"I might have a 4-H project."

"What about school?"

Pammy said, "We might not go back to school."

"That would be good." For a moment, I forgot that things around here wouldn't be good for some time to come.

Linda said, "I don't know. I was used to it. The teachers were pretty nice, and we made popcorn in the dorm at night."

"I want to stay home." Pammy spoke with authority. Linda looked at her and shrugged, then said, "Can I use your glass?"

"Get your own glass. You know Mommy said that was dirty to use other people's glasses."

"Daddy does it."

"Well, it's a bad habit."

Time was getting shorter.

Linda got up to get her own glass. She said, "I want to have a pony for my 4-H project."

"You know they won't let you do that."

"Lori Stanley had a pony. She taught it to pull a cart. She said-" "Where would you put it?"

"Daddy said maybe we could build it a little stall. He said maybe.

He didn't say no. She poured herself some of the juice and began to drink it in deep gulps. I said, "Slow down."

Pammy said, "Maybe means 'probably not' with Daddy."

"Not always."

"Well, I know I can have a baby pig, and when it's grown up, I could get three hundred dollars for it."

I said, "Maybe we shouldn't talk about things we're going to get.

"I'm going to name it Wilbur."

"That's a dumb name.

"It's from Charlotte's Web."

"I know that. But it sounds like some grandfather's name or something."

"I wish you girls would stop lighting!"

Their heads swiveled toward me, surprised. Linda bit into her muffin, then said, "This isn't lighting, Aunt Ginny."

Pammy stood up. "I'm going to watch 'Let's Make a Deal."

Linda said, "I'm going to go see if Daddy's in the barn."

I said, "His truck is gone, honey."

"Oh." Now she looked at me carefully. I did my best to look noncommittal. After a moment, she said, "There's something wrong, isn't there?"

"We'll see. We'll see, okay?" Time was getting shorter and shorter.

Rose had been gone for two and a half hours. Linda's inspection was frank, not the look of a child, but the look of someone experienced in receiving bad news. She went into the living room. A moment later, I heard them murmuring together, and when I peeked in as I was clearing the table, they were sitting close together on the couch, staring glumly at the TV. I did the dishes. A fugitive thought that they would have been better off as Ty's daughters, as my daughters, than as Rose's and Pete's-wasn't this accident clear proof of that?-shot through my mind, but I suppressed it as mean and unworthy.

Our mother died when we were at school. We were in the cafeteria for lunch. I was sitting with Marlene Stanley, who was Marlene Dahl then, and Rose's class, which came down later, was still in line. I saw Mrs. Ericson and Mary Livingstone in the doorway of the cafeteria, looking around. Mrs. Ericson had Caroline by the hand. I knew they were looking for me, but I put my head down and focused on my macaroni and cheese. Our teacher, Mrs. Penn, appeared suddenly in the kitchen doorway. She had that look on her face that adults get when you know they can barely cope with what has happened. It is a terrifyingly sympathetic look, and it is for you.

They spotted Rose first, then came over to get me. I said to Marlene, "I guess I'm going home now. I think my mom died."

The moments in the cafeteria were worse than things at home, where the bed in the living room was familiar, where we had been getting used to the death of our mother for weeks. When we came through the front door, the minister we had then squeezed my shoulder. My father had changed out of his work clothes, and was sitting on the couch.

Caroline went over and sat beside him. The minister told us what the funeral would be like. In the kitchen, the church ladies had begun to cook. You could hear the refrigerator door opening and closing. Our job, it appeared, was to sit quietly in the living room, without reading or playing games. That's what we did, even after the minister left. My father didn't even read the paper. He looked out the window, across the road at Cal Ericson's south field.

We sat there until supper, and then again until bedtime. In bed, we turned out the lights without even reading Caroline a story. When we got up in the morning, the bed was out of the living room, and the furniture was back where it had been before my mother's illness.

After breakfast, we went directly to the funeral home, where we sat as we had the previous day, my father, too. Cal Ericson and Harold and some other neighbors were doing his chores. There was a light dinner in a room of the funeral home, ham and scalloped potatoes and creamed onions and coffee. After the funeral, at the Lutheran Church, and the burial, at the cemetery outside of Zebulon, we went home and ate more food. Mrs. Ericson told me they would be selling their place to my father. I watched the parrot, then went home and to bed. Rose stole the flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and read Nancy Drew under the bedcovers. Caroline cried herself to sleep. I stayed awake later than I ever had before-until three-thirty a. m. or later. My father woke me at live-thirty to make his breakfast, as I had done since the beginning of my mother's illness. He had his work clothes oil. After he was finished, when he was putting on his boots, he said, "You girls go on to school today. No use sitting around the house." I was glad. I'd been afraid we'd have to sit quietly for days or weeks, trying to hold pictures of our mother in our minds.

I have often thought that the death of a parent is the one misfortune for which there is no compensation. Even when circumstances don't compound it. Even when others who love the child move quickly and smoothly to guard it and care for it. There is not any wisdom to be gained from the death of a parent. There are no memories of the parent that are not rendered painful by the death, no event surrounding the death that is redeemed by a single happy thought.

However compromised and doomed I or others considered the arc of Pete's life, to his daughters, it certainly appeared as fresh and full of possibilities as their own lives did. I realized I had nothing to give Pammy and Linda on the occasion of their father's death, since I had learned nothing on the occasion of my mother's death. I went into their rooms and made their beds, which aroused Linda's suspicions even further-she stood in the doorway watching me, then turned and went back to the TV without a word.

By the time Rose returned, she was herself again, matter-of-fact, almost crisp. The girls were on her as soon as she came through the door. She put down her purse and poured a cup of the coffee I had warm on the stove. She sat at the table. She said, "Girls, I have some really bad news for you." They sat down, covering every square inch of her face with their stares. I went out the door, slamming it to drown their cries. Across the road, Jess Clark was pacing back and forth in front of the big picture window. He waved, but when I didn't respond, he didn't come out.

By dinnertime, the marvelous engine of appearances had started up.

George Drake, who owned the funeral home in Zebulon, drove by in his Cadillac. The girls walked down to my house, and Suzanne Patrick picked them up to take them swimming. Pammy wore her sunglasses every minute she was in the house. She asked if she could stay with me instead of going swimming, and I said that it would be easiest if she did everything her mother wanted for the next few days. Her eyes were red, but mostly she had that tormented look of someone striving to get through the next few minutes. They were picked up. Some women we knew from church brought hot dishes and salads. What they couldn't lit in Rose's refrigerator, they carried down and put in mine. They all said, "Oh, Ginny, it's such a shame," and "If there's anything at all I can do, don't hesitate to call." Two said, "How could he be so stupid like that?" and Marlene Stanley said, "You just hate to see all that talent go to waste that way."

A feature of this machine was a gate that allowed certain things to be known and spoken of but not others. That Pete had been drunk and was also a known drinker had to have admittance. That he had slapped Rose around and broken her arm once upon a time could be alluded to, but only in the context that he seemed to have changed, when so many of them don't. Rose's feelings were not probed. She assumed the role of grieving widow, and people seemed glad that she did. Loren came to the funeral, though he sat in the back and left early. Caroline sent a small wreath with the note, "From Caroline and Frank." Daddy did not come, and I realized that while I assumed he was still at Harold's, he might easily be in Des Moines.

I realized that I had accepted Pete's threatening Harold without thinking much about it, as if something in Pete had to give, but no one had in fact said what really happened, except Harold, and his story was confused.

A lot of people cried, if not at Pete's particular death, then at the idea of death or the sight of his daughters in their white dresses, looking bewildered and diminished. The gate proscribed the entry of other realities: our father, Ken LaSalle (though not Marv Carson, who came in his inquisitive way and said to me, "It's just you and Ty now, I guess. This is a big place for one guy to farm"), the common knowledge that Pete would have been a reckless and unorthodox farmer without Daddy and Ty, his threats against Harold Clark, which were widely held to be just drink talking. How else could you understand them? I didn't know. Appearances went well enough. It came to me that the eyes for receiving these appearances were Pammy's and Linda's.

Possibly, because they had nothing to compare this to, it looked good enough to them.

Ty gave the eulegy. He said that Pete was a hard worker and more fun sometimes than a farmer was supposed to be. He said that Pete liked to sing oil the job, and knew a lot of songs, and that anyone who had had the chance to hear Pete play any of the six instruments he knew was a lucky man. He said that Pete loved his wife and his daughters, and they loved him, and that he, Ty, felt lucky to have known Pete.

Henry Dodge said that the sort of accident that had claimed Pete could claim any one of us, and we should take it as a warning. He thanked God that no one else had been involved. He said, too, that Pete was a good man and loved his wife and children, and wouldn't have wanted to leave them like this. He asked, on behalf of Rose and Pammy and Linda, for the wisdom to understand this apparently meaningless death. He offered his own personal hope that this tragedy would show our family the way toward reconciling our differences.

Later, leaving the church, two or three of the older women did find something to be grateful for, and that was that Pete's own parents hadn't lived to see this.

It was exhausting. I was asleep by nine-thirty. Ty was gone somewhere. He was next to me, and sleeping heavily, by one-thirty, when the phone woke me.

Rose's voice said, "Can you come down? I need to talk to you."

I started talking before I remembered our new circumstances. I said, "Where's P-" Then I remembered. She said, "I'd be glad to come there.

I'm crazy to get out of this house, but Pammy keeps waking up and calling for me. Last night she woke up about every forty-live minutes.

I can't sleep anyway.

"Aren't you exhausted?" Even though I whispered, Ty, disturbed, rolled over. I slipped to the floor from the edge of the bed.

"Way beyond that. I think I could stay up for days at this point."

I cupped my hand around the speaker. "Okay. Okay." I put the phone on the hook and rubbed my hands over my face. After the cancer diagnosis, she had stayed up for days. Three, to be exact. I felt for my sneakers under the bed.

EVERY WiNDOW iN Rose's house was lit. Every one in Jess's house was dark.

Rose threw open the door and said, "Want a drink? There's plenty left over."

I took a vodka and tonic, the same as Rose. She said, "Drink it to Pete. He would have done at least that for you."

It was rare to see Rose intoxicated, but reassuring in a way. The vodka made me sneeze. I sat down on the couch. The living room was immaculate, the real Rose. Apparently she had been drinking and cleaning. She saw me looking around and said, "You should see the kitchen cabinets. I wiped all the jars with soapy water and put down new shelf paper. Edged in black for widows. The funeral home has a concession. Shelf paper, drawer liners, inflatable sweater hangers, dusters made from raven's feathers, everything for the housewife-widow."

"I don't believe you.

"Oh, Ginny, you're so literal-minded."

"No, I'm not. I just don't have much of a sense of humor right now.

"You used to."

"When?"

She sipped her drink, looking at me, then said, "I can't remember."

I smiled.

She said, "Where's Ty?"

"Asleep."

"I'm sorry I woke you, but I knew you would be in bed, and I made up my mind to call you anyway.

"Do you think it's a good idea, drinking if you have to tend to her?"

"I told her I was going to."

"You did?"

"Well, sure. I didn't want her to be surprised or scared if I seemed weird to her, so I said I felt like getting a little drunk and she said that would be okay as long as I didn't take the car anywhere."

"How are they? I feel so bad for them."

"You've seen them. They're shell-shocked. I hate Pete for that."

This she spat out. Then she called out, "You heard me, Pete. You really fucked up this time."

I sat forward. "Shhh!"

"So what if they hear me! I want them to hear me! He did fuck up.

Not my life, but their lives. I want them to know I know it!"

"He's dead!"

"So I should feel sorry for him? The way he died, I'm sure he didn't know the difference."

"I wish you wouldn't "Get obstreperous?"

"Well, yeah."

"Shit." But she said this good-humoredly.

She took another sip of her drink and stood up. I looked at her.

She said, "Hey. Get up."

"What?"

"Get up. Stand up."

I stood up.

"Let's move the couch out from the wall. Here, help me." She was already pushing the coffee table out of the way. She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. I said, "It's awfully late for this, anyway, this is a good place for it. It's the longest wall space. Otherwise it would have to go diag-" "I don't want to move it. I just want to push it away from the wall so I can get the vacuum cleaner hose back there."

"It's two o'clock in the morning!"

But there was no stopping her. We bent down and heaved the couch about a foot away from the wall. Rose got the Electrolux out of the hall closet and plugged it in. After she vacuumed behind the couch, we tilted it onto its back and she vacuumed dustballs off the underside.

We pushed it back. Over the grinding roar of the vacuum cleaner, she yelled, "Let's pull the stove out and I'll clean behind there."

We pulled the stove out. In fact, it was fairly clean behind there.

Rose made herself another drink. I poured a glass of orange juice.

She said, "Let's go out."

"Out where?"

"Just outside. We can look at the stars or something."

"What about Pammy?"

"I'll check her. If she's asleep, okay. If she's awake, I'll just tell her."

Two minutes later we were standing in the middle of the county road.

Rose was looking at the stars. I was looking at the left-hand window on the second floor of the big Sears Chelsea. Standing there brought that other time, the time when I told Jess Clark that I loved him, so vividly to mind that I felt my body go hot then cold with shame. I lifted my eyes to the stars. They were dim in the humidity, and they dimmed further while I watched them. I put my lingers to my eyelids.

Tears.

"Ginny, you don't know what it was like with Pete. He told me when I got back from the hospital that he preferred me to keep my nightgown on if he was in the room.

I gazed at her. She pushed her hair out of her face, which had a tipsy, unbuttoned look.

She said, "It's never been good. It was exciting once in a while, because Pete was so unpredictable, but-" She stopped, turned, and faced me. Her face was the color of the moon, and thin. Her eyes were in shadow. "All I wanted when I met Pete was someone exciting enough to erase Daddy. And I thought sure Pete would end up in Chicago, playing music, somewhere Daddy wouldn't even visit.

That was at the very beginning. But he wasn't making any money at it.

I mean, gigs were twenty-live bucks a night, or less. So then, we were going to move back here just until these friends of his got a record contract in L. A. and called us. That was supposed to take a summer, tops. One summer. But Pete had this light with them, and we lost touch, and they put me on at the grammar school, and then I thought that was the way to make some money. We had a new plan every month, but Pete always screwed them up, with his temper, or else by being overenthusiastic and needy and driving people away. When Pammy was born and then Linda right afterward, I just gave up. But it was never good! It wasn't ever even uneventful, the way it was with you and Ty!"

I knew if I kept my mouth shut, all questions would be answered soon enough.

Rose looked across the road and said, "I'm so tempted just to walk over there and go in, but I know Pammy will wake up.

"Go where?"

She motioned at the big square facade of the Chelsea.

"What on earth for?"

She gave me a sideways glance.

My understanding, slower than my own reply, kept exact pace with hers, so that it felt like I was forming the words with my lips as she did.

"To get in bed with Jess." Then, "Oh, don't look at me in that shocked way. I don't want to deal with it." She turned and began walking down the road, south. I watched her go, then ran after her. She said, "Ask me a question. Any question."

"Why?"

"Because I want to tell you the truth."

"Then just tell me." I said it, but I knew I didn't want to hear it.

She said, "I realize that having lovers is not something that women around here do, though I suspect it goes on more than we think. I know you disapprove, but it's important to me that you understand.

He's the first one I trust."

"The first one?" I was only parroting her. I didn't really have the sense that I knew what I was saying, but she seemed satisfied that my responses were adequately conversational.

"Okay, yes." She rocked back on her heels. "I was promiscuous in college, and maybe a little in high school, too, but since Pete, there's only been one before Jess. I always thought one of them would have to supersede Daddy eventually. That was what I thought at the beginning. Later I thought if there were enough of them it would sort of put him in context, or diminish him somehow." She looked at me again. "You know what Pete always said? That I had what he called frenzied dislike of sex. Anyway, I didn't tell him about Daddy for a long time."

"Who was the one since Pete?" I expected her, frankly, to say Ty.

"It was Bob Stanley, but it was nothing. It lasted a summer.

Then she said, "This is love."

I said, "What does that mean?" I'm sure I sounded hostile, but she chose to take this as a real question. I was staring right at her.

The look on her face evolved from challenging to doubtful to speculative to careful.

She said, "Well, of course it's exciting. But I know that will go away. It's only been about three weeks that we've been sleeping together, and it's hard to lind the privacy, as you can" She paused, then went on. "He seems to have this sense about my body-" She eyed me, went gingerly on, "He just looks at it a lot, you know, touches it as if he appreciates it. He says, you know, that my shoulders are a nice shape, or that he likes my backbone. He sees me differently than other men have."

I remembered what he said about the fiancee, her eyes and teeth.

He'd admired my ankles. I remembered how I had carefully protected and revisited that compliment for reassurance that Jess had seen and valued the real me.

"I know that stops. I know all that physical appreciation of the other person stops, but it's nice. I mean, yes I know it stops, but I can't get enough of it as long as it lasts. But it's not really the important thing."

"When that stops, doesn't everything stop? I mean, isn't that what affairs are all about?"

"Well, this is going on. This is it."

I summoned a note of sympathy into my voice. We had walked a couple of hundred yards, so I turned back. I didn't think Pammy should be left entirely alone, but I also yearned to be in sight of Jess Clark's windows. "Rose," I said, low and easy-sounding, "Jess's a restless person. He's never settled down. This stuff with Harold isn't going to help him settle down, either. He's had plenty of women, too. I would bet on that. Unless he positively commits himself-" "But he has!

I've been much more standoffish than he has. He's always pushing me to just-" "Just what?" I sounded so idle.

"Well, that's what we can't decide. Where. What. The girls. I mean, I even felt some loyalty to Pete after all the years and all the shit.

Ginny, you're white as a sheet."

"Just keep walking. Did you tell Pete about Jess?"

"Yes."

"That last day?"

"Weeks ago. Well, a week ago."

"What did he say?"

"He said he was going to kill Daddy."

"What?"

"I kid you not. His response to the news that I was going to leave him for Jess Clark was that he was going to kill Daddy, and if Harold got in the way, he would kill him, too."

I pondered this.

"He emptied the water tank on Harold's fertilizer tank."

"Who told you that?"

"Pete did." Now this was shocking, something else I had not suspected at all.

I said, "Jesus. What in God's name was he thinking of?"

"He was thinking Daddy might be doing some farm work. He said he saw Daddy on Harold's tractor in the morning, then ran into Loren and Harold at the cafe. He put two and two together and came up with his usual sum, which was three." Her laugh resounded in the night.

"I can't believe it."

"Well, shit, Ginny. He was incredibly focused on Daddy. He blamed him for everything that went wrong in our lives. He always said he was afraid he might kill Daddy in a rage, but I actually think he couldn't have-Daddy was too strong. But then Daddy got weaker, and when I told him about Jess he went out and drank every night, and every night he drove over to Harold's place and sat outside in the truck, staring at the windows of the house and drinking.

Frankly, it was all right with me. It was better than having him sit across the room staring at me, the way he used to."

"Is Daddy over there still?"

Rose shrugged. "I told Pete he'd probably gone to Des Moines, but he was nuts. He said he'd seen him. I don't know."

I said, "Don't you think that's really the strangest thing?"

"What?"

"That after all these years, we don't know where Daddy actually is.

We looked at each other. Rose said, "I think of that as freedom."

After a moment, she said, "Anyway, I'm sure Pete's dying regret was that he hadn't gotten back at Daddy."

"I don't know what to say. Wasn't he mad at you?"

"Daddy was the one. He just looked past me and saw Daddy. He was jealous, Ginny! I often thought that when you got right down to it, he was jealous as hell, but too afraid until he saw Daddy weakening-" She stopped and gave a harsh little laugh. "Even then, he couldn't actually do anything up front. Just threaten." She sniffed, and then, "Shit, Ginny. At the core, they're all like that."

"We think that because of Daddy. If he hadn't- If he had beenShe sat up and looked at me. "Say the words, Ginny! If he hadn't fucked us and beat us we would think differently, right?"

"Well, yeah."

"But he did fuck us and he did beat us. He beat us more than he fucked us. He beat us routinely. And the thing is, he's respected.

Others of them like him and look up to him. He fits right in. However many of them have fucked their daughters or their stepdaughters or their nieces or not, the fact is that they all accept beating as a way of life. We have two choices when we think about that. Either they don't know the real him and we do, or else they do know the real him and the fact that he beat us and fucked us doesn't matter. Either they themselves are evil, or they're stupid. That's the thing that kills me. This person who beats and fucks his own daughters can go out into the community and get respect and power, and take it for granted that he deserves it."

"Mommy spanked us, too."

"But she didn't whip us. She didn't slap our faces or use a strap, or even exert all her strength. He did! And when she tried to stop him, he yelled at her, too."

She paced around me in a circle. When she spoke again, her voice came out strong and confident. She said, "I was thinking leaving here was the only alternative. But then Pete did me this favor. Us.

Not Pammy or Linda. I know that. But me." She turned to face me.

"I want what was Daddy's. I want it. I feel like I've paid for it, don't you? You think a breast weighs a pound? That's my pound of flesh.

You think a teenaged hooker costs fifty bucks a night? There's ten thousand bucks. I wanted him to feel remorse and know what he did and what he is, but when you see him around town and they talk about him, he's just senile. He's safe from ever knowing. People pat him on the head and sympathize with him and say what bitches we are, and he believes them and that's that, the end of history. I can't stand that." Her voice thrilled up the scale.

I said, "I feel weird. I must be really tired," but I knew it wasn't fatigue. Then I said, "Okay. Here's a question. Did you know that Jess Clark slept with me?"

She smiled. "Oh, sure."

It hurt more than I had expected it to, even though I wasn't surprised.

I said, "Had he slept with you by that time?"

She paused, then said, "No."

"He told you?"

"At some point. A while ago."

"I guess that means he and I don't have anything private together, huh?"

"He loves me, Ginny. You don't think I would let him have anything private with my own sister, do you?"

"I didn't know you were jealous like that."

"Wheels within wheels, Ginny. Don't you remember how Mommy said I was the most jealous child she ever knew? I mean, I control it better now.

When Pammy or Linda goes to you for something, I know in my mind that's good for them, but I'm always jealous. That was how Jess got me to sleep with him. He talked about what a sweet person you are and how much he liked you and what a shame it was you don't have kids. He's your big fan, Ginny.

He still is. You don't understand him. He doesn't lie, he's just got more sides than most people we know." I recognized the tone she was using-frank and sincere, almost charming, in a way. She'd used it on me countless times. The drink had broadened it a little, added bravado and hardness to it. I caught my breath at the thought of how she'd seen Pammy and Linda and myself. I said, "I guess you want everything for yourself huh."

"Well, shit, yeah. I always have. It's my besetting sin. I'm grabby and jealous and selfish and Mommy said it would drive people away, so I've been good at hiding it."

I'm sure I spoke as bitterly as I felt. "You sound like you forgive yourself completely."

"You sound like you don't forgive me at all."

I lightened my tone. "I'm just surprised at this side of you."

"You notice that Mommy never said to me, 'Rose, just be I yourself'?"

She laughed.

"I don't think it's funny."

She kept laughing. After a bit, she stopped, took another sip of the drink she had carried outside with her, and looked at me for a long minute. Finally, she said, "The difference is, Ginny, that you can trust me. You can and the girls can. I won't hurt you."

But she had, hadn't she?

She saw that I was skeptical, and pressed me. "Even when I tell you the truth, it's not to hurt you. It's because it's the truth, and you have to accept it. But I'm not going to sacrifice you to principle, or make you the victim of my mean streak, or tell myself I'm doing something for you when I'm doing it to you, or pretend I'm not doing it at all, when I am."

I didn't believe her. More than that, I had no way of comprehending what she was saying to me. The distinctions had become too fine. My head was spinning. I stepped back to the edge of the blacktop. I said, "Rose, I have to go home. I can't stand this."

Walking back, feeling her behind me, not following me but watching me for sure, I felt almost close to Pete. I felt that sense he'd had of being outside his own body, of watching it and hoping for the best.

The sun was rising. I was as alert as a weasel, though, and all my swirling thoughts had narrowed to a single prick of focus, the knowledge that Rose had been too much for me, had done me in. I didn't agree with her that Pete's last thought had been of Daddy.

Surely, surely it had been of Rose herself that she had ineluctably overwhelmed and crushed him.

ONE BENEFIT, WHICH I HAVE LOST, of a life where many things go unsaid, is that you don't have to remember things about yourself that are too bizarre to imagine. What was never given utterance eventually becomes too nebulous to recall.

Before that night, I would have said that the state of mind I entered into afterward was beyond me. Since then, I might have declared that I was "not myself" or "out of my mind" or "beside myself" but the profoundest characteristic of my state of mind was not, in the end, what I did, but how palpably It felt like the real me. It was a state of mind in which I "knew" many things, in which "conviction" was not an abstract, rather dry term referring to moral values or conscious beliefs, but a feeling of being drenched with insight, swollen with it like a wet sponge. Rather than feeling "not myself" I felt intensely, newly, more myself than ever before.

The strongest feeling was that now I knew them all. That whereas for thirty-six years they had swum around me in complicated patterns that I had at best dimly perceived through murky water, now all was clear. I saw each of them from all sides at once. I didn't have to label them as Rose had labeled herself and Pete: "selfish," "mean," 'Jealous."

Labeling them, in fact, prevented knowing them. All I had to do " j5 to imagine them, and how I "knew" them would shimmer around them and through them, a light, an odor, a sound, a taste, a palpability that was all there was to understand about each and every one of them. In a way that I had never felt when all of us were connected by history and habit and duty, or the "love" I had felt for Rose and Ty, I now felt that they were mine.

Here was Daddy, balked, not by a machine (he had talent and patience for machines), but by one of us, or by some trivial circumstance. The flesh of his lower jaw tightens as he grits his teeth. He' blows out a sharp, impatient breath. His face reddens, his eyes seek yours. He says, "You look me in the eye, girly." He says, "I'm not going to stand for it." His voice rises. He says, "I've heard enough of this."

His lists clench. He says, "I'm not going to be your fool."

His forearms and biceps buckle into deeply defined and powerful cords.

He says, "I say what goes around here." He says, "I don't care if-I'm telling you-I mean it." He shouts, "I-I-I-" roaring and glorying in his self-definition. I did this and I did that and don't think you can tell me this and you haven't the foggiest idea about that, and then he impresses us by blows with the weight of his "I" and the feathery nonexistence of ourselves, our questions, our doubts, our differences of opinion. That was Daddy.

Here was Caroline, sitting on the couch, her dirndl skirt fanned out around her, her hands folded in her lap, her lace-trimmed ankle socks and black MaryJanes stuck out in front of her, her eyes darting from one face to another, calculating, always calculating. "Please," she says. "Thank you. You're welcome." She smiles. Chatty Kathy, and proud of her perfect, doll-like behavior. She climbs into Daddy's lap, and her gaze slithers around the room, looking to see if we have noticed how he prefers her. She squirms upward and plants a kiss on his cheek, knowing we are watching, certain we are envious.

Here was Pete, eyes flashing like Daddy's, but saying nothing.

Licking his lips. Waiting for his chance. Watching, focusing, gauging where to land the blow and when to strike. Judging how quick the enemy might be, where the enemy might be weakest. No "I," like Daddy, that inflated with each declaration, but a diminishing point, losing himself more and more bitterly in contemplating the target.

Here was Ty, too, camouflaged with smiles and hope and patience, never losing sight of the goal, fading back only to go around, advancing slowly but steadily, stepping on no twigs, making no splash, casting no shadow, radiating no heat, oozing into cracks, taking advantage of opportunity, unfailingly innocent.

It was amazing how minutely I knew Rose, possibly as a result of nursing her after her surgery. I had sponge-bathed her everywhere -the arches of her feet, the pale insides of her elbows, the back of her neck where the hair circled in a cowlick, the bumps of her spine, her scar, her remaining pear-shaped breast with its heavy nipple and large, dark areola. She had three moles on her back. When we were children, she was always asking me to scratch her back at bedtime, or else she would scratch those moles against the bedpost, the way a sow would.

And so, here, at last, was Rose, all that bone and flesh, right next to, right in the same bed with, Jess Clark. If I remembered hard enough I could smell her odor, feel the exact dry quality of her skin, smell and feel her the way he did during those mysterious times when I wasn't around. I could smell and feel and hear and see him, too, with a force unmatched since the first few days after we had sex at the dump. Every time I could not actually see one or the other of them, I had a visceral conviction that they were together.

I thought about how convenient it was for Rose that Pete had died. How the trap that was our life on the farm had so neatly opened for her.

All my life I had identified with Rose. I'd looked to her, waited a split second to divine her reaction to something, then made up my own mind. My deepest-held habit was assuming that differences between Rose and me were just on the surface, that beneath, beyond all that, we were more than twinlike, that somehow we were each other's real selves, together forever on this thousand acres.

But after all, she wasn't me. Her body wasn't mine. Mine had failed to sustain Jess Clark's interest, to sustain a pregnancy. My love, which I had always believed could transcend the physical, had failed, too-failed with Ty, failed with my children and Rose's, failed, in a bizarre way, with Daddy, who in his fashion loved Caroline and Rose but not me, failed with Jess Clark, and now had failed with Rose herself who clearly understood how to reach past me, to put me aside, to take what she wanted and be glad of it. I was as stuck with my old life as I was with my body, but thanks to Pete's death, a whole new life could bloom for Rose out of her body. More children to set beside Pammy and Linda.

With bottled water and careful diet and Jess's informed concern about risks, there wouldn't be a single miscarriage, a single ghostly child in the house.

What was transformed now was the past, not the future. The future seemed to clamp down upon me like an iron lid, but the past dissolved beneath my feet into something writhing and fluid, and at the center of it, the most changed thing of all, was Rose herself. It was clear that she had answered my foolish love with jealousy and grasping selfishness.

She would have been better off telling me nothing, because now I saw more than she wanted me to see. I saw Daddy, and I also saw her.

It was unbearable.

After the funeral, Rose and Jess must have decided to lie low for a while as a couple, so I almost never saw them together, but I saw them separately often enough. Rose's manner was delicate, speaking eloquently of our changed sisterly condition. I was given to know that my feelings were paramount, that it was up to me to establish the degree of closeness that would be comfortable and the appropriate way for us to behave toward one another. I saw that the delicacy and concern were necessary to her, because they were a thrilling reminder of everything new and delicious.

Jess was friendly, kind, and mildly apologetic. I seemed to be seeing him more than I had been, and then I realized that he had carefully avoided me for some weeks, possibly for most of the summer. Now he was everywhere, speaking to me, joking with me, dropping by for a cup of coffee, once even stopping his run to help me weed the garden, putting our friendship on a new footing, a footing that looked forward to the future. His open, happy kindness that approached tenderness galled me most of all.

It was a tangle. I vacillated among three or four routes into the tangle. I told myself that I had to decide what I really wanted and settle for that-every course of action is a compromise, after all.

Then at night I would wake up deeply surprised, amazed at the day's accumulation of bitterness and calculation. This couldn't be me, in this old familiar nightgown, this old familiar body, hateful as this?

In the mornings I wouldn't think about it for a while-after all, I was still busy seeking perfect order and cleanliness-but then Rose would call or Jess would drop off a half dozen doughnuts, and their voices and their bodies expressed such barely contained voluptuous lust for their future together that I knew I had to do something to rid myself of the sight and sense of their nearness.

It was not entirely lost on me that Ty was himself in a crisis.

Elsewhere in the state, and even in the county, intermittent dry spells had lowered production, but we had had perfect weather, and the corn and the beans were both healthy and thriving. It was clear that without Pete and without Daddy, Ty would be hard put to harvest almost a thousand acres by himself. Rose and I could both drive the combine in a pinch, and I had driven a few loaded grain trucks to the elevator almost every year, but the fact was, we always got pressed into service at the height of the harvest; there was no way that we could fill in for Pete and Daddy. There was Jess, of course, who had driven one of the tractors when we hired six high school kids to ride the bean-bar to spot-spray weeds and volunteer corn in the bean rows. He'd worn coveralls, boots, and a face mask in 93degree weather, and let Ty handle all the chemicals, which Ty found excessively squeamish. Every time Ty worried aloud about what we were going to do, he avoided mentioning Jess, leading me to know that he didn't want to work with Jess again, whatever Jess's talents and skills were. I didn't ask if these suspicions were simply based on differing ideas about farming. I would have been the first to admit that they were well founded, whatever the source. He asked around town, put ads on various bulletin boards and in the Pike paper. His tenant agreed to work for live days in exchange for two days' work at his place. There were no answers to the ads. There seemed to be some reluctance around town to having anything to do with us. Ty widened his campaign, advertising for help in Zebulon Center, Henry Grove, Columbus, and even Mason City. He said we would put people up and pay good wages. It was a problem that did not solve itself. The fact was, the kind of men who were around when my grandfather was farming, men who worked but did not own, were gone from the country by 1979. He began calling around to see if he could get some custom combining done.

When he engaged me in conversation about this problem, I tried to sound concerned and helpful, but all the time I was imagining them naked somewhere, relieved to be alone, giddy and giggling and utterly sufficient to themselves. If they thought about me, it would be to plan some little kindness that they thought I needed, that would remind me yet again of who was who and what was what. If even the most clandestine love affair yearns for an audience, then of course I was theirs.

I saw Rose every day. We made pickles and canned tomatoes and I drove the girls places for her. I noticed her fleeting little smiles.

We talked, in a way. She alluded to Jess only tactfully, and gave me little hugs from time to time, or compliments. I don't remember any of what she said. It was as if she were just moving her lips.

Ty decided to sell the last hundred piglets as feeder pigs, instead of finishing them. At the last minute, after we'd loaded the pigs, but before he'd taken down the loading chute, he said, "I'm going to load some of the sows, too. Prices are up enough. I could get something for them."

I snapped to. I was covered with muck from loading a hundred fifty-pound hogs and ready to get into the shower, but what I was hearing amazed me. I said, "Ty, prices aren't up at all. You'll be lucky to get three-fourths of what those sows are worth. They're prime breeding stock. You can't just cart them off to market on impulse!"

"That's exactly what I can do. That's the only way I can make myself do it, as a matter of fact."

"Even if the new buildings don't get built, we can keep on with what we were doing."

"My heart's not in it." He spat in the dirt. "Anyway, I gotta think about the payment on that loan. It's not going to take care of itself."

"What about the rent for your place? I thought we earmarked that for the payment."

"That's going to get eaten up if he works for me at harvest as much as I'm going to need him. Selling off these sows will tide us over till after harvest. That's what we've got to think of now."

A farm abounds with poisons, though not many of them are fast acting.

Every farmer knows a chemical dealer's representative who has taken a demonstration drink of some insecticide-sale as mother's milk, etc. Once, when Verna Clark was still alive and everyone was still using chlordane for corn rootworm, Harold dropped his instructions into the tank and reached in with his hand and picked them out. Arsenic is around, in the form of old rat poison. There were plenty of insecticides we used in the hog houses. There was kerosene and diesel fuel and paint thinner and Raid. There were aerosol degreasers and used motor oil. There were atrazine and Treflan and Lasso and Dual. I knew to wear a mask and gloves if I was handling any of these chemicals. I knew never to eat without getting all traces of chemicals off me, especially the odor. But I didn't know what would kill Rose.

I went to the Earl May Garden Center in Mason City and to the vet's ofhce and to the Farmers' Co-op in Zebulon Center, and I scoped out what was on the shelves and how the shelves were arranged. At Earl May, the clerk watched me because the store was empty and he didn't have anything else to do, so I left without buying anything. At the vet's office, Alice, the receptionist, kept trying to engage me in conversation about some puppies her dog had given birth to, and whether I wanted one. At the Farmers' Co-op, everything except seed, cement, and animal feed was behind one counter or another, and three or four farmers were sitting around, gossiping and watching me. Buying, I realized, would be harder than I thought.

I went to the Pike library, and found a pamphlet, "Twenty-live Poisonous Common Plants to Beware Of" put out by the Ohio State University Extension Service. It was clear that the fields abounded with plenty of poisons, too, and not onlyjimsonweed and bittersweet and common nightshade, deadly amanita and green death caps and common locoweed, with which I had a passing familiarity.

Lilies of the valley were poisonous, and daffodils, and horse nettles and ground-cherries, rhubarb leaves, of course, garden foxgloves, English ivy. Lamb's lettuce berries and roots, what the pamphlet called pokeweed. Mistletoe berries. The most poisonous, mentioned in passing but not pictured, was water hemlock. I went back to the shelf and got out a wildflower guide.

Water hemlock was a member of the carrot and parsley family.

"Its roots," the book stated, "can be and have been mistaken for parsnips, with fatal results. Livestock may die from grazing on it."

I looked at the picture. It looked familiar. I memorized the description, noted that it was to be found in freshwater swampy areas, put the book back on the shelf and went home. Certainly, I thought, this is what they meant by "premeditated"- this deliberate savoring of each step, the assembly of each element, the contemplation of how death would be created, how a path of intentional circumstances paralleling and mimicking accidental circumstances would be set out upon. One thing, I have to say, that I especially relished was the secrecy of it.

In that way, I saw, I had been practicing for just such an event as this all my life.

It took me about two weeks, the greatest part of that time (which wasn't all that much, since there was perfect order and cleanliness to maintain) spent in learning to distinguish between various members of the parsley family, then scouting wet areas for the hemlock.

There was none to be found at the quarry, nor was there any in a boggy spot at the southern edge of Harold Clark's farm. Mel's corner had long since been too well drained. On a hunch, one day, I stopped along the Scenic, just where the Zebulon River opened out into a little slough, and where, in the spring, I had seen that flock of pelicans and thought they portended something good. I wore yellow dishwashing gloves, and I picked a tall, erect plant with white flowers, a magenta-streaked stem, and pointed leaves with veins ending at notches between the teeth. The roots were pleasantly fragrant, not quite carrotlike.

The cabbages in Rose's garden were solid and heavy. I picked two.

Rose and the girls were out. I thawed a pork liver and some loins in the microwave. I had bought sausage casings at the Supervalu in Pike the day before. All operations as familiar as my own kitchen, as any cooking project I had ever engaged ii, before, except more meaningful.

The hemlock root I had minced finely with a paring knife. I decided to use it all. The leaves and stems I had left at the river. The root now sat on a piece of paper on the counter. I washed the knife and the fork I'd used to hold the root while I chopped it.

I ran water down the sink until I was sure the diluted traces ofjuice had gone into the septic tank. I doubted whether they would tear up the ground to investigate the septic system. After grinding the mince into the meat along with pepper, garlic, onion, cumin, red pepper, cinnamon, allspice, a dash of cloves, and plenty of salt, I filled the sausage casings and tied them off every six inches. They were about as thick as a man's thumb. No telling which of them were lethal and which weren't. I carefully washed the meat grinder and the sausage stuffer, using plenty of water, then I packed the canning jars with sausage, shredded cabbage, and brine. It was not unlike the feeling you get when you are baking a birthday cake for someone. That person inhabits your mind. So I thought continuously of Rose.

I also felt a sense of pleasure and pride in my planning. Liver sausage and sauerkraut couldn't possibly appeal to Jess, and was something both girls had detested the thought of all their lives. It was too strong-tasting even for Ty, who could eat venison and rabbit and lutelisk with the best of them. The perfection of my plan was the way Rose's own appetite would select her death. It would come as a genuine surprise even to me.

I burned the paper that had contained the minced hemlock, careful to imagine as completely as possible the potential scrutiny of the sheriff. I burned it to ashes, then swept the ashes onto another piece of paper and burned that. Then I buried the ashes in the heap of leaves and grass clippings beside the garden. I sterilized the jars in the pressure canner, reflecting that poisoning by botulism was theoretically possible, but probably not with someone as sophisticated about that sort of danger as Rose. These sausages and kraut would be cooked at a temperature above 212 degrees for more than fifteen minutes for sure. The orderly progress of cooking something put me in the usual serene mood. I was finished and cleaned up by two.

At live-thirty, I carried a box of twelve full jars down the road to Rose's. It was hot and dusty. Rose was in the kitchen frying hamburgers.

"Look at this," I said. "There's a surprise." She smiled as she took the jars out of the box and saw what I had brought. Pickled peaches.

Tomato chutney. Dill pickles. The stalks of dill in the jar looked just like poison. She grinned as she pulled out the jars of sausage and kraut. She said, "What a sweetie you are. You did all this today?"

"Just the kraut."

"I guess the others won't eat this, huh?"

"Not on your life. Blech. I wouldn't, either. I hate sauerkraut.

And doesn't it make you incredibly flatulent?"

"Not really. Thanks." She kissed me on the cheek. I could see the girls and Jess in the living room, watching the evening news. Jess caught my eye, smiled, waved to me, went back to the news. One of the jars of sausage was close to the edge of the table. I pushed it back and looked at Jess again. For the first time in weeks what was unbearable felt bearable.

A cooling breeze came up as I was walking home. I was calm now, interested to see what would happen.

[I THE KEY TO A GOOD HARVEST is dry weather, because the corn and beans won't store well if they are carrying much moisture; 15 percent is ideal for corn, 13 percent for beans. Corn in the field, ripe and dented, will have over 20 percent. The difference can be exactly measured in the money it costs, and the propane it takes, to drive the excess moisture out of it. Long dry sunny September days are equivalent to money in the bank. Rainy days mean difficult choices, machinery stuck in the mud, long hours as the weather gets colder, complaints at the elevator about moisture content and poor quality, and smaller checks when you decide to sell.

There is always too much of everything at harvest.

Starting about the fifteenth of September, and every day after that, Ty took the portable moisture tester out into the fields, hoping against hope that with good weather he could start harvesting early.

When he came back, he and Jess, with whom he'd made up his mind he had to work, drove the two combines, the big three-year-old six-row picker and the old two-row picker that Daddy had bought used live years earlier, already with four thousand hours on it. There was also the old cornpicker, still sitting in Daddy's barn, that took whole ears instead of shelled grain like the combines. Using the cornpicker would mean more storage, since there were two slatted corncribs at the east edge of Mel's corner, right on Cabot Street Road, but Ty didn't like to use it because it wasn't designed for long modern ears, and tended to shell the biggest ears and leave the corn in the field.

"Nice for the birds," said Ty. I didn't like to use it because it seemed to me, the way things were going, there was bound to be an accident.

Accidents were more frequent with cornpickers than combines, and more horrible, too. One day, I saw them hitch it to the tractor and pull it out into the sunshine to have a look at it. Even from that distance (I was standing at the window in our room and looking down the road), it looked menacing.

We heard people did turn out to help Loren and Harold, including Lyman Livingstone, who put off his departure for Florida by two weeks, and two of the Stanley boys, but we were so busy it was easy not to think about that, and even easier not to mention it. Dollie asked Rose one day in Casey's how Daddy liked it in Des Moines.

Rose said, "Better than he thought he would," and smiled her cheeriest smile.

The court date was set for October I 9, more than a month away.

Mr. Cartier told Rose that since Pete was only involved by marriage, his death didn't affect the legal status of the suit.

I continued to behave as if I were living in the sight of all our neighbors, as Mr. Cartier had told us to. I waited for Rose to die, but the weather was warm for sauerkraut and liver sausage-that was a winter dish.

Around the eighteenth, Ty said he thought he might try harvesting some of the corn. An early season variety planted in our southwest corner was down to 19 percent moisture and there was rain predicted for the next day, which would raise the moisture levels and delay harvest for two days or even three. He said, "There's sixty-two acres over there.

If we run both combines, we can pick most of that."

I smiled. No doubt about it, no matter what, beginning the harvest was exciting. He smiled back at me. I said, "You want Rose and me?"

"We'll see what the lines at the elevator are like. Crop report was pretty good before you got up. Corn was up to $2.45, and if the weather is wet for the next three days it could go up another nickel.

We'll see. We'll see."

He practically leapt from the table then, as if anticipation were a spring in him that had finally overpowered his natural caution.

I finished the dishes, swept the floor, wiped the counter, cleaned the seams in the counter with a toothpick, scoured the drip pans and burner grates, applied the toothpick to the assorted corners of the stove, and cleaned the oven door with Winder. These activities coalesced into a kind of waking dream that was punctuated by the rumble of the combines passing on the west side of the house. There was a track that led to that southwest corner, skirting the little dump.

Jess would be driving one of the combines. I wondered what he would think as he passed, then bent down and began to scrape dirt out of the little round feet that supported the front of the stove.

Sometime later, the truck, with the grain wagon attached, thundered and rattled by, as well.

The harvest drama commenced then, with the usual crises and heroics.

Men against nature, men against machine, men against the swirling, impersonal forces of the market. Victories-finishing the last of a field just before a rain-and defeats-the price of corn dropping thirty cents a bushel in a single day; the strange transforming mix of power and exhaustion. Of course we had the ritual recall of earlier harvests that made me wonder what we would say years hence if this harvest were punctuated by Rose dropping dead at the supper table one night. My hatred of her burned steadily in spite of everything that brought us together. It was separate, but part of everything else, suspended grains that would precipitate to the bottom of the beaker when she chose the fatal jar.

The harvest was a drama that caught me up, no doubt about it, something that moved me below the level of knowledge, the way a distant view of my father driving a green tractor across a green field had always moved me. I saw that I could give in to the theatrical surge and be delivered in a matter of weeks to a reconciliation with my life. It was tempting. It was tempting.

What it took to choke off a reconciliation was the sight, in court, not of my father, but of Caroline and Frank. Your eyes couldn't help traveling over them in a kind of wonder, they looked so out of place in the Zebulon County Courthouse. There was Ken LaSalle in his tan suit from J. C. Penney that didn't quite lit him and there was another lawyer in navy blue with a white short-sleeved shirt, a green tie, and brown oxfords, cut from the same pattern as Ken. But even Jean Cartier looked rumpled compared to Caroline and Frank, with their charcoal gray suits from Minneapolis or maybe New York, their oxblood briefcases, and their hundred-dollar shoes. Caroline had her hair smoothed back and pinned up, leaving her forehead and neck clean and bare as pride itself. She sat right up against Daddy.

And then there was this self-righteous look on her face, for clearly she had taken up Daddy's burden of injustice, and she shouldered it with a sense of injured virtue. She didn't look at Rose or me, though we were sitting in her field of vision. She smiled at Ty. He smiled back.

I saw Rose give her a long, appraising, self-confident look. But after she looked away, she straightened the shoulders of her suit and sat up taller. She glanced at Jess. Yes, Jess was better-looking than Frank.

Rose and I were always proud of how well we had done with Caroline, proud that we had taken good care of our doll, and the reward was the knowledge that she would live a life that each of us had thought about with some longing. That she never called us or seemed close to us did not occur to us as a failure, nor did it occur to us to wonder what she thought of us, whether she liked us. Could we have even said whether we liked her? I don't know.

But sitting across from her in court was maddening. Every item of her appearance, her very familiarity with the courtroom, where I felt out of place and off balance, her confident glances at Frank, her fellow lawyer, seemed to me to exude the odor of disdain, and the wish to take from us what we had that she wanted, but clearly didn't need.

She held Daddy's hand in her lap like a handbag. And Daddy looked like a goner. His gaze would drift around the room for a while then fix on something and he'd stare at that thing or person for minutes at a time.

When Caroline said something to him or patted his hand, he smiled fondly, though not necessarily at her. It was a look that gave me the same room-darkening chill that I had felt eavesdropping on them in Roberta's. Perhaps, along with all the anger and the will to have his way that Daddy carried to me during those strange lost nights, perhaps there might have been just this fondness, too. I shifted my chair so as not to look at them.

Jean Cartier had told us that he didn't expect the hearing, which was before a judge rather than a jury, to last more than a morning and an afternoon. The suit, Jean felt, was relatively clear-cut, especially in light of the fact that the harvest had been successful, and had looked right, too. Our neighbors hadn't helped us, we'd finished in good time, and being a little ahead, we'd gotten a slightly better price on our corn than some others. There was no gainsaying now that Ty was a superior farmer. We had gotten a good enough price on the first part of the corn harvest that Ty had been able to make a payment on the outstanding loan to Marv Carson two days ahead of the due date.

That might have been the reason why Marv was sitting on our side of the courtroom, way at the back. He was the only spectator.

At ten a. m Martin Stanley, the bailiff stood up and announced that the court was in session, Judge Lyle Ottarson presiding. Judge Ottarson, Mr. Cartier had told us, was from Sioux City. There was a family farm in his background somewhere. "He knows the lingo," was what Mr. Cartier had said.

The first person called to the stand was my father. Standing, walking, he was still himself big and strong and hunched forward, his head swinging around like the head of a bull, and with just that suspiciousness, too. Ken LaSalle straightened his path to the witness stand. He focused on Monica Davis, the clerk, long enough to swear to tell the truth. Ken asked him the first question, whether he had in good faith formed a corporation and relinquished his farm to his two older daughters, Virginia Cook Smith and Rose Cook Lewis, along with their husbands, Tyler Smith and Peter Lewis? To this, Daddy answered, "By God, they'll starve there. The land won't produce for the likes of them. Caroline!"

Ken said, "Mr. Cook-" "Caroline!"

Caroline sang out, "Yes, Daddy?"

Judge Ottarson said, "The witness will please refrain from addressing-" "Caroline! It'll gag 'em!"

The judge leaned forward and tried to catch Daddy's eye. "Mr. Cook?

Larry?"

Daddy swung his head around and caught his gaze.

"Mr. Cook, please answer the questions. You can't talk to Ms. Cook just now. Do you understand?"

Daddy looked at him without answering. The judge said, "Proceed, Mr. LaSalle."

"Larry?" Ken got up close to the stand. "Larry? Did you sign the farm over to Ginny and Rose?"

"I don't care about going to jail. If they want to send me to jail, I don't care about that."

Ken said, "Nobody's going to jail, Larry. This isn't that kind of trial. We're talking about the farm. Your farm, that your dad and granddad built. We want to know what you did with it."

"I lost it. It's well lost. Caroline, please forgive me!"

The judge said, "Mr. LaSalle, try once more.

Ken nodded. He tried a firmer, more commanding voice. "Larry!

Listen to me! What happened to your farm? Who did you give it to?

Think about it."

Suddenly, Daddy shouted, "She's dead!" He gripped the arms of his chair.

The judge said, "Who's dead, Mr. Cook?"

"My daughter." He sounded conversational, almost meek.

"Which daughter? All your daughters are in the courtroom, sir."

"Caroline! Caroline's dead. Where is she? Have they buried her already? I think they stole the body. I think those sisters stole the body and buried her already."

While he was saying this, Caroline was rushing to his side. She took his hands and put them on her shoulders, then she said, "Here I am, Daddy. I'm not dead at all."

He said, "Somebody take her pulse."

Rose let out a bark of laughter, which she quickly stifled. I was amazed, though. Amazed and horrified and excited, the way you always feel at a wreck.

Ken LaSalle held up a sheaf of papers, and said, "Judge, here's exhibit A, the contract in question. I'll introduce it in lieu of the witness's response.

Daddy said, "Could be they killed her. That day after church. She didn't show up to get her share. And then, when I went down to Des Moines to find her, she wasn't there, either." He turned to look at the judge. "You're a judge. I'll swear to that. I swear that maybe they killed her and buried her."

Caroline said, "I'm right here with you, Daddy. You live at my house now. You can live there always. As long as you like."

The judge said, "Who killed whom, Mr. Cook?"

"Those bitches killed my daughter."

"What are the names, sir?"

Now I sat forward, feeling the curiosity to hear uncoiling within me.

Would he really say her name, with her living and breathing right in front of him? The photo of that nameless baby crossed my mind. Maybe there was another one after all, one that came before me. It wasn't impossible, and not unlikely, either, that I wouldn't know about it.

Another something less said about the better. He was still looking at the judge. He said, "She was the sweetest, lightest, happiest little girl. All day long she was singing some little song.

Just like a little bird."

"Who?" said the judge.

He couldn't see her. He said, "Well, Caroline, of course. He looked over her shoulder toward Ken LaSalle. He said, "Help me up, boy.

Please. I can't do like I used to, these days." He reached out his hand. When Ken took hold of it, Daddy stepped down the little step.

To Caroline, he said, "Excuse me."

Rose leaned over to me and said, "Ten to one, this is an act."

Caroline, Ken, and Daddy made their slow way down the aisle toward the door. Daddy was saying, "She was the littlest thing.

Little knobby knees. Little bitty lingers, always braiding her doll's hair." All of a sudden, I shouted, "Daddy, it was Rose who had the velveteen coat! It was Rose who sang! It was me who dropped things through the well grates!" I was squawking, right out there in the courtroom, and everyone's head swung toward me. All but one.

Daddy didn't pay any attention at all. The judge banged his gavel, my face flushed hot, and my throat seared. I whispered to Ty, "But it was." He shushed me. I felt icy shakes descend in waves through my body.

The hearing went forward as if I hadn't spoken. Frank stayed in the room, I suppose to make sure there wasn't going to be any funny business. Various affidavits were presented attesting to how Ty and Pete, and later, Jess, and Rose and myself had conducted business on the farm over the summer. Receipts for sales, outstanding bills, my books, which I had industriously brought up to date, were all presented. Ty took the stand, told simply and carefully what he had done and why. Mostly his reason was that Daddy had done things that way, and he had gotten into the habit. Rose jiggled her foot constantly, and a joint in her chair squeaked with her jiggling. I watched it all, but mostly I continued wrapped in amazement.

The strangest person in the room, apart from myself was Jess Clark, and my amazement gradually accumulated focus on him. It was, when I stared hard enough at his face, as if it were May again, and I were only just seeing him for the first time. I noted his hawkish nose, his blue eyes with their orbits of fine lines, his dry, neatly cut lips. He looked relaxed in the courtroom, purely a witness, curious but unimplicated in the developing drama. A stranger, he looked canny, almost calculating.

With no one looking at him and no occasion to exercise his charm, his face was cool, without animation or warmth. His estimation of or feelings about what had happened weren't evident in any way, and something was aroused in me, an instinctive female reaction of caution, as if all that had happened was still before us, as if the sense that caution was in order wasn't, by now, the result of experience. This flutter of caution felt like deja vu, and I wondered if I had felt it before, if that hadn't been the very thing that spurred me forward. I thought, suddenly, of that girl whose boyfriend had stabbed her long ago in June, of how she had gone out to meet him, throwing caution to the winds.

We had all done that, Daddy first, the others after. We had done it without knowing why, or maybe even that that was what we were doing.

And then our cautious lives had grown intolerable in retrospect, and every possibility of returning to them equally intolerable.

And yet, a year ago, I'd been happy enough, taken up with my little pregnancy project, managing the round of work and the irritations of Daddy's unreasonableness. Ty had been content enough with his patched-together hog operation, Pete had accepted the bargain of his life-routine frustration, occasional blowups, but at least some larger purpose to participate in. Jess, too, seven months before his return, must have felt that things were settled.

Only Rose was planning for change. Brooding on her body, her voluptuous, furious, secret, waiting body, had become a habit of mine, a meditation that I hoped would move her appetite toward the sausages and sauerkraut, her hand toward ajar I had canned for her, but now I didn't think of that. I thought instead of that cell dividing in the dark and then living rather than dying, subdividing, multiplying, growing, Rose's real third child ("her only third child," a voice whispered in my head), the one who would not be parted from her. Her dark child, the child of her union with Daddy.

I shook my head, and snapped back to the events in the courtroom.

Caroline had returned and was stepping up to the witness stand.

She straightened her skirt and sat down. She smiled at her lawyer, then at Ken LaSalle. The lawyer said, "Ms. Cook, when were your suspicions aroused about the plans going forward for the division of the Cook farm?"

"I was suspicious from the first. The whole project was very untypical of my father."

He asked her what she meant. They conversed in a friendly way about Daddy, portraying him as a "hands-on manager," a "lifelong farmer."

"What was your response to the project?"

"I made my reservations known."

"How were they greeted?"

"My sister Ginny Smith urged me very strongly to go along with the idea."

"What did you think of that?"

"I suspected her of ulterior motives. I knew she and Rose both wanted to get their hands-" Mr. Cartier objected.

Rose said, "Oh my God, listen to this." The judge cast her a severe glance.

The Des Moines lawyer tried another tack. He said, "Later, it was more than suspicions, right? Later you were really worried about your father's safety, right?"

"They sent him out into a terrible storm Mr. Cartier objected.

Hearsay.

The lawyer tried again, "Mr. Smith told you that they had sent your father out into a terrible storm, did he not?" Rose leaned toward me and whispered, "Did he?"

I let Caroline speak for me. "Yes, he did. It was common knowledge-" Rose sat back in her chair. "I'm not surprised."

Judge Ottarson pulled his reading glasses down on his nose and skimmed a document on his desk. Then he interrupted her. He said, "The mismanagement or abuse clause in the preincorporation agreement that is the occasion for this suit refers, Ms. Cook, to the farm properties only. You may not introduce the subject of your father and his relation to your sisters into this courtroom."

Caroline flushed red, and said, "But-" Her lawyer shushed her.

Then he smiled slyly, comfortingly. I looked over at Mr. Cartier, who was watching with lively interest.

The lawyer said, "Has the Cook farm ever incurred debt?"

Caroline said, "No."

"Is it now burdened with debt?"

"It certainly is-" She wanted to go on, but she stopped, triumphantly, with a glance at Rose, then at me. After a moment, she turned her face stonily forward again, and smoothed her hair. Mr. Cartier declined to interview her, and she stood up. There was dead silence as her hundred-dollar heels clicked back to her seat, then a loud screech as she pulled out her chair. Marv Carson was called to the stand.

Yes, he said, his bank was owed about $125,000 with the farm as collateral.

Yes, he said, if all went as planned, the bank would loan us $300,000.

He smiled proudly.

He said, "This is going to be a first-class hog operation."

Yes, he said, the Smiths and Mrs. Lewis were up-to-date in their payments.

The Des Moines lawyer said, "Mr. Carson, many would consider it remarkably risky for a family operation to take on this kind of debt.

Don't you?"

"Oh, no. I feel good about it.

The Des Moines lawyer raised his eyebrows.

"Hogs are an excellent investment. Prout is going to be in hogs.

The idea of being debt-free is a very old-fashioned one. A family can be debt-free, that's one thing. A business is different. You've got to grasp that a farm is a business first and foremost. Got to have capital Improvements in a business. Economy of scale. All that."

Marv was grinning. Clearly, he considered that he was giving everyone in the courtroom a well-deserved lesson. He went on, "What I worry about is the delay, frankly. This delay is very bad for us. These buildings should be almost finished by now, and it's been almost two months-" "What a coincidence," muttered Rose.

The Des Moines lawyer said, "Thank you, Mr. Carson, that's all for me," turned his back on Marv, and strode back to his table. Marv paused, startled. Mr. Cartier got up and had Marv elaborate on the costs of the delay. Mr. Cartier was very cheerful.

Marv went back to his seat on our side of the courtroom. He was careful not to look at us, full of his role as "expert witness." But I realized right then that by watching Marv, just by watching him, you could tell where the money was, and where it was going to go.

After a moment, Judge Ottarson lifted his papers and stacked them together meditatively, straightening the bottom edge against the dark wood of his desk, then both side edges. He pushed his glasses up his nose, then thumbed through the original preincorporation contract.

He said, "I don't feel I need to take a recess to decide this matter.

The arguments are fairly clear, and the plaintiffs have failed to establish either abuse of the property in question or mismanagement of its assets. The fact is, in this state, if you legally sign over your property, it is very hard to change your mind and get it back." He paused for a long time and seemed to be debating how to go on.

Finally, he said, "Obviously, the mental condition of the chief plaintiff Mr. Cook, must also come under consideration. Were the property to revert to him, it's not clear, given the deep divisions in the family, who would farm it. But this is only a corollary consideration.

The law is clear. I find in favor of the defendants, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Lewis, and Mr. Smith."

We began to shift around, but he went on. He said, "I would also like to say to Mr. LaSalle, Mr. Crockett, Mr. Rasmussen, and Ms. Cook that there is merit in the argument of Mr. Cartier that this may have constituted a frivolous misuse of this court, and Mr. Rasmussen and Ms. Cook, in particular, should have bethought themselves before they decided to carry a family fracas this far. For that reason, the plaintiffs shall be required to pay fees and costs. This court is adjourned."

Rose was smiling.

Caroline's face was red and angry.

One thing was surely true about going to court. It had marvelously divided us from each other and from our old lives. There could be no reconciliation now.

IT DIDN'T SURPRISE ME that we couldn't tolerate the verdict. In the first place, there was no precedent to show us how to behave or what to feel. Nor did we do anything that we had not already planned to do-Ty and I went home to feed the hogs in our pickup, Rose went to get the girls in her car, and Jess drove Pete's pickup back to his place. I noticed that we each thanked Mr. Cartier rather hurriedly and then got out of there, as if we were ashamed.

Ty and I drove home almost in silence. It was the nineteenth of October. The leaves on the trees were the same color as the leaves caught in the ditches and fence lines. The old cornstalks in the harvested fields were almost white by contrast. A few farmers were still out finishing the last of their beans. I could see, and almost hear, from long habit, the sere, reddish-black pods rattling in the breezes as we passed. Hogs and white-faced beef cattle grazed the fenced fields, cleaning up after the combines. Here and there, a farmer was fall plowing. The stiff chill wind swirled the dry soil into the air.

White farmhouses stood out crisply against the umber background, their front yards decorated with corn shocks and dark sun pumpkins.

Last year, Harold and Loren had gone to Arizona for two weeks in October and November, in the cheap period before the season opened.

This year, we'd heard, they were planning to move into town. Harold's eyes were still painful, and he didn't like to be left alone. A couple of women, sisters, had agreed to watch him during the day while Loren was working the farm, but they didn't drive, so Loren had decided to rent a place near the Cabot post office.

Marlene Stanley had told this to Rose. Ty, I was sure, had had the same news directly from Harold, but it was not something we talked about.

When we drove into our yard, Ty got out even before the engine died, and headed for the barn. It was Friday. I supposed that work on the hog buildings would begin again the following week. The poured floors, which had been exposed to the weather for over three months, were a little discolored, and one had developed a long crack that needed patching, but in spite of potential problems, the project had to go forward. We were too much in debt to stop now.

Every farm after harvest looks neglected and disorganized, but as we drove into our yard, and then as I went into our house, our place seemed lifeless to me, far beyond the power of our usual winter cleaning up, mending, and planning to make it what it had been only the previous spring. The house looked somewhat better, thanks to my obsessive work, but the furnishings were old and mismatched, the carpeting and vinyl dark with stains that simply didn't respond to the products available for removing them. Shit, blood, oil, and grease eventually hold sway in spite of the most industrious efforts.

Usually, I didn't take in my place as a whole. I focused on a chair I'd just shampooed or a picture I'd found at the antique store in Cabot, or a corner that looked presentable or welcoming. Tonight I came back to my house as a stranger, and I remembered a friend of Daddy's who told me once about when rural electrification came through.

Unlike Daddy's family, Jim's family hadn't had a gasoline generator to light the house. When the wires were strung and the family gathered in the kitchen to witness the great event, the mother's first words of the new era were, "Everything's so dirty!" Those could have been my first words of our new era, attesting to how strange and far from home I felt taking meat from my refrigerator and salting it with my old red plastic saltshaker and slapping it onto the broiler pan I'd used for seventeen years.

I peeled potatoes and put them on to boil, then went out in the garden and picked some brussels sprouts off the stalk. If you leave them through the fall, through the frosts, they sweeten up. The same with parsnips. The garden, too, was a ruin. I'd pulled out the tomato vines and hung them over cold water pipes in the cellar. The fruit would ripen slowly until sometime around Thanksgiving. The pepper plants were tall, leafless stalks, the potato bed a jumbled plot of dark earth and wet straw. Only the brussels sprouts on their fourfoot stalks looked graceful. A giant green rosette of spreading leaves opened two feet wide at the top, then the stalk curved strongly downward, presenting neat alternating rows of dark knobs. I broke a couple of dozen off snap, snap, snap, and took them inside. All my motions were familiar-running an inch of water in an old pot, piercing the bottoms of the sprouts with a fork. I turned down the heat under the potatoes. Ty came in, stepping out of his boots and hanging his insulated coverall by the door. I said, "Supper will be ready in twenty minutes."

"Great."

I set the pan of sprouts over a low flame.

He finished washing his hands, dried them carefully on a dish towel, and walked out of the room. I turned on the oven to broil and bent down to see if it had lit, because sometimes the pilot light went out.

I said, "One new thing we could get would be a range.

This one is a menace.

He was back in the room. He said, "I don't necessarily think this is the right time to get a new range.

"Well, maybe it will just blow up, then, and put us out of our misery."

He heaved an exasperated sigh, then said, "I'll bring the range over from your father's place tomorrow. That's pretty new.

"Or we could move over there. I'm the oldest."

"That house is too big for us." He said this as if he were saying, how dare you?

"Well, it was built to be big. It was built to show off. Maybe now I've inherited my turn to show off."

"I think you've shown off plenty this summer, frankly."

Steam rose from the boiling potatoes and the simmering brussels sprouts. I remembered the broiler, which was now surely heated enough, and I opened the oven door and set the chops under the heat.

We were silent. The contained roar of the gas and then, a minute later, the first sizzling of meatjuices, took on the volume and weight of oracular mutterings, almost intelligible. With a feeling of punching through a wall, I said, "I need a thousand dollars."

Ty widened the opening. "I have a thousand dollars in my pocket, from the rent on my place. Fred brought it by last night, but I didn't have a chance to put it in the bank."

I held out my hand. He took a wad of money out of his pocket.

It felt large and solid in my palm, larger and soldier than it was. I went to the hall tree and took down my coat and scarf then I went to the key hook and took the keys to my car, and with the meat broiling in the oven and the potatoes and sprouts boiling on the stove, I walked out the door. When he saw, I suppose, that I really meant to get in and drive away, Ty yelled, "I gave my life to this place!"

Without looking around at him, I yelled back, "Now it's yours!"

The night was dark already, and moonless. I stumbled over a rut in the yard that threw me against the cold metal skin of the car. I reached for the door handle, but the money was still in my hand, so I thrust it into the pocket of my coat.

In Mason City, I ate a hot dog at the A and W.

In St. Paul, I found a room at the Y.W.C.A. They didn't ask any questions when I didn't write down a home address on the registration slip.

ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT, even over the hum of the air conditioner in the summer, you could hear the cars passing my apartment on Interstate 35.

I liked the same thing about that as about working my waitressing job at Perkins, where you could get breakfast, the food of hope and things to be done, any time. There was nothing time-bound, and little that was seasonal about the highway or the restaurant. Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people's heroic self regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The lamps in the restaurant, above the highway, in my neighbors' windows, in the parking lot of my apartment building, cast intersecting orbs of light that I could just walk into, that I didn't have to generate.

The noise was the same, continuous, reassuring: human intentions (talking, traveling, eating) perennially renewing themselves whether I happened to sleep or wake, feel brisk or lazy.

The thing I loved most about the restaurant was the small talk.

People bantered and smiled, thanked you, made polite requests, chatted about early visits or the weather or where they were headed. It went on and on, day and night, pleasant and meant to create pleasantness.

Eileen, the manageress, encouraged us to follow company guidelines about creating small talk when it was absent, because, she said, people always ate more and enjoyed their food if they didn't have to concentrate on it too single-mindedly. Mostly, though, you didn't have to work at it. You could walk into the small talk the way you walked into the lighted dining room, and it would carry you. Some of the girls didn't like the small talk, so they sounded a tad mechanical when they said, "And how was your meal, sir?" but for me, it was like a tune playing in my head, and the phrases I produced-"What may I bring you?"

"Will that be all?"

"Thanks for stopping, come in again"-were me picking up my part of the harmony.

I saw this as my afterlife, and for a long time it didn't occur to me that it contained a future. That it didn't, in fact, was what I liked about it. I felt a semi-submerged conviction that I had entered upon the changeless eternal. A toothbrush, a beat-up sofa bed, a lamp I found in a trash bin, shaped like a palm tree but perfectly functional, and a cardboard carton to set it upon, a hot-water kettle, a box of teabags in the refrigerator, two bath towels from a J. C. Penney white sale, a box of bath-oil beads. Pajamas. My uniforms from work gave every workday a sameness that felt like perpetuity. When I wasn't working I stayed in my sofa bed or my bathtub, reading books from the library, one author at a time, every book in the collection. I preferred them to have been productive, but now to be dead, like Daphne du Maurier or Charles Dickens, so that their books formed a kind of afterlife for them and seemed as distant and self-contained, for me, as Heaven or Hell. News was what I didn't want.

I didn't own a television or a radio. It didn't occur to me to buy a newspaper.

It took me until Christmas to address a note to Rose revealing where I was. When I got her note in return, the sight of her handwriting was so surprising that I didn't recognize it at first. I had expected, even more than I consciously realized, that she would have eaten the sausages and died. But she didn't mention the sausages.

She wrote that live days after the trial, Daddy, who wouldn't let Caroline out of his sight although he still seemed to feel that she had been killed, went along to Dahl's, in Des Moines, for the week's shopping. He was pushing the cart; she was guiding it down the aisles.

He had a heart attack in the cereal aisle. I imagined him falling into the boxes of cornflakes. The funeral had been a small one. Rose had not gone.

Rose and Ty had decided to split the farm down the road, the eastern section going to Rose (she and the girls had moved into the big house after Thanksgiving) and the western section going to Ty.

She and Jess planned to farm the whole section organically, with green manures and oats and South American cover crops interplanted with the corn.

I sent the girls each a Christmas present, a polka-dot beach towel for Pammy and a stuffed cat for Linda. I didn't write back to Rose, because there was nothing to tell. Everything between us, more, it turned out, than we could stand, was known. Rose, Daddy, Ty, Jess, Caroline, Pete, Pammy, and Linda, so thoroughly and continuously in me, were too present for letters or phone calls.

In February she wrote again, only a note to say that Jess had gone back to the West Coast, and she had rented most of her land back to Ty until she understood more about organic farming. She wrote, "The girls and I have decided to stay vegetarians, though. And there are some papers coming for you to sign. P.S. I can't say I'm surprised about Jess."

They came, and I signed them. Ty now had three hundred eighty acres, all his own, and Rose, six hundred forty. I had a garden apartment, two bedrooms up and a living room and kitchen down, with a little deck overlooking the highway in the back and a little concrete stoop and my parking place out front. The rent was $235 a month plus electricity, but the heat was included. Behind a fence at the other end of the building was a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool, about twenty-live feet by twelve feet, nowhere deeper than four feet.

That Jess had left her didn't seem to make a difference in my vengeful wishes. If anything, the friendly, informative tone of her notes made them burn a little hotter. Didn't she realize how far I was from her?

Now, as always, wasn't she relying on some changeless loyalty in me, ignoring my angers and complaints as if they were meaningless in comparison with her plans?

The day I received this news, the transmission went out on my car, so I traded it for an eight-year-old Toyota with eighty thousand miles on the odometer. I liked the way it looked in front of my apartment, unassuming and anonymous.

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine.

The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world's details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me.

Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

ONE MORNING, SEVERAL YEARS into this routine, I came up to the table of a solitary man in a cap. From behind, I took him to be a trucker. I was just beginning my six a. m. shift, and there were already four other truckers smoking alone at four other tables. I smiled and said, "What would you like this morning, sir? I can recommend the potato pancakes with applesauce, when I saw a white envelope on the table with my name on it. I looked the man in the face, probably in a startled way, and saw that it was Ty. He said, "Hey. Open it."

I said, "Hey. How's Rose?" Dead now? I wondered at once. Why else would he come to see me?

"Same as always."

It was a birthday card. Inside the card was a picture of Pammy, who was taller and big-busted now, standing next to Rose herself.

Linda, on the end, was wearing glasses. Her hair had darkened and grown out to a thick, glossy mane. She looked pretty but interesting, like Pete as an intellectual. She was wearing a lot of black. I made myself look carefully at Rose. She looked unchanged. I said, "I guess today is my birthday, isn't it? I hadn't remembered it yet."

"Thirty-nine." He smiled, but it was easy to tell he wasn't happy.

This transfixed me, and I forgot my place and my business until he said, "Let me order something," and cocked his eyebrow at Eileen.

I glanced at her. She smiled. I said, "Oh, she's just curious. She thinks I'm without living relatives."

"Are you?"

"Of course not." People started filling up my section. I said, "Have the blueberry pancakes and the sausage. That's the best. I'll bring a pot of coffee."

"Funny how we fall into this pattern."

I put my pad in my pocket. I said, "Don't flirt with me."

He lingered over his breakfast, reading the Des Moines Register he had brought along, as well as a Star and a USA Today that he got out of our newspaper rack (and folded up neatly and replaced). He drank four cups of coffee and asked for hash browns, then a piece of apple pie. I tried to spot our pickup in the parking lot as I scurried from table to table, but I didn't see it. He paid, talked for a moment to the cashier, and walked out. He left a 20 percent tip. Generous for a farmer but cheap for a trucker. I had the birthday card and the picture in my uniform pocket. Once or twice I took it out and looked at it.

He was back at ten-thirty, my "lunch hour." We went across the street to Wendy's.

My birthday fell on the twenty-ninth ofApril. The Ty I had known for all of my adult life spent the twenty-ninth of April in the fields.

I ordered a Coke. Ty asked for another cup of coffee. We sat by the window, fronting the Perkins lot across the street. There were no pickups at all in the lot. I said, "What are you driving?"

"That Chevy."

It was a beat-up yellow Malibu. Things piled in the backseat were visible through the rear window. I said, "Why?"

Ty, I would have to say, did look different. I had seen a lot more men in the last two and a half years, a catalog of American men in every variety, size, and color. Ty looked like the settled ones, those with habits of such long standing that they were now rituals. That, I had come to realize, was the premier sign of masculinity and maturity, a settled conviction, born of experience, that these rituals would and should be catered to. He didn't look unattractive, though.

Weathered, loose-limbed. I wouldn't have picked him for a trucker from the front.

He said, "I didn't want to carry all my stuff out in the weather.

"I'm going to Texas."

"What for?"

"They've got big corporate hog operations down there. I thought maybe I could get myself a job at one of those."

He watched me, waiting, I knew, for the question I was supposed to ask, but I couldn't ask it. Finally, he shifted his feet under the table and said, "Marv Carson wouldn't give me a loan to plant a crop this year. I didn't have any collateral except the crop itself and they decided to stop making those kind of loans, with the farm situation the way it is."

"I heard it was bad."

"Bob Stanley shot himself in the head. Right out in the barn.

Marlene found him. That's been the worst."

"They lost the farm?"

"He knew they were going to. That's why he did it. Marlene's working in Zebulon Center now, as a teacher's aide in the elementary school."

My mouth was dry. I took a sip of the Coke. I said, "What about you?"

"Those hog buildings killed me, that's what it was. The winter was so bad after the trial-" "The hearing. Nobody was on trial."

"I was."

We glared at each other, then veiled our glares.

He went on. "There was just one holdup after another with the buildings, and then I had to start over with all new sows, so that was a piece of change. I sold my place, but property values weren't anything like they'd been, and what I got didn't cover much of the loan, with the sows. Just got behind. And then more behind. The Chevy dealer made me a straight trade."

"An eight-year-old sedan for a four-year-old pickup?"

"I wasn't in a position to complain. Anyway, this is kind of a relief.

And I've never been down there. Or anyplace else for that matter."

I looked him over without shyness, with the inspecting gaze a wife earns after a certain number of years. I said, "You don't look relieved."

He shrugged.

"What about Rose?"

"I haven't been getting along with Rose all that well."

This was a touchy subject, so we watched two women come in the front door and order bowls of chili. Finally, he said, "She's getting a crop in and out. She's renting out land. When we split the farm, I took on the whole loan for the buildings, since they were on my land, so she was pretty unencumbered."

"Except there's nobody to farm the place."

"It's a big place."

"A thousand acres.

"All together," he said, "yeah. My dad would have been scared of that much land."

"There were bigger places than that out west even when he was alive."

"You know what he used to say about that? He used to say, 'Those places got the area, but they ain't got the volume."

We laughed, uneasily but together.

I said, "It's going to fall apart, isn't it?"

"Yeah." He said it reluctantly. "Yeah, it is. Rose swears she's going to keep it together. She's grim as death about it, and she goes I around like some queen. He glanced at me. "Well, she does. You should see her. Frankly, she's your dad all over."

I felt my face get hot.

He said, "I know what she says, Ginny, about your dad. She told me.

She's told everybody by now."

It was clear he didn't believe her. We watched a solitary man come ii dressed in a suit. He ordered a Big Single, large fries, and a water.

After a moment he said, "Maybe it happened. I don't say it didn't.

But it doesn't make me like her any more. I think people should keep private things private." His voice was rising as if he could barely contain himself. I was tempted to nod, not because I agreed, but because I recognized how all these things sorted themselves in his I mind, and I realized that with the best will in the world, we could never see them in the same way, and that, more than anything else, more than circumstances or history or will or wishing, divided us from each other. But the Ty I'd known was always on the lookout for agreement, reconciliation, so I didn't nod, knowing how he'd take it. I kept private things private.

"Anyway," he went on. "That's the past. I signed the whole thing over to her, the land, the buildings, the hogs, the equipment. She's sure prices are going to rise, and she's going to be a land baroness.

She's got it all figured out, the way she always does, and it's fine with me. I'm going to Texas, so he looked at me.

"So what?"

"So, I want to get a divorce."

I must have looked surprised, and I was, because the feeling of myself as a married person was something else that had lifted off long before.

He stumbled forward. "It could happen in Texas. There might be someone there I-" "That's fine."

"I haven't-" "I don't care."

"You don't?" There was a little wounded surprise in this question that revealed something underneath Ty's cool manner. I leaned forward and surveyed him again. He looked good. He would find someone for sure.

After a moment, he said, "The thing I don't understand about women is how cut and dried they are. My mother used to say to my dad, 'Ernie, if it can't be, it ain't," and she would clap her hands together and when her hands came apart, I would see that there was nothing there, and whatever we'd been wishing for or talking about, it would be gone, too, just like that."

"If you'd wanted me back, you'd have come looking for me before this."

"You don't understand how full my hands were. I couldn't leave the place for a minute. It was all getting away from me all the time-" He broke off. "Anyway, you walked out."

"Your pride was hurt?"

"I hated all that mess." His voice rose again. "I hated the way Rose roped you in-" He looked at me. "I thought you'd repent.

When I thought about things at all, that was my bottom line. I still think-" I flared up. "You were on Caroline's side! You talked to her about me!"

He sighed, and looked at me, then said, "I was on the side of the farm, that was all."

"What does that mean? You talked to her! She saw you as her ally!"

"What was I supposed to do? I didn't call her! If she called me and asked me questions, I told her what I thought. I tried to tell the truth the way I saw it."

"You didn't know the truth."

His face got red. "Look, the truth is, it was all wrong. For years, it was right, and we prospered and we got along and we did the way we knew we should be doing, and sure there were little crosses to bear, but it was right. Then Rose got selfish and you went along with her, and then it was all wrong. It wasn't up to her to change things, to screw up the monkey works!" He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. "There was real history there! And of course not everybody got what they wanted, and not everybody acted right all the time, but that's just the way it is. Life is. You got to accept that." I "Rose didn't ask Daddy for the farm!"

"But she was right there when he came up with that idea. She was all enthusiasm "So were you!"

"I didn't have any plans to ease him out! My plan was to-I slapped my hand on the table. Two kids behind the counter glanced over at us. Ty fell silent. I wanted to choose my words carefully. Finally, I said, "The thing is, I can remember when I saw it all your way! The proud progress from Grandpa Davis to Grandpa Cook to Daddy. When 'we' bought the first tractor in the county, when 'we' built the big house, when 'we' had the crops sprayed from the air, when 'we' got a car, when 'we' drained Mel's corner, when 'we' got a hundred and seventy-two bushels an acre. I can remember all of that like prayers or like being married. You know. It's good to remember and repeat. You feel good to be a part of that. But then I saw what my part really was. Rose showed me." He opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him with my hand. "She showed me, but I knew what she showed me was true before she even finished showing me. You see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did. I see getting others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was. Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own?" Ty winced. "No.

I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger and bigger machinery, and then feeling certain that all of it was 'right," as you say."

He was looking at me, but his face was closed over. Finally, he said, "I guess we see things differently."

"More differently than you imagine."

"I didn't remember you like this."

"I wasn't like this. I was a ninny."

"You were pretty and funny, and you looked at the good side of things."

I looked at my watch. There was another question I wanted to ask. I let this observation die away, then I said, "That night. The night of the storm. Did you know what Daddy was going to say to us? To me?"

"I knew he was angry. He was muttering on the way home, but I didn't pay much attention to it."

I let my gaze travel over his face. I saw that its measure of hope -the feature by which I always used to recognize Ty as my husband-had given way to something more mysterious and remote.

I said, "Did you agree with him? With what he said?"

"Ginny-" Resentful frustration edged his tone. He heard it and began again, more carefully. "Ginny, when your father told me what to do and how to farm, I paid attention. Otherwise, I didn't. But he always threw you women into a panic."

I stood up. "I'm lifteen minutes late now, and I don't want Eileen to get after me. I think fifteen minutes is all the farther I can push her."

"You've got to have the last word, huh."

"Well, have it. I don't care.

But neither of us said anything, leaving Wendy's and crossing the parking lot and street and the Perkins lot to his Malibu. He unlocked the driver's door, then turned to me with a gesture that took in the street, the restaurants, the parking lot, and me. He said, "I don't understand living like this, this ugly way. But I guess I'm gonna be getting used to it." That was the last word. We waved simultaneously as he drove off and that was the last gesture. It made a little pair with the first thing I ever saw him do. He was a senior; I was in junior high. For once, Daddy had let me go to a football game with some other girls, early in the season when it was still hot. I was taking off my sweater when I saw a rangy, good-looking older boy waving at me. I was flattered, so I smiled and waved back in spite of my habitual fearfulness. It was Ty, and when he saw me wave at him, his face went blank. I looked around. The girl he was waving at was two rows in back of me. After we started dating, live years later, he swore he could not remember this incident, and I'm sure he didn't, but it was burned into my memory as a reminder of the shame you courted if ever you made the mistake of thinking too well of yourself.

ALTHOUGH Ty would have sworn that my loyalty to Rose was unshaken, and probably pathological, he would have been wrong.

I could not bear getting an envelope from her. Her notes were never more than a paragraph. They were friendly and matter-of fact, with a slight undertone of setting me straight which was simply in the nature of our relationship. It was clear from them that she was still, and consciously, allowing me to define how we would be sisters, and that her patience with me was inexhaustible. That there was, in addition, no escaping being sisters was implicit in every word, even in the address, "Ginny Cook Smith," and the return address, "Rose Cook Lewis."

It was largely because I feared calls from Rose that I never had a telephone installed.

Even so, when she really wanted me, she got me. In the October after the April that Ty stopped, the phone rang at the restaurant during my break, and it was Rose. I knew it would be as I walked to the cashier's desk where the incoming phone sat, its receiver so threateningly, demandingly off the hook.

he was at the hospital in Mason City. That was one thing. The girls were alone on the farm. That was another. She wanted to see me. That was the third. I said, "I'll be there by three."

Eileen, I knew, would give me the time off. She had been pushing me to take time off for a year. I wore my uniform, which seemed like it would protect me, and it didn't occur to me to pack anything.

I left from work with only my handbag, just as if I were going home.

When I got to Mason City, I stopped at a phone booth and called her doctor, who came at once to the phone. He told me that the resurgence of her cancer was already far advanced. The second radical mastectomy had been performed in July, during the summer lull in farm work.

Radiation and chemotherapy into August had bought Rose another harvest.

Now the harvest was over.

She was thin, and little in the bed. When I came into the room, her eyelids lifted like velvet curtains. Her gaze was a spectacle you couldn't look away from. She pushed herself up an inch or two in the bed and patted a spot 011 the edge where I was to sit. I sat. She said, "At the peak of the harvest I drove fifteen truckloads a day to the elevator. We got $3.06 a bushel for corn."

"Sounds like a good price."

"We should have made Daddy show us more, and let us get more into the habit of working. If I'd been in the habit of doing it day after day, like Ty or Loren, it wouldn't have been so hard." She took some deep breaths, then reached for a glass and sipped some water through a straw. She said, "Take the girls back with you.

They're ready to go."

"You mean, they're packed?"

"More or less."

I thought she meant that I was to get them at the farm and take them back to St. Paul that night. I said, "Rose, that's ridiculous."

"Tell me you'll take them."

"Of course I'll take them."

"Tomorrow we'll talk about when."

"Okay."

She spoke in bursts that seemed to issue forth rather than in words formed by her tongue and lips. And it tired her. That was all she said for about an hour, and then her eyelids rose again, and she said, "Go home and make them some dinner. Make them fried chicken."

I stood up. "Rose, I've got as long as I want. I haven't taken any vacation time in three years."

She nodded heavily.

Linda wasn't surprised to see me, only surprised that I'd bothered to knock. I was surprised to see her, though. In the last three years, I had sent presents at birthdays and Christmas, but, actually, I had thrown away their thank-you notes unopened, afraid to face the loss of them along with everything else. I composed myself on the porch, and stepped inside. Ty's snapshot hadn't prepared me for the actuality of her height, her flesh, her fifteen-year-old air of confidence, or her deep voice when she called out, "Pam! Aunt Ginny's here!" I stepped across the threshold and she embraced me tightly. Pammy came in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She said, "Oh, Aunt Ginny!

You were supposed to take live minutes longer so that I could get the dishes put away!"

The house looked less functionally bare than it had in Daddy's day, and the white brocade couch formed the center piece of a living room suite that included a new co-ordinating wing-back chair and an oak side table. A lamp with a white pleated shade and a cut-glass base completed the picture. Daddy's old armchair was nowhere to be seen.

Pete's piano sat in the corner. There were no pictures on it.

Furniture filled the room exactly to the brim, inviting entrance, civilized at last.

I sat down in the new chair, and said, "The place looks great.

Your grandfather always thought his chair facing the window and a stack of magazines within reach was a good enough way to decorate."

They sat together on the couch. They smiled at my remark.

Pammy reached for a remote control, then turned off the television.

She said, "It's just 'Wheel of Fortune."

I said, "I saw your mom.

Linda said, "She called us."

"I guess I'm going to be staying for a while."

Pammy said, "You could stay closer to the hospital if you want.

We're old enough to stay alone."

"That seems kind of lonely."

Linda nodded at this. Pammy said, "For you or for us?"

"I guess for everybody."

After a moment, Linda said, "Are they going to let her come home soon?

She thinks they are, but I don't really believe her."

I shrugged. "All she told me was to come and make you some fried chicken. I picked up a chicken on the way.

Pammy said, "We've been Vegetarians for three years."

"Do you think you've lost the ability to digest meat?"

Linda giggled. They looked at each other, and finally she said, "We eat meat at school. We even go to Kentucky Fried Chicken sometimes.

Are you going to make mashed potatoes and cream gravy?"

"Would you like me to?"

They both nodded.

I thought I was doing quite well. I stood up easily and walked into the kitchen without a hitch. I found the cast iron chicken fryer and a pan for the potatoes. The only trouble was, the kitchen seemed arctic.

The blue gas flames of the burner fluttered coldly. The grease in the pan popped chillingly. When it spattered my hand, the burned dots felt frozen. I looked around, then took Rose's old beige sweater off the hook behind the door. I huddled into it, browning chicken and shivering. It seemed an impossible defeat that I was back in this kitchen, cooking. Since seeing Ty, I had reduced my links to the old life even more by investing in a microwave oven. For six months, I had microwaved every meal I didn't eat at the restaurant, and my pantry was full of oval plastic dishes that I thought might come in handy someday.

In addition to that, although I knew that I would certainly have come had Rose told me about her condition, it galled me that I hadn't even begun to resist. The summons, backed up by the word "hospital," had been enough. I turned the chicken pieces over. It was already dark as midnight outside, and not even six-thirty in the evening. The restaurant would be filling up at this hour, each cheerfully lit table bright with menus and paper place mats. On the other side of the black windows of Rose's kitchen, though, there was only outer space, a lightless, soundless vacuum that on this thousand acres came right down to the ground. I went to the back door, fumbled for the switch, and turned on the yard lights, three spots on tall poles that lit the way between the house and the barn and the machine shed. They helped, but I didn't really believe them.

Linda stood in the living room doorway. She said, "Pam has a history report due tomorrow, but I can help you."

"You don't have homework?"

"I did my geometry in study hall. I have to read some chapters inabook."

"What book?"

"David Copperfield."

"I read that."

"It's pretty long."

"That was the first school book I ever liked."

"I liked Giants in the Earth. We read that last year. This one is hard to read because the writing is funny."

"You mean old-fashioned?"

"Yeah." She sat down at the kitchen table and watched me. After a moment, I said, "Are you cold? The kitchen seems cold."

She said, "No."

I looked at her for a long moment. She looked unsuspecting. I said, my voice idle as could be, "Has your mom got canned stuff down in the cellar, or what?"

"There's some. We don't do as much as we used to, like beans or things. We tried drying some stuff."

"Huh. That's interesting." I waited.

"There's lots left in the other house. It was too much trouble to bring over here."

"I suppose." I started peeling potatoes and dropping them into a bowl of cold water. She watched me attentively. At first, it made me nervous, but then I realized that there was some purpose in her watching, and that it would bear fruit if I were patient. After I had peeled four potatoes, she said, "Could you peel some more, so there can be leftovers? Mommy makes mashed potato pancakes for breakfast." I kept peeling. It felt to me like Rose had been gone for weeks, but obviously that wasn't true. I said, "When did your mom go to the hospital?"

"Monday."

Three days before.

"Have you been to see her?"

"She doesn't want Pam driving the pickup, and she's got the car.

Anyway, she said she'd be back soon enough."

That wasn't what I guessed. I said, "Do you want to go see her?"

"I don't think she'll let us. She doesn't want us to see her."

"But do you want to see her?"

She thought for a long moment. "Yeah."

"Pammy, too?"

"Yeah."

"So, why should Rose make all the decisions?"

I intended this rhetorically, a remark to punctuate opening the refrigerator door and looking for some broccoli or something else green, but Linda said, "She always does."

"Not this time. We'll go tomorrow after school."

She was biting her lips. "I'll tell Pam."

I lay in bed after the girls fell asleep, uneasy and restless. Finally I got up and went to the phone and called Vancouver information.

There was a Jess Clark, and it wasn't too late to call that time zone, so I dialed the number. I felt so cold that I had to sit with the quilt wrapped around my shoulders while it rang. On the fifth ring, an American man's voice did answer, but when I asked whether this was the Jess Clark who'd once lived in Iowa, he said no. I thought I recognized his voice. There was a baby crying in the background.

I was unable to find a bed at Rose's house, Daddy's house, that I could lie in. I ended up on the white brocade couch at three in the morning, and then rain outside entered my dreams, soaking the couch, making it swell and buckle, causing me to light with someone whose identity in the dream wasn't clear.

The next day I got to the hospital in the morning and Rose was sitting up, eating cubes of lime Jell-O. Her jaw was sharp as a blade and her neck had that stalklike famine-victim look, but it was clear that the force of life was coursing more surely within than it had been the day before.

I said, "The girls want to know when you might be coming home."

"Couple days."

"I'm bringing them after school today."

"It's a long drive."

"They want to make it."

She shrugged and finished her Jell-O cubes. Finally, she said, "I'm all right with them. I didn't just leave everything unsaid with them the way Mommy did with us. I wasn't enigmatic, either. I laid it out for them in July when I saw what was happening." Her voice itself was weak, but her tone was absolutely assured; she was going to die in a state of perfect self-confidence. I felt myself disappear into the anger I had been harboring for so long, but I struggled to smooth and soften my voice. I said, "I'm certainly glad of that."

She smiled an amused smile.

I couldn't resist. I exclaimed, "I'm impressed by the way you've tied up all the loose ends." I gave in completely. "Bossy to the end, huh?"

Her arms, at her sides on the green blanket, were stringy and her hands spread like spiderwebs, then folded, then spread again as if they hurt, but not as if she hurt. I remembered this sensation from the first cancer, my feeling that she was so apart from her body that I had to address the two halves of her separately. She said, "Are you looking for a way to hurt my feelings?"

"Probably."

"Still lighting over a man, huh?"

"Jess?"

"If that's the man you're lighting over.

"Somehow, he made a bigger impression on me than Ty did. For every one thought I've had about Ty, I've had twenty about Jess."

"That's because you didn't sleep with him enough, or do practical things with him. Eventually, you would have gotten fed up."

"Did you?"

"Almost. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. I would have been fed up by the summer.

"Thanks." I meant, shut up. She ignored me. She said, "There were all these routines. No more than three eggs a week, always poached and served on browned but never burned wheat toast. Steelcut oatmeal from some organic store in San Francisco. Ginseng tea three times a day.

Meditation at sunrise. If we didn't check the paper the day before and find out the sunrise time to the minute, he was anxious all day. And we had to calculate the difference in time between the sunrise in the paper and the sunrise on the farm. It was something like two and three-fourths of a minute."

"He was a kind man. You could have accepted some quirks."

"Ty was kinder. You couldn't stand that." She gazed at me. "Jess Clark wasn't the way you thought he was, Ginny. He was more self-centered and calculating than you gave him credit for."

I parroted her. "He wasn't the way you thought he was, he was kinder and had more doubts than you gave him credit for." We stared at each other aggressively for a long minute, then Rose lifted one of her spiderweb hands and brushed back a wisp of hair. Her hair was short and thin. Brushing it back reminded her of her condition, and she said, "What you're really saying is that he'd like me better if he knew I was in the shape I'm in. Kindness wasn't freely I given with him, Ginny, it was a way to get where he wanted to go."

"I guess we differ."

"The difference is that I loved him without caring whether he was good.

He was good enough and I wanted him and he slipped away.

You know what? At the end, he was too good! When it came right down to building something on what we had, it scared him to build on death and bad luck and anger and destruction. Listen to this. One night he was late for dinner. It was a complicated squash soup that we'd made together, and he didn't get home till eight, and I was annoyed, but I didn't think that much of it, until he started acting sheepish and guilty. Well, it turned out he'd been to see Harold!

Those old ladies had made a big deal out of it, and Harold had been nice to him, and after that it was just like watching your lover go back to his wife. Whatever you have, however passionately you want it and he seems to want it, what he wants more and more is to lit in and be a good boy. Then everything he feels for you feels wrong to him.

The stronger he feels it, the more wrong it feels, and he starts repudiating stuff. A while later we got this material in the mail about green manures, and he came in and saw it and didn't open it, and I knew that was it, and it was. He packed up ten days later and left without saying exactly where he was going, and it turned out he'd gone to stay a week with Harold before going back to Seattle. I'm sure Vancouver's the perfect place for him. He felt as pure as the driven snow when he was there before." She sniffed, then caught my gaze. "I might have killed him if I'd known what he was planning."

She said this last with flat conviction. I believed it. Or, at least, I believed that she had sojourned in the land of the unimaginable, as I had. Now she lay back, gray and tired, and let her lids drop over her great eyes. I said, "Do you ever hear from him?" But she waved her hand, dismissing the question, or, maybe, just too exhausted to answer it. I mulled over whether to tell her about the call I had made the night before, but instead, I picked up a Ladies' Home Journal by her bed. I read an article about planting annuals in window boxes and other containers, then an article about ways to eliminate fat from your diet without missing it. She would know when the phone bill came, maybe. She fell asleep. After all, he was far too young for her now.

We all were.

I went for a walk in the hospital parking lot, which was busy and lifted my spirits with all those converging and diverging intentions, ven though some of the people in the parking lot were visibly ill or injured. When I came back, Rose had been served her dinner, which she was not eating.

I said, "You could eat the canned pears. Those go down easy."

"I've gotten to where I hate it if I can tell what something is, or was. Hospitals should have some kind of nutrient-rich kibble.

'Patient chow' they could call it." She pushed the tray and it rotated toward me.

I said, "I'm going to leave in an hour to get the girls. It's almost noon.

"I want to tell you some things first. Practical things."

"Okay." I was still wearing my waitressing uniform. I pulled the skirt down over my knee.

She said, "I'm leaving the farm to you and Caroline, not to the girls."

"Why's that?"

"I don't want it to come to them. I want all of this to stop with our generation."

"I don't want to farm. Ty's in Texas. Caroline doesn't want to farm."

"Three years ago I would have said rent it out. You could get ninety dollars an acre. But if it were up to me, I wouldn't do that now.

It's too encumbered with debt." She glanced at me, then looked out the window. "Anyway, Marv Carson's going to make you sell.

I don't know what there's going to be above and beyond paying off the debt and the taxes. I just don't know. It's a bad time to sell."

She sighed.

After a moment, I said, "What if there's nothing? What do you think about that?"

"Pam and Linda know they might have to work, and if they want to go to college, they might have to go into the service. I warned them about that."

I waited.

"Ginny, you don't like me to say what I really think. I need you.

I don't want to alienate you. I haven't changed my mind about Daddy or the farm or what was done to us, but if I repeat myself you could just walk out of here. I trust y "I don't trust you."

"Well, there you are then. Except that what is there about me not to trust? I'm stuck here." She stretched out her spiderweb hands and spread her skinny arms wide. Tears prickled in my eyes. I said, "I guess I was all set to light it out longer."

"Yeah. I'm thirty-seven. It shits, doesn't it?"

I said, "It's hard to bear." At the moment it seemed nearly impossible to bear. I exclaimed, "Oh, Rose."

She sniffed, dismissing this upsurge. After a moment, she said, "Don't do that to me. We're not going to be sad. We're going to be angry until we die. It's the only hope.

"I don't know if I can do that. Especially without you to goose me.

I just fall back into this muddle. At the hearing, I was so shocked.

I mean, he was so lost and diminished. I felt like I couldn't remember what we were so afraid of except that you could, so I could. And then I could see you so clearly all the last three years, how you'd always had your way at my expense, and you'd been selfish all your life. I just saw those words in red letters, 'Rose is selfish," and I didn't have any trouble being hard and having everything you did and said and had ever done and said go for evidence that you were immovably selfish, and that's bad. I mean, if we don't know that being selfish is bad, then what did we learn as children?"

Rose laughed. In the drab hospital room, it was a jolly sound. I liked it and was offended at the same time, so I confessed, maybe just to impress her, make her serious again. I said, "I thought I was going to be angry with you forever, but now I'm not! I mean, I wanted to kill you!"

"So what? I want to kill people all the time."

"No! I don't mean that I said, 'Gee, I could kill that guy." I mean, I set out to kill you. I made poisoned sausage for you, and canned it, and waited for you to eat it."

She looked at me, surprised at last. Finally, she said, "Well, must have worked, huh?"

"Don't you remember? That liver sausage and sauerkraut I brought over?" She shook her head. "Right around dinner, late in the summer?"

"Vaguely. So much was going on, I must have forgotten about it. Then, of course, I was swept up in the Jess Clark life-style, so I would have spurned liver sausage even if I 'd remembered." She drank some water through a straw.

I said, "Aren't you even impressed?"

"I guess I think if you'd really wanted to kill me, you would have shot me or something. Ty had a shotgun. So did Daddy and so did Pete.

Anyway, you didn't have to bother. All that well water we drank did the trick."

I nodded, limp from my confession, slumping in my green chair and damp with sweat. Rose, on the other hand, looked invigorated.

I said, "It must be still in your cellar, then."

"Everything else is. But that house has been boarded up since I moved across the road."

I felt a surprising flush of relief. We exchanged our first real smile since I'd come.

"I should leave if I want to get home before the girls do. They want to come this afternoon." Then I said, "What am I going to do without you?"

"Exercise caution while making up your own mind, as always."

I stood up. "I should go. I promised them."

She reached for my hand. Hers was cool, and her thumbnail dug into my palm. She jerked me toward her. She said, "I have no accomplishments.

I didn't teach long enough to know what I was doing. I didn't make a good life with Pete. I didn't shepherd my daughters into adulthood. I didn't win Jess Clark. I didn't work the farm successfully. I was as much of a nothing as Mommy or Grandma Edith. I didn't even get Daddy to know what he had done, or what it meant. People around town talk about how I wrecked it all. Three generations on the same farm, great land, Daddy a marvelous farmer, and a saint to boot." She used my hand to pull herself up in the bed.

"So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment."

I extricated my hand.

Rose closed her eyes and waved me out the door.

WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE FARM on the day before the sale, one of those iron-chill days in early March, I saw that Caroline, like me, had brought a truck. Marv Carson wanted to be generous with us -we could take whatever personal possessions we liked, and he wasn't going to say a word about it. "You girls deserve that much," was what he told me over the phone.

It wasn't even ten-I'd left St. Paul by six, stopped and had breakfast on the way. Linda and Pam had been stirring, but they knew where I was going, and I didn't want to talk about it with them any more. Pam, I knew, would get in the car, Rose's old car, and drive herself to school and follow the course of activities prescribed for her. Linda might or might not. She had cut school seventeen times since moving in with me after Thanksgiving. We no longer fought about it.

I'd intended to stop at my old house, first, and pick up some kitchen equipment for Pam, who was doing most of our cooking, and at least look through my clothes and books, but when I saw from a distance that Caroline had already pulled into Daddy's driveway, I got suddenly eager to be there, eager and anxious and ready.

She was wearing wool slacks and a beautiful sweater with an elaborate snowflake pattern around the yoke. She was standing in the kitchen, and she glanced around, startled, when I opened the back door. I was wearing Levi's belonging to Pam and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt (Pam had started to date a boy who had a passion for the U of M, who liked to see them both dressed in as much U of M clothing as he could). I was going to the U of M, too, at night; my plan was to major in psychology. The house was cold-the heat and electricity had been off since the first of December. I thought that we would divvy up what we wanted and let what was left be auctioned. In my experience, there would be buyers for everything, even the old shoes and boots and coveralls.

Caroline looked at me for a long moment before she smiled, and then her smile was formal, you might even say careful. She remarked, "I wasn't sure when you'd get here."

"I'm an early riser."

"That's my favorite part of the day, too."

I don't know that an independent observer would have suspected we were related-the same ethnic stock, perhaps, though my hair was dark, with gray streaks by then, and Caroline's was almost red, but the difference now ran deeper than our clothes, to body type and stance, to skin and hair, to social class and whether we expected to be seen or not. She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.

I knew I seemed hostile. I said, "There's a kerosene heater in the barn. I could set that up."

"Some couple in Johnston died from one of those last year.

"We could open the window a little. You just need ventilation."

"We'll see."

"Daddy used it for years out in the shop."

Her eyebrows lifted a millimeter and dropped again. She said, "If we work quickly, we can stand the cold. It's above freezing.

"Fine. Where do you want to start?"

"Why not right here?"

"Fine."

So we started. Taking dishes out of the pantry, and glassware and stainless and old cake plates and coffee makers and cut-glass dessert plates and clear cups and saucers that I hadn't seen for thirty years, since Mommy would have the Lutheran ladies over for coffee and cake on a Sunday afternoon. I felt a small, chilled inner blossom of surprise.

There were Christmas napkins in a drawer that I'd never seen, white linen with embroidered holly wreaths in one corner. A waffle iron, the pressure canner, an electric frying pan with a broken handle. There were three vases with dried-up flower cubes crumbling in their bottoms, a soup tureen shaped like a lemon, a Tupperware cake holder and two Tupperware pie holders, a ten-inch pie plate, a nine-inch pie plate, and four cupcake tins that I knew well, but also a china cream and sugar set with roses painted around the rim that I hadn't seen in thirty years. There were eight glass jars with lids, old olive jars and pickle jars and peanut butter jars. There was a box of corks that Rose must have thought would come in handy. I said, "Once I looked around for some of Mommy's things, and I didn't find any. I thought they'd all gone to the Lutheran Church, but I guess Rose had them."

Did I mind? I couldn't have said.

"Which things are Rose's and which things are Mother's?"

"At this point, they're all Rose's, I guess."

"But some things-these Christmas napkins, for instance. You must remember-" "I remember the cups and saucers." I gestured toward the glass coffee things on the counter. "I remember because I thought it must be a sign of festivity to have the coffee visible like that."

"Well, we'll set those aside then." She carried the set carefully to the table.

I said, "I don't know anything about the napkins. They seem more like Mommy than Rose, but they're new to me.

She left them where they were.

She said, "What about the dishes? What dishes did Daddy eat off of?"

"Some white with a turquoise rim. I don't see them. Maybe Rose put them away.

"Or sold them."

"Or gave them to the church."

She said, "I remember those. I'd like to have them."

"They were just glass. From the fifties. They weren't valuable."

"From that point of view, what is valuable here?" She had her hands on her hips and her tone was rising. I said, "I don't know, Caroline," and I could feel my own eagerness gearing up to match hers.

She said, "Those Corningware plates must have been Rose's.

You can have those."

I spoke with conscious coolness. "You don't want anything of Rose's?"

She was taking some mugs off cup hooks. The one in her hand said "Pete's Joe" on it. I held out my hand for it, and she gave it to me.

Then she said, "Not really, no."

I was about to challenge her. I thought I could make my "why not" feel like a slap, but I suddenly wasn't as ready as I thought. I was disoriented by the array of unfamiliar goods arrayed about. I said, "You finish this. Set aside what you want. I'll go upstairs."

The girls and I had cleared their bedrooms, so I left those doors closed. The bathroom, on the north side of the house, was freezing cold and inhospitable. I opened the medicine chest. Some generic aspirin, of which I took four, Gaviscon and Pepto-Bismol, an unfinished course of Amoxicillin, hydrogen peroxide, syrup of ipecac, Bactine, iodine, Band-Aids and gauze patches. I closed the medicine chest.

Towels still hung over the towel racks. I began to fold them over my arm. I stopped after two and put them down on the toilet seat. The cold seemed to play over my skin like a fever. I walked out of the bathroom, looked around. There would be more towels in the towel closet, sheets in the drawers beneath it. I stared at those drawers, beautiful dark oak that you could order from Sears in i9i0 that you couldn't even get any more. The floors. The door frames.

The tiny hexagonal white tile in the bathroom that as a child I used to try and lit my toes into. It seemed to me that if I only knew the trick-just a small trick-I could look around this familiar hallway with Rose's eyes, and if I could do that, then I could sense everything she had sensed in the last few years. That, it seemed, would be one way to stop missing her. The cold beat against me in rhythmic blows.

A headache pushed up from beneath the aspirin and swelled to fill my skull. I went back down the stairs.

Caroline's face met mine as soon as I entered the kitchen. I said, "You must think you're going to take all of Mommy's and Daddy's things, and I'm going to take all of Rose 5.

"I'm sure there's more that was Rose 5"That's not the point." I realized I was gasping. She looked at me, and I saw that for once she was a little afraid.

Her eyes widened, but she didn't speak.

I said, "Let's hear it."

"What?"

"Let's hear what you're thinking?"

"Why do you want to?" Her momentary fear hardened. "I think it's better if we just divide up the stuff and go home."

"How can we divide up the stuff without knowing what it means?"

She smiled at this.

I turned and ran back upstairs. I opened the door to what had been Daddy's room, after that Rose's room. The pictures were gone, leaving vivid squares on the faded wallpaper. I pulled open the closet door and fought my way back toward the shelf above the window.

They were there, in a stack, just where I knew Rose would have stored them. In the kitchen, I laid them out on the table, the nameless baby at the top, kicking on a pale blanket, smiling in his or her little white hat. I said, "Okay, tell me who all these people were.

Caroline sauntered over and surveyed them. She said, "I'm not taking tests."

"Just tell me."

"Well, those must be the Davises. Those would be the Cooks.

Grandfather Cook again, with the tractor. Mother."

"Who's the baby?"

"You, probably. You're the oldest."

"We didn't have a camera when I was a baby."

"Rose, then. Or me. Who is it?"

"I don't know. Rose didn't know. You don't know."

"So what?"

"So this. Everyone here is a stranger, even the baby. These are our ancestors, but they don't look familiar. Even Daddy doesn't look familiar. They might as well be anyone.

"Daddy looks familiar." She smiled.

"How familiar?"

"He looks like Daddy, that's all."

"How familiar?"

She turned her gaze from the pictures to my face, took her hands out of her pockets and picked up the picture. It was from the thirties, when Daddy would have been about twenty-live. He looked handsome but a little exasperated, as if this picture taking were a waste of time.

Finally, she said, "As familiar as a father should look, no more, no less."

I said, "You're lucky."

"What does that mean?"

I didn't answer. She put down the picture, then picked up the one of the baby and scrutinized it. I said, "Isn't it strange there's only one? I looked for other pictures, but they start in school. This is all, before that."

"Well, so what?"

"So why do you want these things? Pictures of strangers, dishes and cups and saucers that you don't remember? It's like you're just taking home somebody else's farm childhood. You don't know what it means!"

"So I can't pass some test."

"What if I weren't truthful? What if I sent you off on purpose, with all of Rose's things, and kept Mommy's things for myself?"

"I thought of that." Now her look flared at last. She exclaimed, "Have you got to wreck everything? Why are we having this sale?

Because you and Rose bankrupted the farm. I can't even accept that, but I've got to. So I come here, and you can't leave me alone. You're going to tell me something terrible about Daddy, or Mommy, or Grandpa Cook or somebody. You're going to wreck my childhood for me. I can see it in your face. You're dying to do it, just like Rose was. She used to call me, but I wouldn't talk to her!" She walked over to the sink and turned on the faucet. When nothing came out, she stared fixedly at it for a moment, then said, "I told Frank last night, 'I don't know what makes them tick. It's like they seek out bad things.

They don't see what's there-they see beyond that to something terrible, and it's like they're finally happy when they see that!"

" Now she looked at me. "I think things generally are what they seem to be! I think that people are basically good, and sorry to make mistakes, and ready to make amends! Look at Daddy! He knew he'd treated me unfairly, but that we really felt love for each other.

He made amends. We got really close at the end."

"He thought you were dead."

"That was the very end! Before that, he was just as sweet as he could be. We talked about things. It was a side to him that didn't come out much before that, but suffering brought it out. That was the real him."

"How did he mistreat you?"

"Well, by getting mad and cutting me out of the farm. He knew he'd been unfair."

I found myself shaking my head.

She flared up again. "I know you don't believe me! I don't expect you to believe me, but it's true."

"Caroline-" "I just won't listen to you! You never have any evidence!

The evidence isn't there! You have a thing against Daddy. It's just greed or something." She abruptly looked me in the face. "I realize that some people are just evil." For a second, I thought she was referring to Daddy. Then I realized she was referring to me. But I was unmoved. There was not even the usual inner clang of encountering dislike. This was Caroline. Truly we were beyond like and dislike by now.

I said, "You don't know what-" Her hands dropped to her sides. It was clear that she couldn't think what to do for a moment, that I could tell her everything, pour it right into her ear, with no resistance on her part.

Rose would have.

I didn't.

Then Caroline turned suddenly and ran out of the house, slamming the back door behind her.

I continued to sort things, in the living room, where I wouldn't be tempted to look out the window for her. The living room, I realized, hurt me the most, because that was where Rose made her last stand, with the couch and the lamp and the chairs, and other things, too, like a subscription to The New Yorker and another one to Scientific American.

In the bench of Pete's piano was a beginning piano method for adults; in the bookcase, where stacks of Successful I Farming used to sit, were some course catalogs from the community college in Clear Lake. It was easier, from these artifacts, to imagine Rose by herself in this room, contemplating her past, planning her future, reckoning up what it was possible to recover. It was a grievous but soothing picture of Rose, one to set against the memory I had of her in which she was shaking me and shaking me, trying to wake me up, work me up, push me out of my natural muddle.

A truck engine roared outside of the house. I looked at my watch.

Caroline had been, out there a half an hour. I looked out the front window. Her truck, a new red Ford, I noticed, turned north and passed the big picture window, between me and the old south field across the road. A frozen rind of snow lay between the furrows and drifted against the fence posts. It was nearly blackened by the fine dust of wind-borne soil.

I sat down on the couch and stuck my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt. I sensed Rose there, pressing on me like a bad conscience, and I remembered her saying, with that mixture of irony and eagerness that was hers alone, "Ask me something. I want to tell you the truth."

I should have told Caroline the truth.

I cast my gaze around the frigid room. I said, aloud, "Rose. Rose, she didn't ask. There are just some things you have to ask for."

After half an hour, when Caroline had not returned, I went out to my own borrowed truck to wait for her. I turned on the engine and the heater, and sat for another half hour. By then it was nearly one in the afternoon, and I was numb with the cold. I drove into town and had some lunch at the Cabot Cafe, and then I drove to Pike.

Marv Carson was in his office. He had tall bottles of three different kinds of mineral water on his desk, one from Italy, one from France, and one from Sweden. I said, "We don't want anything, Marv.

Everything can go.

He said, "Well, that's terrific, Ginny. I'll tell the Boone brothers to haul it all out. You coming down for the auction? It's a hard thing to watch, let me warn you.

"No. I've got to work that day. Just let me know."

But in the end, I couldn't drive away.

It was nearly four when I got back to the farm. I turned down County 686, and drove dead slowly, as slowly as if I were walking, or driving a tractor, or horses, mules, or even oxen, which Grandpa Davis had used the first two summers ninety years before. I passed the drainage wells, two on each side of the road, their grates a little rusted but still bolted firmly down. I stopped the truck and went and stood on one. Under the noise of the wind, I could faintly hear the eternal drip and trickle of the sea beneath the soil.

The house repelled me now, but the barn drew me. I crossed the frosted, snow-patched grass and pushed the big door back on its slider, then back farther, because the westering sun made up for the electric lights that had been shut off. The big green and yellow pieces of equipment were icy to the touch, parked expertly by someone, taking up every inch of floor space. They had not been cleaned yet -Rose might have weakened too fast for that-and all the tire treads, the metal joints, the knives and hoses were covered with dried black mud and pale corn husks, furry dark fragments of bean pods and stalks. I kicked a crust of mud off the front wheel of the tractor. The big room smelled of diesel fuel and grease.

Things hung from the walls: part of an antique harness that might bring some money, three hurricane lamps, old buckets and feed pans nested precariously together, rakes. A pile of rusted bailing wire.

On the workbench, some C clamps, a hammer, which I picked up, a band saw, a spare ax handle. Other tools. A folded tarp. A pecksized fruit basket. Back in the corner, a ray of sunlight shone on the old pump from the well outside Daddy's back door, here since they piped water into the house. A half a dozen paint cans. A stack of old windows, some glass broken beneath them. On the workbench, cans of nails, new and used. A box of fuses. The lid of an old chicken incubator. I wondered where it would all go. A few plastic Treflan jugs lay underneath the workbench, both with lids and without. A pyramid of ancient one-gallon tins was stacked in the farthest corner, with a little space cleared around them. It was getting cold as the sun approached the horizon, but I went around the tractor and climbed gingerly over the disk. Dust floated in the air. I picked up one of the dry and dented tins. The label said that it contained DDT.

"Handle according to instructions." I wondered where it could all go.

I moved the truck into Rose's driveway anyway. Then I got out and walked around Rose's old house. The butter-colored plywood fading to gray that covered the windows made the place look blind and desolate.

The white siding on the western face of the house was dark with grit.

Rose would have washed that down.

The boards nailed over the cellar door came up easily enough with the claw hammer, even though my hands were shaking in the frigid dusky breeze. The metal handle turned with barely a creak. I lifted the door. There was no electricity and light outside was fading. I didn't carry matches. My feet felt their way down the steps one at a time. I knew Rose's shelves weren't far from the doorway, so I stepped forward with my hands outstretched. I felt cobwebs drift across my lingers and face.

The rough wooden shelves held smooth cold pints and quarts. I didn't have to see them to know what they were-jams and pickles, tomatoes, dilled beans, tomato juice, beets, applesauce, peach butter.

Rose's bounty, years of farm summers, a habit we kept up long after most of our neighbors. I felt a box and knew I had found the sausages, shoved in helter-skelter owing to the jumble of passionate events, then later pushed back, pushed aside, forgotten. I carried the box awkwardly up the steps. I closed the cellar door, and in the dark, with the truck lights trained on my work, I nailed the door down again.

The kraut and the liquid inside the jars had turned a deep orange, and the lids were rusted a little around the rims. I kept glancing at them beside me on the seat as I drove away, and so I forgot to take a last look at the farm.

Pam was at her boyfriend's and Linda was asleep when I got home.

She had dropped off over her economics text. I marked her place and set it on the floor, then turned out her bedside light and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. After looking at her a moment, I smoothed the hair back from her face. Sleeping, she did look like Rose had looked years ago, before her wedding, when, I suppose, she was happily anticipating a life that never came to pass.

I set the jars by the sink and looked down into the garbage disposal.

I was perplexed, actually, perplexed and nervous, as if I were holding live explosives. Gingerly, I twisted off the rings and then pried off the caps. A strong sour odor of vinegar bellied out. Maybe there was a better way to do this-take it to the landfill? Burn it somehow?

Perhaps I shouldn't have taken off the caps? I could have saved it forever in these inert glass bottles. I sat down and thought, but thinking got me nowhere. And so I did it, I did the best I could. I poured the sausages and sauerkraut down the disposal, I ground them up, I washed them away with fifteen minutes of water, full blast. I relied, as I always did now that I lived in the city, on the sewage treatment plant that I had never seen. I had misgivings.

But then I had something else, too. I had a burden lift off me that I hadn't even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.