"Tinkers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harding Paul)

2

THE MORNINGS BEGAN IN THE DARK. THEY began with setting the home in order for the day, so that it might already be industrious when the sun climbed first the invisible horizon and then the branches of the dark trees.

Fill the stove box with wood. Fill the milk pail with milk. (How that pail clanking against George's leg as he crosses the yard splits the seamless night, wakes the other children, who sniffle and yawn and root deeper into their warm beds, dreading the cold air and morning chores. Mother will find Marjorie sitting up in bed and wheezing. Darla will open her eyes and say, The sun's late. The sun's late! I'm sure it was up earlier yesterday! Mummy! Something's wrong! Joe will be found with a foot in the wrong leg of his overalls, grinning and asking for pancakes and maple syrup, his favorite meal.) Fetch the water. Make a fire.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented that it was there every morning when he woke up, that it remained at least until he had dressed and had some hot coffee, if not until he had taken stock of the goods in his brush cart, and fed and hitched Prince Edward, if not until his rounds were done, if not until he fell asleep that night, and if his dreams were not tormented by it. He resented equally the ache and the resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his own limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man's burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy.

This morning-the Monday morning after the Friday morning when there was predawn snow and Howard had stopped to look at a field that had once been a homestead and had, in a fugue state, made a contraption out of twigs and grass and flowers, which he had already forgotten making, and then had had a seizure and awoke freezing in the field and had finally realized who he was and where he was and had made his way home-this morning brought fear that there hid somewhere on one of the back roads that he intended to canvass another seizure, a bolt of lightning coiled behind a rock or stump or within the hollow of a tree or some strange nest and which his passing would trigger to spring, to explode, and to impale him.

Such vanity! What gall to elect for yourself such attention, good or bad. Project yourself above yourself. Look at the top of your dusty hat: cheap felt, wilted and patched with scraps from the last wilted and patched felt hat. What a crown! What a king you are to deserve such displeasure, how important that God stop whatever it is He is tending and pitch bolts at your head. Rise higher, above the trees. Your crown is already hard to see amid the dust of the road and dirt of the ditch. But you are still remarkable. Rise higher, perhaps to the height where the blackbirds flap. Where have you gone? Oh, there you are, I think. That is you, isn't it, that wisp inching along? Well, rise higher, then, to the belly of the clouds. Where have you gone? Now higher, to where, if you are not careful, you might stub your toe on the mountains of the moon. Where are you? Never mind you; where is your home, your county, your state, your nation? Ah, there it is! And higher now, so that your hair and the lashes of your eyes catch fire from the sparks of solar flares. On which of those bright bodies do you rule your kingdom of dirt, your cart of soap? Very well, that one. I hope you are right-there is little need for a tinker on Mars. Now higher again, past the eighth planet, named for the king of the sea. And higher again, past the shadowy ninth, which for now only exists in the dreams of men back on- Well! Where have you gone? Which among those millions of glittering facets is where you belong? Where is it you toil and drum and fall to the ground and thrash in the weeds?

The weather turned warm and on Sundays after church the family sat on the porch. The porch ran the length of the front of the house and was surrounded by a thick collar of wildflowers. In early July, there was Queen Anne's lace and columbines, hawkweed and forget-me- nots, black-eyed Susans and bluebells. There was a bank of loosestrife in the crabgrass and clover across the lawn, between the porch and the verge of the road. The floor of the porch was uneven and ran at a slight incline from one end (where the front door was) to the other (just past the window, through which the dining room table was visible). Looked at from the road, the house appeared to lean toward the left and the porch to the right, so that it appeared the only thing keeping either standing was their mutual pull on each other. From the side of the house, though, it seemed that the opposite was true, that they slumped against one another and remained upright by virtue of their mutual weight. Viewed from whatever angle, the homestead had the look of claptrap. The walls all seemed as if they were about to fall over, one upon the next, and the sagging roof to drop on top of the pile, so that the flattened house would make a neat stacked deck.

The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky. There was a spot on the floor, just to the right of the front door, which, when walked on, made the whole porch bob as if it rested on a branch. There were two decrepit chairs, one an old rocking chair, which had once been painted red, and in which Kathleen sat and shelled peas or snapped beans and barked, Get where I can see you, at Joe, who was rolling around in the side lot. Howard sat in the other chair. It was old, with a ladder back, which made a parallelogram with the floor and listed to one side or the other, according to how Howard sat on it, and the back of which came apart at the splats, so that he had to stand every couple of minutes and clap the piece of furniture back together. The children sat on upended buckets or on packing crates. Buddy the Dog and Russell the Cat lay on patches of sun. Darla and Marjorie helped Kathleen: Marjorie when she was not upstairs in bed, suffering from an asthma attack brought on by pollen and ragweed, and Darla when she did not see a wasp or spider which, sooner or later, she always did, and which sent her shrieking back into the house, as often as not over the springy part of the floor, so that the rest of the family was left to steady themselves on the swaying porch as she fled to the hollow depths of the house. Howard and George played cribbage.

Seven.

Fifteen for two.

Twenty-four for three.

Thirty for four.

Go.

Thirty-one for two.

They played without a board and kept score by adding their points in the margins of the comics pages from the newspaper. Father said, George, I can't find the cribbage board, and I said, That's funny, Daddy; it should be on the porch, where we left it. 1 pretended to help him look for it for an hour until he gave up and 1 pretended to and we used a piece of old newspaper to keep score. I took the board. I stole it and took it to Ray's shed, where we smoked and played cribbage for marbles or an arrowhead.

You missed a fifteen, and the right jack is three more.

So it is. You got me again, George.

I smell a skunk, a double skunk.

Kathleen said, George, go get your brother. Go get him.

No looking.

I won't. George got off the crate.

Walk. So he walked. He turned the corner of the house and called for his brother and when he saw him, stuck in a tree and gnawing on a handful of flowers, he picked up a pebble and threw it at him. The stone struck Joe on the ear and he began to cry. George said, loudly enough for his mother and father to hear around the corner, 0, Joe, don't cry. I'll get you out of there. Joe, don't cry. I'll get you some water to wash out the bitter taste of starflowers and daisies.

What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from ocean siege or October breeze.

And what of barges made to burn? One evening at sunset, as he was walking through the woods near the house after dinner, Howard caught sight of George kneeling on a path, examining something on the ground. George did not hear him, so Howard stood quietly in the trees and watched his son. George rose and hurried back up the path toward the house. He ran out of Howard's view and a moment later the door to the front porch slapped shut. Howard went to where his son had knelt and found a dead mouse, curled as if sleeping, on the leaves. It had not been dead for long. Its head went back and its limbs opened up when Howard toed it with his boot, after which it curled back up again. The porch door swung shut again and Howard stepped back into the shadows in the trees.

George returned to the mouse and wrapped it in newspaper and bound the shroud tightly with kitchen string. He stuffed the wrapped mouse into an empty box of kitchen matches. Howard smelled kerosene and understood that his son had soaked the newspaper with it.

There was a small pond through the woods behind the yard. It was a stopping place for two pairs of ducks and a small flock of Canada geese every year. Its depth was no more than five feet at its deepest. Sometimes, George fished there and caught small brook trout, which he cooked over a fire he made at the edge of the water. If it was a Saturday, he fished at sundown, when, during the early summer, there were mayfly and drake hatches that brought the trout up to the surface to feed. At some point, bats would flit from the darkness out over the water to feed on the insects. George would stop fishing then, because the bats struck at his fishing fly and he had terrible notions of a frantic squeaking bat impaled on the barbed hook, trying to free itself and only breaking its own fragile wings in the process. Grabbing the bat and yanking the hook out would be unthinkable, so the only choice seemed as if it would be to run away, leaving the struggling animal on the end of the line, and to return the next morning to collect the rod and hope that a fox had happened along and eaten the bat (and not swallowed the hook along with the bat, so that it, too, now struggled somewhere in the woods, dragging the fishing pole by the taut line that now ran from its gut up through its throat and tore at the side of its mouth). So, when the bats came out, George cooked what fish he had, if he had any, and watched darkness settle and then went home.

George walked to the water and Howard followed silently behind at a distance. At the edge of the water, George cut a panel of bark from a birch tree with his jackknife. He sewed the bark together at each end with a heavy sewing needle and dark thread, making a canoe shaped boat. He placed the tiny coffin in the middle of the craft and laid a piece of coal, which he took from a pocket in his overalls, next to it. He lit the coal with a kitchen match, which he struck on his zipper fly, and launched the boat. It floated out onto the pond. The burning coal illuminated the birch bark and made it look like some sort of glowing animal hide. The air was still and the surface of the pond was sleek and reflective, like oil, and seemed thick, like oil, too, because the ripples trailing off the back of the little boat spread so slowly, as if the skin of the water offered more resistance against the influence of bodies passing through it that night. White moths came up from the grass at the pond's edge and fluttered out to the boat to flirt with the fire. The fire reached the matchbox and rubbed at it until it began to smoke. When the fire reached inside the box and touched the kerosene-soaked shroud, there was a bright, quiet thump and the bier was gulped in flame. The birch crackled and spat sparks. Then there was a gout of whitish smoke, which Howard imagined was the mouse burning. George's silhouette lit up against the flames on the water. The pyre sank with a hiss and a final spurt of smoke and the pond went dark and was quiet again.

Cremation came to Howard's mind, a vision of Viking kings lying on their funeral beds on the decks of their dragon-prow ships, swords in hand, set alight, and sent blazing into the dark surf, flames snapping from the ships' sterns like pennants in a gale.

Howard felt the movement of his son passing him in the dark more than he saw him, and he waited, listening, for the boy to make his way through the trees, up the path, back to the yard, and into the house before he himself went on, not to the house but past it, up to the road, and then turned back around, so that if anyone in the house saw, it would look as if he was returning from the after-dinner walk he had said he was taking. He came to the front of the house and could see George and Darla and Marjorie through the front window at the dining room table doing their homework.

I will pay my debts with honey!

What if the wagon, instead of a house on wheels, contained a kingdom of bees? There would be a panel on one side, fixed at the top with brass hinges, which would open and be propped up with poles at the corners. There would be windows looking into the hives. People could stand and watch the bees work while I gave lectures on the insects' habits, their industry and their loyalty. I could charge two cents a person. Young children could see the hives for free. Schools could send entire classes, or, even better, I could go to the schools and set up right in the yards. I could plant a bed of flowers on top of the wagon for the pollen and put the entrances to the hives on the side opposite the windows, so that the spectators would not bother the bees. And I could have a cabinet built into the back of the wagon that I would fill with jars of honey and beeswax and honeycombs tied with bright ribbons, which I would sell to the audience after the lecture. I could have a sign painted across the side panel: "The Magnificent Cros-bees!"

Instead, winter came and he put the wagon away in the barn, where mice and stray cats nested in a halffrozen truce in the drawers.

George experienced all but one of his father's seizures as rumors. He would find his mother leaning over his rumpled, shaken father in a chair. There was spit in his father's hair and blood on his chin. His father sat, snorting rapid breaths through his nose and looking first at the palms of his hands and then at their backs as he clenched and unclenched them the way a soldier might after a bomb had detonated in his trench and he was shocked to find himself still alive and possibly unharmed. George came to understand that this was because his father could tell when the fits were coming and always managed, with the help of George's mother, to get to a part of the house or yard where the children were absent, so that they would not have to see him in the throes of a seizure. If one of the children happened along, Kathleen would say in a flat, quite voice, You just go right back where you came from; Father and I are busy. The one time he and his brother and his sisters had watched their father have a grand mal seizure was at Christmas dinner, 1926.

The children were astonished by the ham that Kathleen had cooked for the Christmas meal. It was the largest they had ever seen. It was covered in a crust of brown sugar and molasses. Buddy the Dog sat at attention, as if recommending himself to the ham over the children by his proper manners. Kathleen shooed him with a kick in the ribs, but he just let out a yelp and stayed put. Russell the Cat came into the room, too, and sat facing the wall, away from the table, cleaning his paws, as if an affectation of utter disinterest might be the trick to getting a scrap.

Howard had specially sharpened the carving knife for the occasion. He stood and leaned over the ham and, grinning at the children and at his wife, who scowled and told George to get his brother set in his chair and the girls that they'd get the spoon across the backs of their legs if they didn't sit their backsides down. Howard sliced into the ham, releasing even more of its sweet fragrance into the room, which nearly mesmerized everyone, Kathleen included. Her frown disappeared and even she had to stare at the ham for a moment in admiration. After Howard had carved two slices, however, she regained her usual composure and began directing the children to offer their plates to their father for their portions.

George, get Jack his ham and cut it for him. No, smaller pieces; he'll try to swallow those whole and choke himself. Darla, stop that silliness. Take some beans and pass them on. Howard, cut the slices thinner; this has to last us the week, since you saw fit to take a ham instead of the money you are owed to provide properly for your family.

Howard lifted a daub of potato with his fork. Then he speared two string beans and then a piece of ham. He raised the food to his mouth but stopped before he took the bite. The muscles at the hinges of his jaws flexed. He gasped. His eyelids fluttered. His eyes rolled in their sockets. The fork and food dropped from his hand and clattered onto his plate.

Mummy, what's-,

Howard scrambled his legs, trying to get up, but he only twisted around in his chair, which corkscrewed out from under him. He dropped to the floor, striking his head on the seat of the chair next to him as he fell.

Kathleen barked at Margie, Get your brother out of here, and seemed to shove her three youngest children, who had already huddled together in a trembling knot near the door, out of the room with a single shove. She rounded the corner of the table and stuck her hand out at George, who still sat at his seat, dumbly holding a fork straight up in the air, his mouth wide open.

George, give me the spoon. George looked at his mother. George, the spoon, she said, not angry or loud or bitter, as usual, but almost gently. He dropped his fork and yanked the spoon out of the potatoes.

He said, There's still-

Kathleen said, Give me the spoon, George. She snatched the spoon from George's hand and pounced on her husband, straddling his chest. Howard grunted and Kathleen jammed the spoon crosswise into his mouth, like a bit, so that he would not bite his own tongue off. Howard bit down onto the spoon and George watched as his father's lips curled back from his teeth, thinking, Like a skull's, not a man's, not Daddy's.

George, get here and hold the spoon. Like this. George was terrified of sitting on his father's chest.

Use two hands. Lean on it. Don't let his head bang. George felt his father's body quaking beneath him and was sure that it was going to rend itself apart, that his father was going to split open.

Mum.

I'm getting a stick. Kathleen ran out of the room and George heard her crash into the kitchen table, sending pots and pans clattering across the floor. She groaned and came back with a fresh piece of the kindling George had split that morning. Just as she reached George and Howard, the spoon handle split in Howard's mouth and George fell forward onto his father's face. George tried to catch himself, but his hands slid on a pool of greasy, dark blood collecting on the floor under his father's head. He pushed himself back up with the heels of his hands and saw that his father had opened his mouth and that he was about to swallow half of the spoon handle. George stuck his fingers into Howard's mouth to get the spoon and Howard bit down onto them. George gasped. He saw his fingers clenched in his father's bloody teeth.

Kathleen spoke in a low monotone. It's okay, Georgie. It's okay. Can you hold the stick? Hold the stick. She began to try to pry Howard's mouth open. Let me get his chin, Georgie. She grabbed her husband's mouth as if it were a sprung bear trap.

What if she breaks Daddy's mouth? George thought.

Get the stick in, Georgie-the end. Get it in. Work it in. Howard's head banged the floor and banged the floor and banged the floor again. George managed to wedge the end of the stick in between his father's teeth at the side of his mouth. Kathleen instantly took the stick and ferociously worked it deeper. Without looking, she grabbed a seat cushion from the floor and slid it under her husband's head in between bangs on the floor. Howard's feet kicked at the legs of the table. Darla stood in the doorway and shrieked. Margie gasped for breath. Joe squealed.

Daddy's broken!

That's it, Georgie; that's almost it, little lamb.

There was so much noise from my father's boots kicking the floor and kicking the legs of the table, so that everything on it jumped and crashed back down or leapt off the table and clattered or shattered on the floor Glass and food and forks and knives were all over the floor and Buddy the Dog whined and barked and Joe and Darla screamed but my father was in the middle of it, strangely quiet, as if concentrating or distracted, as wires and springs and ribs and guts popped and exploded and unraveled and unhinged. He was smiling when he nearly bit my fingers off, or it felt like he did and that was quiet, too. My mother got hold of his chin and I forced the cedar stick into those bloody teeth, and I didn't feel like I might be hurting a person anymore, which made me sicker And there was blood everywhere from my fingers, which seemed detached from my hand and just to dangle from it, although I could feel blood thumping in them. And there was blood all over my father's face and in his mouth, which was my blood, and in his hair and on the floor, which was his blood from the cut he got on his head when it hit the chair as he fell. And for some reason, I noticed Russell the Cat bobbing his head, with his ears pricked up and his eyes wide and his pupils contracted and his little triangle nose twitching as he sniffed and stared at the blood. Instead of terror, though, I thought, So, this is what it is; I know what it is now. My father is not a werewolf or a bear or a monster and now I can run away.

And here is Kathleen, lying in her bed, which is set in the bare branches of a tree as dark as a burned-out vision-black-limbed, ash-sapped, spun in night. It is winter and winter winds shake the branches and the bed moves with them. It is winter, and the tree has been stripped of its bright mantle of leaves. It is winter because she lies awake with a bare heart, trying to remember a fuller season. She thinks, I must have been a young woman once.

She lies on one half of the bed. The dark form of her sleeping husband lies on the other half, turned away, sleeping so deeply, it is as if sleep is another world. Only her face is visible above the top of the bedcovers. It glows like a pale egg. Beneath her face, tucked under her chin, is the clean, ironed, starched white sheet, folded back over the top quilt evenly and overlapping it by exactly six inches, as her mother taught her when she was a young girl. Her hair is pinned up and covered by a sleeping cap that her mother sewed for her many years ago. Although her hair reaches below her waist, she lets it down only to wash it-twice a month in summer, once a month in winter. Her hair is auburn but has lost its richness; it has begun to thin on the crown of her head. She finds herself furious that the cut on her husband's head might bleed through the bandages and stain the clean pillowcase. She hears George groan in his sleep in his room across the hall. None of his fingers seem broken, but he probably needs a stitch or two to properly close the wounds made by Howard's teeth. She could not raise Dr. Box on the phone, since it was Christmas Day, so she plans to take George to his office first thing in the morning.

Her stern manner and her humorless regime mask bitterness far deeper than any of her children or her husband imagine. She has never recovered from the shock of becoming a wife and then a mother. She is still dismayed every morning when she first sees her children, peaceful, sleeping, in their beds when she goes to wake them, that as often as not the feeling she has is one of resentment, of loss. These feelings frighten her so much that she has buried them under layer upon layer of domestic strictness. She has managed, in the dozen years since becoming a wife and mother, to half-convince herself that this nearly martial ordering of her household is, in fact, the love that she is so terrified that she does not have. When one of her children wakes with a fever and a painful cough early one freezing January morning, instead of kissing the child's forehead and tucking him or her in more snugly and boiling water for a mug of honey and lemon water, she says that it is not man's lot to be at ease in this world and that if she took a day off every time she had a sniffle or a stiff neck, the house would unravel around them all and they would be like birds with no nest, so get up and get dressed and help your brother with the wood, your sister with the water, and yanks the covers off of the shivering child and throws its cold clothes at it and says, Go get dressed, unless you want a good dousing. She has convinced herself, at least in the light of day, that this is love, that this is the best way she can raise her children to be strong. She could not live with herself if she allowed herself to believe that she treated her own this way because she felt no more connected to them than she would to a collection of stones.

As she falls asleep, half-dreaming of flight and beds in trees, she decides that it is time to do something about her sick husband. She will ask about it after Dr. Box has looked at George's hand.

The next morning, she dressed early. There was a frost on the inside of the windows and no sight of the sun yet.

Howard stirred and asked, What's that?

Kathleen said, I'm taking George to the doctor.

What for? What? Howard said.

Kathleen answered, For his bite, Howard; for the bite you gave him.

Howard croaked, The bite? A bite?

The walk to Dr. Box's house, the front two rooms of the first floor of which served as his office, was a little over two miles. Dawn overtook Kathleen and George as they walked along the side of the road, she in front and he shuffling behind her, half-asleep and only aware of the cold and his aching hand. At first, it was just a cindery lightening of night, then a red light beyond the horizon that illuminated the undersides of clouds coming from the west. Kathleen had worried that she might lose her resolve to speak with Dr. Box about her husband, but as she and George came closer to his office, her determination grew.

Dr. Box's house was tucked into the last bend in the road before entering West Cove. Kathleen and George came over a low slope, expecting to see the two-story building with its wraparound porch, where patients who were not too ill or sometimes not ill at all liked to sit in the summer and gossip as they waited for a tincture to cure their sour stomachs or a poultice to spread over a throbbing corn.

The house was gone. Kathleen stopped walking and looked around. The clouds that had colored the dawn copper had advanced and were now fastened overhead like a lid of stone. Flurries of snow spun in the wind. Kathleen surely stood in the right place and the doctor's house surely was vanished. Instead of the house, there was a hole in the earth. What had been Dr. Box's storage cellar, where his bottles of ether and rolls of bandages had stood alongside jars of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes and pears in syrup, was now an empty ditch exposed to the elements, already filling with snow and the windblown detritus of winter.

What happened, Mum? Was there a tornado?

A trail of fresh earth and deep ruts led from what had been Dr. Box's front yard out to the road and continued around the bend toward West Cove. Kathleen stood at the verge of the foundation. Without the house in its proper place, the lake beyond the trees in the former backyard was visible. Kathleen turned back to the road, and then back to the hole in the earth, unsure of what to do. A panic fluttered in her that all of West Cove might be gone, that if she walked beyond the bend in the road, she would find a bare, raw clearing in the distance, at the edge of the lake, pocked with the open foundations of missing buildings, the entire town pulled from its sockets and dragged somewhere beyond the mountains to the north.

Hear that, Mummy?

Behind the wind, there was another sound. Kathleen took George's good hand in hers and led him back onto the road. She heard a rumbling she could not place. She paused and tried to identify the sound. It was not thunder; it was not a train. Standing still she found that the sound was accompanied by a slight trembling of the earth. She began to walk again, toward the bend in the road. Just before she reached the bend, the din became less confused. She heard men shouting to one another and, in the unmistakable tones she had heard all of her life, at animals. There was a sound of harnesses and of beasts hauling at the yoke. And there was another sound-that of heavy timbers grating against one another.

There's something up there, Mum. George let go of Kathleen's hand and ran ahead. Kathleen called his name once, but he disappeared around the corner. The snow was heavy now, cascading out of the stone-colored sky in gouts. Kathleen rewrapped her scarf about her head and neck. She was cold; the tips of her toes stung and her nose dripped.

Kathleen turned the corner, eager for the first look at West Cove that any traveler had when she approached town from the south. The bend in the road was on the top of a hill and one looked down onto the town from above. Beyond the town was the lake, which stretched toward the horizon and during the winter was a vast white plain interrupted only by the humped black tufts of the four islands in its midst. Kathleen wondered whether the islands would be visible in the storm. She expected not. But instead of seeing the town and lake, she saw Dr. Box's house. It sat in the middle of the road, set on top of wooden trucks. The house and the trucks rested on a bed of massive logs, which had been lined up across a foundation of thick, planed beams set along the road. It was being dragged over the logs a foot at a time. Men wearing woolen red plaid coats and brimmed hats circled the house, carrying sledgehammers and crowbars, and yelled back and forth to one another around its corners. A flatbed truck idled behind the house. Its open bed was loaded with four enormous iron jacks. George stood in the road, halfway between the house and his mother. He turned from the house to her and she held a hand out toward him. She reached her son and took his hand and they walked up alongside the house, keeping to the side of the road, nearly in the ditch. The men ignored them or nodded their heads once distractedly in Kathleen's direction. Each time the house lurched forward, it proceeded along on the logs, which rolled beneath it over the beams. Kathleen saw at once that the process must be nearly impossibly slow; the house could be moved forward only six or eight feet at a time before the men would have to raise it up on the jacks and realign the logs beneath it and take up the timbers over which it just had been rolled and relay them in front of it.

As mother and son came abreast of the front corner of the house, they saw that it was being drawn by eight yoke of titanic oxen. The oxen were yoked in a train and harnessed to the house by chains as thick as Kathleen's wrists. A man marched up and down the length of the team with a bullwhip, cursing and whipping the beasts on their rumps. The oxen heaved and steamed in the cold. Each time the man yelled and cracked his whip, there was a rippling of wood and leather and iron as the chains fastened to the house snapped tight and each successive pair of oxen strained into the weight of the house and the building ground forward an inch or two, its windows rattling, its frame vibrating, and then the man with the whip yelled, Take yeere rest dogs, and the sixteen animals stopped pulling all at once, as if they were a circus act. The man was Ezra Morrell, George's best friend Ray Morrell's father.

Standing off to the side of the road, keeping slightly ahead of the progress of his home and business, was Dr. Box. He was dressed like the other men, except that his hat and his eyeglasses were of better quality. The eyeglasses were justified because of his profession; the town physician simply needed the best eyes he could get. The hat was his one public indulgence, the one symbol of his status in West Cove which he permitted himself. It came from a shop in London, where Dr. Box liked to say that there was an exact replica of his head in wood, around which each year a new hat was fitted for the real head thousands of miles away. (When he could not find his stethoscope or a tongue depressor, he'd say that the heads were mixed up-that the real head was in London and the wooden one in West Cove.) Otherwise, he wore the same wool coat of red plaid, the same dark wool pants, the same heavy boots, which laced up nearly to his knees. He munched on the stem of a pipe, now and then taking it from his mouth to say, That's it, boys! Or, Careful, fellas. Mother Box'll skin me if anything happens to the castle! When he saw Kathleen and George coming along, he made a show of stepping back, bowing slightly, and sweeping a hand across the space in front of himself for Kathleen to pass, and then snapped to attention and saluted George.

Come along, ma'am. Come along, sergeant. Just moving HQ closer to the line!

I'm sorry to interrupt, Doctor, Kathleen said, standing behind George with her hands resting on his shoulders. It's just that yesterday-

Dr. Box yanked his pipe from his mouth and set his large, slightly stained teeth together in a way to show that he was listening as a professional. Before Kathleen could continue, however, he saw George's bandaged hand.

Well, soldier, hurt in the line of duty, I see. Let's take a look.

Kathleen urged George forward a step and he shyly allowed the doctor to take his hand.

Don't worry, sergeant, I'll be careful. Dr. Box squatted and unwound the bandages. When he saw the puncture marks, he turned George's hand over and back twice, whistled, and said, A dog got you, huh, soldier? George looked at his mother.

Kathleen said, Well, it was an accident. We didn't-

I'm afraid you're going to need a stitch or two on the deepest cuts, the doctor said. Nothing broken, but you'll be sore for a good while. You'll probably feel it for longer, maybe even when you're an old man. Who's the dog? We need to see about rabies.

Kathleen said, That's the thing, Doctor. Can ICould we- The doctor looked up from George's hand.

Yes, yes, of course, ma'am. Of course. He wound the bandages back around George's hand. Listen, sergeant, he said to George, your mother and I need to talk for a minute, so let's get you someplace warm. Dan! Danny! The doctor put his hand against George's back and steered him toward the idling truck. The driver's window was down and a man sat at the wheel, his head tilted outside the cab, smoking a cigarette. He looked up when the doctor called his name.

Danny, roll that window up and let this soldier warm up in there; he's been injured in the line of duty!

The man, Dan Cooper, cinched his lips around the cigarette and pulled his head back into the truck cab. He rolled up the window, opened the truck door, and stepped down off the truck.

All yours, Doc, he said.

There you go. That's it, sergeant, the doctor said, helping George up into the passenger seat. You just mark time here and your mother and I'll be done in a jiff.

The cab of the truck warmed up quickly. The seat bench was covered in cracked brown leather. George felt broken seat springs through the bottom of his coat. Old manuals and newspapers and a coffee mug lined with the silt of long-since-evaporated coffee cluttered the space between him and the driver's seat. The glass steamed over and George watched the men and oxen and the moving house turn to phantoms in a silver mist. He remembered stories that his father had told him about ghost ships that had foundered on the rocks off the coast a hundred years ago but whose mournful, doomed crews and splintering keels could still be heard on foggy nights.

Kathleen and the doctor talked for ten minutes, toward the end of which George saw his mother bow her head and cover her face in her hands. He had never seen his mother cry and he knew it was about his father and that it was serious. Dr. Box hugged Kathleen to himself with one arm, patted her on the back twice, and then let go. He marched towards the truck. George looked past him to the blurry vision of his mother through the glass. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her coat and shook herself as if to slough off her weeping with the snow. She turned her face up toward the sky for a moment. Dr. Box grabbed the truck door open and saluted George.

Okay, sergeant, we're headed on ahead into town, where I can get you back into fighting shape.

George climbed down from the truck and went to his mother. Her face was flushed and her eyes red. She smiled at George and took his hand.

It's okay, Georgie, she said. George noticed for the first time that his mother was still a young woman. Dr. Box conferred with Dan Cooper, who had taken up his seat in the truck again, and two other men and then went back to Kathleen and George.

Ready, troops?

Kathleen said, It seems so sad your house out in the middle of the road. She began to weep again.

Oh, poor Mrs. Crosby. There, there. We have to do something. It's time for us to do something. We're going to take care of everything.

Kathleen chopped wood, shaken. Howard was still on his rounds. The girls were in the parlor, doing needlepoint and keeping an eye on Joe, who was having a conversation with Ursula, a bearskin rug that he treated like one of the family pets. George slept upstairs, on top of Kathleen and Howard's bed. The wind was still up. But it will soften and die down when it gets dark, she thought. Wisps of snow were still on the wind, too, sweet and sharp. The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light. The trees lolled under the weight of those luminescent organs growing at the tops of their slender trunks. The brains murmured among themselves. They kept counsel and possessed a wintery wisdom-cold scarlet and opaline minds, brief and burnished, flaring in the metallic blue of dusk. And then they were gone. The light drained from the sky and the trees and funneled to a point on the western horizon, where it seemed to be swallowed by the earth. The branches of the trees were darknesses over the lesser dark of dusk. Kathleen thought, That is like Howard's brain-lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly. How much light does the mind need? Have use for? Like a room full of lamps. Like a brain full of light. She patted her coat pocket to feel the folded prospectus for the Eastern Maine State Hospital in Bangor, located on top of Hepatica Hill overlooking the beautiful Penobscot River. When Dr. Box had given her the brochure, her first thought had been to remember that the hospital had originally been called the Eastern Maine Insane Hospital. But the pictures in the brochure showed clean rooms and a broad, sunny campus and a huge brick building with four wings that looked to her like a grand hotel. The idea of a hotel seemed benevolent rather than cruel, seemed, in the suddenly alien backyard, full of glowing, leaky, vanishing brains, a warm, safe shelter that she envisioned as if she were a famished and half-frozen traveler on a planet made of ice, breaching a hill and catching sight of a lodge with lights in every window and smoke pouring from the chimneys and people gathered together, luxuriating in the dreamlike delight that comes from grateful strangers sharing sanctuary. The brochure was not in either of her coat pockets, and Kathleen realized that she must have placed it somewhere in her room when she helped George onto her bed.

George slept on top of his parents' bed. He lay curled up around his bitten hand. The bandages on the hand were tight, and in his shallow sleep a black dog held his hand in its mouth. The dog looked up into George's eyes and George knew that the dog would bite his hand if he tried to remove it. The dog would never move. It would never tire nor need to eat or sleep, and the thought that he would never be able to move again, but could only sit still, with his hand in the dog's mouth, for the rest of his life terrified George. He panicked and, by reflex, yanked his hand back. The dog's jaws sprang like a trap and the first pressure from the bite startled him awake. He whimpered for his mother. The room was cold and the blue in the windows so dim that it did not seem to be light, but the cold itself, which seemed to pry between the bed and his body, where the only warmth was. George shuddered and whimpered again and tried to burrow deeper into the bed, but he lay on top of the covers and could not get warm. Oh, Mummy, he groaned, and rose up onto an elbow. He looked at his bitten hand. The bandages seemed luminescent, as if the last light in the room might be coming from them. George felt his blood pulsing against them in his palm. The hand ached. He wanted to call for his mother again, but he heard the tock-tock of the hatchet in the yard. In the dark and the cold, it sounded as if his mother was chopping at rock, not wood, and a trace of his dream about the dog made him suddenly feel as if he would have to spend the rest of his life freezing and stranded on the bed with a crushed hand, listening to his mother uselessly chopping at stone out beyond the window fitted with panes of black ice, when what he most needed was to be curled up in her warm lap, with her warm hands on his face and her soft, quiet voice cooing to him that everything was all right. Instead, George sat upright and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up and slid a foot forward in the total darkness of the floor, testing for the edge of the cable rug or a stray shoe that might trip him. He shuffled toward where the door was. He held his bitten hand limply above his head, as if he were crossing a river, and patted at the dark with his good hand until he felt the corner of his mother's bureau, which stood to the left of the door. He opened the door onto deeper darkness still. Rather than risking the hallway and the stairs, George tapped his fingers along the top of the bureau until he felt the lamp. He lifted the glass and set it down and felt for the box of matches. He held the matchbox against his stomach with the heel of his bitten hand and struck a match. The top of the bureau appeared and the image of him holding the match appeared in the lamp glass. There was a pamphlet next to the lamp, with a photograph of a building that looked to him like a school, called the Eastern Maine State Hospital. George realized that this was what Dr. Box had given to his mother after he had finished with the stitches in George's hand (there had only been four, and they had not hurt at first). Underneath the picture of the building, a caption read Northern and Eastern Maine 's care facility for the insane and feebleminded. George touched the match to the lamp wick and light swelled up and out into the room. The light resolved the furniture and the walls and the floor and ceiling and George's eyes as if it were liquid. He opened the pamphlet and began to read. Patients at the hospital experience relief from the frantic modern world, which aggravates so many cases of insanity. They enjoy sessions of hydrotherapy, extended periods of bedrest, harvesting crops, and tending the piggery. They also make and repair furniture and do the laundry…

Never you mind that, George. It's time to come down and get dinner. Kathleen had come upstairs without George noticing. George started when she spoke, and suddenly his head and his neck and his legs and his arms all ached and he felt feverish. Kathleen saw that he felt a kind of humiliation at being caught reading the pamphlet and at knowing just what it meant, even though it was something he should not even know about. She, too, suddenly suffered the weight of the day and felt cold and hungry and impatient.

My bureau is not yours to dig around, she said. She snatched the brochure from George's hands and shooed him out of her room and toward the stairs. Go get your brother ready to eat and tell your sisters to pour everyone a glass of milk. Go.

Yes, Mum. George stifled an urge to burst into tears. He went downstairs. Kathleen folded the brochure in half and stuffed it into a wool sock, which she tucked under a sweater at the back of her bottom bureau drawer.

That night, Kathleen and the children ate dinner without Howard, who was still not back from his rounds by seven o'clock. Afterward, she took up mending a pair of Joe's overalls in her rocking chair next to the woodstove. Darla and Margie played with two dolls, which they pretended were Susan B. Anthony and Betsy Ross preparing tea for George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Darla hopped Susan B. Anthony over to Betsy Ross, who was already sitting at the table, double-checking the tea service.

Darla made Susan B. Anthony bow to Betsy Ross and say, Happy New Year, Betsy!

Margie stood Besty Ross up and made her curtsy. And happy 192 7 to you, Ms. Anthony!

Darla said, No, Margie, it's 1776.

George sat on the couch, holding a book called Mark the Match Boy open on his lap with his injured hand and an apple in the other. He stared at the print but did not read. He thought about his father, who had bitten him and who was a madman about to be taken to the madhouse. It suddenly occurred to him that his brother, Joe, would be sent to the madhouse, too, sooner or later.

For years, an old bearskin rug of indeterminate origin had been lying in a far corner of the parlor. Sometimes, on cold nights, when the family gathered in the parlor, the children sat on it, pretending that they were riding a bear in a circus. Howard had named the rug Ursula. It was a ragged, mangy thing, with a bald patch running from its snout to between its eye sockets, which either had been pitted of their original glass eyes or simply left empty. The previous winter, George had inserted marbles in the sockets, one a milky green with gold sparkles, the other obsidian black. The black eye made the bear look alive. The milky green eye made her look as if she were half-blind, or as if she had one eye on another world, since the gold sparkles in the green looked like a tiny whirlpool of stars spinning inside a cataract. George took a bite of his apple and watched Joe, who jumped on the rug and pretended he was riding the bear and then rolled off it as if it had bucked him.

Stop that fussing around, Joe, Kathleen said.

Joe sprang up, smiling, and stepped toward George. He pointed back to the rug and said, George, that Ursula looks like she's fixing for to bite me!

George waited until Saturday to run away. He hitched Prince Edward to his father's wagon and led the animal and wagon out to the road, holding the reins tightly and walking right next to the mule and whispering to it, urging it, shushing it. When he was out of sight of the house, he mounted the wagon and snapped the reins and said, Hya, boy, not in the manner of his father, who merely flicked the leather leads and made a clicking sound with his tongue against his back teeth, but of his friend Ray Morrell's father, who talked with a strange accent George had never heard before and would never hear again, and who seemed to have stepped out of some bank of mist on the other side of which was, perfectly preserved-or, not even preserved, but still actual -the previous century. Ray's father Ezra, owned sixteen oxen. When he drove them, he said, Hya, hya, boys or, Work it, ye dogs. Mr. Morrell was the only person George ever knew who used the word ye.

So George said, Hya, boy, and Prince Edward barely noticed and started to walk at a pace a little slower than usual, as if registering his awareness that this was not his usual route, not his usual driver, not his usual cue. The sunny weekend morning, the lackadaisical mule, and the extra heaviness of the slow rate imparted by the bulk of the wagon conspired to dilute George's half notions of speed and flight and pursuit and evasion. In his mind, he, during school the previous days, had seen trees flying by, alternating trunks and light flicking by. He saw hounds baying and scrambling past a thicket of reeds and cat-o'-nine-tails at the edge of water and, after they had passed, the stalks parting and his own head rising half out of the water, alert, sharp, animallike. Now, he inched along in full daylight atop a wagon as big as a house and as noisy as a suitcase full of Turkish cymbals. For the first time, he wondered about what all of those drawers were packed with. He realized that he had formed a vague conception of the wagon's inventory-brushes, mops, pots, pipes, socks, suspenders, polish-a single picture that appeared in his mind whenever he thought about the wagon. It came up like a road sign, a billboard, or an advertisement-simple and all-encompassing and, he now understood, cursory and distorted. He peered over the side of the wagon. I couldn't even say what wood the drawers are made from, he thought.

When the turnoff to his friend Ray Morrell's farm came up, George took it without thinking. He was nearly at the old curing house, now a toolshed, or at least shed for odd planks and hoops and handles and blades of wood and iron for which there was no longer use, each artifact having split or worn out or dulled to the very end of usefulness, so that not even Ray's father, the most frugal farmer in a countryside of frugal and impoverished farmers, could nail it, tie it, or hammer it back into place and eke out one more execution of whatever task the piece of wood or metal was supposed to perform. The curing house was at the end of another turnoff along the dirt tracks that led from the main road (which was dirt as well, this far out of town, but of wellpacked and -tended dirt) to the Morrells'. George had taken both turns without thinking. The curing shed was where he and Ray Morrell went and smoked and played cribbage and told stories and jokes after they had finished working for Ray's father-milking the cow or sweeping the yard or, most often, unyoking and feeding and inspecting Ray's father's giant oxen.

(Ray Morrell already, at twelve years old, had the air of a chaste, fastidious old bachelor, someone who knew about commemorative coins and prevailing winds and who, already, had a taste for the turpentinelike bathtub gin his father always had a bottle of stashed away under the basement stairs. And many years after he had enough money to comfortably buy better, Ray continued to buy the most wretched gin he could find, until his swollen liver gave out. He was pleased to allow people to think that his taste for rotgut was because of thrift born of his childhood dirt-farmer poverty, when, in fact, it was because he was forever soothed by the memories of drinking hooch that could have doubled as paint thinner in the old curing house with dusty blades of sunlight stabbing through the gaps in its wall boards during afternoons after school with his best friend in the world, George Washington Crosby.)

Ezra was known throughout the county and beyond as the man to call when you needed something big pulled. This was the source of many crude jokes. The smallest of his oxen stood at just under six feet at the shoulders; the tallest, over seven and a half. The oxen were one of his two passions. The other was baseball, which he followed in the papers every week, nearly committing all of the box scores to memory, so that as he plowed his fields or whipped his team (which he hired out in pairs, from two to the full regiment of sixteen, and which he himself always oversaw), he muttered batting averages and runs batted in and earned- run averages out loud to himself, which, overheard, were simply random-sounding streams of numbers. The statistic that gave Ezra Morrell the most pleasure to contemplate was that of the players' batting averages, and every time he acquired a new ox, he named it after the most recent batting champion from the American League. When he cracked the whip, then, he could be heard variously harassing Ed Delehanty, Elmer Flick, George Stone, Tris Speaker, George Sisler, Harry Heilman, Babe Ruth, one of the three Napoleon Lajoies, or six Ty Cobbs (because he had more oxen than different batting champs, so that when he ran out, he started back at the beginning and named the animals for the different years the same players had won). Hya, Napoleon One, ye dog, lean into it, Ezra would yell. That's no four-twenty-two effort! Unlike other fans of the sport, Ezra took no pleasure in talking about the game with anyone else. When his son dared ask how the great Cobb had fared on the last road trip, Ezra cuffed the boy on the ear, and said, The great Cobb Three has shat his stall full again, ye chatty pup. Now go clean it up before ye're behind with the feed.

George tied Prince Edward to a tree in front of the shed. The inside of the shed felt colder than the outside. Sunlight streamed through cracks between the log cribbing of the walls and seams between boards in the roof where outside the shingles had come loose and blown away. The light flowing in from the roof dropped toward the floor in rectangular planes, which were broken by the heavy rafters. Some of the rafters still had curing hooks hanging from them. There was an abandoned barn swallow's nest in the crook of one of the rafters and a support beam. A dusty hill of droppings remained on the floor beneath the nest.

George stood in the shed. He was suddenly aware that if he was running away, this was not the place to go. To run away meant away. He had never been away. Away was the French Revolution or Fort Sumter or the Roman Empire. Maybe, Boston, three hundred miles south. He had no idea what was in the three hundred miles between here and Boston.

George poked through the pile of ashes and cigarette stubs next to the three nail kegs he and Ray had set up so that each could sit and the cribbage board that George had taken from home could be set between them. He found a butt with two or three drags left to it. He pinched it by the very end. There were no matches. He pitched the cigarette back onto the pile.

A door lay lengthwise against the far wall of the shed. It was from the old Budden place, long since burned down. It was mammoth: made of oak two inches thick. Its hinges and handle had been hacked at. The side facing out into the shed was charred and striated by fire. When George and Ray sat in the shed smoking whatever they had been able to find, which was rolled corn husks as often as it was tobacco, and playing cribbage with the board George had stolen from his own house, they liked to recite the story about the winter of '06, when the snow was twelve feet high and the sun didn't shine for three months and Budden went mad and took the big ax into the house and staved all of the furniture and piled all the broken pieces together in the middle of the parlor and doused it all with kerosene and took a match to it. The hack marks in the door were not from Budden. They were from the volunteer firemen and neighbors (who were the same thing: each a neighbor, each a volunteer firefighter, because you were a fireman if you were a man fighting a fire) who had tried to chop their way through the door to get to Mrs. Budden and the children. By the time they realized that the door was too thick and that they should try to go through a window or the back door, the fire was too ferocious to be able to do anything but leap off the porch. Then, just as they realized this, just as they collectively understood that the door could not be breached, something inside the house exploded and the door wrenched from its hinges and blew outward, plowing the men in front of it, so that they and it landed in the front walkway, they on the ground, it on them-the side which now faced out into the shed burning and gushing smoke. But here was the thing, the reason for the recitation and repetition of the story: When the fire was finally put out, and they found the bodies, Tom Budden's corpse in the kitchen but also one adult (a woman, it was determined) and two children, spooned up against one another within the boundaries of the iron frame of the Budden's big double bed (the mattress, the sheets, the blankets burned away), calm and peace ful as if they were taking an afternoon nap, cooked to smoldering crisps, and whom everybody assumed were Mrs. Budden and the Budden children, and so the town started to make funeral preparations, Mr. Potter measuring the charred corpses as best he could to make the coffins, Mrs. Budden and the children showed up from Worcester, where they had been visiting her mother. No one had ever figured out who that woman and those children were who had been sleeping in the Budden house on the afternoon Tom Budden went berserk and set it all on fire.

George crawled behind the door and lay down. He put his bitten hand against the cold wood and imagined it as scorching hot, imagined it holding back a tremendous fire, which battered and seared it and built up behind it and blew it loose from its hinges. The fire thumped on the other side of the door. George lowered his hand to his lap. He tried to squeeze it into a fist. It was still too sore to fully close. Once again, he fell first to wishing that his father would just disappear from the face of the earth-not die, not be put away, but just miraculously suddenly not be-and then to wishing that his father were a child himself and that he be bitten by his own father, so he could suffer how awful it was to have been attacked by his own sire. George's feelings had moved back and forth between these two thoughts the entire week, except for when he had actually seen his father, who had for the most part stayed away from the house the rest of that week, and had kept to corners and alongside walls and just beyond doorways, like a kicked dog, when he had been home. Whenever George saw his father in the house, he had to keep from crying at being so angry for having a mad father whom he loved and pitied and hated. He tucked his injured hand into his coat and fell asleep. His breath steamed from his half-opened mouth in little clouds, which rolled upward, fragile, and broke apart against the underside of the door.

Kathleen said to Howard, George has run away.

He said, How do you know?

She said, He left Joe alone in the toolshed. He didn't split the wood. He didn't get the water. He didn't help Darla with her numbers. He took Prince Edward and your wagon.

He said, I don't think he'll get too far. He thought, I hope he makes it.

She said, What, exactly, are you going to sell today without your wagon?

He said, Kathleen.

She said, You can borrow Lady Godiva from the Levansellers. He can't be more than two miles away.

He said, Kathleen. But she was already walking back around the house to the tin washtub full of steaming soapy water and clothes.

Seems George's run away.

That so.

Yes, it is.

Well, I never.

Nor I.

The two men looked at the sky and then at the dirt yard ringed in dirty snow where chickens strutted and pecked. Jack Levanseller pursed his lips and blew air from his mouth.

Howard looked toward the Levanseller barn, which was more like a large garage fitted out to stable the old nag Jack Levanseller had bought for his daughter, Emily, when she just had to have a horse and had cried and said things at meals like, I don't want potatoes; I want a horse! for a week, until her father finally could not take the twelve-year-old's theatrics anymore and had gone to the horse farm over in Dexter and bought the cheapest, most run down, wheezy creature on the lot for six dollars. When she saw the horse, with its runny nose and scabby ears and its ribs as visible as the staves of a barrel and its pelvis, too, she screamed, What is that! and her father had said, That is your horse and it looks hungry. And cold, too. And it was true; even though it was the end of June and nearly eighty degrees, the horse seemed to be shivering. Jack slapped the horse on its bony rump and, noticing that the beast was missing a good amount of its hair, and that it was a mare, said, This is your horse and her name is Lady Godiva. Now go get a pail of water and some hay and that old blue blanket and start taking care of your new horse. Emily cried, I don't want that disgusting creature! I'll bet you can't even ride it! And she had refused to have anything to do with the wretched beast, so that her father had taken care of it from the moment he brought it onto his property and complained to anyone who would listen about how he lost a lot more than six dollars on that horse, considering how much of his time and oats he spent keeping the thing till it decided to die.

Howard said, Lady Godiva-

Jack said, She's a dollar a day.

Howard said, A dollar.

Jack said, Plus oats.

Plus oats.

The men looked at their hands, at the chickens.

Well, I suppose I can walk.

I suppose.

Well, thanks, Jack.

Don't mention it, Howard.

Howard walked past his house without telling Kathleen that Levanseller wanted a dollar for Lady Godiva and that he had decided to walk. She would make him go back, even though a dollar was twice what he made most days, after he paid Cullen back the cost of its brushes and hairpins and the penny or two profit afterward. He walked past the house, with its tall front windows and chipping gray paint and rotting unpainted shutters, sitting in its nest of winter grass and snow. It was bright outside and dark inside, but as he passed he shaded his eyes and looked into the dining room and could just see the table and empty chairs.

After Howard has passed beyond sight of the house, Kathleen stops her washing, dries her hands on the front of her apron, and goes into the house. She climbs the stairs to her bedroom on tiptoe, even though she does not have to hide the fact that she is going to her room. She enters her room and opens the bottom drawer of her bureau. The bureau stands directly next to the doorway. She fishes around in the back of the drawer and pulls out the wool sock in which she hid the brochure for the mental hospital. She removes the brochure from the sock and without looking at it places it in full view on the corner of the top of the bureau and returns to her washing.

It was not difficult for Howard to find his son. The fresh wagon and mule tracks left from the yard, away from town. Howard walked along the road and looked at the winter weeds poking up from the new snow. There was more variety than Howard had ever noticed. There were papery shells of burst pods and thorns and whitish nubs at the ends of pannicles. Some were bent over, broken-backed, with their tops buried in the snow, as if they had been smothered in the frost. The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of an extinct species of fineboned insectoid creatures. All of these bones, then, seemed to have been stained by sun and earth from an original living white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been. Howard wondered about a man who had never seen summer, a winter man, examining the weeds and making this inference-that he was looking at an ossuary. The man would take that as true and base his ideas of the world on that mistake. He would concoct narratives about when those thorny animals picked through the brush and fields, sketch outlandish guesses, publish papers, give talks in opulent rooms to serious men all wearing the same formal suits, draw conclusions, get it all wrong. Howard thought, I do not even know if that is ragweed or Queen Anne's lace.

When he came to the turnoff for Ezra Morrell's farm, he saw the wagon tracks turn with it. There was a moment of sorrow, disappointment, and deep love for his son, whom he at that second wished had had a chance of real escape. Never mind why or whether or who or what consequence or ramification-the wake of sorrow and bitterness and resentment you would trail behind you, probably mostly for me-I just wish that you had made it beyond the bounds of this cold little radius, that when the archaeologists brush off this layer of our world in a million years and string off the boundaries of our rooms and tag and number every plate and table leg and shinbone, you would not be there; yours would not be the remains they would find and label juvenile male; you would be a secret, the existence of which they would never even be aware to try to solve. An image arose in Howard's mind of an archaeologist examining the small bones of George's hand and explaining to his colleagues that the boy whose bones these had been had at one time been bitten by another person, an adult, perhaps as part of some savage ritual or because people were more like wild animals in this place in those times than had ever previously been imagined.

Howard stepped into the shed. Light came between the log cribbing where first the original grass and mud and then the wadded-up comics pages from Sunday newspapers had dissolved.

George. Where are you?

Here I am, Daddy.

Where?

Here. George crawled out from behind the old door.

Howard's eyes adjusted to the dim interior of the shed. He made out George's face peeping from behind the old door. He remembered the fire. He remembered the story about the woman and the children. He thought, My son hiding behind the ruins, my son hiding behind the last burned token of a house. Houses can be ghosts, too, just like people. And when he thought this, it was because he realized that whenever he imagined (Am haunted by, really, he thought, because that is what ghosts are, what they do, whether they knock plates of off shelves or blow a door open at night or simply present themselves in our minds, it is all haunting) that woman and her children, they were always in the house, which, like them, was gone from this earth. And we were like the men giving papers on the skeletons lining the ditch; we were certain the bones were those of Addie Budden and the kids, but they were not. So there is my son, hiding behind the last vestige of a house transformed from timber into ash into the dimming memories of those who still remember it. If the door survives us all, it will be, like most things, just another relic sitting (somewhere, somewhere not here, even, but somewhere unlikelyin the grass of the plains, a swamp island in the bayou, down an Arctic crevasse among other artifacts perhaps not yet even made but heading towards made, being pulled toward being made (or fashioned: made in the sense that they are and always have been latent in living wood, in underground seams, in stars and the black sky), but even then, before made, rushing toward their being unmade and perhaps made again. Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?

So there is my son, already fading. The thought frightened him. The thought frightened because as soon as it came to him, he knew that it was true. He understood suddenly that even though his son knelt in front of him, familiar, mundane, he was already fading away, receding. His son was fading away before his eyes and that fact was inevitable, even though Howard understood, too, that the fading was yet to begin in any actual sense, that at that moment he and his son, the father standing in the dimness, the son kneeling and partly obscured by the charred door, were still only heading, not yet arrived, toward the point where the fading would begin. Howard simply knew that that point was coming and that he somehow had caught a glimpse of its existence beforehand, as if the moment were like the burned door: an object sitting in the shed, leaning among the rusty old saws and spades and rakes, but also as unimaginable and unknowable as his extinct creatures with grass bones.

Mother's worried, George. You have to come back.

I know, Dad.

George stood and walked to his father. Howard put his hand on his son's shoulder for a moment and looked into the boy's eyes. He seemed about to speak but then smiled and removed his hand. George climbed onto the cart and Howard untied Prince Edward. The mule responded much more readily to Howard's guidance, and father and son drove back to their house without speaking.

The next evening, Howard passed by his house before he realized he had seen a brochure for a place called the Eastern Maine State Hospital that morning on his wife's dresser and that she was planning to have him committed there. He passed out of the center of town, heading south. Dinner was on the table in the house. Everyone sat at their seats, wordless, waiting for him to turn in to the dirt driveway and tether Prince Edward and give him hay and then to come inside and say grace, which he always ended with the words, And God let us perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own work. Amen.

He had spoken no words to himself. No conscious thought precipitated his action, as if spending the whole day contemplating what he was going to do, had already done by the time he fitted words to the actions, which was to ride past the kitchen window that framed his family and leafed them in its gold light, would have diluted his resolve, would have led him to turn himself over to a fate that, had he thought about it, he would have accepted rather than acknowledge its implications. He could not have let himself be witness to the simultaneity of his wife passing him a plate of chicken or a basket of hot bread as she worked out her plans to have him taken away. Howard had assumed that their silence over his fits, over everything, stood for his gratefulness to her and her loyalty to him. He had assumed their silence was one of kindness offered and accepted.

The distance between Howard and his house lengthened and, as it did, segregated him from his life as if it were time. The smell of the wood oil and kerosene from the wagon made him think of the rooms and stairways he already knew he would never enter again and he realized that what he sat upon, the swaying cart full of products for cleaning, scrubbing, patching, organizing, maintaining domestic life, was a house. I am perched on a house, he thought. He thought, God let us perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own work. God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoe shine and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes. God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets, and slip hooch into coat pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters. God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family-my wife, my children-because my wife's silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving.

There was an early January thaw and it had been raining all day, but just before sunset the storm clouds passed and it rained only in the trees. Steam lifted off of the snow. Trees stood half in light, half in shadow as the sun lowered and striped the world in a weave half of itself, half of the approaching evening. Howard drove Prince Edward late into the night. The mule was difficult to handle. It tried to turn around several times. Several times the mule stopped and refused to go forward. Finally, Howard gave in and stopped for the night twenty miles south of his now-former home. He turned off the road at a clearing where for some reason the snow had melted away and there was a circle of grass wide enough on which to park the cart. He unhitched Prince Edward and fed him and then fed himself by eating the lunch he had saved that afternoon because, even though he had not permitted himself to think consciously about his flight, some part of him had known to save the ham sandwich and cold potatoes for later.

Howard leaned against one of the wagon's rear wheels and stared at the candled sky and looked back at the candle he had lit and wished it would turn blue with the light of the stars and that the stars would turn gold like burning wicks. He wondered if Kathleen and the children were still sitting at the dining room table in front of their cold food.

So what if he could give them circus ponies and silk dresses? What, too, of cinders and hair shirts and bites on their hands and feet? Howard imagined that neither would bring peace to his wife's heart. Her piety depended too much on a pose of forbearance, a face of oppression. Red ribbons served as well as stove ash. That she made a point to eat only the gristliest chicken bits, the burned biscuits, the mealiest potatoes, while she complained that his children were, variously, weakminded, hysterical, or sickly, and seemed to imply that such afflictions were the result of the lack of a good piece of steak or a new bonnet, was only circumstance; were she installed on a throne at a twelve-course banquet table teaming with all of God's creatures brought from both air and field, trussed and roasted and swimming in their own succulent juices, she would heap her plate with the most exquisite victuals and lament that his feeble offspring were the way they were because they had it too well and what they really needed was a vat of cold porridge and a tureen full of dirt.

Howard thought, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely: Sun catches cheap plate flaking-I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees-I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser-I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me-I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better.

He slept in the grass beneath the cart. The moon rose and arced above his sleeping form. Night played its play while he dreamed of empty rooms and abandoned hallways. A small pack of wolves came from the hills. They circled his cart once, sniffed, and padded away. He woke once just before dawn and thought he saw lights in the trees, but a slight wind rose through the grass up and into the branches and scattered them away, so he closed his eyes again.

He woke to Prince Edward snuffling at the grass near his head. He grabbed for his hat because the mule had eaten it off his head once before, leaving the beast ill and gassy and he behind it with teary eyes and a sunburned nose. Birds traded their chirps and whistles of alarm and warning. It was early enough so that the grass in which he lay beneath the cart was still blue and gray and purple. Outside the shadow of the cart, the snow was blue. The rainwater on the trees had frozen overnight and turned into sheaths of ice that refracted the gold light from the rising sun into silver light that glittered in the breeze. A crop of mushrooms had somehow grown overnight in the grass next to Howard beneath the cart. He examined them and was slightly alarmed at how large they had grown from nothing in such a short time and in such cold.