"What do you want me to say, Harold?"

"I want you to say that he's your dad, and even though he's a pain in the butt, you owe him. Rose owes him, too. Everything you got here, he made with John Cook. If this ain't the best farm in the county, then I don't know what is. Them Stanley boys been twisted in their sheets for years, trying to get a piece of this place, and they got two thousand acres and more. But none of their places are as good as this place, and they know it. That's what you owe Larry Cook, my girl."

"A farm isn't everything, Harold."

"Well, it's plenty, isn't it? It's more than one person is. One person don't break a farm up that lots of people have sweated and starved to put together." Harold was beginning to heave with anger.

"If you'd have been sons, you'd understand that. Women don't understand that." He stood up, walked to the back door, opened it, and spit off the porch. When he came back, he'd calmed himself a little.

He flattened his hair with his hands, sat down again, and looked into his coffee cup.

I said, "Rose doesn't owe him anything."

"I'm sure Rose says that. Rose has always been trouble, between you and me.

"Maybe you'd better shut up, Harold."

His head swiveled toward me, and I could see that he was startled, but the fact was that I was suddenly actually reeling with anger. I could hardly sit upright in my chair, I was so awash. I gripped the edge of the table to hold myself in place, and I said, "That's right, Harold.

Shut up. Just shut up about Rose and Daddy." If the coffeepot had been on the table, I would have thrown the hot coffee at him. I could see it across the kitchen, on the cold burner, and I longed to get up and grab it and use it the way you long to drink water when you are thirsty, or climb into bed when you are tired. I held on to the table.

"I'm doing you a favor here."

"Oh, yeah?"

"This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to take your dad to the church supper on Sunday. And you kids are going to show up there and have a nice meal. Fact is, I think you should work this out. You got your side and Larry's got his. I know that." He sought my gaze and smiled at me. "I've known you all your life, Ginny. I know you got a side here, and maybe even it's the right side. But if you work it out, you can get past sides, and keep this place going for another fifty years. That's worth something, ain't it?" He talked slowly and steadily, the way Jess talked, and underneath the elderly quaver and the country grammar was a voice like Jess's. I gave in to it a little, for that. I nodded. "Okay, then," s3id Harold.

The man from Kansas stayed for supper. I grilled pork chops over /soj the lire and made salad from our lettuce, had new potatoes from Rose's garden, and peas. He said, "Man, this is heaven to me, this kind of dinner on this place."

Ty said, "It is good, isn't it?"

I said, "Ty, honey, you look really beat," and the man from Kansas started exclaiming about how much they'd gotten done. He said, "The company doesn't like me to keep them on overtime, but I saw that we could finish up this evening if we kept at it."

I said, "Will you be back after the Fourth, then?"

"Naw. I was just telling Ty, here, we've got to wait at least four days, so I'm giving everybody a couple of days off."

I looked at Ty, but he was looking out the window. His plate was clean, so I said, "Sweetie, you want anything more?"

He looked at me abruptly, then got up from his seat. He said, "If I'm going to catch up on my sleep tonight, I'd better go work on the hogs."

The man from Kansas wanted to talk, so I listened, made coffee, tried not to watch Ty when he came in later, kicked off his boots, washed up, and passed through the kitchen without saying anything.

The man from Kansas eyed him, then me, then smiled. After that, he talked on and on about his growing up and his father's place and the differences between Colorado and Iowa and Kansas, then about his divorce and his teenaged son, who was pretty wild, and how the storm knocked out the electricity over at the motel just when he was sitting down to watch TV. I got rid of him at ten forty-one. Ty was well and truly asleep when I got upstairs. That was the first night.

I have to say that we all avoided each other these few days, though for me, the urge to keep to myself was accompanied by a strange longing, missing those I didn't need to miss, avoiding those I missed.

I didn't even want to see Jess. Wednesday morning, the Fourth of July, another mild, crystalline day, I walked across the fields in the opposite direction from the dump that now represented Jess to me, toward Mel's corner. I scouted around, looking for signs of the old pond, but I couldn't even tell where it might have been-the rows of corn marched straight across black soil as uniform as asphalt. The pond, but also the house, the farm garden, the well, the foundations of the barn, all were obliterated. It was not as though this was mysterious to me-I remembered quite well the coming of the bulldozer, the knocking down and burning of the house and barn. It was a common enough event in the early sixties, when new, bigger tractors meant greater speed and a wider turning radius, fences coming down to create larger fields. The bulldozers were a sight I had glanced at from the window of my bedroom, before going back to doing my algebra or trying my hair in a bouffant style. Now, though, the hallmark of my new life was consternation at even this ancient bit of change. How many times had I walked this way in shorts and a T-shirt (Mommy didn't think bathing suits were necessary just for swimming in the pond), heading confidently for a swim, knowing precisely where I was going and what pleasures were to come? But in the leafy rows of corn I did not find even the telltale dampness of an old pothole to orient myself.

B THE TIME WE'D CHATTED casually to everyone else, we started to feel calmer ourselves. Or at least I did. Talking about Daddy as if these quirks would iron themselves out encouraged me to think that they would. Not talking to Rose or Pete or Ty very much allowed me to imagine that they were feeling about like I was, shocked by events, but able to cope. Clearly, Daddy needed some psychological help, had needed it for a long time, and Rose needed to confront him with her memories. Pete, too, would have to get in on this, and, of course, Ty would have to know and maybe the girls. I could readily imagine us after all of this confronting, after some set number of visits to a psychiatrist's office (which I imagined to be just like the office of the chiropractor in Pike). I imagined a resumption of our old life, but with a different spirit, different subterranean currents-not so much anger and disquiet, more affection, or at least, acceptance, and peace. I wouldn't think about Jess Clark any more, either.

I let myself just twice, imagine a baby, a child who would turn all my miscarriages, and everything else, into good luck, whose birth, after the onset of self-knowledge (Daddy's, mainly, but ours, too), was timed for happiness.

The psychiatrist would of course take our side, Rose's side, that is.

When we were all sitting in his sunny office, he would sit in the middle, between Daddy and us, and he would phrase our, Rose's, accusations perfectly. They would flow smoothly around Daddy's angers and defenses, dissolve the mortar joints like sugar, crumble the bricks themselves. There would be no yelling or threats, because the psychiatrist wouldn't allow that. Maybe things would never be perfect, but was Harold Clark entirely wrong? Wasn't what had been built worth some kind of effort? What I couldn't imagine was everything flying apart.

I looked up Psychiatrists in the Mason City phone book. There were two listings, one for a clinic in Des Moines, and one for a clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I dialed the one in Rochester and asked to speak to one of the doctors. I was told they were therapists, not doctors.

While I held the line, I stared out the window toward Rose's house and the road down to Daddy's. I imagined the three-hour drive to Rochester. I imagined each of us taking turns telling our stories: Daddy's impatience, Ty's skepticism, Pete's refusal to say much, Rose's angry loquacity, my own stomach-churning anxiety, Pammy and Linda's fear. I imagined writing checks on Daddy's account for large sums of money. I imagined the three-hour drive back. A therapist came on the line, and I knew that within a few minutes I would have committed myself to what I had imagined, the impossible. I hung up without speaking.

It was then that I thought of Henry Dodge, our pastor. I would not, in the best of times, have said that I was close to Henry Dodge.

I doubt that anyone would have, including his wife, Helen, or either of their children. They had once hailed from Fargo, North Dakota, though Henry's previous ministry, until the mid-seventies sometime, had been in Denver. He told us how he got to us, a fifty-year-old man rotated out of a big suburban church to our little town, and when he told us (didn't get along with the pastor, became impatient with some of the congregation, had doubts about how his earlier ambitions squared with his faith), he had spoken in a tone of voice that declared openly how moved he was by the crisis that resulted in his coming, but in fact, his coi,lidences had resulted in embarrassment on all sides rather than something that felt like normal friendship. Daddy said he should keep that sort of thing to himself so I'm sure the other farmers Daddy's age did, as well. Probably people my age seemed less put off and so Henry felt that he'd befriended us.

His manner and performance often came up for discussion; the congregation was paying him, after all, which licensed us to discuss at will whether we were getting value for our money. Most people actually liked him, but perhaps for things like his angular frame and slow-spoken manner, his bone-deep understanding of the tact with which you talk to farmers of northern European extraction, his occasional flash of dark wit, no doubt inherited from his mother, who was the only daughter of a long line of Norwegian farmers. His six uncles still farmed around Fargo; people liked him for that, too. But the struggle that was uppermost in his mind, and for which, you always got a feeling, he gave himself a little bit of credit, nobody cared for that.

Once I thought of Henry, I found that I was so eager to talk to someone, anyone, that I ran into my bedroom and changed out of my shorts into a plaid skirt. I had a free afternoon, of sorts. I had intended to bake a peach pie and weed the garden, but until time to get started on supper, I could leave without anyone 5 commenting.

It was Friday afternoon. I decided that the most casual thing to do would be not to call ahead, but to drop by, as if on my way home from shopping. It was not Henry Dodge himself that attracted me.

Confiding in him might be hard, actually. But that word "pastor" promised a patience and capaciousness of understanding that would be just the thing. We could get Daddy into Henry's office. It wasn't far and advice would be free. Ty liked Henry better than I did, even praised his sermons from time to time for being "pretty smart."

When I passed the site of the new buildings, I saw the men the company had brought in for the construction, plus Ty, down on their hands and knees, smoothing cement. There were six of them, heads down, crawling backwards. It struck me as funny and I laughed for the first time in what seemed liked days.

Coming into Cabot, I could still see Henry in his office, wearing a brown suit. A diamond of sunlight would lie on the russet carpeting, and the seat cushions in the window seat would be a comfortable dusty green. My pastor's voice would be deep and hollow, a good place for me to stash my story. Even while I was telling it, the comfort of his murmuring would rise around it. And then he would tell me what to do-how to talk to Daddy and Rose and Ty.

The result, but faster, because of some kind of miracle, would be the same as with the "therapist." That was what I really wanted, wasn't it? The feeling of shame that was still animating my flesh with goading particularity and self-consciousness-it would be enough for that to dissipate.

Henry was not in his office, but he was somewhere-the door to his office was open and his chair was pushed back from the desk.

There were no shafts of sunlight-the windows faced east and north.

The carpet was beige, and the window seats, I remembered, were actually in the church parlor. They, too, had been covered in beige not too long ago by the ladies' sewing group. Henry's office was small and cluttered. Files were stacked on both of the chairs I might have sat in.

I stood in the hall for live minutes. During that time, the phone rang four times, each time for six or more rings. Outside, a lawn mower clattered around the corner of the church. There was a window in the swinging doors down the hall. I saw the face of the church secretary, whom I had avoided coming in, look through it and take note of my presence.

That was the thing. Henry was not only my "pastor," he was Henry. His voice wasn't a low murmur, for one thing, it was flat and somewhat droning, with an edge of unsuccessfully suppressed emotion. He was fifty, but seemed thirty and just starting out, as if his experiences had taught him very little.

I looked around, wondering how to get out without anyone's seeing me, and he came through the swinging doors. He wore grassstained shorts, and I realized that the sound of the lawn mower was gone. It was Henry who'd been cutting the grass. He came toward me with an earnest smile.

His face was red and sweat ran off his upper lip. I stepped back, setting my shoulder blades against the stippled concrete-block wall.

Henry came on. When he got to me, he said, "Ginny!" and seemed to press me toward the door of his office. It seemed like he pressed me, but perhaps it was only me, resisting. He said, "Now, Ginny, you mustn t worry. Harold Clark-" Just then the phone rang again, and he leaned across the desk to pick up the receiver. His back was to me. I walked, then ran, to the exit. I couldn't do it. He was too much himself too small for his position, too anxious to lit in to our community, too sweaty and dirty and casual and unwise. I started the car and drove out of the parking lot. In my rearview mirror, I could see him waving to me from the door I had come out of.

That night after supper, I called Rose and got her to meet me on Daddy's porch. We sat together on the top step, and it took me a while to say anything. Long ribbons of clouds floated a ways above the western horizon, and the cornfield on the other side of the road rolled to meet it. A wash of pale pink seeped upward from the lower margin of the sky and rimmed the clouds with lire. Above them, clear blue shaded to lavender. Rose bent down and brushed some dirt out of the corner of the step below us. I said, "Rose, don't you think we should talk some more? What's next?"

"We'll see."

"I'm afraid to see.

"What are you afraid of?"

"I guess I'm afraid ofanything having to do with Daddy, actually."

Rose laughed, then she said, "Did we treat him badly?"

"I know people think we did."

"But did we? Do you think so?"

I thought about the storm, the light, his cursing me, and then, clearest of all, that moment when he came close to me and lowered his voice, tried to wheedle me. Even then, live days later, it gave me a shiver, as if water had trickled down my back. Threats I was used to, but this-I said, "I don't think so, no.

"Well, then. Stick with what's true."

"What's true?"

"He went out into the storm because he was stubborn and childish."

The clouds had drifted lower on the horizon and now blazed up as the sun dipped behind them. I said, "I don't understand Daddy.

I just don't."

"You're not supposed to, don't you get it? Where's the fun in being understood? Laurence Cook, the great I AM." She laughed again.

"I want to."

"I don't. Anyway, I understand him perfectly. You're making it too complicated. It's as simple as a child's book. I want, I take, I do."

"That's not enough for me. I can't believe it's that simple."

"It is."

"I can't imagine it. We're his children!"

"I'm telling you, if you probe and probe and try to understand, it just holds you back. You start seeing things from his point of view again, and you're just paralyzed." Her voice dropped. She said, "That was his goddamned hold over me, Ginny! For all those years! He talked.

He made me see things from his point of view! He needed someone! He needed me! I looked so good to him! He loved me, my hair, my eyes, my spunk even, though it made him mad, surely I understood that, too, how he had to get mad at some of the things I did! Ginny, you don't want to understand it, or imagine it. You don't you don't you don't."

But I wanted to.

I said, "We've got to talk to him about it."

Rose whooped.

I tried to summon some authority, but my voice trembled. "I mean it."

Rose said, "Be realistic."

"I have to hear what he says.

The upper sky was now black, but the lower sky was still misted with light.

I thought about what she had said. This did sound strangely like Daddy and cast a reflective credibility backward, over everything else. But it didn't change my mind. I said, "I've still got to hear what he says."

It was dark on the porch. I could no longer see Rose, so perhaps that is why I could so clearly sense her mulling this over. Finally, she said, "Okay. We'll see what happens at the church supper. Maybe there will be some kind of opportunity after that."

THE CHURCH HELD A POTLUCK every year on the Sunday after the Fourth of July, to celebrate the anniversary of its founding in 1903. We dressed in our nicest casual clothes, baked our noodlehamburger casserole and our brownies, and went together, the two families. Rose made us stand up straight so she could survey us before we got in the car.

"Respectable to the core," she declared.

I have to admit that the sight of Daddy startled me. In only live days, he had been transformed. The sight of him stopped me in the doorway of the church hall, so that Rose, coming behind, ran smack into me. I said, "Look at him."

"Well, I didn't expect Harold to wash and iron his clothes the way we do. He's obviously worn the same thing since Monday night."

"But his hair's all standing on end. Doesn't Harold have a comb he can lend him?"

Rose stepped around me. "For that matter, why don't they go over to Daddy's house and pick up some of his stuff? It's none of our business. It just goes to show you.

"What?"

"How much we were actually doing for him. Namely everything." Her voice was bitterly triumphant, and she marched into the hall with her pan of brownies, smiling and greeting everyone in the room.

But it wasn't only the clothes. At first I thought he must have dropped some weight, or that he was ill from the storm, but it wasn't that. It was that his whole demeanor was a tad abashed, even sub missive. It was not like anything I had ever seen, or thought possible, with Daddy. Ty came in from parking the car. I said, "Look at Daddy. Does he seem different?"

Ty stared at him for a moment, then said, "He looks his age, if that's what you mean." Then he glanced coolly at me and went to join some of the Stanleys by the soft-drink table.

Harold Clark was talking to Mary Livingstone. I saw his eye fall on Rose, then he turned and looked around until he saw me. He smiled. I smiled back. A moment later, Harold went over to Daddy and stood with him, talking to the people that Daddy was talking to-Henry Dodge, Bob and Georgia Hudson. I noticed Pete, standing alone against a wall, drinking a Coke. He looked like he'd rather be drinking a beer. I remember that his eyes scanned the crowd with predatory detachment, though at the time I only wondered whom he was looking for. I took my casserole to the table, raised the lid, and inserted the serving spoon.

The table, as always, was disproportionately laden with desserts.

Someone had made a chocolate cream roll, decorated with fresh cherries.

That was the most ambitious dish.

Daddy went from group to group, saying something with an air of deferential sociability. I couldn't take my eyes off him, and I longed to hear what he was saying. Harold followed him, too, his protector.

Daddy had never been the mixing sort. He'd always stood in a convenient corner (convenient to the food) and waited for the other farmers to join him, to seek his advice, or try to impress him, or join with him in a duet of ritual complaints about the weather and the government. I watched him, but he didn't acknowledge me.

Rose was more brazen. She joined one of the groups and listened, smiling, as he talked. She didn't move away until Harold actually caught her eye and glared at her. A few minutes later, she wandered past me. She said, "Get this."

"I'm listening."

"This is a quote, word for word."

"Okay."

"Terrible conditions. Their children put them there. I saw it myself.

Their children put them there. Their children put them there."

"What was he talking about?"

"The county home. Considering that Marlene Stanley's ninety-six-year-old mother has been in the county home for ten years, I thought it was especially thoughtful of Daddy to mention it to her."

"Well, everybody here has got some relative in there."

"That must be why their eyes are glazing over. He's going on and on about it. The same six sentences over and over."

"What else?"

"About the children stealing the farms." She rolled her eyes and shrugged. I looked up and saw Daddy staring at us as if he had just noticed us for the first time. I mentioned this to Rose, and she turned and stared back at him. I said, "Let's not."

"Let's not what?"

"Let's not look like we're plotting against him."

"Why not?"

"It makes me nervous. I want to talk to him."

"Go do it, then."

"Okay." I took one or two steps toward him, and he turned away, toward one of the church ladies, who was handing him a drink. He smiled at her and thanked her, ducking his head as if truly grateful.

I was amazed. I took another two steps, but he clearly backed away.

I saw that I was going to have to sneak up on him unexpectedly.

There were some people by the soft-drink table, and I went and joined them, but only long enough to elude Daddy's gaze. Then I scurried along the back wall of the room and ducked into a vestibule.

I saw Rose by one of the front tables, looking around, but I didn't catch her attention. I waited. After a few minutes that I spent smiling and nodding at the few people who noticed me, Daddy came near.

I slid up next to him and said, "Daddy!" He froze, not looking at me, but searching the room for someone. The place was getting hot.

Some men got up on chairs and pushed the windows to their widest.

Henry Dodge brought in another fan, set it on a chair, and turned it on.

At last Daddy turned his gaze to meet mine. I was preoccupied with how I was going to phrase my question-Rose said, or did you, or I have to know, but all I got out was another "Daddy," when he interrupted me and said, "Their children put them there.

And the conditions are terrible." His voice was not the usual aggressive rumble, but flatter, softer, more tentative. I looked him in the eye for the first time. He turned away at once, but not before I saw an abashed, questioning look. My voice vanished.

He walked away. After a minute, I went into the women's bathroom, then I went and found Rose.

As soon as she saw me, she said, "Wait till you hear this. Mary Livingstone has been over to Harold's twice. She thinks Daddy's lost his mind."

"I just talked to him. HeRose muttered, "This enrages me."

"What?"

"This ploy."

"Rose, he-" She lowered her voice, grasped the front of my shirt, and pulled me to her. "I know this. I know that his face is a black ocean and there's always always always the temptation to drown in that ocean, to just give yourself up and sink. You've got to stare back. You've got to remind yourself what he is, what he does, what he did. Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he's having right now. That's how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he's done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there's true remorse. Nothing will be right until there's that."

"He looks so, sort of weakened."

"Weakened is not enough. Destroyed isn't enough. He's got to repent and feel humiliation and regret. I won't be satisfied until he knows what he is."

"Do we know what we are?"

"We know we aren't him. We know that to that degree we don't yet deserve the lowest circle of Hell."

It was incredible to me to hear Rose speak like this, but it was intoxicating, too, as sweet and forbidden as anything I had ever done.

I couldn't resist her. I said, "Rosie, I understand. I'm with you."

She planted a kiss on my cheek and let go of my shirt. I saw that some people were looking at us, including Ty, suspicious, and Pete, amused, from different parts of the room.

Some of the church ladies began calling out that it was time to eat, and everyone should line up. Just then, Jess Clark walked in.

Harold saw him at once and waved him over. Pretty soon, Jess came toward Rose and me with a smile that I felt myself hook onto, the way you would hook a rope ladder over a windowsill and lower yourself out of a burning house.

He said, "Harold's got this plan now, that we're all going to sit together with your dad."

Rose said, "Let me get everyone.

Jess said, "I'm skeptical of this. I want to register that."

"Why?"

"Harold's not a peacemaker. I think he's got something up his sleeve."

He shrugged. "But I always suspect Harold, and he's perfectly innocent often enough."

I said, "Shouldn't we wait for Loren?"

"He went to Mason City for something. I don't know what. He left while I was over by Sac City." He turned to me. "Ginny, I went to see that guy, the organic guy. I just got back. It was amazing.

He hasn't used chemicals on his land since 1964. He's seventy-two years old and looks fifty. They've got dairy cattle and horses and chickens for eggs, but his wife only cooks vegetarian meals. They get great yields! Just with green manures and animal manure. The vegetable garden is like a museum of nonhybrid varieties. We had carrot bread and oatmeal from their own oats for breakfast, and carrot juice, too, and he had twenty different apple varieties in his orchard.

I mean it was like meeting Buddha. They were so happy! I wish you'd come."

I didn't say that I'd had plenty to occupy me here.

"I feel right now like Harold's got to come around. If he doesn't come around, it's like looking paradise in the face and turning away from it. It doesn't seem possible to do that."

"People do it all the time."

"Do they? Do you really think they do?"

I didn't answer. We got into the line. He went on, "Yes, I guess I did, back in the drinking days. Hmm." But his whole demeanor said those days were gone now, nothing. I laughed to see him so joyful.

Carrot bread and oatmeal might have been welcome at that buffet table.

It was barbecued ribs, scalloped potatoes with ham, three kinds of potato salad, four meat casseroles, green beans with cream sauce three ways, two varieties of sweet corn salad, lime Jell-O with bananas, lime Jell-O with maraschino cherries, somebody's big beautiful green salad, but with a sweet dressing. Jess took baked beans and some leaves of salad, then fell upon the carrot-raisin slaw and helped himself to half of it. He skipped the desserts.

Daddy was already sitting at the table. His plate looked like mine-ribs, potato salad, corn, macaroni and hamburger, more ribs.

I said, in a friendly voice, "Well, Daddy, it looks like we picked all the same things." He ignored me.

I sat between Pammy and Jess, across from Daddy, far from Ty.

Rose sat on the other side of Jess and Pete at the end of the table.

As soon as I sat down my heart began to pound. Some people we didn't know began to pull out chairs, then they saw Harold looking at them and they backed away. Though we were uncomfortable enough to trade a few uncertain smiles, we settled ourselves, addressed our plates. I glanced at Ty's face, at his plate, the wife habitually noticing what the husband was eating. He, too, had some of the carrot slaw. I looked at my own plate, the ribs looked good but would be messy. I poked my white plastic fork into the corn.

All of this comes back to me as vividly as if these were my last impressions before an attack of amnesia. Harold's voice rose above the noises of the crowd, and he said, "Hey!" and Jess Clark's foot came down upon my own under the table, and his head snapped up.

I looked around. I had not noticed that the table Harold had chosen for us was right in the middle of the room, but it was.

Harold spoke up, as if he were making a long-awaited announcement, and said, "Look at 'em chowing down here, like they ain't done nothing.

Threw a man off his own farm, on a night when you'd a let a rabid dog into the barn."

People at other tables pretended not to notice, except that Henry Dodge looked undecided about whether to get up from his seat or not.

"Nobody's so much as come around to say I'm sorry or nothing.

Pair of bitches. You know I'm talking about Ginny and Rose Cook."

The minister decided to push back his chair. From across the room, Mary Livingstone's voice came, "Pipe down, Harold Clark. You're talking through your hat, same as always." Henry Dodge stood up.

Harold didn't say anything for a few moments, so Henry sat down again.

Then Harold said, "I got their number. Nobody's fooled me.

He leaned toward me. "Bitch! Bitch!" Now Jess stretched out his arm, his hand open at the end of it, and pushed Harold's face backward. It was a strange gesture, violent and gentle at the same time.

Harold, who had years of work behind him and was a strong man, couldn't be pushed far. Daddy sat there with a kind of bemused look on his face. When a momentary silence fell, he said, "Their children put them there. I saw it myself."

On the other side of Jess Clark, Rose heaved in her chair and said, "Daddy, just shut up. This has gone far enough."

Pammy took my hand.

Henry Dodge stood up again.

Harold jumped up, knocking his chair backward with a crash. He stretched across the table and grabbed Jess by the hair and pulled him out of his seat, then, with his other hand, he grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. Jess said, "Shit!" Harold jerked him across the table. Styrofoam glasses of pop rolled every which way. He yelled, "I got your number, too, you yellow son of a bitch. You got your eye on my place, and you been cozying up to me for a month now, thinking I'm going to hand it over. Well, I ain't that dumb." His voice rose mockingly, "Harold, you ought to do this! You ought to do that! Green manure! Ridge till cultivation! Goddamn alfalfa! Who the hell are you to tell me a goddamn thing, you deserter? This joker ain't even got the guts to serve his country, then he comes sashaying around here-" At this point, the minister had managed to get behind Harold and grab him. Jess socked his father across the face, and Harold fell back against the minister. Daddy shifted his chair out of the way and looked straight at me. A look of sly righteousness spread over his face.

When we left, Rose and me with Pammy and Linda by the hands, leaving Pete and Ty behind and taking the car, it seemed to me that we were fleeing. I kept saying, "Where are we going? Where are we going?"

certain there was somewhere to go. But we went straight home, as if there were no escape, as if the play we'd begun could not end. Since then, I've often thought we could have taken our own advice, driven to the Twin Cities and found jobs as waitresses, measured out our days together in a garden apartment, the girls in one bedroom, Rose and I in the other, anonymous, ducking forever a destiny that we never asked for, that was our father's gift to us.

I DON'T WANT TO MAKE TOO MUCH of our mother by asserting that she was especially beautiful or especially distinguished by heritage or intelligence. The fact is that she lit in. She belonged to clubs, went to church, traded dress patterns with the other women. She kept the house clean and raised us the same way the neighbors were raising their children, which meant that she promoted my father's authority and was not especially affectionate or curious about our feelings. She cared about what we did or failed to do-our homework, our chores, our share of the cooking and cleaning-and expected our feelings about these doings to rise and fall according to some sort of childhood barometer, irrelevant to her, having to do with "phases."

We were given to know that the house belonged in every particular to her-that she was responsible for it, but also that damaging it was equal to damaging her. I remember once when Caroline was about three, she got hold of a lipstick and made large circular marks on the wall of the upstairs hallway. My mother was not forgiving of Caroline's youth, nor did she blame herself for leaving the lipstick around. She spanked Caroline soundly, repeating over and over, "Must not touch Mommy's things! Must not draw on Mommy's wall! Caroline is a very bad girl!"

Even our things were her things, and when we broke our toys or tore our clothes, we were punished.

From our punishments, we were expected to learn, I suppose, to control ourselves. A careless act was as reprehensible as an act of intentional meanness or disobedience.

She had a history-she had gone to high school in Rochester, Minnesota, and one year of college in Cedar Falls-and for us this history was to be found in her closet. The closet was narrow and deep with an oval leaded window at the end. The closet pole ran lengthwise, and there was a single high shelf above the window. The wall that the closet shared with the closet in the adjoining room did not meet the ceiling for some reason, but was finished off with a gratuitous piece of oak trim. A pink shoebag hung from the door and slapped against it as the closet was opened. In each of the countless pockets of the shoebag rested a single shoe, heel outward. There were seven pairs of high heels that Rose and I counted each time we opened the closet. On the floor of the closet were two cylindrical hatboxes, and in these were eight or ten hats, some with flowers or fruit, most with half veils.

Also in the hatboxes were four or live corsages with their pearl-tipped pins stuck into the satin-wrapped stems. We admired these, and picked them up and held them to our chests, always knowing that if we pricked ourselves with the pins, we had only ourselves to blame.

The fabric of the dresses was cool, and if you stood up underneath them, the crepey freshness of the skirts drifted across your face in a heady scent of dust and mothballs and cologne and bath powder.

Although her present was measured out in aprons-she put a clean one on every day-her past included tight skirts and full skirts and gored skirts, peplum waists, kick pleats, arrowlike darts, welt pockets with six-inch-square handkerchiefs inside them, shoulder pads, Chinese collars, self-belts with self-buckles, covered buttons, a catalog of fashion that offered Rose and me as much fascination in its names as in its examples. The clothes ii, the closet, which were even then out of date-too narrow and high for the postwar "New Look"-intoxicated us with a sense of possibility, not for us, but for our mother, lost possibilities to be sure, but somehow still present when we entered the closet, closed the door, and sat down crosslegged in the mote-filled sunshine of the oval window. These were things of hers that our mother didn't mind us playing with. We were out of her hair and we treated them carefully, as the holy relics they were. Now, when I seek to love my mother, I remember her closet and that indulgence of hers. Of course, of course, I also remember Rose, my constant companion beneath the skirts, on whose shirt I carefully pinned the corsages, on whose head I balanced the hats, with whom I stood among the dresses, pretending to be ladies shopping.

After the church dinner, Jess needed a place to stay until everything blew over. Rose suggested that he stay at Daddy's house, not in Daddy's bedroom, of course, but in one of the other rooms. There were four bedrooms, after all, three going to waste in any circumstances.

After she proposed this, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the house, straighten it up a little, put a few of Daddy's things in a little bag, in case he ever wanted them.

I went over after breakfast one day, after sharing Ty's wordless meal and hearing him recite his plans for the day and the incidental information that he wouldn't be home for dinner. He didn't ask me my plans. "Fine," I said, that red flag response, but he didn't react.

I waited until he drove away in the pickup, then headed down the road to Daddy's. Ty may not have known that Jess was moving closer, was, in some sense usurping Daddy's place. It was fine, too, that he didn't know. If he had mentioned it, I would have told him that anything could happen now.

As I neared the house, it seemed like Daddy's departure had opened up the possibility of finding my mother. It was not as though I forgot that I'd been there every day of my life. I knew that. But now that he was gone, I could look more closely. I could study the closets or the attic, lift things and peer under them, get back into cabinets and the corners of shelves. She would be there if anywhere, her handwriting, the remains of her work and her habits, even, perhaps, her scent. Might there not be a single overlooked drawer, unopened for twenty-two years, that would breathe forth a single, fleeting exhalation? She had known him-what would she have said about him?

How would she have interceded? Wasn't there something to know about him that she had known that would come to me if I found something of her ii, his house? The hope was enough to quicken my steps. I passed the kitchen display in the driveway, the white brocade sofa still sporting its tag, upended on the back porch. I ignored the fact that the place was depressingly familiar, that Rose and I had spring-cleaned there every year. There had to be something.

Already the attic was baking. It had never been insulated, and the reflective powers of the metal roof did little if anything against the summer sun. A path had been cleared to each of the four windows and the east and west ones were propped open to ventilate the house.

Considering that our family had lived in this house for sixty-live years, there wasn't much up here-a roll of carpet, almost-new gold shag that Daddy must have gotten somewhere-it was never laid in the house.

Three floor lamps with those old twisted black cords and round Bakelite plugs. A folded-over mattress. Three boxes of back issues of Successful Farm1n. Another box of Wallace's Farmer, dating from the early seventies. An old fan, its black blades unshielded by any grid.

Under the eaves there were old-looking boxes, and in them some newspapers from the Second World War, including a copy of the Des Moines Register for VE Day. Folded into this was an invitation to my mother for a wedding ii, Rochester of some people I had never heard of.

I smelled it. It smelled like the newspapers.

Deeper in the box were farm receipts for 1945. The other boxes also held farm receipts and a few copies of Lije magazine. Nothing else.

I crawled back toward the center from under the eaves. My dusty shirt clung to my chest.

The second-floor closets were just as I had known them-full of boots and my father's clothes, which were largely overalls and khaki pants.

Actually, only two of the closets had much in them. The others had collected mostly hangers. In my father's room, I looked at the pictures on the wall-my Davis great-grandparents standing formally for a portrait oil the eve of their departure from England.

That was the last picture they ever took. My Cook grandparents had their wedding portrait taken in Mason City, and there was also a later picture of Grandfather Cook standing beside his first tractor, a Ford with spiked, tire-less wheels. My mother's engagement picture, as printed in the Rochester Post-Bulletin, which I had seen over and over.

I looked more deeply into it this time, but I found nothing.

The impenetrable face of a hopeful girl, dressed in the unrevealing uniform of the time; her demeanor was sturdily virtuous. Also on the wall was one black-and-white picture of a baby in a hat, but it could have been any of the three of us. I had seen it many times, but it was a measure of my distance from my father that I had never admitted to him that I didn't know who it was. Perhaps he would have said he didn't remember. It was us, then, interchangeable youth.

I looked under the bed. A sock, an empty bottle for aspirin, dustballs.

I opened the drawers that once had held her white gloves for church, her garter belts and girdles and stockings, her full slips and half slips, her brassieres, her long nightgowns, her pink bedjacket with three silvery frog closures that she always wore if she was sick in bed and wore day after day before she died. Now they held only old man's shorts and undershirts, bandannas, thick white socks, thick wool socks, black socks for dress (three pairs). Thermal underwear.

I'd put it all in here, so I knew that it was here. The newspapers folded across the bottom of the drawer were dated April 12, 1972, too late, too late.

Her collection of decorative plates marched around the dining room, on an oak rail just below the ceiling. I'd dusted them the previous spring, not that spring when Rose was sick, but a year earlier. There were no yellowing notes taped to the bottom of any of them. Grandma Edith's breakfront held nothing but clean linen, clean dishes, clean silver. How did we get so well trained, Rose and I, that we never missed a corner, never left a cleaning job undone, always, automatically, turned our houses inside out once a year?

All at once, I remembered how it was that our mother disappeared.

It was Mary Livingstone who did it. Daddy would have called her.

At any rate, some weeks after Mommy died, Rose and I came home from school to find all the ladies from Mommy's church club moving her things out, taking her clothes and her sewing fabrics and her dress patterns and her cookbooks for the poor people in Mason City.

It was the accepted course of action for disposing of the effects of the deceased and we didn't question anything about it. The Lutheran ladies, of course, were as thorough as Mommy herself would have been.

After remembering this, I climbed the stairs, intending to make a bed in one of the rooms for Jess Clark, and the only conscious sense I had of renewed grief at this memory was a kind of self-conscious distance from my body as it rose up the staircase. My hand on the banister looked white and strange, my feet seemed oddly careful as they counted out the steps. I turned on the landing and the downstairs seemed to vanish while the upstairs seemed to fling itself at me. I put Jess in my old bedroom. The sheets were in the hall linen closet, yellow flowered, the same sheets I'd slept in for four or live years.

In the linen closet was where I found the past, and the reason was that Rose and I always washed the sheets on Daddy's bed and put them back on, and we always washed the towels and washcloths in the bathroom hamper and hung them back up. It may be that no one looked in the linen closet more than once a year. There were sheets and towels and bed pads and an unopened box of Sweetheart soap. Behind the stack of towels, hidden entirely from sight, was a half-full box of Kotex pads and in the box was an old elastic belt, the kind no one had worn in years. Certainly these were not artifacts of my mother, but of myself.

I took out the sheets and pillowcase, reflecting only that this was sort of interesting. If Rose were here, she would assert that Daddy had seen the Kotex box plenty over the years, he'd just never dared to touch it. I smiled.

The sheets lit smoothly over the single bed in the yellow bedroom.

I folded back the top edge over the blanket, plumped the pillow. I thought that Jess would sleep there, and I lay down where he would be lying down. The dressing table was beside the window; the closet door was ajar; the yellow paint on the empty chest was peeling; some bronze circles floated in the mirror; a water spot had formed in the ceiling.

Lying here, I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry.

My whole body was shaking and moans flowed out of my mouth.

The yellow of the room seemed to flash like a strobe light, in time to blood pounding in my head. It was a memory associated with the memory of my mother's things going to the poor people of Mason City, with the sight of the church ladies in their cars with my mother's dresses in the backseats, with the sight of Mary Livingstone's face turned toward me with sober concern, asking me if I wanted to keep anything, and I said no. I lay down on the wooden flooring of the hallway because I felt as if I would faint and fall down the stairs.

Rose was supposed to meet me here at some point, and for a while I just said her name, Rose, Rose, Rose," hoping that I could materialize her at the top of the stairs in spite of the fact that no door had slammed, no voice had shouted for me. If she'd been there, I'd have insisted that accepting this knowledge, knowing it all the time, every day for the rest of my life, was simply beyond my strength.

And certainly there was more to know. Behind that one image bulked others, mysterious bulging items in a dark sack, unseen as yet, but felt. I feared them. I feared how I would have to store them in my brain, plastic explosives or radioactive wastes that would mutate or even wipe out everything else in there. If Rose had been here, I would somehow have given these images to her to keep for me. She was not there.

So I screamed. I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before, full out, throat-wrenching, unafraid-of-making-a-fuss-anddrawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams that I made myself concentrate on, becoming all mouth, all tongue, all vibration.

They did the trick. They wore me out, made me feel physical pain which brought me back to the present, that house, that floor, that moment.

After a bit, I got up and brushed myself off. I had given myselfa headache, so I went into the bathroom and took four aspirin.

Rose never came. When I got back to my house, it was nearly nine o'clock. Only nine o'clock. My new life, yet another new life, had begun early in the day.

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE CHURCH supper, I looked for Jess Clark to come by.

There seemed to be a lot to talk about, but as it turned out, I only saw him twice. Even then, he was quiet and inaccessible.

The candor of our earlier talks, which I longed for in spite of myself had vanished. All he said was, "I'm surprised at how lost I feel"; "I can't believe how sure I was that he'd changed"; and "I can't think of anywhere to go now. These three remarks went unelaborated upon. When I answered them, my responses hung between us before I finished speaking, Jess was already preoccupied with his own thoughts again.

His bearing changed, too. His former fluid grace, the acceptance of change and movement that ran through him, had stiffened. He held himself upright.

It hurt and embarrassed me to see him. I ventured awkward sympathy that failed to ease or soften his demeanor. I knew he was, as always, telling me the truth. He was lost.

I didn't tell him about my revelation when I lay down on the very bed he was sleeping in every night, even though I couldn't think of his sleeping in my old room without thinking of it. Nor, after all, had I Rose, though I'd come close. For one thing, I'd been so certain that she was wrong-suspicious and dismissive of her memories. For another, it was easier to be her sympathetic supporter than her fellow victim.

And she would surely remind me of incidents that I could not bear to remember. As certain as sunrise, discussion would open that terrible sack and shine a light into it, and she would press me and I would not be able to resist her, until the drama and anger of it would sweep me up, too, and I would feel a growing obsession to remember surging through me, seizing me, taking me into a danger that I could not endure yet.

We talked about what Harold had done at the church supper. What I thought was that Jess's driving up to that organic farm, then caroling on and on about it had been some kind of last straw. I had never thought Harold would be sympathetic to Jess's organic farming idea, but I thought he had been of two minds about Jess himself. Rose took a darker view: that Harold had been plotting to humiliate Jess for a long time-maybe since Jess's return-that he'd been playing him off against Loren and encouraging him with the will talk in order to get his hopes up. That was the Harold we had discussed during our Monopoly games, the Harold who hid calculating purposes behind foolishness. I related the incident I'd seen helping Jess transfer their frozen food from their freezer to ours-the way Harold snapped from rage to repartee without even a moment to collect himself. "Doesn't that prove, said Rose, "that it's all a game with him? That everything he does is the result of some calculation? He gets people to laugh at him, but he's not laughing."

Then Harold Clark decided to side-dress his corn, maybe so he could get out there on his new tractor one more time. It was not something he did every year, and as far as I could tell, everybody's corn looked fine. There had certainly been plenty of rain-our corn was an intense, healthy green. But why not, Harold must have thought. A little insurance for the yield, and the pleasure of driving that shiny red piece of machinery along the fencerow next to Cabot Street Road.

The only thing Harold said later was that one of the outside knives looked clogged. What he would have done then was to pull the rope that shut the valve on top of the tank. Maybe he was in a hurry, because then he got down off the tractor and went around to the malfunctioning knife where it bit a few inches into the soil. No one knows why he jiggled the hose. Possibly he only touched it while bending down, brushed against it with his hand or his sleeve. At any rate, the hose jerked off the knife, and with the last puff of pressure remaining in the line, sprayed him in the face. He wasn't wearing goggles.

Anhydrous ammonia isn't "drawn to the eyes" because of their moisture, the way people sometimes say, it only feels that way, because the moisture in the eyes reacts with the fumes and creates a powerful alkali.

In spite of the pain, Harold staggered to the water tank on top of the ammonia tank, knowing that his only hope was to flush his eyes and neutralize the ammonia. The water tank was empty. At this point, Harold was overcome, and he simply keeled over in the field.

It was Dollie, on her way to work at Casey's ii, Cabot, who saw him.

He was kneeling among the rows of corn, rocking back and forth with his hands over his face. There wasn't any water anywhere out there. She drove him back to the house and helped him get his face under the outdoor spigot. Then Loren got home, and he drove Harold to the hospital in Mason City.

Jess was out running.

Pete was in Pike buying cement.

Rose was helping Linda sew a pair of polka-dot shorts and a halter top.

Daddy was sitting in the glider on Harold's porch, talking to Marv Carson about getting his farm back.

Ty was working at the top of one of the new Harvestores with the crew of three Minnisota men.

I was dropping Pammy off at Mary Louise Mackenzie's house in Cabot.

I imagine this news rolling toward each of us like a dust cloud on a sunny day, so unusual that at first it seems more interesting than scary, that it seems, in the distance, rather small, smaller certainly than the vast expanse of the sky, which is where we usually look for signs of danger, and where, still, the sun shines with friendly brightness. But they said in the thirties the dust storms were the worst, for the way that the dust got in everywhere, no matter how you sealed windows and doors and closed your eyes and put blankets over your head. So it was that Harold's accident and its aftermath got in everywhere, into the solidest relationships, the firmest beliefs, the strongest loyalties, the most deeply held convictions you had about the people you had known most of your life.

The thing about anhydrous is that it does the damage almost instantly.

After two minutes or so the corneas are eaten away. There isn't much the doctors can do besides transplants, and those don't work too well.

But they kept Harold in the hospital, his eyes patched, for a week, on account of the pain.

This would have been the Thursday after the Sunday of the church supper, three days after Jess Clark moved into Daddy's house. Feelings were still running high. When I came home from dropping Pammy, Ty was standing in the kitchen. He whirled to face me and said, "Harold Clark's had an anhydrous accident. He's blind now, as if to say, was I satisfied?

"My God."

"He can't farm any more, that's for sure."

"Where'd you hear this? What happened?"

"Dollie got us down from the Harvestore. Loren took him to the hospital."

"Then we don't really know-" "Shit, Ginny!" he shouted in my face.

"We know! The water tank was empty!"

"Maybe the doctors-" "Stop it!"

"Stop what?"

"Stop being this way, this quiet reasonable way! Don't you care?

The fucking water tank was empty! You know what it means as wellasIdo!"

I said evenly, "It means he's blind."

"Don't you care? This is a friend of ours! What happened to you?

I don't know you any more." He headed for the door.

I followed him, my voice rising, "What's wrong? What am I saying that's wrong?" He got in the truck and drove off his tires squealing on the asphalt.

The fact is, I was too astonished to think anything. The imagination runs first to the physical, doesn't it, so that no matter what, you recoil from the pain, imagine yourself blind, your tissues resonating from the power of what has happened. I actually don't remember how I imagined the accident then, when I hadn't learned any of the details, but it entered my life with a crash and I do remember my hands trembling so violently as I tried to do the dishes that a plate broke against the faucet and I had to stop and sit down.

Then I remember almost throwing up sitting there.

I got up and hurried down to Rose's place. I burst in with the news, and Rose at once sent Linda out to play, to watch for Pete, to see if she could see Jess down the road. "He's running," she said to me as Linda ran out, "I saw him take off about a half hour ago."

I said, "My God. Can you believe this?" I stepped over the pattern pinned to the fabric on the floor and fell into an armchair. Rose knelt down and resumed setting the facing pieces on the fabric.

"Rose?"

"What?" She sounded annoyed.

I didn't dare say anything else. I guess what I thought was that I'd offended her somehow. I always do feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don't know, sort of puffs you up. She picked pins out of her tomato pincushion and poked then into the oniony tissue paper, then sat back on her heels and cocked her head, surveying the fabric. She was wearing a ponytail. She lifted her arms and idly pulled her liquid dark hair out of the elastic, then made the ponytail again, more tightly. The hang of her blouse revealed that she had not bothered with her prosthesis that morning. She said, "Well?"

"Well, it just struck me so vividly, that's all. It's every farmer's nightmare. I almost threw up.

"The actual event is shocking. I admit that." She picked up her scissors and looked at me. "But I said it the other night. Weakness does nothing for me. I don't care if they suffer. When they suffer, then they're convinced they're innocent again. Don't you think Hitler was afraid and in pain when he died? Do you care? If he died thinking his cause was just and right, that all those Jews and everybody deserved to be exterminated, that at least he lived long enough to perform his life's work, wouldn't you have enjoyed his pain and wished him more? There has to be remorse. There has to be making amends to the ones you destroyed, otherwise the books are never balanced."

"But this is Harold, not Daddy."

"What's the difference? You know what Jess told me? Once Harold was driving the cornpicker, when Jess was a boy, and there was a fawn lying in the corn, and Harold drove right over it rather than leave the row standing, or turn, or even just stop and chase it away.

"Maybe he didn't see it' "After he drove over it, he didn't stop to kill it, either. He just let it die."

"Oh, Rose." The tears burst from my eyes.

"Daddy killed animals in the fields every year. Just because they were rabbits and birds instead of fawns-I don't know." She looked at me and smiled slightly. "when Jess told me, I cried, too. Then the next day I helped Pete load hogs for the sale barn. I thought about Daddy saying, that's life. That's farming. So, I say to Harold, gee, Harold, you should have checked the water tank. That's farming.

They made rules for us to live by. They've got to live by them, too."

I looked around the room. Again, there was a soothing quality to what she was saying, reassuring simplicity. I said, "Would you tell these sorts of things to the girls?"

Her scissors made two crisp sounds in the cotton fabric. Then she let go of them and looked at me. She said, "If Daddy got to them and hurt them in any way I would help them learn about evil and retribution. If he doesn't, then they can have the luxury of learning about mercy and benefits of the doubt."

"You make it seem simple." I thought for a moment. "No. I don't mean that. I mean, you make it seem easy.

"Ginny, I know what I think because I've thought about it for a long time. I thought about it in the hospital, after the operation. You know, Mommy dying, and Daddy, and then Pete being such a mean drunk, and having to send the girls away, and then losing a part of my own body on top of it all. In the face of that, if there aren't some rules, then what is there? There's got to be something, order, rightness. Justice, for God's sake." She cut up the long side of the shirt.

"Listen, I can't tell you how it makes me feel that Daddy's taking some sort of refuge in being crazy now. You know who they blame, don't you?

But it isn't even that."

"What is it?"

"Now there isn't even a chance that I'll look him in the eye, and see that he knows what he did and what it means. As long as he acts crazy, then he gets off scot-free."

Linda slammed open the screen door, pulling Jess behind her. She said, "I ran all the way to the gravel road, Mom." I saw by the color of Jess's face, gray under his tan, that she had told him. I sat up and put my feet on the floor. Jess looked from Rose to me, then me to Rose, then he wiped his face with his T-shirt, revealing his perfect stomach and chest. Rose carefully folded the fabric and the cut pattern pieces into a small square and Jess stepped into the room.

Rose said, "Linda, go pour some lemonade for everybody, then go back outside, because we have some grown-up talking to do." Linda resisted, standing still, for just the merest moment. Rose said, "We'll sew this afternoon."

"No matter what?"

"No matter what, at least for a little while."

"I'm going to make myself some sandwiches and take them outside."

After a moment, Rose said, "Okay." I looked away from them, finding Rose's customary briskness especially irritating in the circumstances.

Linda said "Okay" in return, but didn't move for a second, as if unsure what to do now that she'd gotten permission to do what she wanted. "Go on," said Rose. "I'm thirsty."

Jess sat with his head thrown back against the wall behind the chair, staring at the ceiling molding, it looked like.

Linda brought the glasses of lemonade in on a tray, doing it right, and offered the tray to us each in turn with a little, "Would you like some lemonade, Aunt Ginny?"

"Thank you, Linda." I gave her a particularly warm smile, and she smiled back, relaxing a little.

"You're welcome, Aunt Ginny."

Rose said, "You've got spills on that tray. Be careful."

She went into the kitchen and shortly thereafter banged out the back door. I sipped my drink. Rose said, "It's none of your business, Jess. Just stay out of it."

Jess didn't say anything.

"He humiliated you. Not only that, he set out weeks ago to humiliate you. He intended to humiliate both you and us, and to do it in public.

The fact that he's had an accident doesn't change that."

"I know." Jess's voice was low and rough, so unfamiliar to me that I didn't know how to interpret the tone.

Rose said, "I know what you're feeling. I really do, even if you don't. You think you're feeling sorry for him, but really you're feeling that you can finally get to him, that he'll soften toward you.

If you help him, then he'll be grateful, and then he'll give you what you want. Well, he's never going to do it."

I said, "I don't know-" She continued speaking to Jess. "Ginny is eternally hopeful, you know. She never cuts her losses. She always thinks things could change."

I said, "Harold could change. He could, you know, have remorse.

Sometimes that happens when, you know, people lose things." I'd almost said, see the light. I felt my face redden.

She continued to watch Jess, to address only him. "Not if you forgive him first. Not if you go to him. Not if you act like your mother did, Jess."

I said, "Rose-" When her face swiveled toward me, it was lit up with conviction.

"He should know about how they were together, because that tells how Harold is and how he's going to be."

Jess muttered, "I know how they were together. She was pretty long-suffering."

Rose exclaimed, "She always apologized, even when Harold was in the wrong! Even when he'd been yelling at her or had flown off the handle at her for no reason! She apologized. She told me once, she said, 'Rose, it doesn't do any good to hold out against him. He can hold out longer than I can. And then, he talks about it to everybody. He tells everybody I'm not speaking to him and makes a joke out of it. I think it's just better to wait till he comes around and thinks better of his actions." But he never did! She didn't make him, so why should he?

Guilty conscience?"

Jess was staring at her.

I thought Rose should settle down, but she wasn't saying anything untrue. She wasn't even exaggerating. I said, "He didn't really act like he valued her, Jess. When she found out I was marrying Ty, she said to me, 'You've got to play hard to get, Ginny. If your mother were alive, she'd tell you the same thing. I've never played hard to get, and I regret it. I don't mean with the young men, either.

You've got to find a way for it to be hard for your husband to get you, too.

Jess said, "This is different."

Is it?" said Rose. Now her voice was low but penetrating. Her stare was like a small room he surely couldn't get out of. In spite of everything, a part of me watched with interested detachment the way she surrounded him and captured his agreement. I recognized her intensity from all the years she had turned it on me. "He rejected you. He sent you away. He's been after you for fourteen years, gonna do the same thing to you that you did to him. He set you up when you got here, and then he got his revenge. What kind of guy is that?

If you really think he's going to come around and have remorse, then give him some time to think about it. Give the cure some time to work.

That's my advice. You can go running to him all full of pity and compassion, but pity and compassion have never won Harold's respect in the past, and if you don't win his respect, eventually he's going to humiliate you again, intentionally."

Jess said, "Jesus."

Rose set her glass on the coffee table, stood up, and went over to his chair, then she leaned over him, a hand on each arm of the chair.

He stared at her. She spoke softly, taking direct aim. "You're the one who's always saying they've set out to hurt us! You're the one who's always saying they've subordinated us to every passing principle and whim and desire! You told me that was the lesson of your whole life, the lesson of the whole Vietnam War! You said, 'Rose, every Vietnam vet you see is proof of how far they're capable of going!" You said that!"

He said, "I know. I believe that. But this she encompassed us both in her gaze, and said, "You both seem to think that there's some game going on here, that we can choose to play or not, that we can follow our feelings here and there and just leave when we don't like it any more. Maybe you can. But this is life and death for me. If I don't find some way to get out from under what Daddy's done to me before I die-" She stopped. Her face was white and set. She said, "I can't accept that this is my life, all I get. I can't do it. I thought it would go on longer, long enough to get right. I thought that I would fucking outlive him, and he could have that, half my life his, half my own. But now I bet he's going to outlive me. It's like he's going to smother me, just cover me over as if I were always his, never my own-" Her voice strangled to a halt. Jess and I didn't look at each other.

What soothed me about the way she talked in those days was the simple truth of it, as if we'd finally found the basic atoms of things, hard as they were. I could see that the same thing was going on with Jess, that what happened at the church supper had disoriented him, and Rose's strength of purpose visibly reoriented him.

The result was that the three of us, and Pete, too, kept away from Harold, didn't go to the hospital, didn't visit him or take hot dishes over to the Clark farm when he came home, didn't really ask anyone about him, unless they happened to bring it up. I guess you could say Rose and Jess and I hid. With Pete, there was the edgy sense of something separate going on, and out of long habit, it was easy to avoid delving into that. We knew in general how Harold was. When I ran into Loren in the bank in Pike, we spoke but didn't converse.

I could tell he was exhausted and angry, but even so, I couldn't give up the cool propriety of our behavior. It felt dignified and certain.

Ty and I were behaving the same way to one another and it was working to make life go forward, to make passions cool. It was the ingrained lure of appearances, the way manners seemed to contain things, make them, if not quite comfortable, then clear and hard.

The weather got hotter, and we watched storms tracking the horizon. I had green tomatoes on the vines, yellow banana peppers, onions with green tops as thick as four lingers, almost tall enough to fall over, bush beans dangling among the heart-shaped leaves, and cucumbers starting to vine. I spent most mornings in my garden.

On the seventeenth of July, I heard a car pull up in front of the house. It was only about eight in the morning, and I had been pulling lamb's-quarters out of the rows of beans. I brushed my hands on my shorts as best I could and went around the house. Ken LaSalle was standing on the porch, peering in the window beside the door.

I said, "Can I do something for you?" My voice came out sounding formal and cold. Ken spun around, held out some papers. He said, "These are for you. You and Ty and Rose and Pete."

I held up my soil-blackened hands. "Maybe you better tell me what they are."

"Well, Ginny." He hesitated over the friendly form of my name.

"Your dad is suing you to get the farm back. Your sister Caroline is a party to the suit, too. You better find yourself a lawyer."

"I thought you were our lawyer."

"I can't be. It's not ethical." Now he met my gaze fully. "Besides, I have to say that I don't want to be, either. I don't think you've treated your dad right, to be honest."

"We didn't ask for the farm."

"I don't feel I can be talking about the case. You get yourself a lawyer from Mason City or Fort Dodge or somewhere. That's the best thing to do." He set the papers down on the porch swing and got past me down the porch steps without looking at me again. I felt as though I'd been slapped.

WHEN CAROLINE WAS ABOUT FOURTEEN andIwas twenty-two, already married for almost three years, she came over after supper one evening, and said that she'd been given the lead in the high school play, over all the other older girls. She was to play Maisie in The Boyfriend.

Maisie was a flapper, and had to sing and dance and wear sleeveless flapper dresses. Daddy, she thought, wouldn't like it. I agreed to cover for her rehearsals, and also to pick her up at school two hours after the school bus left. I told Daddy she had a special English project, not too far from the truth, since one of the English teachers was also the drama coach, and I helped with her farm chores when she was late. During rehearsals, I got in the habit of going early to get her and sitting in the auditorium for fifteen minutes, watching her.

She was terrible. She had obviously been picked for her voice she had the most songs to sing, and every other girl on the stage was shrill and off-key compared to Caroline, whose pitch and volume were at least respectable. But she spoke her lines stiffly and her dancing-two Charleston numbers and a waltz-made me wince.

When she had to kiss the boy lead once, a thread of saliva stretched between them as they moved away from one another, and caught the light.

Everyone on the stage snickered, and the boy turned red.

Caroline remained mercifully oblivious. She didn't get any better, either. All the way through the dress rehearsal, her dancing was awkward and her voice pitched every line high at the end, as if she were asking a question no matter what she was saying. I dreaded opening night and was glad that I'd kept her project a secret even from Ty. I called Rose at college that night and together we thrilled with whispered horror over the coming humiliation.

The next day she acted completely normal-no stage fright, no anxiety.

She came over before school to get the costume I had been altering, an aquamarine flapper dress with feathers on the shoulders and rhinestones around the hem, and she ate the crusts of toast off my plate, using them to wipe up bits of jelly, and she talked idly about a boy who wasn't even involved in the play. She went off to the school-bus stop with the dress slung casually over her shoulder.

I had been intending to get Ty to go to the play with me at the last moment, but I decided to go alone. I sat in the back, near the door.

The auditorium was full-lots of feed caps-and there was our name right in the program for every farmer and every farmwife and every person in the township to read.

But the audience inspired her. She knew exactly how to sense us without ever looking at us, exactly how to let us see her smile and cavort and flirt. She even knew how to kiss the boy lead in our presence, and to make him kiss her so that he seemed gawky from passion rather than youth. She kicked up her heels and sang to the back row, and at the end they gave her a standing ovation. Afterwards, I was giddy with the pleasure I felt in this unexpected sight of her. We would bring Daddy. Ty and I would kidnap Daddy and just bring him and sit him down and give him this surprise. Caroline was as calm as ever.

Ty could come, she said, but only Ty. Daddy still wasn't to know. I disagreed about his approval. I thought he would be swayed by the others in the audience, by the obvious manifestation of her talent and energy, but that wasn't it. She just wanted this life to herself and she swore me to secrecy.

She acted in another play in her sophomore year, The Crucible.

She played the second most important of the accusing girls, and had no song to sing. Once again, her performance was stiff until opening night, round and full after that. But the stress of secret rehearsals and performances was too great-there was always the chance that someone would mention to Daddy at the feedstore or the implement dealer's that he'd seen her in the play. So she took up debating, which Daddy considered odd but respectable. Whenever he asked her, she told him that a given debate was to be held in Des Moines or Iowa City or Dubuque. Once again, she squirmed away from having him watch her, as if the very substance that fed her ready and focused performances would vanish if he were in the audience. At the time, she said it was a kind of superstition, the kind you get with baseball players. I colluded.

She did well in school, too, especially in English and history and languages, and especially when there was just a little additive of performance to an exercise. She did not shine at all in science courses, especially those pivoting on experiments and lab reports.

Even in her math classes, a proof she was asked to write on the board was always right, while she might make a careless error or two in the same proof worked out painstakingly the night before in her homework.

I had such hope for her, such a strong sense that when we sent her out, in whatever capacity, she would perform well, with enthusiasm and confidence that were mysteriously hers alone. If we kept her home, she would languish, do badly, seem like nothing special.

Caring for her changed from dressing her and feeding her and keeping her out of trouble to collaborating with her, supporting her plans.

She talked readily to me about all sorts of things, it seemed, but mostly about the question, What next?

Rose and I always thought we'd done well with her, guiding her between the pitfalls and sending her out to success.

I washed my hands inside and went out and picked up the papers.

They stated that my father had chosen to avail himself of the revocation clause in the preincorporation agreement, which stated that Rose's and my shares in the farm were revocable under certain conditions of "mismanagement or abuse." This was a phrase that I only dimly remembered reading in the original papers. I did remember Ty saying, "Well, Larry taught us to farm, and we farm just like he does, so I don't see why we don't let that stand." I also remembered how eager I had been to get everything over with, how much I wanted to get to the door and see if Caroline had really driven away.

The transfer hadn't been an occasion I savored, had it?

Caroline joined my father in invoking the revocation clause. I supposed that I had to carry the papers into the house, but it was hard to do so, like swallowing something large and distasteful. I realized that I had forgotten to ask if Rose was to get a set of papers all her own, or if I had to tell her about them. That was what I shrank from, in the end, all the telling there was, followed by all the hearing.

Mostly I saw Rose as my savior, showing me the way through this quagmire we had gotten into, but sometimes she affected me that barking dog way, never resting for all the alarms there were to sound. And the dog in me was one of those other, less alert but still excitable animals who couldn't help joining in and barking with equal frenzy.

I read the papers and put them on the dining-room table for Ty, weighted down with his coffee cup. Something else not to talk about.

It was a hot day, but as I dialed the phone I began to shiver. When the receptionist at her office answered, it was all I could do to firm up my voice, which came out as if my teeth were chattering, which they were. I gripped the phone, determined that Caroline would take my call, but when she did, I was dumbstruck with surprise, and could only come out with, "Oh, hi."

"Hi."

"What's going on?" These ways of speaking that were neither conciliatory nor tentative came roughly to my tongue exactly when a tone was needed that would not offend.

She said, "I should ask you that."

"Maybe you should have asked me that before this. But what I want to know is more immediate. What's this suit?"

"I can't talk about that. If you want to talk about that, then I'll have to hang up."

I decided not to bring up the ingratitude part, just exactly because it drew me so, because the sound of her voice made it shine more and more brightly. I said, "You were out of this. It's not your business."

"Frankly, I don't consider it business at all. You may, now that you've got control of the farm."

"I didn't bring the suit! I didn't push things out of the personal realm into the legal realm!"

"I told you I can't talk about the suit.

I shouted, "Well, it takes up all the floor space, doesn't it? It drives everything else out, doesn't it?"

"Not in my mind. What drives everything else out in my mind is the thought of Daddy out in that storm."

"He went! He just went! We weren't going to bodily hold him back!"

She breathed in skeptical silence.

I said, "You weren't there. You don't know what happened or what it was like." I tried to say this in a calmer voice, less shrill.

"Daddy was there. Ty was there."

"Ty?"

"He was standing right there."

"You've talked to Ty?"

She didn't answer this, but it was evident that she had. My vision seemed momentarily to close over in red and black clouds. When it cleared, I said, "We did everything for you! We fed you and clothed you and taught you to read and helped you with your homework!

We found a way to get you whatever you wanted!"

"That's not the issue here."

"We saved you from Daddy! We made a space for you that we never had for ourselves! Rose-he-" I floundered to a halt.

"Did I have to be saved from Daddy? From my own father? There are plenty of niceties of my upbringing we can talk about someday, Ginny.

At this point, I don't really blame you and Rose for the way you raised me. I really don't. Actually, I would like to go into it someday. I think that would be healthy, but right now, this is a personal call, and I have a meeting and everything." She hung up.

I held the receiver in my hand for a moment and then replaced it on the cradle.

WHAT iT FELT LIKE WAS THE FLU, SO much so that I went upstairs and took my temperature. My temperature was normal, but I took two aspirin anyway. The relief I longed for was physical; though I had no fever, I felt hot and breathless. I decided to go swimming, just to get in the car and go swimming.

The trouble was, as I drove toward Pike, the town seemed to repel me, to cause my car to slow to a crawl, to resist my entering it as if by protective shield. All the self-consciousness I had intermittently felt over the years, that was sometimes soothed by people's friendliness and sometimes inflamed by slights that I suspected, seemed to resurrect itself whole. As much as I yearned for relief (now it seemed only water, only total, refreshing immersion, could clear my mind) the idea of putting on my bathing suit and walking across the flat, exposed pavement of that swimming pool was an impossible one. I turned north and headed for an old quarry up near Columbus that I hadn't been to, or thought of in ten years. With the kind of rains we'd had, it would certainly be full.

It gave you a moment's pause to go to the quarry, but it was the biggest body of water anywhere nearby, blue and sparkling on a sunny day, or so I remembered it. High school kids had always claimed it as their own; the sheriff scattered them two or three times a year, and somebody repaired the cyclone fence surrounding it. No stone was quarried there any longer; even the company that owned it had gone out of business and no one in the county knew who was liable. It existed, manmade but natural, too, the one place where the sea within the earth lay open to sight.

Except that when I got there, the water that filled it was brown and murky. Thistles and tall native grasses ("Big bluestem," Jess would have said, "switchgrass, Indian grass") just about hid the rusting cyclone fence, grew all the way to the indistinct, crumbling edge. The thick water was nearly to the top, and I had forgotten where the shallows and the depths were. You certainly couldn't dive in-I remembered how we had always pulled rusty objects out of the water with guileless curiosity- hubcaps, tin cans, bashed-in oil drums. Now I saw the place with a new darkened vision. No telling what was in there.

Still, there was no going home, no going to Pike or Cabot, no driving away, either. The turbid water lay still; there was not even the ghost of a breeze. Some of the junk half buried in weeds around the periphery had been there so long that paths circumnavigated it, and I started up one of these, toward a stand of hackberries and hawthorns.

Wild rosebushes clumped here and there, the blossoms now become swelling hips with their golden tufts. Bindweed coiled everywhere, the pearly white flutes beginning to close in the afternoon sunshine.

At home, it was galling to think of how others were talking about us, bad enough to think of their ridicule or disapproval, but worse to think how they were surely entertained by us, how this stinging, goading, angry self-consciousness that impelled me every day, every minute, to seek relief was nothing to them, something they couldn't feel and hardly ever gave a thought to. All these neighbors, close enough to know our business, but too infinitely far from us to feel a particle of what we were feeling, themselves feeling animated, more than anything, by the pleasures of curiosity. Away from the farm, though, that was okay, too. Their indifference constituted the goal, the promise that life, my life, the life of our family, was bigger, longer, more resilient than the difficulties we now found ourselves caught in. At the quarry, it was easier to feel that the main requirement was simple endurance.

Away from the farm, it was easier to think of how people went on from these sorts of troubles, it was easier to see a life as a sturdy rope with occasional knots in it. Every life I knew of in Zebulon County was marked by conflict and loss. Weren't our favorite conversations about just these things-if not how some present tangle was working itself out, then how past tangles prefigured the present world, had made us and our county what it was? And didn't it always turn out with these conversations that the fact that we were prospering, getting along, or at least feeling our life strong within our flesh proved that everything that had happened had created the present moment, was good enough, was worth it?

I came to the grove of trees and stood in the dappled shade. Just there, I realized that I had been sensing another presence, perhaps hearing steps or the silence of the meadow birds. For some reason, when a man's ligure stepped up to the edge of the water and threw a handful of stones into it (I could hear the plinkety-plunks even from that distance), I was not surprised by the fact that it was Pete.

I stayed in the grove, though, unwilling to let my privacy vanish.

He watched the water for a few minutes, the turned and walked toward me. I thought of escaping.

But of course I didn't. The lesson I could not seem to learn was how to refuse the gifts I was to be given.

My feelings about Pete hadn't lost the shimmer left over from the Monopoly tournament. On the contrary, it was easy to see how, over the years, Pete's reponses to Daddy had been more honest than Ty's, destructive but at least not duplicitous, impolitic but passionate, angry but never self-serving, and almost noble in the last four years, after Rose's revelations about what Daddy had done to her. Didn't the fact that she had told him itself constitute a recommendation?

He saw me and paused, smiled for me, came on. When he was just within earshot, I called out, "Playing hooky at the swimming hole?"

He came up to me saying, "I took the alternate route back from Mason City. I suppose you might swim here if you were ready to take your life in your hands."

We turned together and walked back down the path I'd come, toward my car. I said, "Where's the truck? I didn't see anyone when I drove in.

"There's an old quarry road that runs in up on the north end. The gate's down, so you can get right up to where it disappears into the water. Must be where they took the stone out in the old days."

"Somebody in Ty's class in high school drove a car into the quarry once.

"Hmm. Well, plenty of things have been driven into this quarry over the years. I guess it's like windows in abandoned buildings.

You hate to see that surface go unbroken."

"What's Rose doing today?"

"Haven't you talked to her? Something with the girls. I forget what.

What are you doing up here, anyway? I haven't ever seen you around here before."

I liked talking to Pete like this, taking an interest, as if we were friends. At home, our relations were circumscribed by work, and other things, too, I supposed. I said, "I just wanted to go somewhere wet.

I remembered this place as different, though. Blue."

"Some days it is blue, but there's a lot of runoff from the rains. I wouldn't swim in it blue, either, though. I'd imagine that the bacteria level's pretty high. Jack Stanley's got that feedlot back up the creek there." He pointed toward the northwest horizon.

"The high school kids swim here."

"Mmm. Slurp slurp. Must be okay, then."

I laughed. But the reason I was there included Pete, too, didn't it?

He was named in the suit. I felt that awful self-consciousness returning, chasing out the momentary ease I had been enjoying. The rope of my life, coiling into this knot, then out of it, seemed again more like a thread, easily broken. Even if I didn't tell Pete about the legal papers, that moment of ease was gone. So I said, "I was running away from the suit, actually."

"What?"

"Caroline is-well, I mean, Daddy, is suing us to get the farm back.

That abuse or mismanagement clause."

"Huh."

He sounded speculative, hardly interested. We walked on, passing my car and turning west along the south end of the quarry. I said, "It just made me so mad. I had to go somewhere. I felt like all this was giving me a fever."

He didn't say anything. We walked along the path, which followed the cyclone fence. Bindweed petered out, replaced by ground-cherry.

Bunches of milkweed were beginning to blossom white along the fence line. I said, "I can't believe the way all of this has blown up.

I mean, I didn't have a good feeling about it when Daddy first came up with the idea, but I can't say I sensed any of this coming."

Still we walked. I stopped for a second and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the tail of my shirt. We were completely out in the sun, now. When I caught up to Pete, he said, "Ginny, what do you think Rose wants?"

"I don't know." What I meant was, I thought I had known, I thought it was obvious, until he raised the possibility of doubt. "A stake in something of her own. A life she can call her own, maybe.

It seems fairly clear. For the girls to be all right, too."

"What do you want? You're the oldest, but Rose always seems like the oldest."

I said, "For all this to be over. That's all, at this point. For these feelings to end."

"Huh."

The path narrowed and he went ahead of me. He was wearing cowboy boots, the ones he always wore off the farm. He had two or three pairs, and the high heels made his legs look long. He was in better shape than Ty, although not without a little thickness at the middle.

When the path widened, I jogged a little to catch up to him. I said, "Why do you ask?"

He looked at me as if he couldn't remember where I had come from. I said, "Pete? Why do you ask about what Rose wants? She's pretty straightforward about it."

"Is she?"

The ease of our earlier conversation seemed to be gone, and I didn't say anything. He stared at me for another moment, then walked on. We were walking fast, approaching the southwest corner of the quarry, where an old implement that looked like it might be a harrow of some kind jutted out of the water. Pete stopped, picked up a couple of pebbles, and threw one, hitting a half-submerged tine with a ringing ping. I walked on, toward another grove of trees, then came back.

Pete had moved to the edge of the water. I thought I would tell him I had to get to the grocery store. I looked at my watch. It was already nearly three. Ty, looking for his dinner, would have seen the papers by now.

Pete said, "Sometimes, all I want is to hurt someone. Not even for any purpose."

"That's understandable, when you've been hurt."

"Maybe. You know what Ty says, about when the hogs get on one another and start lighting, how the underdog never lights back, he just looks for a smaller one? Ty always says, 'Shit rolls downhill."" I smiled.

Pete stared past me. A breeze had come up, shattering the surface of the water into shards of light. I said, "Pete, are you okay? When I get away from the farm, I feel like all of this is going to turn out okay. Not the same as before, but okay. I mean, maybe that's the definition of okay. Jess would say change is good." I tried to say the name neutrally, glad I hadn't said it before in this conversation.

It was important in all circumstances not to say it too often.

"Oh, Jess."

"Don't you like Jess?"

"Oh, sure."

Now we stood together in true awkwardness, Pete rolling stones in his hand and looking over the water, me not knowing what to do with my hands, looking at the distant white roof of my car. It was apparent that Pete, too, knew of my feelings for Jess, that this information had escaped from me somehow, though I had tried desperately to contain it.

Pete wasn't even especially observant, nor very interested in me. It was terrifying to think of myself so obvious, so transparent. I remembered just then how my mother used to say that God could see to the very bottom of every soul, a soul was as clear to God as a rippling brook. The implication, I knew even then, was that my mother could do the same thing. My lips were dry and hot, and I thought of right then just asking Pete what he knew, how he found it out-from Ty or Rose or Daddy orJess himself. Wouldn't it be a relief to have everything out in the open for once?

But that question was easy to answer, too. And the answer was negative. The last few weeks had shown well enough for anyone to understand that the one thing our family couldn't tolerate, that maybe no family could tolerate, was things coming into the open. So I didn't ask Pete. I said, "I guess I'd better get to the store. It'll be suppertime before long. Ty will wonder where I am."

"I've got chores to do myself. More and more I can't resist stopping here, though. It's such a weird place."

We began back along the path to my car. A snake appeared, vanished, leaving the low sound of grass rustling in the air. I halted, Pete ran into me. That close, there was plenty we had to say to one another, but habit and probably fear prevented us. Later, it was strange to think of his body bumping me, how solid that was; the smell of his sweat mixed with the plant and water smells of that place; the sight of his face that close, his gray-blue eyes with their long pale lashes, turning toward me, holding me then releasing me.

I barked, "Snake!"

"Huh," said Pete, in that same oddly disinterested, curious tone, as if I see now, all he was doing by then was waiting to see what would happen.

IT WAS APPARENT THAT Ty HAD EATEN and gone out againdirty plates in the sink, chicken bones in the garbage can, and the coffeepot warm on the burner. He had moved the legal papers to the kitchen table. I read them again and looked around for a place to put them. Finally, I opened the desk and stuck them in with the tax receipts. There were books to do-we were overdue on that.

The last day of June had come and gone without our monthly accounting session, though I had paid the regular bills. I couldn't eat, so I began straightening the house up. It didn't take long-it was the one thing I still knew how to do.

The building crew from Mason City had spent the week pouring the specially designed concrete subfloor for the breeding and gestation building, over which a slatted steel floor would be laid. An automatic flush system would eventually flush the slurry along the subfloor to the Slurrystore. You couldn't see the site from the house-it was hidden by the old dairy barn that would itself be converted into the farrowing and nursing rooms. The Harvestores now rose, blue and efficient, with clean lines and rounded edges, just south of the dairy barn, right beside one another. A cement mixing truck was parked permanently on the shoulder of Cabot Street Road, ready for the crew to progress to the subfloors of the grower and the finisher buildings.

Another three-man crew had spent the week tearing out the dairy stalls in the barn. As hogs are far more inquisitive and destructive than dairy cattle, the plan was to install concrete partitions to about live feet, then wood frame walls above that.

Eventually, every hog in every building would reside in an aluminum alloy pen with hot water heat in the floors, automatic feeders and nipple waterers for the shoats. There would be, as the brochure said, "several comfort zones to accommodate varying sizes of hogs."

Supposedly, it would take six months at the least and eight or nine at the most to complete all the buildings, but the plan was to move the first ten sows into gestation stalls by the beginning of August.

Ty had written two checks so far-a $20,000 check to the Harvestore builder and a down payment check to the confinement system builder for $27,500. By the first of August, he would write another check to the Harvestore builder for $20,000 and another check to the confinement system manufacturer for 20 percent of the remaining building cost, or $49,300. If hog prices remained steady, and the sows weren't stressed by the new buildings or the noise from construction, and he managed to finish an average of six hogs from each litter to an average of two hundred thirty pounds each, he could expect his first check in late winter, for almost $20,000. But by then he would have written two more checks for $49,300, as work on the other buildings progressed. In a quieter time, these numbers would have made me gasp, lie awake at night, comb the books for savings here and there. With everything else that was happening, their effect was to make me merely giddy.

Their effect on Ty was as strong-he had rigged lights around the gestation floor, and he and the crew worked out there until almost eleven. They were back the next day, although it was Saturday, and the next, Sunday. Each day they put in twelve or fourteen hours, and after the crew had gone home, Ty and Pete continued to work until it was dark. From time to time, I wandered out there and looked at the work for a few minutes, but Ty and I did not speak about it.

Nor would he talk about the suit, even whether he had known it was coming. I was certain he had. When I said so, he just kept hammering nails into the forms he was setting as if I hadn't spoken.

Over the weekend, they finished the Slurrystore, set the footings for the grower building, and carted away the innards of the old dairy barn.

I served two big meals Friday, two Saturday, and three Sunday, because the cale in town wasn't open for breakfast. No one went to church.

Rose came by each day and helped cook. They had been served with their own set of papers, but we didn't talk about it, either; there was too much to do and, maybe, too much to say.

Anyway, the kitchen was like a steambath, too hot for getting worked up.

Sunday afternoon, I was basting a turkey for supper and washing dinner dishes when Ty came in the back door and threw some dirty rags on the floor. I said, "What's that?"

He said, "You tell me."

I looked closer. Pink stripes. My nightgown, some underwear. I didn't have to look again to know what the rusty stains were. I hadn't actually forgotten them; it was more like I hadn't had the occasion to dig them up, and, as busy as we were, I had forgotten that they might be excavating that floor so quickly. I said, "Where was that?"

"Where do you think?"

Our gazes locked, and I wondered if I could bluff him, simply deny knowledge, and then I wondered if it was worth it. I dried my hands on a dish towel, wiped the counter with the dishrag for a moment.

Finally, I said, "Floor of the dairy barn?"

"I didn't think you would admit it."

"Well, I did."

"Then I guess we have something to talk about tonight."

"I guess I don't think so.

But by that time he was out the door. Though he certainly heard me, he could pretend he hadn't. I picked up the nightgown and threw it in the trash can. If he had found it six months before, it would have been an innocent thing, a testament to undying hope, evidence of bravery, however secretive, on my part, as well as of my commitment to our future. To a forgiving and affectionate man, these clothes would have seemed tragic at the worst, not for a moment guilty or injurious. But that was one thing about Ty. He knew how to make up his mind, and to keep it made up. I jammed the clothes farther down among the strawberry hulls and the turkey giblets with my foot. There was a difference in me, too. If he'd found the clothes six months before, I would have been ashamed at the subterfuge. Now I was only annoyed that I'd forgotten and left them there.

Had there been no miscarriage, the baby would have been a week or two old now, a startling thought. I would have been eight months pregnant for the coming of Jess Clark, the ponderous focus of witty remarks during all our Monopoly games. A restraining influence would certainly have been exerted on me, on Ty, possibly on my father. With the future visible, growing, getting ready to present itself (assumed to be a boy until the last possible minute), it would have been unwise to question the past, a tempting of fate. There would have been no new buildings, because we would have taken a conservative fiscal line. We would have sought instead to present a different picture: live generations on the same land. In honor of my son, wouldn't I warm enthusiastically to such a picture? All the other mothers of sons ii, Zebulon County did.

The fact was, in theory it was all still possible. If Jess were right and our well water was at fault, I could drink and cook with bottled water. And then there would be a grandson. Our neighbors who were now inflaming my father with phrases like "Some things just aren't right," would be saying, "Let bygones be bygones."

Except our feelings stood around us like ramparts, and we could not unknow what we knew. For one thing, Ty clearly thought that some unacceptable true nature had been revealed in Rose and communicated to me. I was sure his real loyalties lay with Daddy, and I could readily envision him in long phone discussions with Caroline, uncomfortable, maybe, but dogged. I recoiled from telling himthe trust that would allow confidences had disappeared into formality. For another, there had been no sex between us of any kind since before the memory of my father had returned to me. Sex itself which I had rarely if ever actually enjoyed, seemed now like it would be too close to those memories for comfort.

I thought about such things all afternoon, basting the turkey, peeling potatoes and carrots, snapping beans, icing the applesauce cake Rose had baked, putting a jug of sun tea in the deep freeze to cool.

The men on the crew were polite. They thanked me for everything and called me "ma'am." They made a lot ofjokes at one another's expense, and it came out at the table that Ty had been paying them triple time since Saturday morning. There were four of them. At a hundred dollars an hour for twelve hours for two days, that was $2400. I said mildly, "I thought the company pays you." One of them said, "Well, normally they do, ma'am, but it was Ty's idea to work this weekend, so he's picking up the tab on that. I'd just be out drinking somewhere, so the extra cash is fine by me."

"I'm sure it is."

"We done a lot, too. You'll probably get some back at the end from the company.

Ty put down his fork. "We've got the time. It's best to use it.

The more we get done before harvest, the better off we'll be." He wouldn't look at me.

After a moment, he went on, "You guys get your smokes or whatever.

We've got four more hours of light today. Tomorrow you can go back on that vacation schedule the company's been paying you for."

"Yeah," said the one. "Maybe I'll get time to take a shower."

"You are getting pretty ripe, Dawson. Phew!" shouted one of the others as they rumbled out. "Thanks for the supper, ma'am. At least you're probably glad to see us go."

I was sitting up in bed reading when Ty came in. I could hear him downstairs, getting himself a cup of coffee and another piece of cake.

The chair scraped the kitchen linoleum when he pulled it out. He ran water in the sink to rinse the plate. Then there was a long silence before he climbed the stairs. I turned the page of my Good Housekeeping to an article about strawberry desserts, "On Beyond Shortcake," and that's what I was staring at when he came into the room.

He was an orderly man. I'd never had any complaints about that.

He threw his socks and underwear in the hamper, his work clothes in the work clothes bin. He walked around the room for a minute or two, but I don't know whether he looked at me, because I was staring at the magazine. When he went into the bathroom, I turned the page to "New!

Quick and Easy Strip Quilting." I heard the shower go on. The first line of the article was, "Love to quilt but hate to cut out those pieces one at a time?" I read it over, concentrating on each word.

None of them made sense. The shower went off. Ty's footsteps returned to the bedroom. A drawer clattered, then slammed. The next line of the article was, "A new technique, utilizing a pizza-wheel-type cutter, makes quick work of a once arduous step. Quilters all over the nation are-" Ty's weight lifted my side of the bed. His skin radiated the coolness of the shower he'd taken, and he smelled of Right Guard soap.

"-enthusiastic. 'I used to dread-' "He said, "We're ready to pour the subfloor for the grower building and the footings for the interior walls in the barn. I called the company, too. They're going to have the framing lumber out here by six a.m. It's already on the truck."

"That's good news.

"I think so."

"Well, we'd better get to sleep then." I raised my head. His weight shifted in the bed. He said, "When did you bury those things?"

"Last Thanksgiving, about. The day after."

"How come?"

"I don't know." This was short for, it's too complicated to go into.

"What are those bloodstains from?"

"Well, I had a miscarriage." The next line of the article I was staring at instead of looking at him said, "the cutting-out part, especially diamonds, since they're so hard to-" "Lots of secrets around here." This came out so mildly that I looked right at him, so that he said, "That's number live, right?"

"Number live?"

"After number four from that trip to the State Fair that Rose told me not to tell you she told me about."

"I'm surprised Rose would betray me like that."

"Your desires aren't at the top of Rose's agenda, Ginny."

"What is?"

"I wonder about that myself."

"I know you think Rose and I are plotting something, but we aren't."

"What I think is that you can't stand up to Rose. She bulldozes you every time."

I still couldn't look at him. I was staring out the bedroom door, across the hall at the corner of the bed in the guest room. "And so do you and so does Daddy. You want to know why I kept it secret about the pregnancies and the miscarriages? Because I didn't agree with you about stopping, but you drew the line. I didn't ever want to draw the line. I wanted to keep trying forever, but I couldn't stand up to you.

Compared to anything having to do with Rose, that's what's important.

People keep secrets when other people don't want to hear the truth."

"I just couldn't take it, the big buildup and the letdown. I'd think you would understand that."

"But I could take it. I wanted to take it. Taking it was better than not trying at all, just giving in. You always just give in! You think whatever happens, if we just wait a while it'll turn out okay! I can't live like that any more!"

"I do think patience is a virtue." His voice seemed to regard this as if it were just one of his illteresting quirks.

"I think you think patience is everything!" I turned on my knees and faced him. "I feel like I'm waking up from a dream! A dream where you just go along and go along and whatever you do, you're just looking on, you're not affecting anything! At least Rose isn't like that. At least she takes what she wants. I mean, Jess said to me that the reason for the miscarriages is probably in the well water.

Runoff in the well water. He says people have known about it for years! We never even asked about anything like that, or looked in a book, or even told people we'd had miscarriages. We kept it all a secret! What if there are women all over the county who've had lots of miscarriages, and if they just compared notes-but God forbid we should talk about it!"

"Oh, Jess. He's got the most harebrained ideas."

"You don't know! You havent read the books he has! You just don't know!"

"I know enough! I follow the instructions! I'm careful!"

"Don't the tile lines lead right into the drainage wells that lead right into the aquifer that leads right into the drinking well?"

"The ground filters everything out!"

"Who says that?"

"Everybody knows that! Well water's the best you can drink."

"If I got pregnant again, I wouldn't drink it." We were facing each other, our foreheads about six inches apart. Simultaneously, we both realized that talking about my getting pregnant again was a dangerous enterprise. I leaned over the side of the bed and picked up my magazine, smoothed the pages. Ty said, "You hid things from me. You lied to me. That's the fact, and you turn it around. You simply lied.

I think that's a fairly straightforward issue."

Possibly he didn't know the half of it. Possibly he did. At any rate, the accusation, true as it was, cowed me. I felt my face heat up and my scalp prickle with that old familiar sense of shame. I remembered the Sunday school teacher we had in junior high, a man who only taught us for a few months, making us repeat as a group, "Sins lead to other sins. Sin piles on sin. Lord, keep me from committing the first sin."

Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. It was a powerful and frightening word. I took some deep breaths. What about Caroline?

Didn't he have a secret there? That accusation stood rampant in my brain, wanted to batter its way out. Ty sat back. I looked at him.

It was clear to me that there was a deeper level for us to light on, a level where nothing could be held back, and the true import of our conflicting loyalties would express itself. The next shot was mine, and he was waiting for it. But this was a new world for me, for us.

We had spent our life together practicing courtesy, putting the best face on things, harboring secrets. The thought of giving that up, right now, with my next remark, was terrifying.

Finally, I summoned a firm voice, in which I said, "If I were always perfectly open and truthful, then most of the work of being sure that I agree with you on everything would be already done for you, wouldn't it?"

"There was a time I thought we did agree on everything." He said this in a quiet, and, I thought, sentimental voice. I said, "You're patronizing me."

He said, "I want to stay with you, Ginny. That's one of those virtues in me you seem to hate now, but it's true. I think you'll come back to me. I think we'll go back to having what we had before.

That's all I ever wanted."

"Well, it's not all I ever wanted, and I can't go back to it." I said this with a sense of lifting a lid, just for a peek, just to test the temptation of it.

"Do you really hate me that much?"

"Oh, come off it. I don't hate you."

But just saying that smote me unexpectedly. Hadn't I hated him a little recently, for talking to Caroline behind my back, for failing to defend me when Daddy denounced us, for never bothering to tell me that he didn't agree with what Daddy said, and even just now, for undermining my trust in Rose? And I hated myself for going along to get along, so didn't I hate him, too? The fact was, I didn't feel hatred right then. If I had, I thought, I would have been willing to say anything, do anything, have everything about me be known.

My strongest feeling right then was that the feelings that he seemed to think were simple enough were too complicated for me to name, which seemed like a form of lying, felt like a form of coercion.

These, my Sunday school teacher might possibly have said, are the wages of sin.

His voice suddenly barbed with resentment, he said, "Well, you might feel like you're waking from a dream, but I feel like I'm having a nightmare. I was so excited about the hog operation! That was my dream, and it was coming true. I was working around your father!

I was bringing him into things bit by bit. I never thought it would be easy, but I thought I was making progress, and then you women just wrecked it, you just got him all fired up. He was acting crazy!"

"But it was basically harmless. Just buying stuff. So what?"

"He had that accident."

"So, we could have gotten him to come around more, but Jess Clark was ming around instead "Don't bringJess Clark into this! Anyway, you said you had fun."

"It was fun, but-oh shit. What's the use?" He slid down under the sheet. "What time is it?"

"After eleven."

"That lumber's going to be here at six."

I turned out the light.

In the dark he said, "If you wanted to get a job in town, you should have said so."

I lay there for a long time, panting with relief and also with a Strange disappointment that the truth hadn't come out, distantly bemused that this was the conclusion he drew from the last live months, from Rose's operation, from the transfer, from Jess Clark, and Rose's revelations and my fresh memories. I said, "That wasn't what I wanted." Ty gave out a loud snore, then turned on his side.

When I was certain he was asleep, I slipped out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts. My sneakers, which I tied on without socks, were beside the back door. In moments I was standing on the blacktop, looking toward Daddy's house. For the moment, I couldn't go any farther than that. The moonlight picked up the white hatches of the centerline and the glinting bits that looked like mica mixed with the asphalt. To either side, the corn plants rattled in the eternal breeze in a way that made you aware of how they grew-as tall as a man in a tiny fraction of a man's lifetime, drawing water from deep in the earth and exhaling it in a vast, slow breath. I stared toward Daddy's place.

It was dark except for a light in the window of my old room. The big cube of a house seemed to expand and vibrate with the presence of Jess Clark.

Just because everything about him had turned shameful and awkward for me, that didn't mean the thorn of longing had worked its way out of my flesh. So far, I had restrained myself fairly well, or, maybe, fear had restrained me-fear of being caught out by Ty or Daddy as well as fear of appearing forward or foolish to Jess. Or ugly. Or undesirable. Looking toward the light that surely contained less right then-perhaps he was reading?-I knew I was afraid of him, too. More afraid of him than of anyone. That had sprung up along with the shame, hadn't it? Desire, shame, and fear. A freak, like a woman with three legs, but my freak, that I readily recognized from old days in high school and just after, when every date had the potential to paralyze me. The way I unparalyzed myself then was to break dates with boys who actually attracted me. The best thing about Ty had been that he attracted Daddy. I saw that he was clean and polite and familiar and good. Somehow that enabled the three-legged woman to walk, carefully, and very slowly, but with dignity.

Now the three-legged woman stood on the blacktop in the moonlight, and each of her legs strained in a different direction. Actually putting one foot in front of the other, carrying myself closer and closer to someone for whom I was soaked with desire, which was what I was doing, seemed like an illusion. Soon this illusion had me standing below the window, then circling, quietly, around to the back window of that room, where I saw what I had been looking for, Jess Clark, his back and the back of his head, in a white shirt, the slope of his shoulders and the angle of his neck as evocative and promising as anything I had ever seen. But distant and unreal, like a picture on a television screen, as unreal as the imaginary walking me that had left behind the actual motionless me on the blacktop.

Now the imaginary me sang out, "Jess! Hey, Jess! Jess Clark!"

Magically, the ligure turned and came to the window, pushed the sash higher, and bent down. He said, "Hi! Who's out there?"

"It's, uh, Ginny." Shame and fear rose up around me like a cloud.

He said, "Hey! What are you doing? Did you knock? I had the radio on."

Although the light was behind him, I saw the white flash of a smile. I said, "I guess I haven't seen you in a while, huh?"

"Lots going on. I miss you." His voice softened. He should not have said that. He should not have said it because then I said, "I love you," and he said, "Oh, Ginny," and what I heard in his voice was pure, clear remorse that resonated in the ensuing silence like the note of a bell and told me all I needed to know about every question that lingered from earlier in the summer.

After a moment, he said, "Let me come down. I'll be right down."

But I wasn't going to wait for that. I knew the way home, not down the open, revealing road, but between the stiff concealing rows of corn.

No apologies or kindness or humiliating clarilications of his feelings would follow me there.

I was washing the breakfast dishes by six. Ty was pacing the shoulder of Cabot Street Road. At seven the construction workers arrived, already having breakfasted at the cafe. I started one load of wash and took another outside and began to hang it on the clothesline.

I was a good machine, and soon my view of the work site was hidden by sheets and shirts, so I didn't see two cars pull up behind the lumber truck. What I did see, sometime later, when I was carrying the basket back into the house, was the lumber truck and all the cars-including Marv Carson's big maroon Pontiac and Ken LaSalle's powder blue Dodge-pull onto the road in a line and drive away. Ty was standing, watching them go. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, then he put the cap back on. He stood looking after them for a long time.

I didn't need him to tell me that Marv and Ken had made him stop work on the hog buildings, nor did I need him to confess to me that he'd paid for the weekend's work in a futile attempt to push the construction past some point of no return. I dimly recognized as I watched him that his efforts had been foolish, a waste of our money, an extra fillip of defeat that he could have avoided, but what it looked like at the time was our crowning failure as a couple.

TWO MORNINGS LATER, I was getting out the vacuum cleaner.

Ty was out in the hog barn, and we had spoken very little since our argument.

"Crops look terrific."

Ijumped.

Henry Dodge, our minister, was standing outside the screen with his hand on the latch.

I said, "Bin buster in the making. We'd better have a long dry spell in September."

"Are you going to invite me in?"

I stood up. My hands dripped suds. I dried them. "Sure. Coffee?"

He pushed his thumb down on the latch and opened the door in a smoothly aggressive way, as if I thought meanly, he was practiced at taking advantage of small openings. I recalled that he'd been a missionary at some point early on, maybe in Africa somewhere, or the Philippines He said, "Ginny, I thought we were friends."

I said, "Here, sit down. There's some cake from last night."

"It's a little early for cake."

"Ty likes it. He likes pie for breakfast better, though." I looked at him when I poured the cup of coffee. That word "friends" floated in the air, taking on more complexity the more that I looked at Henry Dodge. I said, "Maybe."

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe we've been friends. Maybe you could define the term more clearly."

He laughed as if I had made a joke, then said, "You came to visit a while ago."

"Well, I did, yeah. But it's okay." This remark made him seem inquisitive, and I resented it. I said, "Maybe I should have called you after the church supper. What a stir." I rolled my eyes.

"I should have called you, I think. That's partly why I came."

I gazed at him. I said, "Maybe we've been friends. Define the term more clearly, and I'll tell you."

He laughed again. I felt a distant recognition ofhow these responses of mine could seem witty, or ironic, but I was dead serious. Henry sat down and shifted back and forth in the seat as if he were hollowing himself a spot in deep grass. He took a sip of coffee and said, "I think I'm good at seeing wider perspectives, but mostly I'd like you to talk to me."

I allowed, "The church supper was embarrassing."

"Not everyone thought Harold was right to speak out like that."

I gauged this. Finally, I said, "Do you mean that a few disagreed with Harold, or most people, or just how many?"

"Well-" "Actually, I can't believe anyone thought it was right of Harold to speak out like that." I felt myself heating up. "He set that up!

He came over here especially to set it up, and he was gleeful about it-" "In his present affliction, I don't think-" He turned the handle of his cup toward me and began again, "I'd like to be a peacemaker."

"Why?" I tried to make this sound as flat and purely interrogative as possible, but he took it as an accusation. He said, "No one else seems to have. As your pastor and your father's pastor-" "I mean, what purpose is served by making peace?"

"Oh."

Apparently he hadn't really considered this. I waited for him to think of something.

Finally, after glancing at me two or three times, he said, "Wouldn't you prefer it yourself? I'm enough your friend to know you thrive in a happier atmosphere than this. I've never seen you to seek a quarrel.

That just doesn't seem like you." He liked this line, and warmed to it as he spoke. "You look unhappy. You look drawn and tired."

The irrefutable evidence of appearance.

"Are you watching us? Me? Looks aren't everything."

He laughed again, then sobered up. His voice was solemn when he said, "You don't have to watch to see."

My friend? Could I rely on him to see what I saw in our family and our father and Rose and myself? That seemed like the one test of friendship.

He said, "Families are better together. Working together."

"Is that an absolute?"

He paused to inventory the families he knew, sipping his coffee, then said, "Maybe not quite an absolute, if we're talking absolutes."

He smiled. "But the exceptions are extremely rare. I know I'm a conservative on this score, Ginny, and that hasn't always been to my advantage. But in all my years in the ministry, I've only seen one divorce I agreed with. One single family breakup." He paused the way he liked to pause in his sermons, preparatory to driving home a point he was especially fond of then he said, "The kind of life people lead in this county is getting rarer and rarer. Three generations on one farm, working together, is something to protect."

"That seems true in theory."

"Helen and I chose to come here partly because we want to help preserve a way of life that we believe in. Some of my best memories are of making hay with my grandfather when my uncles were young men. They worked like one body, they were that close."

"Do they all still get along?" I smiled frankly and disingenuously.

"Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Well, of course there are spats. Man is fallen. And maybe there's a value to being yoked to your enemies. You have more opportunity to learn to love them." He beamed, having solved the puzzle I'd proposed.

I said, "How many haven't spoken to one or the other in more than ten years?"

Henry licked his lips. "I don't know. Listen-" "Come on, Henry. Fess up.

"You're asking whether my family is holy, as if only perfect virtue on my part permits me to advise you. That's a commonly held fallacy, and even ministers fall for it, but-" "I just don't know why you're here.

Who sent you, what you want me to do, what you think I've done, why you came here instead of going to Rose. Are we friends? Have you had us over for a barbecue? Do you call me to chat from time to time? Do you solicit my advice on your problems? No, no, and no. I don't want you coming out here for a purpose. I don't want to be on your rounds."

"There are pastoral duties-" Problems. Barbecues. Chatting. There was something I wanted from him after all, wasn't there? My heartbeat quickened and my palms got damp. I said, "Just tell me what people are saying about us.

"Ginny."

"I want to know. I really do."

"People don't gossip as much as you think."

"Yes, they do."

"Well, not to me. His look was impenetrable. Then he said, "Can't I reach you? I want to." His tone and demeanor were warmly sympathetic here, and it occurred to me that in the past he would have suckered me, back when I would have readily called him my friend just because I would have been flattered by the public acknowledgment of such a friendship. Now the whole idea seemed suspect. I couldn't tell whether I mistrusted his office or him, but either way, there would be no confidences. I set my coffee cup on the table, stood up, and went to the sink, where I wrung out the sponge under a stream of hot water.

I began wiping the table. I said, "Lift your cup."

He lifted his cup. "At least, keep coming to church on Sundays.

Keep the avenue to God open. He's marvelously forgiving. More forgiving than we are of ourselves."

The screen door opened. Ty saw Henry, stepped inside, and greeted him respectfully. Here, I thought, were two people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality. It was a small world they lived in, really, small, complete, and forever curving back to itself. Their voices relaxed and lowered, and their world looked far away to me.

That afternoon, when Ty left to haul a bunch of hogs to Mason City, I cleaned up from helping him load them, and went into Cabot.

Henry's reluctance to disclose the gossip had inflamed me. I figured I could tell what was being said about us by how they looked at me and spoke to me. I toyed with asking Rose to go along, too, for another, more observant set of eyes, but Rose had always scorned such pursuits, so even when she called and asked me what I was making for supper, I didn't say I was going anywhere.

Cabot wasn't much of a town, but it was on the only straight road between Mason City and Sioux City, so there were two antique stores and a clothing and fabric store along with the cale, the hardware store, the Cool Spot, and the feed and seed. It was a nicerlooking town than Pike or Zebulon Center, either one. Those two towns had both once had hopes, or pretensions, so their main streets were four lanes and wider: old storefronts barely cast shadows a quarter of the way across the glaring expanses. Cabot, on the other hand, was built to the north of Cabot Street Road, and Main Street was lined with maple trees that Verlyn Stanley had donated when all the chestnuts were dying. Lawns in Cabot were big and houses were pretty-late Victorian, about twenty years older than the houses in Pike and Zebulon Center, but well kept up. Lots of farm couples aspired to retire there if it should come time to sell off the place on contract and move to town.

Old Cabot Antiques was where Rose had sold the hall tree she'd found in our dump, so that was where I went first. Dinah Drake set her prices high. She didn't expect to be selling to people from town, and though you never saw anyone in there, it was rumored that she had contacts in the Twin Cities and Chicago who bought her best pieces. She had a friendly manner, and she liked to show off her new things. A discussion of whose they were always shaded into a discussion of how they'd fallen into her hands. Her habitual manner was one of amazement-that some right-minded Zebulon County person would actually let such a piece get away from the family, or else that some city person would actually pay what Dinah asked for it. Fools on both ends, and Dinah in the middle, tsk-tsk-tsking.

Dinah noticed me right away, and drawled, "Well, hi, Ginny.

How are you?"

I gave the standard reply, "I don't know. Not too bad, I suppose.

I started down her center aisle, but stopped almost at once to look at some figurines sitting on a marble-topped chest. I turned one over.

Dinah said, "Royal Copenhagen. Can you believe it? Old, too. When I lock up at night, I put those away."

The ligure I was holding was a shepherdess in a gown rough with dainty china frills. Dinah seemed to expect me to say something, but I knew I would get farther if I kept quiet. I picked up a silver dish. She said, "That'sjust plated. I'm sure it's from the Montgomery Ward catalog. Rather pretty though, don't you think?"

She came out from behind the rolltop desk she used for a counter.

"That Royal Copenhagen, though. You know Ina Baffin down in Henry Grove?"

I shook my head.

"She was a hundred and four. She got those from her grandma when she was a girl, and her own granddaughter said they didn't interest her.

Ina loved those, I'm sure. This granddaughter said they were just too simpery. Simpery! Something as valuable as that." She lifted another figurine, a boy playing a flute, and gazed at it, then set it down with care. I moved down the aisle, smiling politely, lifting things and looking at them. Dinah picked up a rag and began to dust with a thoughtful air. There were some Saturday Evening Post magazines in a bin. I leafed through one of them. Dinah lingered near the front of the store, then slowly made her way back to me.

She dusted each piece of a ruby-colored glass decanter set that was sitting on a dark-colored sideboard, then said, "People say your dad's moving to Des Moines, now.

"Mmm." I was noncommittal.

"You know, sometimes people have me over to look at some of the older things, just to see if there's a market for them. The market changes all the time-" Her voice faded, then strengthened. "I wish now I had all that Depression glass I used to see at farm sales, but nobody wanted it in those days. Reminded them of the Depression!"

She laughed. "I always feel like I should buy everything and just store it, because sooner or later, it's going to come into vogue."

"I never thought of that."

"Well, you know-" She wandered away.

I picked up a stack of old crocheted antimacassars. Not in vogue.

The most expensive one in the stack was six dollars, an elaborate pineapple design done in the finest thread. I held it up, imagining the work that had gone into it. Six dollars. It made me sad. Dinah came close again.

"The thing is, what I do when I come to someone's house is give them an idea of what can be done with everything. ArId there's always so much stuff. You have no idea how much people accumulate over the years. I don't guess your father's going to be farming again. You might not realize, but there is a market for old farm tools-" She let her eyes rest on my face. I let my eyes rest on hers. She said, "It can be a touchy subject. But when they move to an apartmenteven old clothes, or shoes. You don't have to let everything go to the church or the Salvation Army."

I said, "I'll talk to Rose. And Caroline, of course." Her eyebrows lifted at this last. I handed her the piece of lace, and said, "I'd like this. This is pretty."

She turned and went back to the rolltop desk. I opened my purse and found some money. I noticed that my hand was trembling.

At the cafe, Nelda served me a cup of coffee and an order of cinnamon toast without more than the most perfunctory politeness, as if she were angry with me but holding her tongue. Another sign, I thought.

At Roberta's, the clothing and fabric store, I thought I might buy some underwear or a belt or some stockings. Roberta herself wasn't there, so I spoke in a friendly way to her niece, Robin, who was in high school. Robin seemed to know, or at least, to think, nothing.

The merchandise was set out on the same wide wooden display tables that Roberta's mother, Doris, had used when I was a child and the store was called Doris's. It was easy to ramble from table to table, turning over price tags and unfolding things just for a look.

Like a lot of village stores, Roberta's had once been half of what it was now, and had expanded into the next building by breaking through an old wall. Roberta's had two front doors, and on summer days, both of them were open, as well as the back door. There was no air-conditioning; Roberta relied on cross-ventilation for comfort.

I was standing in women's underwear, holding two blouses that I wanted to try on, when I saw Caroline enter the farthest door, followed by Daddy, followed by Roberta, followed by Loren Clark.

Caroline was turned to help Daddy up the steps, Daddy was looking at his feet, and Roberta's eyes met mine. She stiffened, and I slipped hurriedly into a changing booth nearby. I did not try on the shirts.

I stood there holding them, immobilized.

It wasn't hard to hear them getting closer. Caroline was speaking to Daddy in a loud voice, and his tone matched hers. It was as if they both thought the other one was deaf. Loren must have left, because I heard him say, "I'll be back in fifteen minutes."

Roberta said, "Is there anything in particular you need, Caroline?"

Caroline said, "Daddy needs some things. Daddy? Mostly some socks and things. He made a list. Daddy? Have you got your list?"

"I've got it."

There was a long pause.

She said, "May I see it?"

"Daddy? May I see the list?"

Another long pause.

Finally, he said, "You got money?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"Let me see it."

"It's in my wallet. I've got plenty. It's okay." I saw Roberta's feet go by my curtained booth, pause, turn, pause, proceed. Caroline said, "Let's look at the socks. You like white, Daddy? These crews are a good buy." Her voice was falsely enthusiastic, the way mine had always been. Urging progress, trying to avert letting this small project mire itself. After a minute or two, she said, "These are nice, Daddy. The heels are reinforced and they're a hundred percent cotton.

That will feel good on your feet."

"Let's sit down."

There was a shuffling, stepping noise, then the scrape of a chair.

He said, "Come sit down here." His tone was equal parts commanding and wheed]ing. It gave me a chill. I noticed the two blouses I had taken off the rack. They were still clutched in my list. I hung them on the hook, then shook out my hand.

Caroline said, "Daddy, we should-" "Won't you sit down? Come sit by me?"

She gave a laugh, and said, "Oh, okay." I peeped from behind the curtain. The chairs they had found were between me and the door. I drew back again into the gloom of the booth. There was no chair, and the gap between the bottom of the curtain and the floor meant that I couldn't sit on the floor without being seen. I leaned against the wall. He said, "You were a little birdy girl. Remember that brown coat you had? Little hat, too. You were so proud of that.

It would have been that velvet stuff."

"Velveteen," said Caroline.

"I called you my birdy girl. You looked just like a little house wren.

"Did I?"

I set my lips together "You didn't like it either, nosiree. You didn't want any brown coat and hat. You wanted pink! Candy pink. You had it all worked out in your mind about that pink velveteen, and you took a pink Crayola to that coat, too!" He laughed a full, happy laugh.

"Your mama had to spank you then for sure!"

"I don't remember any of that. I remember something red-a jacket with hearts round the-" "Couldn't ever get you to stay away from those drainage wells!

Didn't matter how we punished you or whipped you, pretty soon, you'd be crossing the road and pushing bits of stuff down the holes!

It was like a moth to the flame. Your mama would say, now do you understand, and you'd look her right in the eye and say yes, Mommy, and then off you'd go. I tightened down all the bolts. I knew the grates could hold three men, but it made me so nervous anyway, I got some U-bolts and went around and bolted 'em all down a second time. Then all I could think about was you crossing the road."

They laughed.

I felt a kind of rushing pressure in my head, and the white walls of the booth changed color.

Caroline said, "We've got to go talk to Ginny and Rose today, Daddy."

He didn't say anything.

"We need to talk to them. I want to talk to them. I want to tell them-" He mumbled, wheedling, "We don't need them."

"We don't need them, Daddy, I know, but-" "All we need is this."

I leaned my forehead against the nubby cool wallboard.

"But I think-" His voice was warm and low. "They'll be jealous. You know how they are. You're enough for me. Let's go back to Harold's, now.

There's Loren."

"We didn't get-" "Take that stuff. Those things are okay." Their chairs scraped, and Loren's voice said, "Ready?"

Daddy said, "Now he's a good boy."

Ten minutes later, I was in my car heading east. My head was throbbing, and I barely knew where I was going. The air seemed intensely hot, though I remembered that it had been cool enough before.

Even so. I had to keep my window rolled up so that I could lean my head against it from time to time. I saw Loren and his truck in Harold's farmyard. The others must have gone inside. I sped up as I passed, and he did not wave.

Rose was sewing on her machine. The girls were not in evidence, but even if they had been, I would have burst through the door with my question: "Rose, what color was your coat when you were live or so?"

Rose, never startled, finished her seam, lifted her foot off the pedal, raised the presser foot, and cut the threads. Then she said, "The only nice coat I ever had was that brown velveteen thing Mommy got from some cousin in Rochester. Little billed cap, too. I hated that thing."

"What color of a coat did you want?"

"Oh, pink, probably. I adored pink for years.

"Did Caroline get that coat?"

"No. Mommy cut it up for glass polishing rags because I threw up something on it and she could never get the stain out." She looked at me. She said, "Ginny, you look terrible."

I fell into an armchair. I said, "I was in Roberta's and Daddy and Caroline came in. I can't tell you the tone of voice he used to her.

All soft and affectionate, but with something underneath that I can't describe. I thought I was going to faint."

She set down her sewing and stood up. There was a fan sitting on the television, and each time it turned toward me and blew in my face, I felt calmer. Rose gazed down at me with utter seriouslless, her eyes deep and dark, her mouth carved from marble. She said, "Say it."

"Say what?"

"Say it."

"It happened like you said. I realized it when I was making the bed for Jess Clark in my old room. I lay down on the bed, and I remembered.

She went back to the sewing machine. She didn't speak, but the methodical way she assembled her pieces, transformed them into a pair of tan slacks, was reassuring enough.

WHEN I WAS THREE AND A HALF YEARS OLD, Ruthie Ericson fed me twenty-seven baby aspirin while I was sitting on the toilet.

I know that they were cube-shaped and yellow and sweet, and I know I lay on my back and was rolled under circular lights, which must have been at the hospital in Mason City. What I think of as a distinct part of this memory is that I suspected that eating the pills was forbidden, and somehow this was related to my sitting on the toilet. It must have been summer; I remember the yellow of my halter top, my pink stomach beneath that, the V ofmy thighs splitting above the dark basin of the toilet and the white semicircle of the Seat running between them. I was wearing dark blue sneakers.

Their rounded, rubber toes dangled above mottled gray linoleum.

My shorts lay on the floor beneath my feet. I wonder if vivid selfconsciousness was my normal state, or if the forbidden pills carried it into me, and thus imprinted my memory.

When I contemplate this memory, I feel on the verge of remembering what childhood felt like, that its hallmark was the immediacy of one's every physical sensation, and also the familiar strangeness of one's parts-feet and hands, especially, but also chest, knees, stomach. I think I remember meditating on these attached objects, looking at them, touching them, feeling them from the outside and from the inside, wondering about them because there was wondering to be done, not because there were answers to be found.

There must have been some component of anxiety in this wondering because it was borne in upon me daily that I was "getting out of hand."

That was the phrase my parents used. Daddy would tell Mommy that I was getting out of hand, or Mommy would tell me that. I knew, too, whose hand I was getting out of just as I knew what it meant to be in her hands. If Mommy wasn't around, the hands were Daddy's. We were told, when we had been "naughty"disobedient, careless, destructive, disorderly, hurtful to others, defiant-that we had to learn, and I think that my selfconsciousness might have grown out of that necessity.

I think I must have been trying to keep tabs on those wayward parts of me that kept wandering into naughtiness.

I remember what I looked like because I looked different from Mommy and especially Daddy. Daddy was never without his work clothes, usually overalls, and Mommy always wore a dress. In the privacy of my bed, under the covers, looking down the waist of my pajamas or unbuttoning the top, I saw that I was naked inside my clothes, and another thing I distinctly remember about being a child is that awareness of oneself inside one's clothes. Pinching shoes, a prickling slip, a dress that is tight across the shoulders or around the wrists, ankle socks bunching in the heels of my shoes. Mommy and Daddy never complained of their clothes, but mine seemed a constant torment. On the first day of school, first grade, a dress that MomnIy had made me was too high and too tight in the waist. Every time I lifted an arm or leaned forward, the waist rode up against my lower ribs. At the last recess, when one of the boys wouldn't vacate the swing, I bit him on the arm and drew blood. He had to go to the doctor and have a tetanus shot. At home, I was spanked and told to sit in a chair for an hour without moving. The dress had made me mad with irritation. I remember feeling my skin all over my body, feeling its exact surface against the world.

Ty and I spent our wedding night at the Savery Hotel in Des Moines. I was nineteen. I had never touched my breasts except to position them in my brassiere or to wash them with a washcloth.

As far as I knew then, my hands and my body had never met without an intermediary washcloth. Certainly much time was spent scrubbing; washcloths in our house were rough and soaps were heavy duty. Just as you didn't want to let the farm into the house, you didn't want to wear it, either, especially into town. That was a matter of pride. But the scrubbing went beyond that. In and behind the ears, around the neck, all over the face, the knuckles, the fingernails, the armpits, the back where you could reach, then all below. I suppose what I was afraid of was some sort of stench. It did not bear actually thinking about. I scrubbed just like that before my wedding, knowing that when we got to Des Moines and my going-away dress came off Ty would be repelled if I wasn't perfectly clean and odorfree.

He wasn't repelled, but he tried not to be overly curious, which meant that we disrobed with the lights out and confined ourselves, that first time, to hugging, kissing, and an insertion that seemed, more than anything, practical and hygienic. While we were doing it, I made a little prayer that my period wouldn't suddenly come, mid-cycle, in response to defloration. There would be drops ofblood, I had heard, so I kept one of the hotel washcloths beside the bed, and put it between my legs as soon as he pulled out. There were no drops of blood, only the wetness of our combined fluids, but I succeeded in preserving the sheet from it. The next day, I threw the washcloth in the trash chute at the end of the corridor. I remember that washcloth, obvious evidence that my midnight experiences with Daddy had lifted off me, leaving no trace in my memory.

But sex did make me touchy. It was full of contradictory little rituals. There had to be some light in the room, if only from the hall. Daytime was better than nighttime, and no surprises. I always wore a nightgown. When he pushed it up, I closed my eyes. When he entered me, though, my eyes were wide open, staring at his face.

I hated for him to turn away or look down. I didn't like it if either of us spoke. He made the best of it, and I never refused him.

I didn't want to see my body.

I assumed that all of this was normal, the way it was for everyone.

It went without saying that bodies fell permanently into the category of the unmentionable. I don't know that there would have been much more communication had our mother lived-though she did tell me never to wear "pointy bras"; they were "too suggestive." She also advised against nylon underpants, because they were "slippery" and "made you feel funny."

One thing Daddy took from me when he came to me in my room at night was the memory of my body.

I have only one memory of my teenaged body. I was fourteen, in ninth grade, and it was a Saturday night. I was going to bed. I sat down to take off my long underwear, and as I pushed the dimpled cotton down my right leg, I realized that my leg was slim and looked the way magazines said it was supposed to look. Recently, during physical education, Rita Benton had lamented her own legs, calling them tree trunks. I had noted her disappointment, but not related it to myself. Now I saw that I had had better luck than Rita-my leg was slim from heel to crotch. I pulled off the lonohns, put my legs under the covers thankfully. I promised never to be vain about them.

I didn't even look at the other leg; I looked away from it, and made myself concentrate on some math problems to put myself to sleep.

And so my father came to me and had intercourse with me in the middle of the night. I could remember pretending to be asleep, but knowing he was in the doorway and moving closer. I could remember him saying, "Quiet, now, girl. You don't need to light me." I didn't remember lighting him, ever, but in all circumstances he was ready to detect resistance, anyway. I remembered his weight, the feeling of his knee pressing between my legs, while I tried to make my legs heavy without seeming to defy him. I remembered that he wore night shirts that were pale in the dim light, and socks. I remembered that his hands were heavily callused, and snagged on the sheets. I remembered that he carried a lot of smells-whiskey, cigarette smoke, the sweeter and sourer smells of the farm work. I remembered, over and over again, what the top of his head looked like. But I never remembered penetration or pain, or even his hands on my body, and I never sorted out how many times there were. I remembered my strategy, which had been desperate limp inertia.

What I remembered of Daddy did not gel into a full ligure, but always remained fragments of sound and smell and presence. That capacity Rose had, of remembering, knowing, judging, as if continually viewing our father through the cross hairs of a bombsight, was her special talent, and didn't extend to me.

THE LAWYER iN MASON CiTY, Jean Cartier, which most people pronounced "Carteer," had a surprisingly deluxe office. It was in one of those minimalls, beige brick with white trim and tall, narrow windows, but inside it was paneled with real wood, not Masonite, and carpeted in thick green. What looked like a real Oriental rug lay under Mr. Cartier's desk. Mr. Cartier, whom I never could call "Zhahn" or, as his secretary called him, "Gene," had come from Montreal originally.

He was married to a woman from Mason City.

There was a picture of her and their four children in a silver frame on his desk. Ty had taken the papers to him and asked him to handle them for us. Late in July, he called and asked the four of us to come for a consultation.

Ty and I drove. Rose and Pete drove. The girls had been dropped at the Mason City public swimming pool.

We positioned ourselves around the cherrywood consulting table rather like guests at a club who are conspicuously not membership material.

Mr. Cartier introduced himself to each of us individually, making eye contact and smiling gravely. He must have estimated our relative worth, because he then addressed Pete and me once for every three times he addressed Ty and Rose.

He asked lots of careful questions about the farm, Daddy, Ty's and Pete's farming methods, the construction, the loans, Marv Carson and Ken LaSalle, Caroline, and Frank, her husband. He explored the family rift in the deliberate way a surgeon might probe a wound, not poking or cutting, but holding one layer out of the way while inspecting deeper ones. He smiled often. He was orderly and each question only advanced a degree or two beyond the previous one.

He seemed to leave nothing unconsidered. Compared to him, Ken LaSalle was an earnest bumbler.

Ty sat across from Rose. For the first hour of the consultation, Ty sat forward in his chair, his legs tucked against the rungs under the seat. A couple of times he stretched, and once he must have bumped into Rose's legs, because he jumped as if he'd been scalded and curled his legs tight again. He wouldn't look at her, and when she answered a question, he held his breath, then let it out suddenly when she'd finished speaking. She cast him two or three annoyed glances, but didn't say anything. Mr. Cartier asked him twice if he had anything to add. Each time, Ty shook his head.

It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success. Certainly, though, when we entered into the world ofJean Cartier, a lot of things began to seem different, less impossible than they had before. Nothing changed, but it all coexisted more agreeably, as if the march of time that would soon make everything crash together were suspended.

In the second hour of our consultation, Ty stretched his legs out again, and when they bumped Rose's, he just shifted them to one side after a quick apology. Rose glanced more often toward Pete, as if deferring to his opinion, not a habit of hers. Pete hitched his chair a little closer to hers. Mr. Cartier had his secretary bring in coffee.

I slipped off my high heels, which were tight, and ran the sole of one foot over the toes of the other. Mr. Cartier came back to the subject of Daddy. "I gather," he said with a smile, "that Mr. Cook is in the habit of doing what he wants."

"You can say that again," said Rose.

"And in the habit of having others do things his way?"

"More or less," said Ty.

Pete said, "Ha!"

"I see from records that he was arrested for DWI in late June?"

Rose said, "Yes, they served him with that shortly after he left our farm."

In all the excitement, I had forgotten about this, but Rose seemed never to have forgotten a thing.

Mr. Cartier looked at his papers, then said, "A substantial fine has apparently been paid by Ms. Cook?"

Rose said, "That would be the way it would go." She sniffed.

After a moment of looking at each of us, Mr. Cartier said, "In my experience, passing down the farm is always difficult. If there aren't enough sons, then there are too many. Or the daughter-inlaw isn't trustworthy. Wants to spend too much time having fun."

He smiled again. "Every farmer remembers what an unusually sober and industrious young man he was himself."

Rose coughed impatiently.

"Even though these aren't precisely the problems here, it's well to remember that this transition is always always difficult." He looked directly at Rose. "And that, in most cases, once the transition has been made, and the older generation is taken care of things can go back to normal for twenty years or so.

"God forbid," said Rose.

Cartier's smile took on a particle of uncertainty. Pete said, rather mildly, "If you don't mind my saying so' it seems to me that the only course of action is to have all the ownership problems cleared up.

That's the basis for any future, whatever it is."

"Oh, they'll be cleared up," said Cartier. "No two ways about that."

I felt a tightening in my chest at this remark, as if should we get the farm, Daddy would be consigned to wander around in the rain for the rest of his life. Then I thought, what in the world are we going to do with him?

As if in answer to my fear, Mr. Cartier said, "One thing at a time, though." He looked down at his notes. "You four do intend to farm it, however?"

"Of course," said Ty.

"Isn't that the point?" said Rose.

"We'll see," said Pete. Rose looked at him in surprise.

"I don't know," was what I said, but this doubt fell unregarded into the flow of everyone's expectations.

"Well," said Mr. Cartier, looking at his watch and folding together his papers, "one thing at a time. The 'mismanagement or abuse' clause in the preincorporation agreement is pretty undefined. From what you tell me, they're certainly not going to be able to prove abuse, and probably not mismanagement, but you've got to farm like model farmers until the court date. That means working together yourselves, finding help, and getting the harvest in in good time."

He turned to Rose and me, smiling. "And you ladies, you wear dresses every day, and keep the lawn mowed and the porch swept."

Rose said, "Are you kidding?"

"In part. But appearances are everything with a clause like this. If I have to, I'll call some of your neighbors to attest to your skills, and their lawyer will call neighbors to attest to your mistakes. If you look good, they won't be able to touch you."

"This is ridiculous," said Rose.

"It's millions of dollars," said Mr. Cartier. "Millions of dollars is never ridiculous." He opened the glass door for us, saying, "The court date isn't set, but it will certainly be after the harvest is ii so use it to your advantage." And we were suddenly out of his world and in the hot asphalt parking lot of the Houston Avenue Professional Minimall. The office next door was occupied by United Parcel Service.

Ty opened the door on my side, then went around to his side and got in.

I was looking at Pete. He wore a nice shirt-a sharply cut moss-green cotton twill with a pale gray tie that he loosened while he and Rose walked to their silver truck. Rose walked half a step in front of him, not looking at him, though he was blond and tall, graceful and well worth looking at. He wasn't wearing a cap the way Ty was-he never did, in town-and he ran his hand through his hair. His hands were arresting, wide and veined, dark tan, with long lingers. As I stared at them, I could almost make myself see what they knew about melodies and harmonies and all the other musical mysteries. I dragged my gaze from his hands back to his face. Neither expertise nor confidence was visible there. He said, "It's after four. I want to stop somewhere for a drink."

Rose said, "Oh, for God's sake. The girls have been waiting for three hours."

"They'll be fine."

They got into the truck.

When I finally sat down in my seat, Ty said, "Need anything at the Supervalu?" I shook my head. He said, "Plenty hot after that air conditioning, huh?"

"Mmmhm."

"Must be ninety-live." He pulled onto the street. Rose and Pete had disappeared.

"What time is it?"

"Four-thirty or so.

"Already? It seems like I just made dinner."

"Well, it's a different world in that place, huh?"

"I thought that, too."

We passed the hospital and the enviable houses around it. I said, "Pete really isn't going to have much more say in the farm operation, is he?"

Ty said, "Doesn't look like it to me."

Even so, the afternoon at Mr. Cartier's had its effect.

I did what he said. I swept the porch, mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, canned tomatoes and pickled peppers and onions, mopped and swept and washed and dusted, and wore housedresses in the heat rather than shorts. I served up meals at six and eleven thirty and live on the dot as if Ty were a train coming into the station. I waited for Jess Clark to run down the road, but only as you would wait for a recurring dream to seize you again. I took down the curtains, the way I did every fall, though usually after harvest, and washed and bleached and ironed them.

I was so remarkably comfortable with the discipline of making a good appearance! It was like going back to school or church after a long absence. It had ritual and measure. Tasks proliferated. Once you made a good appearance your goal, you could confidently do things like nest all the spoons and forks in the newly washed and dried silverware tray and face then, in the same direction. You could spend an hour or two vacuuming the tops of the floor moldings in the house with an attachment you d never used before, then go back over what you'd done with a sponge dampened in ammonia, then again with furniture polish.

There was cleaning you could do in the bathroom with an old toothbrush that might have repelled you before. There were corners and angles and seams all over the house that could be gotten at. The outside of the house itself could be scrubbed from a ladder, with the hose and a brush. The outside second-story windows could be washed. The grass could be edged and trimmed and raked and rolled for the great open invisible eye of The Neighbors to judge and enjoy. Cars, and trucks, of course, could be washed every day. There could be no limit to your schedule.

Even though you had washed the supper dishes as you were cooking, you could jump up from the table when a serving dish got emptied, and wash it and dry it and put it away before finishing your beans.

You could follow your husband from the door to the sink, and sweep the dust from his boots into the dustpan and throw it away before he was finished washing his hands, and then you could take the towel he had dried them with and run it downstairs to the washing machine while he was sitting down to his food.

I was amazed at what I didn't have time for any more-reading, sewing, watching TV, talking to Rose, talking to Ty, strolling down the road, departing from the directives of my shopping list, taking the girls places. That Eye was always looking, day and night, even when there were no neighbors in sight. Even when no one who could possibly testify for or against me was within miles, I felt the familiar sensation of storing up virtue for a later date. The days passed.

Around the first of August, Pete got drunk and took a gun over to Harold Clark's place and threatened Harold, who was sitting on the porch and kept shouting, "Pete, you don't think I can see you but I can, so you just get away from here before Loren calls the sheriff!

Get away now. I see you for sure," always turning his head the wrong way. Then after he terrorized Harold, he drove his own silver truck into the quarry and drowned, and nobody knew whether it was an accident. According to his blood alcohol level, he shouldn't have been conscious enough to drive, much less to stay on the road.

T MUST HAVE BEEN about six. Ty had eaten his breakfast and headed for the hog pens. I had been upstairs making the beds, so I didn't see the sheriff's car go by, but when I went outside with the blankets to hang them on the line for the day, I saw Rose stumbling up the road. That was the oddest thing, how she didn't seem to know where she was going.

I was so struck by the strangeness of it that I didn't go out to meet her, but let her come.

I think that was the only time I saw her hesitate. She staggered up the road and when she got to about ten feet from me still standing in the road, she said, "Ginny, Pete's drowned himself in the quarry and the girls are still asleep, and I don't know what I'm going to tell them. Can you go down there?" It turned out the sheriff was going to come back and pick her up and take her up to the quarry. She didn't know if they'd pulled him out or not. Her face was bleached white and her eyes were like holes burnt in paper. I said, "There's coffee made, you"I'll drink some, but just go. Just go down there."

I dropped the blankets in a heap and ran toward her house. The one time I stopped and turned to look at her, I saw her standing where I had left her, her arms limp at her sides, her feet wide apart for balance. I ran on. That was the only time I ever saw her flinch.

She'd been making muffins. The milk and eggs and butter were in the bowl of the mixer. The flour was half measured into the sifter.

A green apple and a measuring cup lay on the floor where she'd dropped them or knocked them. I picked them up and finished making the muffins. There was no sound out of the girls, who were allowed to sleep until eight in the summer. Pete's work clothes, a couple of feed caps, and a fluorescent orange sweatshirt for hunting hung from hooks by the door. A mug that read "Pete's Joe" was filled with water in the sink. I couldn't help stare at these remainders.

I sat down at the table, and except for getting up to take the muffins out when the timer went off I continued to sit there. I let the girls sleep in. Their rooms were off the kitchen. At eight-thirty, I heard Linda stir. She rustled around, then began talking to herself. At eightforty, Pammy got up and went to the bathroom, then went back in her room and closed the door. Time was getting shorter.

At that point, of course, I didn't know about Harold or the blood alcohol level. I didn't even know that Pete hadn't come home the night before, or that he'd done his drinking in Mason City and driven almost thirty-live miles after leaving the bar. I sat at the table. I thought about getting up and going into the living room and looking at the photo on the piano of the old Pete-the young Pete, that is -the lost funny handsome Pete who was the kind of boy mothers are especially fond of full of tricks and jokes and talents and energy, whose darker side hasn't shown itself. But I didn't.

Pammy came out of her room, entirely dressed with her shoes and socks on. She didn't seem surprised to see me. She sat in her place, took a muffin off the table, and began to butter it. I said, "How'd you sleep?"

She said, "Fine."

I said, "Your mom should be back in a little while."

She said, "Okay."

She said, "Is there any juice?"

"Why don't you check?"

She got up and opened the refrigerator and took out the juice and the milk. She climbed up on the counter and got out two glasses, then poured a glass of each for herself. She brought them to the table.

Time was getting shorter. She said, "It's supposed to get really hot today, Aunt Ginny. Do you think you might take us swimming?

We haven't been for three days."

"We'll see."

"Doreen Patrick called me yesterday to go, but Mommy said no."

"Are you and Doreen friends now?"

"I don't know. She has a boyfriend."

"Who's that?

"Joshua Benton. He's going into ninth, but he drives already."

"Only to school, right? Doesn't he have one of those special licenses for kids going to school?"

"Yeah, but he looks older, and his mom lets him drive other times, like to take Doreen places. He took her to the A and W in Zebulon Center last Friday."

She buttered another muffin. I saw that my lists were clenched. I put them in my lap. Pammy would have said that Pete was her favorite parent, in spite of his temper. She looked something like him, too, though her features weren't as finely cut as his, and her hair was a different shade. I heard Linda's feet hit the floor. She came out of her room in her nightgown. She said, "It's nine o'clock.

Where's my mom?"

"She'll be back in a little while. Want an apple muffin? I sprinkled cinnamon sugar on the tops."

"Where'd she go?"

"I don't know."

"Where's Daddy?"

"I don't know."

"Daddy said he was going to take us to the sale barn today to look at some baby pigs."

"You can come down to my place and look at all the baby pigs you want to see."

"Not Yorkshires, Hampshires."

"Oh."