State of Grace

20

THE CONGREGATION was the town and the town made up the island. The cold was convivial to their natures but before the Reverend had come they had never been instructed in the bitter ways of God. It was true that once, before the Reverend took up his duties, there had been a suicide among them. Mr. Pardee cut his throat with an oyster knife. Mrs. Pardee, who was only seventeen at the time, was making cheese and refused to attend to anything else before the cheese was completed. This was an enviable trait exhibited and one which, all conditions being equal, everyone in town would have been proud to show themselves. Since that time, nothing more occurred — one dusk as they were out cutting greens for the Christmas mantels, each noticed the other had become middle-aged or worse.

Then the Reverend came and after a few years it appeared that God had found the island again, in the manner of putting a bad hand down upon it. When it appeared that the hand had come to rest on the Reverend’s little family, the people came to the conclusion, without being aware that they had reached it, that the distribution of pain, at least on this tiny place, on this doggerel rock adrift in the sea, was as just as man could expect, because the man and the lone peculiar little child could bear it best. They handled it not only impassively but gracefully. It was almost their style. It was the mother who had always been wasted by it, who threw herself on grief’s mercy. And of course now she was gone. There was the lesson. Everything exists to teach. Her haunted manner, her aching ways gone, at peace the frenzy she had shown in the last months … The Reverend was a difficult man, an exacting man. Perhaps he never should have married … but who could say? Needs are forgotten. Arrangements rearranged. Now he is alone, a father with the little Kate. Such a discomfiting child. There’s something lame about her, something dark. There is the air of a sanctified crime about her — of a holy slattern. But she is only a child! She has the boniness of a child, the tiny features — they could be put in a cup. Heartbreak surrounds her, though she seems unaware of it. She moves through it like a leaf, like a feather, like a falling piece of soot. It is as though she is living out some event that is not part of her life. The townspeople, however, would not think of this. How could they? They live in the faltered rhythm and dip of the island. They listen to the telephone. Nothing happens here. The town has no possibilities and this is the only child now. The wombs are barren, the land cannot bear. They swim in conjecture, the time and the tides.

But how will the father and the little girl live now? The child seems an orphan, a ward of something vast and troubling. Of course they will remain here, she will go to school. The townspeople expect that the Reverend will continue to instruct her. Already she has developed great skill at recitation and vaguely terrorizes them, being able to recite long sections of the Bible with a dreamy and demonic exactitude, translating the sounds into something privately understood and then returning them to rote, to a maddeningly void and childish lilt. It’s almost heresy for her to prattle so, so unmindful, the words so clear and useless like a mirror hung backward on a wall. She reflects nothing but her father. He is in her eyes, the way she holds her hands. Perhaps it is simply a stage the child is going through. They know nothing about children. The sister had playmates who would come from the mainland, who would tumble and yowl through the crisp black and white town, but now Kate is the solemn solitary child they must share and she has no friends who visit her. Even before the mother died, she was seen only in the company of the Reverend. At dusk each weekday, he would meet her at the ferry slip and they would go home together, flowing up the street, not speaking, her fingers in his big hands. The townspeople watch from their windows, eating bread and beans. They take an embarrassed delight in her inconsistencies, embarrassed because she is, after all a child, not yet seven years old, and they wish her no ill. She maintains that she takes no pleasure. That phrase. She has said it to almost all of them at one time or another when they wanted to give her a little something, make her a small and harmless present. And yet they have seen her eating ice cream. Tying ribbons in her hair. Climbing in the trees. In the winter she plays earnestly, skating, sledding, running with her dog. She obviously has rules, strict restrictions, self-imposed. The play is highly ritualized but it is play. Once the postman heard her singing …

“God’s begun a state of grace in me

I’m the only one in town.”

The sea wind carries such scraps of conversation, nonsense rhymes, dream images, for miles. Everything is echo. The townspeople are ashamed of the smallness of their thoughts but they are pleased that her actions belie the lie. She is a child, nothing more, small, dependent and without resources. We are justified not without and yet not by our works is the base they build upon. Is that not what has always been taught? And has not the Reverend himself said, scornfully, coldly, so that one could almost hear in his ears the frozen whistle of the fall to hell, “Works, a man get to heaven by his works! I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand.” So they needn’t concern themselves with their thoughts about the child. They are free to think them. The Reverend continues to remind them that they are worldly free. They are dismissed. Perhaps they are truly saved and safe. The child dismisses them with the gaze of her father. She is meek and even pretty, but unruly, a bit menacing. Sometimes her face looks withered as a crone’s.

But her mother is dead, her sister is gone, transported so precisely that summer day, out of the moving car into the giant oak, that historical oak was it not? the one that had been brought over from England in a snuff jar? Yes, it could be the burden of death that the very young can assimilate but not bear, it could be merely that that makes the child appear so singular, so remote. And then the mother, the Mrs. being so odd at the end, bearing that new baby with such fury, being so unseemly, almost deranged.

Yes, they had not seen how any good could have come of her rage. For something had been in evidence, even to the town’s slow heart. Something desperate and angry and even afraid. She was after something nameless, the Mrs. Jackson, or had already found it. How, they couldn’t say. Where, they couldn’t imagine on this simple island where everything lay like silhouettes flat against the sky. But she said the queerest things at the end, things that had no substance. It was as if already she had one foot in the other world. And half her mind as well.

SHE SPOKE OF HORRORS. She spoke to Mrs. Morrissey of giving her heart to horrors. This was difficult. For some reason, the Mrs. had chosen Mary Morrissey to confide in although Mary had once been Catholic and drank and couldn’t be counted on to keep things straight. Had she selected someone more dependable to speak to, the town might have made more sense of it. It was the burden of a woman bearing, they supposed. She moved with hatred, moving hurriedly, heavily off through the ice, her chapped face wrapped up in scarfing. These were the only times they saw her in the last months, walking recklessly, out for the air, they supposed, but walking so quickly, as though she had a destination. But she visited no one and the boundaries of the town were the sea. Once, she had seemed quite ordinarily happy. Quite social. Enthusiastic. Kept herself up quite a bit more than the other ladies would care to. After the daughter’s death, though, the only habit she kept was churchgoing. Three times a week for prayers and twice for Sunday service. Each time she left, she shook the Reverend’s hand, her eyes averted, cast off into the umbrella stand. Except for these moments, she was never seen with her husband. He was always with the Lord.

The Reverend seemed such a loveless man. A dedicated man certainly. Wedded to God’s work. But not one to give a woman comfort. They could not imagine … but their thoughts were frivolous, base. They had been shocked when they learned the Mrs. was pregnant. At first they had believed that their feelings were those of dismay, of fear for her well-being, but then they admitted to each other that they were oddly shocked.

She was in the seventh month when she died. She had taken to bed shortly before then, receiving no visitors (had it been her request or the Reverend’s? — the question didn’t matter — they were all barred, even Mary Morrissey, who undoubtedly would have been disappointing in her information anyway, having been married three times and divorced once, and having a penchant for unpleasant generalizations). No one could recollect the Mrs. ever looking as poorly as she did lying in the coffin. They can’t understand what did it. A complication of pregnancy. They don’t inquire further. They misunderstand medical terms. Their vocabulary is not one of disease. Nor is it one of health. What they do, always, is a compromise between death and living. They do know that no doctor was called. She died at night while the Reverend was sleeping, while the little child Kate was sleeping. They also know that the fetus was not expelled. It was tight within her still when she was taken away. Snug as a core in an apple. They do not like to discuss it really. It is not that they are not curious or bereaved or amazed. It is just that they lack the proper terms. They are embarrassed by their own references. The death isn’t quite acceptable. It isn’t quite … respectable.

They shuffle past the coffin, observing. Hair puckered up in tight ringlets. Not her way. A great deal of gray. They hadn’t noticed. But very natural. With good color. Lipstick, which she seldom wore, prettily applied. A good job the man had done. Came over on the ferry with the equipment of his trade and set up in the parish house. Realistic. She looked as though she would get right up and walk among them, blinking her large mortified eyes, her hands spilling over them, making invitations and promises as she always did. She had loved to entertain, although the townspeople were not familiar with the accepting of hospitality. Once she had been giddy, nervous, eager. Twice monthly, she opened the doors of the parsonage, the finest house in town. They could depend on that like on the sun rising … the tea and cookies served in the pleasant rooms of the first floor, “strings” on the record player which they didn’t care for. The afternoons began well but ended rather badly. One of the men would make a crude comment or break a cup. Fingerprints on the clean windowpanes … The talk would die down to almost nothing. And she would seem close to tears. She was always high-strung and expensive-looking. Once she had been from the city. A flawless complexion, a charming laugh. All gone now. Emptied her essence somehow. The mysteries of undertaking. Who would want to? In the family’s footsteps.

A lovely job. Though it was not the woman they remembered. She had lost an extraordinary amount of weight. Her head was quite wasted. And her skin seemed much too smooth. After all. He must have poured the makeup on. Stomach flat as a frying pan, for the unborn child had been removed and placed in a smaller box. Such a tiny coffin, like a jewel box. She had carried the baby full and low … wasn’t that to mean a boy? The word was that it had been a boy.

“Called back,” said Mrs. Parrish, whose husband was in feeds. “Called back because the loving Lord couldn’t bear to have him leave His care, not even for man’s brief lifetime.” Her good eyes shook out tears.

The child did not even have the opportunity to be born dead. As the Reverend said, for he was a man of order and belief, even though he spoke of his own … “too imperfect even for that.” Sickly harbored. So sad. With its little untried soul.

“My wife,” the Reverend said, “had unnecessary thoughts at the end. You could tell she was sick. You could tell that something wicked had her in its grasp.”

They all tipped slightly over the coffin, their hands twitching behind their backs. A button on the deceased’s blouse was dangling, the thread all ravelly. They all had a desire to push it back in place. Such carelessness was inexcusable. All pride gone out of craftsmanship ever since the war. The blouse was brown silk, rather old, the thread of the buttons was black. Two strands of beads; one of glass, the other of clay. Like an Indian curio in a novelty shop. Almost a toy. A child’s necklace, for dress-up. Perhaps the child had been responsible for this. A lovely gesture, though rather lurid. Motherless Kate. Makes you cry. Looks like neither the poor Mrs. nor the Reverend except in bearing. Little stranger. Black wool skirt on the deceased. A full skirt, as though for dancing. A plastic belt. Red and white pumps. Newly shined. The darker polish somewhat lopping over its bounds. The Reverend had picked out the clothes. You know the way men are. No sense of a woman’s image. If the Mrs. Jackson could see herself, she’d cry. She cried for less when living. Her eyes were always brimming. Just before the end.

MARTHA’S COFFEECAKE was in a box tied on a little string to the front doorknob, the man says. His bulk is enormous. “She brought you a nice warm coffeecake this morning while you were still asleep. Did you eat it for breakfast?” Kate had not eaten it. “Yes,” she says.

Everyone is there. She looks around at them all but their eyes are settled on something on the ground. She looks at the ground too but can see nothing extraordinary. The grave is a mess. The ground is frozen and the hole is ragged. The hole looks more like an act of God than anything men would think of doing with a plan and shovels besides.

The Reverend is talking about the grave, how deep and insatiable it is, just like the barren womb. It’s never satisfied, he is saying. There are three things that are never satisfied and there are three things that are wonderful and there are three things which disquiet the earth and there are three things that go well. The child agrees, moving her small dark head as he speaks, making everyone want to cry out and rescue her from her false and awful comprehension.

But the child is thinking a harmless thought. The world’s in her head. They’ve filled up the hole and the dirt on top is soft and black. They’ve trucked it here. The child is thinking about the land behind the gas station where the Hanson twins burn tires. The ground is springy from the rubber … it’s like a trampoline. She is thinking about that is all, how nice it is.

The service is over. The child runs to her father. She rocks and dreams in her father’s side. In the sea, the buoys ring and the sun slips from the afternoon toward warmer lands. She brings back the dream she has learned. It is delicate and brutal, brief and interminable; she can call it back any time she wishes. It lasts no more than a second, being, at the least, no more than one single shouted and preposterous word and being less word than the witless weight of joy. She stands on one boot on the bluish ice and dreams.

People try to interrupt her. Women in old furs are kissing and handling her. They make a ring around her and crouch, patting and joggling her, grasping her tightly. The child suffers this for she knows that they are inevitable. She knows that they are Christian and are being saved. When they go home after church on Sunday, they change into white gowns that are like wedding gowns and sit in shadowy living rooms, watching the door, waiting for the kingdom to come.

It is snowing. Everywhere an apocalyptic absence of light. A dangerous day of God’s. The snow falls and shines in the women’s fur collars. It falls upon the bright flowers banked upon the ground. The child is holding a flower in one unmittened hand. She squeezes it again and again. It feels very odd; it feels very wrong like the soft rubber stomach of a doll. She plans to bring it home and place it in the drawer where she keeps all her treasures.

The wind howls in from the sea. The congregation would invalidate her dream if they could, but they don’t know all the facts. The child is neat and polite, distant, old-fashioned in her manner. The people are uneasy as they wait and stamp in the snow. Perhaps they are even annoyed, even though the child poses no threat to anything except what they believe to be her own maidenish future.

The mourners separate and get into their cars. They travel up to the parsonage, meeting no one else on the road. Everyone is among them. They follow the curve of the sea which is high and yellow. It is the aftermath of a weekend storm. A flock of eiders move heavily into the wind and then change course, surrendering. The sky is white and the water is yellow. The birds vanish. It is an ugly day. The child sits beside her father, her hand in his pocket. He has some coins in there and his pipe, the bowl of which is still warm.

“Look at the ruin on the wrack,” the child says, using her other hand to point at the beach. Her father smiles and the child laughs a little. It is an old joke that she has made up. She can’t keep herself from saying it even though she knows that she has exhausted its possibilities. She looks at her father gratefully for having acknowledged it once again.

They arrive at the big house. The child follows her father inside. Relatives and congregation troop in behind them. Everyone takes off his boots and places them on newspapers put down by one of the thoughtful. Later that evening, several of the ladies present will insist that their own boots have been taken and strange boots left in their place. They will claim this because they cannot get their feet into these boots. Actually this is not what has happened. Their feet have swollen in the heat of the house. There are fires in several of the fireplaces and the big stove is burning as well. There are breads and cakes baking in it and on top are pots of coffee and soup. The place looks festive with all the lamps shining and the food and the women moving officiously about. The child lingers on the stairway. She feels invisible. She makes a face. Upstairs she hears a noise.

THE ROCKING CHAIR is rocking in the draft. No one’s in it which means a death. The child thinks of her mother, upstairs, in the month before she died. The child dabbles with the thought that she is still there but it doesn’t really engage her imagination. The woman had been alone in that room for so long. What difference would it make if she was there still? The child sometimes had brought up a few toys and watched her. The woman moved around the bed, smoothing blankets. She moved about the room, breathing wearily, touching her breasts, caressing her stomach. Often, then, the child had seen the baby stretch, the head bubble up, the mother’s stomach bunch and sag grotesquely. She had seen this before. Where had she seen the likes of this before? The shuddering yawn. The reluctant host carrying continence. When? She is a child, not even eight years old.

She had watched the woman in the room. Everything was bare. The light sockets were empty. The door had been taken off its hinges and was gone. The woman spent hours at the single window that overlooked the field. She pressed her breasts against the icy glass. She pressed her lips against the glass; she gnawed with her nails on the frost, putting down words, things, pictures. From the hall, the child saw them. They made no sense. Perhaps it had been an elaborate code, done in reverse, decipherable only from outside, from the field. Perhaps it had been mirror writing like Da Vinci’s. The child had not investigated. It had been too exciting. She is just a child and she enjoys mystery and secrets and disastrous forebodings.

On the rim of the field is a snake fence. The field was always empty, one couldn’t even see the wind move across it, but once, one morning very early, the child, again standing in the hall, saw tracks curving deeply across the snow there, as though something hungry but harmless had closed its jaws over the land. The day’s ice storm obliterated them and they were never there again.

The child had imagined the woman behaving as though she were a prisoner in the house, suffering terribly and devising fruitless plans for escape. But how could this be? The woman was only her mother and she had planned to have a baby. She was merely “lying in.” Naturally this has never been a prison house. It is a home. Like any other. There are cookies in the kitchen, for instance. In a china crock poorly rendered as a bear. There are little maxims scattered throughout: HANG IT HERE AND LET ME HOLD YOUR TEABAG and there is a spice and herb chart and a welcome mat and other homely objects, patent leather bags and night cream and paregoric and mayonnaise and seed bells for the birds.

The woman had always been free to go. Yet in that month, she never left that room which she had chosen for herself, except at night. They, the child and the father, had suspected this long before it became apparent in one terrible incident. She used her house then when she thought that they were sleeping. They would hear the toilet being flushed or note that some of the food was missing. They would never hear her actually. Only the sounds of her ablutions. Secretive. Functions. In the old house were many sounds. All of them could not be heeded. At night she wandered. That had been their conclusion. She did the small housewifely chores she felt were imperative. It had no doubt been relaxing for her. And respecting her whims, they had let her be and not confronted her with themselves. But they had never been certain that she rose when they retired until the night they heard the scream. It was in the kitchen. She had been ironing and there had been an accident. She didn’t get enough sleep, she confessed. She was becoming absent-minded. By the time the Reverend reached her, she was quite in control of herself. She’d put a stick of butter on it. She had also picked up the iron from the floor. She worried about the burn in one of the tiles there more than she bemoaned the burn on her face. It had taken in a good part of her right cheek and chin. White as a flounder. The child had never seen anything so white. It went beyond sickness. It was the deep trauma of the flesh.

“I know butter doesn’t do it, but it’s all that was here.” She moved placidly, curiously out of step with her pain. She put the ironing board back in the closet and went down on her hands and knees to rub at the blackened spot on the floor. She had been dressed up. A gray suit with a little velvet collar, a silk scarf around her throat, a gay hat fastened to her hair with pins. But her hair was combed queerly, slicked down forward and flat, ending in greasy rolls. The zipper on her skirt was broken. Her nylons were torn.

She rubbed at the floor, chiding herself gently. “How silly of me. How ridiculous. I was just pressing a few things. That basket is just full of things. The lid can’t even fit. And they go back for years and years.” She patted the floor one final time in commiseration. “The ones on the very bottom look like doll clothes. Little gowns. Tiny slips. I didn’t want to move them for fear they’d break, but on top of them all the other things, in strata, you know, in histories. I had forgotten them and they’re still quite good. If I just put them in order again I’m sure there’s life in them still.” She rose awkwardly. She still held the butter in one fist. It rose grayly with her, accompanied her as she moved to the big wicker hamper.

The iron had cut into the corner of her mouth as well. A few days later it would be black — a slim, fried shoestring of fat. “I used to imagine Kate and I doing little things together,” she said abruptly, “you know, gardening, making cookies, Christmas candies. No, no,” she said, although no one had interrupted her, “I had always wanted her to be happy. And kind. I wanted us to do little things together. Like in the stories.”

“What stories?” the Reverend had asked, and his voice had been melancholy, surprisingly mild, gently respectful. His back was to her and to Kate as well. The night had been very still. They had heard the rocks rolling in the surf below, clopping like horses’ hoofs. The child had crept to the stairs, had waited on the third step. She decided to run through one of her Bible quizzes. Thinking of puzzles, the Reverend had told her, is always permissible.

A was a monarch who reigned in the East

B was a Chaldee who made a great feast C was veracious when others told lies

D was a woman heroic and wise

“The stories,” crooned the woman’s voice. “But that wasn’t her way, was it? Now her sister. Her sister used to say on a bright sunny day, she would smile up at me and say, ‘Mommy, what a good drying day!’ ” There had been silence. The child moved up another three steps.

V was a castoff and never restored

Z was a ruin with sorrow deplored.

“I was ironing,” the woman had said, “and my cheek itched. I forgot I was holding the iron. I reached up to scratch it. How else could such a thing have happened?”

The child had gone back to bed.

THE DAMAGED TILE had been replaced. There was a box of extra ones in the barn. It was brighter than the surrounding ones, but the pattern was the same. From then until the night she died, nothing of the sort had been repeated. She had stayed exclusively in the room upstairs. Nothing was done in the house except what they, the father and the child, did. Nothing was said except by them. The woman took no further interest in the household.

“We mustn’t expect too much from your mother any more,” the Reverend had told the child. “We mustn’t tire her or question what she’s doing. Think of the changes in her body, Kate. Hormones and the will of God. That’s our life, Kate.”

The child had played in the hallway, outside the woman’s unpleasant room. She would play absorbedly for a while and then announce, “Mother, I won.” And then she would say calmly, for the truth of it had never troubled her, “It doesn’t mean anything because I’m the only one playing.”

The woman had not replied. Her mind had long since stopped on the blank threshold of that door. Her mind no longer dealt with the child. It was over, over, in the past. But where before had been this loneliness? When the exile? Why had mere words corrupted her instinct for love?

The child had played in the hallway. An only child, amusing herself — her head full of fantastic things. When her dog plodded up the stairs and stepped across her, intent on visitation, functioning in some gentle memory of a contented time, the child had reproved him severely. “No, no, Race, don’t go in there.” Of course it had been just a child’s frivolity, but the woman had not replied. Deep in her musing, she had carried on in her singular fashion. Her time had been divided into three parts, like a banal clover. There had been the smoothing of the bed, the idleness at the window and last and basically, the devout involvement with her burgeoning self. For daily, the child had seen her, tending to her body, cleaning it, carefully sounding and examining it. She gave her limbs brisk slaps and pinches, moved her trembling hands and mouth over her skin, scouring herself like a bird. She had become her own physician, her own lover. The child had watched the foaming tub of her belly shiver, had watched the woman’s hands become delicate, swift, precise. The child had watched, unstartled. Always it had been the same. The difference was only in degree. The woman had traveled miles in that room. Centuries. Reaching her debacle, she had also attained herself.

Her face had been on the way to healing itself, in its own manner. The injured part glowed dusky under the sliding white cast of the sun. Like a map. Like the state of … Virginia. The child had lingered on the doorsill, tracing out astonishing creatures for play. The only thing that could kill a skoffin, she was sure she had heard her father say, was the sight of another skoffin. The woman had given little cries. Her shanks were skinny, her shoulders gaunt. Her mouth had opened into a crooked O. Her teeth lay across it like tiny fishes waiting to be hatched. The child had heard of this. Fishes born in their mothers’ mouths, fleeing back there when in danger. The woman’s mouth had closed with a moist sea sound. She had writhed briefly, she had straightened. Like a thick weed floating in the valley of the surf, her stomach plump and vulnerable as a seaweed’s pod. The child had often thought at that point, for there had always been that point in the day at the edge of her mother’s room, just before she, the child, would leave, the child had often thought that if she crept into the room, softly, so that the woman would not become aware of it, like an Indian, like a thief, clever and soundless as a hawk or a shark, that if she slipped into the room and embraced her, lightly, lightly and unbeknownst to the woman, if she encircled her waist with her own small arms as best she could and squeezed suddenly and very hard, the swollen stomach would pop like a blister of bladder wrack, it would crack like the grim Atlantic and all would be delivered and dispelled. The baby would rush to the floor in a flood. There would be a briny, shiny smell, and then the ceiling of the room and then the roof of the house would topple away leaving in the dull day, and then the winter sun, with its evaporating qualities, with its own mysteries, would drink up every drop.

But the child never entered the room. Not even cleverly. Not even in stealth. She went outside. She skated a little. She returned, she asked her father for a candy. The woman and the room were forgotten for a while. After all, what could be done? She was a prisoner in waiting, and quite mad.

THE LONG BLUE LIPS, the wave of what had been, draw back. The child is at the bottom of the stairs. There is no one in the room any more. She has no mother. She is in a house of mourners. They are all eating but someone comes out of their number and she feels her coat being taken off. She sits down and her boots are unbuckled and then they are gone too. She has loafers on, a white penny in each one. An older girl in school had approached her one recess. A penny means you’re single and you’re looking, the girl had said. And a white penny means you’re a poor dope because they’re from Canada and not worth a thing.

Kate doesn’t care. How can it matter? All of her dreams are satisfied. The perils of childhood mean nothing to her. She studies her loafers, but someone guides her gently to her feet and into the kitchen. Someone ladles soup into a bowl for her. “Give the child more than that,” Megan Jones orders. Kate looks up. She shudders. The room vanishes. Only the looming woman remains. An infant hangs from her hip, the tiny feet webbed like a wind-bird’s, moving, making up time. Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock, seven. Then six o’clock, five o’clock, four. Her mother shakes it but it goes on unperturbed through the bottom of its days. It is her mother, lovingly nourishing her, making sure she gets enough to eat. Kate’s hands flail into the soup. She puts it down quickly and her mother disappears. There is simply a neighbor there, smiling and only slightly known, a dish towel bobbing at her side. “Megan!” a voice scolds, “you’ve filled it too high. Here you are, God love you.” An arm comes out of the voice and pours out a bit of the soup into a cup with a handle. A cracker is dropped into it and bobs merrily. The child walks uncertainly into the dining room, searching for her father.

“D’you notice how much Megan Jones resembles the poor Mrs.,” the civil servant, Bolt whispered.

“It happened all at once,” his wife agreed. “It seems there’s always one to give you a start.”

Kate is looking for her father.

“Eternity is forever the glimpse of extirpation in the eye of …”

“Kate,” an elderly woman grasps her arm weakly. Her touch does not even spill the soup. It is vegetable, homemade. The thick pasta letters tack heavily through the red and green. An M floats up in three-dimension. “Kate,” the old woman repeats. Her hand slips to the child’s thumb and waggles it forgetfully. “We have a parakeet, you know. We wish you’d come over and see him. What a little fellow! He’ll be your friend. He’ll take a seed from your lips.”

The thought makes Kate feel sickish. Her eyes rise from the soup, knock against the woman’s smile which is peculiar, her narrow teeth seeming to alternate with another substance entirely, like grout between tile, and settles on the mirror reflecting the food-burdened table. She sees the pink jellied packing of a ham tremble as the woman who looks like her mother sets down a dish of pickles. The sound that it makes as it comes in contact with the platter comes across the room much too late. THLOK.

“Ahhhh,” someone says. “It was a beautiful, beautiful service.”

In the eye of what the child wondered. Ex tir pation in the eye of who?

“He’ll cheer you up,” the old woman was saying. “The best medicine. We got him after they did that operation on John. They hung those bags on him and we both thought we’d die of shame but that budgie’s brought us around. He’s made us smile again.”

The people move in a line around the table, gathering food, choosing and chewing, eating being styptic, a check on the world. It reminded the child of the way they had filed past the coffin. The old woman selects a stumpy piece of celery and spectacularly fits the entire thing in her mouth. Kate slips away but is apprehended almost immediately by a short sad man. Perhaps he has had a little too much to drink but Kate thinks he smells very good. He smells of bread rising. He smells of the water bottled behind the peg they put in the lobster’s claw. Kate has forty-one such pegs in a leather marble bag. She has eaten forty-one lobsters in her life. It seems impossible. Someone must have assisted her. Nevertheless she has the pegs. She has enjoyed them all but her enjoyment is tainted with uncertainty. They are no longer moving through the sea.

“Eat,” the man says morosely. “Eat, now.” He detains her with one hand while, with the other, he fills a plate for her. The hand wrapped around the child’s fingers is cold. It is like a piece of gear. It is nothing personal. It belongs to his job, to his big white boat, to the sea. Somewhere Kate has put down her cup of soup. She sees it close beside her on the tablecloth. She picks it up. Underneath it is a part of a fingernail. Someone’s nervousness. She puts the cup over it again. The man forks food rapidly on a plate. Ham, meat loaf, macaroni, chutney, carrots, fried tomatoes, potato chips, rolls, orange cheese, white butter. The plate is jumbled high with food. There is a ball of stuffing on the very top but there is nothing visible that has been stuffed. There is no turkey. No duck. Suddenly the child’s throat aches uncontrollably. She wants to cry. There is stuffing but no turkey. It is a ball of dirt on top of everything.

She sees her father and hurries over to him. The ache in her throat stops. She sits close to him, resting her head against his arm.

“Whose eyes, Daddy? Whose eyes were you talking about?”

“What, sweet?” His hair is an early and unearthly white. The child had always remembered it being very white and beautiful, folding gently back across the tops of his ears to lie thick and low upon his neck. His fingers were long, the nails slightly dusky, like a woman’s.

“You were talking about eyes. They were very important.”

“Your eyes are the only ones that are important.” He kisses the top of her head. “It’s only what you see that matters to me.…”

Jewel, the man who passed the plate on Sunday, said kindly. “You have beautiful eyes, Kate. Dark hair, blue eyes. You’re going to be beautiful, Kate.”

Embarrassed, she picks an object from her plate and vaguely puts it in her mouth. It is creamy and tastes terrible. She tries to swallow it but it lingers on her tongue. Like the communion bread, she cannot digest it. She has helped her father cut up the latter on Sunday mornings. Tiny, crustless cubes. It is simple grocery fare, slightly stale. Should it not be in the shape of a man? Should it not have the outline of defeat? The suspension of the world must be strong. The child can achieve all worlds but this one. She swallows miserably through the service. Her mother used to give her a mint. She cannot swallow fast enough. There is a limit. The pulp of the bread cube remains behind, girding her teeth, numbing her. Now, this night, she picks up her napkin and grimly excises the thing that is its artifact. It is a struggle. It resists. She knows she has not been altogether successful. She remembers her mother saying, Chew chew chew, you can’t be too cautious. It is a sauced tiny onion. No one has noticed. She looks at her father. He is not eating anything. She shoves the plate quickly and disgustedly beneath her chair.

Kate’s eyes. She is bewildered. Glimpse of ex tri cation in my eyes. “I think I’ll go feed Race now,” she says.

She makes her way through the mourners, wriggling past their legs. A man’s voice rises thinly in the air … “dress up britches like a small hotel …” The people were bumping together and breaking apart. They swung around Kate as she walked to the kitchen. “I read in a magazine where two chinchillas will make you a wealthy man. Two of them. Can raise thousands of dollars of them right in your own bedroom.” The voice was happy with an innocent greed. The child plunges through them. Once, her head is caught for a strange moment between two woolen hips. “Ahhhh, little darling.” Faces lower and low. She is hugged and petted. Kate suddenly feels like a bride. Her fingers smell of gardenias. Her mother had told her sister about blood. Kate had overheard it. She, Kate, will never bleed. This is her wedding day.

A BRIDE IN THE KITCHEN, opening a can of dog food. She picks up a knife and a sack of meal. One door of the kitchen leads outside. She opens this and tramps through the snow around the back of the house to the bulkhead that leads into the cellar. The sky rests on top of her head. Everything is still. The snowflakes falling are very tired and small. Months ago, after the first big freeze, Kate had seen the great geese flying past the moon every night. She had heard their honking, though they were miles high. Now everything is still. The ice is thick on the metal fastenings of the bulkhead doors. If she puts her tongue to them, she’ll be mute forever. They have the power of witches. When the doors give, there is a pleasant thump as the snow slides to the ground and she steps into a warm darkness. She holds the sack in front of her to feel the walls. She guides herself by the beat of the dog’s tail upon her legs. She turns on the light. Race writhes happily before her, picking up a ball, a shoe, a coat hanger, reeling around and around.

“You’re nutty,” she says, putting down the food. Then she freezes, turns slowly around, gritting her teeth and staring ferociously. Race’s mouth flaps shut. He crouches, putting his muzzle between his paws, waving his haunches in the air. “Argggggghhhh,” Kate growls, ponderously raising her arms, curling her fingers into claws. “Brrrrrhharrr.” She stalks toward him, hung with sudden menace and ghastly intent, then shifts her direction slightly and begins to close in on him from the side. The dog’s eyes hang fast to the place where she had been but his flanks tense, his tail swings back and forth with a lazy delirium.

The child inches toward him, wheezing and babbling, and the dog’s brandy eyes flickered sly and eager now as he tried to keep her in his sight. He leaps, swiveling in mid-air, facing her directly again, his head cocked to one side, his hindquarters swinging artfully. He wraps his forepaws around her, panting and whimpering with delight, and Kate now rubs his head, digs softly at the bone above his eyes, the cartilaginous buckle of his beloved skull.

“What’s your opinion, Race? What do you say?” He sits politely before the dish as she mashes the meal and the canned meat together. Then he drops his head and nudges the food, trying to eat around the meal. Kate walks to the bulkhead steps. Race has a piece of meat bulging in his cheek and when he sees her leaving, he stops chewing. “You be a good boy now.” She waves. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He opens his mouth and the meat falls drearily into the dish. His gaze is hurt and accusing. He walks swiftly to the blanket and curls up upon it.

Kate circles the house and enters the front door. Once again, the stairwell to the second floor is before her. Her feet are wet. She has ruined her shoes. She hears someone moving about. A light goes on. It is a bare light bulb, hanging from the ceiling. It bounces a little from the pull that awakened it. Her cousin stands beneath it. She smiles up at him. While she is smiling, the bulb blows out with a slight whistle.

TWO COUSINS are sitting on a bed. The house is noisy and upstairs it is cold. The oldest is a boy and he is fourteen. The child is a girl, seven and one-quarter years old as she says, and her mother has just been buried a few hours before. The boy has very dark blue hair like someone in a comic book and is smoking a cigarette.

“I bet you’re not supposed to do that,” Kate says. “I bet your daddy would give you what for if he saw that.” She goes to her desk and takes out a small plastic basketball that splits in two. She opens it and brushes the ashes out of his hand where he has tapped them. “You’re smelling up my room but that’s all right. I like it. I don’t care.”

“You’re wet,” the boy says. “You’ve been running around with no coat and you’re going to get pneumonia.” After he says this, he wishes that he hadn’t. He does not want his little cousin, whom he is meeting for the first time, to think she is going to get sick and die. He is a nervous, worried boy, softly handsome. His parents run a small drugstore in the next state. It’s all they have. The entire family works there, the boy coming in after school. It is necessary that they like and respect their patrons, who steal lipstick and aspirin and knock over their Coca-Cola glasses. The boy is never allowed to do anything. He imagines himself far away, even now, in a foreign capital, in a night club. He’s read in old magazines that there are rooms of degenerate art in Europe, houses where evil and sexual things are displayed. He’d like to get into one of those rooms. Just once. But they were closed down, before he was born. He is dying to go to one of those rooms where songs by a man named Weill are played. At the same time, he realizes that his information is dated. He would do anything if someone could tell him where to find a room of degenerate art.

“I’ll never get pneumonia,” the girl says. “I’ll probably never ever get sick. There are some people who never get sick and others who never get well.”

The boy draws and draws on his cigarette until there is an ash almost two inches long. He dumps it into the plastic basketball. “Where’d you get this?”

“There was chocolate in it. Little chocolate basketballs wrapped in foil. I ate them all.”

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says quickly. “It’s very sad and I’m sorry.”

The child scratches her throat and looks out the window. “Well,” she says, “you certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. You don’t even live around here.” She wonders how long people will be talking about this. She sighs.

“No,” he says, surprised.

“Your hair is beautiful. I wish I had blue hair. It’s the color that a storm is, did you know that?”

“I wash it a lot,” the boy says. The child is sitting on the edge of the bed, her bare legs swinging beneath her short dark dress. She swings them faster and faster. The hem of the dress is wet and wrinkled.

“Well, it’s very nice. It’s unusual.” The child enjoys being here with her cousin. She is glad that everyone is downstairs and that no one knows where she is or is bothering her. She likes having him sit on her bed, smoking and looking around at all her things. When her father comes up, perhaps they will all have a cup of cocoa together. She wants to be a good conversationalist. “Do you ski?” she asks politely.

“I ski pretty well.” The child’s face is provocative and he feels harried. He feels that something is being expected of him. He lights another cigarette.

“I have a sled,” the child says vaguely, “but I have never skied. Daddy doesn’t ski.”

The boy is perplexed. He tries to keep himself very still but it is as though he has something live and hasty buttoned up within his clothes. He wonders if he will get meningitis or cancer or become deranged because of his thoughts and his constant manipulation of himself.

“I want to show you something,” the child says. “I want to show you my things.” She goes to her desk and removes an entire drawer, setting it between them on the bed.

“Look. I have seventy-six wilderness cards from Shredded Wheat. All different. I have a hundred Dixie-cup tops with the pictures of movie stars. All different. I have the pictures of eight football players that can only be seen through a special red magnifying glass. Four of them are members of the Crimson Tide, a name which I think is very pretty. The Crimson Tide is all I care about. I’d give the other four cards away.”

In the upper corner of one of the Wilderness cards is a deer. On the bottom is an Indian. When one is moving through unknown country, the card instructs, it is wise to make small signs which will guide you back yet which will not inform possible enemies of your presence. Break the branch of a certain tree. Move a rock slightly so that moss will be visible. Make marks in streams. Beware of marked paths.

There were flowers and dirt in an envelope, a bridle bit, a photo of his uncle, her father, as a young man, cut out precisely, like a paper doll. There was a piece of flannel shirt, a magnetic plastic lady in a bathtub. It was a new currency, giving access to a ruined land. There was a cast-iron colt, his hoof broken off.

“You can’t fix them,” the child sighs. “It’s gone forever. It’s like a real horse when he breaks his leg.” She picks up a common pin. “This is supposed to be lucky. I found it honestly, on the ground. Lots of people pick up pins in department stores where they’re all over the place. They go into dressing rooms where there are hundreds of pins. If you believe in pins I’ll give it to you and it will probably bring you luck. It can’t bring me luck because I don’t believe in it. Believing in pins would mix up the whole religion.”

The boy accepts the pin and sticks it in the lapel of his suit. In six more years, he will be heavy in the face and hips. It runs in the family. His mother is the dead woman’s sister. In six years he will be perfectly synchronized with his life. At this moment, he does not realize this, but it will happen. Now he thinks of himself as a French gangster. He blows smoke out between his teeth in a fragile stream.

The child replaces the drawer in the desk. “There is one more thing,” she whispers. “There is the greatest thing.”

THE DOOR BENEATH HER BED has been there forever and only her father knows about it. Often, in the day, in a certain white and winter light, it glows like bronze, it shines for the child like the bell of an old cornet. It lies flush against the floor, the latch on that side having been removed or never existing; the latch and lock that is visible massive and cold to the touch, even on the warmest day. There’s not a scratch on it. It’s never been scraped with a key.

The child believes that her life is behind the door. She believes that the door will become lighter as she grows until just before she dies it will have no more weight or substance to it than a scrap of paper. She’ll be able to fall right through it. She watches it every day and it never changes.

“Look,” she says, and takes her cousin’s hand. He kneels, pressing his cheek against the wide floor boards, his ink-black dungaree-blue, thick and damming hair spilling across the child’s foot. He looks beneath the bed. He is vicious, innocent, ordinary. The child’s breath sprinkles on his neck. He bats his eyelids furiously. His whole face twitches and jumps.

“What’s the matter?” the child asks worriedly. Perhaps she is not supposed to show the door to anyone. Perhaps she shouldn’t because it will give them fits. She takes tiny inconclusive steps to and fro and tugs on her hands. Her cousin looks like a picture she had seen once in a book about the Civil War. She begins to pat his hair.

The boy’s eyes fly open and he stands up and sits on the bed again.

“I thought you were ill,” the little girl says.

“There’s a door under your bed,” he says tentatively. The child looks at him without speaking, not knowing quite what to think of his response. “Whose door?” he asks. “Where does it belong?”

“It belongs under there. It was never any place else.”

“Knock, knock,” he says. The child is silent. “What’s behind it? Lash La Rue? Milky Ways?”

“It’s me,” she says at last. “It’s Katey that’s behind that door.” She pulls the bedspread back into place.

“Don’t you think you’d better get her out?” The boy cannot imagine what he is talking about. He moves his mouth in the shape of a smile but his dry lips snag on his teeth.

The child begins to chew on her braids.

The parsonage is on the coast. On three sides is a large dead yard, empty even of the smallest bush. The front of the house faces a cliff of shining rock and purple weeds and then there is the sea. Everything is very still. Snow falls. Downstairs, the mourners mutter softly to each other. There is a clink of silverware, the sound of water running.

Outside, an engine coughs and dies. It turns over again, catches, hums, drops into gear. The tires thud softly across the snow. The boy says,

“I have something nice to show you too. It’s something special. Do you want to see it?”

“Yes.” The child’s wrists are extraordinarily narrow, the bones huge and painful. It is as though there are two rocks jammed beneath the skin. “Sure,” she says.

He leans back slightly and unzips his fly, working his penis out of his clammy shorts without yet exposing it. He takes his cousin’s hand and presses it down. The child has curled her fingers and they knock uncertainly around his crotch and then open and grip. She does not look at him but instead concentrates upon her hand, sunk into his trousers, curved around something soft and feverish.

The boy rolls himself back further on the bed and draws himself out. It’s raw and narrow. An eye blinks moistly. The hairs are short, lighter in color than the hair of his head.

The child shakes her head. A boy in school has a mastoid the size of a walnut behind his ear. An old woman in church has wattles like a turkey and there is a man who has no mouth. Each day he wears a fresh red white and blue handkerchief over his face. The child has seen pictures of terrible things. The Bible has told her of terrible things she cannot even picture.

“Will they be able to take it off in the hospital?” She decides that she will ask her cousin questions and see what he has to say. Then she will compare his answers with what she already knows.

“No, no, it’s good. It’s what men have.” He moves her fingers around it. “It’s for you to play with.”

The child strokes it carefully. It is very warm and muscled. Like a fish fillet. There seems to be something softly crackling beneath the skin.

“Does it hurt if you fall?” She saw him becoming impaled by it with the slightest stumble, quivering like a jackknife on the floor. “Does it get in your way?”

“Yes,” the boy says. “All the time. This is the way you show you love someone,” he tells her.

The child does not want to hurt her cousin’s feelings. She smiles.

The snow is turning to sleet. It falls like broken glass. He moves his feet up onto the bed and settles the little girl beside him. She is thinking of asking him for a hank of his beautiful hair.

On the floor is a pink and white package of Dentyne gum. The child knows an excellent trick. She can take one of the smaller wrappers inside the package and fold it two times. It spells

DIE CHUM

which she thinks is terrific. She wants to show her cousin this, but her father has disapproved of the trick and so she pretends that she has forgotten it.

Her cousin is saying something to her. His voice is slow and turgid, the words coming out as though they are things, eating their way through milk.

She does not want to be discourteous but she is bored and she twists away from the boy’s grasp.

AN IMPALPABLE SUBSTANCE, at the same time being very dense; the child unconceived. She often worried about never being born. It was idleness, she knew. For here she was. Her name was Kate.

If she had not been born, her father never would have realized that he did not have her to love. She would have known though, small gelatinous thing rotting in a womb the other side of the stars. She, floating in a cold and bloodless place, would have known that she had been the none end result of a stroke sterile and unfinished. She would have known, even though she would have been more dead than her mother was now, that her nothingness had left no absence in her father’s heart.

They had been living together alone for more than a month, the little girl and her father. Her hair was carelessly braided. There was a smudge of supper still around her mouth. The house was huge but they did almost all their living in two rooms, as they had been in the habit of doing even before the wife and mother passed away. The room that they are in now is warm. There is a fire but it is a noisy one. The kindling is fir and it snaps and cracks loudly until it is wasted and the good oak logs begin to burn. Outside, the child can hear the black wreath on the door, twisting on its nail in the wind. Neither speaks. The remnants of their supper is on the hearth. Cocoa and swordfish, the last of the summer’s frozen catch. Downstairs, in the cellar, behind a bench of potted sleeping chrysanthemums, behind the jars of jelly and green tomatoes, leans an oil painting, delivered just that morning by several members of the congregation.

The child had answered the door. She was barefoot, wearing a woolen bathrobe. Behind her the house was dark. The painting was wrapped in brown paper and part of the paper was dark from the falling snow. It was too large for the child to lift. They brought it inside to the kitchen. The child offered them tea. No one unwrapped the painting. The Reverend did not appear. They drank tea and looked around the bare kitchen. On the wall was a calendar but it’s wildly inaccurate — a dated car journeying through a constant August, advertising a brand of tires that is no longer sold.

Before the mother died, things were more … under control, more up to date. The rooms had furniture, clean slipcovers, rugs. In the cupboards were candles and cans of food. The children were sent off to school with thermoses of soup. A piece of fruit. A slice of meat. Raw vegetables. Healthful, balanced meals. There were always flowers on the table. Even in the winter, there were paper arrangements. There was a smell of wax and washing and cooking. Of life being mildly but thoroughly employed.

But now … the house is so empty. Everything has been sold or given away. The members of the congregation comment on this without coming to any decision. There are leaves in the hallway, a box on the floor filled with summer dresses, cracks in the plaster and windowpanes. Some purpose has been forgotten. Some simple lesson and requirement of family life has been found unnecessary and not resumed. The rooms are being abandoned, their services discontinued. There’s no telling how long this has been going on. It was this way before the funeral. The day of the funeral, when the women of the church arrived to fix the salads, set up the folding chairs, when the men came to remove the remains, they discovered that there was a great deal to do. They freshened things up as best as they were able. It was a house, it was clear, where someone had been sick for a very long time. And yet, of the Mrs. there was little trace. Two rooms, right off the kitchen, there was a woman’s place it seemed, a private place. The walls pale yellow, birds and fruit carved into the mantel, a canopied bed. But the comforter was flung back to expose the mattress ticking. Rust and water marks. An ant cake in the corner. A sense of departure, dismissal …

As for the other rooms, there seemed no plans for their use. Most are completely empty, the others almost so. One enormous sunroom on the third floor, spreading out above the sea, has a few of the child’s toys in it, a record player, a stack of albums. They would look through them briefly. Classical music. Churchly music they supposed. And there was the child’s room. They didn’t enter that. There was a faded stencil of tiny animals on the door. The door was closed. They had a strong sense of what was right. There are three bathrooms. One has a tub filled with damp clothes and towels. Another has a tub filled to the brim with water. Cold. There is a fat creamy bar of soap in the dish. A bumpy rubber mat to keep a bather from a slip and a nasty fall. A box of powder on the commode top. Perhaps the Mrs. had drawn herself a bath, poor thing, just before she passed away. They don’t blame the Reverend for wanting to keep it up, if indeed it’s so. Perhaps it’s just a gummy drain. They remember in Mr. Smiley’s salt-box, in the dining room, the table’s still set as it was on the night fifty years before when the Smileys Sr. failed to return for dinner and failed ever to return again, having been crushed when a haywagon overturned on them. It was how young Smiley showed his due to them. They can understand that.

The third bathroom seems functional enough. Shaving brush. Bubbles of toothpaste in the sink. They didn’t go in. No one had the need to.

UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES they had examined the house as best they could. It had been a fine house. Once everyone had wanted to live in it. That wasn’t so long ago. Now it was as dark and strange to them as an idea of Europe. They had to walk through it again to see what the problem was.

The child stood in the kitchen eating dry cereal from a bowl. She looked feverish and thoughtful. The oil painting was leaning against the wall. It slipped flat onto the floor without a sound. Someone picked it up and set it on the table. The child showed no interest in the painting. She was really not a very curious child, they thought. Children were supposed to be curious and shy. She ate Cheerios, picking out the perfect O’s. They made themselves some more tea. Outside the kitchen window was a sparrow strangled in the end coils of the clothesline. It could have just happened or it could have happened in the last month. No one mentioned it. They didn’t want to bring it to the attention of the child. She was really not a very observant child, they thought. The wind blew in from the sea but the bird didn’t move. Icicles sparkled on its breast like spurs.

“I have a cold,” the child said, “and won’t be going to school for a week. I have all my books at home and I also have books from the library. They’re overdue. I have an excellent one called The Lore of the Horse. One white foot, buy a horse, two white feet, try a horse, three white feet, look well about him, four white feet do without him. Daddy doesn’t ride. If he did it would be wonderful. We could employ ferries and planes when necessary and ride right around the world. I know everything about horses. Horses know everything about us. You can tell the future by reading the hairs in a horse’s mane. Of course you shouldn’t do that.”

“I’d bet you’d like to run off to the circus and be a bareback rider,” Morgan, the carpenter, said. His wife looked at him and rattled her teacup. “Little girls do not run off to the circus,” she said. “Only little boys do.”

“Well, where do they get their girls from then,” he said loudly, not looking at her but at his neighbor, the man who sharpened blades.

“I have seen a circus only once in my time,” the man who sharpened blades of all sorts said. “And it was not an astounding thing as they would like to have you believe. For example, the bareback rider, who, in this case happened to be a young man (he said this sadly to Mr. Morgan), a heavy-set fellow of another extraction, missed. He did not miss the first time or the third time, but in the middle of his act, he made a poor judgment and did not come in contact with the horse at all. Of course this is what everyone remembered. Had he done his job as he was supposed to, no one would have thought about him further.”

“Isn’t that the way, though,” someone said.

“Why should I run off anywhere?” the child said.

“He didn’t mean that, dear,” Mrs. Morgan said. “You want to stay right here for now and take care of your father.”

“Daddy cares for me beautifully,” the child said, “and I care for him.”

The house was still. There was not even the sound of a clock. Then there was a dry scrabbling at the door and the child got up and let in her dog. The hair beneath the dog’s chin was gray. The child went to the refrigerator and made a sandwich which she fed to the dog. “We have everything pretty much in order now,” she said. “Though we thank you very much and though they were delicious, we won’t be needing any of your casseroles in the future. Those noodles and meatballs that one of you dropped off Tuesday night were really delicious. We added a little wine and we ate it all right up.”

“Wine?” Bettencourt, the fisherman, said the word so angrily that it seemed to all present that he had cursed. He still wore his crude gloves, stained with grease and with a hole in each thumb. His lips were blue, even in the summer, from working on the water and his eyes were half shut.

“A full red wine is always a great help in cooking,” the child said.

“I had no idea your father partook,” one of the ladies said.

“I don’t think wine is good for you, dear,” another lady said, venturing to touch the child’s shaggy bangs. Each felt giddy with a liberty they couldn’t understand. The Reverend didn’t seem to be home. They had almost forgotten the painting, the solemn, thoughtful reason for their visit. Hadn’t the sea always seemed safer than this house? Wasn’t there something about this house that was as difficult to discover as the nests of the sea birds? They glanced around it stubbornly, all but a few ignoring the child. Dirt in the potato bin; no potatoes. Up on the sill, a big seed of something, its root end hanging over a dry glass. Another relic of the mother. Nothing visible. Why were they so curious and confused? Two women left the room and softly padded up the stairs. The child heard them. She put more water on to boil. She slipped about, like an unpunished, untethered pet, across the floor boards, creaking and familiar and all her own. She watched the women go up the stairs.

“It’s bad for anyone’s kidneys, wine,” Bettencourt said.

“That’s only the very good wine,” the child said, “with the stones, the silt, on the bottom. And that’s only if you drink that part, the bottom of it. We haven’t the means to buy very good wine, so I’m sure we’re quite safe.”

“Oh my dear,” the lady said, still stroking the child’s bangs, “where do you hear such things?”

“Well, Daddy tells me everything of course. He tells me the things I should know and the things I shouldn’t know. And he tells me which is which. As God says, ‘I set before you the way of life and the way of death.’ That’s in Jeremiah. And Daddy has done that for me.”

“You’re a lucky little girl,” Morgan said boisterously. “And you’re just a little girl certainly but soon you’ll be all grown up and what will you be?” He sucked on his teacup, found it was empty, swallowed, regardless, twice. “What will you want to be then, eh?”

“The child has a cold,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Don’t push.”

The child looked out the window, past the sparrow, along the rock ledge that plunged into the sea. Beneath the surface were the fishes and beneath them, caves, and beneath the caves were sightless, creeping creatures, wailing with a whale’s song from everlasting starvation and beneath the creatures was the bottom of the earth and below that, the wealth and terror of everything. The child chewed on her hands. The seaweed on the ledges was delicate as lace, sheathed in ice and shining in the sunlight. There was dead ice and living ice, her father had told her. One was white and one was blue. Everything was living and dead together. There was always some part of you that was dead. There was always some part of you that didn’t need anything and couldn’t help a living soul.

“Well, I just couldn’t know what you mean by that,” she said. “I am what I am. Next Tuesday morning we’re getting up before the sun and we’ll spend the next three days singing and talking to all those people off of Marlsport, on those islands. We did the same last year, if you remember. Father and I were gone three days. It was a very rewarding experience. Everyone got together and baked Daddy a cake in the shape of a Bible open to the Psalms. It was the largest cake I’d ever seen. I don’t know where they could have got the pans. It was white with red icing. It was close to Valentine’s Day that year and Daddy cut me a big piece of cake and served me first and said, ‘This is for my one and only Valentine.’ ”

They catch each other’s eyes above the child. The two women who have left the kitchen can be heard as they move about through the empty rooms. Peter gets up abruptly from his stool by the stove. Peter farms a little. A luckless man, with allergies, but vain. He gives the child a little pat and then goes to a closet, opens it. Turns away. Pushes on a light. Then walks with a quick step through the house. Some present murmur. They feel like a mob. They feel slightly dangerous to themselves. The women think of a vast sale, the sale of the century, where fantastic bargains are offered. The men are ruttish, warm. They think how long the nights are, how cold; how little warmth familiarity brings. They are in this house at last. Though they have been guests here before, it was not the same. They would like to take something from here. What? They want to steal something from this place, anything, something trivial. Who knows? They want to push this child away, put her in her place, this silly simple child who makes them feel so rancorous. Nothing is here for their taking. This makes Bettencourt nervous, almost sick. He has always had this problem.

BETTENCOURT HAS TO THIEVE A LITTLE, otherwise he feels that he himself has been robbed. Each year, late in the spring, he and his wife drive down to Boston for two days. It is their anniversary. Each year they stay at the Parker House. He steals dinner rolls, glasses. The last time he took $1.85 from the pay radio in their room. Once, on the trip home, on the new highway snaking around the city, a station wagon in front of them lost a suitcase from its luggage rack. The rope securing it to the roof broke and a dimity-covered suitcase sailed across the highway. It landed in Bettencourt’s lane, exploding on contact into a bright flower of ladies’ weaknesses, clothes, hats, little purses and boxes and bottles. Bettencourt was a slow driver. He witnessed this slowly. He braked to a stop beside the broken suitcase. The station wagon backed up. Bettencourt’s ready help was much appreciated. The occupants of the station wagon were a man and two shiny blond women just off the ferry at Woods Hole. Bettencourt was fearless and shambling quick. His wife screamed for his safety as the cars whistled past. Everything was snatched from the asphalt and thrown in the back seat of the wagon amidst many regrets and wild thanks from the women. The rest of the trip was without incident for Bettencourt. His wife sat in the back seat. When they crossed the border into Maine, she sang all the verses of the Maine Stein Song. She had been doing this all her life, every time they came back from Boston, even though she had never gone to the university. Bettencourt never sang along. In this particular case, he drove with a pair of panties in his pocket. They were the color of peaches. On the left hip of them was Tuesday in pretty scroll-sewn letters. The thought that all the days of the week were represented in such a way made him gloomy and dissatisfied. The panties, he thought, were of silk. There wasn’t enough to them to cover his wife’s elbow. He had them still, and he enjoyed having them, even though he didn’t look at them very often.

Now Bettencourt is in the Reverend’s house. It is all he can do to keep from scowling at the child. She seems both burden and obstruction. She seems to block something in his mind. Like the black water, he works every day, setting and pulling his traps and nets, there is something into which he cannot look. She stands by the window, regarding them all absently, patting her dog. She is tightly cinched into her bathrobe. The cord of it belonged to some other garment and was too long. She had wrapped it around herself twice.

Bettencourt’s hands had been toying with a paper envelope of pills that were lying on the table. He slides them in his glove. They are pills for the dog, obtained from a veterinarian. The dog has ulcers in his ears and the howling of the wind here bothers him. They are for the dog’s pain. Bettencourt does not know this. He would not plan to swallow the pills anyway. He wants merely to remove something from this house. Now he has done so. But he knows that he has been duped. The child sees the pills disappear. Life is so artless, is it not? There is so much that meets the eye?

The child said, “On Saturday nights Daddy and I dance upstairs. It’s always chilly in that room. Our breath stays in that room as long as we do. The snow can fall right into that room when the wind is right. On Fridays we sometimes dance too. And those nights he gives me my bath. We’re not in need of anything that I can think of.” She looked at the painting all wrapped up. “You really shouldn’t have,” she said, “and I hope this isn’t perishable, for we haven’t the room for it. Perhaps you could take it back until another time …”

The men and women are scattered throughout the house, walking, rattling doorknobs. They still wear their heavy outdoor coats. Their boots make wallowing tracks in the floor’s dust. They look through the windows at the bright, starved landscape. The house seems abandoned; it simply cannot be lived in. Whatever they are searching for has already been taken.

And behind them is the child’s voice. She had not followed them but she has such a pervasive, inhibiting quality that they feel she is at their backs. They have seen her everywhere. Grocery, graveyard, boat basin, tumbled duck-blind. She is that part of their days that they cannot come to terms with. She is that part of themselves that they cannot recognize. In springs past, they have watched her, trotting a horse through the crumbling frost-heaved streets of the town and into the sea. She wore gray jodhpurs crusted with sea water and the animal’s sweat. She wore a small stern blouse, buttoned tightly at the throat and wrists. They heard her high clear voice at dawn and dusk and holidays, bringing the horse to a gallop. Now the horse is dead too. A big clay-colored horse with a black mane and no name. Its legs got thick as railroad ties and it cried blood-stained tears before it died. The child cries herself, even now, when she speaks of the horse. They remember the day the carcass was burned, behind the owner’s barn. It smoked and smoked, a hopeless blue. They remember her walking through the town, fumbling at the wide hips of her jodhpurs, trembling, the tears springing from her eyes. The breeches were second hand, brittle, about to tear. They remember her as she walked stiffly past their houses, her hair white with dusty grain, and then began to trot, to canter, changing leads, loping miserably in her shined boots beneath the smoking sky.

GALLOPING HORSELESS TOWARD HER LIFE, which is up past the hill, in the parsonage, in the winding halls, in the rooms gone to storage, in this silence, this requirement, this breeding place of dreams …

They hear the child’s voice.

“I thank you for dropping by, but I’m afraid if you stay much longer, you’ll all be sure to come down with my cold.”

“Yes, we must be going,” someone said. “It’s almost lunch-time. What do you have for lunch, dear?” They found it so tedious speaking with a child.

“Daddy and I often don’t have lunch,” the child said. “We try to use that time more constructively. We speak of things and such.”

Everyone straggled back into the kitchen. They didn’t consider that they had actually left it. What right would they have to do so? What reason would they have given? And yet they were tired and troubled as though they had returned from a long and fruitless journey.

“Well now,” Mrs. Morgan began, coughing slightly, unnecessarily. Her words had been chosen and approved by the group. It was disappointing to her that it was merely the child she must address, but it seemed apparent that the Reverend was not home. And yet, had he not been present in one of the rooms they passed by? Had he not simply ignored them, making no attempt to restrain them? Had he not been there, oblivious to their petty acts of trespass?

And was not this child, trapped in her awkward childhood, feeding in his cold gaze even at the moment?

“I’m sure we would all like your father to be present for this,” Mrs. Morgan began. The child was doing an odd and formal dance, touching her heel with her toe. She was not paying attention. And the men were in the hallway, eager to be off, their stomachs growling.

Mrs. Morgan said, “It’s for both of you, of course, but we would like your father to be here for the moment of its unveiling.”

“But he’s not here now,” the child said sensibly. “He’s resting and thinking. I can understand that perfectly, can’t you? I understand everything he thinks. Later today, the two of us will open this together. I wouldn’t care to see it by myself. Father and I will look at it together, at the same time. I know that would be best. I hope this isn’t valuable. I mean, I hope you didn’t spend a lot of money on this. True value lies in self-knowledge. All else is rust and rot. You must excuse me now. When you leave, please don’t slam the door because then it won’t catch. I have a fever. When you have a fever you should get ten or twelve hours of sleep a day. I haven’t begun any of them yet.”

She pirouetted around the corner. Mrs. Morgan pursued her appointed course doggedly. “You’re a little young now, dear, but we’re sure as you grow older, you’ll see the pricelessness of this portrait. And we were so happy to be able to do it. Though the price was considerable, for we dealt with no sign painter, we dealt with a real artist, an artistic, creative person. And how could the price be too great in this case? For in its way, this will live right along with you. We’re sure you will dwell on this portrait often. And may your hearts be glad! Do not sorrow any more!”

And here she dropped her voice for there had been disagreement among the congregation whether this should be said. “Who knows the joys of heaven? I wouldn’t dream of saying anything out of place, but who knows the arrangements the Lord has made for our everlasting peace? For Time is only here on this sad earth, isn’t it? Another example of man’s ignorance? For in God’s Love there is no Time! There is no East or West!” The lilt of the hymn caught her up. Once her future had been bright, so bright. Beside her photograph in the high-school yearbook so long ago they had said a girl with her eye on the stars who will go jar. And what had happened? Where had she made her errors? “For in heaven,” and she smiled bravely, her voice rose again, “beyond the limitations of our poor lives, will not all promises be kept, will not all our dreams become real? And will we not all sit at the Lord’s table and rejoice, with all our lost loved ones restored to us, with the moments that were and the moments that could have been at last One, Triumphant and Complete!”

She stopped. Mrs. Morgan felt that she had never been so eloquent in her life. She had tapped a new and wealthy source within herself. She moved her hand up to her breast and the fluttering of her heart. He eyes descended onto her husband. There he was, quite fat; Mr. Morgan, with a look of wonder on his dumb and dumpy face.

The child danced around the corner again. The robe had slipped down over one shoulder, exposing her thin flat chest. “I hate to say it,” she muttered sadly, “but I think I know just what you’ve got in there.” She tipped her head far to the left and then far to the right as though she were shaking water from her ears. She left them all again, and this time did not return.

Those present agreed that they should unwrap it. They carried it into the room that seemed most lived in and hung it on the wall, on a conveniently placed nail.

“It certainly does become the focal point of the room,” said the wife of the man who sharpened blades, as the painting was going up.

High above them, in the sunroom, the child was dancing with her father. They moved with measured slowness across the wide pine boards of the long room. They danced to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as played by Albert Schweitzer. The music is inventive and bold. It is known that Bach composed most of his religious music as he played it in the little and large churches of his youth. The music was created as it went along. As is the dance in this cold and endless room. As are the dancers.

THE PAINTING was, as is to be expected, of a family grouping. It is done in oranges and yellows, shrimp and sun colors. Most of it was copied from an old photograph, taken a year and a half ago, in the garden. The garden, at the time, was quite spoiled and brown. It was not the season for a garden. The mother and the girls, Kate and her sister, are seated on a little wrought-iron bench. The bench is too small for them all. The child, Kate, is turned sideways and it appears that she is giving more room to the others. The Reverend stands behind them, wearing a white coat which is also out of season. Somewhere, beyond the picture, there must be a stiff wind blowing, for the mother is holding her skirt down across her knees and laughing while the sister seems to have just returned from a motion of brushing back her hair. Kate is wearing a pullover sweater and shorts. She is not smiling, for she has lost her front tooth. She fears that she will never get another one. There is a great deal of foreground. The sky is not even visible.

The man who took the picture was the sexton. He had not taken many pictures but he had recently bought a camera at a pawn shop and he was trying it out on everyone. He also bought a lie detector and four metal ornaments that had once been fitted to a Japanese sword hilt. His wife said he’d gone soft as a sneaker. The sexton thought the lie detector would be a nice way to pass an evening with people if his wife ever had anyone over for coffee and cake. His wife was not a hostess. The lie detector went its way. Little Kate wanted it, but it passed into other hands.

So the sexton took the picture and in time it was developed and printed. And it was this picture that was brought to the lady painter on the mainland with the artistic personality. She could not be reached on the phone or in person. She had to be dealt with by correspondence.

The painting was large. The likenesses were not excellent but they were good enough. That is, no one would mistake those who were being represented for others, who were not being represented at all. License was taken with the land. It is covered with flowers. A dress has been put on Kate and she has been turned around to face the others. Everyone’s hand seems vaguely on top of everyone else’s hand, as though there was a mallet between them and they were determining who should be first at croquet. And before them all, his own little hands resting on his mother’s knee, is a standing infant. His back is to the viewer. He wears a charming, common smock and his head is covered with tight blond curls. His head is tipped slightly toward his mother’s lap. And everyone’s head seems slightly tipped toward him. The expressions on the faces of the mother and her oldest daughter are marked by a tight-lipped calm, as would befit those, we might suppose, who have passed on. Entwined in the lower windings of the iron bench is an empty nest.

The father has told the child that those who have loved become a single angel in heaven or a sole beast in hell.

They sit in front of the fire, the father and the child. The wall is empty, as it has always been, except for a little while that morning. The child says, “I think that that thing should have a name, like graves have words. What do you think, Daddy? Of course it’s a foolish thing, it almost makes me want to laugh, Daddy.”

“Some things don’t have names,” he says. “Many things.”

“I think that maybe if it had been done another way I couldn’t stand it. But nothing was right, was it, Daddy? The eyes or anything. It won’t be like that, will it? We won’t be all together again? It would make Mother so unhappy. You know, sometimes she comes back to me just before I fall asleep and her face is like a movie star’s, but I know it’s her because that’s the way dreams are. She’s sad and pretty, Daddy, like once you said she was, and she holds my hand like she used to, Daddy, remember she was always interrupting me and holding my hand and I would be busy but she would hold my hand and hold me back and say, I just want to know that you’re here beside me for a moment, Katey. I just want to know that I’m here with my little girl. And I would say, Yes, Mummy, but we never could give her what she really wanted, could we, Daddy? And now when she comes to me at night, she’s sad but not crying and she doesn’t say those terrible things any more. She doesn’t say anything for a long long while, but then she always says, please don’t ever bring me back again. That’s what she says. That’s all she ever says.”

The Reverend is silent and the child shyly drops her eyes. GOD IS IN HEAVEN AND THOU UPON EARTH THEREFORE LET THY WORDS BE FEW. Ecclesiastes 5:2 or 2:5, she thinks and begins to chew nervously on her nails. She keeps forgetting things. Sometimes she trembles because she can never seem to keep things straight in her head.

“Don’t do that, sweet. You’ll spoil your pretty hands.”

Her hands are freckled and yellowish. They were always being scratched or bumped or squeezed. She puts them away.

“I think a nice title for that thing, that painting, if it ever sees the light of day again would be Mortals prepare for you must come and join the long retreat,” the child says.

He looks at her gently. “Where did you see that?”

“I heard it one day, from you.”

He has a cold blister at the corner of his mouth. He touches it with his tongue. “There is no retreat,” he says. “Words are often a presumption and a sin.”

The child knows all about words. And sin. She knows that even a baby is polluted in the eyes of the Lord. She knows that every person who has ever been born had been born bad. Everybody living is sinful and everybody dead and everybody quick. The baby that had died in her mother’s stomach, that had killed her mother, had nothing on any of them just because it had never been born. It was only twice gone, that’s what it was.

The child knows all about faith too. She knows that punishment doesn’t have the slightest relationship with what you do or don’t do.

They go into the kitchen for dessert but there is nothing sweet in the house. They settle for a wedge of cheese.

“This is very sophisticated,” the child says, not enjoying it much.

The two of them sit side by side at the table in the position they had always held.

FOUR OF THEM had been at the table not so long ago. It is the Fourth of July. The Reverend Jason Jackson is at the head, a handsome man, wearing his hair a little long, a little out of style. There is one eye, his left, that he cannot close. The nerves are severed in the lid. An old injury. He is thirty-one. No one is aware that his eye is curious. It can only be noticed when he is sleeping.

To his right sits Katey. She hums and stares past the worn window sill toward the sea. She has thick dark braids, tightly knotted. Her hair troubles her. She feels it is a vanity and is afraid that some day when she is riding the neighbor’s great bay horse, she will catch it in an oak tree like Absalom and die.

Opposite her is her sister, a round and freckled girl of eleven. From her schoolmates, she has acquired a flat New England accent that no one else in the family has. She is energetic and affectionate and studies her mother shamelessly, trying to detect how to be a lady.

Kate has no desire of becoming a lady. She wants to be sexless, like an angel.

It is the Fourth of July and they are eating salmon and peas. The mother insists that they adhere to the tradition of each holiday. Shrove Tuesday there are pancakes, every Easter a ham. Each Christmas there’s a pudding with the beef.

The mother does favors for them all. She likes nice things. She has learned of nice things in the state of New York where she tells the girls she was born. New York seems to Kate as distant and as cheerless as the desert. She tells the girls about New York. She tells them that Dewey was not elected President because of his mustache. She tells them how to eat an artichoke should they ever be offered an artichoke. She instructs them in the writing of thank-you notes. Kate receives this information mutely as though she were accepting punishment.

The day is incredibly white. Sailboats with striped spinnakers rim the island. A blueberry pie bakes in the oven. It is taken out too quickly. The bottom crust is thick and underdone. The mother cuts huge wedges for everyone and puts them on old pewter plates. She pours out glasses of milk for the girls. On the bottom of Kate’s glass is a picture of Charlie McCarthy. She is a child and this is her glass. Each time that she lags in drinking her milk, her mother urges her on with the promise that there is a surprise at the bottom. Kate has seen the picture a hundred times and loathes Charlie McCarthy who even in real life is only made of wood. She thinks her mother is simple-minded.

The mother and sister are talking to one another. The girl is speaking of a friend’s dachshund on the mainland. It’s slipped a disc and is in a pet hospital.

“They’re not made properly.” The mother laughs. They chuckle and chat.

Surely this is not what is actually being discussed. Kate is so little, beautiful and glum. She is constantly trying to hear. She can hear perfectly but she doesn’t believe any of it. Her mother has expressed concern over her vocabulary which is rigid and obscure. Sometimes the mother wants to hug her or slap her because Kate turns eyes upon her that are totally passionless and without mercy.

Kate takes the filling out of the pie and spreads it across her plate in an unpleasant paste. She is thinking about a little book that she has in her room on the Ten Commandments. It is a Golden Book of crummy construction. Each commandment is accompanied by a picture depicting what is going on. Opposite THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY there is a drawing of two little children running away from a house with a broken window. Kate can’t understand this and she asks her father to explain it to her. He does, the mother believes, a little too explicitly. He does not comment on the picture which is so subtle that it suggests the workings of a truly erotic mind, but he speaks of everything else. Kate sits with her mouth ajar. Her sister starts to cry. The mother is furious and the meal is a shambles, the pie forgotten by everyone except the Reverend. He finishes his portion, oblivious to the commotion around him. He wipes his mouth with a napkin and then makes a steeple of his hands. He looks at them.

Kate begins to giggle. “You are a rascal,” the Reverend says. She smiles, her tongue raised over her missing tooth. She feels obdurate and lighter than air.

“I won’t have that,” her mother hisses. “I won’t have that.” She takes the older girl by the arm and pulls her into another room. There are mutterings as they gather up their purses and sweaters. Kate draws in her cheeks. She thinks this makes her look tubercular which is the way she sometimes likes to look. Her mother stands between the two rooms, still gripping the older girl by the arm.

“Everything’s funny, isn’t it! Everything’s a nasty little joke. Well, I want you two to clean everything up here,” she says. “Washed, dried and put away. We’re going.” She tugs her daughter’s arm for emphasis. Kate’s sister holds herself carefully in a starched white dress. Her face above the collar is like a strawberry cream. “We’re going and we’ll have a nice time.” Her mother looks drawn, even frightened. “You two do what you want, but you needn’t follow us. You needn’t bother us.”

They turn on their heels, the mother and her more tractable daughter and rush away. The door slams. Other doors open and shut. An old engine turns over, backfires, wails out of gear, stalls. A door opens again, the hood is raised, banging on the bound linkage ensues. The hood slams shut. The door slams shut. The car is backed up and driven off.

Kate puffs out her cheeks.

“You still want to go, don’t you?” the Reverend asks her.

“It doesn’t matter, Daddy.” Some people in a boat are shooting off fireworks into the daytime sky. It excites her. The idea of candles burning while it’s still light.

“You had been looking forward to it.”

“Yes,” she admits. “I’d like to see the donkey again. I’d like to go down in the mines in a donkey cart. I’d like maybe to go on the merry-go-round once.”

“Then we’re going, of course. It’s a big park. Your mother doesn’t have to see us there if she doesn’t want to.”

“We give her fits, don’t we, Daddy?”

“Are you ready to go?” he says.

“Oh yes, Daddy.” Kate slides out of her chair and skips outside to where the family’s other car is parked. Sometimes it doesn’t even start. There is no guarantee that a journey will result simply by turning the key in the ignition. Kate and her father get into the car. It is an old white Hudson. Someone has painted it by hand. Hairs from the brush are fossilized beneath the paint. The interior is beige. Kate bounces several times on the seat. She pretends she is aloft in a marshmallow.

The engine rumbles spiritedly. “Good-by, Race.” She waves to her dog graciously. He takes a few steps toward them, ramming his paw into his water dish. Kate and the Reverend drive onto the ferry and are taken across the sound to the Independence Day celebrations and the amusement park.

HER MOTHER LOST HER MIND. Kate saw it. It was not after her sister was killed but before. Kate witnessed it. It flew out of her mother like the black puff of a devil’s breath, and enmeshed itself in the workings of the merry-go-round, entwined itself in its cheerless and monotonous music.

The riders were quaintly solemn, thumbing rings from a chute. All looked desperate and disappointed. The horses were welded into place.

Kate stood with her sister. Her sister was fretting over a spot on her white pleated skirt. They had been sharing a hamburger. Grease had dripped down from the bun. It had ruined her skirt, she wailed. Everything was ruined. Kate looked listlessly on while her sister rubbed at the stain. A woman holding a styrofoam cup had come down from one of the concession stands and she said, “It’s all right, honey, this will take it right up. You just watch this, honey.” The woman had a star cut out of one of her teeth and the star was gold. “Watch this now,” she said, but Kate was watching her mother and father standing on a little scrap of darkness shed by a faded purple awning. Her mother’s face was white and distorted. She looked ancient, inhuman. Before them, fat sea gulls waddled about, for the park was on the coast. They looked like toys. One shuttled around Kate in a stumbling circle, making a poor sound, a long piece of string trailing from its open beak.

Kate heard her sister. “Oh!” she said. Her voice was pained, incredulous. “Oh, what’s happened, what’s happened! Why did she do it? Why did she want to do such a mean thing for? Oh, Katey, look what she’s done!” Kate turned reluctantly. Above them, the woman from the stand was alternately shaking her head with a frown and grinning encouragingly, the star in her mouth sparkling and wet. She was drawing off thick pink milk into a glass for a customer. Kate looked at her sister’s skirt. It was now corrupted by a much worse mark. The woman had daubed cold coffee on the grease and the stain seemed darker and twice as large. The sister wadded the cloth into a brown bunch like a wilted bouquet and little Kate looked at her wryly. She was not interested in this — in clothes, in outward appearances. Besides, it had looked hopeless. She shrugged.

Later that day when her sister was dead, lying between the green oak and the wheels of the mother’s car, Kate wished that she had said something nice, something reassuring. She wished that she had said, Why that dress will be white as ice, white as it was before in just a little while. She wished that she would have known that that was the way it was going to be so she could have said that. For, a few hours later when her sister was lying dead on the road, that skirt looked brand-new. It hadn’t even been mussed or dirtied by the fall from the door. And neither had her sister. She had flown soft as a butterfly into that giant tree and the sound, when she struck, was not loud, as one might expect but a low, poor, redeemless sound, like that of the dying gull. Nevertheless they heard it, Kate and her father, for they were not far behind and their windows were down and the air was still. And it was true as well that they saw it, what there was of it to see. For the moment passed so swiftly and then the girl was dead even though it was only her hand that seemed damaged at first glance. The mother, in her confusion, had backed the car over it. It lay bloodlessly hidden beneath the patched tire. It was the fact that she had crushed her daughter’s hand that seemed to affect the mother most. And it was the sight of the spotless skirt that Kate would remember. And it was the Reverend who took the gum from the young girl’s mouth and smoothed the collar of her blouse. Death brings order, does it not? There is nothing too small to rest in peace?

Kate was brought back to the car to wait. There was a bag of pretzels there and she began to eat them. She wanted never to eat another pretzel again in her life, so she ate them all, to finish them up. Once her mother came to her and she seemed to have a calm, almost studious expression, an aesthetic air, but beyond suffering any more and without light. And she looked at the child, her daughter, the last, left. It couldn’t have been long, no more than a moment, for there was so much confusion around them, noise, unfamiliar voices and the more generous sounds of a summer holiday, the humming of birds and insects unseen and the bright whistling of the car ferry as it moved out of the bay. They had missed it. The four of them had missed going back forever. And all these sounds and strangers were imposing upon them, insisting that something be done or said, so it could have been no more than a moment that the mother was able to look at her living child with such hatred and such intimacy.

Kate’s sunburnt lips smarted with the crude salt. Her fingers continued to rummage dreamily through the empty bag of pretzels and her mother stayed her hand before it could rise once again, spasmodically, to her lips. “I wish it had been you,” her mother said softly, almost musically. “You listen to me now. I’ve said this to the others and they pretend they haven’t heard. I wish with all my heart that it had been you.” She moved her face closer to Kate’s. The child noticed the extraordinary thickness of her mother’s lashes. They were tangled and some were turned inward, brushing the balls of the eyes.

Why doesn’t it hurt? Kate thought. Where is Daddy? When will he drive us to the boat? Her mother was stroking her limp hand. Kate’s face was expressionless. She knew what the woman said could have no bearing on her life because the woman was mad. She had lost her mind while Kate was watching. Her mother’s mind had lodged itself in the obscure mechanisms at the core of the Wooden Horses. Kate had seen it all except for that which had brought about the exorcism. She had turned away only for an instant and when she looked again, everything had been accomplished. She had looked again and her father was walking toward her, looking arrogant and exasperated, and the mother was walking toward her too but slowly, so slowly, her hands pressed to her temples, and from her head, Kate saw the black, corrupt and weightless blossom of her knowledge fall.

“Evil suckled you,” her mother said. “You’d never take my milk. He would never let me touch you really. I wanted to, you were my baby. But he took you the moment you were born. The doctor couldn’t stop him. He took you and cradled you and wiped the blood from your eyes. He was covered with you. I was disgusted, embarrassed. He was covered with the wetness and the slime of you. No one could stop him. He bathed himself in you. You were seconds old and a terrible chill came over me, a premonition. Such cold! I knew that a terror had been delivered of me. And you remain still, don’t you? Nothing touches you.” She did not move away from Kate, intimating by neither gesture nor pause, the crowd, the tree and the old car she’d been driving and would never drive again, her life from that moment on until the end of it, being tractless and impassable. She stroked Kate’s hand gently, at odds with the words, a mother still, “that innocent and loving child over there is gone. He told me, ‘You’ll only destroy yourself. ‘He told me, We’ll go our own way.’ And he was right, wasn’t he! I’ve destroyed the only person who ever loved me.” She shook Kate’s arm. Her lips were almost resting on Kate’s own. “I know all about him, little girl, though you’d like to think I don’t. And I know you too, and your sly cute ways. Daddy daddy daddy, it’s made me sick for years!” She lowered her voice, though she had never actually been shouting. “I won’t scream. I’m not going to do anything that will make me seem to be the guilty party. I’m not the guilty party, I never have been.”

The phrase had swum up in little Kate’s head. She had heard almost nothing of what had been said but now she thought of a dreary hall, riddled with black and brown crepe, tables of disgusting food, broken toys, cowering chicks and kittens and rabbits in fetid boxes, and everyone there, all the children, weeping, blindfolded and in chains.

“YOU’RE SICK,” she said to Kate. “You must be helped.” She stopped, breathing shallowly, drawing back a little. She examined Kate who sat mutely, looking through the windshield. Whose child was this now? Where had all this time taken her? Why had it taken so many years to arrive? And the other child, lost now. Had she ever truly been beside her, all that time before this time, present beside her all those years and chattering dearly, her death existing before her life had begun?

Confused. She felt herself becoming confused, lightheaded. Shock, she thought. I’m going into shock. I am aware of that, she thought.

“Sick,” she repeated with effort. “Don’t you think I know what’s going on? And yet it was only today that I found the strength to act. It was as though at last I had roused myself from a drug. His drug. I had at last shaken it off but too late. Hours too late after years! But today I had a plan. It was so simple, so right. We were just going to leave. I was going to take her away, my poor dear little lost …” Her fingers fluttered feebly and momentarily at her lips. “She didn’t know about any of this. She never saw — I shielded her from it as best I could but today I faced it at last. I knew I couldn’t go on. It was up to me to save her, to get her away. We were going to run away and you would have been dead to her. There would be nothing in her life to remind her that she had a father or a sister. I tried to make it sound like fun to her, an adventure. ‘Just the clothes on our back,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll live in the mountains. Like Heidi,’ I’d said. She was worried about friends. Oh, she would always have friends. She was like that. She never lacked for friends or happy times.”

She looked at Kate as though she were making some final plea to a cool and inquisitional power. Two policemen reluctantly approached. “Yes.” She waved to them with an uncertain gesture. “Yes, yes.” Kate looked through the windshield. “There’s no reason for me to go now,” her mother said. “My reason is gone so I’ll stay. I’ve never been strong but I’ll stay and take whatever Jason’s God is preparing for me.” Kate gave a start. Her father’s name was so seldom mentioned. She stirred in the dusty seat.

“It’s a personal God, Jason has, belonging just to him. That’s always been clear. Viciously clear. I’m not strong but I’ll stay now. I’ll stay and I’ll fight. I’ll fight you,” she said. “Yes,” she said to the policemen and walked back with them to the ambulance.

Kate thought of her sister. Once her sister had given her a pin with Kayo on it. Once she had given her a tiny book of drawings of Woody Woodpecker. The pages were stapled together at the top. You thumbed them rapidly and they became a little movie — Woody Woodpecker rescuing a kitten from a tree. She had lost the pin. She had lost the little book. The thought of that made her grievously sorrowful.

BUT THAT TO THOSE WHOM HE GIVES UP TO CONDEMNATION THE GATE OF LIFE IS CLOSED BY A JUST AND IRREPREHENSIBLE JUDGMENT.

At the first allusion to the baby, months later, Kate had been sick. She hadn’t said anything but she had thrown up. She is not so old now but someday she will be older. Surely there is something frightful in this.

The fact that she can be no younger than she is now is one that we don’t have to accept.

When she was first told about the baby, Kate tried to fix the hint, the sign, the foreboding of the disaster and disloyalty that was so complete. It was as though her father had struck her. He seemed more and more like the fanciful fearsome God he had taught her to know.

Kate remembers. She and her mother are in the amusement park once more. It is fall, a few days after school had opened. Her mother had been waiting for her in the schoolyard. They had taken a bus. Her mother had insisted that they go on some of the rides. The air was raw. No one but themselves were in the plywood pit of the mines. Even so, when one donkey was hired, all the others would go with him, pulling their wooden carts. They were all strung together. They wouldn’t be unharnessed until night.

The child remembers … there is a head hanging in a splinter of light until with a shriek it slides along a wire into a basket. Glued to the empty cart rocking before them is a pink sticker, Don’t Follow Me I’m Lost. There is a roar of rocks, of a cave-in, and a stone wall coming toward them at furious speed through the donkey’s ears. A stuffed bear dances round and around in a wire cage, one ear gone, holding a violent bouquet to his plastic snout.

In the daylight, her mother had put her hand on her stomach.

“He’s living right here. He’s being made here.”

The calliope played. The donkey, with a sigh, shuffled in his traces and freed a wide sparkling stream. Kate pulled her fingers away from her mother’s stomach and rubbed them over the donkey’s warm burred head. There was the smell of the tide and of clams and of tomatoes baking on dough. Everywhere there were sputum and paper blowing, religious pictures and the faces of movie stars sliding out of machines.

They walked down to the beach and sat on a bench, watching the green calm sea and the lace curtains blowing in the windows of the old hotels. The child remembers … her mother’s face is extraordinary. A brown vein throbs in her temple. The child cannot look at her mother. She never looked at her, unless she forgot. She never looks at herself either, in mirrors or photographs. She has no interest in it. An old man walked in front of them. He wore a tight brief bathing suit. His limbs and chest were brown and oily. He was very old. Kate watched him and he in turn looked at them curiously. The teeth in his mouth were like kernels of corn.

She remembers … wishing that the old man would take her mother’s hand and walk away with her, into one of the decaying hotels. The man looks as though he might do something like that, if requested. In one ear, he has a ball of cotton.

“He loves me,” her mother said. “He wanted this. He comes to me every night. He won’t leave me alone.” Her hair was wet on her brow. Her mouth was wet.

THOUGH THOU BE SOUGHT FOR YET SHALT THOU NEVER BE FOUND AGAIN. Her father had taught her everything. Ezekiel that was. Words were more important than the things they represented. That was why using some of them was a sin. Kate’s throat was bitter. She swallowed.

“It has to be a boy,” her mother said. “A boy would kill him for what he is. He wanted me to be the one to tell you. As though it weren’t any of his doing.”

A drop of saliva dropped on Kate’s bare knee. The damning wish rose serenely and without hate. Without hate. I hope it rots and molds and dies inside her. And then maybe she will leave us be. They had to shoot the horse because he was sick. He didn’t know how to be a horse any more. Then they had to set him on fire. I just want her to leave us be. Dismally, she was sick. It was as though she had spoken aloud and the words had come into the clear air, darkening and putrefying everything. She vomited onto the sand.

Her mother did not move right away. Then she took a handkerchief out of her pocketbook and walked down to the water. Kate raised her head. The old man was still passing by. He seemed to have a grapefruit in his crotch. He had tiny dugs wreathed with long white hairs. And he was still passing by with a look of disgust and impatience.

And then Kate saw it. Propped between her and the place where her mother had been was a faint bundle, wrapped in a white blanket. It was bubbling, amorphous and horrendous, a clear liquid restrained by the blanket folds. When she touched it, her fingers fell through to the amnion slickness beyond. There it is and it’s never going to be any different. It’s never going to get beyond that. She might as well take it out of her stomach now and sell it to the traveling circus. Daddy and I will not discuss this, how it got inside her stomach, we will not mention this.

Her faith had taken on a terrible reality. Her faith had taken on the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Kate stood and tottered from the bench. The old man was passing by. And her mother came and reamed her mouth with the dainty cloth soaked in the cold sea water. She pushed back her braids and wiped them clean.

The child remembers … She tastes, she thinks, the fish that have swum in the water. She sees the form and future of the world in the shabby exotic skyline of the amusement park. Almost everything has already happened in her life. What can remain?

“I want to help you,” her mother said. “How can I turn my back on you?”

WHAT CAN SICKNESS NOT DO? Now the child is a woman. She is in the woods with her young man. The woods are far, far away from the place where she was born.

The land is owned by a paper company and can be bought for $150 an acre. They are not beautiful woods but they will do. They are still scarred from the logging operations of ten years ago. The loggers cleared and burned. Later, they planted seeds but the resulting growth is ramshackle, delicate. The larger animals never returned. The land is shocked, stilled. Everything is wet and tapping from a rainstorm in the night. In the leaves, fearful rustlings are heard, but only tiny finches emerge. The woods offer no enlightenment. They are a huge barred door before God.

The boy points to a square of soft earth. “A fox,” he says. He has slow pale eyes and thick hair, lying like a cap on his head. All the buttons are missing from his shirt and his thin hard chest is exposed. Above his navel, a blond furrow of hair begins. It is soft as seal would be, the girl thinks. She loves it. His jeans are faded. Around the pockets and the fly, the fabric is almost white.

The girl kneels beside him. She is tall and a little awkward. She has a wide sad mouth and two dark moles near her left eye which give her a convalescent look. To the boy, she seems different each day. It is nothing that he can explain. Her face seems to change. He is not yet used to her. It is as though her life has lacked the continuing experience that will make her what she will become.

She cannot make out the paw’s imprint. She searches for it on the damp ground, ashamed. She reaches for his hand and presses it to her cheek. At last she finds it — a very faint impression, more a memory than a mark. “In China,” she begins, “if you give a fox a home of his own, and incense and food, he’ll bring you luck.”

“Incense.” The boy smiles carefully. He has strong nice teeth, white as bone.

“Of course.” She nods. “In China, a family is very fortunate to be adopted by a supernatural fox.”

The boy rises. “Do you wish that you had been adopted?”

“Oh,” she says, stunned. “Of course.” This land depresses her. The red ground sucks at her feet and the pines are tall and empty of life.

“Perhaps we could go to China,” she says. “Or we could live in Mexico. Some country where there is a magic and mystery and luck.”

“All that’s right here.” He spreads his arms wide, taking in the trees, the swamp and distant bay and sky, the roll and ruin of the land.

She shakes her head.

“Why not Canada?” he says. “Why not Alaska?”

“No, it’s too cold.”

He tells her a joke about Eskimo children. The last line is don’t eat the yellow snow. She laughs. It is so innocent, so harmless. He touches her face with his.

The girl knows that they will never go anyplace. Before she met him he had a job. Earnest ambitions. He had a car and a few nice possessions. But now he has stopped working and sold everything except the car. He spends all his time with her. They live on his savings. He is self-made, clever, charming and shy. He owes nothing to anyone. But now he seems to owe a great price to her. They are students but seldom go to classes. Sometimes he does not touch her for days. It’s like a game. Being in love is not what he had expected it to be. She has taken away his energy and replaced it with premonition. He had imagined a different woman. Often he had imagined no woman at all for this was not necessary to him. He could make his way on nothing. Now he is involved with the nothingness within her.

The girl knows that other countries are not open to them.

The woods are sunny and then dark. The sky is full of square, swift clouds moving across the sun. Shadows flow down the trees like water and then evaporate. The boy walks several feet in front of the girl, leading them back home. Suddenly he stops and grasps her arm. He points to the left, to a hollow beneath a runty cypress.

There is a dog lying there, a big red hound. His big eyes gallop toward them, but he is scarcely breathing. He lies on his side. They can see the cracklings and mash of his dinner lying in the scummy pool around his head. He is torn open from his balls to a point a few inches before his front leg joints. The rent is straight and neat as any zipper opening and the guts hover still within the belly in bluish globes.

The hound’s eyes run toward them and the boy moves forward and crouches by the dog’s head, stroking it. The folds of flesh on the dog’s neck and shoulders are soft, crumpled like velvet. The hound doesn’t move. Two ants crawl across his nose.

“A boar must of got him,” the boy says. “He got caught up by a big mean boar.” The girl nods. She doesn’t know what to do. Her hands hang ponderously useless at her sides.

“Is he dying?” She can’t hear herself speak. The dog’s eyes are incredible.

The boy stands and walks away. He picks up a short thick branch, hefts it, pushing it against a tree to check its strength. The girl slowly opens her mouth. Deep in the limbs, the trees crack. The air shimmers in the morning heat. She doesn’t know this boy. They met stupidly, at a dull movie. He had been sitting in the aisle behind her and had bent over her shoulder, saying something, thinking she was someone else. It’s all a misunderstanding. A case of mistaken identity. He is going to brain the dog, dispatch him, club him expertly as he does the fish he catches.

The boy is taking off his shirt. “What is it? What’s the matter?” He hands her the shirt. “Tear it up in strips.”

The girl looks at him closely. He is still a stranger. She doesn’t really know what he should mean to her. She can’t remember anything about him. She feels as though she has wandered into a painting. The dog smells like straw. The sun burns her neck.

She rips the shirt in four pieces and the boy takes them and ties the dog’s legs to the branch. The dog makes a hissing sound but doesn’t show his teeth. The pads of his paws are torn and there are large ticks buried in the fur around his mouth. The exposed guts tremble fretfully with the movement and something oozes out and onto the ground like batter.

THE YOUNG COUPLE walk through the woods, the hound between them, swaying upside down on the pole. Sometimes, the boy holds the pole with only one hand and uses the other to slap at the flies which hover across his back. The girl uses both hands always and pants with the weight. She tries not to look down at the dog but it is all that she can see. The open belly swings and shines below her. The tail droops down, exposing the brown bud of the anus. A pellet of turd appears and slips to the ground. The hound has great dignity. His great eyes unblinkingly study the sky.

They are almost two miles from the trailer where they live and they walk without speaking. The woods slowly change. They become thicker, primal, cooler. The boundaries of the paper company are left behind. The girl is lost but the boy knows the way back. He has always paid so much attention to these woods that he no longer has to be familiar with every part of them. They reach the river and follow its course until they come to the trailer. It’s very old. Battleship gray and shaped like an egg. Tiny windows like machine-gun slits in a bunker.

The boy wedges the pole in the crotches of two young pines and runs to the trailer for fishing line and needles. The dog’s tongue hangs out of his mouth. It seems to run for yards. The boy sews skillfully — tight short stitches. The girl does what she must without questioning him. His presence, his essence is beginning to return to her. She suspected his gestures and now she feels terrible. Of course he would not kill the dog. He is to be trusted more than herself. Everything she does is unfaithful to him.

She is unreliable, she says.

“Oh no.” He looks at her briefly and then down again to his work. Her face is clear and shiny as though she has just awakened. She holds the belly together as he sews, pinching it together with the tips of her fingers. “You’re fine. You’re doing everything you have to do.”

His hands are greasy and spotted with blood. He wipes them distractedly across his chest. He knows that this is not what she means but he does not want to talk about it.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He finishes stitching up the dog and knots the line. He lowers the animal to the ground and unties the legs from the pole, carrying him, then, into the trailer. The hound looks huge yet shrunken, like an empty gourd. The girl throws a pile of blankets and towels on the floor and the boy arranges the dog upon them.

“I’ve got to wash,” the boy says. He looks like a butcher. She watches him run through the woods and dive into the river. In a few minutes, he throws his jeans and shoes upon the dock. He swims to the far bank and returns, again and again, a blunt chopping stroke. It seems that hours have passed. The girl moves an ice cube around the dog’s jaws and the dog sighs and closes his eyes.

She walks to the river and takes off her clothes. The dock is made of six planks, set half a foot apart, floating on oil drums. She lies on her stomach and the boy drifts on his back beneath her. He flows down the length of her. A breast falls slimly through the planking, a long strip of rib, waist, hip, thigh. He sees one fourth of her precisely, no more. She can see nothing of him, her face is turned aside, one cheek resting on the wood, her eyes somewhere in the scenery. At some point she falls asleep. The boy floats beneath her. It gives him an odd and hurtful feeling to be there in his tarred and barnacled cage. Above him, the girl becomes nothing — a piece of hanging bait. She is a pastime for him like the stars. He cannot believe that always there will be this love which consumes him yet which changes nothing. He cannot believe his need. Or why when gratifying it, he is not satisfied. What can be beyond love? He wants to get there. With the girl. Together, they could arrive at this point. But he feels that she does not know the way. She merely represents the way, and they are lost, somehow, with each other.

When he gets back to the trailer, the boy lies down on the couch. In a corner, the hound is breathing lightly in a heroic whisper. The air of the room hangs in dusty layers. Lizards skid across the glass. Everything smells unused. It is something he cannot understand. Everything here seems to be used slightly for the wrong purpose, although, he would admit, the results seem to be the same.

The walls of the trailer are cardboard. They buckle out like sails. The girl has taped up colored pictures torn from magazines. None of her selections are original, but she has insisted upon explaining them to him. There’s a picture of a sculpture of James Joyce beside his new grave in Zurich. There are recipes for rich desserts, ads for movies, clothes, hardware. Her favorite, she told him, is the photograph of a tropical bird. She loves it, she says, and describes it to him. It requires high temperatures and is gregarious. Its massive soft bill is a puzzle, as is its long bristled tongue, as it only eats fruit and has no need for such equipment. The bird is actually seven different colors. Mauve, she says, one, blueberry, rose, purple, four, she tells him, emerald green and smoldering orange. That’s only six she realizes, but the other is merely white. Flaming and liturgical colors but the photograph is black and white and fading. It wasn’t dipped in the proper solution. It’s almost gone but will probably not disintegrate further. She insists that the bird is truly as depicted. It possesses the requirements of another creature.

The boy despises metaphor. He grows irritable. To think of her is maddening. He wants to reach some point of reference, something marvelous about them as lovers, but his mind dwells only on the commonplace.

He wakes once. It is dark but close to morning. The night has passed and he is making love to her. It is so good; she is smiling and her body is cool. He feels cured, rediscovered. He turns on the light and the hound blinks at them, feebly raising its tail and letting it fall, and everything seems beautiful, full of hope and lucky chance and love. He tells the girl this and she agrees. The animal closes his eyes once more and sleeps. Together they watch him mend. No man has ever died beside a sleeping dog.

THE UNIMAGINABLE PRETENDED TO BE INEVITABLE. Inevitable it was. Unimaginable it was not. Kate has a young man. They may or may not be married. If so, it is a secret. Married girls, past, present or future, are not allowed to reside in sorority houses. Uxorial vagaries are not permitted. How archaic the idea of a sorority house, how truly peculiar! All the references made within can be construed as sexual ones. When in doubt, snicker. Nihil est sine spermate they shriek over their tuna fish.

Kate is living with the girls at Omega Omega Omega. Not just yet, but in a little while. They do not know there that she has a young man. When she returns, they will recognize her as the girl who had been with them before, scrubbing herself with a bar of tar soap in the shower stall. Tar soap — the funniest thing they’d ever seen. She was queer as the girl from Massachusetts. Things that Northerners did seldom caught on. Things either caught on or they didn’t. Your boy friend had either a Porsche or a Pinto. You either knew how to do all your Christmas shopping in Goodwill stores or you did not. They will know Kate when she returns. In her absence, the girl from Massachusetts had left for good. The peachy complexion of the girl from Massachusetts had gone all to bumps in the South. She attributed it to the fact that she couldn’t rinse her face in her baby brother’s pee any more. Diluted. Five to one. Among themselves, the others agreed that Northerners were the oddest things and fast and filthy in their ways.

In college, Kate studied French. She studied French and she had lovers, usually men that she picked up in the afternoon or evening. Kate never made an acquaintance before one o’clock. Men can’t think strange in the morning. Men in the morning think of ham and hotcakes and money. They want order and the familiar.

She was never disappointed with her lovers, even the dreadful ones, because they gave her life the feeling of great transparence and they made her feel restful and inconsequential.

Her first dreadful lover in town was the first one she took, shortly after she arrived. It was the day of the evening she met her friend Corinthian Brown. Her first lover was not very pleasant. He was a cab driver. He told her one thing right away.

“I used to be a deep-sea diver,” he said. “For seven years they could count on me to go down after anything. Anything. Jewels, boats, bombs, bodies. No matter what it was, the last twenty feet I’d be sinking through silt. That’s no kind of a job,” he said.

She hailed him as she came out of a used book shop. She had just been given as many books as she could take away if she took them away right away and so she had called for a cab. Kate had taken to walking through the town in the dead part of the afternoon. Nothing ever came of it. Her back would get wet from the terrible sun. She would wait until three o’clock before she’d have a cooling drink. It was the least she could do. It was the most she could do to wait until three. On the day that she took shelter in the book shop, it was not yet three. She went in there to get out of the rain. The sun was shining and the rain was pouring through the streets like smoke.

“I’m not in business any more,” a woman hollered to her. “I’m not keeping things going for that crummy bastard any more.” Kate looked glumly at the rain. “Take what you want. I’m Lady Bountiful. Clean the place out,” the woman screamed. “He never gave me a thing I didn’t end up paying on. Forty-nine years with him,” she yelled, “and not one happy moment.”

She wore a hairpiece that rose and fell on her head. She wore a dress that had a print of flowers and their scientific names and she smoked a Silva-Thin.

“I suppose you came in here to get out of the rain,” she snapped. “Well, it’s all past mattering. I’ll tell him if he ever has the nerve to ask. I gave them all away, I’ll tell him, all your crummy books, to a chippie who at least had the crummy sense to come in out of the rain. Well, come on,” she said. “COME ON, goddamnit!” Kate had never met a retiree before. She was not astounded. Nevertheless, she was careful not to move too quickly.

Kate helped her throw the books in boxes. There were dry bug shells on the shelves.

“Over there was where I saw the rat,” she said, pointing into a little alcove. A sign said hopefully, THE ROOM OF KNOWLEDGE. “He didn’t do a thing about it naturally. I got it myself. Peanut butter.”

“What?” Kate said, speaking her once and only.

“Peanut butter,” the woman said irritably. “IN THE TRAP!”

Kate hauled several cartons of books onto the street. The rain had stopped and the air was steamy. She waved to the old woman. The old woman was eating yogurt and she waved her spoon at Kate. Then Kate called the cab. They put everything in the back seat and she sat up front with the driver. His hair was combed back flat and wet and severely from his forehead in a ’20’s fashion and he reeked of Juicy Fruit.

“Yeah?” the driver said, raising his eyebrows.

“Omega Omega Omega,” Kate said. Her sunglasses were steamed up. “Do you have a Kleenex?” she said.

The driver looked at her sideways. There was something about her, he decided. To get women these days, a man had to have good instincts, accurate judgment. He fancied his mind as being swift as a steel trap. He fancied his body as being hard and cruel as a steel trap. He saw himself, it’s true, as one mean old knowledgeable boy. And this fare was showing off her underwear. When he was putting the books in the cab for her, he saw her bra. Not the wide, white kind that his wife wore, which was big enough to strangle a hog, but a tiny colored one, a tiny blue polka-dot piece of nothing.

“I’ll stop and get some,” he said. He pulled into a gas station and bought a box of Kleenex. He pulled out several for her and then put the box in a glove compartment. “You’re my last fare of the day, isn’t that coincidental,” he said. “I mean it’s been a long day but it’s still early. Too early to start in reading all them books.” Beneath the Juicy Fruit there was a smell of spicy tomatoes. “You don’t look like a bookworm to me.”

Kate wiped off her sunglasses. She put them back on.

“How about joining me for a drink?” he said.

“Why not,” Kate said. Her reply did not surprise her although it was not at all what she would have imagined herself saying.

“I know a nice little place. It’s a bar on the water and they give you free lasagne roll-ups with your drinks until six.” He took a series of hard rights and turned onto the highway. The books slid across the seat. In less than a mile he turned off and down a partially paved road that led to a point on the bay. The land was bulldozed flat. Models for condominiums were scattered around and little flags and pennants were strung between concrete electricity poles. Then the land became wild and overgrown again and then there was the bay.

The bar was a shingled house on pilings. Nailed on the walls were sharks’ tail fins.

“Two of those mothers is mine,” the cab driver said. There was no one in the place but them and the bartender. The bartender was sneezing. “Two Mai-Tais,” the driver ordered. Kate turned on her stool and looked out the window. BRYANT’S BEASTS, a sign said over a crooked building on the other side of the road. BRYANT’S BOATS BRYANT’S BUNGALOWS. “Here’s to you,” the driver said. She took a swallow of her drink. It was all rum with a plastic orchid and a canned pineapple chunk in it. Her throat constricted and her eyes began to water. The driver coughed. “Them sharks will go for your hoses every time,” he said. “That’s no kind of a job.” He coughed. “What’s going on?” he asked the bartender.

“Algae,” the bartender said morosely. “Two days now. It’s not red tide but it’s some lousy algae rotting out there.”

“Goddamn,” the driver said. He got up. “You wait here,” he told Kate. He went outside and walked over to the bungalows. Kate thought of Uncle Wiggly. He was always so snug and clean. She swallowed her drink until it was gone. She saw something change hands between the driver and another man. He came back to the bar, coughing. “Two more Mai-Tais,” he said.

The bartender turned away. “Why don’t we drink these over in that little cottage over there,” the driver said to Kate, smiling firmly. “We can’t hardly breathe here. They got fans in those cottages.” The bartender set down two fresh drinks. “Where are those free noodles today?” the driver asked him querulously, looking up and down the counter.

“Nobody’s been here all day. I didn’t make them today. It wouldn’t have been economic.”

“Goddamn,” the driver said.

“I don’t kiss,” Kate said.

“I couldn’t care less,” the driver muttered. She followed him to the first little cabin.

“Look at that,” he said before they went inside. “Ain’t that cute. Little window boxes and a weather vane.” Inside, the room was cool. Her throat and eyes stopped troubling her.

“Bryant’s the biggest flit I’ve ever seen,” the driver said.

When they came out later it was almost dark. The wind had changed and the air was clear. The bar was lighted and Kate could see people moving around inside.

“I gotta get back,” the driver said tensely. “I got obligations.”

“I think I’ll stay,” Kate said. “I think I’ll have another drink.”

“I couldn’t care less,” the driver said. She went back into the bar and played the juke box. The patrons were mostly parents and their children drinking ginger ale.

“That was the song!” a child shouted. “That woman played just exactly the song I was going to play. Now I won’t have to play it.”

Kate went into the ladies’ room. GULLS it said. She washed her hands and went back through the bar and outside. Between the bungalows and BRYANT’S BEASTS were stacked the boxes of her books. Her sunglasses were steamed up again and she still didn’t have a Kleenex. She took them off. She could hardly see any better even then, it being night. She went over to the crooked building that held the animals. There was a bleak smell of droppings. She tried to look in the dark windows.

“What are you doing around here?” a voice hissed. “You been sent out here by somebody to drop a match?”

“Oh no,” Kate said sadly.

“They probably said ‘You just go on out there and move around and smoke a little,’ ” Corinthian Brown’s voice said.

“I came over to see the animals,” she said. “I just wanted to look at them.”

“Jest?” the voice rose. “Jest! That’s something which ain’t easy at all!” But the door opened up and she went in.

CORINTHIAN BROWN’S DADDY shot down robins in the winter and baked them in delicious flaky pies. His daddy always would say that he could never understand how a bird so full of shit as the robin, dumping all his mean bug and berry shit over the clean clothes on the clothesline, could taste so good cut up in little pieces with a few peas and a little flour and water. His daddy shot up robins so neat you would have thought they weren’t dead at all.

One morning as Little Corinthian was turning out of the yard to get to school, a police cruiser came screaming up the street and turned into their yard, shaking up the mud and almost knocking down the porch. The Audubon Society had complained, the Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters and the Surfside Bank who always had their ear to the ground for the rumble of possible trends. The tourists were horrified, the paper indignant and Brown became an object of rage and the chosen warning to the Negro community that the sick practice would no longer be tolerated. In Night Court four months later, he was sentenced to two years in the County Jail. The only voice raised in his behalf was that of an ugly smart-assed little dribble of a man who was later found to be not wanting to pay his federal income tax and who said that the shooting of songbirds in the neighborhood would not be necessary were there better housing and more jobs. Everyone agreed that if they heard that song one more time they’d throw up.

Corinthian’s daddy didn’t say anything, not even to his boys. After one year in the jailhouse, he showed enough potential and good intentions to be considered for the position of dog-boy on the work crews sent out daily. He was a good dog-boy because he was strong and had an easy way with them and because he had good lungs and legs and could run with them through the sloughs and across the fields and weeds when the sheriff’s people were after fugitives. Brown no longer had anything to do with the police who were a loutish bunch of questionable authority. For running with the dogs he got a lot of fresh air and 1,500 extra calories worth of food a day. Two days before he was to be released, he wound the leashes of his dogs around a light pole and stepped down the road for a can of beer. He was rearrested and sentenced to an additional six months. After that was up it was springtime and he took a bus up to New Jersey where, after writing a note to his boy Corinthian on the back of a postcard which depicted the colorful Howard Johnson’s on Exit Seven of the Turnpike, he disappeared forever.

The writing on the postcard said:

“I’m sorry about doing this but I am worn out and got nothing to give you anyways. I hope that by now you have stopped pulling on yourself and have found yourself a woman and cleared up your face. I had a Fisherman’s Platter here and I hope you and Amos will be able to get one of those some day.”

Corinthian could see that most of the message was for him but the part about the woman must refer to his brother as Corinthian was only seven years old.

CORINTHIAN BROWN’S BROTHER shot up mayonnaise and peanut butter as well as anything else he could pop. He had blue eyes which are always very bad luck for a black man. Corinthian loved his brother and worried about him incessantly. When Amos wasn’t messing himself up in the shed, he would be very sweet to Corinthian and make as much of a meal that was possible for him when he came home from school. Most usually, it was a lard and sugar sandwich and a pitcher of Kool-Aid. In the months of May and June it was a strawberry and sugar sandwich. Amos always asked Corinthian what he learned from his books and would always find his replies hilarious.

One evening just before suppertime, Corinthian heard a scuffling in the shed and opened it to find Amos writhing on the floor, his blood, for the most part, filled with liquid Sterno. It seemed the police were always driving through the neighborhood and this evening just before suppertime was no exception. They saw the little boy howling and crying and taking dizzy steps into and out of the shed. By the time they carried Amos into the back of the squad car he was already dead.

“Lookit that,” one policeman said to the other, “it’s pissing all over the seat,” and they made Corinthian clean everything up before they moved on.

Amos was buried in a place that was difficult to get to. Corinthian couldn’t remember if they had told him where. Corinthian had a series of jobs for the next few years which didn’t work out. He had an unpleasant skin condition which people were fearful they’d contract. They thought it was catchy, like ping-pong flu. All the doctors Corinthian had seen had told him that the disorder was psychosomatic and caused neither by heredity or dermatophytes. How could it be catching? It had caught him and that seemed to be the end of it.

“Are you often afraid?” Corinthian asked Kate that night.

The ostrich was following the darkness falling off her silver earrings as she moved her head.

“They like shiny things,” Corinthian said, interrupting himself. “They like to play with spoons.”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“Are you afraid all the time?”

“No,” she said.

“I’m afraid all the time,” Corinthian told her bravely.

TERRY BARFIELD’S PRETTY PIEBALD was the reason he was in the sheriff’s posse. That horse represented the life he loved and couldn’t get enough of — the gear and the parades and the good camaraderie and the dragging for criminals or fishermen who drowned off the keys or in the swamp. He knew it was all ornamentative and an anachronism but it was easily the most significant part of his life. He had four daughters who gave him nothing but back talk and one frail son who spent every moment messing with numbers, adding, multiplying, subtracting, dividing like a fancy computer. “There’s never enough paper around here,” the boy would scream and beat his head on the table until it bled. Terry Barfield had nothing but trial and misery and his beautiful piebald horse. He was a cracker and his poppa had been a cracker but a real one, an expert with his whip, and foot-loose and fancy in his leisure after driving cattle all day, and Terry Barfield wished that he had been him, born him or even born before him. That was the time to have been a man. He would have shown them what for then. He would have been cock of the rock.

Now he was just trying desperately to hold onto his horse which his wife wanted to sell so she could get a gas barbecue. He was working too much and suffering too much, he said. He had a bellyache all the time. Sometimes it hurt him to piss. His wife told him that was from the horse. He’d liked to have strangled her.

He worked all day driving the cab and then he drove his truck for the county all spring and summer through the mosquito and tourist season. He drove it in the three hours before dawn. He drove it now. It was five o’clock in the morning. He was in the college compound, smoking a black cigar and pulling on the lever he’d installed that released the malathion. His headlights picked up a raccoon hustling across the winding road in front of him. He tromped on the accelerator but the engine just grunted. “Oh Christ,” he said, grinding his teeth. He shot out a cloud of chemicals and spit out the cigar.

The truck moved along. It had been made from a car, the back lopped off, pine planking wedged on the chassis where the cylinders were mounted. A green and benignant truck, one headlight kicked in, something winglike fluttering against the exposed radiator grid. “Oh Christ, Christ,” Barfield roared. He turned the wheel so hard that for one awesome moment he thought he’d broken it off, and moved the wheels up over the sidewalk curb for a hundred yards or so, bouncing and weaving toward the nigger boy who ambled along there like a fool, his hands fanned out as though he were holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres. Barfield had worked this route for weeks, licensed by the county, being paid by the county and using their gasoline and equipment but wearing out his own truck and wearing down his balls and his own, what he considered to be, innate good nature for nothing more than he could see than another piece of crap his wife would buy and set up in the house. He owed 673 dollars to the finance company and his old lady was having the change. He was so sick of it all he’d liked to have spit and the final indignity had become the first for each morning before the sun came up as he was doing his honest work he would come across this loitering nigger doing his party time right before his eyes.

He was afraid of making too much of a racket. He didn’t want any complaints. But every day he wanted to make a mulched stump of Corinthian Brown.

AL GLICK’S SIGN on the edge of his junk-yard says

Anyone caught beyond this point without my permission had better have settled for his soul to go to God because his ass belongs to me

The sign troubles Corinthian Brown even though it is his job to be daily beyond the point that Glick refers to. Al Glick killed his first and last wife by pushing her face too hard into a hot pan of her cooking that he didn’t care for. He broke a waitress’ hand in an argument over the price of a slice of pizza and he put a boy’s eye out in a fight about pinball bowling. So each early morning that Corinthian enters the cars’ graveyard, which is still as any graveyard, he can feel himself getting shot. He can feel it and he can see his head popping off and rolling into the morning wet weeds where they’d shovel it up like a rabid squirrel’s, put it in a box and send it up to the laboratory in Tallahassee. Each morning he moves past the sign, coming or going away again, he knows it’s his last moment. They are going to dismember him. He’s going to hear a snap behind him and they’re going to be on him like white on rice, turning him every which way but loose.

But nothing of the sort happens. Corinthian stands intact within Glick’s boundaries. The dogs trot up and sniff him thoroughly for he has the smell on him of all of Bryant’s Beasts. Corinthian works continually. He is a wakeful watchful boy. He seldom sleeps. He has probably slept only one hundred hours in his whole life. He moves through the dogs which wind themselves around his legs. Each morning, the dogs suffer the same indignation, hysteria and delight as they glut themselves on the scents of the Beasts. Corinthian reeks of feed and droppings, fish and mice, hair, hide, scaled backs and feathers. Corinthian is truly a phenomenon, a representation of the natural world trapped, an example of the basic made bizarre by cages. But those who speak are not aware of his existence.

Now it is not that Corinthian is himself caged. It is not that he does not move out into the world. He has places where he goes. He has his routes. He uses the movie theatre, the County Book-Mobile, Super-M Drugs, where he buys lotions for his skin’s disease, and a café where he eats supper and breakfast in the morning. He leaves Bryant’s Beasts while it is still dark, for Bryant begins each day early and eagerly. Bryant believes that each day is the one that will turn the tide, that will make him a man of means. He is a big bouncing man with fine pale hair and big teeth. He has many frustrations but he remains hopeful. He loves jujubes. He chews on them all day long. One thing that annoys Bryant is that he can buy jujubes only in very tiny boxes that seem to be only one-sixth full. He would like to have hundreds of them available at all times but the fulfillment of this small desire does not seem to be in the near future. Another thing he wants is to be allowed to become a member of the Chamber of Commerce. This is remote. The thought of Bryant becoming one of their own makes the members drink too much and speak unseemly. Bryant’s Beasts is just within the city’s limits, a maverick on the Gulf’s backwash, a tin and broken blemish which drives the mayor and commissioners mad. “Jest let that pissant make one mistake and I’ll close him up,” the mayor says several times a week. But Bryant is a modest citizen, obeying the laws. All of his toilets function. His animals make no noise. No one has ever gotten sick on his snacks. The only thing that the commissioners and the Chamber of Commerce can do is hope that the place will burn down. Then they can forbid him to build it up again because of the zoning.

In the meanwhile, Bryant comes to his establishment early, rakes up the beach and sets up for his patrons. He sells mementos, nut logs and jellies. He rents beach umbrellas, rubber rafts, and three bungalows, day, week or season. Bryant would naturally like his Beasts to become a tourist must but visitors are uninterested in anything which is not indigenous. After all, they might as well have stayed at home if they’re not to see something indigenous. The Beasts are the weak link in Bryant’s business. His driving range is patronized as is his chili-dog and soft ice-cream stand. His paddle boats are popular. It is the Beasts that no one wants to pay to see even though the price is only seventy-five cents. He has a black bear, a llama, a leopard, a buffalo, a coyote, three deer and two egg-eating snakes. He has two dusky sharks, a bull shark, a tank of turtles and cow-nose skates and two walking catfish, which should alone guarantee half a hundred visitors a day. He has parrots, an ostrich, a kestrel and a vulture. Almost no one comes to see them. Days go by without anyone having observed the Beasts, but nightly, Corinthian, their caretaker, watches them and leaves with his watching pure and unbothered. For no one watches Corinthian. Or would give a penny for what he saw.

Corinthian knows that no one watching or listening is one of dying’s little tricks on life. No one’s yet come up with any tricks life might have on dying. The Beasts fill Corinthian up. Each night he comes to them empty. He’s been sitting in the daylight, thinking and reading and dreaming and trying to fill himself up. He’s read about the animals. He knows everything they’re supposed to do naturally. Their games and pridefulnesses, their diets and habits, their methods of mating and fighting and hiding. He knows the ostrich, for example, with its tiny wings and heavy legs has adapted itself to running and not to flight. Now in its tiny arena, with its straw and washtubs of soft vegetables, it seems to have adapted itself only to dying. Corinthian reads and studies. None of the rules given apply to the Beasts. He has even read Darwin who says all animals feel a sense of wonder and curiosity. But the Beasts’ mouths spill open with their own fur and feathers. They bite themselves mortally and without pain. Corinthian sees very clearly that they’ve begun to gnaw on themselves, even the vulture. They are trying to eat themselves up. Corinthian knows what this terrible hunger is like and tries to apologize to them for it, pushing out his hands to touch them. They do not respond. Sometimes a creature moves its muzzle slowly across the floor. Sometimes a bird moves a talon just an inch farther up the bar. Nothing more happens. Corinthian’s medicine of conscientious regard fails. It grieves him to think that his watching the animals doesn’t make any difference, that his eye seeing is worse than no eye at all because it has nowhere to turn but inward where the beasts, now twice bereft, vanish. They are suffering creatures, suffering his intrusion. And they go on. The continuing is all that remains to them. They have achieved what people think they themselves hope for. They cannot perish any more.

AN ANNAL OF CRIME, the girl begins. The woods are hushed, waiting for the night. Light comes late here and leaves early. From where she and Grady are sitting, only a scrap of sky can be seen, a tear in the crown of the trees. A buzzard circles high in the tear as though it were his inescapable arena. Of course he owns the sky but to the boy and girl, he seems pinned to this small pocket.

“The tidy housewife,” Grady says, “mopping up the world.”

The girl lies back and studies the bird gratefully. Interruptions shape our hours. How else can our time here be measured? “It is a very peculiar thing about buzzards,” she says. “People do not care for them. No one tells their children charming stories about the Little Vulture that Could. No pretty myths have sprung up around them. And yet they are just as good as a unicorn.”

He laughs. “Better than a unicorn any day.” He loves her, he loves her. Where is the danger?

“Despite their great size,” she says, “they never kill and will not touch food that shows any sign of life. That was one of the most pleasant attributes of the unicorn.”

“The buzzard is more wonderful also because he exists.”

“That is always true,” the girl agrees. “The unicorn was so gentle he would not even step on live grass for fear of injuring it.”

“That is not even a consideration of the buzzard, he is so pure.” He kisses the girl softly. The bird floats out of view. There seems a small black dot where he had been.

“Would you like a little something to drink?” the girl asks miserably. She goes into the trailer. The boy ambles down to the dock. There’s a logjam of branches and leaves a little offshore. Tiny fish sprinkle off it like stars at his approach and drop off into deep water. In the trailer the girl fills two glasses with ice from the cooler and spills in a little gin. She fills another glass with raw gin and drinks it. She washes out the glass and goes down to the boy.

“You didn’t care for that truck full of mirrors, did you?” he says.

“It made me dizzy. I was afraid we’d get confused and run off the road.”

“No way,” he says in the light lilt of the country.

“They seemed to be mocking us,” the girl says haltingly. Her throat pulses, hoarse with the gin. “The way they were arranged. That closed tepee. It seemed they had taken us out of the world. There was just ourselves riding. Anywhere you looked, that was all that was left.”

“There’s a carnival in Torrent’s Landing, that’s probably where it was going.”

“On to the fun house,” she says unhappily.

They sit on the dock. A turtle climbs up on the logjam.

The gin is so cold and clear. The girl hangs suspended in it.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to the beach today,” he says. “We’ll go tomorrow if you’d like.”

“Yes, another time.”

He holds her face between his hands. “What is it, blueness? Too much alcohol in the blood surrogate?”

She shakes off their joke from the brave new world. “You never ask me any questions,” she says stubbornly. She knows how stupid this sounds. His body so close to her is unnerving. She rises without moving as though for love. Her throat is a glacier, melting.

“Ah, blueness,” he says wearily. He rubs his chin. The sound is staggering. It seems to resound inside her head. Like axles grinding.

“I want to tell you a little story. It’s just a little story I read.” She sips her drink. “It would seem to have a bearing on our situation.”

“Our situation is fine,” he says.

She tosses her head. “This is how I would like to begin,” she says. “With this little story.” He sighs. She hears it like a sound that hasn’t happened yet, like the first cry her baby will make. “An annal of crime,” she announces. “In the French countryside in 15 say 14, an eleven-year-old girl was married to a boy her own age. The wedding was not consummated for several years, but soon they were old enough to live together in a portion of the fine house that would be theirs upon the death of the boy’s father. The father was a cruel man. Once, he had struck his only son with such force that he broke the boy’s jaw and knocked out four of his rear teeth. No one felt the old man’s passing to be an unfortunate event. The young couple moved into the house they were heir to and began their instruction in the management of the rich estate. The girl was taught her uxorial duties. They were soon parents of a baby boy although they were hardly more than children themselves. The girl was faithful and mild and obedient. She grew to love her husband although he offered her little reason to. The child had become a handsome but harsh and passionless man, besides being a casual father, quick to anger and slow to please. Yet they had another child, the seasons changed, the harvest came and went and so on.”

“A regular saga,” Grady says politely and without interest.

“It was not that they did not get along. The girl had many fine memories of their life together. She couldn’t imagine being happier or anything being other than it was. Then one spring morning, he came to her and told her that it was necessary for him to go to another town. A three days’ ride away. He was going there to buy the land that was adjacent to their own. The owner lived there and it was necessary that he meet with him. He said he would be gone a week. She kissed him dutifully and saw him off. Of course he was not gone for a week. Years went by. It seemed that he had vanished forever.”

“The scoundrel!” Grady interjects. “Of course we must remember he had been married since he was twelve.”

“She never lost hope that he would return. She raised her children and tried to keep their father living in their minds. She kept the farm flourishing and themselves rich. And of course she was true. Everyone was in 15 say 28.”

The girl finishes her drink. A dragonfly is on the rim of her glass. He stays on it as she raises it to her lips. He remains while she puts it down again.

“Then he came back. Lean from the wars for that was where he had gone. The same fellow certainly. All the old servants rejoiced, all the old friends. The children were delighted and the young wife found life worth living once more. She also found her prayers for his return had been answered double strength for he was a much more loving and kind man than he had ever been before. He was tender, honorable and exemplary to an extreme. She had never felt such pleasure; she had never known such joy. Then she began to worry. She bore another son and her worries increased. A terrible doubt had taken hold of her. She did not think that this man was, her love, her true husband. He certainly looked like him. He was even missing the four teeth that her husband had lost as a boy. He seemed to recall and even extrapolate on all the incidents of their life together before his long absence. Neither his children nor his servants nor his own sister and mother who still lived on the farm had ever entertained such a bizarre notion that he was anyone other than who he appeared to be. Nevertheless, the young wife’s suspicion became her belief, strong as her awareness of the strong love she felt for the man. She confided in her husband’s sister. The sister was understandably dismayed. She felt that the girl was losing her mind. Quickly, the household became aware of the astonishing nature of her thoughts. She would have nothing more to do with her husband, refusing to share his bed, refusing to even discuss the matter with him. He tried to be understanding although, daily, his wife became more hysterical and committed to the notion that he was an impostor. Eventually, despite the opposition and incredulity of everyone, she managed to bring him to court. There was no witness against him but herself, holding her nursing baby in her arms. The charges were dismissed as preposterous, yet how could this reassure her? Shortly after this, several shabby fellows from the battlefield, on hearing of the strange case, came to her and claimed that they had actual knowledge that indeed this man was a fraud, that her true husband had sold the facts of life together to this lookalike for a considerable amount of money and was still living, a professional adventurer. The wife, relieved but heart-broken, went to court again. This time the man she had so steadfastly accused, the father of her youngest child, was led before the judge in chains. She wept to see him so, for, as I’ve mentioned, before her doubts, she had never known such happiness or love. It still seemed, however, that the charges would be dismissed once again and forever for the court was losing its patience and there was no additional proof other than the statements of these very unsavory and unpleasant soldiers. But …”

“But …,” Grady repeats distantly.

“Suddenly in the last moments of the trial, the door opened and another soldier, as unappealing as the others, strode into the room. He bore a striking and uncanny resemblance to the prisoner in the dock. The real husband had returned at last and all present sadly recognized him for he had lost none of his cruel and dour bearing. The prisoner admitted to the deception and was duly guilty of imposture, falsehood, substitution of name and person, adultery, rape, plagiary and larceny.”

Grady stirs beside her. “Imagine that,” he says. “1500. Things like that wouldn’t happen today. People aren’t as …” He laughs. “Women aren’t as thoughtful.”

“He was put to death,” the girl says. “She murdered him. The father of her son. And she had loved him, but only in thinking that he was another. Touch, word, act, daily passion and affection meant nothing you see. It wasn’t even a matter of fidelity.”

“What became of her?”

The girl shrugs. “Stories stop,” she says.

“But I must draw a conclusion from this?” he says slowly, puzzled. “There is something that applies? There is you and me and the third who always walks beside us?”

The girl rattles the ice cubes in her empty glass. Unseen, the hounds are baying again in the woods. They are famous hounds. She can feel them. They race across the tightening band that grips her head. They are eternal and usually sleeping, but they have always awakened to seize the souls of the dead if one happens to lament them too loudly or too soon.

“Who is to be accused of imposture in our trinity?” Grady asks playfully.

The hounds are hurting her head. They run and run. She rubs her head with an ice cube. “I don’t know,” she says. “I want to tell you about Daddy.”

THERE ARE NO HOUNDS in the vicinity of the sorority house. The housemother has a dog but it is a cocker spaniel. It lacks both voice and genitalia. The housemother had the veterinarian remove its bark and compromising organs. It hardly seems a dog. It is more of an experiment that is still going on.

The housemother lives in the sorority house. Her significance is unknown. She seems useless and unpleasant. She is so lame and arthritic that she cannot walk up to the third floor where the girls sleep in their bunk beds. She cannot climb to the second floor where the girls’ desks and record players are, where their bright new clothes hang in the closets. She cannot see well, she lacks any real authority. Nonetheless, everyone hates her. In the dining room where she shows her fine upbringing by eating very tiny quantities of everything, she moves her fork in and out of the food many times before she brings it coyly to her lips. Her stomach is round. She is full of fluids, gases and tumors. Burps and bubblings come from her corner of the room. She likes to say cruel and pointed things to the girls, things that will embarrass them, but it takes hours to think of the words, sometimes days. The proper moment never comes.

Once this woman was married but her husband expired a long time ago. She looks upon those years without much interest. She has never been in love. The girls have boys to love them, sometimes several in a single year. Despite this difference, the housemother is similar to the girls in many ways. She cherishes Kahlil Gibran, just like them. When bathing, she soaps her breasts carefully, as though they could still be useful to her.

If she were younger or if someone had ever loved her, she would be able to do more harm.

One evening at dinner, she finds herself seated beside a girl she has not seen for quite some time. She has never liked this girl and in the midst of spooning Dream Whip on her pudding, she realizes, quite strongly, that the girl has been up to something rotten in her absence. The housemother has never feared her intuitive powers. On the contrary, she has always welcomed and used them. She takes a bite of pudding and says,

“I know your background and I am sure that those who love you would be very ashamed at your recent behavior.”

That, she is sure, will cover it for the time being.