Arcadia

City of the Sun

Bit is already moving when he wakes. It is February, still dark. He is five years old. His father is zipping Bit within his own jacket where it is warmest, and Abe’s heart beats a drum against Bit’s ear. The boy drowses as they climb down from the Bread Truck, where they live, and over the frosted ground of Ersatz Arcadia. The trucks and buses and lean-tos are black heaps against the night, their home until they can finish Arcadia House in the vague someday.

The gong is calling them to Sunday Morning Meeting, somewhere. A river of people flows in the dark. He smells the bread of his mother, feels the wind carrying the cold from the Great Lake to the north, hears the rustling as the forest wakes. In the air there is excitement and low, loving greetings; there is small snow, the smoke from someone’s joint, a woman’s voice, indistinct.

When Bit’s eyes open again, the world is softened with first light. The tufts of the hayfield push up from under trampled snow. They are in the Sheep’s Meadow and he feels the bodies closer now, massing. Handy’s voice rises from behind Bit and up toward all of Arcadia, the seven dozen true believers in the winter morning. Bit twists to see Handy sitting among the maroon curls of the early skunk cabbage at the lip of the forest. He turns back, pressing his cheek against the pulse in his father’s neck.

Bit is tiny, a mote of a boy. He is often scooped up, carried. He doesn’t mind. From against the comforting strength of adults, he is undetected. He can watch from there, he can listen.

Over Abe’s shoulder, far atop the hill, the heaped brick shadow of Arcadia House looms. In the wind, the tarps over the rotted roof suck against the beams and blow out, a beast’s panting belly. The half-glassed windows are open mouths, the full-glassed are eyes fixed on Bit. He looks away. Behind Abe sits the old man in his wheelchair, Midge’s father, who likes to rocket down the hill at the children, scattering them. The terror washes over Bit again, the loom and creak, the flash of a toothless mouth and the hammer-and-sickle flag as it flaps in passing. The Dartful Codger, Hannah calls the old man, with a twist to her mouth. The Zionist, others call him, because this is what he shouts for after sundown: Zion, milk and honey, land of plenty, a place for his people to rest. One night, listening, Bit said, Doesn’t the Dartful Codger know where he is? and Abe looked down at Bit among his wooden toys, bemused, saying, Where is he? and Bit said, Arcadia, meaning the word the way Handy always said it, with his round Buddha face, building the community with smooth sentences until the others can also see the fields bursting with fruits and grains, the sunshine and music, the people taking care of one another in love.

In the cold morning, though, the Dartful Codger is too small and crabbed for terror. He is almost asleep under a plaid blanket Midge has tucked around him. He wears a hunter’s cap, the earflaps down. His nose whistles, and steam spurts from it, and Bit thinks of the kettle on the hob. Handy’s voice washes over him:. . work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. . words too heavy for the soft feet of this morning. As the dawn light sharpens, the Dartful Codger becomes distinct. Veins branch across his nose, shadows gouge his face. He rouses himself, frowns at Bit, shuffles his hands on his lap.

. . God, says Handy, or the Eternal Spark, is in every human heart, in every piece of this earth. In this rock, in this ice, in this plant, this bird. All deserve our gentleness.

The old man’s face is changing. Astonishment steals over the hoary features. Startled, Bit can’t look away. The eyes blink but come to a stop, open. Bit waits for the next puff of smoke from the cragged nose. When it doesn’t come, a knot builds in his chest. He lifts his head from Abe’s shoulder. A slow purple spreads over the old man’s lips; a fog, an ice, grows over his eyeballs. Stillness threads itself through the old man.

At Bit’s back, Handy talks of the music tour he is going on in a few days, to spread the word of Arcadia. . be gone for a couple of months, but I have faith in you Free People. I’m your guru, your Teacher, but not your Leader. Because when you’ve got a good enough Teacher, you’re all your own Leaders. . and the people around Bit laugh a little, and somewhere little Pooh screams, and Hannah’s hand comes from Bit’s side and smoothes down his cap, which has come half off, his one ear cold.

Handy says, Remember the foundations of our community. Say them with me. The voices rise: Equality, Love, Work, Openness to the Needs of Everyone.

A song boils up, Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, they sing. Abe shifts under Bit to the rhythm. Sing a song full of hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun. . the song ends.

A silence. An inhale. In the great Om that rises from the mass of Free People, startled crows speckle up from Arcadia House roof. The sunrise blooms all over them.

In such perfect dawn, even the old man is beautiful, the blue of his beard under the newly luminous skin of his cheek, the softness in his jaw, the tufts in his ears touched golden. He has been gentled in living light. He has been made good.

When the last voice falls silent, just before Handy’s Thank you, my friends, Midge puts her hand on her father’s shoulder. Then she takes off her glove and presses her bare palm against the old man’s cheek. And when Arcadia moves, soul-shakes, hugs, shares its good energy, Midge’s voice cuts through the din. Father? she calls out, low. Louder, then: Father?

It is not in the speed with which Hannah grabs Bit and rushes him back home to the Bread Truck, or the fact that Abe stays behind to help Midge. It is not in the special treat, the dried blueberries in the porridge, or Hannah standing, wordless at the window, blowing on her green tea. It is not even what Abe says when he comes in: Karmic energy rejoining the ether, or Natural, the cycle of life, or Everybody dies, Ridley, honey. Abe does his best, but Bit still doesn’t understand. He saw the old man turn beautiful. He wonders at the worry on his parents’ faces.

The sadness they feel begins to crack open only when Hannah drops the dirty breakfast dishes on the table and bursts into tears. She rushes out over the Quad to the Pink Piper, to the comfort of Marilyn and Astrid, the midwives.

Abe gives Bit a tight smile. He says, Your mama’s okay, Little Bit. It’s just, this morning struck a deep chord with her because her own papa’s not doing so hot right now.

In this Bit smells the small sulfur of a lie. Hannah has not been herself for a while. Bit lets the untruth slowly dissolve away.

Hannah’s dad who lives in Louisville? he says. In the fall, the grandparents had visited, a fat man in a porkpie hat, a nervous puff of a woman in all pink. Bit had been squeezed, remarked upon: So tiny, the woman had trilled, I would have said under three, not five years old! There were sideways looks at him, and Hannah saying through gritted teeth: He’s not retarded, he’s fine, he’s just really small, God, Mom. There was a meal that the pink lady wouldn’t touch, a handkerchief lifted to the corners of her eyes every few seconds. There was a bad argument, then the fat and the puff went away.

As her parents drove off, Hannah’d had angry tears in her eyes. She’d said, May they rot in their bourgeois capitalist hell. Abe had laughed gently at her, and after a minute, the fierceness fell from Hannah’s face. Grudgingly, she had laughed, too.

Abe says now, Yeah, your Louisville granddaddy. He has a wasting disease. Your grandma wants your mother down there, but Hannah won’t go. Anyways, we can’t spare her.

Because of the Secret, Bit says. Everyone has been whispering about the Secret for a month, since Handy announced his music tour. While Handy is gone, they will finish Arcadia House so they can all move out of Ersatz Arcadia, that loose mishmash of buses and lean-tos, and, at last, live together. They had meant to these three years, ever since they bought the land and found the house, but they were distracted by hunger and hard work. Arcadia House is to be a gift to Handy when he returns.

Abe’s eyes crinkle and his lips split to show his strong teeth in the red of his beard. I guess it isn’t a secret if even the little guys know, he says.

They play a game of Go Fish until Hannah returns, her face raw but calmer. She tells them that Astrid and Marilyn have been called to the Amish neighbors’ for a birthing. For a hello, Hannah rests her cheek in the crook of Abe’s neck for a moment and kisses Bit gently on the forehead. Like a sigh into breath, life releases into life. Hannah turns to stoke the woodstove. Abe fixes the drafty chink where he had built the lean-to against the Bread Truck. They eat dinner and Abe plays a tune on the harmonica and when night falls all three curl on the pallet together, and Bit sleeps, a hickory nut within the shell of his parents.

The forest is dark and deep and pushes so heavily on Bit that he must run away from the gnarled trunks, from the groans of the wind in the branches. His mother calls for him to stay in sight, but he doesn’t slow. When he comes into the clearing by the Gatehouse, his face smarts with cold.

Titus, pocked and immense, heaves up the gate. He seems old, older even than Handy, because he was damaged in Vietnam. Bit adores Titus. Titus calls Bit Hop o’My Thumb and can lift him with one palm and will sometimes even smuggle Bit a few goodies from the Outside — pink coconut cake in cellophane or peppermints like bloodshot eyes — despite the ban on sugar and the harm surely done to animals in making the goodies. Bit believes the treats’ chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like. Titus slips him a throat-thickening butterscotch in a crinkle of yellow paper and winks, and Bit buries his face in his friend’s greasy jeans for a moment before he hurries on.

All Arcadia has gathered on the frozen road to say goodbye. Handy sits in lotus on the nose of the Blue Bus with his four blond children: Erik and Leif and Helle and Ike. His main wife, Astrid, tall and white-haired, gazes up at them. She unknots a hemp necklace from her throat and ties it around Handy’s neck, kissing him over his third eye. Even above the roar of the engine, the radio belts out a jiggly country song. Handy’s other wife, Lila, who wears feathers in her black hair, sits with skinny little Hiero, her other husband. The band hugs those they are leaving behind and lugs their stuff up into the bus, then Handy passes the children down: Ike, inches taller than Bit though a year younger; Helle, froggy as her father; Leif, who is always angry; chubby Erik, who slides to the ground by himself and lands on his knees and tries not to cry.

On the Gatehouse porch, Wells and Caroline argue with flushed faces. Bit’s friend Jincy peers from parent to parent. Though the wind makes her curly hair spring in ten directions, her face is pale and still.

From the path comes a sweetness of bells, of voices. Out of nowhere, great broad heads of giants bob in the branches. Bit’s gut swirls with loveliness. Onto the road come the Circenses Singers, Hans and Fritz and Summer and Billy-goat, in their white robes, carrying the Adam and Eve puppets. These are new-made creatures, naked and huge with flushed genitals. The Circenses Singers go off on the weekends to protests and rallies, staging dances at concerts, sometimes busking for change. Now the robed people bend and sing under the vast and eerie bodies above them. When they finish, everyone cheers and they pack the great bulbous beasts into the back of a Volkswagen van.

Bye-bye-bye-bye, shouts brown little Dylan from Sweetie Fox’s arms. Bit runs to his friend Coltrane, who is poking at an icy puddle with a stick. Cole gives Bit the stick, and Bit pokes, too, then hands the stick to Cole’s brother, Dylan, and Dylan waves it around.

Gingery Eden, her pregnant belly enormous, cracks a bottle of pop over the hood of the Blue Bus and rubs her back when she stands. The dazzle of her white teeth under her copper hair makes Bit want to dance.

Handy shouts about how they’ll be back before Spring Planting, and the Free People huzzah, and Tarzan hands up a cooler of beer the Motor Pool sold an engine to pay for, and Astrid lays a long kiss on Lila’s pretty lips, and Hiero does, too, and slides to the ground, and there are other kisses, the band’s chicks and wives smooching up into the windows, and then the engine gets louder and the bus starts to move off toward the County Road. Everyone cheers and some people cry. In Arcadia, people cry all the time. Others do funny dances, laughing.

Helle stumbles after the bus, sobbing for her father. She is always in tears, the bigheaded, strange-looking little girl, always screaming. Astrid scoops Helle up, and the girl wails into her mother’s chest. The bus’s sound softens and filters away. The noises they are left with seem doubly loud in the quiet: the ice that cracks in the branches, the wind like sandpaper across the surface of the snow, the flap of the prayer flags strung across the Gatehouse porch, the squeak of rubber boots on frozen mud.

When Bit turns, everyone is looking at his father.

Abe grins at them, the ones who can’t play music, the four dozen left behind. They seem so few. Abe calls loudly, All righty, everybody. Are you ready to work your bones to sawdust and shards?

Yes, they shout. Bit wanders back to Hannah, and rests his head against her hip. She blocks the wind and warms his face with her heat.

Motor Pool, you ready to go out into the wilds of New York and salvage and steal and sell your sperm and blood to buy what we need to do this?

Hells, yes! shouts Peanut, and behind him, Wonder Bill and Tarzan pump their fists.

Womenfolk, are you ready to clean and polish and varnish and scrape and sand and take care of the kidlets and operate the Bakery and Soy Dairy and Laundry and cook and clean and chop wood and do the everyday stuff we need done to keep we Free People going strong while all this work’s happening?

The women cheer, and way above Bit’s head, Astrid mutters to Hannah in her strange lilt, As if it is not what we already do, already. Bit looks away. When Astrid speaks, she shows her teeth, and they are so yellow and crooked he feels he’s looking at something private.

All you Pregnant Ladies from the Henhouse, you ready to sew those curtains and braid those rugs and make the rooms all cozy and homey? Scattered yeses, the Hens surprised into acquiescence. A baby begins to squall.

Abe shouts: All you men, ready to work in the cold and stink of that old house to get her up and ready, with plumbing and a roof and everything? The men yell and yodel.

Abe’s face goes solemn; he raises a hand. One thing, my cats and chicks. I know we’re a nonhierarchical society and all, but since I’ve got my degree in engineering and Hiero has all those years under his belt as a construction foreman, we were thinking we’d be the ones to report to, yeah? We’re just the straw bosses here, so if you got a better idea to do something, just let us know. But run things by us before you go off on your own initiative to do new stuff and we have to waste our time and dough to undo it. Anyways, serious talk over. We got about four more good hours of daylight today and only three months to totally refinish a fallen-apart nineteenth-century mansion. Or orphanage or whatever it was. So let’s get our beautiful beatnik asses cracking.

A shout, a rush, and the group steams forward, up the mile-long drive scabbed with ice. They laugh, they are warm, they are ready. The last time Bit was in Arcadia House, he saw a sapling growing in a clawfoot tub and the roof caved in to show the clouds and sun. How wonderful it will be to have the house finished, tight and warm. If sleeping in a nest with two parents is happiness, imagine sleeping with eighty! Children dart around the legs of the adults until Sweetie Fox rounds them up and takes them down the shortcut to the Pink Piper to play.

Bit falls behind, feeling something gone wrong. He turns back.

Hannah stands alone at the gate. The ground is muddy around her. Bit hears a bird’s low call. He begins to walk back toward his mother. When he is almost the whole way to her and she still seems small, he runs. She is hunched in an old sweater of Abe’s, shivering. Her face is folded in on itself, and though he knows she is twenty-four, she seems younger than Erik, younger than Jincy, as young as Bit himself. He takes off his mitten to put his hand in hers. Her fingers are ice.

When she feels his hand, she smiles down from so high, and he can see his mother again within this shrunken woman. She says, All right, Bit. All right.

A snowstorm blows in. Bit dreams of hulking, hungry wolves with red eyes circling the Bread Truck. They howl, scrabble at the door. He startles awake. He wants his mother, but it is Abe who rises and shows Bit, through the window, the clean white sheets blowing down, the trackless heaps of snow. Abe heats up soymilk, and burritos Bit in the softest blanket. In the hope of lulling him to sleep, Abe tells him the story of his birth, which Bit knows the innards of. The legend of Bit Stone, the first Arcadian ever, is another story so retold that everyone owns it. The bigger girls play it in the Pink Piper, substituting the newest babies for the role of Bit.

You were born on the Caravan, Abe says softly, when we were a bunch of groupies, following Handy around for spiritual food. Two dozen, max. Going to the concerts, staying for the meetings after. Everywhere we went, we saw communes, some that worked, others that didn’t. Yurts and geodesic domes and sweat lodges and squatted-in mansions in the inner cities, and we started having an idea that even though everybody else was doing something along these lines, what we wanted to do was unusual. Pure. Live with the land, not on it. Live outside the evil of commerce and make our own lives from scratch. Let our love be a beacon to light up the world.

Anyways, those days, Handy was the only one with any medical training from being a medic in Korea, and he thought Hannah was five months along, because she wasn’t huge. So here we are, driving through the mountains, trying to get from Oregon to Boulder, when a sudden snowstorm comes up, flakes huge as plates on the windshield, and wouldn’t you know it, Hannah chooses this time to pop. We were in that little Volkswagen Camper the Motor Pool uses for trips into town. I’d fitted it out with a stove and all, pretty nifty, but we were in one of the smaller vehicles, so we were stuck at the back of the line, in these narrow mountain passes. I knew I had to get up to where Handy was because I sure as hell didn’t know how to deliver any baby, undercooked or not. So up we go, fartleking past everyone in the left lane, and we’d all be dead if anyone came the opposite direction. Finally we pass the Pink Piper, and I slow the whole zoo down. Turn at a sign that says Ridley WY, pop. five thousand something, and I think there’s got to be a hospital there, but there’s snow on the sign, and of course, I turn the wrong way. On and on and on, mile after mile, and it’s black out and finally we see lights and stop, and the Caravan folds itself around us and the Pink Piper to keep out the wind, and the door opens and some snowy person bursts in. I was expecting Handy, but who was it? Astrid.

Handy is seeing faces in the bus ceiling, she said (Abe says this in Astrid’s Norwegian lilt; Bit giggles). He just ate three tabs of mescaline. But I have a Ph.D. in Victorian literature and I have three babies myself. I am well used to parturition.

She may have been thinking leeches as far as I know, but I know less than her, so I say, Okay, sure. So we all get naked because that is natural, and Astrid orders me around, Boil this water! Boil these knives! Get clean towels! But as soon as I have the hot water on, Hannah faints, and just like that, out you come, all bloody, with a plop. Well, I had no hope. You were so little, an apple, and barely moving. You couldn’t even cry. Your poor lungs were too tiny. But Astrid cleaned you up and put you on your mother’s boob and you had this ferocity for life, little man, you just started sucking her nipple like this huge sugartit as big as your own tiny mouth. Astrid gave out a cry and moved back down to Hannah’s yoni because, guess what, there was another thing coming out, an afterbirth.

Abe pauses, strokes Bit’s head absently.

Astrid wraps it all up in a batik and sends me out with a shovel and I struggle on through the snow to the black lake and dig through the frozen pebbles and into the ground and finally get it all covered and say a few words of gratitude and trudge my way back.

Then it was morning, and the sun came up, and I’ll tell you, it was beautiful. It lit up that frozen lake so it was shining from within and the ice looked like hot lead at the base of these gorgeous purple mountains, and the churchbell rang up in town to celebrate you, our miracle baby. Then the townspeople came out, all shy, with food and bread, and deposited it on the hood of our Camper. That morning Astrid knew she’d found her calling. Her hands were meant to coax babies into the world. You were a gift, she said. She wrapped you around and around with a thick wool scarf and went to the grocer’s and weighed you. You were three pounds, exactly. The size of an itty-bitty butternut squash.

The old grocer lady was this crusty German hag, cussing out all we longhairs among her twisted potatoes, her cabbages, but she took one look at you and her face cracked wide open, suddenly stunning, I mean a beam of light blasted out of her mouth. And she said, Oh, well if that ain’t the littlest bit of a hippie ever made!

So this is how you came to be, Ridley Sorrel Stone, named for a town we never did see. Our Littlest Bit of a Hippie. Oldest soul in Arcadia. Our heir with no spare, Abe says, and his eyes pinch, then go clear again, and he nuzzles Bit around the neck, which tickles and makes Bit laugh, healing the invisible soreness in the Bread Truck, making them both forget the red-eyed wolves and the storm and the weariness of Hannah and the morning full of hard work now bearing down on them.

The first few days without Handy, the world feels off balance. He’s not there for the weepers or the bad trips, for his daily cheery wanders around each work unit to urge them on. No scraggly gray beard, no quick-blinking eyes, no constant tinkle of his guitar or ukulele or banjo. For a few days, the ones left behind tread too softly on the ground, and every other word that falls from their lips is Handy. Then, one morning goes by and Bit doesn’t think of Handy at all, until he trips over little Pooh, who throws herself in Bit’s path, and he skins his hands, and waits for Handy to come down from the Pink Piper to lift him, to look deep into his eyes and gather cosmic energy, and say, Oh, Littlest Bit, you’re A-OK, man, don’t have a freak-out. Pain is your body telling you to be more careful. Instead lovely Sweetie Fox kisses his palms and rinses them with cold water and puts a bandage on them. Abe organizes the work crews. Astrid smoothes over conflicts, assigning the hug therapy or work yogas to dissolve the tension. Two of the guys from the Singleton Tent are so mad at each other that in their yoga they rip down almost all the rotten plaster in the upstairs of Arcadia House in one day, a miraculous feat, and now are best friends, hanging on one another’s shoulders. The music isn’t as good but there still is music: recorders and guitars and harmonicas. It is as if all of their edges have bled a little into the space where Handy had been, the way separate stews eke across the plate to mingle when the rice in the middle has been eaten.

In his half sleep, late, Bit hears Hannah murmur: It’s nothing. I’m just tired.

You sure? Need a break? I’m sure we can scrape together the Greyhound. .

No, baby.

Fabric sounds, something against his foot.

Speaking of which.

Hey. Wait. I’m sorry. Babe, I’m sorry, no.

Will we ever? Do you think? Ever again?

It’s just. I would prefer not to.

Okay, Bartleby.

His parents laugh quietly, and when they stop there is a different kind of silence. Bit listens until his hearing fades and he carries only the sound of the kiss with him into his sleep.

Like the tractor that leaps forward with a nudge of the throttle, Arcadia jumps into high gear. Someone is always breathless, someone is always running. People have long conversations about wood rot and epoxy. There are knocks on the Bread Truck door in the middle of the night, the Scavengers home from Syracuse, Rochester, Albany, Utica, from the abandoned mansions they rip into for parts. In the morning, Abe whistles while he fondles the intricate carved mantels or soapstone sinks that have magically appeared on the Quad in the Octagonal Barn. He is a whirlwind of plans, sudden private laughs, and his energy spreads into the others, makes even Bit want to dance.

Bit makes up a song and sings it to himself all the time: Renovelation, renovelation, renovelation, fix and patch and clean and paint. . renovelation.

At night, making soy cheese and onion quesadillas, Abe beams at him, saying, Renovation, honey. But Hannah squeezes Bit and whispers, I think your word is apt. Re-novelization. Reimagining our story. She touches under his chin with her soft fingers, his mother, and he laughs for the happiness of pleasing her.

It is morning. Hannah has put hot coffee into Abe’s thermos. She has made them scrambled yeggs, soft, fresh tofu yellowed with nutritional yeast. When Abe marches up the hill to fix Arcadia House, his toolbelt jingling, Hannah goes to work in the Bakery.

Bit is building a castle out of woodblocks with Leif and Cole when he sees Hannah trudge back across the Quad and go up into the Bread Truck. He waits all day, but she doesn’t come to get him. Twilight spreads over the windows. All around the Quad the cold air sounds with the voices and bootsteps of the menfolk and ladies who are coming home. The Family Quonsets are abuzz, the Pink Piper spills kids into the dusk, the scents of fried onions and tempeh rise from the Singleton Tent, the tinny wail of baby Felipe is answered by the echo of a smaller baby, Norah or Tzivi, startled awake. Doors open, doors slam, voices call out in the raggedy homecomings of Ersatz Arcadia. At last, he gets Sweetie to suit him up and walks home alone.

Hannah sits up from the bedclothes, stretches, and gives Bit a piggyback outside for a pee, hopping barefoot over the frozen ground. Inside the loo, it smells like wet muskrat, though it is warm out of the wind. Hannah curses when she eyes the wipe-nail, filled with glossy squares cut from a Life magazine. Glossy means sharp and cold against your crack, itching later.

When they come in, the damp chill of the Bread Truck seems somehow colder than the outdoors, and Regina is standing at the kitchen table, a loaf of bread before her. She turns and gives a small wave. Hey, she says.

Hey, Hannah says, setting Bit down. He runs to the bread and tears off a hunk to gnaw. Bit hid when Hannah didn’t pick him up for lunch, and hasn’t eaten since breakfast. He’s starved. Hannah crouches to start a fire in the white ashes of the woodstove, the pinecones a fragrant kindling.

So we missed you this afternoon in the Bakery, says Regina. I looked up to ask you to make the granola, and you were gone. She has flour in her black crown of braids and a smear of something shiny on her cheekbones. Her eyes are tiny and set deeply in her head, her eyebrows are crows’ wings.

I got sick, Hannah says. Her voice is taut, but when she touches the match to the kerosene lamp, her face looks normal in the glow. I didn’t want to get anyone else sick, so I thought I’d go home.

Oh. Uh-huh, says Regina. Okay. It’s just that what with the Arcadia House project, it’s just me and Ollie up at the Bakery when you do that. Which is okay on the days you tell me, but when we’re relying on you, it’s a real pinch.

Sorry, Hannah says. I’ll be there all day tomorrow.

Is this about what happened in the fall. . begins Regina, but Hannah makes a shushing sound. Bit looks up to find Regina peering at him.

Really? Regina says. I mean, it’s not really our style to hide, you know? It’s a matter of life—

He’s so little still, Hannah says. We’ll tell him when it’s time. It’s our choice.

Handy says that kids don’t belong to individ—

My kid, says Hannah, more forcefully. I don’t care what Handy says. If you had one, you’d know.

The women turn away from one another and pick up things to examine: Hannah a match, Regina the coffee percolator. The air is rich with the silent adult language that Bit can never understand. All right, says Regina. She sets the percolator down with a bang. She picks Bit up, squints at him. Little Bit, make sure your momma pulls her weight, okay? she says. No slackers allowed in Arcadia.

Okay, whispers Bit.

When the door clicks behind Regina, Hannah says, Nosy bitch.

Bit waits for the sourness in his stomach to pass, then says, What’s bitch?

A girl dog, Hannah says, and bites her lip and puffs out her cheeks with air.

Oh, Bit says. Pets are not allowed in Arcadia. Bit doesn’t ask what he knows in theory from picture books but longs to understand better: what, exactly, a dog is, or why people want to keep them. Jincy once nursed a baby bunny with soymilk for three days until her mother, Caroline, found it and made her leave it in the woods. When Jincy cried and cried, Caroline said with a shrug, Come on, Jin. You know personal property’s not allowed. Besides, you really want to enslave a fellow creature?

Petey wasn’t my slave, Jincy sniffled. I loved Petey.

Petey will grow up to be a big strong bunny hopping through the meadows, the way he’s supposed to, Caroline said firmly. The next day the squirmy pink thing was gone from the little pallet of leaves where Jincy had left it. Now the children make a game of scanning the underbrush for their tiny friend. Often someone runs shouting back to the Kid Herd, sure that they’ve seen Petey from the corner of an eye, rosy as a lump of flesh, swift in the brambles, a creature miraculous and tender, their shared secret.

Hannah has brought Bit in the predawn to the squat stone Bakery, and he wakes on the flour sacks in the corner. It is hot; loaves plumpen on the shelf. The flesh of the dough makes Bit hungry, makes something warm rise up in his sleep-swimmy head, and he creeps to where Hannah stands, hip against the mixer, talking to Regina and Ollie. Bit tugs Hannah down, and she bends absently, and he lifts her teeshirt, and latches his mouth to her breast.

Hannah slides her nipple away, pulls the shirt over her body, hugs it to her, pushes his cheek gently with her hand.

You’re too old for that, baby, she says, and stands.

The room trembles in Bit’s eyes. Ollie murmurs something about Astrid nursing Leif until he was eight, Regina says something and hands Bit a soft pretzel. Hannah says Something-something-can’t, but Bit doesn’t hear her words exactly, his sorrow a too-loud wind in his ears.

When it’s too dark to work, Abe comes home. His coat and overalls and workshirt shed sawdust. When his gloves come off, his hands are nicked and chapped. During dinner, Hannah yawns. Bit and Abe can see the tiny man bobbing in the cavern of her throat. She says, I’m bushed. Sometimes she washes her face and brushes her teeth with baking soda before she falls asleep, sometimes she doesn’t. The nights are long. Abe picks Bit up and reads aloud whatever he’s studying at the time (New Politics, Anarchy and Organization, Mad magazine). Bit can pick out sentences, can follow along the swoops of emotion in Abe’s voice, can sound out headlines to himself. Parts of the world click into shape, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. But the puzzle is alive; it grows; new pieces appear for him to fit together faster than he can gather them in his mind.

He fights sleep to think about it all. His father washes dishes and fetches water from the stream so they don’t have to in the morning, and when he unbuttons his shirt with heavy hands, he falls, already sleeping, into bed.

There is, Bit knows, what happens on the surface, and there is what pulls beneath. He thinks of standing in a river current, the wind strong in the opposite direction. Even in the happiest times — Cockaigne Day in the middle of summer, Blessing Day at the end of the year, the Harvest Festival, the spontaneous gigs — even during all that dancing and happy arguing, the Slap-Apple, the banquets, in the corners there always sit a few muscled young men with a badness in their eyes. There are murmurs when they come to Arcadia, dodger, four-eff, rather. . jungles. . bayonet babies? There is old Harriet, whose braless breasts waggle at her navel, who hoards food under her bed (Poor thing, he overheard someone once say, watched her parents starve to death in the siege of Leningrad). There is Ollie, one of the original Caravaners, who worked alone for the first two years to reinforce the secret tunnel between the Octagonal Barn and Arcadia House with sheets of metal, stocking it with barrels of water, canned goods, matches, tarps, iodine salt. Ollie has the pale softness of a salamander down by the stream; sometimes, he jerks and blinks and goes silent in the middle of a sentence.

The badness even spreads, at times, to the kidlets. Bit won’t go into the fruit room in the Free Store, despite all those delicious wrinkling apples in their barrels. Someone put up an enormous black-and-white poster with a glowering man in moustachios. There are words Bit is far too frightened to piece out beyond Big Brother; and even when adults go in, they look at the poster and come out fast.

Hannah and Abe share the same nightmare from their childhood: a dim room with a fat woman who stands before them, a siren overhead, a scramble under the desks, a white flash. These dreams have been catching at Hannah often recently, spiderwebs tightening the more she tries to escape. Most days, when the first sun melts itself across the Bread Truck linoleum, the panic from the dream slowly vanishes, leaving an oily taste behind to taint the air.

But this morning, Bit wakes alone, heart racing. The icicles in the window are shot with such red light of dawn that Bit goes barefoot over the snow to pull one with his hand. Inside again, he licks it down to nothing, eating winter itself, the captured woodsmoke and sleepy hush and aching cleanness of ice. His parents sleep on. All day, the secret icicle sits inside him, his own thing, a blade of cold, and it makes Bit feel brave to think of it.

He watches his parents kiss goodbye. Their lips slide from each other’s cheeks, and as they turn, Abe pats the level on his belt with a hand and Hannah frowns at something Astrid calls out, waiting on the other side of the Quad with heaps of laundry in her hands. A shock; Bit hasn’t understood until now; his parents are vastly different from one another. There is only one Abe, beamy and talky and gathering his energy from things, Arcadia House made solid; but there two Hannahs. Summer Hannah is going away, the one who loved people, who gathered the children’s boots while they slept to paint the snouts of animals upon them, pigs and horses and birds and frogs, according to their wearers. His laughing mother, the loud one: in a place where all bodily functions are matter-of-fact, where even in solemn moments there are whole brass sections of flatulence, her gas is legendary for its thunder. La Pétomane, she nicknamed herself, with a flushed half-pride. That Hannah is as strong as the men. When someone yells “Monkeypower!” to get help with a mud-stuck truck or with digging sand from the creek for the Showerhouse concrete, she shows up first, works the longest, her back under the sleeveless shirt as taut and muscled as any of the men’s. That is the Hannah who cracks jokes under her breath until the ladies around her snortle; the one who shuts the curtains on the Bread Truck some days and opens her small, secret trunk that she isn’t supposed to keep, all possessions in Arcadia held in common. Then she pulls a delicate tablecloth out, her great-grandmother’s Belgian lace. She pulls teacups out, porcelain tender as skin, ten oil miniatures and a mahogany case of silver with five different kinds of forks, all vined with tiny lilies. She sets it up and makes a mint tea and orange-peel cookies with smuggled white sugar, and Bit and she have a tea party together all afternoon long.

Ridley Sorrel Stone, one chews with one’s mouth closed! Summer Hannah says in the acid voice of her childhood deportment teacher. One puts one’s napkin on one’s lap! She and Bit clink teacups solemnly, accomplices.

But this Hannah is burrowing inside a new one who has let the winter in. She has begun to stare at the walls and allows her braids to unravel. She forgets to start supper. Her golden skin fades to a pallor, blue bruises press under her eyes. This Hannah looks at Bit as if she is trying to see him from a very great distance.

Bit is chopping wood with Titus Thrasher up by the Gatehouse. He gathers the chips that spurt off the ax and puts them in a bucket for kindling.

You want to talk about what’s bothering you? says Titus, and Bit says a low No.

They watch Kaptain Amerika tool by in a croaky station wagon he has taken from the Motor Pool. The Trippie is going into Summerton for his psychotherapy, which the state pays for. Many in Arcadia are on food stamps or disability. When there’s been a long spell without new people to put money in the pot, welfare keeps them going. Kaptain Amerika was an English professor, but turned on too many times and messed up his brain. Now he sharpens his long beard into two points and wears a sarong made of an American flag. Bit had once heard Astrid defend him: Yeah, he is a creepo, this is so, she’d said. But he has his moments of lucidity. Bit supposes she’d meant the moments when Kaptain Amerika will shout: Uncle Sam wants me. Or, Nixon is the albatross!

How come he’s called Kaptain Amerika? Bit says, watching the blue exhaust from the station wagon curl and fade. Not Professor Merton?

Titus leans on the ax handle. He is steaming with sweat, his undershirt the color of a teastained mug. No woman lives with Titus to wash his things, so they never get clean, unless Hannah or another woman steals them when he is out. He smells like a turnip gone bad. He says, People get to choose who they want to be here. Part of the deal. Near everybody’s got a nickname they gave to themselves. People come here to become what they want to be. Tarzan. Wonder Bill. Saucy Sally. He flushes when he says the last name, and Bit studies his friend in silent wonder.

A car pulls up the long dirt road. Titus steps to the gate, mopping his face with a bandanna. Four young men with fringed leather jackets and cameras in their hands pour out, slamming the car doors behind them. Hey, man, says one, and Titus says, No, no, no. You’re welcome if you’re serious about living here, man, but you’ve got to respect our privacy if not.

Oh. Well, we’re on the paper at the college in Rochester? says one of the boys. And you don’t have a phone. We thought we might interview Handy?

I dig his music, says a pipsqueak with red ears. He’s the American Original.

The four grin, sure that admiration is their ticket inside.

Sorry, says Titus.

Come on, man. We’re hip, says another. He hefts a thirty-pound sack from the trunk. We brought some yams for the Free Store. Just let us poke around? We’ll be gone after dinner.

A hardness comes over Titus’s face. We’re not zoo animals, he says. You can’t bribe us with peanuts.

Yams, the boy says.

Titus swings the ax to his shoulder and strides closer to the boys. They falter, break apart, only one holding his ground. At times, Titus has to be violent to keep the gawkers out. Bit is afraid to see his gentle friend turn into the ugly stranger he sometimes needs to be. He runs away. All afternoon, Bit stays in the woods, poking at icicles and frozen puddles until he is too cold to hold off going home to the Bread Truck any longer. When he comes in and puts his fingers on the back of her neck, Hannah shudders awake.

Abe comes home shouting, the Children’s Wing is roofed! It’s plumbed. It’s insulated and airtight. The babies’ll have a place to live!

Bit dances, and Hannah stretches to her full height, releasing her warm smell from her sweater and murmuring, That’s lovely.

In the morning, sweet with snow, a train of women with mops and buckets walks up to Arcadia House. They will scrub and polish and paint it all, redo floors, re-plaster. Hannah goes with them. She is shaky on her feet, a cage of bones.

Bit, honey, Hannah had urged, Go play with the Kid Herd in the Pink Piper, but he said No, no, no, no, no. He hadn’t seen the house since the big push on the day that Handy went off on his concert tour. At last, Hannah lets Bit come along. He sits in the little Red Wagon with the vinegar and rags, a box of sponges on his lap. Hannah pulls him over the sludgy ground, falling behind the others. The women call to each other in the sharp air; they laugh. The men on the Arcadia House roof stand up like woodchucks in a field to watch the women come through the terraced apple orchards. They wolf-whistle. Abe makes great arcs with his arms above his head.

But when the women march through the courtyard and into the Schoolroom, they go silent. There are vast begrimed windows; a curious, squat old woodstove; coat hooks that range from tall to tiny. The heaps of desks are scalloped with rainbow fungi. The walls shudder with cobwebs disturbed by their entry. Someone long before had camped in the middle of the floor and burnt a great black pit into the planks. The plaster of the ceiling has come off in spurts and chunks, baring the raw lath and, over the ghosts of antique calligraphy on the slate board, someone has scraped a huge Fuck with a knife. Bit spells it out in his head, says the word under his breath. The women are still, wide-eyed.

Then plain Dorotka with her granny glasses puts down her bucket and rolls up her sleeves. She ties her long gray braids around her head, crowning herself. Ladies, she calls out, disturbing the fur on the wall so that it shifts and floats, loose as hair under water. We have us a job, don’t we, now.

Don’t we now, don’t we, the women softly echo.

Bit is given a rag, sat at a desk, told to scrub, but he watches the women sweep the walls with their brooms until wigs of cobweb fall slowly.

He can, he finds, walk out unnoticed.

In the hall, he hears the pounding of the men somewhere. There is music, something familiar, Hendrix on a radio but warped by the distance and the walls and the beats of the hammers until, all together, the music and the cleaning and building sounds blend into a snowstorm, all winds and rattles.

At the end of the hall, a built-in seat cowers below a small window. He tries to climb, but the cushion collapses when he touches it. He flees the upswell of dust, a snow of mold and dead spiders, goes down a darker place, turns to where the wall goes jagged with stairs. He climbs them. Some treads are missing; he leaps these, and when he does, something moves in the gap below him, and he scrambles, up, away, the terror bitter in his throat, his heart jigging in his chest, onto the next floor. It smells of pine and sawdust, the fresh beams of the new roof above, but he must skirt great jagged holes in the floor. He creeps along, rounds a bend. One door opens as he passes and he looks inside. It is a vast and dark room, the Proscenium, he remembers someone calling it. A tarp stretches over the ceiling where there once had been full sky.

Hannah has told him it’s not possible that he remembers the day they came to Arcadia. He was only three, she says; no three-year-old could remember any single day. But he does. The Caravan had been on the road for too long and had grown too large. Wherever they went, people joined them, bringing more trucks and buses. At last, all fifty of the Free People were weary. When they picked Titus Thrasher up in an army-navy store, he told them about his father, who had inherited six hundred acres in upstate New York from an uncle. Titus had been with them only a week when he walked out of a drugstore phone booth and said, simply, It’s done.

They drove all night into deep countryside, and arrived on a rainy spring morning. Barton Thrasher was a roly-poly man who came weeping out of the stone Gatehouse, extending his arms to his long-lost son. They went into the Pink Piper, and Harold, once a lawyer, checked the papers. The state needed a name on the deed, and they agreed it would be Handy’s, though it belonged to all, equally. Only when the papers were signed could Titus say to his father, Bad blood between us, Pop, but now I reckon everything is even. In response, Barton Thrasher leaned against his son’s broad chest, and Titus stood still, bearing the affection.

Then, someone let off a Roman candle and everyone cheered.

The leftover rain fell on them from the trees above as the Free People took their first quiet hike through the woods to see their land. The men beat down the overgrown trail with machetes and the women held the kids and picked over the path behind them. They came into the Sheep’s Meadow, and gasped. There were enormous structures on top of the hill, which nobody had expected: Barton Thrasher said he thought it had all been farmland and hadn’t known that the buildings existed. Arcadia House reared above them in a blush of brick, a tangle of briars overgrown upon it, the huge gray ship of the Octagonal Barn behind, the stone outbuildings swallowed in grass. Up the Terraces they went, their feet wearing through the mud and weeds to the hidden flagstone steps. The apple trees were stark and ancient, heaped goblins, and the raspberries were wild between the trunks. Last autumn’s windfall stuck, a too-sweet mud, on their soles. They came out onto the slate porch and gathered before the huge front door.

In Arcadia Ego, someone said. They looked to the lintel, where the words were hastily chiseled.

Astrid said: Arcadia. It means, Even in Arcadia am I. Poussin made a painting. Quote comes from Virgil—

But Handy interrupted loudly, No egos in this Arcadia! and they shouted for joy. Astrid muttered, No, not ego, it’s not what that means, it’s. . But she trailed off. Nobody heard her but Bit.

Arcadia, Hannah whispered into Bit’s hair, and he’d felt her smile in his scalp.

The entryway: a chandelier fallen, crystals underfoot mixed with filth, animal spoor, leaf litter; stairways that curved to sky, the roof ripped off. The Free People separated, searched, discovered. Hannah carried Bit through the mess, the tumbleweeds of dust, the antique graffiti, the doors unopened for a century. Arcadia House was an endless building shaped like a horseshoe, embracing a courtyard where a vast fifty-foot oak tree presided. The wings of the house were filthy, broken, went on forever. Out a window, Bit saw the glimmer of the Pond, and outbuildings like ships in a sea of weeds. There were holes everywhere: in roofs, in walls, in floors. He was frightened. At last, they all met up in the Proscenium, a grand hall with benches, a stage, ratted curtains faded the color of dirt, a deep red velvet in the hearts of their folds. The Free People were filthy and starved and craving a party. After the long years they’d debated their community, shared readings, talked about the kibbutzim and Drop Cities and ashrams that some among them had lived in, they had come home. They longed to celebrate with music and pot and maybe something stronger, but Handy wouldn’t let them. If we don’t do the work now, my beatniks, he said, when will we do it? And so they stayed in the Proscenium as the afternoon faded and became midnight, they argued it all out, the rules of their Homeplace.

There was a hole in the floor where the Entryway grew black beneath, until all that remained were a few gleams of the crystals in the dirt; there was a hole in the roof where the night turned inky and soon went up in a blaze of stars.

All things would be held in common, all possessions — bank accounts, trust funds — would go into the pot, everyone who joins must give everything they have. Bills and taxes would be paid with this money. When they made dough, it would be by midwifery or by hiring out Monkeypower to work in the fields, until in the end they ate only what they harvested themselves, and sold their surplus. Within Arcadia, filthy lucre would be forbidden.

All people would be welcome to join, as long as they promised to work; those who were too damaged or weak or pregnant or old to work would be cared for. Nobody was beyond help. But no fugitives; they didn’t need the authorities on their heads.

They would live pure and truthful lives; no illegal activities. Well, they amended, when the familiar skunky smoke rose up, nothing that should be illegal.

Punishment would be unnecessary; all must subject themselves to Creative Critiques when they erred or didn’t pull their weight, where they had to undergo the community telling them off, a ritual cleansing.

Whoever you fuck, you’re married to, said Handy; and thus rose the four-, five-, six-, eight-part marriages of the beginning, most of which soon splintered apart into singles and couples.

They would treat all living creatures with respect; they’d be vegan, animal goods and pets forbidden.

Until the day came when they could renovate this great, strange ship called Arcadia House and live together in love and kindness, they would make an Ersatz Arcadia.

By the time their rules had been laid out, agreed upon, named, it was almost morning. Many had fallen asleep. The few who were awake saw Handy’s broad face kindling in the dawn through the filthy windows. He made a grand gesture toward the heap around them, saying, This land, these structures we found here today are gifts of love from the Universe.

Then the years of transience broke in him and Handy cried.

Three years passed full of hard work, some failed crops, some good. They borrowed oxen from their Amish neighbors to plow the fields. Later, the silent, hardworking Amish men came — a surprise — to help reap the sorghum, barley, soy. There was enough only to eat and none to sell. The midwives went into the towns beyond, into Ilium and Summerton to deliver babies for money. The Motor Pool was founded to drive trucks for pay, and to find abandoned vehicles to salvage for parts. Every autumn, they rented Monkeypower to the fields or apple orchards to make as much cash as possible. They made alcoholic Slap-Apple and sauce and pies from their own apples, they canned just enough wild strawberries and raspberries and goods from the garden to make it through the winter. But even the previous winter in Arcadia, there was a week of hunger that would have been worse had Hannah not succeeded in wrestling her trust fund from her parents’ lawyers. Together, they survived.

One night in December after the Solstice celebration, when Handy was in a Vision Quest in the sweat lodge they’d built off the Showerhouse, Abe called a secret meeting for the Arcadia House Renovation Project. He had chosen a few people to join him, the straw bosses of the work units: Fields, Gardens, Sanitation, Free Store, Bakery, Soy Dairy, Cannery, Midwifery, Biz Unit, Motor Pool, Kid Herd. Hannah had brought Bit along under her poncho, because she had been the straw boss of the Bakery then and didn’t want to leave him in the Bread Truck alone. They met between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn, in the tunnel that Ollie had reinforced against nuclear strike.

Listen, said Abe. I’ve been thinking, and we’ve reached a kind of turning point. We’ve got to move into Arcadia House soon, or we may stall out on putting all our big ideas into action. Just get comfortable in Ersatz Arcadia and let our dream of Arcadia House fritter off and never move in.

There was a protest, something about money, but Abe held up a hand. Give me a minute. It’s pretty clear we’re working too hard, too inefficiently, doing redundant stuff just to live. It’s all about division of labor. If we had centralized child care and cooking and didn’t have to worry about carting our own water up from the Pond or getting the stuff from the Free Store for our suppers or making sure we chopped plenty of wood to be warm this week, we could actually get enough work done to support ourselves and make money. I’ve done the math, he said and held up a paper covered in his tiny script. If we fix up Arcadia House and all live there together, we can do this. We can make it work. Maybe even make a profit this year.

Abe’s beard split, his smile so big Bit feared for his father’s cheeks.

There was a silence, the sound of someone in the Octagonal Barn above dragging something heavy across the floor. The straw bosses all began talking over one another, pacing up and down the tunnel as they dreamed aloud, building their vision detail by detail.

The deeper Bit pushes into Arcadia House, now, the more he is bitten by a wretched clammy cold. The men haven’t touched these rooms yet: they are moldy and dark. He pushes at a latch, and a door swings open with a foul exhalation. Between the darkness of the hall he is in and the light above the stairwell, he takes the light and goes up, though the dust is to his ankles. He finds himself on a catwalk that skirts a deep room, an intact couch, a grand brick fireplace, a sea of filth that moves ten feet below from the air he displaces. From this spot in the house, he can no longer hear the men on the roof, their music, or the women far away in the Children’s Wing as they sing and talk.

There is a black spill beneath the first door, an evil that spreads from the crack. He skips it, creeps on. From behind the second he hears a sound, a sigh, a whisper, and feels a cold in the metal of the knob, so he skips it, too. The third opens when he pushes hard, and he enters.

The room is furred with dust, inches deep. It grows off the walls, over the floor, spreads itself across lumps that are furniture, Bit discovers, when he inserts his hand and feels wood beneath. He touches a filminess under one, cloth, and finds it a bed.

In the middle of the floor, a delicious lump, and Bit plunges in both hands. There are hard things deep down. He brings out his fist and peers at a series of tiny bones, a mouse’s skull and skeleton. Then, a handful of buttons in a strange, dense material, creamy white and shimmering. At last, an object, hard and soft at the same time. He blows on it until the book reveals itself.

On the leather cover, there are embossed flowers, a boy who peers from behind a tree, and letters in gold. Bit traces four — G-R-I-M — then grows impatient and opens the pages.

At first he sees an illustration. It is the most vivid thing in all of Arcadia House; it sucks the daylight into it. A girl with a squinched face seems to be using her cut-off finger for a key. On another page, there is a tiny man who splits himself in two while blood spills in gouts from his wounds. On another, a girl in a long dress walks beside lions, her mouth open, her hair up in a furry acorn hat.

He finds the smallest story. His finger runs under each word as he puzzles it out. It is about a mother with many children in a time of famine, something Bit knows: the terror in the belly, winterberry and soybeans all they have left in the mason jars. The mother wants to eat her children. They are angelic and choose to die for her. But she is so ashamed with their sacrifice that she doesn’t eat them. Instead, she runs away.

Horror is heaped within horror: the mother eating her children, the children dying, the mother disappearing forever into the dark behind the story.

He drops the book back in its heap of dust, clamps his hands over his eyes. The world moves in tight and squeezes him. He holds his face until the terror scuttles off and he can breathe again.

From afar, Hannah’s voice, high, frantic: Bit! Come here, right now! Before he leaves, he snatches the book, shoves it down his pants, and runs down over his own treadmarks in the dust, runs and runs, turns the wrong way, loses Hannah’s voice, bursts into a familiar hall, hears her voice closer now, goes down the stairs, leaping the gaps in the treads, stumbles into the Entryway, goes down a corridor, loses her voice, goes another way and at last finds himself in a glassy room with half-collapsed long tables, where Hannah’s back is turned to him, where she is shouting for him. She is so happy to see Bit she snatches him up under the arms and hugs him to her so tightly he can’t breathe, and puts him down, and wipes her wet face on her shoulder and says, Don’t ever wander off here, Bit. You can get hurt. This place is very, very dangerous.

She holds him away by the arms. God, she says. You’re black with filth.

Then her mouth shifts as she feels the book in his pants. She looks at him, and Bit watches her, and is almost disappointed when she lets the book go. She has been letting everything go, these days.

Midge comes from a back room. Since her father turned to ice during the February Morning Meeting, Midge’s face has gone sour, as if she is constantly sucking a gooseberry. She snaps, This is no place for a kid, Hannah. Take him home.

Midge has no neck, Bit notices. Her head swivels on her shoulders like a ratchet.

Away they go again, rattling down over the hill in the Red Wagon. Bit leaves the book under his shoes and pants when he and his mother go into the cement-block Showerhouse together, though their day to bathe isn’t until Sunday. Most days, they do what Hannah calls a KACA Bath: dip a washcloth in hot water, soap it up, hit the Kisser-Armpit-Crotch-Ass. Today the Showerhouse echoes, empty. Everyone else is working. There’s a dangerous luxury to the steam, the rosy softnesses of his mother under the hot water, the faces of sleeping babies that live in Hannah’s knees, in his own layers of darkness that fall as she rubs at him with her chapped hands until she has scrubbed him raw and red as an infant again.

Clean in the quiet of the middle of day, Hannah makes herself a cup of tea. She sits at the window, Edith Piaf on the record player. Non, the invisible singer warbles, je ne regrette rien. Bit hears: No, Gina rug-wet again. He thinks, Poor Gina, heartstruck for her shame.

Hannah’s so deep in her thoughts that Bit is invisible. He waves his hands before her eyes, but she doesn’t blink. He takes the book he stole from Arcadia House from his pants and sidles down the steps from the main Bread Truck into the chilly lean-to, and puts it into his Stash tin, where it just barely fits if he takes everything else out: the snakeskin and glass eye with a green iris and arrowhead and sparrow with working wings that Abe had once carved for him.

Daring, he goes out into the afternoon and carries his treasures to the Free Store, where he puts them on the shelf where all of the other unused things live. He touches the hemp necklaces that Sylvia braids, the single rollerskate, the musty paperbacks, the neat stacks of patched and folded jeans, the flannel shirts. Cheryl is weighing dried cranberries in the corner and putting them into paper bags for the cook of each homestead to pick up, and when her back is turned, he plunges his hands into the flour barrel and squeezes the powder deliciously through his fingers. Muffin looks up from where she’s funneling cooking oil into mason jars, and the spatters of oil on her glasses refract her eyes into many tiny blinking eyes. But she doesn’t tell on him. He takes a piece of dried apple from the snack bin and runs home through the cold. When he comes in, his mother cocks her head and says, Where’d you go, Little Man? but doesn’t even listen for his answer.

He makes a plan. Tomorrow, he will sneak home from the Kid Herd and spend hours in his new book happily, piecing together the terrible, sharp stories until the world is stuffed full of them and nothing else can get in.

The snow melts under a freezing rain and the sky is the color of lint. Jincy comes over. Her face is red with tears. She is eight and her head is a wild screw of white curls. She is much older, but Bit’s best friend. They zip themselves into his sleeping bag, and in the closeness there, she whispers: My parents are fighting.

There is so much for Bit to say that he doesn’t say anything.

They play Babysitter and Baby, they play Boycott, they play Handy and Lila. They play Nixon, Jincy making her face loose, veeing her fingers, saying I am not a crook. They play Midwife, in which Jincy is Astrid, and Bit pushes a porcelain babydoll out of his pretend yoni, until Hannah sees and blanches and says, Hey, kids! Let’s make cookies! Then they stir and mix and bake, oatmeal cookies with almonds and raisins and molasses, while Hannah gives them directions from the kitchen table.

A good bubble rises in Bit, and he moves lightly to keep it whole.

Abe comes home while it is still bright out, and cooks dinner for them all: crepes with tempeh and preserved mushrooms and soy cheese. At nine, the parents have to go to a Creative Critique of Tarzan up in the Octagonal Barn because he has been making unwanted sexual advances on a number of chicks, even the Pregnant Ladies, which is really spreading some bad vibes. Hannah huddles in her overlarge sweater, looking like a snake about to shed.

Abe says, frowning, I don’t know if the kids should stay here alone. .

Jincy says, We’ll be good! We won’t touch the woodstove or go outside! If we’re scared, we’ll run to the Pink Piper! Reluctantly, Hannah and Abe go into the dusk.

In the sleeping bag again, Jincy hugs Bit too tight. When he complains, she lets go and starts to whisper stories.

Under the footbridge over the river, she says, there’s a troll who needs a sacrifice before you can go across. A nice leaf is fine, or a bolt taken from the Motor Pool, or a piece of fruit, but only a little one, so as not to waste.

What about a booger? Bit says.

A booger will do, Jincy says, and they laugh.

Her voice goes lower. Jeannise had sex with both Hank and Horse, and now the twins aren’t talking to one another. Which is bad because they’re the Sanitation Crew and pump out the loos.

Wes and Haven are going to have a baby, and Wes and Flannery are, too, she says, and Haven and Flannery got into a chick-fight and their faces are all scratched up.

Jincy heard a mouse conversation last week. They were squeaking that they were so so so so so so hungry in their little tiny voices.

When Peanut and Clay light one cigarette off an already lit one, it’s called a Dutch fuck, though they don’t do the regular fuck, because they dig chicks.

A witch lives in the woods. Last summer, at the Cockaigne Fest, when all the adults were drunk on Slap-Apple, Jincy went to the Sugarbush because her parents were yelling, and she saw a huge old hunched lady in black just stop and look at her and go away. She had long white hair and a terrible bad face. She floated in the air.

Bit drifts to sleep with Jincy’s voice still murmuring on. He sees the shadows full of creatures, trolls like so many green and stunted Handys. He sees the Sugarbush, sinister with gloom. He sees the Pond glistening with moonlight. There, a witch with Astrid’s bad teeth and Hannah’s winter-stringy hair and Midge’s sour yellow face looms up, again and again, out of the shadows, until the witch is so familiar that he begins to wait for her, then long for her to arrive, until he tells himself within the dream that he is no longer afraid. And he is not.

An uproar in the middle of the night; men come for Abe, talking over each other. When Hannah rises and makes coffee, Hiero says, Oh, hey there, Hannah-baby. Fred Major claps his great hand upon her shoulder. But none of the men are there to drink the coffee by the time it has finished percolating. Hannah sits at the table. Her eyes glint in the shadows.

Bit’s pajamas are too small for him; the hems ride his calves, his forearms, his belly is cold in the air. He goes over to Hannah and climbs up into her lap, and lays his head upon her chest to hear the slow slosh of her heart.

She says, In the morning, my friend, someone you love will be gone.

Bit says nothing, but he thinks Abe? and something begins to collapse in him. Hannah must know what he’s thinking because she says, No, no, no, no. Wonder Bill. He had a different name before he came here. He’s done some bad things that we didn’t know about until yesterday and has to go.

Monkey Wonder Bill? Wonder Bill who can go hand to hand from branch to branch in the Sugarbush? Wonder Bill who makes animal sounds better than the animals, his turkey gobble in the fall (oh, so long ago, the jewel-bright leaves, the golden silver smell of autumn), the noise that made a turkey as tall as Bit sprint lusty from the bush toward them?

In the morning, the Pigs come to look for Wonder Bill. Arcadia gathers on the Quad as the Pigs rustle through the dwellings, searching for him. Nobody speaks. Bit sits on Hannah’s feet to insulate his bum from the frozen ground.

He is confused. He was imagining pinkness, snouts, curly tails, the pictures in the Kid Herd storybooks. These are black-suited men with reflective sunglasses. They are pink: that, at least, is true. Perhaps their tails are hidden under the creased pants they wear. They trail strange smells behind them: Cologne, Hannah whispers, making a face.

The Pigs go into the first Family Quonset, then into the second. The ones who ring the woods hold guns, and with a startle, Bit sees green under their feet. Garlic mustard, hummock sedge, Dorotka tells him when he asks. Spring is coming. He is tired of the men who murmur into radios. He wants them to go home.

Bit hears Leif ask Astrid, Are they gonna shoot us? Astrid shakes her head no although her eyes are hard, and she presses her son’s face against her belly.

Crashes from the Singleton Tent. The Pigs go into the Pink Piper, they go out, they go into the Bread Truck, they go out, they go into Franz and Hans’s lean-to, with the half-made puppet head hanging from the rafter like an oversize piñata though the Circenses Singers are all out on the road. They go out, they go into the Henhouse, and stay in there for a while. The Pregnant Ladies run out, huge and indignant, in their men’s boots and sweaters, squawking.

Up on the hill, Arcadia House crawls with Pigs. Bit peers at the roof, but Abe is not working up there today. There are no Arcadia men there at all. They must be waiting to start work until the Pigs in black leave.

At last, a Pig comes over with an angry, fat face. The sheriff from Ilium is beside him, a man in a khaki shirt whom Bit has seen drinking coffee up at the Gatehouse with Titus: his sandy hair lifts and falls like a mudflap over his bald spot. He winks briefly at Titus then looks away.

The three talk together. The angry head Pig begins to shout. The sheriff makes soothing sounds. Titus says very little.

At last, the men troop over the snow back up to Arcadia House. The Free People move behind them. From the top of the Hill on the slate porch they watch as the Pigs get into cars and trucks that flash with red and blue lights when they drive away.

When the last pulls out, a cheer goes up around Bit, so loud and unexpected that he startles and turns his face into the closest legs, Eden’s swollen thighs, to hide. Her forehead is a moon over her pregnant belly when she laughs down at him.

Abe returns in the afternoon in a Volkswagen with a case of maple spouts and pails for their first sugar season this year; the Sugarbush is huge and ancient, the syrup one more thing they can sell. They had lived near it for three years without suspecting what the copse of trees really was until Dorotka stood up one Sunday Morning Meeting in the Octagonal Barn and nervously suggested making sugar this year. With what? said Handy, our cane didn’t do so hot. She looked confused, then said, Oh. The Sugarbush? It’s a mature old stand, we can get gallons and gallons out of it. And Handy said, What Sugarbush? And Dorotka threw back her head in astonishment and led them down to the Sugarbush, the miraculous woods on the other side of the Pond, and they all couldn’t believe the new bounty; they threw the snow that was too soft that day to make snowballs, the entire community dusted in sunbright powder.

Handy had wanted to call the product Free People Sugar, Titus wanted to call it Sinzibuckwud; Abe prevailed quietly but persistently as he does sometimes, and they are calling it Arcadia Pure.

Hannah and Bit come out to the Quad to meet him and help him unload. Abe pulls up to the Bread Truck, the radio spits out a whine, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

How was Vermont? Hannah says.

Abe envelops Hannah in his arms and whispers in her ear. He is tall, she is tall, and between them Bit is pressed as if by the warm trunks of old trees. He doesn’t want the hug to end, but after a minute it does. Their bodies fall apart. His parents turn away.

On top of everything else, the women must do the sugaring: the men work up in Arcadia House from sunrise to sunset and often beyond. They scrape and hammer, put in pipes and plaster, roll on the oopsie paint they got from a store in Ilium in exchange for Sweetie Fox and Kitty posing provocatively with rollerbrushes in the store’s advertisements.

The Kid Herd follows the sugaring ladies out one day to learn. The huge maples are hung with icicles, roots so intertwined they form a mat above the ground. There is no wind here, and when the sun finally touches the copse, it glows softly as a kerosene lamp.

Like a church, breathes Maria and turns away to privately make a four-pointed sign from head to belly to shoulder to shoulder, which Bit mimics again and again behind a tree, loving the gesture’s solemnity. He doesn’t want the others to see. Superstition, snorts Hannah when the others talk about God. Though people here have private rituals, Muhammad kneeling on a bit of carpet during the day, Jewish Seders and Christmas trees, religion here is seen much like hygiene: a personal concern best kept in check so as to not bully the others.

Mikele drills holes into trunk after trunk, and Eden screws in the spouts. The trees bleed clear blood into the buckets. The ping-ping-ping on metal is a sound like warm rain on the Bread Truck roof. But this sound feels different; sweetness will come of it.

Language has begun to shift in Bit. There are small explosions of comprehension every day. He remembers last August, when he lay in the sun-warmed shallows of the Pond while under the water he was nibbled by things unseen. With his Grimm book, it is as if he has his eyes below the surface and can at last see the tiny fish there. Speech splinters into words, each phrase with its own order: Scuseme becomes Excuse me, Pawurduthpepel becomes Power to the People, all words he understands both alone and combined.

Separate drawers emerge in his mind, now, to sort people into. Handy is a frog king. Titus is a lonely ogre in the Gatehouse, keeping out the Pigs and gawkers. Tall Abe, with his tools, his ax, his beard, is a woodsman. Eden, with her bright coppery hair and pale skin, eating the succulent greens raised in the south window of the Henhouse for the Pregnant Ladies, is a queen. He hopes she is not the good mother who must die to make way for the wicked stepmother. He hopes she is not the bad mother who sells her baby for the herbs. Wonder Bill, with his mobile face, with his monkey clambers, had been a fool. Astrid is difficult: her hair shines like a princess’s, but her face is old and her teeth terrible like a witch’s; she delivers babies and gives people medicines like a witch, but she’s married to the Frog King, like a queen. He will decide on her later.

Most clearly, though: Hannah. In her bed as the day rises and falls around her, she is a sleeping princess, under a spell.

Bit puts the book back in its place and feeds another log to the woodstove. If he didn’t, his nose would drip and Abe would come home from a terrible long day on the cold roof to frown at Hannah on her pallet. She would close her eyes and let his disapproving silence wash over her. Bit closes the stove and eats a piece of dried pineapple and watches the lump of Hannah for a long time.

Will she wake on her own? The day begins to go shadowy. The wind picks up within the forest, and Bit can hear its dark rush toward them.

At last, Bit washes his hands carefully and brushes his teeth three times with baking soda. He kneels behind his mother’s pillow. He cups her cheeks. Slowly, he lowers his mouth to hers, kissing with all he has within him, pressing his lips hard against hers until he can feel the shape of her teeth behind her lips and taste the bad tang of her breath.

She doesn’t awaken when he lifts his head away. He takes his hands back sadly. This is what he’d feared. Bit is not the one. He is not her prince.

The women boil down the sap in a water heater Tarzan welded into a huge double boiler, and the air all over Arcadia smells sweet and a little burnt at the edges. Bit can almost taste the sugar when he puts out his tongue. One morning, when Sweetie brings the Kid Herd over the fresh drifts of snow to the Sugarshack, Mikele and Suzie, who have boiled all night long, are giddy, and paint the soft snow with streaks of syrup. The syrup sinks as it cools, and when they fish it out, it has hardened into candy.

Don’t tell Astrid, says Suzie. She hacks the syrup taffy into pieces and hands them out to the kids. His piece is so sweet that Bit gags, but to not hurt their feelings he swallows it anyway and pretends to want more.

Abe’s clothes stink with sweat and sawdust; the men are finished with the entire roof. Tomorrow, the joints of Abe’s hands won’t have ice in them all the time, and Bit won’t startle when he accidentally brushes them in his sleep. Tomorrow, Abe will start to put in bathrooms and plumbing to the Eatery, and the huge heap of salvaged copper pipes down at the Motor Pool will shrink to nothing.

When we’re in Arcadia House, people say all the time now, longing writ on their faces. Always, the dream of when. Things will be better, we will be warmer, people won’t argue, we will send extra aid into the world, we will start the publishing company, nobody will have vitamin D deficiencies, the kidlets will go to school, the midwives will be on hand, the bears won’t come out of the woods and ransack the garbage pails and scatter the unwashed diapers or Menstru-fleeces all across the Quad, there will be no loos.

Muffin, who once lived with her mothers in an apartment in Albany, tries to describe toilets to the kids: You turn a knob, she says, and water gushes out and swallows up your poop.

Helle begins to cry. Like a monster, she sobs. It eats your shit!

The others sigh and shift away, as they usually do when Helle cries. But Bit goes to her and hugs her to him, this squishy hard girl, all elbows and pudge. At first she pulls back, but when he lets go of her, she sinks against him. She is bigger than he is, but sometimes he thinks she’s younger, even, than the toddlers. She is strange. She smells like a vanilla bean. Bit always feels a little sick for her.

Not like a monster, says Muffin with disdain. It’s like the loos. But it doesn’t stink and isn’t cold and there aren’t spiders and the Sanitation Crew doesn’t have to pump them, and you don’t have to spread lye. You just turn the knob and it goes away.

Where’s away? says Leif.

I don’t know, says Muffin.

They look at one another, thinking. At last, Erik, who is eleven, says, I think the ocean. Yes, they all agree, away must be the ocean, which Bit pictures as the Pond on a windy day, people in strange outfits waiting on the opposite side: women in kimonos and wooden shoes, men in paddy hats and dashikis like Muhammad’s, little flotillas of shit rushing over the surface toward them, scrap-paper sails and all.

As they sleep, a cloud dumps snow upon them. Ersatz Arcadia has become a smooth pretty village of white, poked with playful, smoking chimneys, like the old-timey picture in Hannah’s book on Russian serfs. Today, again, Hannah doesn’t get up. Every part of her is filmy with oils. She murmurs and grabs Bit and pulls him in gently under the blankets, against her warmth. When he is very still and breathes with her and drifts off to sleep in her wake, he sees pieces of her dreams: a gray street that Bit has never seen, a tree with coppery bark, a fountain under oaks draped in dusk, a huge black bird with its beak cracked to a red tongue. Deeper, and he is in the belly of a closet and something soft brushes his temple and voices are raised outside. There is a dinner table with many forks and spoons laid out in rows and a tiny silver bowl into which a white hand dabbles. There is a return to something private, slippery, that tips and spills. When he wakes, he is drenched with sweat but shivering.

Midmorning is blindingly bright. His friends are rolling yarn balls from unwearable sweaters, and the Pink Piper smells like sweaty oatmeal. When Bit passes the Free Store with the Kid Herd, out for what Sweetie calls their Afternoon Constitutional, he sees Kaptain Amerika on the porch. The stars in the Trippie’s sarong flap in the wind. He beckons Bit close with a bony finger. Inside my ear a bed she laid. And there she slept. And all became her sleep, he murmurs with his sour breath. Rilke. My translation, of course, he says. Bit doesn’t understand. The Kid Herd has moved past the Store, and Bit runs to catch up and, safe again, looks back to see the old Trippie gazing at him. The Kaptain’s words tumble over one another in his head all afternoon, like a small room packed with toddlers.

Jincy’s mother, Caroline, is gone. She has left her things and run away. And though Jincy weeps and her father, Wells, spits about abandonment and puts Caroline’s clothes in the Free Store, Bit knows what happened.

This morning, when there was pewter frost on the grass, Bit came out for a pee and saw a huge white bird on the roof of Jincy’s bus, bright in the predawn. He saw it spread its wings and turn, once. It flapped. Then Jincy’s mother heaved herself up into the air and flew away.

Jincy comes over to stay at Bit’s, to sleep in his sleeping bag with him, to squeeze him until she feels better. He goes limp and bears it.

At night: Sweetness. Hey. Hey, sweet girl, wake up.

Umph. What.

I’m worried about you. Regina tells me you haven’t been going to the Bakery these past few days. Dorotka says you’re not going up to Arcadia House with the women in the afternoon.

I’m just tired. You know how winter always gets me down.

Yeah. Yeah. But this seems worse than usual. Are there days you’re not getting out of bed?

Hannah says nothing.

It’s just. I know with your dad and the other thing you’re pretty sad. But, I mean, I’m working my ass off. It’s already March and the plumbing still has another week and then we’ll start in on the rest, and we’re already behind, and in that last letter of Handy’s he was talking about cutting out Oregon so they all could get back here the week before we have to plow, and we can use all the Monkeypower we can get so that we’re all done before they get back.

Nothing. Bit’s own heartbeat in his ears.

Sweet girl? Don’t want to talk?

Only the trees shaking outside.

Okay. You take your time. Take a week or so, sleep it off. But I’d like you up and at ’em next week. Okay?

His mother’s even breath.

An emergency. The Showerhouse water heater is dead. Abe takes Bit with him. When they get down to the low hut by the Pond, there is no hot water left and the Thursday bathers look on, miserable, soap in their chilled hair.

Abe must examine the hookups under the tank, and Titus and Hiero and Tarzan help move it. Someone gasps, someone screams: mounded under where it had stood, they find a coil, a ball of snakes, hibernating rattlers.

Abe’s muscles are quick, and with the heavy heels of his boots, he smashes until blood splatters, a great deal of it, bits of snake everywhere. Bit wants to bend down and touch one of the rattles that sticks above the gore, delicate as a mushroom. But Abe picks him up and thrusts him at Titus. Just as someone begins to shout in horror, Titus goes back into the night with Bit, his long-legged giant’s stride impossibly fast over the ground. Hannah doesn’t awaken when Bit crawls into bed with her. In his sleep, the wind blowing through the forest becomes Hannah’s breath, becomes the embers falling in the woodstove, becomes a distant roar.

Sweetie outfits the kids in their anoraks and boots and takes them to the Pond, which has finally, this late, frozen solid. They wait for Bit, shaking the Bread Truck on its axles until he reluctantly comes out. It is a tearing in him to leave Hannah behind. But when he is in the fresh cold air, he feels scrubbed. All morning, they slip and slide across the ice in their boots. They scream. Hysteria smacks them in the gullet. They form whiplash lines, where one of the bigger kids, Leif or Erik or Muffin or Molly or Fiona, is the pivot, the little kids at the end. Bit, one of the littlest, littler even than Pooh, who is only three and a girl, is released and flies, over and over and over across the ice on his feet, then his knees, and into the pillowy snowbanks at the edges.

The sun peeps out sporadically, and when it does the ice glows green. The trees that rim the Pond dazzle with icicles that clatter together when wind blows, that make a sound like chimes when they fall.

Helle forms fat snow angels connected like paper dolls around the Pond. It takes her hours. Jincy and Muffin spin until they’re dizzy. Leif finds a great fish frozen with his snout to the surface, and talks to it in a low voice. The babies who can walk, Felipe and Ali and Sy and Franklin, dabble their mittens in the snow, toddle and fall in the drifts. The boys knock each other down. Astrid and the pregnant teenagers Saucy Sally and Flannery bring grilled soy-cheese sandwiches and thermoses of chamomile tea down for the kidlets, and take the babies home. The bigger kids are refueled for another hour when, one by one, they drop.

Bit can feel the ice cold and hard through his snow clothes. He feels his body washed clean by the winter, by the hard good work of playing. When he enters the Bread Truck, his mother is at the table with Abe.

Abe’s eyes are red-rimmed, and he gives Bit a kiss on the head before he takes off Bit’s jacket and snow pants and hat and gloves. I’m sorry for what happened last night, Little Man, he says. I’m sorry you had to see it. It was instinct, that’s all. I never, ever meant to kill anything, even snakes. You know it’s wrong to kill. It’s really bad Karma.

Bit pats his father’s face, forgiving him. He is shy near his mother, scans the air around her head. Hey, baby, she says, and pulls him onto her lap. He gives a little hiss of pain through his teeth, and she sets him down again, takes off his jeans. Oh, my God, she says. Oh, my God, baby, what happened to your legs?

He doesn’t recognize them at first, they’re so purple with bruises. His knees are also raw, skinned bloody. He shrugs, and she kisses each one gently, and Abe swings back out and up to Arcadia House, as if chased.

That feel better, Bit? Hannah says, rubbing Bag Balm into his skin.

Bit’s tongue is frozen. As he struggles and fails to speak, he understands that he hasn’t said much for some time. He tries to count the days but loses track. Words have buried into him, gone to sleep, a frozen ball under the earth of him, coiled and waiting for the thaw.

You’re so quiet these days, baby, Hannah says, pausing as she dreamily combs out her waist-long hair. She gives up when she meets the matted knots. She pulls him to her. It feels too sharp inside Bit to look at her, and so he turns and sits on her bony lap and lets her comb his hair. The teeth of the comb are so gentle on his scalp, it feels like crying. He had forgotten this small pleasure. She says, pressing her lips into the top of his head, My strong, silent boy. Let’s sing. She begins, her voice scratchy, but he won’t sing along to the lullaby, and when he doesn’t, she also stops.

He wakes to see Abe watching Hannah as she sleeps. Oh, Bit thinks. He waits, but Abe lies down. And it is Bit who touches his mother, who pats her face, hands, belly, again and again and again.

In the afternoon, he hides behind the toybox in the Pink Piper while all the other kids pull on their winter things to play outside. He is left alone in the quiet bus. The shouts of the others are muffled by the snowy world outside, and the babies are downstairs with Maria, having a snack or a bottle. He hugs his chest and tells himself the story of the girl and her swan brothers, holds it in his mind and looks at it this way, that way, to find out what it means to him.

Once upon a time, he tells himself, there was a princess. She lived with her six brothers out in the deep forest, hidden from her father’s mean new wife. The stepmother found out where they lived and knitted silk shirts out of magic and threw the magical shirts over the boys and turned them into swans. The princess became sad when her brothers flew away and went into the woods to try to find them. She walked and walked, until she found a little cabin. At dark, she heard the sound of wings and six swans fluttered in the windows. They took off their wings and turned into her brothers, but the boys could be human for only a short time before the robbers who lived in the cottage came home with their booty. She asked her brothers how to reverse the spell, and they said she had to go six years without laughing, singing, or speaking and she must make six shirts out of starflowers.

But remember, they said, if you say even one word, the spell will be broken and we’ll be swans forever.

So the girl went away to collect starflowers and sew. She was quiet as a mouse. One day, some men were walking along and they saw the girl up in her tree where she lived. They called for her to come down and she shook her head and she kept throwing down clothes, trying to get them to leave, until she was naked. Then they dragged her to the king of a faraway place who married her, even though she couldn’t say a word. But when the girl gave birth, the king’s mother stole the baby and told the king that his wife had eaten it. This happened three times until the king believed his wife ate their babies and he said to kill her. The day she was supposed to die was the last day of the girl’s six years of quiet, and she’d sewed everything but one sleeve of one shirt. The brothers flew down to her and she threw the starflower shirts over them and they turned back into people, except that the brother who got an unfinished shirt had a swan’s wing instead of one arm. Then the girl could speak, and she explained what had happened and the babies were brought back and the king’s mother got the electric chair. And the girl and her brothers were happy forever after. The end.

A vision rises before Bit, a celebration: a keg of Slap-Apple under the stars, one boy winging in spirals toward the moon, the girl golden and round as Hannah had been in the summer, the old Hannah, who had stood on a picnic bench and shouted about freedom, love, community. He imagines those babies who lived for so many years without their mother, what it would feel like to be hugged by her for the first time, her warmth at last against their bodies. How they would clutch her to them and never let her go. He imagines not talking for six years, until he is almost twelve, so many years, more than he has been alive. The days stretch out before him. He tries not to cry, but the world he can see from where he is hidden (the loft of the Pink Piper, the heap of hammocks where they’re stored during the day, a baby’s shoe on its side) goes wavery in his eyes.

Last, he thinks of Hannah, her face drawn to something he can’t recognize. This thought fills him with an electric pulse; it thrashes, fishlike, in his gut. He must do something. He must.

He concentrates. He pushes back the words that were already sickly until they die on the bitter part of his tongue. They send bad tendrils into his chest. They heap, a toad, in the cave of his throat. When he walks and eats and plays, he can imagine the slimy thing there, waiting angrily for a word to slip past, for a chance to curse them all.

Tonight, all is peaceful on the surface in the Bread Truck. Hannah has cooked dinner, and the three of them listen to some scratchy voice singing “Your Eyes Have Told Me What I Did Not Know” on a crank Victor that the Motor Pool picked up from a trash heap in Buffalo. Bit is on Abe’s lap, following along as his father reads the newspaper aloud. Bit once points to a caption that says “Goose bites baby” and does his new, silent laugh, and when he looks up at Abe, his father is studying Bit, his lips sucked in at the corners.

Hannah puts down her book and sniffs once, loudly.

Bit sniffs, too. Something somewhere is burning.

Abe flicks his paper down. Bit’s parents gaze at one another. They leap up and in their slippers and bathrobes run out the door.

The cold air roils with smoke. Shadows pour from the doorway; the gong bangs and bangs and bangs. Family Quonset One is on fire.

Abe is running with Bit to the Pink Piper, and he thrusts Bit inside, and the kids who live in the Family Quonsets are being shoved inside, too: Jincy and Sy and Franklin and Ali and Pooh and Molly and Fiona and Cole and Dyllie. The midwives have disappeared. The kids who already live in the Pink Piper run downstairs, and the Pregnant Ladies come over from the Henhouse, shaking muddy snow off their boots, shivering. Flannery and Eden and Saucy Sally pick up the littlest ones and comfort them. Someone thinks Bit is one of the littlest ones and presses him against her taut warmth, and Bit is grateful again for his smallness, to have these soft arms around him.

Where’s Felipe? whispers Flannery, and Imogene, who lives in Family Quonset One, makes big eyes.

Leif and Erik hold Bit up to the window so he can see, though there is not much there: the world across the Quad swirls with yellow and gray, the last of the snow on the ground reflects the fire, the shadows of people dart with buckets.

Dylan sidles over. He is younger than Bit but taller.

It went boom, he says softly. Back where Ricky and Felipe and Maria live. And then Maria had the fire wings.

Shut up, Dylan, says Coltrane, who pushes his little brother and runs up the spiral staircase to where the hammocks are strung.

Dylan’s eyes well up. He comes even closer to Bit.

She did too have the fire wings, he whispers, his voice full of sleep. Also she had hair of fire, Bit. And also a head full of fire, too.

Bit stares so long at the burning Quonset that the world blotches in his eyes. The other kids have gone to sleep. The Pregnant Ladies are at the kitchen table, trying to swallow their sobs with glasses of water or cups of chamomile tea.

Outside, he sees people going slowly back to where they live. Some of the people who lived in the burnt-up Quonset go into Hans and Fritz’s lean-to because those two men are away with Handy; the Pregnant Ladies go back to the Henhouse. Only a few Arcadians remain outside, watching the twisted metal and the embers within. In the dully gleaming dark, Bit recognizes his parents leaning into one another, tall Hannah, tall Abe, her braids on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. Bit shuts his eyes and blindly feels his way into Jincy’s sleeping bag, to keep his parents standing there together.

In the morning, Ricky and Maria and Felipe are gone.

Bit overhears Astrid telling the older kids that the baby had died. She cries, pursing her mouth up over her terrible yellow teeth, the way the horse the Amish bring for harvest draws his lips over a carrot.

Burnt up? says Molly, who cries and cries. Her sister, Fiona, begins to wail into her hands so that only her vast white forehead is visible.

A burnt baby. Bit pictures one of the marshmallows from before Astrid’s war against sugar, crumpled and black on the edge of the bonfire.

No, Astrid says. From smoke. In his sleep. Small blessings. Maria is burnt, but she will be home soon. Ricky is with her in the hospital.

Leif says, angrily, Handy should know about this. If Handy knows, he’ll come home and make it better. My dad can fix it.

Astrid does her funny in-breath that means a yes. Assent on the intake, Hannah calls it. I called Handy in Austin, Astrid says, kissing Leif. In Texas. He told me to tell you he loves us all and he is sending vibes into the ether. He wanted to come home, but Maria and Ricky said no, don’t return early, we need the cash from the concerts. Besides, they’re not ready yet to have the memorial. We’ll have a service for Felipe in the spring.

I want my dad, says Leif; and his big boy’s face crumples and he begins to cry.

Astrid pulls him to her, pulls all of her children, Erik and Leif, froggy Helle, hyper Ike, to her, and says into their matching white-blond hair, Well, that’s another story, indeed.

In the morning, Bit runs to the stream trickling in the woods. Yellow jags of ice edge the water. Bit kneels on the ice and puts his head in the stream, and the cold is enough to rip the breath from him, a relief.

Handy sends a letter, express. Astrid calls a meeting in the Octagonal Barn, and they gather in the late afternoon to hear Hiero read it aloud. Handy says greetings to all his beautiful beatniks. He is devastated by the news, and feels profoundly for the Free People keeping the faith at the Homeplace. He urges them to remember that suffering is what tempers the steel in the human soul, and when one suffers in community, the community grows stronger.

Hiero’s voice shakes when he reads: Pain, when given its proper place in the human heart, can be a door that leads to a feeling of oneness with the Universe. This is a path to deeper empathy.

Soon enough, Handy tells them, they will all be together. Try to be strong and we will bear the impossible weight of our sorrow in communion. Namaste.

Namaste, they say, and the women cry, holding one another. The babies goggle at their mothers and pat their faces.

After one week, Maria returns from the hospital, her head and arms wrapped like gifts in white bandages. Ricky and she seem to be carrying one another wherever they walk.

Bit sits under the table as Marilyn and Hannah drink St.-John’s-wort tea. They talk about the oil embargo, about Marilyn’s webbed feet, about thalidomide babies, born with flippers. Bit thinks of a wee newborn flapping underwater, like the beaver that lived in the stream behind the Family Quonsets and gave them all giardia one spring.

He goes back to his book, the story of the fisherman and his wife. The women forget about him. They begin to murmur.

I don’t know how much longer I can handle it, Hannah says. This isn’t what I signed up for, this isn’t a better life, this isn’t anything but poverty and hard work and not enough money to buy the kids winter boots.

I know, says Marilyn.

Hannah’s voice goes muffled when she says, . want. . out. She makes a sound that doesn’t seem human. Bit watches her legs worriedly, afraid she is sick.

Marilyn’s voice, softer than ever. Hang in there. We move into Arcadia House in less than a month. We’ll all live together, and everything will be better. You can make it.

I can’t, Hannah says. Fucking Handy. .

You can, says Marilyn, and her voice sounds like a door closing, and Bit knows that there exist things even outspoken Hannah isn’t allowed to say.

A taste of Saucy Sally’s poppyseed cake, the way Leif can swing Bit by the legs so the world spins deliriously past, the feel of running on the last crust of snow when the others fall through, that softness at the end of a branch that is the whisper of a bud. He adds to the list in his head. Raspberry jam on just-baked bread. The smell of the pocket of Titus’s waxed coat, pipe tobacco and lint and cedar. The four blond heads of Handy’s kids around a letter. The feel of fresh plaster. He sits by his mother and comes up with these fragments and tries to beam them into her head. Once or twice, he is sure he succeeds. She sighs sweetly in her sleep when he remembers the smell of a newborn’s crown or the downy feel of her own soft cheek upon his.

The Kid Herd is at the stream. The footbridge is not safe: it wobbles, its ends dunked in the wild runoff. White suckers churn upstream, their many bluish bellies transformed into a single pulsing one. Bit stares down, the stick gone heavy in his hand. Toothwort bobs on the bank.

Do it! shouts Leif, who has turned into a dancing goblin. He is hysterical with violence.

Bit, calls Jincy over the roar, and Bit looks up at her. Her curls are wilder than usual. There has been a charcoal smear on her cheek for a week. It’s wrong to kill, she shouts, close to tears.

The others stand, a mass, uncertain, waiting to see what he will do. Helle has begun to wail, though her eyes bulge with anticipation. Bit looks at his friends. Cole and Dylan, side by side, make the same face Sweetie makes when one of the kids hurts another. Jincy covers her mouth with a hand.

He thinks of a fish body wriggling on the stick, of a mass of blood.

Bit grips the stick that Leif whittled with Abe’s pearl-handled blade. He pulls it behind his head and hurls it into the stream. It bounces back at him and smacks him above the eye. The pain is terrible, like swallowing a brick of ice. Leif and Erik and Ike and Fiona shriek and dance, Helle wails, Jincy says, No, no, no, no, no. Molly, who thinks she’s a horse, who has made them call her Secretariat since last summer, even though Secretariat is a boy, whinnies and throws her mane and stomps her foot. In fury, Bit grabs the stick and chucks it as hard as he can toward the bank, where it grazes Muffin’s knee.

Muffin’s face goes red behind her glasses, and she screams. She claws up the muddy bank and runs off through the forest, over the fields.

Now you’re in trouble, says Fiona, her voice humid with excitement. Her bangs are slicked with sweat and her forehead gleams. She runs off. The others follow, the boys whooping like Indians through the afternoon dapple. Helle stays for a second to scream IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouBitStone, then she, too, scurries off. Her round little body falls behind her brothers’, and she ruins a patch of early spring beauty flowers as she goes. She pumps her arms and tiny corncob legs to catch them but they move off without her, as ever.

Alone, Bit is seized with grief. He comes down tentatively to the edge of the brook and tries to leap to the shore, but his boot fills with water. His shocked foot inside the boot feels the way his stomach feels inside his body.

He crouches for a while on the side of the brook, watching the frantic push of fish. He sends out mute apologies, waits for the great King Fish to surface, its stern face leathery and terrible, to open its vast mouth and curse him. Or eat him. Or maybe, he thinks with a pulse, to send him off on his search to find the thing that will save his mother. He holds his breath until he feels faint and, when nothing happens, moves up the bank to sit among the fiddleheads, their bald skulls rearing shyly from the dirt. The wind blows cold from the top of the trees, brushing down, and the parched leaves chatter under it. In the hollows to the north of some trunks, he dips his fist into small pockets of snow.

He sits long enough for a squirrel to emerge and almost run over his foot. A hawk swoops over the stream and snatches at something and rises again as if riding a pendulum.

For a few breaths he forgets himself in the swim of nature around him. Its rhythm is so different from Bit’s human own, both more nervous and more patient. He sees a bug that is smaller than a period on a page. He sees the sky, bigger than all that’s in his head. An overwhelm from two directions, vast and tiny, together.

From behind him, footsteps. He hears them when they are still far away. They thunder the ground. He knows from his Grimm that it is probably a giant come to eat him, but he can’t find the energy to fight. Bit bends his head and waits for the great hand, the teeth. Instead, he smells something fleshy and feminine, blood and pus and sweat and rose soap. Astrid. She sits beside him and he waits for her to yell.

She doesn’t. She just sits. When he dares, he lifts his head to look at her. She studies her feet, unshod and luxuriating in the cold mud. She smiles down at him. I love spring mud in the toes, she says. Makes me think of home. Norway, you know.

He takes off his own shoes and wallows his toes in the mud.

After some time, Astrid claps him on a thigh and stands. She scoops him up. So light, little Bit, she says. You are maybe twenty pounds? I’m sure I have delivered a new baby almost as heavy as you. You are a marvel.

They come out of the forest onto the Sugarbush path, then up into the Sheep’s Meadow. Already, flowers spread on the ground like small open mouths, purple bells, white stars with golden hearts.

He rests his head on her shoulder, and she says, Not to worry. You will grow. And one day things will not be so confusing. This I can promise you.

When they come into Ersatz Arcadia, she says one last thing into his ear. She says, Don’t think that nobody knows you are not talking, that nobody worries about the words that are stuck in you. But you take your time. When you can, you will tell me the story of everything you feel and I will do everything to make it better. This I also promise you, she says, and Astrid’s face is kind as a field of dandelions.

Astrid carries him into the Henhouse, and only now, in its warmth, does he know how cold he has been. It smells like chamomile and yarrow and lavender, other herbs that hang from the rafters in the kitchen. Someone moans above, and Flannery lopes downstairs naked, with a basin in her arms, her belly vast, her face panicky. She is one of the teenagers who have been showing up every few weeks, petrified but knowing, as they somehow do, that the midwives take care of the Pregnant Ladies who come to them.

Oh, thank God you’re back, she breathes. Marilyn was called off to Amos the Amish’s daughter, and Midge had to go take a nail out of D’Angelo’s foot.

Astrid looks down, and touches Bit’s head, and says, You’ll stay here, in the kitchen, with Flan? We can have our talk after Eden’s baby is born, yes? And Bit nods, though he knows he won’t say a word. Astrid strips off all her clothing and washes herself for a long time with soap and water so hot it steams. When she goes upstairs, she is nude, also.

Flannery puts on a bathrobe and makes a face at Bit. So what’s your story, she says. You’re the retarded one, right? He shakes his head, but she snorts, and gives him a piece of apple cake, and goes off to lie down on the couch. Jesus, she says. I’m definitely not looking to get this little bastard out of me if it’s gonna be like that. She points, finger trembling, skyward.

In a moment, she is asleep and breathing heavily. Bit goes upstairs.

The room is murky where Eden is lying on her back. At first, he can see only the gleam of her coppery hair, then a lady’s swollen bottom and a great upswell of flesh. Astrid is astride her and rubs her belly with something glossy, breathing with her. You must remember, she says, it is a rush, it is good energy, it is the energy it takes to get this baby into the world. There is no pain here. Do not push. All in its own time.

Eden grimaces and gives a low whine, and seems to release something, and Astrid says, Good, good.

Astrid puts two long white fingers into Eden’s folds and feels around. They are bloody when she takes them out. She nods and grunts.

The coil begins to wind again in Eden. Her feet clench. In the middle of the grip, she opens her eyes and sees Bit there at the door and locks her eyes into him, and Bit locks back, pushing the way she pushes at him. Then she relaxes again, and lolls her head back, and Astrid coos, and Eden picks up her head and winks at Bit. Hey, she says. Thanks for that one, Monkey.

Astrid turns. You! she says, Ridley Sorrel Stone! But before she can shoo Bit away, Eden says, No, no. He was helpful, Astrid. I want him here, okay? He’s good at this.

Astrid goes to the doorway and calls to Flannery, who takes Bit downstairs, grumbling, and scrubs him until he hurts. He is naked when he climbs back up, and shivers in the chill. He burrows into the bed with Eden and rests his head against her shoulder. She smells like chicory and fatigue and onions; she is vast and hot. He puts his hands on her forehead and smoothes out the wrinkles there.

The light dies in the windows. People come in and out, among them Abe, worried. He tries to talk to Bit. But Bit is concentrating. People leave. Astrid changes the sheets by rolling both of them over. Someone gives Bit a piece of warm bread with applebutter, but he doesn’t care to eat. He stays with Eden. He sleeps when she naps between waves, and wakens when she surfaces in pain.

Something suddenly shifts in Astrid: she becomes quick, efficient. Flannery rubs Eden’s shoulders. New light kindles in the panes of glass and grows. It is somehow day. Astrid makes coaxing noises, and Eden gives high moans, which Astrid tries to make her lower. Marilyn comes in, fresh and smiling and bearing two quilts and a mince pie, her voice spinning over of the miracle of the Amish baby she just delivered, fat and blue-eyed and rosy as a piglet. Eden shouts, and Marilyn screws up her lips and goes away.

Eden manages to eat some porridge, which comes up. She drinks some tea. She grips Bit’s tiny arms, and he won’t feel the steel in her hands until later, when Hannah will take him to the Showerhouse and cry at the purple on his skin, touching the bruises gently with her fingers, as if to brush them away.

Eden’s body is a fist as she pushes. Bit hears voices saying, Good, sweetheart, so good, the head is here, it’s wonderful, one more, Eden. But Eden gazes into Bit’s face, her canines catch on her lower lip; and in sudden overwhelm, the smell of shit. Then there’s a breaking, a slippage, and in Astrid’s hands there’s a bloody, waxy, frantic beauty, a creature that wags its tiny arms and begins to squawk like a seagull. Eden and Bit rest against one another and watch through half-closed eyes.

Eden lifts her arms up for the baby, which Marilyn has already washed and wrapped in a blanket. Astrid guides the tiny mouth to Eden’s fist-size nipple, and shows the baby how to latch on. It grunts and snorts, the most urgent thing Bit has ever seen.

Bathed in the dim early morning light, in sweat, in exhaustion, Eden swims in the last thrashes of pain. She holds her baby and looks down into the ancient face. Bit takes everything he feels now and buries it deep in him, a secret shining place to visit in his quietness, the best place he has ever known.

The women come for Hannah. They come into the Bread Truck while Abe is still there, before the sun has risen. They bring the spring cold in the pockets of their clothing. Their breath steams in the warmth of the Bread Truck. Up, up, they say, and Hannah stands. Magnificent women, the women of Arcadia, all legs and thin hands, bandannas, white throats, cracks at the edges of their eyes where the sun has creased their skin. They seat Hannah at the table, brush out her hair, braid it up again tightly. They warm water and strip her. Bit’s mother’s body is thin, her bones show, and they wipe her down with hot cloths. Slowly, her smell is thinned with Astrid’s rose soap. Her skin, her hair, her sleep, is watered until, at last, what is her own disappears.

The women take her away.

Abe is distracted during supper, oat groats with soy-sauce, fresh bean curd. Hannah hasn’t been back since the women took her. Bit is free to think his thoughts, and he thinks of how he will go into the forest, soon, to help his mother. He wishes for someone to tell him what to look for, and he hopes that it won’t be someone too frightening or ugly. He listens to the wind in the pines, but it doesn’t talk to him the way it talks to boys in his stories.

When all is cleared and clean in the Bread Truck, Abe deposits Bit at the Pink Piper to sleep in Cole’s hammock. He kisses him gravely and leaves.

The metal roof clicks with tiny icy snow. Astrid’s children breathe lightly. Sweetie’s boys snore and shift, Cole jabs at Bit with his heels. The pile of Family Quonset kids tangle together under the blankets.

Bit turns and sees Helle’s eyes are open, yellow, in the dim. Tadpole of Handy, he thinks, bulby and strange. She looks at Bit, her mouth swelling with information. She is nosy, a listener at doors, a tattletale.

She whispers, They’re making a Critique tonight. Of Hannah. Of your mom.

Bit hears Marilyn downstairs talking to someone, Saucy Sally it sounds like. He gets out of his hammock and creeps down the stairs. They’re smoking funny stuff out the window, even though Sally is pregnant. They gab, are not watchful. He goes out the door.

Ice glazes on the grass and his feet are bare, his legs cold under the thin pajamas. His soles burn until he can’t feel them anymore, and he must pump his arms to be sure he is still running. The wind smacks his face with a cold hand. When he longs to lie down in the sinister rows of the apple orchard, he thinks of Hannah and goes on.

Up the slate stairs to Arcadia House, up the stone porch. He can’t reach the doorknob, but he pushes and the vast door swings open.

A powerful stench: varnish and polyurethane and paint, beeswax and vinegar and sweat, sawdust and copper and cold nails. The stairs are finished but dark because there is no sky above them, only plaster and ceiling. The grand chandelier has been pieced together, and it hulks overhead in half shadow.

Over the still-tacky floorboards, to the stairs, curving up. Halfway there, he hears voices. Another corridor, paint sticky under his hand. Another stairway. The voices are louder. When he reaches the doorway to the back of the Proscenium, the voices are very loud.

He crouches and puts his eye to the crack. His feet come alive again, and he would cry with the pain if he didn’t first bite the inside of his cheek to blood.

From there he sees the silhouettes of bodies, some shiftings, the shadow of a hand that rises to a face, heads that move together then apart. Beyond, elevated on the stage, uplit by three kerosene lamps, there is Hannah.

She is tiny, shriveled, so distant from him. She is alone. Her hands are folded in her lap, and she looks down and nods. Someone, a man, says: . . mean, Hannah baby, we love you and want you to feel better, man, but it’s just such a drag, you’re like bringing down all our energy and we’ve got a shitload more work to do before Handy and them get back and we need all the energy we can get for the planting, you dig?

Hannah nods, nods, nods.

Now, someone else says in a calm cold voice, . Mahayana, big boat, caring for everyone, but you’re manifesting pure Hinayana, small boat, taking care of yourself. . Hannah nods.

And someone, a woman, says, Listen. . when you’re good, there’s nobody better. . in the fall know you had that accident. . sad to lose a baby. . over it by now?

And Hannah’s hands clench at her skirt and her face contracts, then smoothes out, and still she nods.

Now a familiar voice, Titus’s. He roars. He says, . fucking nuts, man, it’s like taking someone whose leg is broken and jumping on the fucking leg, we’re not doing anybody any favors here, I’ve been there, Hannah, I’ve been where you are, I’ve been down so low the black dog is at my neck, man, I know what it’s like so don’t listen to these hypocritical assholes. .

An uproar, voices shouting over Titus’s. Hannah looks out into the audience, finds a face to fix on, and stares at it. In this moment the whole of her is present. His mother, so wispy, so far away.

Bit can’t hold himself: he leaps up from where he is crouched and begins to run. Down the endless aisle, down past the people who sit on the benches, down past the folks sprawled on the floor, to the stairs, up. Out of the shadow and into the shallow pool of kerosene light, with Hannah alone in the center. He thrusts himself onto his mother’s lap and cradles her head in his arms. He can feel all the others’ eyes heavy on his back. For a long moment, nothing, silence.

Briefly, a wet warmth on his belly, his mother’s face pressing into him.

Briefly, her mouth moving against him, kissing him through his shirt.

Now, Abe is on the stage and lifting Bit, and Bit floats halfway down the aisle in Abe’s steely hands. Abe is whispering fiercely into his ear; Bit twists and fights to return to Hannah. In silence, Bit struggles, desperate, and when they go down the third-floor steps, down the curved entry stairs and out into the night, he hears what Abe is saying, . I know, little one, I know you’re in pain, I know you’re holding it in, monkey. . Abe presses Bit against him and Bit hangs on to his father, his warmth, his one solid ground in the spinning awful world, his gravity. He presses against Abe and tries to push him away, tries to fly back toward Hannah, clutches his father; pushes him, clutches. Abe is saying. . don’t have to let it out yet. . It is only when they are halfway home, as Abe begins to trot over the hard ground, that Bit’s internal scream lurches and burbles and emerges in a sour rush of vomit.

In the night, he hears: Now or never, baby. I left a Bug outside, keys in the ignition.

A silence so long Bit almost sleeps. Then a whispered No.

Then you have to try. You have to begin to try. You have to. You have to.

His father’s voice is thick and shuddery, and it makes Bit go thick and shuddery inside.

A very long silence. Bit is almost asleep. Then it comes, soft, soft: I’ll try.

He wakes, gnawed. He breathes with Hannah until Abe gets up, feeds them, drops Bit off at the Pink Piper. Before he goes, Abe kneels before Bit and brushes the hair out of his eyes, and says, Whenever you want, you talk to me, okay?

All day long, Bit is being eaten inside. The nameless bad pushes in his legs, makes his shoulders ache. He longs to rip up the pillows and send the hammocks a-scattering over the Quad.

His silence isn’t working alone. He will need a Quest. And if he doesn’t go on his Quest soon to find the thing to save Hannah, he is afraid what he might do.

Sweetie tries to talk softly to him, but he runs away. The Kid Herd is quiet today. Dorotka takes time from starting the seeds in the solarium and now leads the kidlets into the forest to tell them about trees. He trails the other kids, stomps his boots. He must do. What? His longing twists and flicks in him.

The Kid Herd moves across the meadow and into the bitter woods. Bit lags five steps, ten steps behind.

Mud has dried into pocks and pits here. Pussy willows velvet the banks; other willows are awash with gold buds. Sweetie and Maria take the babies back to the Pink Piper with the wagons. Jincy and Muffin and Fiona roll down the tender-grassed slope. The boys stop smacking things with sticks to listen to Dorotka: Look, she urges them, Ulmaceae, elm. It has simple alternate leaves that are just coming out, look! It comes from Asia, originally. It seeds with a kind of samara, let’s see aha, aha, here’s one from last year.

She lifts a seed and it flutters down, a propeller.

She beams. They beam. Springtime, she says, a letter from a loved one.

Dorotka hugs the trunk, and one by one, the children do, too. They move deeper into the shadows. Dutchman’s-breeches! she calls. Look, miterwort. Look, hobblebush.

There is a crack in the gray sky and the sun sifts through, falls over the ground, powders the new buds. This is it, Bit understands with a great pulse in his throat where his words used to live. This is where his Quest begins. Bit crouches behind a rotten log where a fern grows in a bed of moss. He watches the others go. Soon, he cannot hear them at all.

Below the log, a cold spot, snow. Up through the snow push tiny wild strawberries that he eats and lets the bright sweet juice stain his hands. This is good, a sign to go deeper, to find what he needs to find.

He pushes off the path and into the woods. He is alone and everything is sharp, full of hungry life. Two chipmunks chase each other from branch to branch, and one falls, bounces on the ground, runs off again. The thickets grasp at him and only reluctantly let go. A stream sings in the distance: he turns a corner and almost stumbles into it. He goes onto his belly and leans over, and with a smooth stick he has found, he can almost touch the surface. His head is a splotch in the white sky, rimmed by the black reflected trees; his clothes are full of burrs. He knows he has a gash in his face only when he sees a drop of blood fall and be sucked down into the water and fade like smoke.

Now it will come, he thinks. Out of the water, probably. He hopes for a golden swan or a water nymph, but he would take a troll, an ugly little man Bit’s size, a monster. He waits. Nothing happens.

In time, he moves on. His bones are weary. The day has gone cold and the sky above the greening branches is a deeper blue. Out of nowhere a doll’s-eyes plant, googly with great white eyeballs, watches him. Through the hole in the trunk of one tree he sees a whole and early moon, and it reminds him of a pie. But when he looks closer, he sees the face embedded there. Why has nobody ever told him that the man in the moon is shouting in alarm?

He is so very little. And the woods are so black and deep.

His feet have gone numb when he finds the hiccup in the woods, the clearing. He feels an airlessness here. Stones stick out of the snow-burned grass, and Bit thinks of Astrid’s teeth, the way they are haphazard and yellow.

He sits to gather himself, and finds his fingers tracing words carved in the stones. Minerva, one says. Whose Name Is Writ In Air.

1857, another says.

A tiny one, a milk tooth, says simply, Breathed once, then lost.

He doesn’t know how long he sits. The trees whisper among themselves. Dusk falls, and the stone under him grows chill. There is a sense of gathering, a hand that clenches the center of a stretched cloth and lifts.

From the corner of his eye, he sees a white movement. He watches it obliquely for ten breaths, then turns his head to look. He expects to see one of the stones crawling off into the darkness, but it is not a stone.

An animal stands there, pointy and white and tall, fringed. It is graceful as a white deer, but it is not a deer.

The beast fixes Bit with its yellow eye and sniffs. At its side, the shadows thicken. The texture flows vertical and becomes fabric. Bit holds himself tiny and still, and looks up the dress to find a face. A woman stares at him, a very old woman. It is the witch, the one he has dreamed of. But she is not ugly: her hair is a soft white with a black streak, and she has roses in her cheeks. Though her lips are set in deep wrinkles, the lips themselves are plush. The way she looks at him, Bit feels pinned.

They gaze at one another, the woman and Bit.

This is it, the nut of the Quest, what he was meant to find, the moment where everything will turn. He waits for her to speak or give him a sack of gold, to give him the curse or the antidote, a vial, an apple, an acorn to crack and spill, a silken dress, a horseshoe, a feather, a word. She will tell him, give him, help him. He feels his body, so tiny in the great, twilit world, but he knows he will do what she asks of him. Even if he has to live with her forever and ever in a small stone tower in the woods and never get to see Arcadia again, he will do it.

He thinks of Hannah, a shape in her bed. He thinks, Please.

He wishes he could shout but fears the old curse that may befall Hannah if his lips split and his longing pours out.

He waits, but the woman only steps backward and becomes the woods again. Then the beast lifts its thin front leg and, with a snort of steam from its nostrils, it, too, trots away. Their sounds fade. He is sitting in the blue dusk alone. His hands are as empty as ever.

His heart settles again into its rhythm, and he trusts himself to move. His jeans are wet in the seat and down the insides of his thighs. The forest pushes down so hard on him he can hardly breathe. He cannot cry, not now.

Bit begins to run, crashing over the sticks, stumbling in the sudden gouges in the ground. Trees loom like dreams in the dim before him, and it is all he can do to swerve around them. Something scatters the dry leaves behind him, something catches up, something will grasp him with its bony fingers. He runs harder, and it runs harder, pressing on him, and he can smell its terrible breath, and at last he hears the lap of water and bursts out onto the stony edge of the Pond. It seems vast tonight, and he realizes he is on the side opposite where they usually swim. Up the long black lawn, he sees the outbuildings hunched, the Soy Dairy, the Bakery, the Octagonal Barn; he sees Arcadia House, lit in some windows by the new generator the Motor Pool liberated from somewhere. Even from the lonely side of the Pond, he can hear the roar.

A glow warms a window upstairs where Bit imagines his father, good bearded Abe, rehanging a door. It calms Bit to imagine Abe in the lantern light, fixing, building, making better. This is what Abe does: he is steady, calming. There is a golden warmth also in the arched windows of the Eatery. Tonight, he remembers, is their first collective supper in Arcadia House, cooked in the stainless-steel kitchen ripped from an abandoned restaurant in Ithaca. He hopes his mother has been drawn to the light and warmth and food. It hurts him to think of the others, laughing, in the Eatery while she is alone in bed.

The ice along the border of the lake is thin as a glass ornament. He crunches it as he runs. When he reaches the path where the snapdragons will grow in the summertime, he begins to sprint. In the distance, people move in a line lit by lanterns and flashlights up the path from Ersatz Arcadia.

He bursts inside, into the overwhelming warmth. Here, too, is a thicket of legs like birch trunks, and he almost runs into one. Hey, there, man, someone says. Whoa, where’s the emergency, someone else says. What the hey was that? someone asks, and someone else says, Oh, just your average forest elf, and there is laughter and he screws his fists and pushes harder.

The kitchen blasts with heat, hurts him. It smells so good he wants to cry. It is something fried, vegetable stew. He finds Hannah stirring vinegar into the roasted beets in a huge steel bowl, and clutches her knees. She smiles down at him. She lifts him and washes his face with warm water at one of the sinks. She says Brr, when she touches his hands, and picks the leaves and twigs out of his hair and lifts him to sniff at his rear end, and makes a little face, shrugging. We all have accidents, she whispers. It’s okay once in a while to piss yourself, I’d say.

He puts his face close to his mother’s warm mouth, and like that, the chasing thing in the woods draws away and dissolves back into the night.

Out in the Eatery, under the exposed beams, they sit at newly varnished tables for a moment of thanks. Someone says, Itadakimasu, I take this nourishment in gratitude to all beings; then they pile up their plates. Hannah pulls Bit up onto her lap and cuddles him there. She feeds him from her fork, small bits of bread and stew, and his day comes over him in a great wash. The words that others are saying go meaningless in his ears. With a bit of seitan still in his mouth, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.

He has done it, though he is confused, though he doesn’t know what he’s done. There was no key he was handed, no word that he said.

Hannah is not out entirely, but she is emerging. She rises every day. She brushes her hair. She bakes at the Bakery. Only sometimes when Abe isn’t looking does Hannah close her eyes for a long time, and Bit holds his breath. But with an effort that seems to wrench her, she always opens them again.

Though Abe frets at first, Astrid commands the afternoon off. They will play, she says, and dares anyone to protest. They do not. The afternoon is bright and warm. The men go onto the tender green lawn between the porch and outbuildings, carrying the lacrosse sticks that Billy-goat, a real Onondaga Indian, had made one winter out of ash sticks and reclaimed raincoats. The women braid the hair of the men into plaits like their own, and then the men strip down all the way to their cotton shorts, torsos glowing winter-pale. Bit sits with the laughing women, who smoke wackystuff and chat among themselves and drink iced tea from pitchers, who pass around babies and blow tubas on the bellies of the wee ones. The other kids are playing somewhere, but he sits on Hannah’s thin lap, he watches the heaving mass of men chasing down the little ball, colliding and breaking apart, singing and arguing, falling to the ground, sweating. He watches his father drop a ball out of the basket of his stick and blush all down his neck and chest, how Titus’s fat-tire flops at his waistband, how Hiero is so nimble he doesn’t even seem to run, just appears where he needs to be. And Bit realizes as Tarzan shoots an easy goal and his team leaps and shouts and pats and squeezes that none of these big adult men, despite their smells and strength, are much more than boys, not so different from Bit himself. The world contracts in a friendly way around him.

Time comes to him one morning, stealing in. One moment he is looking at the lion puppet on his hand that he’s flapping about to amuse Eden’s russet potato of a baby, and the next he understands something he never knew to question. He sees it clearly, now, how time is flexible, a rubber band. It can stretch long and be clumped tight, can be knotted and folded over itself, and all the while it is endless, a loop. There will be night and then morning, and then night again. The year will end, another one will begin, will end. An old man dies, a baby is born.

Summer Hannah will take over from Winter Hannah with a slowly crisping voice and a new pair of dungarees. Not completely yet. But soon.

Sweetie passes, and puts her cold hands under his chin. What’s the matter, baby? she says, wiping his cheeks. Are you hurt?

His secret swells in him, almost bursts; it is good, it is wonderful. But he must be silent, he remembers almost too late, and shakes his head. She carefully dries his cheeks with a clean bit of her sleeve and gives him a cookie she tells him to keep secret from Astrid, whom she calls the Sugar Nazi. Then she kisses him. He would like to stay like this, Sweetie’s soft lips on his skin, but with a long breath he reluctantly lets time flow again.

The dawn of the day that Handy is to return from the concerts, the clouds break their bellies overhead and a surprise snow sweeps down in layers upon them. The forest hushes under the unexpected weight, the green buds startled inward, the birds huddled together in suffering. Late in the night Abe had fallen into bed in his work clothes, supervising the last of the woodwork, the last of the painting, the last varnish and sconces and what curtains they have, thrift-store finds, bedsheets sewn into curtains, curtains made from old Indian bedspreads still smelling of sandalwood. Loosely braided rag rugs, even stenciled oilcloths pretending to be rugs, are scattered everywhere. The house is ragtag, Bit overheard Midge complain; but it is complete, paint and plaster, woodwork and glass. Bit, who has never lived in a house, thinks it’s breathtaking, the most amazing thing he’s seen: the space alone threatens to drown him. Abe’s sweat on the pallet last night, though, stank of anxious incompletion. He tossed, fretted: he sleep-talked of broken window weights, unmatched molding, unpainted doors.

Against the sharp bones of his mother’s ribcage, Bit slept. When Hannah dreamed, the dream was so vivid it entered him; he saw a giant in a charcoal suit, as big as Arcadia House, half the size of the sky. He felt his hand, Hannah’s hand, extend to touch the swollen damp flesh. A nail nicked the giant’s skin, and air began to hiss out like a punctured tire. The man slowly deflated, flabby, shrinking. He was the size of the oak in the courtyard, then the Pink Piper, then the Showerhouse, then the Bread Truck. He was the size of Abe, then Hannah. The face was blank, like those of the Amish dolls Astrid once brought back in repayment for midwifing a baby. The suit the man wore became a pond. He shrank to the size of Bit, then smaller. He became a baby, then a nubbin of a baby, a fleshy balloon in a small red pool.

At last, the balloon popped. The man was gone.

Bit opened his eyes to find Hannah looking at him.

My dad’s dead, she whispered.

Bit put his hand to the pulse of his mother’s throat, and she fell back into sleep.

The sun is shy on the white fields now. Before the coffee is finished, the spring warmth melts the snow on the new Arcadia House roof until it is fragile as lace.

From the window, Bit watches Titus Thrasher come over the Quad with a sad face. A telegram flutters in his hand.

Hannah is red and puffy. But the invisible straps that kept her arms at her sides have dissolved, and her hands now seem to float. Even her breath seems less labored. Her eyes are enormous in her face.

I’m okay, she insists to Abe when he clutches her to him. I’m really okay. He kisses her on the temple, but his face is pale, disbelieving.

They stand again at the Gatehouse, eager for Handy, under sun so hot the snow has vanished. A dozen Newbies wait on the porch, a shoal of Germans unpacked from a hearse painted with passionflowers; two pregnant girls hugging themselves; a matted-haired Trippie muttering angrily to his shoelaces. The Newbie tent is full. Handy will know what to do with all these people.

It seems to circle, this wash of relief, above and through the crowd: Handy is returning, Handy will know what to do.

The day is splendid, and as they wait, the men toss a Frisbee on the long road. The women stand in loose clumps, touching one another on the shoulder, on the waist. Eden’s baby is the newest and is passed around. They gaze into her walnut face, each in turn sent on the cosmic energy trip of meeting a new soul. Kitty is so keyed up she takes off her teeshirt, and a man somewhere says in a thick voice, Far out, and Kitty shakes her stuff with a little grin, and it strikes Bit with a sudden force that she is beautiful. With her brown bob and pointed chin, she is a chestnut come alive.

It seems like forever ago that Handy and the Free People Band left, three months. Bit was a very tiny boy then. He can see himself that day, half a head shorter, his brain a blank, nothing at all to fill it but snippets of images. He sees his mother alone in the winter mud, her stare down the road.

Now the sound of a motor, and someone’s trumpet blares, and in the far distance around the bend, there it is, the Blue Bus, with Lila in a crocheted bikini and handkerchief posing like a pinup girl on the hood. On the driver’s side, Handy leans out the window, pulsing the horn, a shout braying out of his Confucius beard. Other heads hang out all the windows now. The engine dies and the bus coasts in and people pour off in a fug of smoke, and everyone embraces and Handy shouts. The Circenses Singers are in a goldfinch-colored bus that rumbles to a stop behind the Blue Bus. They pour out. They take out their now-dirtied Adam and Eve puppets, and then two new puppets they’ve made, an ancient man with muttonchops and a gaunt woman with a psychedelic dress. Four new puppeteers have joined; they sing and ring bells, and their song now is even stranger, trembling and breaking in air, making even the spring-fevered birds hush to listen. They finish their tune, and a roar goes up.

Bit sees new people who clamber out of other vehicles, stretch their limbs, grin; two dozen Newbies that Handy picked up on the road. One of the Newbies says, . were going to go to the World’s Fair, but, man, this place is way better. . One begins to clap her hands and breaks into song, and the old, familiar Arcadians catch on and they all sing now: ’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home; and at the end everyone hoots and hollers, and Handy leaps up onto the nose of the Blue Bus with little froggy Helle on his shoulders; she clutches her father’s head and kisses and kisses his thinning crown. With a hat made of little girl, with glasses filled with sunlight, Handy starts one of his raps. My good people, my friends, my Free People, he says. How blessed we are by the Great Goodness in the world to find ourselves together again, at last. . Bit is in Hannah’s arms, his hand on her hand, and though everyone else watches Handy, Bit watches the old flowers begin to bloom again in his mother’s cheeks, and he can hardly bear it, it is so good.

When Handy finishes, Abe lifts Bit from Hannah’s arms and puts him on his shoulders, and steps up onto the Blue Bus bumper and shouts: Those of us who stayed behind have made you quite a present. Brace yourselves, all ye who went on tour!

Now Peanut and Tarzan roll out the wheelbarrow they decorated in garlands of spring flowers and apple boughs, and they hustle Handy into it and set off at a dead run, and everyone runs beside and behind, and they take turns jostling Handy over the ground to the circular gravel drive at the base of Arcadia House Hill.

Such billows of laughter! Such long-legged joy! Bit clutches at Abe’s hair as his father gallops beneath him.

Then someone puts a blue bandanna over Handy’s eyes, and they chair-carry him up the steps while he chortles. Abe throws open the great door and whips off the bandanna and scoops up Bit so that Bit can feel the heat and pulse of his father’s body, and Abe turns to everyone massed on the Terraces.

We’ve done it, he shouts. We worked ourselves until we were worn out. But we finished Arcadia House, and there’s room enough for a hundred fifty, maybe more, what with the kids’ dorms and the itty-bitty bedrooms, and we even got ourselves a Library and Eatery and toilets and even a generator for a few hours of light and music in the evenings.

The cheer is the loudest thing that Bit has ever known. A stunned expression grows over Handy’s face. His eyes blink fast. This is. . neat, Handy says, slowly and quietly, to Abe alone.

Under Bit, Abe seems to deflate, his shoulders loosening, his head lowering. The people mass behind them and push them into the Entryway, under the great chandelier. Everyone goes quiet because the room is grand and full of sun, and all the Old Arcadians, the original true believers, remember the holes and the spoor and the darkness, the house splintering around them. This, the contrast, the vastness of the space here that they will never be able to fill, eighty tiny bedrooms, a children’s dormitory; all of this magnificence steals their breath from their lungs.

They scatter. Some find their names on cards on the doors, in Harriet’s calligraphic hand. Others run from room to room to find a place to trade. This new couple wants to be together, these Newbies would like a nicer room, this married couple separated on the road and needs space apart.

Someone shouts from upstairs, They’ve enameled the toilets in gold! In the hilarity that rises and echoes in the house, something in Handy’s face relaxes.

That’s funny, he murmurs. I get it. Diamonds and carbuncles, silver baubles for the kidlets. I read that book, too. Which was it?

More’s Utopia, Abe says, a little sullen.

Yeah, Handy says, and he considers Abe. Then, miracles, Handy breaks into that famous smile of his, that dimpled Buddha beam; it turns plain old Handy into something charming. He puts his hand on Abe’s shoulder, and they lean toward one another for a moment. Handy says, Well, all right, then. All right. It’s a good thing. You’ve done good to keep us together, this is a good thing. A great gift. I thank you, Abraham Stone, with my full heart.

Under the older man’s words, Abe flushes with pleasure and ducks his head like a child.

That afternoon, before the kegs of Oly beer and jugs of red wine, before the Slap-Apple and pies, before Handy and the Free People start to play their music out on the grass during the wild reunion party that will stretch, thanks to the generator, deep through the night and into the quiet parts of the morning, before the kids heap together to sleep like baby chicks in a nest, before all this uproar, they bring up from Ersatz Arcadia everything that they need for the night, the mattresses and sheets and toothbrushes and soap. Everything else will be carried up the next day.

Then someone sets off a Roman candle, and in the after-stink of sulfur, the party begins.

Deep past midnight, Handy stands on a table. How small Handy is, but how he seems to fill all of Arcadia. People are sleeping in the grass. Bit is on a blanket with the other children, their faces smeared with jam and juice, the night turning cold on their limbs. Handy begins to sing, his voice whetted to a knife edge by the Tour. It cuts Bit to wakening when he hears Ole, oleanna, ole, oleanna ole, ole, ole, ole, ole, oleanna. The Norwegian lyrics stretch toward something fleeting, the perfection Handy talks about all the time, dreams about, weaves his seductive words around until it rises, whole and beautiful, before the rest of them. He sings as if today, the day of homecoming, he can reach out to touch what he sees, as if mixed in the victory there is still nostalgia, but for the good present that will soon be the past. Bit looks beyond Handy, to a blanket on the ground where Hannah and Abe are clenched so tight together that it is hard to tell his skin from hers. Yet Bit sees it clearly when he looks at them: even in the darkness, the empty space that keeps the one from the other, the thing the size of a fist, a heart, a loaf, a rose; the size of his sister he’ll never see. Something rips in Bit, and he begins to cry. He cries his overfull heart out, pours it into the dazzled sky. He does so silently. Not yet, noise. It’s still not time.

It is the day after Handy returned, the day before May planting, and the sun is hot and good. The grass is bristling with green. The women move the last of the stuff up from Ersatz Arcadia, and the children nap in the Dormitory. It feels too strange to sleep without his parents’ smell in the sheets, and Bit watches in the window where a lazy fly buzzes on the glass.

Like ants that bear bits of leaf and bread, the women go up the hill with their armfuls of goods. Bit’s breath stops: under the green and welcome arms of the oak, he sees Hannah.

His mother pauses in the courtyard and puts down her pillows. She unfurls her fists. She lifts her arms up and closes her eyes and cants her chin toward the sky.

Hannah, hands full of sun.

A soft dawn, under the copper beech that Felipe loved. Maria sings, her voice broken: Gracias a la vida. Ricky’s hands are clumsy on the guitar. Under the leaves, the skin of Maria’s burnt arms shines, slightly wrinkled, like the bark of the tree above her. Her face looks like Hannah’s does when she is in her thickest sleep. The song ends, and someone gulps, and here are the long soft waves of people crying. A minute of silence to remember.

All that Bit can bring back, though, is one moment of Felipe, a coo of delight, the baby’s face wide with glee, three awkward steps. Then a tumble, and the baby beams up at him from the ground. Even this will fade. Soon, Bit knows, Felipe will no longer be inside Bit but will become a story they all remember together, and better, this way.

Bit thinks: We are a hive. Get up when we hear other people waking up. Do yoga in the Proscenium together. Warrior pose, corpse pose. Good food smells from the Eatery, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Cookies all day long. No more cold loo on my thighs, warm toilet. No more spiders and wind in the Bread Truck. Now radiators that hunch under the window and clink and hiss on cold nights like wheezing monsters. Now when parents come home in the evening from their work units, they have time to talk. Hannah in a book club, White Niggers of America, her voice flaming bright in the Library; Abe in a political theory group, ten beards leaning into the circle, the soft cheeks of the ladies in the shadows. They build societies of air, then carefully tear them down. The adults have grown softer. They squeeze each other’s arms when they pass, give happy hugs. In the Dormitory, the children lie next to one another for naptime. The warm pile of children, the smell of crayons and clay and paste. Handy’s voice booming and joyous everywhere.

Bit thinks: Oh, we love each other better now.

He sleeps one week in the Dormitory, on the squeaking cots, far from the bodies of the others. Leif snores. Jincy sleepwalks. The Dormitory is so vast the shadows thicken and move in the corners. He wakes three times per night, desolate for his mother. At last, he writes a note to Sweetie. He labors over it with a red pencil.

Im to little, it says. I have to sleep with Abe and Hannah.

When he hands it to Sweetie, she goes speechless. You can read? she says.

Sweetie gives the note to Hannah, whose lips form an O.

Oh, Bit, you can write? she says. She kneels to his height and kisses him.

He moves into their tiny room on the second floor of the Main House, and sleeps on the old pallet on the ground beside their small iron bed.

As he sleeps, a fast wind descends on the world and rain slants horizontal. He wakes to the forest thrashing outside in a strange green glow.

There is lightning, a blue snap, and the world goes jagged. In the flash he sees Hannah midmotion, hair spun over her mouth, sheet peeled to her waist. One breast is in the open. A hairy arm buckles her shoulders.

In the swallow of black after the flash, he understands what was in the shadow above her crown: Abe’s face, eyes closed, mouth a deeper darkness in the dark of his beard, straining toward something, it seems, he can just about grasp.

Bit crouches under the cherry tree on the lawn. Wet petals fall on his head and the sun is gentle. The adults are in the fields, planting, save Abe, who must fix the place on the roof where the oak branch fell during the storm. Bit can see the pale blue sweater of his father as he works, reflected upside down in a puddle. From here, his father’s head points into the center of the earth.

When Bit closes his eyes, he can see what Abe can see, how Arcadia spreads below him: the garden where the other children push corn and bean seeds into the rows, the Pond. The fresh-plowed corduroy fields, workers like burdocks stuck to them. Amos the Amish’s red barn, tiny in the distance. The roll of the forest tucked up under the hills. And whatever is beyond: cities of glass, of steel.

There would be a strong wind up where his father is. It would be hot, because it’s closer to the sun.

Bit sees the pink petals skim the surface of the water, passing like ghosts through his father’s body. It is wonderful, absurd. He laughs with sudden lightness, and the sound emerges whole from his mouth before he can clamp it in, a needling sound like an old hinge. He presses his hands to his mouth, and his skin tastes like grass, like dirt.

For a moment after Bit’s sound, there is nothing. The wind ruffles the water. A bird passes overhead, a brief cold shadow over the sun.

But now, reflected in the puddle, Abe. Rolling off the roof; a marble, a pebble. For one bright moment, Bit’s father hangs in the air. He is stuck, hovering; some string must be holding him. But there isn’t a string. Abe flies down the surface of the puddle.

Bit lifts his eyes from the water and into the world. He blinks. Things are dim, like looking into the night from a lit room. On the courtyard grass Bit sees a tiny blue crumple. Somewhere, an engine roars to life and a crow hisses from a branch above and Bit’s foot breaks the puddle and he begins to run.