his mother would only assure her he'd be along any day and last they'd seen him he was fine. There were still those few whose eyes rose over whatever length of road they could see from time to time to see if the figure in the distance was him. Some among them even doubted he'd come at all, but even those doubts were less of a judgment than a curiosity. They were not the sort of men to place themselves in another's shoes and would not voice an opinion unless the matter bore directly upon them. And this with Norman did not. Still, they watched the road.

So they saw him pass along the road that Indian-summer morning with the sugarbush maples flaring on the hillsides and the hilltop sheep pastures overgrown with young cherry and maple. Word ran along the road ahead of him so near all his neighbors and townspeople saw him walking in the long easy stride of one who counted walking in months and years not miles, a rucksack cut from an issue blanket strapped to his back and by his side a girl near his own height in a sunfaded blue dress and carrying her own cardboard suitcase bound with rough twine. Norman wore his army brogans while the girl walked barefoot in the dust, her own pair of wornout boots tied together by the laces and slung over one shoulder. Norman raised his hand to greet those he saw and most nodded or waved back. And those that hung back in barn doorways or stood behind curtains he paid no attention to, satisfied to pass them by and telling himself he held no malice to those who ignored him. At one point the girl said to him, "They watching us."

"They been watching us all along the way."

"They has been. But these your folks."

"All they got is the right to look."

"Maybe."

"No maybe about it," he said. "They can look all they want and think what they like, it don't matter to me and it don't matter to you." And he meant what he said; he'd walked through any fear he might be wrong back in southern Virginia. There was nothing cocksure or militant in how he felt, just his own certainty at having settled his fears and doubts. If there was any hesitation left in him it came from his great tenderness for her, his knowledge of the cruelty a person may inflict upon another and his determination to shield her from any damage that his own people might cast upon her. He was not simple in love but ferocious with it.

They turned off the road less than a mile from Randolph village to climb the half mile of gravel track to the hill farm where only his mother and youngest sister now waited, his father kicked in the head by the old mare as he bent to pick up a dropped dime two years before. The letter with this news had reached him just days before the battle of Fredericksburg in which men died before, beside and twice behind him as his body recalled his father's advice and he dropped in a long swivel from his knees to rise again with the breech-loading Springfield coming up before him. His older sisters married and gone, Miriam on a farm in Iowa, Ethel to a paper-goods man out of St. Louis. As he and the girl passed the final house along the way, the farm wife was in the side yard stringing laundry, with her arms full and her mouth agape with pins, and so was unable to wave or call greeting but just watched them pass by, the neighbor boy grown war-hardened and the green-eyed girl with her African body so lovely in the fall sunshine, her skin the color and luster of hand-rubbed heartpine. Norman called out and the girl raised a hand in a gesture the woman read as saying You're over there and I'm over here and I'm going to stay right here unless you invite me otherwise. As they continued on up the hill, Norman thought he heard the soft spatter of clothespins falling into the grass behind them.

He was wounded twice. The first time was at Gettysburg when the 2nd Vermont found the breach in the flank of Pickett's fated charge and waded in to turn the battle, charging across the field through the offal of dead and dying men and horses, the siren of battle at full crescendo. Norman was wounded as a red-eyed cavalryman swept through them with his sabre flaring in the dying summer light and sliced Norman's right arm deep to the bone and the sabre flew up from the blow and was coming down again. Norman had dropped his Springfield but raised his left arm as he threw his body against the man's horse behind the long blade and drew the man down on top of him, knocking the wind from himself and leaving it to others to drag the rebel man from Norman and run bayonets through him. They saved the sabre and presented it to him when he returned to the company from the hospital at Lee's old home outside Washington but he did not want it, still able to feel the sweat coming from the cavalryman's mustache and chin as he came down on him, still able to smell his glaze of fear and death as they struck the earth and the sky darkened with the bodies of his comrades closing over them.

The second wound came almost two years later outside Richmond after that city fell and Lee's army was crumbling before them. It was late in the day when the company crossed a small stream with the dogwoods blooming and the few spring leaves on the trees fine and pale, the size of mouse ears. The men they were pursuing had gained enough ground to turn their one fieldpiece upon the 2nd and fire off a final canister of grapeshot that blew apart a dozen feet from where he crouched with the others in poison ivy and trout lilies, hearing the whistle of the grape coming in. While the shell fell short, it sent something hard through the air, a piece of tree perhaps, which struck Norman in the head, tore apart his left ear and left him unconscious and alone while the company camped around him. Sometime during the night he woke and, still senseless, crawled off in the manner of a sick animal seeking better shelter in which to die. He awoke in mighty pain at dawn next to a hedgerow somewhere in Virginia, his ear a throbbing thing attached to him and his brain ill and scattered, shivering with the dew already burning off before the rising sun and his tongue thick with wanting water. He'd rolled onto his good side to keep his ear in the air and away from the ground. He slept some like that and waking again saw a girl squatting there beside him, her face serious as death itself and her hands cupping a dipper gourd of water as she asked him, "Is you dead?"

He lay there etching her against the pan of his brain: the fine raised cheekbones that brought all focus of her face to her wide eyes already bright before the sun added light to them. The fine cleft chin he wanted to hold as an apple and the lips cracked with her own fearsome journey and still lovely as if chiseled from a piece of veined rose marble. Still he could barely speak from pain but felt he must or she would flee, thinking him dead or somehow dangerous, and so he said, "I just need to lay here a bit." Then, his head and ear booming, he asked, "Is that water you got there?"

She nodded and held the back of his head as he drank and then settled him slow back onto the ground and he slept again. When he woke later she was still there and the gourd was full again and she helped raise him up and gave him water. The sun was up but they sat in the thin shade from the hedge. She had biscuits and a hunk of ham with the mold scraped off and she fed some of that to him and he slept more. At full dusk he was awake again and heard whippoorwills calling each other off in the darkening woods. The girl stood over him this time. She said, "You got to get up and walk. It ain't far but you got to go. Another night here fever gonna carry you off. I spent too much time to have that happen." He saw that she had blankets looped long and narrow over one shoulder. She said, "You ain't that bad hurt. You ain't dead. Rise on up now." And when he was standing, his body pressed to hers and one arm around her and one of hers around him, he asked her name and she paused, her face turned away from him down into the folds of the blankets she carried. She said, "Leah."

"Why that's a pretty name," he said. "From the Bible."

And again slowly as if gauging him she said, "I guess so. Anyway its my name."

He wanted to tell her she was prettier than her name, any name, but the words were wrong; that, and he was still seeing her blackness, still thinking of her as the most beautiful colored girl he'd ever seen. As the land fell away with the dark, the pain in his head was made a lesser thing against the girl beside him.

They moved that way into the night, the girl leading him through fields as he struggled to find his own balance and when that would not happen finally let himself move along with her as with a current. She led him down through a woods of old oaks and into a narrow ravine with a small stream and he guessed this was where she had carried his water from. In the dark she brought him to a hidden dugout shored with logs and shielded with a thicket of rhododendron, the open front of the dugout half covered by a hand-laid drywall of stone, old enough so the surfaces of the stones were soft with moss. Inside she made a fire with flint and steel, and in the light they ate the rest of her ham and she brought more water up from the stream. She kept the fire small but with the food it warmed them. She asked where he was from and he told her and she asked where that was and he said up by Canada and she knew where that was. He asked where she was from and she thought about it and then said, "Round here." He didn't know if she was lying or telling the truth and knew it wasn't his business to probe. She had every reason not to trust him and he realized how exceptional her care of him was, how great her risk had been and in her eyes still likely was. He sat with her in the cave, built he guessed by her own kind. Word of this place and others like it passed along a vein of trust, a line of knowledge outside the reach of his own race, and he looked at her, feeling he was beginning to know her. The idea of sex bloomed in his mind and he moved a little away from her and took up one of the two blankets, leaving the most room he could for her by the fire and told her, "You've been awful helpful. I just want to tell you that. Dawn tomorrow I'll get out of your hair and get on and find my regiment. They'll probably go ahead and shoot me for deserting anyway." And seeing her eyes flare at this he said, "That's a joke. I bet they think I'm dead. Probably think I'm a ghost when they see me."

She made a face at him that was not quite a smile. "You're not any ghost."

He grinned at her. "Not yet anyhow."

"Some strange kind of man, that's what you are."

"What're you talking about?"

She shook her head and said, "Scuse me." Her tone sudden with spleen she stepped around him, ducking low until she was outside, and he lay and watched her disappear in the darkness. When she came back she was silent and so was he. Something had been extended from both of them, some straw bridge from one to the other, but then it had fallen apart and not either of them knowing what made it fall but both knowing it was gone. As children both feeling the fault and afraid to admit it. So they said nothing.

During the night she moved him close to the scant coals and wrapped in her own blanket had spooned against his back and so he woke at bare dawn with her against him and he lay without moving until there was light in the treetops and she stirred behind him. Through both their blankets, he felt the long muscles of her thighs against the backs of his and her torso and breasts pressed tight to his back and one arm flat against his chest inside his own blanket. Only when he felt her wake fully and leave the dugout did he move at all, so that when she returned he was up with his blanket folded, moving his arms and legs to wake. She led him to the stream and there ordered him onto his hands and knees and held his head in her hands and lowered the wound into the shock of water, letting her fingers run over his scalp to clear the matted blood and woods-trash, her touch warm even in the cold water. When he stood he found his balance and she stepped back from him and as if accusing said, "Should have done that yesterday."

Still breathless he said, "It would've killed me then."

She gripped his forearm and he felt the bite of her nails and she said, "Don't you tell nobody about this place, you hear me?" There was no protest before this fury and so he only nodded, once and short but looking straight into her eyes. He wanted again to touch her or say some words to her but she'd already turned and was walking away into the woods, looking back once with impatience or scorn, so he followed her because it was all he could do.

She led him in a straight line up the side of the ravine and through the woods again and he had no way of knowing if it was the same route they'd taken the night before or a different direction altogether. Then she led him across a field to a small height of wooded land until they looked down on a field beyond a road with the camp of the 2nd Vermont. He started forward, the smell of food rising from cookfires, and then turned back but she stayed in the underbrush and he said, "Come on down with me. There's food."

She shook her head.

"Come on. I guess I ate up all your food. Least you could let me do, it seems to me."

She shook her head again and then said, "You go on, Mister Norman Pelham." When he stepped toward her she held out a hand, palm raised out and flat to stop him. She stepped back, her hand still out, one step at a time until she placed a briar thicket overgrown with honeysuckle between them. He stood listening to her slipping away until no sound came from the woods and she was gone. He thought of following her back to the field on the other side but suddenly knew she would not be in sight. And so he stood there a long while and then turned and went down to the encampment.

When his wounds were dressed and he was fed, he told his story leaving out the part about the girl and it was listened to but only just; a rumor had come down late the night before from Appomattox Court House and there was talk of going home or going on into North Carolina where an army under Johnston was still in full fight. Others said that army was nothing but a fragment and Sherman would mop it as a barkeep would the overflow suds from a bucket of beer. Others reminded them they'd considered Lee done for before this and been proved wrong. It was all talk to Norman; even the idea of a surrender left him idly numbed and he was quiet among the men. He sat that night by the bright circle of the rail-fence fire, unable to see beyond the wall of dark but imagining her in the dugout with the small fire even as he knew she would've moved on from there, was likely miles away along her own route of hidden road. Norman wondered if she'd heard the rumor and what it might mean to her and once felt clearly that she was out there looking right back at him. He stood then, making a show of stretching his body, his face turned toward the wooded height, and then felt a fool, knowing she was not there. He moved out to the rim of light to pee and then back for a tin cup of the overboiled coffee they all sat drinking. An hour after midnight a horse clattered hard down the road and the war was done for them.

The next day they passed through two towns as they made their way back toward Washington and both times the townspeople stood silent watching them with empty faces and the troops were quiet also, as if they were all at the same funeral, the viewers and the procession all indispensable. In both towns Norman's eyes searched through the colored people but did not see her. He was already unsure if he'd recognize her until his eyes found one and then another tall woman and knew immediately each was not the one he sought. He wondered how long that surety would last and did not let himself consider why this was important.

Twice during the afternoon he saw movement off the roadside, once behind a hedgerow and once again farther off along a wooded edge, and both times he looked to the men around him to see if they too had seen anything and wondered if he'd imagined it or even why he might think it was her at all. The countryside was filled with people: men deserted and foraging from both armies, colored people some still bound as slaves and others runaway, white children competing with the deserters for what game or roots the land might offer up. There were women also, both white and black who'd come out to the encampments to offer what they had to offer for whatever they could get for it. Still he watched hard through the afternoon for another flicker of movement and saw nothing at all.

They camped that night in a well-built barn with overhanging sheds on both sides. The men tore out planking from empty mule stalls for fires, the rail fences already stripped away, and the woman of the house brought down a kettle of potato soup made with milk and butter although they saw no cow. The surrender meant something to someone somewhere but nothing yet to these men on the road and nothing yet to the people they imposed upon, except the chance to acknowledge the imposition, and so they filled their tin cups and thanked her one by one and she nodded to each and stood silent until the soup was gone and then carried the kettle back to the house.

After midnight he was walking sentry, the Springfield loose alongside him held in just one hand, his tunic unbuckled, open to more than just the spring night. In the darkness he paused and as he stood looking at those men the idea of leaving them frightened him a little. He wondered if the men there he knew from Bethel or Randolph or Royalton or Chelsea would come upon him in years ahead and nod their greeting and pass along by as if this were all nothing more but a great and forever silent part of their lives. Norman knew how glad he'd be back up on the farm with his arms bloody on February mornings from birthing lambs or his back burned and sore from lifting forkfuls of hay from the hot fields. The war was already breaking apart into fragments for his memory to hold, the odd things: the squirrel racing back along the road through the advancing troops that first day at Second Bull Run; the summer mist burning off the Potomac as they marched north into Pennsylvania two summers before; the man out on the field well before him who landed on his back and for a long moment seemed to hold the cannonball with both arms to his belly before he flew apart under it; the boy face up and his mouth open to the air, flies already pooled around his eyes as he called a woman's name, his tone plaintive as if she were nearby and ignoring him. These sights and others, each forever etched in its own small box of his mind. Life after this was not so simple a thing as going home and carrying on from where he'd left off, and he remembered his father's death, a news that at the time seemed just one more in a long chain of life poured out upon the ground. Now he could begin to feel it as the hole he'd forever carry forward with himself: not having the chance to not talk about the war with his father, not even having that silent presence there beside him as he birthed those lambs or dug that potato ground. He was watching his fellows and himself all at once when from behind him she said, "Norman don't you shoot me with that gun of yours."

He turned slow and saw her face split in half with shadow and light, her eyes wide, her nostrils flared as if to breathe him in and her lips parted like the mouth of a bell. He took a step closer and said, "I thought that was maybe you follering us." Smiling.

"You never seen me."

"Seen something."

"Sho." She snorted this at him and he almost laughed. "Something in your head I guess."

"Well," he said. "You were there and now you're here."

"I didn't follow nothing. Been here waiting."

"That right?"

She nodded. He could see she wore a different dress, once a deep green now faded to old moss.

"Waiting for what?" And he immediately wanted to bite back the words from the night.

But she only said, "Waiting for that woman to get done with her charity while you all tore up her barn. Waiting to see you walk out here sometime tonight. Waiting to see if you jump up in the air already running when you see me like you see a spook. You still got time for that I guess."

"I'm sentry tonight. If I tore off running who knows what would happen. So I'm standing right here I guess."

"Sentry sposed to walk around I thought."

He shrugged. "War's over. I guess you heard that."

Now she shrugged. "You think that's gonna change a thing, Mister Norman Pelham?" Before he could respond she reached out one hand and ran her fingers down his forearm, and he felt the flesh of his arm rise up to meet her. She was speaking not of her life or the lives of her people or even the people all around them but of the sudden and irrevocable breach each had made in the other. And nothing said out yet in the air between them, nothing said to make it real, as if words could do such a thing. So he only asked, "You get anything to eat today?"

"Some folks shared what they had." She watching him now as if seeing he'd finally figured things out. Or maybe afraid he knew the words to break it apart. So he touched her upper arm and felt the chill of her skin, smooth and tight with cold. And said, "I need to find you a coat."

"I got a coat. Out there." Pointing out into the dark with her chin. "With my blankets and mess." Norman shuddered with the complicated ripple of knowledge that the next minutes hours days would circuit his life; he'd learned early in the war to avoid reading signs or portents into any one small thing because the larger ones pay no attention to those small events. Hope and desire or dread are puny human attributes beside the work of a dreadful god or a careless universe but at this moment he knew his life was some way shapable. He was breathless that long moment and then Leah moved forward so her face was in full light now and he told her, "You wait right here. You wait just one minute. Please. Here, hold this." He thrust the Springfield into her hands and turned to lope back up to the fire, where he poured out a can of coffee and took biscuits and bacon from the racks by the fire, stuffing his tunic pockets to a bulge. He was turning to leave when he saw Goundry watching him, the fervently quiet small blacksmith from Poultney now captain of the company, whose voice just carried the five feet between them.

"What're you doing, Pelham?"

"Something to eat sir?"

"Hungry?" Goundry eyeing the tunic.

"Yes sir."

Goundry nodded. "Where the hell's your rifle, Pelham?"

Norman inclined his head. "Back there. Right by the barn sir. I just wanted to get this food."

Goundry nodded again. "Is your head feeling all right, son?"

"It's fine sir."

Goundry held him with his eyes. Then he said, "By Jesus I'm glad this thing's done with. Get out of here, Pelham."

He found her crouched in the shadow beside one of the mule-stall partitions, his rifle held upright between her legs, the barrel hugged against her chest. He took her hand and helped her stand and she said, "Some man came out the back of the barn and peed there so I hid down here."

He traded her the can of coffee for his rifle and told her, "I've got some bread and bacon too. You know some place we could set down?"

She took him by the hand and led him over what had been vegetable gardens and then past a chicken yard, down a dirt track with a pair of empty cabins on each side, and behind these was a smaller structure made of heavy logs with no windows but with a door busted apart, pieces of timber still splinted upright by strap hinges. Inside she hung a blanket from nails over the doorway and lit a candle stub and he saw her suitcase and bedroll on the floor and a small rude bench made of a split log with unpeeled limbs splayed as legs. A short length of stout chain was bolted into the log wall, the chain ending in a manacle roughly cut open with the marks of the slipped chisel. They sat on the bench and shared the coffee and she ate some of the biscuit and the bacon he sliced off for her, ate with a vast controlled manner that made clear how hungry she was, and while she declined more than a small amount of the food he cleared his pockets and set the rest on the edge of the bench in a natural sort of way. They sat silent on the bench in the guttering candlelight, the boy younger than he thought he was and the girl older than she thought she was. He saw slight spasms running over her upper body and he unbuttoned his tunic and saw her watching him, her mouth tight and her eyes flat, and he took the tunic off and put it around her shoulders and sat there beside her with his suspenders up over his woolen undershirt. She crossed her arms to take the tunic edges in opposite hands and drew it close around her and in so doing leaned a little so her shoulder touched his and she said, "Norman, what do you want with me?"

He thought about this and only would say, "I guess I could ask the same thing."

Without pause she said, "Ask then."

So he did and she said, "I want to go to Up-by-Canada."

"Vermont," he said.

"Ver-mont," she said, breaking the word in two parts and he thought Yes that's right, that verde monte, that old green hill of Champlain-his Randolph Academy brought back clear by the girl's usage-but he only said, "It's a long ways from here."

"Already walked one of those. I can walk another." Then, "Less you don't want me to."

Norman looked away from her now, looked down at his hands joined together between his knees, his elbows and forearms flat on his thighs, and was quiet until his voice came and then he said, "I don't know." He could hear her breathing beside him, could feel slight movement in her shoulder against his and felt a patience from her as she waited for him and he knew what for and didn't know how to say it and so only said, "I don't barely know you."

"Course you don't," she said. "What it takes to know a person you tell me soon's you know. I don't know, not me. You got brothers, sisters?"

"Sisters," he said, "three of em."

But she kept right on talking as if he'd said nothing. "Your mama and daddy. You known those people all your life but you don't know what they really all about inside. And you think they all gonna sit around waiting for you to know, Norman? You think even they themselves know? Not like they like to, I tell you that. You and me sitting here strange as can be to one another but here we are, ain't that right? And what you call that? You call that a accident? I walked maybe three hundred miles to meet up with you Norman and didn't even know it was you till I seen you laying there under that briar clump and how'd I know then that you'd wake up to be you? I didn't. You know what I'm telling you Norman?"

All he could do was nod his head, just once.

She said, "I look at you, you know what I see? Norman?"

"I got no idea."

"I see a man gentle right down in his soul. All the way down."

Then she was quiet and when she spoke again her voice had lost a little edge and he heard it right away, a little less certainty and he felt this loss in his chest like hot water. She said, "So me. You look at me what do you see? Norman?"

His face furrowed like a spring field, wanting to get this just right. He had no idea what to say and kept looking at her hoping she'd wait for him, hoping she'd be patient. Hoping he'd find his way not out but through this.

She didn't wait. She said, "You see a little nigger girl wanting to eat up your biscuit, your bacon, whatever you got? You see me thinking my taking care of you once overnight is something I can trade for lots more than that? Or maybe even just nigger pussy ready for you to say the right words, do the right thing? That what you see, Norman?" And she was reared back away from him now, sitting still on the bench, upright as if at a great distance, her back arched like a drawn bow, eyes burning wide open as her soul welled up but not at all ready to pour out without something back from him. He watched his hands turning one over the other, the fingers lacing and relacing until he realized she was watching him do this. He slid around and lifted his right leg over the bench so he sat spraddle-legged facing her front on. With his face collapsed in sheer terror, he said to her, "Leah. All I see is the most lovely girl I've ever seen."

She stood off the bench away from him and said, "I told you the truth, Norman. I told you the truth. But you lying to me if that's all you see."

And without even thinking about it he said, "What I see is the most lovely girl and one fat wide world of trouble. Trouble for both of us. That's what I see."

And now she stepped back over the bench to face him and said, "You got that right. You got that just exactly right." He reached and took one of her hands and sat looking down at their hands lying one into the other, the small slip of warmth between his fingers, her life lying up against his, and still not looking at her he said, "Don't you ever talk that way to me again Leah."

"What way?" Her voice low, already knowing, needing to ask, needing him to tell her.

So he said, "That nigger-this nigger-that business."

"White men talk any way they want to a colored girl."

"Am I white men to you then?"

She reached her free hand and took his other hand and put it against her breastbone just below her throat and told him, "My daddy's a white man, Norman."

"I figured something like that," he said; in truth he hadn't thought that far. So again without thinking he said, "He doesn't talk that way does he?" His hand warming to the heat of her, his brain on the buttons down her dress-front.

She tilted her chin to look at him. "My daddy has never even said my name to me." Her voice tight with disgust, venom, a loathing that was distinct and almost covered all what sadness she had but that he knew was there, knew it the same way she believed his soul to be gentle. He scooted toward her on the bench and she brought her knees in tight to the bench to let him come close and he put his arms around her and she laid her head against him and he sat there, holding her like that.

From the bench to her blankets on the floorboards of the little stockade was not a long way to go but they took a long time moving there, seeming to travel down inch by inch in a locked body motion that neither led nor followed but went with them trembling. Once down, they wrestled with limbs made slow and heavy, his fingers thick with the buttons of her dress and her breasts out then, nipples like summer blackcaps against thick honey, and she shuddered under his tongue. She astride him and with one hand he swept the dress up over her hips and opened his flies with the other, but she arched away from him even as he strained toward her, his thumb once traveling down the length of her as she opened under, the wet there breathtaking. Still she held off from him, their mouths smothering each other, tongues each hot and sharp to the other, almost struggling until she broke away, rolling over to lie beside him, her legs still spread and her dress open to the waist, and she said, "If you'd got it in I would've let you." He rolled over on top of her and as he entered she said, her voice now a wet thing in his ear, "I could just melt all over you," and with that he was done, thrusting from the small of his back and her soft cries falling into his ears like thin slices of bird-flight entering his brain. She reached down and held him to her after he was finished and told him, "Don't leave, don't go." So he stayed until he slipped from her and still he lay there, the wet between them sealing one to the other. Neither one now wanting or able to leave.

Walking up that final half mile of rough track above Randolph with the farmhouse not yet in sight, the crown of the elms over the house stretched ahead where the road cut an opening through the trees, the girl already thought she knew something of the place to which she'd come, having walked through half the state just to get here, as well as all the rest of the north that lay behind them now. The boy paced slow with so much home after so long finally in sight, both with those long days and too-short nights behind them; those and the weeks they spent outside Washington where after Lincoln's assassination Norman waited with his company through a mourning for the president. They stayed through most of May to walk together one final time as a military force down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac, Norman waiting with great agitation while Leah disappeared into the swamped springtime of the capital, a place at odds with itself, wildly festive with the war's end and murderously foul from the dead president. After four long days, she reappeared with lye-burned mottled hands and a pure gleefulness nothing could diminish; she was working in the basement of a hotel scrubbing linens and ironing them to a slick starched stiffness but earning cash money, in fact a sum that gave Norman pause; during the years of the war he'd come to think of money in the abstract and at those random intervals when his pay arrived he wired it through to his sheep account at the bank in Randolph. Those first six weeks passed and they went their own way, disregarding the packed trains leaving for Philadelphia or New York or Boston and walking up the country through the lush and easy summer, sleeping in woods or fields with hedgerow cover and buying food when they needed it. At times they had to fend off dogs and small boys with their name-calling and meanness strident and forgivable for their age and ignorance. Only once, outside Port Royal, New York, did a man on horseback block their passage, inquiring the price of the nigger whore. And Norman brought the man down from his horse, an easy job after that long-dead cavalryman, and thrashed him there in the dust of the road, three other men off in the distance watching and not involving themselves. It was not the watchers but Leah who stopped him, who began kicking him in the muscles on the backs of his calves and screaming at him until he gave way. They continued up the road, leaving the man lying and his horse standing off some distance in a field, blowing its nostrils clear, and Norman and Leah walked by the watching men and Norman met their gaze and wished them a good day. So they walked to Vermont, to home for both, and told each other stories along the way. Outside a river town in northern Massachusetts they married each other standing naked in the moonlight in the Connecticut River, the water end-of-summer low and syrup-colored even in the night, the rings thin gold bands he'd bought three days previous and carried as they watched and waited for the right place and time. Late the following day they crossed into Vermont and Leah grew quiet, her animation screwed now to a tight focus, watching around her as if careful observation would offer keys or clues to the place she would assume among this landscape. As if her silence before this spectrum offered her protection against any hostilities or animosity.

They came up that first sharp knee of the home-place hill and the land opened out not so much in a bowl as a series of wide ledges that held the farmstead: the haymeadows and sheep pastures and the high field where potatoes were grown, the orchard just above the house and barns, to where the sugar house stood flanked by the bush of great maples rising in crown over it all, the final pitch of the hillside steep again at the top amongst granite outcroppings and ranks of spruce. Norman's gait gained with the sudden leveling of the track and the place there before him, his feet for the first time in years striking ground as if each separate egg of gravel and patch of dusty hardpan were known through the soles of his boots, Leah still apace beside him, her head high and her gaze steady before her, her eyes sweeping at first to draw it all in but settling on the house under the elms. Without looking at him she said, "Reckon they seen us yet?"

As she spoke a figure broke out from the apple trees heavy with ripe fruit. Norman saw the baskets under the trees and the narrow picking ladder and thought Cider-could not smell it yet but could taste it-and then the girl hurtling down the road toward them, short-legged and strong, twice the little girl he'd left behind, still small but grown, her schoolgirl breasts rising against her shirtwaist like young apples as she ran toward him, her voice calling out his name.

Beside him Leah softly echoed her. "Nawmin."

The girl spied Leah and gathered herself down to a walk and Norman saw the moment when she misstepped, saw her head cock like a puppy's at something strange, and yet she came on, her eyes on Leah even as Norman stepped the last three feet and pulled her against him. Before he could speak she said, "Seems to me, a man or stout boy would've been more useful around, you had to bring one of them home." And she stepped back from Norman then, her eyes already wiser as she looked Leah up and down.

"Maybe you'll find out, Miss Quickmouth," Leah said, "that I'm a good bit stouter than you like."

Connie shrugged this away. "There's work enough to share," she said. "I guess you already learned how to work."

"Worked all my life. I learned how to let my mind work for me too. Sometimes before I opened my mouth. I know my manners."

"Well, la."

"Ain't no la about it. There was, you'd be behaving different."

"That's enough," Norman said.

Connie said, "You're a feisty one."

"I wasn't, you think I'd be here? Since your brother forgot himself, my name's Leah." She held out a hand. Connie looked at Norman and then back at the hand.

Norman said, "My little sister. Constance. Connie, we call her."

Connie let Leah take her hand and then both women let go. Norman said, "Where's Mother?"

Connie said, "Up to the house." And looked at Norman as if just thinking of something. She half turned and looked back at him. "You don't look like I remember."

He nodded. "You've grown some too."

"That's not what I meant."

He nodded again, both brother and sister using this time to take measure of the other, recognizing each as familiar stranger to be learned anew, some parts of each never to be glimpsed. Norman strove for the ordinary, some tentative linkage to all that lost. "You making cider?"

"Getting ready. Pressed some last week a little too rough. Sheep liked the pomace though."

"Jug of cider's about the only thing I can think of that might clear all this road out of my throat."

She grinned. "You'll have to help then." And glanced again at Leah.

Norman said, "I believe I recall how to crank a press."

"You'll want some dinner first."

"About anything."

"I could run help get things started."

"Sure," he said. "You do that. Carry your news along with you."

"You home is news enough." Her eyes cut once more to Leah; then she turned and flew up the road.

"So tell me Norman. That the easy part?"

"I guess," he said. "She didn't intend meanness. You're a shock. You have to allow that for folks. Otherwise you'll just be disappointed every time."

They went a little ways and Leah said, "Tell me you love me," and he did and she reached to take his hand. Norman took stock of the sheep in one high meadow, of the milk cows in higher grass of better pasture close to the barn and also of the broken axle off the wagon that sat upright against it like no one knew what to do next. There were other things, simple benign neglect adding up in his mind, an accounting freed of blame, more in the nature of inventory. Halfway to the house he felt her fingers begin to slip from his and he took a firm grip to hold her there beside him. He thought her only nervous and when she wrapped his hand tight with hers he thought she was fine again. He did not look at her. And so could not see the fear pass over her face or the swift knowing that ran through her, that the woman in the house ahead of her would take one look and read the weakness there that trembled constant as water running, the pith of despair and turmoil of her soul. She said nothing. Together they skirted the front of the house around to the side entry through the long woodshed and small toolshop into the kitchen, where he knew his mother and sister both waited. Leah walked alongside him.

His mother was an old woman. She was stooped over the oven of the range and she turned to place a beanpot on the table where Connie sat silent. His mother placed her hands flat on the table and looked at Norman as she said his name. Her face was fierce and worn like treebark, her hair pulled back tight as always but dappled gray like a Percheron. Her hands on the table thick with raised veins and spots the color of new rust. She'd grown old in three years.

So he only said, "Beans."

She demurred. "It's Saturday you know. They was for supper. But it happened I started them early yesterday. Before milking. So they're ready. I haven't steamed the brown bread yet, you'll have to make do with loaf-bread. There's pickle."

"Leah, my mother. Mother, this is Leah."

Leah said, "Missus Pelham." And her body swayed beside him as if almost to dip a curtsy. "Pleased to meet you." Erect now, not moving.

Mrs. Pelham remained behind the table, a guarded patience upon her face as if she'd seen wondrous and terrible things before and was waiting for this one to reveal which it was. She had never seen a black woman. And meeting her for the first time not in the village but here in her own kitchen. Brought by her warrior son. The woman was with him. That much was all she knew. So she inclined her head and responded. "I'm sure. You two set. I've got buttermilk and spring water and that's it. No cider, fresh or hard. I've not put any barrels up these past two years. Too much work for just the girl and me, without anyone to drink it. So you'll make do. But set; you must be famished walking all the way back up here." Her eyes on Norman as she added, "Other men rode trains at least part of the way."

Stretching for the beanpot, he said, "I should've got back here to help you. I wanted to see the country. Thought I might not get the chance again. And I figured you and sprout here was capable." And then added, "So we took our time."

"You took your time."

"Yes ma'am." Grinning at her, not yet realizing he couldn't be both the boy-child miscreant and the unassailable man. He dug the spoon to the bottom of the pot and lifted the seasoning onion up through the beans and divided it half onto his plate and half onto Leah's, then scooped beans onto his own plate and handed her the spoon.

Connie said, "Could be others might like some of that bean-onion."

"Could be," said Norman. "Could be some been eating bean-onions while others ate stale biscuit and bacon in the mud and rain. Sprout, you've grown up." To see if he could make her blush. She did not, but her eyes clouded with hostility.

She said, "I started to the Academy this fall."

Mrs. Pelham said, "Connie, go bring up some buttermilk."

"Not for me," Norman said. "Spring water's all I want." Eyeing it where the iron pipe ran in through the wall, ending over the soapstone sink, the line laid the summer before the war by Norman and his father from the spring high on the hill above the house, the water fed by gravity, running in a steady thin stream year round, draining through clean cheesecloth clamped in a small pouch over the end of the pipe. He said, "I've drank more mud than water, enough so that spring ran in my dreams."

"Perhaps Lee would-"

"Leah," she said.

"Yes, that's right." Mrs. Pelham said, agreeing to nothing. "Perhaps Leah would care for buttermilk."

"Thank you, no. Water would be fine. But I could get it." She started to rise.

"Set. There's no servants here but we can take care of a guest." Inflecting slightly on the last word and moving to the sink, filling a pitcher and placing it on the table, this time coming around to stand behind them and reach the pitcher through, placing it between them. She stayed there, her hand on the pitcher until Norman looked up at her, her eyes stark with brightness, a faint flutter around her mouth as she gazed on the bright slender band on his left hand. Her voice a husk, stripped of fluid as she said, "Oh Lord, Norman. What have you done?"

Leah swung her head sideways to look up but Mrs. Pelham was gone, her skirts swept by her movement. She opened the door of the small parlor and closed it after her. The sound a small clap in the stillness. Leah released a held breath. She said to him, "Go after her. Go talk to your mother, Norman."

"No." Connie stood up fast, her chair a rough scrape backwards. "No. I'll go. You two just set there. Set there and eat your damned beans." When he spoke her full name, she turned back as if his speaking had not lessened her angry confusion but charged it further, her small face pinched upon itself, her curls tossed adrift by the speed of her movement. "You waltz on in here in your own sweet time without a word about Father or how we made out alone here and set down to eat up the supper in the middle of the day and that's not enough, no sir, not for you, but you drag along home with you this…this…colored woman and set her down at the table to feed her while your own mother stands waiting a kind word or embrace from you, feeding her up our supper-"

"That's enough," Norman said. "Leah's my wife. We're married."

"Married?"

"That's right." His tone meant to settle the matter.

"Norman Pelham," his sister said all in one breath, "you've lost your mind," as she walked a mannered step through to the closed parlor and shut the door behind her soft as nothing at all.

"They not delighted with me," Leah said.

"That's all right," Norman said, wondering not only why he'd failed to write his mother some warning or caution but why he'd not even thought to. And stranger still, he felt a tingling of excitement at this failure, excitement real as his balls tightening. He looked at the woman next to him and said, "I am."

Sunday morning Mrs. Pelham and Connie hitched the mare that killed his father to the high-seated two-wheeled cart and took it to town: to church and, Norman was sure, much more than a usual simple worship and social. It would be late afternoon before they returned. He spent the morning at his father's old desk, reviewing what passed for accounts and then writing a letter to the horse trader in Chelsea. He would not keep the team with the killer mare. This done he began a close count of the sheep, walking over the high pasture and tallying with a pencil stub on a sheet of brown wrapping paper, always watching Leah as she went back and forth outside, working at the tub, scouring their clothes with lye soap and hand-wringing them before draping them onto the lilac and hydrangea that bordered the back of the house. The clothes from the height of land small bright flags that served to bring the careless summer over him so that he did not fret over the number of ram lambs or the three ewes he absolutely could not find but allowed himself a fine moment at the edge of a stone ledge looking down over it all; this was his and he was needed here and he'd returned to it. He came down off the hill before the middle of the day to find Leah and led her back into the house, up the stairs to the attic where the night before he had taken her, instead of to his old room down just from his sister's and close to where his mother lay not sleeping. They'd climbed up the small cramped stairs to pull out and shake loose an old feather ticking where they made their bed, and now he was on his back in the empty house with her above him, Norman deep with solace as her face pitched and roamed over him, he watching the steady come and go of mud daubers along the rafters. In the afternoon he stripped down the broken axle, readying it for the smith and then went through the barns, taking stock of the small lay-in of hay and the dairy tie-up, having already run his eye over the five cows in the pasture, small brown and dun Jerseys that all looked poor to him. He'd never cared for cows but accepted the five were there to stay and likely more of them. Then he walked through the empty pig shed and scattered shellcorn to bring out the ranging hens, the flock greater and older than it should have been. They'd be eating a lot of stewed hen this winter. He killed a young roasting rooster and took it to Leah, who sat on the ground in a clean skirt and shirtwaist under the appletrees, her legs bared to above her knee and her chin wet with apple juice. He held up the rooster and said, "It won't hurt to have supper ready when they come back."

"Un-uh," she said. "I'm not messing with her kitchen."

He said, "There's potatoes and carrots and parsnips on the hill. There's winter squash on the old manure pile by the barn. You could bake a pie from these apples. There's fresh cream in the pans down basement. It's your kitchen." He dropped the rooster on the ground next to where she sat. He said, "It's my farm."

He climbed the track up the hillside, passing the sugarhouse, not willing to look inside at the buckets with rusted hoops and rotted staves, continuing on through the sugar bush, the ancient maple trunks thickbarked and dense, some capable of holding five or six buckets, from there following the track around the shoulder of the mountain into other mixed hardwood of beech and birch, ash, ironwood and hickory. The woods a carnage of color, the early autumn-smell sweet as if death could be that way. A partridge blew out of the litter beside the track, and Norman flinched without hesitation. He wondered if everything would somehow always remind him of the war. If a partridge could ever be just that again.

He came around the mountain above the wildland of a small gore and walked another quarter of a mile before coming upon Ballous'. A shake-sided one-story dwelling more cabin than house but for the length of it. Backed up against a granite outcropping the builder had used as backside for the fireplace and chimney. The front door open to the afternoon and Ballou himself seated there, as if waiting for Norman. Dressed in green woolen pants, leather braces up over red underwear, the clothing not so much dirty as having gained a texture from the forest loam, sawdust, deer and fish entrails. His long hair greased behind his ears and his face sharp-shaven, features like a fisher-cat. Smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, the only one Norman had ever seen, the stem and bowl the color of antler from handling and tobacco stain.

"Heard you was back."

"Yuht." Not surprised the news had leapfrogged up the mountain.

"One a them boys hellcattin down to Randol' last night, chasing some little skirt come weaseling back at dawn with word a you. Boys no good for nothin but they got to do her, young like that. Not me, no. Not no more. One old woman is much for me, right? You be learned that soon, eh?"

"You been keeping my mother in wood?"

"Yuht, sure. No complain?"

"Nope. Not at all. Just there's only two-three cords back behind the house."

"She been buying as she needed. Pretty much."

"Uh-huh." Angry but not sure at whom. "You got any yarded up?"

"Got plenty down. Not sawed and split."

"Not too hard to get to?" Norman watching him.

Ballou grinned, feral amber teeth. "All I cutting here on the backside a you. What I want your wood for, I got all this?" Spreading his arms.

Norman ignored this, certain come winter or spring he'd find stumps in the far reach of his own land, knowing Ballou enjoyed selling her own wood to his mother. He said, "I need ten cords for the winter."

"Them nigger women don't know no snow. Got to keep em warm and it take more than what you got, eh, Norman?"

"Henri, you got that much wood or not?"

Ballou sucked his pipestem. "How soon you want this ten cord?"

"Two weeks."

"No."

"Two weeks."

"Can't be done."

"Your boys around?"

Ballou looked around the yard as if to spy them there. He shrugged. "Out the woods somewhere."

"You got plenty of help then."

Ballou fired the dead pipe. The smoke smelling like the day itself. When it was well lighted he said, "October fifteen. Ten cord."

"Split and stacked."

Ballou spit. Agreeing.

"I pay when it's done."

"Half and half. I got to have something keep the boys out the woods."

"Five cords, half. The other five, the rest."

Ballou shrugged. "You want some tea?"

"Thanks, Henri, but I got to get on. I got lots to do. Give my best to your Missus."

"That war, she bad, eh?"

Norman nodded. "Yuht."

Ballou gazed off, done with it. He looked back at Norman and said, "Well get on with you then. The boys and me we start this week. Come a load and meet your own Missus, eh?"

Norman went back around the mountain, the afternoon failing, the light rich as butter. The two-wheeled cart was out in the yard before the open barn doors, resting its horseless shafts on the ground. Connie came from the barn and picked up the shafts and backed the cart around into the barn, Norman guessing she'd arrived home and left the mare to stand in the yard while she went to change from her good clothes before coming back out to stable the horse and wheel the cart away. Wondering if his mother was milking. He decided to leave them alone, all three of them, for a little while, feeling some things might be worked out better with him absent. The kitchen showed a clear smoke rising with heat vapors at the chimney top. He settled at the base of a maple, his back against the rough soothing ridges of the trunk and his knees up. He could still see the farm.

Intending to sort his plans and purposes for the coming days, not only what must be said and done but also what must be established, for whatever lapses might be made then would be lapses with them forever; he knew this, and knew also that payments would be extruded, the least of them in cash or kind. Telling himself he'd known these things, these costs, all the summer long, right down to the first day that he woke to her looming beside him. Telling himself no event lies or falls unconnected to others and that will is only the backbone needed to face these things head on. Determined then to pay attention. As if his father spoke, calling for him to look sharp.

Gazing out over the bowl of his small fortress, watching a wedge of geese tracking over the far ridge following the branch of the river south, Norman found himself thinking of Ballou: the man as wild goose pursuing his own course without concern of what others cared or thought of him. Norman's father ever bastardizing his name even to his face, as if his unwillingness to commit body and soul to a patch of rock-studded ground was crime enough without the taint of otherness about him already; the French Canadian unreliable but content to live on the unclaimed wildland above the small gore. Ballou was out on snowshoes all winter long running traplines and felling trees if a market appeared on the horizon, the rest of the year happy to fish, hunt and attend horse races or run hounds. Ballou was among the first of only a few who paid out hard money in gold coin for substitutes for his three boys, not waiting for the draft. Offering no explanation, his smile tight and scornful as if he saw the others fools not to appreciate that life was short and bittersweet enough without being blown apart to serve some other men's ideas of how things should be. Norman felt that he and Ballou had just executed a short and easy turn of dance with one another: firewood bought; money paid. And Norman now deflated with the effort as if it had stripped some layer from his soul. Knowing the worst men could do to one another wasn't the clear gore of Marye's Heights or the wreckage of Petersburg but the relentless small decades of generations of Sweetboro, North Carolina. Which all the efforts of battle might change but not erase from the thinking walking talking breath of the woman down the valley before him. What was he to say, Rest easy now? With both of them knowing however far the distance and unlikely the location she would never, and so neither would he, assume that some peace or ease was theirs to hold the way others assume that peace could be held. Live quiet, was what she'd said. But without knowing exactly what they were headed to, he knew while it might be possible it could never be certain. He wondered if that was why Ballou paid that gold money, as much to save his sons as to announce his intention to live quiet. Would make it so with all the fiber and gut he could string out of himself to ward off everything else. Whatever good it might do.

What she told him about Sweetboro she'd told him only after they'd left Washington and were traveling north through the war-blown countryside of northern Virginia and through the western arm of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Camped in the barn of a man they'd met along the road, the man with a yoke of young balking oxen that Norman stepped forward and helped goad. The man who did not offer his home but his barn-loft with good bright barley straw, the man with a woman a head taller than he who stood at the half-door of her kitchen and watched Norman and Leah cross the yard to the barn, the door holding back three round-faced boys no more than six to ten. The man crossing from the house in the summer evening with a crock of sauerkraut baked with spare ribs, a fresh wheat loaf on top that steamed when they broke it open. Leah watching his back until he closed the kitchen door behind him again and only then reaching to eat.

Norman said, "You don't care for that feller much."

Her mouth brilliant with grease she said without pause, "It's not him. I don't trust his woman."

Norman almost asked what to trust and then stopped himself, letting his quiet run along under him as he ate his supper. It was the first hot food he'd had not prepared by the army or purchased out the back door of a rooming house or hotel. Since Washington there'd been a wariness, a caution near skittish of strangers about her that she'd not so much hidden as simply acted upon without direct reference, making clear she'd prefer camping in hedge or thicket than asking at a house. She wouldn't linger in towns or around groups of people, especially groups of men; she would startle at the sound of galloping horses approaching on the road. Recalling the town in Maryland where a police officer had hurried toward them, cutting it seemed across the street to meet them and how Leah had folded herself against Norman's side even as the man passed them with no more than a glance. In the pale green twilight he carried the crock back to the kitchen door and thanked the woman, returning to the barn to lie in the straw opposite Leah atop a spread blanket. He said, "Why's that woman bother you?"

As though she was not sure she was going to tell him she said, "The way she look at us. Everybody look. But some people, like this woman, seem like she trying to line my face up with something else, something she heard or been told or maybe even some picture she seen somewhere. Or like she memorizing me, like she want to get every little line down right. It's more than not liking me cause I'm me or even that I'm me with you."

Norman was quiet awhile, thinking everything she said was true and sure also it was not. When he spoke again it was dark with the summer stars out the open loft door of the barn showing bats slipping out from under the ridgeline, cutting slim arcs against the night sky. He said, "You going to tell me the rest of it now or you want to wait some while longer?"

"Tell what?"

"Whatever it is that gets you so spooked around strangers. Whatever it is you done wherever it is you come from. Something makes you think somebody's watching for you. Or might be."

"You got that all figured out."

He shrugged even though he guessed she couldn't see it. "I guess you'll tell me when you're ready. Although it might not hurt if I knew what it was we're looking out for. Or not."

"I'm not keeping nothing from you Norman."

"Didn't say you were."

"I just ain't told you everything yet is all."

"I guess there's plenty about me you don't know too."

"You hush up Norman. Trying to talk to you." He could not see this but knew she was frowning in the dark. Then she began speaking and her voice gained a flatness he hadn't heard before, without passion or tone, the voice older than she, as if the voice of the place she spoke of, the voices held there and rising from that place through her.

She told him of Sweetboro: the late February afternoon alone in the kitchen of the house, with her mother Helen and the old woman Rey not three dozen steps out the back door in their cabin, Leah alone heating flatirons on the stove and pressing the clothing of the white people, all now gone to Raleigh but for the younger son somewhere in the house behind the kitchen door. The white people were clutched near to panic with disarray: firstborn Spencer dead almost a year defending Petersburg and the younger Alex just fourteen run off two months before and returned almost immediately with his right arm gone to the elbow, the pus-stained wrappings among what Leah ironed because everything the white people wore in any way when washed was also ironed. Alex would not leave the house, as if his arm lost was somehow not enough, that it was disgrace to have come back at all. Mebane took his wife and two daughters to the capital where life was only less grim because there were more white people to share it with. Leah was not so much happy with the white people gone as no longer caring; the rumors of the past four years she'd learned to ignore, but what was clear was the state of the white people and she knew things had in some fundamental way already changed, even if she still stood with rising steam burning her nostrils as she pressed their underclothes.

Mebane the youngest son of a youngest son who went from the coastal plain rice fields below Wilmington to Chapel Hill and then for no reason clear to anyone, brought his bride to Sweetboro where he practiced law and spent much of his time traveling the thirty miles southwest to Raleigh while she kept house with Rey and another slave, Peter, a man brought to tend the stable and the flower gardens that fell in steps between the house and the redclay street. His wife became pregnant almost immediately with Spencer, but four years passed before Alex was born and it was during this time that Helen was bought from Mebane's brother. Seventeen years ago: Helen at the time two years younger than Leah now was. Mebane would still from time to time pass through the kitchen to nod at Helen before passing out the back steps to wait for her in the cabin, his eyes never more than glancing off Leah like fingers flicking a fly, his eyes the same wetglass green as hers. Other times he'd come to her mother at night, less cautious, taking no notice of the girl or the old woman behind their curtains, his rut then loud and jubilant. Where Leah first heard the words that other white men and boys would direct at her. Where she would lie awake without moving, her face stiff as if held together by will, the breath under her ribs a small sharp thing, waiting for him to finish and leave, waiting for the smell of him to drain out of the night before falling back to sleep. As the February afternoon folded without notice to dusk, the rain still steady down and the kitchen steaming with warmth, her right hand slid the iron back and forth and her left moved fanlike both before and behind the iron. Something pleasant in the sway of her torso over the board, pleasant in the slight clutch of leg muscles anchoring her over it all. Happy to be left alone, to feel left alone. And so only a little less happy when Alex came through the connecting door from the dining room across from where she stood, thinking he would come and go and she would still be alone in the short evening.

He sat at the table across from where she worked, his good arm up on the table, palm flat, the stump of the other flat against his side, the cauterized tip still swaddled with bandage that seeped a clear pus that yellowed in the cloth. He was a pretty boy, with a pouched lower lip and his father's ginger hair swept back in ordered waves from his forehead. His skin was smooth, made more so by faint feathers of beard. His crumpled clothes gave the idea he no longer cared how he looked. She continued ironing, not looking up at him, pressing the same shirt slowly over with a cool iron. She couldn't help but wonder about the missing arm, where it was, what had happened to it. She only knew it had been removed, what fragments and pieces of it were left. She still thought of it as a whole thing. Sure a part of his soul had been lost with that arm. Wondered where that hand was and what it grasped for. His other hand on the table, fingers drumming now. She knew he was waiting for her to look at him. It was too hot in the kitchen and she broke sweat.

"What's to eat?"

She didn't look up, her arm still moving. "Same as always. Field peas, turnips, collards, some cornbread. All of it cold though."

"Colored food."

She shrugged, still not looking at him. "It's what they is. You want better you should've gone off with the rest of them."

"Yes," he said. "I spect they're eating oysters and champagne. Beefsteak maybe."

"I don't know," she said. "All I know is what's here."

His fingers drummed hard and fast on the tabletop, then stopped. "Get me something to eat."

"I'm working."

"You already ironed that thing three times."

She stayed quiet.

He said, "Get me some dinner."

"I'm busy. You feed yourself."

"Look at me."

"I done looked at you. You still able to feed yourself, I can see."

He slapped his hand on the table hard. "Goddammit, I said look at me."

She stepped away to the stove and placed the cold iron on it and brought a hot one back and set it on the end of the board. She took up the shirt and folded it and placed it on the pile and dipped to lift another from the basket and laid it over the board. Then she looked at him and said, "What you want, Mister Lex?"

A shroud of darkness ran over his boy's face, not strong enough to break the softness of his skin but something laced through the muscles beneath the surface, a tautness there; and for the first time she feared him. This fear angered her and so angry at the manchild before her she only said again, "What you want, Mister Lex?" This time the title over her tongue the juice of a bitter weed.

"You know what Mama told me before they all lit out for Raleigh?"

She said nothing. His eyes dark, wet.

"She told me there was nobody but myself to blame. I said I was just trying to do my part. She told me I was a fool, my part wasn't anything I thought it was, nobody's part was what they thought it was anymore. She said we all had new parts coming and not one of us could know what they was. But we could be smart enough to figure out to wait until they was revealed. And me sitting there like this and her telling me that. Like she was angry at me. Like she somehow blamed me. Like she blamed me for the future somehow."

Leah said, "She a tough woman," and didn't know she knew this until she said it.

His eyes shot from her face as if she'd said nothing. He said, "It was mostly old men and boys like me. What men there was was worn out. Cold like you never known. Grown men barefoot in the wintertime. When the fight come each one lit up with a rage. Men furious wild with right. One minute you're red as bears' eyes and the next you're flat on the ground with the world all gone to pain and men climbing over you running and you thinking about your daddy sitting on his fat ass down there and knowing it's men like him that keep this thing going at the same time you know somehow it's men like him keep it from working. My arm wasn't nothing next to that. It made me sit up and puke. It still makes me want to puke."

She was ironing again. She didn't want to talk about his father. She said, "Seems to me your mama was maybe right."

"What's that mean?"

Picking her way. "It don't mean nothing. Just, things change. Folks get used to most anything."

He was quiet a little while, watching her. She was wet under her arms and could smell herself and guessed he could too. After a bit he said, "Know what I saw coming back down home?"

She folded the shirt and turned to the stove with the iron and set it there and turned back, standing now before the stove, a pace away from the table. "What'd you see?"

"Come across a pair of wagons. Hooped over with canvas covers, a skinny old team of oxen hitched up to each wagon. The wagons filled up with house stuff, feather ticks and furniture, nothing too big but all of it looked nice what I could see. Old men and little children and women in the wagons. Six men bareback on mules carrying pitchforks and hog-butchering knives, one with a scythe. What do you think of that?"

"I don't think nothing. Lots people moving round now."

"They was all niggers. A whole troop of niggers. Heading north in broad daylight. In ox wagons with pilfered belongings. Going what? Six-eight miles a day? Some great old escape. A dash to freedom. Two of the ones on muleback rode up with their rusted weapons with edges whetted to shine like water and sat there and asked me what I was doing. 'What you wanting here white boy,' they said to me. 'Jus keep moving on,' they said. 'Jus keep one foot front of the other and you'll get your little white ass on home.' And I didn't say nothing to em, just kept walking right on by those spavined mules and them old wagons and them oxen near dead anyhow and didn't look back at em, the whole time feeling those pitchfork tines running right on through my lungs, knowing they was looking at me like they'd like to do that. I went on all day until it was dark and never met anybody looking for em at all. Them out there in broad daylight, brazen as that. Like they was riding angels not oxen to the skinny bosom of Lincoln himself. Like there wasn't near the whole state of Virginia to get through and it filled up with thousands of men all too happy to shoot runaway niggers. They going along serious but easy too, like it was just what they was doing. I bet them women and old men setting up there on those ticks even went along singing. What do you think about that?"

She stepped away from the stove and went and stood before the door where it was cooler. Now just down the side of the table from him. She felt her breathing, a tremble along her ribcage. His eyes wide, focused on her, each an even distribution of mockery and anger. Back in the house a clock struck six, the tones each separate and round with brass clarity. She could picture the clock, the cherubs twining to reach from the pedestal to hold up the sphere of time. She said, "Ain't no business of mine what those folks up to."

"I wasn't asking what you thought they was up to."

"What you asking then?"

"What do you think?"

She pushed off the door and took a step toward the table, toward him, and stopped. She folded her arms over her chest and said, "Why you messing with me? Why you can't just leave me be?"

He ran his fingertips over the boards of the tabletop like stroking the strings of an instrument. Then he put his elbow on the table and held his chin with his hand. "Free," he said. "That old freedom song. That old road north. That what you want, Leah?"

She shrugged her shoulders, still holding herself. The sweat chill against her now, the smell rising now fear sharp as chopped onion.

He went on. "How do you think that would be? I bet you ain't even thought that far. I bet you think you get up north and those folks sweep you up like long-lost cousins and set you up pretty in a little house and bring you food and clothes and pretty little things to set around the house, little knickknacks. And take you on into their church and let their god sweep down onto you and raise you up to providence? And let their sons walk out afternoons with you and bring you home and feed you dinner and then let them marry you. You think it's going to be like that? Or maybe you think you'll just set right here and we can swap places. You all would move on in here and wear my mother's clothes and maybe even set up on the back gallery and look down at her on her hands and knees weeding out the vegetable patch, and Daddy would drive you all whenever you took a whim to go downtown and pass some new law what white folks could or could not do. Maybe you think it's going to be like that. Maybe you think that old stick rail reading off a piece of paper in another country going to change things here and maybe you think this sweet country that's home to you and me both is falling apart and you're going to get whatever you want. I bet that's it. I bet that's what you think it will be. I'm right, ain't I? Stand there like a free woman and speak the truth to me for once in your life, like a proud free woman would do. Come on now."

"I don't think nothing about it." And then bold and scared by his words she said, her voice low to a mumble, "I reckon I'd work. Work like I do now, maybe here, maybe some other place. I don't know. But for myself. So my work all my own. But I don't know a thing about it. You and me both, Alex, we don't know what's coming, what it mean."

His face blackened over, and she knew he'd wanted to hear something else from her, some fear of clinging to what she knew. And thought how young he was and clear and bright with danger. Thinking of those glistening pitchfork tines he'd spoken of.

He still held his chin but his legs were spread long out beside the table, crossed at the ankles. His stump lying flat against his side. He said, "You're a stupid bitch. Ain't anything going to change. Not one goddamn thing. It might get all rearranged but it ain't going to change. You'll still be a nigger girl and the rest of the world'll still be white. Nothing going to change."

She nodded as if agreeing, all the while sure he was wrong in some way she couldn't explain to him. So all she said was, "We'll see, I guess. Comes to that."

He nodded back and she saw he was not agreeing either. He looked at her, a long pause until her feet became sore with wanting to move under his look. Then he grinned at her and said, "So tell me: When old Spence was home last two Novembers ago did he screw you? I'm just curious. He talked about it. Said you was ripe and ready for it. But he never said he had. So did he?"

And she was rigid again upright between table and door, sweating again and thinking of Spencer. Slender tall and well made with his mother's frame but their daddy's ginger hair and hawked nose. His eyes also. It was Spencer the one the summer she was twelve who found her crouched in tangled honeysuckle and briar canes in the grown-over lot off a lane three streets away, found her in the high green summer dusk with her arms locked around her knees rocking and leaning against the red oak growing in the side of the lot, away from the cellar hole of the house burned out before either of them were born, found her with her dress torn and blooded and streaked with the red clay, the clay matted also in her hair and grimed on her face, caked there like mud with her crying, rocking back and forth and shaking and crying in the hot summer-still dusk, everything around them very quiet but for a dog barking some streets away. She heard him coming, heard him calling her name just above a whisper so she knew he knew where to find her and why and so she sat still and did not run, her head still down on her arms but waiting for him as he stepped through the tall grass and briars straight on to the tree not to the cellar hole as if he'd thought it through since hearing whatever he'd heard. Knowing she'd be there, as if he'd asked himself how far he'd go and where that would be if something like that happened to him. And came to her and knelt down with a boy's clumsy tenderness and held her head against his thin chest until her fresh crying stopped, Spencer not speaking but crooning soft like to a child and after her crying stopped he lifted her to her feet and led her through the lanes and backyards, cutting through as straight a line as he could to home and still avoid anyone out in the evening. His colt's legs slowed to a cautious easy pace for her until they came through the back garden gate off the lane and her mother came off the stepstone before the cabin door and ran to her. Spencer then followed to the cabin door and reached to touch Helen's shoulder and say, "I just want you to know I didn't have nothing to do with this. I went and got her soon's I heard word of it." And her mother turning swift and saying, "Leave us be! Don't you talk to nobody about this, not your daddy, not nobody!" And her mother talking nonstop after the door closed in her hushed whisper of white boys, white men, as she lifted the dress from Leah and bathed her standing naked no longer bleeding in the center of the cabin, her hands gentle against the harsh bitten-off flow of her words, each word dropping like a small fleck of the dried blood from Leah's thighs. Leah not listening but crying silent and remembering only that he'd come as soon as he'd heard.

And Spencer home that last time two Novembers ago, silent and restless around the house and yard as if he no longer knew how to relax around people. The day Leah found him sitting one knee crossed over the other on a stump of firewood behind the garden shed, when she came from the garden to hang the fork she'd been using to dig the Irish potatoes for dinner the next day, Spencer wearing only the trousers from his uniform and an open-necked white shirt of his father's, the pants already worn and patched but nothing like the wornout home-dyed stuff she'd see on men in the years to come. He was smoking a short thin cigar wrapped in black leaf, leaning back so the stump tilted under him and blowing the smoke out into the quiescent golden air of late fall, and she saw he was waiting for her and he said, "Hey girl, how you been?" and took the fork from her and hung it on the nail. She told him she'd been fine and asked about him, but he only stepped to her and took her by the upper arms and held her with her back against the shed wall and leaned and kissed her, his mouth soft, pliable against hers, lips easy against her and she held her mouth still against his kiss not stiff or remote but as if just waiting until he figured out he was doing the wrong thing. He lifted his lips from hers and grazed against her cheek, the soft ends of his mustache slipping along the folds of her nose as if they belonged there and the moment his mouth was gone from hers she wanted it back and she reached her mouth up to find his, her mouth open once she covered his and he groaned against her as his body slipped forward and pressed over the length of her and she moved a little against him. He drank at her mouth as his hands came off her shoulders across where her throat spread to her breastbone and down to hold her breasts through the cotton shirtwaist, the weak sun coming into her eyes spangling over his shoulder and the air sweet as lying down and she closed her eyes as a sound came rising up from deep below her lungs and sliding from her mouth into his and he stopped, his hands falling from her as he reared back his head and looked at her, his eyes wide with pride and sadness, longing gone hollow as if he stood outside himself watching not just himself but the both of them and he placed his hands on the shed and pushed away from her, pushed his body back to stand over his own feet and not against her anymore and he said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry Leah. I'm so sorry." Stood like that looking at her and her looking back at him for a long moment and she not saying anything and when he saw she would not and seemed to know all that was running through her he turned away, his eyes at the last terrible and sad, and he went to bend by the stump and pick up the gone-out cigar and walked down along the garden to the back gate and out into the lane. She stood where she was, her legs trembling and her mind hot with not being able to think, watching after where he'd gone and after a moment she could smell faint the smoke floating back, a sieve of scent from him already gone and she looked at her hands, still smeared with clay from picking out the potatoes and rubbed them against the front of the apron over her skirt and then wound her fingers tight together and wrung them, watching the edges of the joints turn a pale whiteblue against the pressure, and out loud she said "Stupid" and walked back out to the garden to lift up the basket of potatoes and go to the kitchen.

And stood now in that same kitchen facing his younger brother and thinking what he'd said of Spencer was likely true, knowing enough to know people held many versions and forms revolving like trials around their own true self; but saw now that there was something wrong with that brother's eyes, too wet, too dark, too wide, as if his brain worked at unusual speed and his eyes raced to keep pace with the workings behind them, and with great and true calm she said, "Spencer always was good to me. Was a gentleman. Treated me right. Treated me like a sister." Her own eyes steady on him as she said this, feeling undistorted and stalwart to something she couldn't put name to but emotion, one of love and memory combined, sentiment from her as pitch to amber from a loblolly pine. Knowing the manchild before her would not understand this or would not be able to allow understanding and was patient with serenity before his reaction.

Which was simple and nothing more than what she expected. Some part of her as he stood even thinking it was what she wanted. As if unknown but inevitable. As if that door finally glimpsed. He crossed swift to her and she saw and heard and felt each footfall in her chest as if synchronized to her heartbeat. When he stood before her she saw a waver once in his eyes and she thought Go on and the waver was gone. The wounded soldier a head shorter than she before him.

He struck her with his one balled fist hard just below her ribcage and she fell forward toward him and the fist came off her and raised to clip her chin, snapping her teeth together and a sound came from her, a drawn half-cry, half-sob, and he caught her as she sagged, grasping her wrist and turning it under itself as she was spun with her back to him. He pressed her wrist up deep below her shoulder blades and she felt the joint of her shoulder strain. He held it there and pressed up behind her and moved her forward toward the table, she still bent forward with no wind. Then her torso was flat against the table and he dropped her wrist to reach down and lift her skirts over her hips, her cheek harsh against the oiled planks, smelling the taint of old food, her nose burned raw by the shove down. All the time Alex not speaking, his breath ragged and raw like a rusted crosscut blade moving through punked timber, his hand swimming over her bared rear and then down between her legs, opening her. His fingers were soft from his weeks in bed or sitting upright in a chair, and she was wet under them and ashamed and shocked by the betrayal of her body, as if her body was somehow to blame. She knew it was not but still felt it open to him. Then his hand was gone and he used it to open the flies of his trousers, Leah hearing the buttons pop open with the soft snick of fabric. She got both hands flat against the table and didn't just come upright but backwards also, her right elbow leading to drive into his open crotch, to strike hard into his scrotum. He sagged away from her, mewling sounds from his lips and it was only then she realized he'd been chanting the whole time, words not to her but to himself, words meant to carry him forward: 'little nigger bitch, little nigger bitch.' She was upright now and stepped to the stove and turned back, raising the hot iron over where he was still crouched, both his arms over his crotch as if that was what was wrong with him, as if that was what she meant to hurt and she brought the iron down against the side of his head, not even as hard as she meant to. His head seemed to bounce from his shoulder and raise up again to face her, a cry just starting from his lips when she brought it down again, the edge of it catching hard and deep just above his ear. This time she saw it split his scalp, saw the fine auburn hair part and render up torn whiteness like marrow that then ran quick with blood, not gushing but filling his hair and draining down onto his face. He tried to raise both arms to stop her, and then tried to cover the bloodflow from his head but only the one hand reached there, a small ineffectual cap over the flush of blood. Then that hand fell away, lank against him and his head tilted back as his eyes rolled up awful whites toward her. His head was a mat of blood and his pants were tangled down around his thighs. Her breath was hot with great infrequent blasts, and she stepped back and set the iron back on the stove. The smell of burned hair and blood rose from it. She looked at him. He lay not moving. She stepped forward and words came more hiss than sound, "Fuck that white fuck," and she raised her foot and kicked him hard in his open slack genitals. It was full dark outside and the light was dim from the one lamp on the table. She bent and cupped the chimney and blew out the wick. She went out the door into the sleeting rain. She pulled the door shut hard and silent behind her.

She moved fast, not running, not yet, past the cabin with her mother and Rey and around the garden, the rain wetting her quickly. She went around the stable, empty of horses all gone to war, to rap hard the door of the small attached shed, the one paned windowglass lit low from within and a voice called for her to enter, the voice so low as to be missed in the rain but she was straining for it and pushed the door and stepped inside. The old man sitting at what had once been a cobbler's bench in the center of the room, his bed off to one side and a small table and single chair the only other furniture. A small fire in the grate. One wall hung with harness, this the fancy set he and Mebane had hid from the requisition officers, the brass buckles and ornamental rivets like gold in the low light. He had a bridle on the pommel of the bench, polishing the brass with an ash slurry and fine cloth. He kept working as she came in but with his eyes on her, not speaking, waiting for her.

"I got to go Peter." Only now aware not only of her heart hammering but a feeling over her as if she would break into a thousand parts if she paused. As if her skin was thin frost over an upsurging hot liquid.

"That so." His hand still worrying a small circle with the rag. Studying her, his face blank.

She wanted to swallow before she spoke and could not; she crossed to the bucket and raised the dipper and drank and faced him again. "I got to go now, Peter."

He nodded and said, "Bad night to travel."

"Mister Lex lying over there in the kitchen dead. Knocked me round and tried to stick his thing in me and I busted his head open with a iron. So you pardon me but it seem like a fine night to travel." Saying it put it behind her. She grew calmer, rapturous with motion, as if her nerve cells were already out before her in the wet night. Watching Peter fold his polish rag slow and evenly and place it on the bench before him. Then he stood. His eyes on her hard and fierce, not angry but clenched wide open. He did not speak. He stepped to the connecting door into the stable and from the back of the door took down a heavy greatcoat, ragged at the collar and cuffs and torn once low in the back. She'd never seen the coat before; it was the navy wool of the Union army. He laid it over the small table and from under his bed came out with a pair of boots and two pairs of socks and said, "Set down and get this on your feet." While she put the boots on he found a sack and put three cold sweet potatoes still black with fireplace ash in the sack and folded it over and lifted the coat as she stood and put it around her shoulders. He put the sack in one of the coat pockets and told her, "Carry your shoes out and drop em in the lane back the garden. Don' carry em far. Leave em right by the gate. Your mama find em in the mornin'. Cut crossways and don' let nobody see you, white or colored. Get down in the bottom under the train trestle, opposite end of the bottom from that. Couple big oak trees there, you know?"

She nodded.

"Wait there. Anybody there, cut back up through and get to the colored burying ground. But they ain't gon' be anybody down in that bottom. Wait there or the burying ground until a man come find you. Won't be long, maybe a hour but it seem like a long time. Just wait there."

And then she paused, arrested now, alone. And said, "You ain't goin take me?"

"Gon' to go clean your mess child. You don' need me hold your hand."

"Peter-" she started but he cut her off.

"Get on out of here," he said. "You ain't got no time at all to spare right now. Just git. Watch your step. Watch out around you. Git."

And so like that she left there, left her mother without farewell but to pause with a wet face in the rain a moment outside the gate, looking back at the pale windowlight of the cabin, left the white man both father and owner of her who behaved toward her as if she were nothing more than a dream of herself; but mostly she left Peter. That last fall before the war, following the summer she was raped, Peter took her one evening to his shed where he boiled water and made her peppermint tea. He sat on the edge of his bed facing her, she in the only chair holding the hot tin cup of tea just letting the smell rise up through her nose and flood through her as he talked to her, talked as no person ever had, explaining to her with words simple and precise what was happening in the world beyond her that was her world also and never telling her what she could or might think of these things but only how he felt and saw and believed. She sat listening as to a madman or someone speaking a tongue unknown to her and he finished as she drained the last of the tea. That might have been the end of it but for what he did next: rising and sliding the bolt in the door, he brought out a thin broken-spined primer and made her come sit on the bed beside him as he opened the book and read the first simple page to her. He then used his finger to trace out the words and the sounds and made her repeat them after him, over and over until it was memorized, just that first page with its poor printing of two children hand in hand at the top of the page. Then he closed the book and took her to the fireplace and knelt at the hearth and scraped back a layer of ash onto the bricks. He spread it thin and even and began to trace letters for her there, making her say them, making the sounds, having her say cape and cart over and over until he could ask her and she could make the sound without the word and know how it fit. That night ended with her promise solemn to die before telling anyone of what they did there. Daytimes he still ignored her although she watched him now, watched the dip and twist of his grayed head as he moved with the horses or in the flower gardens, knowing he knew she watched him and those odd evenings he'd sign to her and she'd slip away from the cabin and go to him and drink that sweet tea and learn to read. She used up the first book and after that another, several years more advanced, and after that pieces and fragments of newspapers, some only weeks old and others several years out of date that he'd burn after she mastered them. In the second year, he made her begin to trace the letters herself and make sentences of her own. And some evenings, when the reading and writing was done with, he told her also what he knew of the world beyond them, telling her news of the war and what he heard from the north or heard about the north, his authority never questioned, never given as absolute but as knowledge greater than any she might have otherwise.

But it was not until the wet February night when she left through the freezing rain without looking back once she dropped her shoes outside the lane gate that she understood it had only been for her. She'd always assumed that he shared something both could dream of or hold to, but she'd been wrong to think that. It was only for her that he held out what slender things were his to give and that night knew he would take no thanks for it. So she went through that night knowing it was love he sent her away with, sent her toward what would be the first of many meetings in the dark with strangers who might lead her a ways until they could point to a landmark or a sleeping place for the daylight hours. Other times only someone who passed on directions and landmarks and if she was lucky a bundle with some food in it. She passed the first of two months of living by darkness and lying by day in some shelter: brambles, brush, woods, twice a hayloft and once a thin pallet of blankets under a bed in a slave cabin. All as if with Peter standing far back at the beginning watching her move ahead, moving north and all as if she was racing down a long twisted channel of night straight into Norman lying bleeding and stuporous in the noontime heat and light. At first she was afraid of him because the wound to his head seemed a duplicate of how she'd killed Alex. Then, as she crouched watching him, she felt as if he'd been sent to her as restitution, as if the world were offering her atonement and rescue all at once. Knowing she could not walk away from this, feeling as if all her life had folded over itself to bring her to this moment, to this man, this lying near-dead Union man. And so she went to the creek in the woods three fields away and brought back the gourd of water to drip into his mouth and smear onto his lips until his tongue began to work and his throat to swallow.

She told him all this plain and simple and true as she could. Everything as it happened. But what she did not tell, what she did not trust yet enough to tell, was some part of her responsible for it all. Something in her she could not name or touch but which ran through her deep and solid as a vein in rock-that something in her had drawn all this upon her. That something in her cried out into the nameless dark for punishment of some sort. That she deserved all misfortune that came her way. She did not think it was her race or even the circumstances of her life thus far. It was, she thought, something wrong in herself.

He came down from the sugar bush into the blue-dusk bowl of the farm and entered the barn basement tie-up where his mother was up in the loft, forking down hay to the stalled horses. He let the five milk cows free of their stanchions and followed their shit-caked hindquarters as they filed out into the night pasture and slid the door shut after them. He took up the yoke over his shoulders and carried the double buckets of milk out of the barn, wordless meeting his mother as she came down the ladder from the loft and saw what he was doing. He crossed the yard into the cellar of the house, the stone-vaulted chambers cool and moist. In the cooling room, he poured the milk out into the long pans and laid them out by the well square-sided with even slabs of granite, the water in the well from the same source-spring as what flowed into the kitchen overhead. Here he could smell food and heard girl-voices warbling with laughter over his head. He skimmed the cream from the morning pans and dropped the clots into jars and fastened the bails and lowered the jars into the water to sit overnight. His mother came in behind him and spoke his name. He turned to her and said, "I was remiss not letting you know. I failed you not getting home sooner. Whatever spree I was on I still ought to have let you know. Truth is I never thought to."

She nodded, meaning she knew that much. She said, "Father passed, I'd thought they'd send you home."

"Would've I'd asked."

She nodded again. She studied him, as to fathom, to reconcile the man before her. Then she said, "You surely brought a surprise."

"Surprise to me too."

She cleared her throat. Pronouncement, he thought. She said, "Father left things clear. We need to set down together."

He nodded. "I've money in the bank."

"I know it." She paused and then went on. "I always expected you'd find some girl soon's you were home. I always supported the abolition. Little it was but I did my part, knitting things that went forward to those folks journeying on toward Canada. You didn't know that. It was quiet, you know. But Norman, this."

He looked down, studied the earth-packed floor. The smell of the room sweet and sour at once with the new milk and cream and the dank wet coming through the stone foundations and the faint cleanth rising from the water. His eyes off his mother he looked up to the low rafters and said, "I brought her."

His mother looked now up. She said, "She's taken over my kitchen. Just like that."

"That was me. I told her to fix a supper for us. Whatever it is is all my doing. And by Jesus I could eat that chicken all myself. You can't imagine how it smells to me."

His mother nodded. And was crying now, silent, the tears running over her face. Her hands wrung before her, tugged and clenched and twisted in her apron. He stepped the two feet and reached and laid his hand flat on her forearm. The first time he'd touched her since arriving home. Then laid his other hand on her other arm. She looked up at him, her eyes great and wide and wet. She said, her voice husked, "You recall that old song, Norman? I used to sing it when you were a baby, me jolly and disbelieving."

He looked down at her and shook his head. "I don't recall you singing."

And she held his eyes and her hands curled up over his arms and her voice low and pliant with her whisper sang,

"We're gettin ready for the mother-in-law,

gettin ready for the fray.

When she puts her face inside this place

we'll make the old girl feel quite gay.

There's a little ell room on the third floor up

where the beetles up the wall do climb.

Mother, mother, mother,

Mother, mother, mother.

We'll have a lively time."

He wrapped his arms around her back and drew her against him, feeling her now as an old woman the same way he'd seen her the afternoon before. She came against him and laid her head sideways against his chest and he stood high craned over her, holding her and feeling as awkward and rough as if he'd been new split from some great tree, some man made from some material and propped up for all to see. He held his mother close against him, his breath warm against her shoulder coming back onto his face. He thought again of the woman waiting upstairs for him and of all she'd left behind and also brought with her to this place. It was her courage somehow that allowed him to hold his mother so close and long against him.

Two

She could not keep a baby. She miscarried four times in five years, each event a tragedy of silence endured at a scream-pitch within as Norman spoke in quiet tones that made her hate him a little, his assurances that they would try again, his certainty each would be the one to swell forth and thrive. Beyond the terror of her failure lay the restlessness of the small souls, lacking even the infants' headstone awarded to earlier generations of Pelham child-death. The fourth was the worst in a way: a trauma of blood late in her fourth month, the blood thick and rich and darkening fast against the linen, the day outside brilliant against deep snowbanks of February, the window beside her bed hung with sparkling dripping icicles, the pain as if all of her body was clenched tight to hold the creature within her, a fish not to be grasped in swollen viscous liquids. They had kept this one secret until she began to show visibly and it seemed settled within her. Alone, Norman laid the creature too small for him to comprehend truly as a child in a cut-down egg crate and buried it in a place he would not tell her: under the lilacs beside the kitchen where the south sun had softened the soil at the foundation and where she could not see him working from the bed above on the other side of the house. He then carried the bundled linens high up to the woodlot and burned them with a brush pile on a day of soft wet falling snow while she was still in bed, and yet clearly she smelled the smoke of the blood-soaked cloth, the stench of her own failure passing downhill through the snowscreen. She rose silent that day from her bed and resumed her work, unable to not think of what small remains burned also there above her. The doctor was a portly man who wore pince-nez and heavy wool vested suits, abrupt and hesitant with Leah, ineffectual beyond assuring her this happened to many women, not helped by her silence over her own history and not improving upon her impression when she overheard him telling Norman that after all half the fun was in the trying. The doctor's hands were delicate and timid, trembling slightly as they came upon her and she knew he drank but could not help but think it was her skin that caused their tremor.

Throughout that spring and summer she worked alongside or separate from Norman, caring daily for the long pens of laying hens they'd built into what had once been the basement dairy of the barn, the pens stretching outside in wired runs on the south-facing open slope, dividing the several hundred hens by breed: Rhode Island and New Hampshire Reds, Barred Rocks, Plymouth Rocks and Silver-laced Wyandottes. Daily gathering the eggs in baskets and carrying them to the house basement to candle them and pack them in straw in wooden crates which twice a week were driven to the depot in Randolph where they were shipped to Boston; daily also working in the brooder house newly built according to plans from the agricultural school at the university in Burlington, raking the litter and spreading pine tar on young fowl wounded by others, clipping beaks when she found the warrior bird, culling the sick. She talked to the hens as she went among them, a low fluttering tone of speech half-directed at them and half to herself. She knew them all and would wring a neck when egg production dropped off. Six times a year the brooder house was emptied: young hens joining the laying flock, the young cocks packed two dozen to a crate and shipped south for the live market.

Most of the chicken they ate themselves was stewed, old hens eating more than they laid. Tough meat cooked slow and wet and well seasoned until it fell from the bone, made sweet with patience. Eaten in spring with dandelion greens or fiddleheads or asparagus and sometimes the small dense morels Norman would carry back from the woods, cradling them in his cap held in his hands; in summer with garden vegetables and sometimes great fried slices of the puffballs that would spring up in the pastures like brilliant white boulders; in fall and winter with the great Hubbards or Irish potatoes stored down basement along with carrots and parsnips packed in crates of sand. Always something good to eat and work enough to keep them both long-muscled and hard, both young and fresh enough with strength so that even the long stretching summer days, light by four and still light at half past nine at night, were not long enough. And they could not make a baby. After the fourth miscarriage they stopped speaking of the problem or what might be the cause and went through that spring and summer with the first true remove about them, a slight skim of distance walked with both through everyday, neither willing or able or even conscious to admit to themselves or the other that this was happening to them. Still coming together in the night, both still endless with appetite and it was not then, at the end of the day as dark and sleep came over them, but during the day that both carried the small discontent of attendant fear.

He woke one August midnight to the bed alone, the room cool with pewtered moonlight. He lay waiting even as he knew she was not in the house. Finally he rose and went to the window to stand and was there more than an hour before he saw her coming down from the granite ledges of the high sheep pasture, wearing the old shirt of his that she slept summers in. Still stood as she came into the house and he saw the faint flare of light from a kitchen lamp spread from the window below onto the dark of the yard, stood listening long enough to know that she was cooking something, baking something, and would not be back to bed, not soon.

When he rose again at four-thirty and went downstairs the kitchen was seasoned with steaming loaves and a pair of blackberry pies and he thought She was up there picking berries in the dark. She was still wearing only her nightshirt and was turning eggs in the pan, coffee already hot on the stove. He went to her and held her from behind, his elbows against her sides and his hands over her breasts and so felt the familiar new weight to them even as she spoke, her voice steady as her body was tight. "Trying again, Norman."

"That's right," he said. "That's good."

She slid the egg pan to the cold end of the stove. She didn't turn around to face him. She said, "You got to tell me it's going to be all right."

"Sure," he said. "Sure it is."

She still wasn't moving. Letting his hands hold her, letting his body come up against her backside, but not giving anything into this embrace. She said, "No. You got to promise me."

He didn't understand. "We just have to see I guess."

She turned then, still inside his arms and took his shirtfront in her fists, the hands small hard-curled knobs, tugging him toward her and pushing him back, a wild rocking, her eyes sprung wide and flaring. "You got to promise me Norman. You got to promise me."

He stood there while she pummeled him, making no effort to stop her as if he deserved this, as if it were all his doing, his fault, as if he deserved not this simple sharp beating but something far worse; pressed between grinding stones. He held her until her breath was gone to sobs and her hands lay flat and still on his chest, all the while keeping his hands at rest against her back and when she was done and cried against him he still said nothing. Just held her standing there in the kitchen ripe with yeast. Then soft to a near silent whisper he said, hating himself for not being sure of it, not able to believe himself but sure it must be said, "I promise".

Bringing her home, what he had not foreseen was not so much the drift away of his own family but the estrangement, the voluntary withdrawal, the displacement he felt toward the neighbors and villagers themselves. Times he felt he'd lost something and times he felt if he'd returned alone it would be the same: as if not the dark-skinned woman but the war he found her in was where he'd lost any sense of common-hold with other men. As if the affairs of humans had been revealed to him as puny maunderings, rife with self-interest and greed, little more than spinning of blood and brood to enthrall all inward toward a latch onto the world that was not so much a turning away from the dark as blunt refusal to acknowledge how frail the light was. Norman did not hold himself separate through any belief he was beyond or above all this but a lack of interest so sincere as to frighten him a little when he paused too long upon it. All he wanted was his daily round of work, the blood pleasure of sweat and muscle fatigue and the satisfaction of mild accomplishment and to follow this then with the woman who seemed such a part of him as if she'd stepped whole out from some corner of his soul; as if he'd lacked a part of himself never known missing until confronted with it: this he wanted and-as the years brought the miscarriages-children with her, at first children for her and then clear as grief after the third miscarriage, children for himself as well. He was to wonder silent if that failure of wanting on his part had played some role in those lost children. And he was to learn as well that she was not only that missing part of himself but a self full-blown in contradiction and turmoil far too great to have ever only been held silent in himself. Her temper roiled from her as easily as her passion; often he thought of them as each the backside of the other. He did not know rage in himself except in that one unending sweep of war years and that was not a rage to inform his life once left behind; as if that raised spectre of the human was now too great for him to confront, let him go mend harness or cultivate potatoes. He did not know if this began with the war's end or his finding Leah; there was no way of distinction. He wondered if he'd been this way perhaps even as a child but there was no one to ask and no way to formulate the question even if there had been. That child was a stranger to him, as much lost as his father. As much lost as the world of his neighbors and townsfolk.

That first year he'd learned much. He learned more than Leah. Because what he learned constricted the world he'd thought he'd known. Leah reported village children following her through the streets and one bold boy who stepped forward and without asking took her arm in his hands and rubbed at her skin as if to loosen the pigment. Also the gawking and murmurs as she passed. Even the women standing side by side with hands flapped loose against their mouths as if to conceal the words they meant for her to hear as she passed. Even the merchants who ignored her until other latecomers had come and gone. It was all more or less what she had expected. Not the place she had come from. And so was puzzled first and then reluctant and then adamant with refusal when Norman offered to do what shopping must be done. This not a possibility she'd consider. So it was left to Norman to set limits of whom they would and would not trade with, she smart enough perhaps even before him to not demand reasons. It was the place he knew, not she. So they carried trade in sundries and dry goods to Allen Bros. because Ira Allen offered the same clipped milk-eyed service to anyone, Leah or Norman or a grimed child wanting a penny's worth of horehound or lemon drops. To Gould the harness maker for that work as well as boots and shoes and to Mose Chase for smithing parts for the machinery and implements. It was Chase who built the stoves and shaded lights for the brooder houses. Contracted with Flannagan the Irish farrier from Bethel to come twice a year with his ox-drawn wagon to the farm, spring and fall to shoe the horses, adding heavy caulks in the fall against the ice. Because it was the Randolph farrier Harringdon who caught Norman by the sleeve to ask if it was true those dusk women's slit went sideways, Norman saying as if passing on fresh news that No it was just like the mares the smith tupped, up and down like all the rest of creation. The woman Norman did not know who came upon him on the street and beat his face with her open hands, him standing silent before her rant over her lost husband and both boys, as if their deaths were for nothing than for him to bring home love. Worse than all this were the handful of veterans missing a limb or more who would not speak but ran eyes hot over him as if he were their loss, him walking with both arms and the woman up the hill. There was nothing to be said. Not to them, not to the rest. He did his business and went home.

There was little they needed of the village. One time weekly or twice as the season called for, one or the other would drive the load of eggs and perhaps crates of young roasters to the station and then pick up what passed for mail and penciled list in pocket make the short rounds. They had all they wanted otherwise and so cared less for the town than it for them. First Tuesday of March, Norman went to Town Meeting and sat throughout, feeling his presence huge with silent condemnation before his neighbors. Business was conducted. He would speak his aye or nay and had done enough. Every other November he'd go down to vote. Beyond this he felt no civic drive; let them make their choices, it all came to the same thing. He left these obligations eager for the farm and whatever chore was postponed. Eager for the sight of her. He was twenty-six and she twenty-two after her fourth miscarriage the summer she was pregnant again. He did not understand his age; it made no sense to him. He did not know himself in the mirror or reflected in the other young men of the village he saw time to time. The middle-aged tradesmen seemed worn out from nothing. It was the silent old men he felt kinship toward. The ones he guessed who understood that life was partial at best. Everything else was grandiose imagination. He wanted nothing more than his feet on the ground. It was a tremendous thing to ask for. When Leah made him promise their child would come, it was the first time since the grapeshot concussed beside him that he felt he could not carry on all alone. His fear was so great that he could not ponder it, could not let it tag his days. He sat down at the pigeon-holed desk that same night and wrote a letter.

His mother had moved herself and Connie to the village three weeks after Norman first brought Leah home almost six years before. Cora Pelham then telling her son the move was for the girl, that she'd been overheard telling girlfriends of the noise coming through the attic floorboards nightly; Norman with heat in his face accepting this, knowing it was the one way his mother could silence him to acquiescence even as she went on in a burst of apparent candor explaining that it was only natural for a young married man to satisfy himself upon his wife, he watching her through this for the certain deception in her face, unwilling to accept that she might have lain with his father as burden. Realizing she censored with her actions even as she draped words over them. He listened with an odd slow pity, not sure if it was for her or his dead father.

"What I think, you're spoiling her." Holding her ribboned hat in her lap, her loosed hair flaying her face, the curls grown out to a thick bundle.

"Could be." The reins tight against the backs of the bays, the geldings he'd traded for just after the war, getting rid of the team that included the mare that killed their father. "Could be just what she needs. Some peace of mind. Might do the trick. And, long's you're willing, won't hurt, is how I see it."

"It's why I came," Connie said. "But I won't wait on her." And then added, "I wouldn't wait on anybody."

Norman watched a bobolink bending a roadside stalk. Careless, he said, "Wasn't thinking of anybody waiting on anyone. Just a set of hands to lighten the load."

"I'm a set of hands then."

"I was thinking more the company of a woman."

"Mother wouldn't do for that."

It was not a question but he answered anyway. "She's well settled at Breedlove's. I believe she's happy off the farm and wouldn't want to come back except I asked."

"I was happy off the farm too."

"My asking was no commandment."

"If you don't know it was, you know less than I thought, Norman. It is fine to be back though. I doubt my lungs'll ever clear all that crud."

"I couldn't ever tell if you were happy or not, down to Manchester."

"It wasn't happy or no. Not much in the way of opportunity for a single woman in these hills."

"Thought you might catch a husband down there." As they came upon it the bobolink lifted and coasted over the road before the trotting team, planing down into the river elms on the other side. The horses' backs sweat shining.

"Oh," she said, "I guess I could, that was what I wanted." Her tone defiant with failure. He glanced at her, his compact pretty sister, and wondered what that story might be and if he'd hear it. Not from her. Leah perhaps. She went on. "Mostly, it was the awful monotony of the work. Five days ten and a half hours a day and a half of Saturday cooped up inside with the dust and noise from the looms and spinning machines. It wasn't the work itself, just there seemed nothing human about it. Funny to say that, working with thousands of other people around you and comparing it to chasing cows across a pasture and thinking the cows more human than the woman at the next stitcher over. I liked the work all right and I liked making the money but I was ready enough to come home time your letter came asking. I worked next to people came into that mill when they were twelve or thirteen and will be there till they die or close to it. I couldn't imagine that for myself, never once. Truth is I thought it would lead to something else and I guess maybe it has. Although there's no telling what I'll do when you're done with me."

He thought of Leah creating a minor poultry industry with no model and said, "When we chuck you out the door like a broken chair. Can't say for sure but it seems to me there's maybe more opportunity in the old burg than you're thinking. And you've got plenty of time to find out. Might even be some single young fellers around town; you never know."

She snorted. "Any still around Randolph are ones still wet behind the ears or lacking the gumption to go west."

"Like your brother," he said.

She looked at him. They'd turned off onto the road leading up to the farm. That spring Norman had leveled it, drawing a loaded stone boat up and down to flatten and smooth the gravel down into the dirt, working with a pick and shovel at the worst washes and clearing the ditches by hand. The road now in the end of August hardpacked and almost black, cool in the shade. The team kept their gait easily up the grade. Connie said, "No. You don't lack gumption. Imagination either. I just don't know what your problem is, Norman."

"Could be there's not one."

"You still holding on to that flock of sheep?" Imp's grin.

He smiled back at her. "Devil me about my sheep. That poultry puts a nice dollar in the wallet but it wouldn't feel like a farm without the sheep. The wool price makes it a loss to shear and ship but the market's good down to Boston for the spring lamb."

She turned her hat in her hands, nervous now as they came over the rise into the bowl of the farm. "A man's a strange creature, Norman. Each and every one is capable of great surprise, maybe even to themselves."

"Likely so. I like to think I've used up my share of surprise."

"You should hope so, Norman."

Norman and Leah in the pantry off the kitchen, the shelves lined with hot-packed summer vegetables in glass jars with glass lids and rubber seals and metal bails, tins of flour and meal, crocks of pickle and sacks of dried beans; they stood talking in tones urgent, hushed, as if the speaking suffered threat of interruption. Leah held his hands and stood close to him, her breath sweetly cooling in the close warmth of the summer afternoon.

"I'm not going to lie in the bed for six months. I couldn't do it. I couldn't even if somebody was to tell me, the doctor, somebody. I couldn't stand it. Who says that's what I should do, anyway? Who says it's even me? Could be something with you. You thought about that, Norman?"

"Nobody's saying lie in bed. Not me. Not Connie."

"Course not. Some white woman tending me."

"All it is, is to help out. And she's not some white woman."

"You think I can't do it, don't you? You think I can't make us a baby, don't you? Think there's something wrong with me inside, something messed up or maybe just missing. Maybe you think it's from when those boys done me I was a little girl. Just not right. Not a whole woman. Maybe you beginning to regret me even."

"Doctor said you're fine. I don't think none of all the rest of that."

"What that doctor know? Old drunk man."

"Knows enough to tell you and me both you're a fine healthy young woman and nothing wrong but bad luck. You made me promise you a promise I'm doing my by Jesus best to keep. And the first thing I thought of was to get somebody in here so it wasn't all on you. And I did that."

"I don't want no help."

"She's not help. She's my sister."

"I don't want anybody Norman. I want it just you and me." Her hands clenched tight around his. As if her hands would convey all that her soul might not send otherwise. "I don't want no one tiptoeing round the house thinking I can't maybe do it. I don't want no one feeling sorry for me." Her eyes brilliant with panic and hatred. Of just what Norman was not sure. Something much greater than his sister in the house. He felt himself stretched out as a thin hot wire. He remembered his mother telling him the younger Potter girl throughout the war each time they met would ask after him. He wondered if it might have been different with her. He suspected it would've been. And not. Like remorse for he knew not what he longed for the fields, the woods, the barn. Some task to take to hand. Work, tinker, trial, work some more. There. His head ached with not knowing what to do. And so was tender, not because he felt tender but with a desperate calm he prayed to convey.

"Right now, seems to me, there's nothing to regret. Nothing to feel sorry about, you or anyone else. Far as I'm concerned you're going to have a baby. Way I understand it, plenty of women have a hard time the first time around. There's nothing to know. It's something greater than what we can understand. It's providential." He took a breath. His hands had moved out of hers and rested loose around her breasts, knowing she liked this soft touch, knowing the swelling of her breasts was magnified to her by his touch. He went on, suddenly deeply sad. "It's all we can do. It's all we have."

Her voice a whisper he felt more than heard. "It is providential. I can feel that. It's a punishment on me."

"Leah."

"It's true".

"Leah."

Her voice up now she said, "Don't you try and pacify me Norman Pelham."

He stood silent, his hands ridiculous on her body: great lumpen scabbed things. He took his hands from her and didn't know what to do with them. He reached and traced an invisible line on a shelf edge. Then pushed both hands in his trouser pockets and felt this action someway defiant and so pulled them out and hooked his thumbs low in his suspenders, the fingers curled in loose fists. As if guarding his own belly. He gave up. He said, "You start into that business and it never stops. Trying to pin one event to another. Look at me. I killed men. I killed as many as I could, without trying to be a hero or some such. Now maybe, according to your notion, the Lord was angry with me for doing that and so it was Him caused my father to fumble that dime right smack behind that old mare what was always ready to kick. Maybe the Lord made her born that way so she could wait all those years just to be in the right place in time to kick Father in the head. Or maybe it wasn't me at all. Maybe Father did some wrong none of us knows about. And so it was all lined up because of that. Or maybe not. Maybe he just dropped the dime. Maybe that's all it was."

Her face was turned a quarter sideways. As a murmur she said, "An eye for an eye."

"I always took that to mean to fear the Lord's retribution. The wrath of Him. If He was to spend all His time meting judgment and punishment and reward during this short lifetime what would be the point of face-to-face judgment? Seems to me it'd all be a jumbled-up thing nobody could sort out."

Her smile broke small and crooked across her cheeks. Unable to stop it, she said, "You oughtn't make jokes about that."

"Goodness," he said. Now was able to shove his hands in his pockets. "I'm serious as forty below."

"You know I always liked Connie. She always been kind to me." She paused and Norman was also thinking of others less kind. Leah went on. "I just have to get used to the idea. I always just wanted it to be you and me."

"I know it."

"Might could help," she relented.

"Couldn't hurt."

"Here she come now." Both listened to the double-step fast slap of bare feet down the stairs and his sister came into the kitchen. Both turned from the pantry to her. Out of her traveling clothes, wearing a simple white summer dress with her hair loose and grown out to her shoulders, she said, "Here it is almost September and my feet tender as June. Some things, you go without and you forget all about until you get it back again and wonder how you ever managed. Little things like going barefoot in summertime." And she gently hitched her dress and skipped a quick toe-and-heel about the table, coming to a stop before them, laughing. Norman felt Leah's hand flat against his back, stroking. Connie said, "Now you tell me what to do. I'm not going to raise a hand unless I'm told to. Otherwise I'm just going to go out and shuffle my feet in the dooryard dust like one of those old hens."

"I guess there's plenty to do," said Norman.

"Go on," said Leah. "Go shuffle your feet. We'll let you know, we can use help."

It turned into a brutish wet fall of cold streaming rains that mired the farmyard like April and made pools in the poultry runs. The old cow paths up the meadows ran as brooks through the last lush uncropped growth of grass. The leaf change was brilliant in the wet: watercolors through the streaked windowglass. They picked apples in the rain and pressed four barrels of cider on the hayloft floor, the sheep crying from the sheepshed at the smell of the pomace. They wrapped the best of the apples in newsprint and packed them loosely in crates in the cellar. Norman dug the last of the potatoes in the rain and spread them on the barn floor to dry. The giant Hubbards were left in a storage room in the barn. At the end of the month there was a single placid day of feeble Indian summer and that night the cold returned. Three days later it snowed to cover the ground and by mid-November there were two feet of snow over everything and the winter pattern set. Paths to the barn and sheds were dug and redug. Norman used the stone boat to pack a track down to the road, which the ox teams were already packing with the giant rollers. The sleigh trip to the village was in brutish cold, the heated soapstones under the horsehide robes little more than a pale offering. He rose twice each night to fill the stoves in the brooder house and henhouse, the long snakes of stovepipe suspended by wires two thirds of the way to the ceiling before venting outside; this the most central feature of the modern plan. On dark storm days he lit great kerosene lamps in the laying pens, the lamps with wide skirts of metal about their tops to reflect the light down. The hens continued laying. It was a miracle of sorts; as a boy he'd not eaten a fresh egg from November until the spring.

The sleigh went out odd weekdays when there were enough eggs to ship and always on Sunday, with Connie alone behind the bays, hard upright and driving the team with taut reins and tight-curled hands as her father'd taught her. Bundled against the cold, she wore the one black velvet-ribboned hat she'd brought back from Manchester, going to the congregational church service and most Sundays afterward returning to Breedlove's with her mother to take Sunday dinner there from the old widowed Breedlove woman. Mrs. Pelham continued to board there, renting an extra room as well for the mending and hemming and occasional fancywork she took in. Mrs. Pelham did not visit the farm; Norman and Leah did not attend church.

When Connie quizzed her mother she replied that she held no ill will to the Negro girl but could not forgive her son. Asked what there was to forgive she chalked with anger and said nothing. Connie told her, "You'll change your tune soon's there's a grandbaby." Her mother turned to Mrs. Breedlove and asked for another cup of the tea the old woman brewed from white pine needles against the winter's agues. She took up a molasses cookie and nibbled it, putting her daughter in mind of a mouse before a cheese wheel. Mrs. Breedlove spoke.

"I found the Reverend Potwin pallid this morning. Perhaps I was distracted."

"It was cold to the church," Mrs. Pelham responded.

"Some might've used the chance to bestir us."

"He is no fancy speaker."

"Plain speech is best. If it has a destination."

"Perhaps you were distracted. I enjoyed the homily."

"I believe he was extemporizing. I'm seventy-four years old and sound as a post. He was at sixes and sevens if you ask me."

Connie said, "We all have our off days."

Both women looked at her, blinking, as if to learn who she was and why she was at their table. Connie took up her cup of awful tea and imitated sipping. The old women continued their vague dissection of the morning. Connie yearned for the warm farmhouse kitchen. The mantel clock read one fifteen. She might leave by two. The old women would only note her departure if it was early. Life with Norman and Leah might be temporary, might not be her own life-the one coming she was sure-but it was pleasant, oddly soothing. Even the winter day-to-day was vivid, each action etched. Visiting her mother was like being submerged in a neutral heavy liquid, the old women like salamanders resting in warm pond water.

From behind she did not look pregnant but her belly grew high and round and she seemed to walk around it, as if moving her belly through the space before her. Nights she would wake to find Norman's hand over it and she would cover his with her own. She felt a true calm, not from certainty that she would bear this child to life but as if her body had someway stilled her mind and all else was simply passage, the small collapse of time that each nightfall and daybreak brought. Her unease over Connie's arrival had less to do with any intrusion than her own nervousness in the company of women; she had never known another woman as confidant, companion or friend. She did not realize this about herself until Connie had been there some weeks and proved clever about taking over no one's work, simply waiting until there was a job to be done and no one but herself to do it.

By the time of that first beginning snow cover the three had settled into easy routines. The women were alone much in the house; Norman save in the worst weather spent free time up in the woodlot felling and skidding trees out to the sawpit for the next winter's sixteen cords. Connie and Leah worked together, candling and packing the day's eggs, cooking and baking, cleaning house, three times daily touring the laying pens and brooder house for problems, once a week boiling the big kettle on the stove for laundry, often just sitting in the parlor mending or making clothes, and it was weeks after it began that Leah realized she no longer lifted anything or carried anything, that without obvious effort or awkward excuse her sister-in-law was there before she thought to move and the work was done. They spoke only of the present, as if both had no desire to unwrap their pasts before the other. It was so easy as to seem natural. Leah was secure within this and believed herself happy. Then one afternoon they sat sewing in the parlor, Leah mending a tear from the sawteeth in Norman's woolen pants before cutting a patch to sew over it, when she looked over at Connie on the horsehide sofa, a great ball of homespun wool from the unsold attic fleece lying beside her as her hands flew in crisscross with needles flashing, a small thing in her lap taking form as she lifted and turned it. Leah stopped her work and watched and then her voice betraying her said, "What's that you're working on?"

"A set of little suits for your baby. The cap's finished. It's small and so I'll make another larger." She turned the piece over in her lap, the needles never stopping. "I think this'll be more useful than a blanket wrap since I've put arms on it. Easier for you I should guess. And I'll make a larger one to go with the other cap. Should get you through that first year, cold days like this."

Leah continued sewing up the tear, watching the speed of the woman across from her, watching the soft thing in her lap take a shape and form, her own fingers working the needle and thread in and out of the pantleg at a pace not meant to try and match her sister-in-law but faster than she ever worked and she not watching. The needle ran deep into her left forefinger. The tears came from her in torn sobs that bent her double, her face down now close upon her stalled work. Bent over her swollen belly as if to hide or cover or save it from anything outside of her. As if it was all of her and she betrayed it with her tears. Then felt Connie's hands on her knees. Not pressing, just there upon her. Leah slowly recovered, felt her breath coming back. Lifted her head slowly just enough to face Connie, her face hushed and serious, waiting. Kind. Leah said, "Look at me. Must be the baby makes me act like this."

Connie didn't take her hands away. She said, "Norman treats you good, doesn't he?"

"Yes. Oh yes."

"And others?"

Leah paused, letting what was asked settle. "Nobody's mean. I don't believe no one intends any meanness."

"Well, shit on a stick," Connie said. Leah choked: laughing, still crying. Connie stood and pulled the Boston rocker close and sat leaning forward and asked, "What happened? Was it Mother?"

Like a child sprinting homeward of a hot summer afternoon and sidestepping the basking blacksnake Leah said, "No. No, no." Connie's eyes appraised this and let it go. Leah went on, unable, unwilling to check, as if in rupture. "No," she said again. "I'm not what she wanted or expected and I can understand that. I can even understand that she don't have any idea how to deal with me. She can't set across from me and just carry on a conversation but gets all fluttery and curt, as if her mouth opens and her brain chomps the words off before they get out. I can understand that. I don't mean this like maybe it sounds but I forgive her that. Because I couldn't tell you how I'd be if I was her. It's awful easy to think you know how somebody else should be but you ain't them, never. Maybe I could've done different with her too. But I don't know how and clearly she doesn't either. So I understand that."

"Most times, I think, it's hard between a woman and the mother of the man she marries." Connie's eyes off a little distance. Then, "And Norman her only boy. With Father gone I wonder if he could've married any right girl. Just so you know."

Leah nodded. "Mother-in-law's the price every girl pays. I heard that said."

Connie smiled. "You don't have any friends here though."

"Norman's my best friend."

"You're lucky there perhaps. But-"

"I never had friends even when I was a child. My mama kept me away from the other colored children. Kept me separate. And the white children, they the white children. Didn't have the time of day for me. At least until I was old enough to be something they wanted to have time for."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean four white boys, big boys, sixteen, seventeen years old, got ahold of me one day. I was twelve years old."

"Good Jesus."

"I think that's maybe why I've had such a hard time keeping a baby."

"Oh good Jesus, Leah. Did you tell Doctor about that?" She shook her head hard.

"Why ever not?" Connie slid back in the rocker and crossed her legs.

"Why not? Why not? He's a white man and he seen me most naked. It's not something I wanted to put in his head."

Connie was quiet with anger. "The bastards. All of them. It's not just you, you know. Whoever the man, there's that horn of evil upon him."

"Now you're not talking about any man that's been coming round here to see you. Must be that Manchester man."

Connie not moving, abrupt, alert. "What Manchester man?"

"One Norman told me about."

"Norman didn't tell you a thing. He doesn't know a thing. There's nothing to know."

"Said there was a man behind why you were so willing to come back up here."

Connie snorted. "I was ready I expect. Sick of that town. Sick of that old mill."

"No man then? No Manchester man?"

Her legs still crossed, her hands cupped over the upper knee. Eyebrows raised. "Not worth the telling."

"You fall in love?"

"I thought."

"So?"

Connie stood from the chair and went back to the sofa and took up her knitting. Leah sat watching her. The needles flared and cracked against each other. Leah sat with her mending loose in her lap. A short time passed. The long blue and purple winter dusk was gaining. Other-times, Leah would have risen and lighted the lamps. Now she only sat, letting the pale window light suffice. Connie worked until she came to a pause, counted out stitches and then began to finger out loops, backing up. Finished with that she held her needles flat in her lap atop the infant blanket and said, "First day in that mill was the most terrifying thing you can imagine. The racket of it. The size. The machines. All the people. I was determined not to be the country girl I was. I worked so hard at it. I think it was three months before I took a breath I didn't think about. I worked so hard at not being a country girl that I didn't even see him coming. I believe he had my number before I even knew he existed. Jack. Jack Lavin. He was a lovely man. I should've noticed that. He took me out. The opera house. Sunday picnics. Such a gentleman. Found out where I was from and got me talking all about it. Began talking about coming back here and opening a shop of our own. As if each one of us doing the same thing over and over a thousand times a day made us experts about clothing, dry goods. Brought me a cup of ice cream one afternoon and I got all the way to the bottom when I found the ring in it and Jack up against me breathing in my ear about how there would be a better one as soon as he could afford, how this was just a token thing against what he intended. Well it had me in a swoon I tell you. June evening. We walked out through the town to the old cemetery and by then it was dark but oh so warm. We lay out there among the dead until the dew came down and he brought me back to my boardinghouse wrapped up in his coat. And we did that for three-four weeks. I got so worried but he assured me everything was all right. Nothing to worry about. Well, I don't know why but I was fortunate. After five days of his not showing up I skipped my lunch, so sick already to my stomach, and walked down through the lengths of the mill buildings until I got to the rooms of the looms where he worked and found a foreman. Oh, Jack, he said. Jack married that Quebec girl and went off with her to the Gaspé where her people had a bakery. Said Jack told him he'd grown up in a bakery and knew bread like the back of his hand. Foreman said to me, You was lucky dearie, them Frenchies aren't gonna know what hit em when Jack Lavin breezes in and out of the old Gaspé. Might likely leave some flour behind but whatever cash and coin they stuffed in cans under the hearth will grow feet like that. And he snapped his fingers. I said I was just asking for a friend. He put his hand on my shoulder and said to tell my friend she was a lucky girl. So I went back to work with the sweat pouring off me and sweat like that two weeks until my monthly came. Just another dumb-cluck girl I guess. Like I said, Not worth the telling."

Leah put aside her held mending. It was too dark to see the needle passing. She stood and lighted the lamp on the side table and crossed over and lighted the one on the end table next to the sofa. Standing there, near Connie, she said, "You and me both know the bad of men. But there's good too. There's Norman."

"Well, yes, there's Norman. But I shouldn't care to share even if you would." And screwed her face up goggle-eyed at Leah. Idiot face. Both women laughed. Fell silent. The room fluid with lamplight. Tentative flickering warmth. Outside in blue dusk Norman crossed to the purple shadow of the barn. A hanging hook of moon over it in the eastern sky. Leah ran her hands over the hard nut of her belly. Connie wrapped her knitting and set it aside and stood. Leah said, "Time to get supper on."

"I'll help Norman with the feed-up."

"I think," Leah said, "he can manage all right."

Connie paused, then said, "What I'd like, is some tea."

"We got that pine-bark tea your mother sent up." They moved, not quite side by side, down the short hall to the kitchen. Connie said, "No thank you ma'am. I'll make that mint tea you like."

"Sounds good to me. I'm about sick of that herb tonic Marthe Ballou brought over for me. Build my blood, she said. Well, my blood's built enough this one day. Drinking it makes me jealous over that pine-bark."

"Maybe that's what I need. A little build-my-blood."

Leah looked at her. "Sounds to me your blood's doing just fine."

Connie shot her brows. "Being home's not so bad. Except for the shortage of men."

"There'll be a man. Soon as you stop looking, one'll jump right around the corner and scare you to death."

"Think?"

Leah filled the kettle under the spring-fed line. Connie had the flue and firebox open, pokering the stilled fire back to life. Leah set the kettle on the stove and said, "It happened to me. Happened to me, could happen to anyone."

Connie added sticks from the woodbox. Shut the stove door and straightened up to face Leah. "Except for the worry," she said, "I liked it."

Deep winter January. It had been sometime before Christmas since daytime temperatures rose over zero. Days still of air with light glittering off the hard-crusted snowbanks. Nights thirty to forty below and lying in bed wakened by the gunshot crack of trees bursting with the freeze, Leah swelling and flushed with heat, as if her body were a furnace wrapped around her child. Over the covers her breath hung in the starlight like pale moonlight off the snow. Afternoons she'd venture to the barns, swaddled like a slow-footed bear to review the hens from the walkway between the pens, leaving the filling of feeders and waterers and stoves and lamps to Norman and Connie, feeling henlike as she made her way in the fecund warmth. There were few eggs to gather and the brooder house was closed down. She'd go from there into the horsebarn, colder there, the windows rimed inside with a thick burr of frost, and slowly run a brush over each of the geldings. As a child she feared horses but this team of light drafts were different from saddle or fancy driving horses, capable of sustaining a light even trot on the cart or democrat wagon but happier with the steady step of day work in the woods or fields. Heavy-footed and round, thick-necked with large proud heads, eyes the size of her bunched fist, eyes of a density and depth she'd known on no other creature. Tommy and Pete. She talked to them while she worked over them, inhaling the sweet rich horse dust rising from them as if inhaling something of their spirits or souls. She had no doubt they had souls. She told them everything about the child in her belly. She told them about summer. She knew they remembered summer. She'd carry each a handful of shellcorn, the great soft lips against her palm. She stroked their noses. Small beads of frost chained along their sparse coarse whiskers. She'd warm their noses with her hands and breath and then leave them. They were in her dreams. She felt them to be protectors of her child. She told no one this.

She passed the benchmark of where she'd miscarried the winter before, marking it with silence. The weather had softened enough for several new inches of snow over everything, wiping clean the bootmarks and ash trails laid down on the paths, the scuffs of cinders, chaff and bark rubbish blown down off the hill. The world a new morning. There were times she felt she was living in another country. Not the winter or the place. Times she felt she was another person observing her hands at work over some piece of task. Times she would hum a low soothe that vibrated throughout her and would take her away to nowhere at all; only when back did she know she'd been gone. This could happen alone or not. As if she went away not out but deeply in, far below sense of sound or sight and she would lose everything around her and have only the deep surge of her own bloodstream, the dynamo of pulse a hum in her ears. For minutes at a time. And then resurface abruptly with no sense of having been gone but for the unfamiliar around her. At the supper table, Norman was saying, "Be mid-March now is my guess. Happens like that, it'll be heavy."

"Means we'll be up day and night for a couple of weeks," Connie agreed. "But I like it. That excitement."

Leah kept eating. Her baby was due mid-April. She didn't need to but she counted backward and forward again. About to speak, to correct them, when Norman went on. "I've by Jesus never seen a winter without a thaw late January early February. Just cold like this. Bitter cold. But its going to make for a good sap flow. You'd think it less exciting you slung a yoke and trudged the wet snow with sap buckets either side of you, instead of tending the boiling. But you're right; I look forward to it."

Connie said, "I could I'd match you in the woods bucket for bucket, and you know it too."

Norman shook his head. "Yuht, you would. It'll be on snowshoes this year too. Good for me I guess. Get hardened up for the summer."

"That's right. You been lazing around up to the sawpit all winter."

"Yuht." Grinned at his sister. Then serious again. "I don't want the thaw now anyhow. I hate that stop-and-start sugaring. But Christ it could soften a little. I've got lambs coming any night now. Hard on those little buggers, this cold."

Leah stood and carried her plate to the sink, clattering it down, and turned back. Both sitting watching her. Norman said, "You all right?"

Leah said, "I've got vinegar pie. Still warm but set up. You all want some?"

Norman nodded, studying her. She'd tried to explain herself to him days before but only managed to confuse and frighten him with her telling him she didn't feel herself and then found herself reassuring Norman instead of the other way around. Since then, times she felt his eyes on her as if to fathom where she might be. That was fine. Let him keep an eye on her. He said, "I like that vinegar pie."

Marthe Ballou came down on snowshoes late one bright morning, wearing the heavy green woolen trousers of her husband and a red and black mackinaw. She filled the kitchen with the dense scent of wood-smoked unwashed old woman, sitting with Leah and Connie and drinking coffee, two cork-stoppered bottles removed from her coat pockets before she sat down, the bottles clear glass with the murk tonic within: suffused wild herbs and the tender stripped inner bark of some half-dozen trees. Putting them on the table she said, "You steady now. Thought two see you through. You need more send that man up. Liddle spoon mornings all you need now, lest you got a taste for more. Me, I take it from first snow till dandylions out. Up to you." Then sat silent drinking her coffee and refusing cookies while the sisters-in-law made chat of the cold and the three thus far new lambs until they ran out of things to say and fell quiet alongside Marthe. Marthe ignored Connie but kept her eyes on Leah throughout. After there had been steady silence for some long moments Marthe looked to Connie and said, "Come to see this one. Leave us lone, hey?"

"Well I-" Connie stood. A short pause with her fingers fluttered before her. Then said, "Gabbing like old geese. There's work waiting." Shot her eyes at Leah: sympathy and outrage, the hurt of a child cut free of a game. Then went into the entryway mudroom and deployed herself with deadly silence, getting into boots and winter wraps and went out, letting in a waft of chill air. Marthe seemed to wait for the chill to lose itself into the warmth of the house and then scraped back her chair, staying down in it but pushing out from the table. She said, "Stand, you."

Leah raised herself using both hands on the arms of her chair. Upright she faced the old woman: gray greased hair worn loose onto her shoulders, her face lined and charred to a texture of dried root, her nose a small smudge of lumped flesh set beneath great black eyes. Her mouth drooped and chapped to a rough red flake. Leah saw that as a young woman she had not been pretty but beautiful. Did not wonder what had caused her to join life with the half-wild man in the half-wild outward reach of the small gore. Anymore than she would explain herself and Norman. Marthe studied her midsection and then raised a hand, extended it open to its full reach before closing it upon itself and drawing it back toward her. As if bringing something in. She said, "Step close."

Leah stepped to stand over her, breathing the aroma no different from the tang of fresh-turned soil or the ammoniac of manure or the bronzed bolt of Norman's armpits the end of a summer day, smells all rending of her childhood and carried forward as if the movement of life itself, and Marthe reached and unbuttoned her dress from below her weighted breasts to her pubic arch, the belly moving outward easily as the fabric slid back against the protrusion, the navel distended. Marthe placed her hands on the abdomen and ran them over it slowly, moving from the center out to the sides and then back in again, a gentle round motion that touched deeper than it felt. Leah stood looking down at the grimed hands seeming to feel and draw something from beneath her own skin. Kneading as if the oldest most fragile loaf in the world. Wordless, worldless. Just hands and the belly under them. Going back once to where there was a slight movement, her hand again not probing but reaching somehow deep under the skin. Just a whisper she said, "Right foot." Then reached up and opened the top of the dress so the swollen breasts were freed and took each in a hand and held them, weighing them or just letting their weight fall into her hands. Then ran her hands down buttoning the dress and only then did she look up at Leah.

"This baby, she fine. She gon' be just fine. You fine. Beautiful, you."

"She?"

Again Marthe put her hands on the belly, covered now. As if explaining she ran her hands again. "She spread around you. Out wide like this. Boy-child be bunched up, high, cutting off you wind. Men start like that, makes it hard to blame them, them not knowing how to stop."

"A girl." A whisper. "A little girl."

Marthe leaned back in her chair, her eyes now bold on Leah. "Most likely. She start coming you send that Norman up after me. Don' let him get that Hurdle man in here. That man no good at all. Kill a woman bringing out a child. Don' let that Norman give you no guff. You gon' have this baby just fine."

Norman on his knees with one forearm slid into the ewe; a set of gelatinous feet lie along his wrist. Connie kneels at the front, cradling the lowered head with both arms, light comfort coming from her lips, holding the sheep still and upright. The ewe wants to lie down. Her bleats have broken to rasps, her breathing harsh in the cold night. A lantern hangs from a rafter overhead and a hinged two-sided gate leans against the drystone wall. At the other end of the sheepshed is a boulder half the height of a man, broad at the base and flattened at the top: too great to remove when the foundation hole was dug. Leah leans against it, over wrapped in one of Norman's greatcoats. The lambs born the week before are awake with the lantern light and play king-of-the-mountain on the boulder, butting heads and flying on and off the rock, missing Leah neatly and avoiding the end of the shed where Norman and Connie work. Norman seems absolutely still but Leah can see the muscles of his bared arm flex as he works his hand inside, moving in fractions of inches. He's silent, letting Connie croon to the ewe. Then, there, the ewe groans and the lamb slides out, Norman's hand coming with it, under it. His arm thick with blood and mucus lays the lamb on the bedding and clears its mouth and nose of membrane and raises its head and the mouth sucks open and draws air. Norman wipes the lamb dry with burlap sacking and while drying brings it to its feet. The ewe has twisted her head to watch. Connie still holds her. Norman gets the lamb upright against the ewe's side where it butts against her until striking the soft udder it finds the teat. The bit of tail works. The ewe groans again and a second lamb slides out just as Norman was raising his arm to go back in. He clears this one also and when it's up and feeding he cleans his arms with the sacking and stands. "Sometimes, with twins, the first one pops the cork." Leah steps forward to take the lantern while Norman and Connie pen the ewe and lambs with the folding gate against the corner wall. They all three stand side by side a moment and watch the lambs nursing. Norman takes the lantern and checks the other ewes still to lamb. They then go out into the hanging night, the moon great in the sky like the burnished skull of a long gone beast. The snowfields and hills with etched trees and farmstead buildings all softened, fantastic, substantial. Leah pauses a moment behind the brother and sister, watching the world. She loves this as much as a June day. Sometimes wishes at full moon she might sleep through the day and spend nights walking. Walking out in a world the opposite of the one she lives in, a world in reverse. A place where her spirit might be freed, truly freed at last. Freed from the burden of herself. A world that doesn't exist. She goes on. No lamps are lit in the house, just the faint glow of the lantern where they wait for her at the entryway.

By midmorning he'd be done with what the barns demanded and then he'd file his saws and grind the double-bitted axe and using the heavy harness with brichens he'd hitch the team to the sledge, load in the skidding chains and whippletree and a pair of nosebags with rations of oats and head up to the woodlot. At the sawpit he'd unhitch the team and leave Pete to stand while Tommy followed him, Norman carrying the saw over one shoulder and the axe on the other and together they'd make their way up the broken trail into the woodlot. He'd fell a tree, selecting not just for the thinning but also for a clean fall. Each site held several right choices with twice as many wrong ones. He wanted no hung trees. Down, he'd limb out the log with the axe and saw through either the tip or midsection depending on the size. Most mornings he'd cut two trees, some three. Then Tommy would skid the log out to the pit. Tommy was a skid-horse; stepping off with Norman's word and going on his own, needing no driving. Would be waiting with the log always just a few feet shy of the end of the skidway when Norman would catch up to him. So Norman would have to say "Step up there" and Tommy would ease the log up. Then Norman would slip on the nose bags with feed for both horses, step into the pit and pull back the old buffalo robe that covered over the peaveys and canthooks and heavy iron bar and using these tools roll the first log out onto the timbers over the pit. And begin sawing twenty-inch chunks from one end then the other of the log, the timbers over the pit set to act not just as guides for size but to keep the log stable until it was down to the final cut. Then it was down into the pit, the fresh sawdust spread sweet on the crusted old broken snow and frozen clotted sawdust from the days before. The pit not a hole in the ground so much as a cave manmade, with the south side open to level ground. Here he split the chunks into stovewood.

As a child with his father, this work took forever. Mornings were endless cold feet and hands and ears. Now alone he could load the sledge in a morning, often unaware he'd taken no break until the sledge was filled. At noontime he'd hitch the team again and take the load down to add to the lengthening cords stacked tight as drystone in ranks behind the entry way woodshed. Water and stall the still-harnessed horses, feed them down with hay and go in to his meal. In the afternoon doing it all again. He could look down from the sawpit onto the backside of the house and see next winters warmth in the gray stacks. Coming in at dusk or later to the kitchen steamed with food, fatigue a pleasure over him like summer sun, smelling himself as he washed for supper, the sweat and sweet sawdust on him as the skin of a day's work.

The danger stilled his mind. Danger only started with the felling. Then ran on the bright edge of the axe as he walked the downed tree, limbing. Then the log itself, in motion or containing motion all the way to the pit and then by hand up the skidway. Motion to crush a foot, a leg, a whole man. Then the axe again, rising and falling, quartering the rounds; the axe oddtimes glancing, and always throwing the chunks up to fall about him. And danger in the repetition: letting himself drift to the chickadee working the sawdust chips in the spruce boughs, the snort or thick plash of urine from the geldings, the bay of a hound over the ridge. His right arm pushed outward a small ache during the splitting from the old sabre wound, the ache serving to tether his attention to the bright slice of the axe.

Some afternoons the sledge was loaded and he knew by the lightfall he was early. As February spread evenly before and after, the cold held but the sun climbed and on this south slope he could pause, warm with work and the false cheer of the sun on his face and sit up on the timbers of the sawpit, his long legs dangling, his trouser cuffs filled with sawdust riding up to the top of his laced boots and there with the danger not so much gone as back up in the woods waiting for the next day his thought would idle and drift. Beyond what was at hand. Sometimes to the house below and sometimes beyond that. Oft to the hope of the child and as many times to his own shortcomings as a man. He felt as if his father was nearby. Just beyond sight in the rump of spruce running uphill one side of the sawpit.

"Father was proud of you, Norman." His mother's final words to him before she clamped a hand on the shoulder of the boy driving the rented democrat wagon and told him, "You're not paid to sit here daydreaming." The wagon then went clattering smoothly from the dooryard down the track, the back loaded with the chests and sets of drawers and cartons of clothing and personal items of Cora Pelham and daughter Constance, his mother refusing from pride or bitterness or both to allow Norman the same job done for free. As if in her desire to not upset his new life she found the one final way to make clear how badly she wanted to do so. Connie turning to wave at Norman, the boy driving wedged between the two women. Norman raised his hand to his sister and stood the brief moment until the wagon crested the rise of land and dropped from sight. And stood there still with his mother's benediction or condemnation or both still fresh and seared into him for all time. As if that was what she wanted. One final spring of doubt passed on with final authority from beyond the grave. Who better to know than she. Who better to choose the careful clipped neutral tone that left room for all meaning to fly in and settle on the sear, like crows onto a sown field. So he stood there until he heard Leah come from the house and then he started up and went away from her to the barns, wanting still to be alone. Without blame for her remaining inside while his mother departed but not willing yet to grant that lack by waiting for what words she might add. Went and milked the cows and swore that by the week out they'd be gone save the one fresh heifer for their own use. October home from the war.

Now legs dangling above the sawpit, already in the shade of the spruce the winter evening spreading like inkstain but him with the sun on his face. The team, not restless, slipped weight foot to foot. The sledge full. Chimney smoke rising from the house below in a thin vapor. A cloudless sky. Paused for his father's voice to come down from the spruce. It never did.

What child remained in him walked side by side with his father. Where affection came from the man in even reprimand tonicked with dried humor. A man with two daughters already, too pleased with a son finally to expect perfection, and so was to know the boy. His eye sharp as a raptor upon Norman's back always gentled when the boy turned in confusion with the bent nail, the flung tool, the short-sawn board. Never once he could recall praise; something made right was made right. Otherwise, the job remained. At ten he first rode the sledge to the village pond one January to join in cutting ice. They pulled up short and surveyed the men already out, sawing and using great tongs to lift the blocks, the dripping pond water freezing as it fell. After watching a short time his father stepped down, wrapped the lines on the left upright front pole of the sledge and took out the saw and their own tongs and looked up at the boy. "Question is, which of us takes the bottom end of the saw. Flip a coin?"

He believed his father would've liked Leah. He liked to think so. As if his father, freed from life, would also be freed to see all of her that Norman saw. Not only the beauty and courage that to him were evident as drawing breath but also the lesser fragments that made the whole: the temper and guileless smile; the pluck beyond even thinking; the decision then, the end product of that same pluck, given over to intense focused scrutiny as if she more than most knew clearly how one step leads inevitably to the next and not some other. Her gentle humor, less prod than tease, and the sudden way her face would bloom as if her skin gave off light when Norman would fumble or misstep. The containment of herself, so ferocious as if her skin were a moist sacking over whirling conflict and contradiction. Just the sight of her walking barefoot in a meadow amongst throngs of buttercups and daisies, black-eyed Susans. Or her face lifted and half buried in a spray of lilac. Or by evening lamplight leaning over the round reading table in the parlor, her elbows holding down the spread pages of the Randolph newspaper as she read the week's news. Or now filling with his grandchild. Whom Norman intended to name James after him. Norman sat on the timbers of the sawpit and thought his father might know all these things. Might not only approve but applaud. Thinking this because he thought the dead may know all things and not just what each action might mean to them: freed of that concern. For in truth he wondered if his father had been living would he have brought the girl home with him or taken her to some other place, an idea unknowable to the boy who had held the farm against his thin chest over his heart throughout the battles and long deadly pauses of march and tent and march again between the battles like other men carried lockets with the likeness of a wife or sweetheart next to theirs. Even wondered if he might have left her there in Washington and rode the rods home with the others, content with some good deed done, carrying with him always that passion and fear of the what-might-have-been. Because it was all very simple. The farm became his when he married, the parents to make partnership with the son and new wife. At such a time as he was able and all parties willing he might purchase it for market value. The sole clause being in the event of his father's death Norman must provide either home for his mother or a third share of the market value. As most are the will written with the intent of living decades past the dating and signing. Never dreaming of the mare's hoof anymore than of a star fragment piercing the night sky and his own head. And so made way for the boy to bring the girl home. And gave to Norman the bitter hidden secret of some relief in his father's death. As if he was freed by the death. As if his father gave him not only all of his own life but all of Norman's as well; do as you please. His father became sealed always to what had been and only informed the present by the convenience of recollection. Not only is to recall or not the choice of the living but also how and what to recall. The father became more echo to his own desire than a man full-blown. As a knife lost in the garden over winter loses its edge and the handle rots with the spring. How well it used to cut. As with his mother's words: Father was proud of you.

Norman let himself down by his hands on the timbers until his boots struck the sawdust in the blueing dusk. He went to the team and lifted their feet, cupping one mitten under each thick hoofwall to hold it against his knee as he scraped out the packed snow and ice with his pocketknife. The horse breath now hot steam in the cold. Stepped the team to the sledge and lifted the pole and hooked the neckyoke to the collars and then down the pole to attach the tugs by trace chains to the doubletree and evener. Then took up the lines and walked to the back of the sledge and stepped up behind the load. The saws and axe already wedged in on top. He gathered the lines in one big double loop in his right hand and held each line taut and looked down the backs of his horses. The evening star was up over the eastern ridgeline. The horse's nosebags dangled from their outside hames. He was cold now and felt the day's work in him. The woods were dark behind him and he felt a vicious thing not of the place, an intruder in his own life. Some rot. Some weakness that allowed the woman down the hill to be his reason for all things done and not done. As if he lacked something essential other men had or might have. He did not know. There was no reason to think his father would be proud of him, living or dead. He spoke to the team. "Get up now, boys."

The last Sunday in February the weather still had not broken and Leah was growing large, settling into and rising from chairs and the bed with effort and strained groans. Connie came back up the hill after church with Pete trotting hard between the shafts. She had not gone to dinner with her mother at Mrs. Breedlove's but come straight on. Once in the house she filled the copper boiler and lifted it onto the range and opened the flues. Rushed up the stairs and back down with clean undergarments and a dress over one arm. From his seat in the parlor Norman saw it was the dress she'd traveled home in. He hadn't seen it since. He glanced to Leah sitting with the family Bible open on her lap, wedged up against her belly and held from beneath by both hands. She would spend an hour over a page. Time to time a noise would issue from her mouth, a sipping sound as if taking something in or a more clear louder chirp of doubt. She met his raised eye and cocked head and only shook her head, a gesture emphatic enough to shame his questions. Connie closed the door to the kitchen and was in there some minutes before she came into the parlor to stand hands on hips and announce, "They make a reservoir now clamps to the side of a range by the firebox and allows for hot water all the time. None of this having to wait. Seems a small luxury in a house with a baby coming." Then turned and went back into the kitchen, the door sucked to by her passage.

Norman spoke. "Now, what was that."

Leah raised eyes hooded down like a turtle. "Seems to me she has a point. Those things are cheap. Simple too. Something a man handy could take on I spect. Hot water takes forever. You'd be surprised the difference. That lye soap raises up a nice sud."

"I recall bathing in hot water one or two times. You want something for the house then speak up. I'll not deny you, it's not too dear. But what has her to a boil?"

Leah ran her hand over the open page, her hand flat as if smoothing the thin paper. Then said, "You're thick in the head, Norman. The woman wants to wash herself and dress up. Likely not for you or me, either."

Norman was quiet a moment. Then said, "What're you reading in?"

"Job."

"Now that was a rare bugger."

"Nothing more than the rest of us."

"I can't see that."

"I always took it to be the point."

"That right there is the definition of faith."

She leveled her eyes now on him. "No. It's not. I don't know what is."

"That's fair. Tell you what. You find out, let me know."

She looked long on him. Through the kitchen door they heard the splash of water and small sighs of pleasure. Even with the door closed they could smell the scent of soap and rosewater on the steam runneling through the house. Leah said, "I don't spect it in this life anymore than you. You know that."

Connie came into the room, her face flushed with scrubbing, dressed fine and already wrapped for the outside. "We're going to skate on the river," she said, "I just hope my christly ankles hold up. Skating, they always fall out on me. Always landing on my bum. It's not the fall I mind, it's the being helped up."

It was the eldest Clifford boy came to claim her. Came in fast with a swept-back sleigh drawn by a fancy pair of black light trotting horses, each with a fine white blaze. Norman was amused and did his best to not be, feeling the smile tic the corners of his mouth. The boy-now young man-whose father owned the livery with teams and single horses to let, along with conveyances. Also a cartage business. The same boy then who five years before drove Norman's mother and sister away from the farm. Now come calling. Or rather to take the girl skating. Norman wondering how many years his sister had fired in Glen's mind. How many long Sundays over the fall and winter it had taken him to reach this point. Glen took his hand firm and called Norman sir which pleased him and then went on to lament his being too young to do his part with the late war which Norman was gracious enough to only nod away. Glen promising Connie home not too much after dark, adding the dangerous explanation of a bonfire. Snuggle up to it was what Norman was thinking but only said, "You watch out that team. There's ice where the road's packed." And turned to grin at his sister, not caring if the boy saw this. And Connie then came forward and leaned up tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Glen taking his hand again and then nodding with a great and real gravity to Leah and speaking to her for the first time in taking leave. "Ma'am." The word ripened like sun-gorged berries with respect.

The two gone, Norman took his chair again. Leah watching him. Norman said, "That just made me feel like old folks."

Leah smiled, a hand over her belly and said, "Just wait, you."

The second week of March brought a sudden deep thaw that Norman declared to be brief and was: three days and nights above freezing with the days arching into the mid-forties. Then six inches of wet snow and the wind shifted and all froze hard again. Still that thaw was enough for Norman to carry the stacked sap buckets from the hayloft to the basement where beside the old milk cooling well he filled them in regimental rows, letting them sit with water overnight to swell the staves tight within the hoops. From the sledge he scraped out the layer of ice mixed with bark and sawdust and rolled the gathering tank into place. Set in the gathering yokes and buckets and took the team and sledge once again up the hill past the skidway to the small sugar house, just a roof on poles over a chimney and bricked hearth with a firepit underneath and the heavy boiling kettle set into the bricks. There unhitched the team and roped together the buckets in bundles and hung them over Tommy's back and let the horse follow him as Norman broke trail on snowshoes through the sugarbush, stopping at each of the rock maples to bore holes and hammer in spouts and hang buckets. Back down at the sugarhouse he shoveled out the drifted snow and pulled canvas tarping from the year-old woodpiles extending off the north side. He filled the boiling kettle halfway with snow and made a fire underneath and waited for the snow to melt and then scrubbed the inside of the kettle with a stout limb with a gobbed head of burlap sacking on the end. The sugarhouse was raw and bleak, more so with the winter snow cast out and the floor bare earth but he could see it already as it would be in a week's time or two: steam flaring off the kettle, the firebox running day and night with smoke hanging in the limpid air, the sweet scent of the woods rising as each boil-down ended and the kettle was tipped to pour off the syrup into the filters. Connie even now down to the house washing the squares of red flannel and spreading them on racks to dry tight-sided in the kitchen. Then he went down the hill, stopping at the sawpit to load the tools from there. He spent one afternoon in the barn wiping them down with grease and hanging them for the summer. Weather aside, he was done lumbering for the year.

A week later, a gray day, the cold still like toothache but a wind out of the west-northwest and Norman over breakfast stated winter was over. Then with nothing else to do went to the barns to gather eggs and fill the stoves and check the brooder house. Even with the cold lingering the hens were laying with the longer days and steady heat. Near twenty gone broody over fleets of eggs in the boxes in the brooder. No chicks yet. Looked in after his ewes and lambs. Easter dinner for those in Boston who waited for their Son to rise before going home to eat lamb with mint jelly. As if eating spring and resurrection its very self. All this though, for Norman, little more than escaping the house and his own idle hands. He tasted the cold drab air, sniffing deep for the change he was sure was held far down in that wind somewhere. Out over the Great Lakes, Canada, somewhere. Coming.

The women in the kitchen, Connie floured and up to her arms in kneading bread dough, the oven already thumping and crackling with heat waiting the loaves. Leah sat at the table, cutting dried apple rings to quarters and dropping them into a bowl of sugar water for the filling of the pie that would follow the loaves into the oven. She watched Connie's back and arms, already knowing the bread would be dense and stiff from the hearty pumping and soft thumping sound as she turned the knead over. Finally cleared her throat and watched the back stiffen and the arms pause and then continue, slowed, as she waited and Leah spoke with direct emphasis.

"So?"

Connie darted her face back so her chin grazed her shoulder, looked at Leah and turned back to her work. Her voice muffled as if buried in the dough said, "So, what?"

"You've been a busy girl."

"Umm."

"Having a good time?"

"I am." Emphatic, snapping her words closed like a box.

"I'm poking my nose."

"Oh no." Connie turned and swept back loose curls, leaving flour trails against her forehead. "I didn't mean that. You are, I don't mind. I'm having fun. Been back to Randolph six months now and I'm having a good time. I think I'll keep right on doing that."

"Sounds good to me. That Glen, he a nice boy or just a convenience?"

"He's nice enough. Maybe a little young."

"What, two maybe three years?"

"Two. Two and a half. But you feel the difference."

"Well, Norman and me, we're four years apart."

"It's different with the woman older."

"I guess. Does he, does Glen act that way?"

"Not one whit. Always has the right idea."

"And him younger than you."

"Exactly."

"And you been to Manchester and all. Experienced."

Connie shook her head. "I've no interest in a reputation."

Leah cut the string from another loop of apples and sliced. Watching her work, said, "No reason to think that'd happen."

Connie came forward and sat, picking up one of the dried rings and chewing like worrying over it. "But God, he's a well-made man."

Leah smiled at her. And said, "You're holding back."

"Well, for now!"

Leah nodded. "He's young."

"Some things, it seems to me age don't matter on a man."

"He strikes me as steady-minded."

"Any boy can mind his manners waiting on dessert."

"Is that what he's after you think?"

"By Christ I wish I knew. He talks a serious streak and so do I and then we're all over each other and it's Katy-bar-the-door. What I like about him is he's got big ideas but not too big. It all sounds right and fits with who he is but I still get antsy. Like jumping out my skin. Other times we're just having a grand old time and I don't think about a thing. I don't know what to trust: him, me, the both of us."

"Sounds like your Mister Jack Manchester man gave you something more than what you recognized."

Connie looked at her, one side of her lower lip pulled up between her teeth. Paused, thinking. Then made a small nod. "Thing is, how do you know?"

Without pause Leah said, "When you can't help yourself. When it's all beyond you. When thinking just doesn't even happen."

"Sounds like ten times a night."

"Then maybe it is. Or maybe not. One these days you're going sit across from me and bold as brass tell me what your future looks like. Could be him, could be not him. Could be somebody else. Could be tomorrow. I don't know and you neither. Hard as it is, that's how it should be. It keeps things, interesting."

Connie nodded. "Things're interesting enough I guess."

"Now that's good. All you can ask for."

"I want to know."

"Uh-huh."

"Stupid."

"Not hardly. But that don't mean you get advance notice."

"I worry I'm not around as much as you need. Both you and Norman. I made a promise to him and doing that, one to you too."

"You're round enough just now. Time comes we both know you'll be around more. Norman worries about the sugaring and I worry about this." Patted her stomach like a guest arriving. "Time you're shirking you'll know it. Who knows, maybe that Glen'll even come in handy."

Connie burst breath through her nose. "That'd be a fine day." Then said, "How'd you ever trust Norman?"

"I don't know. But, the time I met him, I knew I had to trust or not. It didn't mean I didn't leave my doors open. It just meant I wasn't going to use em less I had no choice."

Connie nodded, her face lowered toward the table. After a bit she said, "All I want is to climb up all over him. All the time."

Leah was finished cutting the apples. She needed to pee. She needed to all the time now. Both hands on the table she pushed up and stood, Connie now watching her. Leah rocked and steadied herself and said, "Your bread's ruined." She went to the entry way and pulled on a shawl and overcoat, wrapping herself easy for the outhouse. She looked back and Connie was watching her. Leah said, "Of course you feel that way."

Connie stood from the table and said, "I punch that loaf down and let it rise again it'll be fine. Won't hurt it a bit for patience."

Leah nodded. Turned for the latch into the woodshed and without looking back said, "Bread's not all will rise you wait a little."

They'd been sugaring day and night a week, the sap daytimes seeming to pour from the trees so both Connie and Norman hiked in the woods with the yokes, the snow shrinking each day so the trails became quickly packed enough to walk without snowshoes. The south side of each tree spread a small stage of bared brown leaves outward. They brought up the second older and smaller gathering tank and placed it on a scaffold beside the sugarhouse to empty the gathering tank into so when dusk fell and the wind dropped and temperatures fell they had two tanks' worth of sap to boil off. One of them would take the team and sledge down to do evening chores and eat supper while the other fired the kettle and began boiling. The first would climb back after dark with a cake tin of supper wrapped in towels.

The two would work into the morning hours, stoking the fire to keep a low rolling boil, skimming off the surface with a paddle and then plunging the paddle in a downward twisting turn to keep the thickening sap even. When it would froth too high they'd drag a lump of lard on a long string through to settle it. A long-handled dipper would pour forth a thin apron when it was syrup, a thicker sheet when it was ready to sugar. As a kettle finished they worked fast to pour it off into the long sugar molds. Then the kettle was refilled and the fire pokered up and there would be a brief time before the fresh sap came to a boil. Norman had a demijohn of cider and would pour out a couple of drams into the sugar dipper and sip at it until it was gone, Connie taking it once or twice for small swallows. Both too tired to talk. Norman would go outside and look out over the starred valley of the farm, his back to the sugarhouse. Then return to the work, the short chimney sending up a straight white plume while steam from the kettle broke out under all sides of the roof. They would finish by half past two or three and be back up in the woods by eleven the next morning. The soft spring air itself invigorant to the work.

The night the ice went out it was Connie came down for the evening feed-up and to eat with Leah and carry supper back up to Norman. Leah moving slowly around the kitchen now, cooking one-pot meals that would carry well and furnish the long nights. Connie was famished with work and mopped up two plates of pot roast with carrots, parsnips, onions and potatoes, the vegetables all showing wear from the long storage, while Leah across from her ate slowly and with tired method, as if the food were no more than sprite fuel atop an already filled stomach. Before she went off up the hill again with Norman's food Connie stopped while wrapping the cake tin and stepped forward and said, "You look peaked. You feeling right?"

Leah shook her head. "I'm wore out. Wore out is all. Nothing's comfortable anymore. Everything's a job of work."

Connie touched a hand to her brow. Held it there and lifted it off and touched her again. "I guess for a hot kitchen you feel all right. It's much to ask, you working down here for all of us."

Leah shook her head again. "Cooking's all. I haven't lifted a broom or dustrag since I don't know when. I'm fine. Nothing like what you two are up doing. You forget, I've done it years past. I know. All I am is a fat tired woman gonna have a baby. Poor little old me."

Connie grinned at her. Leah went on. "Go on. Get food up to that man 'fore he drinks too hard at that cider."

With Connie gone Leah washed up, using hot water from the new tank on the firebox side of the range. Then swept the kitchen and filled the stoves, here and in the parlor and the one in the front hall, the ceiling of which was punctured four times along its length with cast-iron round registers to let the heat upstairs. Then back to the kitchen and the luxury of warm water to wash herself and finally up the stairs in the dark, undressing and pulling the soft washed flannel nightdress down over herself and letting herself slowly down into the bed on her back. The second-story windows free of frost for the first time in months.

She was not sleeping when the ice began to boom. Perhaps she'd slept some earlier; she could never tell. Then she was lying in the bed and hearing it. The ice over the river a mile away in the valley, grown thick through the winter, began to come apart in great torn shreds the size of boxcars and barndoors, softened from the top by the warming days and strained from underneath by the feed of snowmelt from the hill brooks. It was a sound unlike any other. She imagined it to be like a very slow train wreck that went on for hours. Or maybe some bent memory Norman might hold from a great distance of artillery fire. She'd never seen it go out but had seen the remains the day after: the blocks and chunks and sheets all jumbled along the shorelines, caught up in stacks like huge spilt cards in riverbends or where the bank had caved, leaving a three- or four-tree clump half into the water for the ice to layer up behind. The central channel open and thick brown, roiling white on top with current, paddies and cakes of ice sailing along with tree limbs and other trash. So she lay in bed listening to the air-softened destruction of winter and seeing the aftermath of it in her mind, seeing also the slowed low river of summer spilling over the ledges and boulders of pools and shallows and then felt without pain or cramp or other warning the soft warm flow between her legs and reached down and knew what it was even as she lifted it to her lips to taste.

She rose in the dark and made her way downstairs to the kitchen where a single lamp was lit, hiked her nightdress and reached again and checked her fingers. Like admonishment her first and index finger were coated with blood. She stood what seemed a long time looking at it. And deflated said aloud, "Oh God damn it." Then went out through the entry way woodshed with the meager stack and took up a length of split wood and continued outside. Barefoot into the caked hardened mud of the yard to the weathered silver post where the dinner bell hung-the bell never once rung since she'd arrived, some thing left over from other days-and began to beat the side of the bell with the stovewood. At first just a low hollow tone and then the clapper broke free of the rust seal and at counterpoint to the stovewood struck the side of the bell. So there was the hard low metal thrang followed by the crisper tone of the ring. Beating it like beating herself.

Up the hill they'd just poured off into the molds and refilled the kettle with new sap and were awaiting the boil, standing outside listening to the ice going out. The night was still and Norman was pulling it in with small gasps, tasting for the turn of the wind to the south and the warm air to follow, not finding it but sure it would not be far off. The warm air would end the sugaring. They passed a dipper of cider. They both heard the sound at the same time and both said nothing but strained to clarify it from the percussions of tearing ice. They spoke at the same time.

"That's a bell," Connie said.

"Is that a fire?" Norman scanning the skyline ridges and blank depth of darkened valley beyond the farm. Saw nothing save for the faint light and rising steam and smoke from distant sugarhouses on the far ridge. Then again, both at once.

"That's our bell, that's our bell." The tones now clear, sharp rising from the farm.

"Oh my Christ." And Norman threw down the dipper and began to run, his boots sliding in the mud of the track, going then off the side into the snow, his arms pin wheeling for balance as he went. Connie stood a moment, watching; then the full implications of the bell came over her also. She started after him, then turned back, running to the sugarhouse to throw open the firepit door in the brick arch and, leaving it open, took up the old spade and ran in and out after shovel loads of snow, casting it on top of the freshened fire until she was satisfied the fire would die. She could hear Norman crying out for Leah. Connie blew out the lantern and left it there, running after her brother in the dark.

She fell twice going down and in the farmyard found her brother already with Tommy out, the harness thrown up over his back unbuckled and Norman trying to fasten harness at the same time he mounted the shafts of the high-wheeled cart into the fittings. She was breathless, panting, sore up her back and right arm with her clothes soaked through. She went forward and settled the hames to the collar and tightened them closed and stepped around her brother to lean and catch the bellyband and buckle that. He saw her as he tightened the trace chains and his voice choked. "She's bleeding. I got her back up to lie down." He pulled the looped lines free of the hame ball and stepped up into the cart, still speaking. "I'm going after Doctor. Go set with her." He settled into the seat and gathered the lines and took up the whip from its socket and said, "Keep her quiet if you can. It's not even a month early. She'll be fine. I'll get Hurdle up here and she'll be fine. Get up, you bastard!" and laid the whip across Tommy's back and they went out of the yard and down toward the lip of the bowl in the dark, the thick wheels sucking at the mud, the hooves pulling up smart with the slog, the cart lurching as it went through the mired ruts and pools that once were a road.

Connie went quick to the house thinking Mud like this it's an hour to the village, time to rouse the doctor if he be home, then an hour back if he don't kill the horse, and went into the kitchen and stopped, frightened. Her breath still ragged from it all. The house was very still. She stood in the kitchen trying to get her breath back, scrubbing her hands under the gravity line. Opened the draft of the stove and set the copper boiler atop the range and filled it with water. Filled the reservoir also. Then pulled the tea kettle forward, lifting up a range plate so the kettle was over the open flame of the firebox. Set out cups and saucers and teapot on a tray and stuffed the strainer with mint and dropped it into the pot. Spooned in fresh sugar made just the day before. Checked the kettle and saw she had time and ran down cellar to the small cask of applejack and popped the bung to pour out a scant half cup. The applejack made from freezing a barrel of hard cider and then siphoning off the small unfrozen core of alcohol. Ran back upstairs and poured the applejack into the teapot and then filled it all with water, the kettle singing now. Replaced the stove lid and lifted the tray and went down the hall and up the stairs, the camphorate odor of mint, maple and apple rising into her nose as she went. Her clothes still wet, clotted with mud, sticking to her.

She went along the upstairs hall. The bedroom door was open, light like orange rind coning onto the hall runner. She was terrified. The youngest child, she'd never seen a newborn. Certain it would come with Norman gone and the doctor not there. Such a small child, so early. She had only vague ideas of what to do. Her wet clothing chilled her, as if death walked with her. She paused before the door, out of sight. She could see the foot of the bed, the slender tent of Leah's feet. She dreaded what lay above them. The feet were spread apart. It was very quiet, no moans or the cries she'd expected. The tray an awful weight in her hands. The muscles in her forearms ached, holding it.

From the room, Leah's voice. "That you, Connie?"

"I'm coming," she called, her voice scraped, oddly gay.

"Get in here quick. I need you girl."

Connie went in with the tray. Leah was propped high on pillows, her face composed, calm, set. Connie set down the tray and poured out tea into the two cups, talking all the while. "I threw this in the pot coming up here. That mint tea you like, fortified up a tad. Norman's already gone for Doctor so you just rest easy there, he'll be back in no time, you'll see, and everything'll be just fine. Here take this, you look good, you look fine, are you all right?"

Leah took the saucer in both hands and brought it up to breathe in the tea, then set the saucer on the nightstand. She smiled at Connie. "I'm all right. I guess I'm going to have this baby. I don't know. I'm bleeding a little. It mostly stopped. Nothing else has happened, not yet. Look at you. You're a mess."

"We came running, both of us."

"Well. I was scared." Took up the cup, blew and sipped. Wrapped her hands around the cup and rested it against her covered belly. "I'm still scared but not so bad. I need you to do something you're not going to want to do but you have to anyway. For me you have to."

Connie drank from her tea. Immediately regretted the applejack over the cider she'd already had. With no idea what was coming. Swallowed a little more and set the cup down. Leah raised her cup and sipped again and looked at Connie, waiting. Connie said, "What's this thing I'm not going to want to do?"

Leah grinned and said, "You're just like a little bull calf sometimes. Put your chin down against your throat looking like you're ready to dig in your feet."

"What is it you want?"

"I want you to go up and get Marthe Ballou for me."

"Oh no. I won't do that."

"Yes you will."

"No I won't. I promised Norman I'd set with you. He's getting the doctor and you're going to be just fine."

Leah sat silent. Leaned back against the pillows. As if running something long and complicated through her mind all over again, to render it down to the simple flat statements needed. Connie saw all this and felt something waver inside herself, some weakness she'd never before guessed at, or named, or done more than dismissed before. And rose up against it still silent, all the while feeling the rally as something false, something not true to herself. And knew then she'd do what Leah wanted and knew also it was her duty to not acquiesce, to drag forth all argument. And felt behind this all men, the simple fact of manhood and their great abiding, the gift they held and also the curse. To see things simply with resolution determined when all life was trial and guess. At best.

Leah spoke. As if explaining elemental process to a child yet with bold straightforwardness not to be denied. "I'm bleeding a little bit. I don't know what that means. It's most nearly a month early. My water's not broke and I've got no cramps. Not yet anyhow. All of that I guess could happen any moment. Or a week from now. Or three like it should. Or I might be set to lose this baby. All those things. And I don't know which. Won't until I do. What I know is this: Norman went and did what he felt best to do. Didn't ask me but told me. Now, that shaken old man called doctor ain't so much as going to take down these covers and probe me. It just ain't gon' happen. He might do all that and be right with what he has to say but I ain't got trust with him. Not one smack of trust. And I do trust Marthe. So I want you to go get her. It's simple as that."

Connie felt all her wind wrapped tight in her throat behind her tongue. She said, "I can't, Leah. I promised Norman. I can't do it."

"Ask you something. Who's having this baby? Norman? Or me?"

"I know that. I just can't do it."

"Whyever not?"

"I said, I promised Norman."

Leah spat air.

"Even I was to, time I got up there and found her and got back down with her, Norman and the Doctor would be back long since. There's no point."

"I thought about that. What horse'd Norman take?"

"Well he took Tommy. Tommy on the cart. Only thing would go through the mud."

"It's simple then. Put the bridle on Pete and use a set of lead ropes for reins and ride the booger up there and carry Marthe back down here."

"Pete? Pete don't ride."

"Girl, Pete rides like he was born to it. You get out those clothes and dress up warm, get on a pair of Norman's wool trousers and belt em up tight and cuff em high and you'll ride like angels."

"You've rode that horse?"

"Rode him all around the place summertimes. With just a looped rope around his lower jaw."

"I won't. I won't do it."

"Course you will. It's me lying here with the baby asking. Course you will."

"No."

"Yes. Oh, yes you will."

And as the ice from the river it all broke free of Connie, she feeling it on her tongue as it spilled, hating it and loving it all at once. "What do you want with that dirty old woman? Old hag, wood's whore, all grimed up and greasy and smelling like skunk long dead or something dug up out the ground? Old bitch lying up there spewing out her get like a wild creature, like an animal. Christ you got no idea. Things I heard about her. Came down out of Quebec all on her own no more than thirteen and already more willing than the men she serviced. Dirty woman. Dirty stinking bitch of a whore. Why you think she knows so much about the ins and outs of babies? How many maybe you think she's carried? Just those odd half-dozen boys in and out of the woods? What about those others? What about the times she rid herself of them? And how about those other girls, those girls in trouble, mostly French girls, some not, would come miles to find her? Go up the mountain with trouble in their bellies, come down with trouble in their hearts. You know about all that? Anybody told you this about your great friend? I guess not. I guess not Norman. I guess not herself. I guess not one solid soul before me."

"You surely hate those Canadians, don't you?"

"I don't hate a living person but for one. But those people make a choice, they have the choice, they sink to one end and stay there. Like creatures they live. Like dirt their minds work. I can't change that. I can't change that."

"You don't know nothing about it."

"I know every goddamn thing I need to know."

"You don't know nothing. What you talking bout is niggers. Just niggers. Just some people you don't know nothing about but think you do. And you too stupid to know what you think's part of what they is. Just niggers. Niggers like me. Stop your silly schoolgirl friendly with me, girl. I just a nigger too. Just a fat little nigger woman bout to have a child the best way she know how. And nobody, no one, not you, not Norman Pelham, gon' tell me how to go about that. This my body holding this child, not his, not yours. Most not yours. Just this nigger woman's."

"Jesus Leah. Stop it." Connie hot with it, the heat all through her, burst like sunburn over her face. Shame, pride, anger, some fear, some sickness. Shame.

"No. I ain't stopping nothing. Choice is simple here. My mind is set like granite. Somebody gon' ride that horse up the hill around the mountain and fetch her down here to look over me. Only question is, it gon' be you or it gon' be me?"

Save for a time or two as a little girl when her father set her up for a brief amble she'd not been horseback in her life. So she led the giant from the barn with the blinkered bridle and makeshift reins, feeling at odds with the job and the strange constricted movement of the heavy belted-up woolen pants. She led him to stand beside the granite block with the iron ring on an eyed rod for hitching, and pushed the horse up against it and went around him to balance atop the block and holding the rope reins tight with handfuls of mane slung herself up the side of the horse, her right leg stretching and catching the broad spread of his back and her arms then pulling her up so that suddenly she slid evenly onto his back. The horse did not move. She pulled up on the rope reins and drummed him with her heels. He did not move. "Shit, you," she said. She slid her right hand down the rope toward the bit and drew back on it, pulling his head around and slowly he stepped off, following his head. She tapped him again with her heels. As if afraid of getting his hooves wet or slipping on the hardened mud he walked gingerly across the yard toward the uphill trace, responding more to her reining than her heels, his back arched, as if at any moment he would quit this. She pulled him up short and they stood motionless. She thought about quitting it with him but not for long. She said, "Dammit Pete, we got a job to do here. Now get your ass up." And took the long rope reins tight in one hand and backhanded with the ends to quirt him one shoulder and then the next and raised up her heels for a sharper jab and yelled loud for him to get up. And he went from standing still into a long floating gallop up the hill track, his body rolling forward with great weight as if he'd divined her intent and she somehow kept the reins as she fell forward, stretched along the high curve of his neck, both hands buried deep in his mane, her fists tight-curled into the long hair that raised otherwise to whip her face. Her legs clamped not around but against the great barrel of his sides. Not until they reached the upper leveling of ground and passed the sugarhouse at a slowed canter did she realize that her mouth, only inches from his bright bowed ears, was still pressing him to Go go go.

Through the night woods beyond the reach of the sugarbush trails the horse went on, now at a walk, now at a trot or canter, following the rough path of mostly frozen mud but for several points where the great spruce grew close both sides where the hardened dense shrunken drifts still lay, through which he floundered, sometimes up to his belly with Connie's feet scraping against the deeper of the drifts. She did nothing more than hold the reins loose; the horse did not so much know the way as discern the only track there was and went forward along it. The night was dark here with even the rotting snow a dull shade of the darkness. Above the containing bowl of the farm hillside the distant roaring of the ice going out was almost lost, more a disturbance in the current of air than actual sounds. Then they rounded the shoulder of the mountain and the only sound then the suck and scrape of Pete's feet as he moved over ground that stride by stride changed degree of freezing. Still he trotted more than walked. Once one forefoot struck rock and he lost footing and regained it before Connie even felt herself began to slide, the horse making great thumping bursts from his nostrils.

She smelled the woodsmoke before she saw light from the house and then saw the light from a distance off. She pressed the horse to canter. The bear and catamount hounds Ballou kept chained roared. Connie began to call out for Marthe Ballou and the door opened as she drew near, throwing a splay of light onto the frozen mash of the dooryard. Ballou stood in the door in his long underwear, holding across his chest a rifle and wearing unlaced boots on his feet. She pulled Pete up a dozen paces from the door, just at the edge of the light. The great hounds strained. The horse sidestepped back and forth, snorting nervous air.

"Looka that," said Ballou. "Pelham girl in long pants 'stride a plough horse. Me, I always thought woman look second best the back of a horse."

"I need your wife, old man."

"Any girl come galloping up here middle of the night, she need my wife. Days now at least. Time was, not so long pass, had to wait learn was me or Marthe she be after. Not no more. But maybe so hey? Maybe you just thought Marthe be your cure. Maybe you truly be needing old man Henri to fix you scratch, hey?"

Connie raised her voice, calling the woman's name.

"Aw, pipe down, she hear ya. Heared you comin fore them damn dogs even start up. She getting dress is all. How that chicken do this bitter time?"

Pete was dancing from the dogs. She took the reins tight and wheeled him to face Ballou, letting the man view more horse than her. She said, "The chickens did fine."

Ballou slid the rifle down to dangle one-handed, the muzzle toward the ground. He slipped his free hand between buttons of his underwear and rubbed his belly. He said, "Come time, she won't take no pay for nothing she done. But you, you send a brace fine young roasters up with her. Awful lean the venison and pa'tridge come this time of year. So send up a couple fat chickens, hey?"

Marthe appeared around her husband, without touching him causing him to step back inside the door. One hand carried a basket filled with bottles and bundles all wrapped in cloth. In the other she held the smallest pair of bearpaw snowshoes Connie had seen. She wore a plaid mackinaw over thick layered woolen skirts. She came straight to Connie and said, "That baby coming?"

"I guess. I don't know. She's bleeding."

Marthe nodded. "Bleed. What else?"

"Nothing yet I guess. She said not."

"Bleed heavy or light?"

"Oh Jesus I don't know. Light she said, I think. But that was a while ago. It could be anything now. Norman went after Doctor Hurdle and Leah bid me come after you."

Marthe said nothing. Nodded once and handed up the basket for Connie to take. Then sat on the ground to strap the bearpaws to her boots. "Carry that stuff down. Me, I be right along."

"Get up behind me. We can get there quick. Pete did fine in the dark coming overhill and he don't lack room for two."

Marthe stood, shuffled in her snowshoes and buttoned her mackinaw. Grinned. "Not for gin or gold, me. You see you, I run on these. Ever thing crusted fine an I just fly. Me, I go up and over, not all the way round. Could even be I beat you down."

"She hoped to get you there before Doctor."

"She just bleeding a liddle that man can't hurt her much. Sides, I tell you, I beat you to her." And turned and stepped into the darkness of the woods, a luminous figure against the gray-stained old snow. Walked a step or two more, paused, rocked side to side as testing the snowcrust, walked again and then skipped out into a spread-footed short loping motion. Connie heard the slap and cut of the snowshoes against the snow. Going uphill the old woman seemed to lose nothing of her stride as long as Connie could hear her moving. Then she was gone from earshot. I soured that, Connie thought. Then aloud, "Pete! Let's get to home." Wheeled him hard about and clapped her heels to him and loosed the reins. He jolted forward as if released. The dogs began to roar into the night again, Ballou calling after her about chickens.

Her head still ringing from the downhill scramble of the horse she came into the kitchen and found Marthe washing her hands at the sink. The bearpaws thawing crust from their lattice to puddle the floorboards and her mackinaw flung over the tabletop. She set the basket of tonics and herbs beside it. Marthe took up a towel and dried her hands with the precision of peeling an apple and spoke before Connie might.

"She fine so far. Liddle bleed. Nothing more, not yet." And poured water from the copper boiler into a washbowl. Crossed the kitchen as if it were her own and took a stack of worn washed sacking towels from a cupboard, draped them over one arm and took up the bowl. "Least you got plenty water ready. Most likely won't need but still. I'm gonna clean her up some, set with her, me. You make up some coffee so's ready them men when they get here. They be runnin a liddle late, hey?" Grinning at Connie, teeth like amber shards. "Then come up you, tell her about you ride."

So Connie was still in the kitchen, still in the oversized ballooning wool trousers, still flushed and animate from the marrow out, leaning over the range with a spit of crushed eggshell in her palm, waiting for the coffee to come to a boil so she could drop the shell in to settle the grinds, when her brother came through the entry way with the short stout doctor following, the doctors cleated bootheels reporting against the boards in perfect counterpoint to his ragged wheeze. Connie dropped the eggshell in and pulled the coffee to the cool side of the range and turned as Norman spoke to her.

"What's that Pete horse doing dragging a pair of lead-ropes around the yard?" His face splotched red and white with cold and wind and anger rising already from knowing something somehow was done without his plan or guidance: knowing of action beyond him, behind him. How he'd see it, she knew. And before she could speak he went on, the anger rising even more clearly now and she understood it was fear as much as any other thing and she wondered if he knew that as he said, "Why aren't you up with her? She all right?" His eyes scanning the stovetop, the hot water, the effects of Marthe.

The doctor was coming out of his overcoat as if from a tight embrace. His pince-nez were steamed and his vest was stretched over a great tight ponderous stomach, the watch chain a line of gold links fine as sutures. "The girl's upstairs." It was not a question. "I'll want hot water, strong soap and old clean quilts or blankets for when her water breaks. Or whatever mess we face. She's far enough along we should get a baby out of it. But we'll know that when it bawls. Also, that coffee, and applejack if you've got it; not, cider'll do. He had a handkerchief out to wipe his lenses clear and dab at his face, now throwing out a fine sheen of sweat. He loosened the knot of his bowtie and the collar of his shirt and lifted up the snap-top bag of cracked leather. He saw the basket then on the tabletop and prodded it with his finger. "What's this?"

"Marthe Ballou's. She's up with her." She looked to her brother. "She made me go after her. She's fine; she's all right just now. She threatened to go herself if I'd not; I had no choice." She ran eyes toward the doctor and back. "She knows what she wants."

"You left her." His eyes not hatred but swollen bright as an animal's. She feared him.

"You've made a grave error." The doctor lifted his bag and looked to Connie, his swollen features monkish, jowled, purulent. The veins of his eyes a red lichen. He said, "A hard job multiplied without need. I'll want the brandy with the coffee. Not in but alongside. A woman bearing or in labor is not within reason. You'll learn that firsthand yourself one fine day." And strode to the hallway where his bootheels diminished on the runner there and then resumed up the stairs and fell away again meeting the upper runner.

Connie took up the coffee and poured out a cup and then a second and handed one to her brother. He'd not turned his outrage from her while the doctor spoke. She said, "Marthe says she's fine now. Nothing going on at all. I didn't know what to do. She was lathered up but the bleeding had stopped. It seemed best to do's she asked, to calm her. It was a risk. There was no one here but me and she said Jump. I did. I'd dare you do otherwise given the same. And you know she don't like that man." Glaring hard to meet his stare, her whole body trembling.

Norman balanced the cup and saucer on the smooth worn rim of the soapstone sink, his fingers deliberate, trembling just away from the cup, still burning her with his eyes. "I trusted you. Trusted you to do's I asked." His teeth set, the words coming through them.

"Do as you asked." She mocked his words back at him. "You think to ask what anybody else wanted? You think to ask what she wanted?"

"Goddammit!" He swept the coffee into the sink. The rupture of cup and saucer as a physical blow to Connie, running through her. Norman said, "I did what I thought best."

"You! Always you! I know you. You came running down the hill and scooped her up and carried her back to bed and raced off after the doctor. Didn't pause for a minute but racing around like you know just the right thing. The first simple thing comes into your mind, now that's the right thing. And expect everybody else to agree with it, not question it. Just like you're God or something. But I'll tell you what, Norman. You was God you wouldn't have had to run after that doctor. You would've known how to stay right here and make things right. Maybe even, you was God, you'd have had those other babies too. Maybe everything you ever thought or did would've been perfect, right as rain, instead of hit-or-miss like the rest of us. That's how it'd be, wouldn't it? Tell you what, you think about that." Was shaking, her mouth twisted, anger contorted around the words. Her lips wet as if the words were the liquid gush of her fury.

He stood gazing at her, his head quivering with anger, his color like new brick. He parted his lips to speak and shut them again. She faced him. The room smelled of wet wool, sweat, fear, coffee. After a long moment he turned his back to her and began picking up the broken china from the sink. Then he stood like that, not moving. After a moment one hand lifted from the sink heaped with shards. He piled them carefully on the drainboard. His back to her, he said, "So she's all right?"

"Go see yourself. Take up whatever it is that fat man wants and see your wife. She's fine."

He then turned, his face now thoughtful. He nodded. "She knew what she was up to. She'd asked me, I'd have been hard pressed." He paused, glanced toward the hall and went on, "She strike you as being not within reason?"

Connie smiled. "She's ferocious all right."

"Yuht." He would not grin back but said, "So how's that Pete ride?"

"Kind of broad but wicked smooth. Why'd you lose your hurry to get upstairs?"

"Thought I'd let things settle out with the three of them first." He shook his head. "That Hurdle's a pushy little son of a gun, idn't he?"

"More a popgun than anything else."

"Well," said Norman, "I'm going upstairs."

The doctor had lighted a lamp in the upstairs hall and was tilted back in a straight chair there with his heels up on a rung. He scanned them as they came, his face wrung in smirked disgust. "I'm no use here. The colored girl won't allow examination or cooperate otherwise. The hag Ballou sits in the rocker chirping laughter like a squirrel. A pair of monkeys the two of them."

"Shut that."

"You'll carry me back overstreet."

"I'll carry you nowhere right now." Norman opened the bedroom door and stepped in. As he did the doctor said, "My fee's the same I sit here or deliver the child."

Connie looked down at him as she passed into the room. "Thank goodness for that," she said. "We can all rest easy now."

Marthe had the lamps down and the room was golden. She sat in a corner working a cat's-cradle, her hands up before her with spread fingers, the geometry of strings taut and everchanging as her erect fingers dipped and lifted, her hair a waterfall onto her shoulders. The room redolent of her wood-smoked woman and the stale mint tea and underlying all that the faint taint of blood. Leah was still up against the pillows, her head back deep into them and her arms spread over the covers in ease. On the night-table the washbasin stained in a swirled stream. A clot of damp cloth also stained beside the door.

Norman went to the bedside and stood over it, looking down. She looked up at him, her face relaxed, without expression. As if waiting for him. She said, "Hey there, Norman."

"I went to hell's half acre and back."

"I'm sorry bout that."

"You might've told me what you wanted."

"It wouldn't have done no good, I did."

He nodded. "It was a waste of time, still."

"Not my fault. Wasn't me in a panic."

He looked off across from her to the far wall. Cabbage roses faint and faded on old paper. Each seemed with its own shadow from the lamp. He looked back to her. "I was afraid of losing you."

Without smiling, her face lit with humor. "It'll be more than this gets rid of me."

He shook his head. "You oughtn't have been alone though."

She studied him a moment as if making up her mind. Then, her voice lowered for only him to hear, "I wasn't."

He took his hands from his trouser pockets and ran them together before him, his fingers muscled and swollen with work. As if he wanted to touch her. As if he wanted to take something up and hold in them. As if he wanted them available, visible, capable, before the unknown of the room. The cabbage roses almost an audience of dim worn past faces. He assumed she was speaking of the child in her belly but did not want to know if it was otherwise. She watched his hands and he watched the depth of glow in her eyes on him. Thinking she understood everything his clumsy hands were reaching for. She reached a hand then and covered his knit fingers with her own: long supple slender hand that gripped hard once and went back down onto the quilt beside its mate, both resting over the heave of belly. Norman turned then to speak to Marthe.

"Snowcrust must've been iced up pretty good in the woods tonight."

She tilted only her head in shrug. "Them bearpaws cut the ice pret good. Sides, it kept me movin."

"What do you think about this woman lying here?"

She continued working the cat's-cradle, her eyes off it and on Norman. "A liddle hard to say. What I think, that bleed just a liddle-what?-false nothing just to scare you. She go through the night fine I bet she go rest the way. Maybe she done something more she ought to. I bet she go just fine. But we wait the night to declare that. Dawn come then we can bet she go the last two, three weeks so fine. But she be stay in that bed even then, not up moving round, caring for you, hey?"

Norman nodded and stepped close to her. "Anything I can get for you, Marthe? Anything you need?"

"Me? I'm just fine. Tell you, what you need to do, get that man out the hall something to drink. I sit here, can smell the need coming off him even worse than his fear. It settle ever thing down round here, you do that."

"I can do that. I was inclined to deny him."

She shook her head at him. "Naw, don't do that. He suffer, we all gonna suffer."

"I'll do it," Norman said. "I need to put those horses up anyhow."

"You seen the ice busting out the river?"

"Yuht. Godawful big chunks shelving up atop each other, riding and jamming the channel broken in the middle."

She nodded. "Been years I seen that. Used to love I was down to see it. Don't get round like old times, me."

"I appreciate you made it down to here. That horse would've rode double, I bet."

"Less far to fall, them snowshoe." She grinned at him. "Get on, put you horse up and fix that doctor, him be hurtin pretty good by now I bet."

"Yuht. I bet." He turned to the bed, Leah watching him. He felt awkward, oversized in the room of women. His sister in the straight chair by the washstand. She'd gone out while he was talking to Marthe and was back in her skirts. So he only settled his gaze serious upon Leah and said, "I'll be back."

She said, "I know."

To Connie he said, "I'll take care of your horse." As he went out Leah asked Connie about the ride uphill. Then he pulled the door shut. The doctor was missing. Norman went downstairs and found him in the kitchen standing over the range with a fresh cup of coffee. Norman pointed to the door to the cellar steps and said, "Down there's a piddly cask of applejack. Cider in the barrel's not bad too. I got to care for my horses; then I might join you in a tipple." The doctor raised rheumy eyes upon Norman and gazed at him hard, the look of a man caught between being found out and deliverance. He sighed and slowly twisted his cup in the saucer, his motion deliberate, calibrated. He pursed his mouth and relaxed it open. "The girl is fine?"

"She is."

"I feel I'm no help here."

"You're here come help is called for."

"That's right." The doctor twisted the cup a final time and let go of it. "You need help with your horses?"

"No," said Norman. "Go on down cellar. Could be a jolt'd do us both good. I'll be only a couple of minutes." Thinking, Let him go ahead and satisfy himself without being watched and then catch up to him before he's too far gone. Thinking that inside himself was the same dweller owned the doctor; thinking his fields and woodlot and numbing round of work was not so different from the sweetened bite of drink. He wondered what it was for the doctor. And wondered if he'd grow to know his own more as age came to him. Hoped it would not be so. And saw no reason to believe that. So he scooped up Marthe's bearpaws to set in the entryway where the webbing would stay cold and coatless went out into the night, leaving the doctor to himself.

In the yard Pete and Tommy stood head to head, the one still in the cart shafts and the other trailing rope lines as if tied to the ground. Both swung heads to regard Norman as he came forth from the house. Steam rose from their nostrils and light ice lay prickling their raised coats. It had gone cold. The breaking river was a distant thing in the cold-stilled air. Norman was ready for the relentless deep thawing of April; ready for April altogether. What it was bringing. He went to Pete and lifted off the bridle with the makeshift reins and set it over one of Tommy's hames. Freed, Pete went for the barn. Norman dropped the cart shafts from Tommy's harness and went to the head of the horse and rubbed his bristled nose with one hand, breaking off the ice beads and warming it. He tilted his head back to look at the constellations: Orion overhead but swinging now to the south as well as the west. Wherever heaven lay, he doubted it was out among the stars. He didn't know where it was. He didn't touch the bridle but laid his hand along the muzzle of the horse and said "Step up" and took his hand away. The horse followed him to the barn.

The lamp wick was guttered and the chimney fouled with sooted smoke, the room weaving with shadow seeming to crawl the walls and sprawl away on the ceiling; the contraction that woke her was a hard stab that broke a gasp from her, waking her from a dreamsleep of contractions and constrictions, the feeling of not being able to get her breath and immediately as bad as they were it was better to be awake. She had slid down the pillow bolster and sideways and so righted herself quietly and squirmed to a body comfort. The room was empty of people but for Marthe who sat collapsed into sleep in the corner rocker. Leah lay in bed silent, taking long steady breaths against the next building pain, not wanting to wake Marthe or anyone, not yet, wanting to be alone with this while she could. When they came the pains were of such violence that they seemed to seize her and each left her with long moments of tear-eyed breathlessness. Then she would calm and gather toward the next. She thought to herself it was like having fatal hiccups and almost laughed aloud. It was nothing like that but the idea brought out a half laugh.

And then was lonely, not the loneliness of a child or the aching want of love felt when meeting Norman but the sharp desire for her mother, needing her mother there and then in the room with her, that need a brittle ache, a gorge in her soul: her mother. And that ache magnified with knowing nothing of where her mother was or how, even trying to see her, to envision or conjure something of her face. She would be a young woman still; for the first time Leah realized this. They knew nothing of each other. If there had been a way to send word someway she would've but there was none. Not even a letter. It had been as if in fleeing the old life she'd fled all the way into herself. Alone. How else to judge yourself and measure what distance covered if not through the reflected lens of parent or sibling? All this gone from her. And the wanting, the desire, was as if attempting to send a letter to a younger self. And so this left Norman. She felt a great fear of him, never once expressed and never would be. How could she explain that what she loved terrified her? He would understand and seek calm for her and so misunderstand completely. What she feared could not be reassured. The ones that can so simply destroy can never know they hold that power. Told to his face he'd laugh it away or at most watch her as a stranger for a day or two before falling back to his old easy rhythm with her. She knew his life too was shaped by hers but his was of solid construction: of granite rock, hardwood, black-turned earth. Hers was not even spiderweb but the dew-beads strung there on a summer morning.

And thought then again of her mother, birthing Leah at fifteen or sixteen, younger even than when Leah left home, birthing her in the small rank cabin alone with only the old woman Rey for aid. Rey probably all the help she needed, looking at Marthe Ballou sleeping in the corner, her mouth sagged open. Those old women always around someway. Witches, nearly. Knowing more than is good for them to know until you need them to know it. And wondered how her mother must've missed her own mother then, the little girl having a baby alone far from home. And was less lonely then, as if seeing all this stretching back made more sense for where she was lying and how. As if someway her mother was there with her. Knowing she would want to be was as if she were. Leah held her hands up over her face and between contractions wept silent into them. Oh God she wanted her mother.

When she took her hands away Marthe was watching her. Not moved in the chair but for her eyes open. A faint gray light smeared the window and the room was cold. Leah wiped her nose with the back of her hand and felt the pain reach and sear deep in her and went through that all the while looking back at Marthe. When it was done for this time Marthe leaned forward in the rocker and said, "You all right there, you?"

"I guess so. Seems like this baby wants to be born."

Marthe stood. "I thought maybe so."

It was a gray day. Dawn brought vain thin color to the underbelly of low rolled cloud and the wind turned and it was warm. Time to time spits of rain or sleet fell. Norman and Connie did morning chores together and in silence, each with their own aches from the night before and each with their ears strained, leading their whole bodies through the work, listening as if striving toward the silent house. The faint ping only of rain on the tin barn roofing. A little after nine Glen Clifford arrived in a high-wheeled gig to fetch the doctor for a man with both legs crushed during the night when he slipped standing too close on the heaving riverbank beside the bridge in Randolph, the man trying to watch out for ice lodging against the bridge abutments. Glen back in an hour without the doctor, who found the man dead and repaired then to his home to sleep away the night's long nurse at the applejack, sending message with Glen he'd come if needed. Glen and Connie sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee while Norman sat and fiddled or stood to pace, the house holding so easily the drifting down of drawn groaning and small choked-off cries. Midday Connie warmed food that none ate save for Norman, who ate a whole loaf of bread sliced and spread with butter. Then terrible cries rose and rose until they seemed to be only one long-drawn pitch of a soul fighting to escape itself and Norman bounded the stairs to the room where Leah drove him out with her cursing of him: God damn you Norman What'd you do to me Goddamn you. Marthe catching him at the door to stroke his arm, telling him to pay no mind, it was the pain of it; she needed that fight; it would pass. He went back downstairs through the kitchen to the cellar to draw a pitcher of cider but when he carried it back to the kitchen Glen was gone again and Connie was over the range, pushing back and forth the copper boiler and the big kettle and several smaller pots all filled with water, as a commander keeps all craft standing to in formation before a stout wind. All she sought was each at a constant simmer. He sat alone with a mug of cider but could not stand the cries and rose and carried the cider with him to the barn, where he sat in the small shop room on the south side and sharpened tools and watched out the window at the spring weather rolling in. And so missed when Glen returned carrying Mrs. Pelham with the fey Breedlove woman as familiar or shadow or simple reinforcement but when Norman stepped forth from the barn midafternoon he saw the livery's best covered carriage, the wheels caked with mud and the underside coated above the axle, and knew then not only who had arrived but also that Glen would one day soon marry his sister. The carriage was no vehicle for weather thus. He wondered if the use of it had been approved by Clifford the elder or if the son had taken it upon himself. Either way the meaning of it was clear. And went to the house to find the women silent in the parlor balancing cups of tea on knees drawn together, each listening not only to the rising and falling of life searching up the stairs but also to their own memories or hopes. Glen twisted from his stance at the window to duck his head at Norman. Norman spoke to the women and left them there, taking Glen to the kitchen to pour him cider. Now on the stove alongside the simmering pots was the great lard kettle, bubbling. As the men sat silent Connie came in and began to turn doughnuts into the lard and out again with a wire hook. She piled a plateful and carried them into her mother and Breedlove. Norman and Glen stood beside the stove and ate them as they rose and were drained on brown wrapping paper, the grease on them scalding the roofs of their mouths. The broken open sweet steam rising of sugar and yeast.

Norman felt as if each of his bones and joints and muscles were weakened to breaking. As if he'd been holding himself upright against a descending sky. Almost as if back with the long marching. His eyes ached and brimmed red. If not careful, his hands would shake as he reached for one thing or another. The cider helped only in that he no longer felt as if he'd fall down. It had been a long night with the doctor and at some point during it he'd failed to anticipate the day. Believing she'd hold out the short weeks left. Now he felt a sickness through him, not of his own making but as if he'd failed her some way. Some way he could never call back. Never do over. Her cries overhead had gone off now, had faded to deep grunts and body-drawn groaning. He had decided she would not live through this. He had decided he could forgive no one. Least himself. His revulsion was complete, near to panic. He stood eating doughnuts.

Then the house was quiet. He walked the kitchen. Connie came down and using thick rags lifted the copper boiler to carry up. He offered to take it and she looked at him and said no and went out. He listened to her footsteps up the stairs. Then quiet again. Then the single cry: high, torn, slicing keen as a razor, new. Raging into life. As if thrust from the womb and also torn from the breast of a greater, kinder mother. As if knowing no kindness had been done it. Furious rage. One raw gulped-out cry. As if knowing all the souls within the house straining to hear that cry knew this loss and so welcomed her joining them. Or had forgotten they knew it and so welcomed her as surrogate to themselves. That cry then: new, and very old.

Norman went upstairs to view his wife and daughter as soon as both were washed clean and swaddled, the child in lambskin with the fleece still on and Leah in a fresh nightgown and with the bed changed and the room cleared of the bloodied and soiled linens and toweling-Leah still sobbing and shaking, holding the child to her opened plump breast-and he went to the long narrow closet built-in and drew out an additional quilt and spread it over the bed, drawing it up close under the infant. Then Leah raised the child from her breast and the girl was silent as Norman held her, down before his chest as a small fragile piece of firewood, gazing into the puckered face with pinched closed eyes, holding her thus and feeling nothing, a small scrap of fear only and nothing more. The fear then nothing more than fear he might drop her or not hold her right. He'd expected something other than this but could not say what it was. So he only held her silent and read her features and looked to Leah and asked what they might call her. And Leah spoke her name, not as a question, not as a possibility but as an arrived-at thing and he shortened it and so it was done. Then he handed her back to her mother and Leah slid her gently sideways until the nipple brushed her mouth and the girl took it. And Leah, no longer sobbing but still racked with shaking, turned eyes up to him, eyes hooded with a bliss he'd seen before there and that seeing now ran a tremble through him, as if seeing something he ought not to. Leah smiling, her face etched with light over the long drain of fatigue, telling him to leave them then, telling him to send his mother up. And he looking down at her, his body and brain jangling, still had the moment of himself to bend and press his cold lips to her hot forehead before righting himself and agreeing he'd of course do that.

And so descended the stairs to find his mother at the parlor door, her face wary and soft at once, a small woman lined and frightened and radiant, close to tears. He touched her and told her it was a girl and for her to go up, and heard her tread the stairs, her steps tentative and gaining as she went; not the first time in six years she'd been in the house but the first time she'd climbed those stairs her feet knew as her own, and he swung out into the kitchen thinking there was all too great a pain in this to make sense of, too great to hope to change and yet no different than it could ever be. It was all he had and it made no sense. In the kitchen Marthe and Connie and Glen sat at the table, too high-spirited for him to understand and he went past them, saying nothing but what he had to, refusing Glen's help as he worked into his chore coat and went out into the young dark for the barns.

He fed and watered his stock and loaded the stoves in the brooder house and the laying barn and left the egg gathering for the morning, working through what should take near two hours in half that time. Working as one who gets the job done quickly not only for the stilled mind while doing it but to return to the tremble run through him as soon as he could. As if the brief time away was needed but nothing more. And came out to stand in the dark, the warm night, the clouds boiling overhead before a three-quarters moon. There was no sense to his life. He'd thought the child would bring it, that glimpsing her would run a charge through him and clarify his faults and gains. There was none of that. He supposed it would come, someway. He supposed he would love her. He guessed there would be a time he'd cut his arm away from him if only for her to use as a club to batter him with. But he felt none of this. He felt that love was only one more weight working to drag him bit by piece down into the earth. He kicked the toe of his boot into the soft deep mud and wondered why since he knew his destination anyway he couldn't savor what came before. He wondered was he selfish. If melancholy was just selfishness. He looked overhead. The sky was a turmoil. There was no mirror there. The sky was its ownself.

His mother came out of the house and found him. Stood before him a long beat, studying his face as if reading all of him there. She did not touch him. He gazed back at her, not caring how much of what she saw was true or not. After a while she reached and touched his arm. She said, "You've got a lovely baby girl." She paused and then went on. "She won't have an easy time of it. But what a time you'll have with her."

Named Abigail, they called her Abby. Eighteen months later the second girl, Prudence, called Pru, was born. Then twelve years would pass and they no longer cared or strived for another. And so the boy was born, named James for Norman's father. But Leah would not call him Jim or Jimmy. His sisters raised him as much as his mother at first; later instead of her. It was they who named him Jamie. He was as beautiful as Abby. He was a nightchild and would not work. He craved sensation of all sorts.