The Painted Drum

1 Revival Road Faye Travers

Leaving the child cemetery with its plain hand-lettered sign and stones carved into the weathered shapes of lambs and angels, I am lost in my thoughts and pause too long where the cemetery road meets the two-lane highway. This distraction seems partly age, but there is more too, I think. These days I consider and reconsider the slightest of choices, as if one might bring me happiness and the other despair. There is no right way. No true path. The more familiar the road, the easier I’m lost. Left and the highway snakes north, to our famous college town; but I turn right and am bound toward the poor and historical New England village of Stiles and Stokes with its great tender maples, its old radiating roads, a stern white belfry and utilitarian gas pump/grocery. Soon after the highway divides off. Uphill and left, a broad and well-kept piece of paving leads, as the trunk of a tree splits and diminishes, to ever narrower outgrowths of Revival Road. This is where we live, my mother and I, just where the road begins to tangle.

From the air, our road must look like a ball of rope flung down haphazardly, a thing of inscrutable loops and half-finished question marks. But there is order in it to reward the patient watcher. In the beginning, the road is paved, although the material is of a grade inferior to the main highway’s asphalt. When the town votes swing toward committing more money to road upkeep, it is coated with light gravel. Over the course of a summer’s heat, the bits of stone are pressed into the softened tar, making a smooth surface for the cars to pick up speed. By midwinter, the frost creeps beneath the road and flexes, creating heaves that force the cars to slow again. I’m glad when that happens, for children walk this road to the bus stop below. They walk past with their dogs, wearing puffy jackets of saturated brilliance—hot pink, hot yellow, hot blue. They change shape and grow before my eyes, becoming the young drivers of fast cars who barely miss the smaller children, who, in their turn, grow up and drive away from here.

As I say, there is order, but the pattern is continually complicated by the wilds of occurrence. The story surfaces here, snarls there, as people live their disorder to its completion. My mother, Elsie, and I try to tack life down with observation. But if it takes a lifetime to see things clearly, and a lifetime beyond, even, perhaps only the religious dead have a true picture of our road. It is, after all, named for the flat field at its southern end that once hosted a yearly revival meeting. Those sweeping conversions resulted in the establishment of at least one or two churches that now seem before their time in charismatic zeal. Over the years they merged with newer denominations, but left their dead sharing earth with Universalists and Quakers and even utter nonbelievers. As for the living, we’re trapped in scene after scene. We haven’t the overview that the dead have attained. Still, I try to at least record connections. I try to find my way through our daily quarrels, surprises, and small events here on this road.

We were home doing pleasant domestic chores on a frozen Sunday in the dead of winter when there was a frantic beating at our door. In alarm, Elsie called me. I came rushing from the basement laundry to see a young man standing behind the glass of the back storm door, jacketless and shivering. I saw that he’d lost a finger from the hand he raised, and knew him as the Eyke boy, now grown, years past fooling with his father’s chain saw. But not his father’s new credit-bought car. Davan Eyke had sneaked his father’s new automobile out for an illicit spin and lost control coming down off the hill beside our house. The car slid toward a steep gully lined with birch. By lucky chance, it came to rest pinned precisely between two trunks. The white birch trees now held the expensive and unpaid-for white car in a perfect vise. Not one dent. Not one silvery scratch. Not yet. It was Davan’s hope that if I hooked a chain to my Subaru and backed up the hill I would be able to pull his car gently free.

My chain snapped, and the efforts of others only made things worse over the course of the afternoon. At the bottom of the road a collection of cars, trucks, equipment, and people gathered. As the car was unwedged, as it was rocked, yanked, pushed, and let go, as different ideas were tried and discarded, as the newness of the machine wore off, Davan saw his plan was lost and he began to despair. With empty eyes, he watched a dump truck winch his father’s vehicle half free, then slam it flat on its side and drag it shrieking up a lick of gravel that the town road agent had laid down for traction.

Over the years our town, famous for the softness and drama of its natural light, has drawn to itself artists from the large cities of the eastern seaboard. They have usually had some success in the marketplace, and can now afford the luxury of becoming reclusive. Since New Hampshire does not tax income, preferring a thousand other less effective ways to raise revenue, wealthy artists find themselves wealthier, albeit slightly bored. Depending on their surroundings for at least some company, they are forced to rely on those such as myself—a former user of street drugs cured by hepatitis, a clothing store manager fired for lack of interest in clothes, a semi-educated art lover, writer of endless journals and tentative poetry, and, lastly, a partner in the estates business my mother started more than fifty years ago.

At any rate, one such artist lives down at the end of our road, in a large brick cape attached to a white clapboard carriage house (now studio). Kurt Krahe—last name correctly written with an umlaut, a vampire bite above the a—is a striking man. Formerly much celebrated for his work in assemblages of stone, he has fallen into what he calls the Zwischenraum, the space between things. Kurt has lost his umlaut to American usage, but he loves German portmanteau words. Sometimes I think he makes them up, but Zwischenraum is real. It is the way I see the world sometimes. Kurt has fallen into the space between his own works and is now mainly ignored. He hasn’t done a major piece in years. Often, his sculptures incorporate native slate or granite and to help with the massive project of their execution he occasionally hires young local men. Krahe’s assistants live upon the grounds—there is a small cottage sheltered by an old white pine—they are to be available for work at any time of day or night. There is no telling when the inspiration to fit one stone a certain way upon another may finally strike.

Kurt’s hands are oddly, surprisingly, delicate and small; they remind me of a burly raccoon’s hands, nimble and clever. His feet are almost girlish in their neatly tied boots, a contrast to the rest of him, so boldly cut. I’m always curious about the stones that Kurt chooses for possible use. I inspect the ones he’s kept and I think I know, sometimes, what it is about them that draws him. He says that the Japanese have a word for the essence apparent in a rock. I ask him, why don’t the Germans? He says he’ll think one up. I suppose that I love Kurt for his ability to see that essence, the character of the rock. Only, I wish sometimes that I were stone. Then he would see me as I am. Peach-colored granite with flecks of angry mica. My balance is slightly off. I suspect there is another woman—maybe on his trips to New York City—but he has deflected and laughed off my questions. He has implicitly denied it, and I haven’t the confidence, I cannot bring myself, to ask him point-blank. Still, in spite of my suspicions, I am leaning toward him, farther, farther. Do I right myself? This is not an aesthetic choice.

When Davan Eyke was forced to leave home, he did not go far, just up to Krahe’s to inhabit the little cottage beneath the boughs of the beautiful, enfolding pine. It is a tree of an unusually powerful shape, and I have speculated often with the artist upon the year of its first growth. We are both quite certain it was small, a mere sapling, too tender to bother with, when the agents of the English king first marked the tallest and straightest trees in the forests of New England as off limits to colonists and destined for the shipyards of the Royal Navy, masts to hang great sails. A large pine growing now was a seedling when the climax growth, the pine canopy so huge and dense no light shone onto the centuries of bronze needles below, was axed down. This tree splits halfway up into three parts and forms an enormous crown. In that crotch, there is a raven’s nest, which is unusual since ravens are shy of northeasterners, having a long race memory for the guns, nets, and poisons with which they were once eradicated.

When Davan Eyke moved in, the ravens watched, but they watch everything. They are a humorous, highly intelligent bird, and knew immediately that Davan Eyke would be trouble. Therefore they dropped sticks upon the boy’s roof, shat on the lintel, stole small things he left in the yard, and hid them. Pencils, coins, and once his car keys. They also laughed. The laughter of a raven is a sound unendurably human. You may know it if you have heard it in your own throat as the noise of another of Krahe’s favorites, Schadenfreude, the joy that rises as one witnesses the pain of others. Perhaps the raven’s laughter, the low rasp, sounds cynical to our ears and reminds us of the depth of our own human darkness. Of course, there is nothing human in the least about it and its source is unknowable, as are the hearts of all things wild. Davan Eyke was bothered though, enough so that he complained to Krahe about the way the birds disturbed his sleep by dropping twigs and pinecones on his roof, which was of painted tin. End over end, the refuse clattered down.

“Get used to them” was all the artist said to Davan Eyke.

Krahe tells me this the day I bring the mail, a thing I do for him often, when he feels he is close to tossing himself into the throes of some ambitious piece. Then, he cannot or will not break the thread of his concentration by making a trip to the post office. There is too much at stake. This could be, I know although he will not admit it, the day his talent resurrects itself painfully from the grief where it has been plunged.

“I have in mind a perception of balance, although the whole thing must be brutally off the mark and highly dysphoric.”

He speaks like this, pompous, amused at his own pronouncements, brightening his eyes beneath harsh brows.

“Awkward,” I say, deflatingly. “Maybe even ugly.”

In his self-satisfaction there is more than a hint of the repressed Kansas farm boy he was when he first left home for New York. That boy is covered by many layers now—there is faked European ennui, an aggressive macho crackle, an edge of Lutheran judgmentalness about, among many things, other people’s religions. He says he has none. I can infuriate him easily by observing that, all the same, he is still Lutheran—a fire-breathing crank. Lapsed, maybe, but still tearing down hypocrisies. Still nailing his theses to the doors of cathedrals. He also descends at times to a strata of ongoing sadness over the not-so-recent loss of his second wife, who was killed on a road out west when her car ran over a large piece of stone. “Do you know,” Krahe said once, “that a stone can be wedged just so into the undercarriage so that, when you press the gas pedal, the accelerator sticks and shoots the car forward at an amazing speed?” That was the gist of the fluke accident that killed his wife. A high school prank near Flathead Lake. Stones on the highway. Her speed increased, says Krahe, as she pressed on the brakes. Not a beautiful woman from her pictures, but forceful looking. Resembled by their daughter, Kendra, a girl evidently committed to dressing in nothing but black and purple since she’s entered Sarah Lawrence.

“He’s not working out,” Krahe says now, of Eyke, who has moved just out of earshot. “I shouldn’t hire locals.”

I tell him that I resent his use of the word “local.” After all, I am one, although I qualify in his mind as both local and of the larger world since I spent several years in London, living in fearful solitude on the edge of Soho, failing my degree, and also because he senses that I’ve had a life he knows nothing about, which is true, but I never talk about who I really am with him. The work I do with mother takes us into an extremity of places and lives, too, and I suppose this also exempts me from the “local” tag.

“You wouldn’t have to hire anybody if you used smaller rocks,” I answer, my voice falsely dismissive.

“This guy’s a brainless punk,” Krahe continues.

“I thought you knew that when you hired him.”

“I suppose I could have told by looking at him, but I didn’t really look.”

“The only job he’s ever had was cutting grass, and half the time he broke the lawn mower. He broke so many on this road that people knew enough not to hire him. Still,” I tell Krahe, “he’s not a bad person, not even close to bad. He’s just…” I try to get at the thing about Eyke, but there just isn’t much to get. “…he could learn a lot from you.” My defense is lame and my lover does not buy it.

“I was desperate. I was working on Construction Number Twenty.”

That is the working title of a piece commissioned many years ago by a large Minneapolis cereal company to rise on the corporate grounds. It is still not finished. Krahe slowly flips the mail along his arm, frowning at each envelope as though it holds a secret outrage. In contrast to those sprightly hands and feet, his body is thick, he favors the heavy plaid woolens sold by mail, and his movements are ponderous and considered. His black hair is cut in a brushy crew cut, the same hairdo Uncle Sam once gave him. At fifty-six, he hasn’t lost his strength, and though he complains about his loss of energy, when I see him and my heart charges up, it is like being near a power source. When he speaks of Kendra coming home for a weekend, his voice is tender, almost dreamy. In those times there is a kind of yearning I’d do anything to hear directed toward me—I think I also love him because I want to know this side of him. Kendra doesn’t seem to have a complicated view of her father. And he sees Kendra, I tell myself, partly as the incarnation of his lost wife and not as his actual self-absorbed and petulant daughter. I don’t like her and she doesn’t like me.

I stay and watch the two men wrestle steel and stone. Davan Eyke is slight by contrast. He doesn’t look in fact as though he can lift as much weight as his boss. Together, though, they haul stones from the woods, drag and lever blocks of pale marble delivered from the Rutland quarries and farther away, too. His studio contains German Jurassic limestone, ammonite fossil-bearing rock, a granite shot with bits of hot blue. If Davan himself was artistic, this would be an ideal job, a chance to live close and learn from a master. As it is, Davan’s enthusiasm dwindles in proportion to the resentment he quickly transfers from his father to his boss.

Elsie sighs and makes a face when I tell her Kendra Krahe is visiting her father, and that he has invited us to dinner. I laugh at her eye-rolling. Krahe often invites us to dinners that do not materialize once Kendra becomes involved. She rails against me; more than once I suspect she has prevailed upon her father to break off our friendship when it turned more serious. She would not tolerate my sleeping there while she was in high school, and the habit of Kurt’s coming here has persisted. There is a low energy about Kendra, a fantastic drama, a way of doing ordinary things with immense conviction. Her father has never believed the dots splashed on the paper, the C+ science projects she displayed with such bravura, were only adequate. Seeing through the lens of her dead mother’s image, Krahe firmly believes that Kendra is extraordinary.

I shouldn’t be so hard on her, I suppose. But is it proper for the young to be so disappointing? And Krahe, why can’t he see? I have wished she’d find a boyfriend for herself, wished dearly, and still, such is the engrained denial of class distinction in our country that neither of us thought it strange not to consider Davan Eyke, either to dismiss or encourage such a match. There he was, sullenly enduring his surroundings, winging pebbles at the tormenting birds, but since he was not of the intelligentsia, such as we are, who live on the road, he didn’t occur to us.

This is the sort of family he is from: the Eykes, our closest neighbors. The father is a tinkering, sporadically employed mechanic. The local gas truck was driven by Davan’s mother, until she took over the school bus route. They belong to an Assembly of God church, a scruffy-looking place with the same sort of plastic sign in front that gas stations use to display shifting prices. The two-word mottoes change weekly. God Loves. God Knows. God Sees. In the Eykes’ packed-earth yard, a dog was tied for many years, a lovely creature part German shepherd and part husky; one eye brown and one blue. The dog was never taken off the short chain that bound it to the trunk of a tree. It lived in that tiny radius through all weathers, lived patiently, enduring each dull moment of its life, showing no hint of going mean.

I suppose I am no better than the Eykes. I called the Humane Society once, but when nothing happened and the dog still wound the chain one way and then the other, round and round the tree, I did nothing. Rather than confronting the Eykes, which seemed to me unthinkable since Mr. Eyke not only hauled away the trash but mowed our field, yanked out saplings to prevent the trees from closing in, and lived close enough to call in emergencies, I remained silent. From time to time, I brought the dog a bone as I passed on walks, and felt a certain degree of contempt for the Eykes, as one does for people who could mistreat an animal. Still, I did nothing.

That is one failure I regret, having to do with the Eykes, for all of us on the road were to pay for what was done to that creature. The other failure was the shortsightedness regarding Davan and Kendra.

A turbulence of hormones flows up and down this road. On my walks, I’ve seen the adolescence of each neighbor child hit like a small quake. Except in the wide loop sold off by a lumber company, divided into twelve five-acre parcels, and settled in development style, most of the houses on this road are surrounded by a depth of dark trees and a tangle of undergrowth. No two are within shouting distance. Yet you know, merely waving to the parents whose haunted eyes bore through the windshields of their car. You hear, as new trail bikes and motorbikes rip the quiet, as boom boxes blare from their perches on newly muscled shoulders. The family cars, once so predictable in their routes, buck and raise dust racing up and down the hills. It is a painful time, and one averts one’s eyes from the houses containing it. The very foundations seem less secure. Love falters and blows. Steam rises from the ditches and sensible neighbors ask no questions.

Davan hit like that, a compact, freckled boy who suddenly grew long-jawed and reckless. Elsie says she knew it was the end once he started breaking lawn mowers, slamming them onto the grass and stones so savagely that the blades bent. She quietly got my mower fixed and did not ask him back to cut the grass. I took over that job. Davan’s brown hair grew until it reached his shoulders, and a new beard came in across his chin like streaks of dirt. Frighteningly, Davan walked the road from time to time dressed in camouflage, hugging his father’s crossbow and arrows, with which he transfixed woodchucks. That phase passed and he lapsed into a stupor of anger, which lasted for years and culminated in the damage he did to his father’s new car. It was the most expensive thing his family ever bought, and since he left home soon after, it was clear he was not forgiven.

Kendra, on the other hand, had resolved her adolescence beautifully. After a few stormy junior high school years following her mother’s death, she settled into a pattern of achieving small things with great flair, for as I mentioned she had no talents, and was at most a mediocre student. She gave the impression that she was going places, though, and so she did, though her acceptance into a prestigious college was a mystery to all who knew Kendra. Her teachers, including me, were stymied. Perhaps it was the interview, one woman told my mother. Another was convinced of a mistake in the college computer records.

At night, in raw blue winter darkness, Krahe enters our house via that back screened porch, a door to which he has the key. The back door inside the porch is the only one that unlocks with that key, and I keep things that way for the following reason: should I decide, should I tire, should I have the enlightenment or the self-discipline or the good sense to stop Krahe from coming to me in the night it will be a simple matter. One locksmith’s fee, nothing more. One tossed key. No explanation owed. Though my mother must sense that Krahe’s night visits occur, we do not and have never spoken of it. Her room is downstairs at the other end of the house. We live privately, in many respects, and although this is how we prefer to live, there are times I nearly spill over with my need and wish to confide my feelings.

For when he steps into my room it is to me as though I am waking on a strange and unlikely margin. As though the ocean is set suddenly before me. Landlocked, you forget. Then all of a sudden you are wading hip-high into the surge of waves. In the moment, there is so much meaning, so much hunger in our mouths and skin. I think every time is the last time I will be with him. I am physically amazed. What I like best is the curious, unfolding, confessional quality of sex. I seek it, demand it of him, and for a matter of hours he is bare to me, all candor and desire. How can he lie? He begs things of me. Put your mouth here. We are reversed from our day selves in nakedness. I gain assurance in some switch of roles I do not altogether understand but which I suspect is entirely due to my manufactured scorn. He believes I am invulnerable. I protect myself with every trick I know.

Ravens are the birds I’ll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens. I’ve watched these birds so hard I feel their black feathers split out of my skin. To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next. When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. If I have a religious practice, it is the watching of these birds. In this house, open to a wide back field and pond, I am living within their view and territory. Krahe’s family group of birds divided up a few years ago. Once, they numbered eight or more. Now just three live within and around the pine, and six live somewhere in the heavy fringe of woods beyond my field. Two made their nest. Three hatchlings were reared. The other raven was killed by Davan Eyke.

You may wonder how on earth an undisciplined, highly unpleasant, not particularly coordinated youth could catch and kill a raven? They are infernally cautious birds. For instance, having long experience with poisoned carcasses, they do not taste first of dead food, but let the opportunistic blue jays eat their fill. The ravens watch, amused, to see if these bold greedy birds keel over in agony. Only when the jays are seen to survive do the ravens drive them off and settle in to feed. Davan had to use his father’s crossbow to kill the raven. One day when Krahe was gone, Davan sat on the front stoop of his little cottage and waited for the birds to gather in their usual browbeating circle of derision. As they laughed at him, stepping through the branches, he slowly raised the crossbow. They would have vanished at the sight of a gun. But they were unfamiliar with other instruments. They did not know the purpose or the range of the bow. One strayed down too far and Davan’s arrow pierced it completely through. Krahe drove into the yard and saw Davan standing over the bird. Amazingly, it wasn’t dead. In some fascination, Davan was watching it struggle on the shaft of the arrow, the point driven into the earth.

Krahe walked over and bent to the bird. He snapped the arrow’s point off and drew the shaft tenderly, terribly, from the bird’s body. For a moment the raven sprawled, limp and addled, on the ground, and then it gathered itself. The two humans watched as the bird simply walked away from them and entered the woods to die.

All of this time, overhead and out of range, the other birds wheeled. For once, they were silent.

“Let me see the bow,” said Krahe conversationally.

Davan handed it to him, prepared to point out its marvelous and lethal features.

“And the arrows.”

Davan handed those over too.

“I’ll be right back,” said Krahe.

Davan waited. Krahe walked across the yard to his woodpile, turned, and fit an arrow into the groove. Then he raised the bow. Davan stepped aside, looked around for the target, looked uneasily back at Krahe, then touched his own breast as the sculptor lifted the shoulder piece. Shot. Davan leapt to the other side of the white pine and vaulted off into the brush. The arrow stuck just past his shoulder. Then Krahe walked over and removed the arrow and laid the bow on the block he used to split his firewood. He axed the weapon neatly in half. He laid the arrows down next like a bunch of scallions and chopped them into short lengths. He walked into his house and phoned me. “If you see that boy running past your house,” he said, “here’s why.”

“You shot at him?”

“Not to hit him.”

“But still, my God.”

Krahe, embarrassed, would not speak of this again.

Davan had saved enough money from his pay (we thought) to buy himself a small old Toyota, dusty red with a splash of dark rust on the door where a dent had raised metal through the paint. The car now spewed grit and smoke on the road as he drove it back and forth to town. He’d returned to his room in his parents’ house and he resumed, every day, his chore of feeding the dog, though he never untied it from the tree.

That dog’s maple grew great patches of liver-colored moss and dropped dead limbs. The dog was killing it. Shit-poisoned, soaked with urine at the base, and nearly girdled by the continual sawing and wearing of the chain, the tree had for years yellowed and then blazed orange, unhealthily first of all the trees upon the road. Then one day it fell over and the dog walked off, calmly, like the raven, into the woods, a three-foot length of chain dragging. Only the dog didn’t die. Perhaps it had been completely stark mad all along, or perhaps it happened that moment after the tree went down when, unwrapping itself nervously, the dog stepped one step beyond the radius of packed dirt within which it had lived since it was a fat puppy. Perhaps that step, the paw meeting grass, rang down the spine of the dog, fed such new light into its brain, that she could not contain the barrage of information. At any rate, the outcome of that moment wasn’t to be seen for several weeks, within which time Davan had successfully raised dust near Kendra on illicit visits hidden from her father, and secretly taken her out with him to local parties, where at first she enjoyed her status as a college-goer and the small sensation caused by her New York clothing styles. Then, at some point, something awakened in her, some pity or conscience. Before that I’d seen nothing remarkable about Krahe’s daughter, other than the clothing. Her lack of kindness, laziness, feelings of enormous self-worth, all typical of women her age. Then all of a sudden this urge to care for and rescue Davan Eyke, a sudden unblocking of compassion that made Kendra come clean with her father. Her humanity terrified Krahe more thoroughly than if they’d been trying to get pregnant.

I step out of the car with the mail and see Krahe standing square in front of Davan, who slouches before the older man with obdurate weariness. Locked in their man-space, they do not acknowledge me. Krahe is of course telling Davan Eyke that he doesn’t wish for him to see his daughter Kendra, in the course of which he probably calls Davan some name, or makes some threat, for Davan steps back and stares at him alertly, hands up as though ready to throw off a punch, which never comes. Krahe kicks him over, instead, with a rageful ease that astonishes Davan Eyke. From the cold ground, there suddenly, he shakes his head in puzzlement at Krahe’s feet. When Krahe draws his leg back to kick again I move forward. The kick stops midway. Davan rises. The two stare at each other in a spinning hatred—I can see the black web between them.

“You still owe me,” says Davan, backing away.

“Say you won’t see her first.”

Davan just starts to laugh, raucous, cracking, a raven’s laugh. I can still hear it through his car window as he revs and peels out.

I turn to Krahe.

“You should let Kendra see him,” I say.

He is as astounded at my temerity as I am. Not only am I not the sort to get involved in other people’s business, and this is definitely not mine, but he also knows that I’m not fond of Kendra.

“What’s it to you?” he says, more amazed than defensive.

“She’s got a right,” I say. “And besides, she’ll see him anyway.”

“No, she won’t,” says Krahe.

We hold each other’s gazes belligerently. “You’re the dad,” I finally shrug.

I suspect that he will learn soon enough just how much weight his objections carry with Kendra. Still, I don’t understand why Krahe detests the boy so much—it is as though Davan has tapped some awful gusher in the artist. Is it partly the fear we nonbelievers have for what Krahe calls “the fundamentally insane”? He adds holy rolling to the list of Davan’s undesirable Eyke-ish qualities when he sees the family truck pulled up at the unkempt church, which he calls a Quonset hut. Is he afraid that Davan Eyke will draw his daughter into the flock? Whatever else, his anxiety is also a productive, dark vein, for now in a welter of frustrated energy, Krahe starts working. He finishes Twenty. He produces, hardly sleeps. Hardly sees me.

It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother—somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join in the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother’s indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn’t enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is all right to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame.

Elsie and I are past the blame, and as she sits before me now we are listening to a CD of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in E-flat Major. It is a familiar piece, a thoughtful conversation between old friends. I am writing as usual in my daily journal, a red hardbound book that I order every year through the mail. This journal company has been in existence a long time and I have thirty-three of these books stacked among my other notebooks, shelved in my room. My mother’s eyes are closed. It strikes me that there is something in the nakedness of her face and shut eyes like that of a newborn animal. Her skin has always been extremely clean and fine. Always, she has smelled to me of soap, but now she’s added a light perfume.

I think that she knows he has been here. Last night, he came down off the manic high in which he hung, raven- or hawklike, between one uninspired month and the next. It is morning. Even to me the house seems different, more alive, alert, and with a comforting maleness, after Krahe has made love to me in the night. Still, openly becoming Krahe’s lover would upset the balance. As well, I believe my deadlocked secret love and unsecret contempt is the only hold I have over him, my only power. So things remain as they are. Elsie and I maintain a calm life together, the treasure of routine. I do not dread, as others might, her increasing dependence. It is only that I have the strange unadult wish that if she must pass into death, that rough mountain, she take me too. Not leave me scratching at the shut seam of stone.

Winter lets go of this road with a rush of dark rain. The snow and slush melt away, raising slick mud that freezes to a glassy tar. One day the weak sun heats the bark of young birch trees; the next, a sudden temperature drop ices the drawn sap and splits the trunks. All through the woods they gape like throats. New sounds are heard. The caterwauling of the barred owls startles me from sleep, raising bubbles of tension in my blood. I cannot imagine myself changing the locks. Without a word, without a sound, I circle Krahe, dragging my chain.

During these weeks, there is no sign of the dog that slipped free of the dead maple, and Elsie and I can only assume it has been taken in somewhere as a stray or, perhaps, shot from off a farmer’s back porch for running deer. Indeed, that is how it probably survives, squeezing through a hole in the game-park fence, living off hand-raised pheasants and winter-killed carcasses.

The dog reappears during a false three-day warmth that doesn’t fool a soul. My neighbors up the road, the ones who clear-cut fifty acres of standing timber in four shocking days, have their cocker spaniel eaten. They leave the dog out all night on its wire run and the next morning, calling in poochie from the back door, Ann Flaud in her nightgown pulls the dog’s lead toward her. It rattles across the ground. At the end of it hangs an empty collar, half gnawed through. She stands with the collar in her hand, on her back steps, wondering.

There is little beyond that to find. Small evidence. Just a patch of blood and the two long, mitteny, brown ears. Coydogs are blamed—those mythical creatures invoked for every loss—then a bear, then Satanists. I know it is the dog. I have seen her at the edge of our frozen field, loping on long springy wolf-legs. She has no starved look. She is alive—fat, glossy, huge.

She takes a veal calf for supper one night, pulled from its stand-up torture pen at the one working farm on the road that survived the nineties. She steals suet out of people’s bird feeders, eats garbage, meadow voles, and frogs. A few cats disappear. She is now blamed for everything. And seen every day, but never caught. The farm panics over missing chickens. One of my rougher-hewn neighbors misses a bear’s hide and finds it chewed to yarny bits deep in the woods. It is not until the dog meets the school bus, though, mouth open, the sad eye of liquid brown and the hungry eye of crystal blue trained on the doors as they swish open, that the state police become involved.

A dragnet of shotgun-armed volunteers and local police fan through the woods. Parked on this road, an officer with a vague memory of a car theft in Concord runs a check on Davan Eyke’s red car as it flashes past. Eyke is on his way up to Krahe’s, where Kendra, less boldly attired than usual and biting black paint from her nails, waits to counsel him. Apparently, they go for a walk in the woods, leaving the car in the driveway in view of Krahe’s studio. They return and then, against Krahe’s express, explicit, uncompromising, direct orders, Kendra does exactly as she pleases. The human heart is every bit as tangled as our road. She gets into the car with Eyke.

On the computer check, the car turns up hot, stolen, and as it speeds back down from Krahe’s an hour later, the police officer puts on his siren and spins out, giving chase. There ensues a dangerous game of tag. On our narrow roads filled with hairpin turns, sudden drops, and abrupt hills, speed is a harrowing prospect. Davan Eyke tears down the highway, past his family church and the week’s wishful-thinking motto, God Cares, hangs a sharp left on Jackson Road, and jumps the car onto a narrow gravel path mainly used for walking horses. He winds up and down the hill like a slingshot, meets the wider road, then joins it and continues toward Windsor, over the world’s longest covered bridge, into Vermont where, at the first stoplight, he screeches between two cars in a sudden left-hand turn against the red. Leaving town, he pops an old man walking the road—John Jewett Tatro—high into the air. The car has vanished before Tatro rolls to the bottom of the embankment. Tatro lies there, dying among the packed brown leaves, the snow crust, the first tough shoots of trillium. No doubt, the ravens are curious. On blacktop now, Davan’s car is clocked at over a hundred miles per hour. There isn’t much the police can do but radio ahead and follow as fast as they dare.

Another left, and it seems Davan is intent on fleeing back toward Claremont on the New Hampshire side. The police car slows as Eyke swings around a curve on two side wheels and makes for the bridge that crosses over the wide, calm Connecticut that serves as our boundary. The afternoon air is on the verge of freezing, the mud’s a slick gloss. According to the sign that blurs in Davan’s eyes, the bridge is liable to ice up before the pavement. It has. The car hits transparent black ice at perhaps 120 miles per hour and soars straight over the low guardrail. A woman in the oncoming lane says the red car travels at such a velocity it seems to gain purchase in the air and hang above the river. She also swears that she sees, before the car flies over, the white flower of a face pressing toward the back window. No one sees a thing after that, although there is a sort of witness near the scene. An early fisherman pulling his boat onto shore below the bridge is suddenly aware of a great shadow behind him, as though a cloud or bird has fallen out of the sky and touched his back lightly with its wing.

Within minutes of the radio call, all of the pickups and cars on our road gather their passengers and firearms and sweep away from the dog posse to the scene of greater drama at the bridge. Although the wreckage isn’t found for days, and requires four wet-suited divers to locate and gather, the police make a visit to Krahe’s on the strength of the woman witness’s story. Fearing that Kendra has gone over the bridge as well, they take me along to question my friend.

I wait on the edge of the field for Krahe, my hand on the stump of an old pine’s first limb. From deep in the brush, I hear the ravens, the grating haw, haw, of their announcement, and it occurs to me that he might just show up with Kendra. But he doesn’t, only shambles toward me at my call. As I walk toward Kurt, I feel for the first time in our mutual life that I am invested with a startling height, even a power, perhaps more of an intelligence than I am used to admitting that I possess. I feel a sickening omnipotence.

He starts at my naked expression, asks, “What?”

“Davan’s car,” I report, “went over the bridge.” I don’t know what I expect from Krahe then. Anything but his offhand, strangely shuttered nonreaction close to relief. He has apparently no idea Kendra might have disobeyed him and gotten into the car. Unable to go on, I fall silent. For all of his sullen gravity, Davan had experienced and expressed only a shy love for Krahe’s daughter. It was an emotion he was capable of feeling, as was the fear that made him press the gas pedal.

I stare at Kurt. My heart creaks shut. I turn away, leaving him to talk to the police, and walk directly into the woods. At first, I think I’m going off to suffer like the raven, but as I walk on and on, I know that I will be fine and I will be loyal, pathologically faithful. I will be there for him when he mourns. The knowledge grounds me. The grass cracks beneath each step I take and the cold dry dust of it stirs around my ankles. In a long, low swale of a field that runs into a dense pressure of trees, I stop and breathe carefully, standing there.

Whenever you leave cleared land, or a path, or a road, when you step from someplace carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what’s beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the deadwood of another tree, fungi black as devil’s hooves. Over us the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches.

The dog is not seen and for a time, at least, she abandons Revival Road; there are no spaniel or chicken killings, she does not appear again near the house where her nature devolved, she doesn’t howl in the game park or stalk the children’s bus stop. Yet at night, in bed, my door unlocked, as I am waiting, I imagine that the dog pauses at the edge of my field, suspicious of the open space, then lopes off with its snapped length of chain striking sparks from the exposed ledge and boulders. I have the greatest wish to stare into her eyes, but if I should meet her face-to-face, breathless and heavy muzzled, shining with blood, would the sad eye see me or the hungry eye? Which one would set me free?

He has weakened, Kurt, he needs me these days. Elsie says, out of nowhere, Don’t let him use you. I touch her shoulders, reassuringly. She shrugs me off. Perhaps because she senses, with disappointment, that I actually don’t care. Shame, pleasure, ugliness, loss. They are the heat in the night that tempers the links. And then there is forgiveness when the person is unforgivable, and the man weeping like a child, and the dark house soaking up the hollow cries.

2 The Painted Drum

I am called upon to handle the estate of John Jewett Tatro just after his Presbyterian funeral. Elsie has her hands full rearranging the shop, so I drive to the Tatro house to make the appraisal of its contents. The morning is overcast, the sky threatful, an exciting dark gray. The Tatros have always been too cheap to properly keep up their road, and the final quarter mile is all frost heaves, partly crumbled away, the gnarled bedrock exposed. I bump along slowly so as not to slide into the frozen swamp grass and iced-over ponds at either side. I wish for thunder, then take back my wish. The wind is still brittle and icy. Any rain that falls will turn to slush and send us swerving back into the cold exhaustion that was February. We are over halfway done with March. April, though fickle, will inch us toward May’s tender, budding, bug-hatching glory.

The Tatro house is not grand anymore. The original nineteenth-century homestead has been renovated and enlarged so many times that its style is entirely obscured. Here a cornice, there a ledge. The building is now a great clapboard mishmash, a warehouse with aluminum-clad storm windows bolted over the old rippled glass and a screen porch tacked darkly across its front. The siding is painted the brown-red color of old blood. The overall appearance is rattling and sad, but the woman who greets me is cheerful enough, and the inside of the house is comfortable, though dim. The rooms are filled with the odor I have grown used to in my work. It is a smell that alerts me, an indefinable scent, really, composed of mothballs and citrus oil, of long settled dust and cracked leather. The smell of old things is what it is. My pulse ticks as I note that even on the ground floor an inordinate number of closets have been added during some period of expansion. Some run the length of whole walls, I estimate, roughly noting the room’s proportions.

The niece, whose name is Sarah, surname also Tatro, is an RN at the hospital just north of here. She is a pleasant, square-jawed woman, hair of light brown and eyes of blue, a woman in her midthirties, years younger than I am, the sort of mother who volunteers to supervise recess or construct grade school art projects. The sort of community citizen who campaigns for historical preservation and school bond votes. I know the type. I have attempted to be the type. So has my mother. But our fascination for the stuff of life, or more precisely, the afterlife of stuff, has always set us apart. Mother started the business and we have run it jointly now for nearly two decades. We are fair, discreet, honest, and knowledgeable. We are well-known in our part of New Hampshire, and well respected I think, although I’ve always known that we do not fit in. There is a certain advantage to our gender. More often than not, it is the women of the family who get stuck dealing with the physical estate, the stuff, the junk, the possessions, and we are also women. We understand what it is like to face a mountain of petty decisions when in grief. As I sit down with Sarah, formalizing things over a cup of coffee, I feel that comfortable and immediate sense of connection that one can have with other women in this time—sympathy, of course, but also some relief. Finally, to get on with things! There is even some excitement at the idea of the task ahead. Cleaning out a house is bone-numbing work, but there are always discoveries along the way. Some are valuable—under a coat of milk paint an original Shaker table, Herter Brother chairs, a fabulous porcelain or saccharine but valuable old Hummels amid chipped salt and pepper shakers. Once, an old bucket forgotten in a pantry corner turned out to be a hand-painted Leder, worth thousands. First editions turn up, first printings, a signed Mark Twain, a Wharton, a pristine Salinger—you never know what will surface from even the most unpromising pile. And, too, some discoveries are revelatory—diaries, packets of love letters, a case of antique pornography featuring trained ponies, death certificates that list surprising causes, unknown births. The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

There is also, in my eagerness to take on the Tatro estate, a thread of personal connection that reaches back several generations. It is nothing my mother or I would have pursued while either of the Tatro brothers was alive, although it has to do with our specialty—Native American antiquities. In The History of Stiles and Stokes, a book published on subscription by our local historical society, there is an entire chapter devoted to the branch of the Tatro family that lives in Stiles, and within that chapter a paragraph about the grandfather of the most recently deceased Tatros. Jewett Parker Tatro was an Indian agent on the Ojibwe reservation where my grandmother was born and where she lived until the age of ten, at which time she was taken east and enrolled at Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania. A young teacher from Stokes, only twenty years old, had written to Tatro and was even put up at Tatro’s house on the North Dakota reservation while he recruited students there. He’s the one who got my grandmother to come to Carlisle. There, she learned to sew intricately, to add and subtract, to do laundry, scrub a floor clean, read, write, and recite Bible passages, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Keats’s odes, and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Carlisle Institute was also where she fell in love, or came to know her husband, I should say. It is hard for me to imagine that the cold little woman I remember, the anti-Grandma, I used to call her, ever fell in love or felt much in the way of human emotion.

The young teacher whom she married kept her in the east, though she returned to the reservation for a while when she inherited land, and bore my mother on her own allotment. My grandfather lived there too and apparently was, in turn, educated by the Ojibwe in the arts of trapping and hunting, occupations he so thoroughly loved that he returned to Stokes and worked for the rest of his life in the rich people’s game park that abuts Krahe’s land. My grandparents lived in a little house just outside the game-park gate. Elsie and my father bought a new house and we kept living in it when he died—six months after my younger sister. So that’s our little cat’s cradle of connections. That is why we are not really Easterners and partly why, I suspect, Krahe finds me interesting—he can’t quite place exactly who I am.

The connection between Tatro and the reservation is also of interest because it wasn’t uncommon for Indian agents to amass extensive collections of artifacts, and of course mother and I have always wondered whether the Tatro house held such a trove. We have had little indication, beyond the odd reference here or there. The last two Tatros were a forbidding couple of fellows who lived meanly and died within two months of each other—the younger of natural causes and the older, of course, of the shock and injury he sustained when struck by that doomed Toyota. Although once in their house I see little that would lead me to think that their closets hold anything more exotic than magazines and clothing and phonograph records, there have been rumors. And to our knowledge, there has never been a large-scale Tatro collection donated to any local, state, or college museum. There are those many closets and the thick walls of the downstairs rooms. Also, there is or was the nature of the Tatros—oh, there is certainly that—to consider.

They were sharp, they were shrewd, they were flinty, unreasonable, calm cheaters and secret hoarders. They haunted tag sales. Bought food in bulk. Hitchhiked when gas was expensive, though they were not poor. Ate day-old rolls and bread and drank postdated milk. Saved the rubber bands off broccoli and bananas, when they bought such luxuries. They boiled the sap from their trees and stole the corn from their neighbor’s fields. They picked fiddleheads, tore fruit off stunted trees, shot and roasted raccoons. Each fall they bought and salted down or froze half a pig, devouring it from snout to hock over the course of a year. To my mind the Tatros were exactly the sort of cheap old Yankee bachelors who’d have kept a valuable collection of artifacts just because it never occurred to them to part with anything. They never would have thought of donating, or even selling; they would have simply hung on to their stuff—moldering, mothballed, packed away with cedar blocks—until Judgment Day. Or so I hoped.

Curiously, perhaps, as we are put in the way of many fine objects, the house I live in with my mother is not cluttered. It’s not that our vocation has turned us snobbish. Rather, it is the constant reminder of our own mortality that reins us in. The useless vanity of holding on to anything too tightly is, of course, before us always. To strive to own anything of extraordinary value mostly strikes us as absurd, given our own biodegradability. Still, there are a few things we’ve come across and found irresistible. That they are in our line of specialty probably reveals that we are more captive to our background than we admit—a lustrous, black, double-throated Maria Martinez wedding vase; an Ojibwe cradle board, the wrap intricately beaded on velvet; three very fine Navajo rugs; a bandolier bag that was probably carried by the last Ojibwe war leader, Buganogiizhig; a few seed pots; several shaved-quill boxes; and some heavy old silver and turquoise that must be continually polished. Oh, we’d like to leave our path to heaven clear. Travel a spare, true road. Yet we’re human enough.

Sarah Tatro did not intend to let the house and its contents trap her. Over the cup of coffee—one of those thick diner-style white mugs surely swiped from a local café by one of the uncles—she told me that she was anxious to clear the place out and put it on the market. I found her forthrightness appealing and yet, at the same time, that the Tatro house should pass from Tatro ownership after nearly two centuries infected me with a faint melancholy. It is unusual for one place to remain so long in a single family’s hands—I was, surprisingly, tempted to try dissuading her from breaking with the past and carrying on with, of all things, her own life. I controlled myself. I took out my notebook and began to make a rough list of the contents of the house. Later on, I would be joined by two assistants, but I prefer to work alone at first, as does mother. I like to get a feel for the things in the house, a sense of the outlook or taste of the person who, though safely in the next world, still lingers in the arrangement and treatment of goods. I like to make peace with the dead.

Were I a traditional Ojibwe, I would have a special place in the community because of my line of work. According to a number of written sources from my collection, the objects left behind by a dead person were regarded with fearful emotion. They were never kept by family, but immediately gathered up by a person whose job it was to parcel the belongings of the deceased out to others. I assume things haven’t changed much, at least among people who live the old way. Possessions are thought to attract the spirit back to their loved ones, and so only persons unrelated to the dead are considered safe to handle them. Those persons who distribute the objects should not wear the color red—it is the one color the dead are thought to see clearly. It attracts them. They wander toward it. I avoid wearing red in my work, for somehow I find that idea compelling.

I tell Sarah that I am ready to begin a preliminary tagging and cataloguing of the main portion of the house, and then I ask if her uncles had any particular interest, field of study, or collection that might require special handling or appraisal.

“Oh, I don’t know, there’s just so much of everything.” She waves her hands. “So many old sets of dishes. Uncle John owned a number of guns. Some of those are old. And then the closets on the ground floor go way back behind the walls. They’re stuffed. That’s pretty much to say it’s anybody’s guess.”

I am on my own, and very soon I am immersed in the pleasures of my job. The sorrows of strangers are part of my business, and were I to examine my motives in continuing this work, I might find that from their losses I extract some bit of comfort—as though my constant proximity to death protects me and those I love. The furniture in the first two rooms on the ground floor is in adequate repair and quite good, though there are no “finds.” Predictably, the Tatros weren’t bibliophiles, nor is there much in the way of decorative little touches—lamps, vases, figurines. Yet the walls are hung with six nicely done paintings by local artists and there is one oil sketch, a sort of pre-painting drawing, by Maxfield Parrish. I am pleased to see it and I wonder if the Tatros were acquainted with him. That particular discovery would have made my day at any other time. In this case it also indicates the Tatro tendency to hold on to things, as the Parrish was well-known to have value and could easily have been sold. I try not to get my hopes up, but when I open the door to the first closet my fingers are clumsy with excitement. Quickly, I go through what I can see—the usual boxes of magazines. Piles of curtains and old and faded linen. A great many boots of all styles, reaching back for decades. Mothballed coats of everything from wool to skunk skins. The closet goes on and on, but soon enough I decide to leave its contents to the patience of my assistants. The next closet, running between two parlorlike rooms, one of which probably at one time held a piano and other musical instruments, is stuffed with records. 78 rpm. Most swing or big band groups. I’m not an aficionado of the music of that era so I only make notes and leave the details. I am beginning to worry that the rumors were just that when, upon opening the first of a wide bank of drawers built into a wall, I find the first indication of, it seems curious to say, life.

Some estates come to life and others don’t. Some holdings have little personality, others much. For instance, there is a moment I think of still, one I nearly missed. Years ago, I opened a small wooden chest containing what appeared to be handkerchiefs wrapped in tissue paper, only handkerchiefs, bearing the owner’s initials, L.M.B. I was about to empty the box and stack its contents among the linens when I noticed a label. Pinned to each cotton, lawn, lace-trimmed, or embroidered handkerchief, I realized, was a carefully cut piece of paper. Of course, I examined the papers. Each bore a date inked in ladylike script. A name or names were written. And then occasions. Teddy’s Christening. Venetta and John Howard’s Wedding. And then, Teddy’s Funeral. Brother Admantine’s Wake. First Opera, La Traviata. Wedding. Broken Arm. And far down at the bottom, perhaps the first such kept handkerchief and the author of the collection, a child’s small square of fabric clumsily sewn with the initials and labeled My Mother’s Funeral. I remember sitting with the handkerchiefs belonging to L.M.B. as the rest of the work of pricing and sorting swirled around me. Here was a box containing a woman’s lifetime of tears. I passed through several stages of emotion. The first was elation at the novelty of such an odd, Victorian idea, and the urge to show the box and its contents to my assistants. Next, I was swept through with such irritation for this evidence of outrageous thrift that I had a rare thought. I almost never think of non-Indians as white. After all, my own skin is pale. But I experienced a sudden bolt of prejudice that surprised me. Just like a white lady, so stingy with her tears she kept them, and then I recovered myself and sat further, still holding the box, which was very light, the wood dry old varnished pine, and turning over one and the next handkerchief. Theodor’s Precious Birth. Aunt Lilac’s Deathbed Supper. What was a deathbed supper? Cousin Franklin’s Wedding to Mildred Vost. More funerals. As the other workers tackled the next room, I was left alone with the box in my lap and it was then, sitting with L.M.B.’s sorrows and joys, that my own eyes filled with tears. There weren’t many. I am not the crying sort anymore. So when I did feel that swell of sadness I reached immediately for one of the handkerchiefs, dabbed my eyes dry, and added my own tears to the box. Then I closed the box. I knew what had happened was exactly right. Tears Shed for L.M.B., I might have written on a scrap of paper. I’d have to buy the box myself now, but that seemed the proper close to the collection.

Later, I heard that L.M.B. was a ferocious old bore in her age, critical, churchy, and prone to making complaint calls to the parents of young boys who cut across her front lawn or spoiled her tulips. But that’s what I mean by coming to life.

The estate of John Jewett and Burden Tatro comes into a similar focus when I make the acquaintance of a doll with a face of fawn-skin and eyes of jet. I know that the doll is something special the moment I put my hands on it. She is wrapped in faded red trade cloth and placed inside a shoe box. The shoe box is mistakenly stored upon a shelf of shoes, and when I open it I catch a whiff of smoked hide. It is a smell that could have accumulated molecule by molecule inside of the box only if it was not opened for a very long time. As I unwrap the doll, the fugitive taste of smoke vanishes and there is the doll herself, exquisite. The perfectly cured hide of her skin has somehow retained its softness, though from the faintly smudged darknesses on her arms and skirt I see she had been loved as a toy. Her red quill lips are stitched into a calm, amused smile, and her bead eyes are set at a lively angle. Her coarse black hair was plucked from a horse’s mane and each black thread sewn into her head and then divided into braids. Her dress is also made of tanned hide, decorated with bits of shell and the old antique beads called greasy yellow and ruby red whiteheart and german blue. Her waist is belted with a woven sash. Attached to it she wears a tiny scabbard that secures a tiny skinning knife. Her moccasins are sewn with flowers, and she wears jewelry. A ring of trade silver makes a bracelet on her arm. From her pierced fawnskin ears dangle miniature earbobs that are hawk’s bells so unusually small that they could hang from the throats of warblers. She carries a thimble-size basket woven so cleverly that I laugh in pleasure. I bring the doll out at once, and show her to Sarah.

“Oh, there she is!” She takes the doll from me and handles her with familiar tenderness, smoothing the coarse hair down and caressing the slender horsehair brows embroidered above the glittering eyes. “My uncles used to let me play with her if I was very good.”

“She’s very good, you know. Valuable, I mean. We should have a museum curator look at her.”

“Yeah?” Sarah is surprised, but not particularly pleased. I think she feels the same way I do about the doll. It is personal—the delight of the doll’s presence has nothing to do with her worth.

“Were there other things, American Indian I mean, of that era?” I ask. “Did your uncles keep them all together somewhere? In a cabinet? Trunks?”

“Oh God, yes, I’d forgotten all about it. One of the Tatros way back lived with Indians,” she says. “There was a lot of old beadwork and stuff. Come on upstairs, I’ll show you.”

On the way up the stairs, I try to breathe slowly. There is an attic room of course—a long unfinished tar-papered hall lined with simple board shelves and stuffed with old suitcases. The major portion of the collected items are kept in the suitcases, Sarah tells me. There are as well some larger things wrapped in old bedspreads and horse blankets. We unveil these at once—a cradle board not as good as mine, large birch-bark winnowing baskets, a curious, beadworked footstool. A drum. The suitcases hold some precious examples of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century bead and cloth-appliqué work. There are moccasins, leggings, beaded ceremonial breech clouts, a vest, and two bandolier bags (in extraordinary condition, worth a great deal). There are also a number of lesser items—small purses of the sort once sold to tourists, a band for a headdress from which the feathers are all removed, tobacco pouches, woven carrying straps and reed mats. We lay things out, unwrapped, on the tops of suitcases, draped off the edges of drawers and shelves, but stop eventually. The collection goes on and on.

“Congratulations,” I say. Sarah Tatro looks startled.

“Congratulations for what?”

“You can probably retire. Or at least take a long vacation. No more early-morning wake-up calls.”

“You think all this is valuable….”

“Very.”

Sarah drops to a trunk and stays there, puts her head in her hands. “You mean, they were sitting on this all along?”

I don’t reply and after a time she shakes her head and laughs shortly, without humor. “They were so cheap with themselves that they ate oatmeal for dinner. And they spread Crisco on their bread instead of butter. The taxes on this place had gone sky-high, of course, and they wanted to keep it. So they lived on nothing. But in the end”—her voice lifts—“I have to say I think they enjoyed their stinginess.” And then she laughs with more ease. “They probably enjoyed what they had here. You can see they went through things. Checked them for mildew or bugs, I guess, rewrapped them. Set mousetraps. Look.” She shows me the date on a newspaper that was used to cushion a lovely little sweet-grass basket. “Last year’s.”

“That’s fortunate,” I say, “the acid in the newspaper could have ruined that basket.” I move closer to look at the little coiled and sewn basket, and that is when I step close to the drum.

I’m not a sentimental person and I don’t believe old things hold the life of people. How can I? I see the most intimate objects proceed to other hands, indifferent to the love once bestowed. Some people believe objects absorb something of their owner’s essence. I stay clear of that. And yet, when I step near the drum, I swear it sounds. One deep, low, resonant note. I stop dead still, staring at the drum. I hear it, I know I hear it, and yet Sarah Tatro does not.

“I’m getting out of here,” she merely says. “Too dusty. I’ll be back later on this afternoon. I’ve got some errands in town.”

And so I am left with the original Tatro’s loot. I continue to stare at the drum, what I can see since it is mostly swaddled by a faded quilt. I don’t just hear things and I’m not subject to imaginative fits. There will be an explanation. Something shifting to strike the skin. A change in air pressure. The quilt isn’t anything special, a simple collection of squares, yarn-tied, the sort of thing sold at church bazaars. I step over to the drum and pull the fabric entirely away. The light comes from two bare bulbs with pull chains, and casts harsh shadows. The head of the drum glares out, huge, three feet across at least. The buffalo or moose skinned to make it must have been a giant. In spite of its size there is something delicate about the drum, though, for it is intricately decorated, with a beaded belt and skirt, hung with tassels of pulled red yarn and sewn tightly all around with small tin cones, or tinklers. Four broad tabs are spaced equally around the top. Into their beaded tongues of deep indigo four white beaded figures are set. They are abstract but seem to represent a girl, a hand, a cross, a running wolf. On the face of the drum, at the very center, a stripe is painted in yellow. That is all. The figurative detail, the red-flowered skirts, the tinklers, combined with the size of the drum, give it an unusual sense of both power and sweetness.

I draw a folding chair close, sit, and jot down the details. My hand drags across the page. This is the sort of find that would usually thrill me, but I am not pleased. I put down my pen. I am uneasy, anxious. I look around. I hope that Sarah has not returned from her errands yet. I set my hand on the drum and then I feel, pulled through me like a nerve, a clear conviction. It is visceral. Not a thought but a gut instinct. I cover the drum again with the quilt and go downstairs to make sure that Sarah is really gone. When I see that the garage is empty and I’ve called through the house to make certain I am alone, I prop open the back door and go straight back upstairs. I bundle the quilt more tightly around the drum, and then I carry it out of the house. I set my bundle on the gravel only briefly as I lift the hatch on my car, then I slide the drum into the cargo hold and hide it by pulling over it the theft-deterring blind I always use when parking at big auctions.

I work the rest of the afternoon without thinking about what I’ve done. When my thoughts flicker toward the drum, I veer away from any further examination. What I’ve just done, or am about to do, is probably a felony and could ruin our business. The ease with which I have done it bewilders me. For a person who has not stolen so much as a candy bar in all of her life to walk coolly out of a client’s house with such a valuable object might signal insanity. The beginning of a nervous breakdown. But I don’t feel that way. I feel quite lucid. And I wonder whether others who suddenly commit irrational and criminal acts feel this calm acceptance of an unknown part of themselves.

Dusk is forming, blue and cold, by the time I arrive at home. I leave the drum in the car, wrapped in the quilt, underneath its stretched plastic curtain. I don’t want it in the house yet. I have to think—not about whether what I’ve done was right: I have decided that I wouldn’t have done it unless it was on some level right. And yet the explanation of this rightness swirls out of my reach. My real concerns are whether I can keep the drum hidden and whether I’ll get caught. I am pretty sure that Sarah Tatro hasn’t noticed the drum; in fact, she seemed indifferent to all of her uncles’ objects save the doll she played with as a child. I’m also fairly certain that she is the only one who’d have any possible knowledge of her uncles’ collection. And even she had forgotten it existed. I’d had to take the drum that afternoon, if I was to take it at all. Once I catalogue the objects and have them appraised, the drum will price itself out of reach of any but the wealthiest collectors, or a museum. Yet I don’t want the drum. What would I do with such a thing, where would I keep it? No, I didn’t take the drum for myself. I reassure myself of this again as I sit down to dinner with my mother.

“You have an odd look on your face,” she says. “So, how was it?”

I take the salad bowl from her hands and begin forking leaves onto my plate.

“Well, it was there,” I tell her.

“Oh!” She puts her fork down.

I’ve taken a mouthful of spinach leaves but suddenly I feel too tired to even chew. I slump in my chair, throw my head back, stretch my arms. “I’ve been crouched over the notebook all afternoon. It’s a real haul. Old—I mean old old—Tatro, walked away with everything—dolls, beadwork, cradle boards. You name it.”

“The thieving bastard!” she marvels again. “So he got away with the good stuff. He had an eye.”

We sit there with our food between us. Elsie’s hair, sleek and pulled back in a knot, is very white. I am always very proud when people tell me that she is beautiful. She bore me, and then my younger sister, in her thirties when she had given up on getting pregnant. I was a gift. It’s very nice being told, all of your life, that you are a gift to someone. We are very happy right then, although I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps it is just that our secret expectations or suspicions have been met.

“There was a drum,” I say to her.

She pushes her plate away and puts her elbows on the table, leans toward me, peering at me. Her eyes are narrow and slightly upturned at the corners. The iris, dark brown, has the milky blue ring of age but her gaze is still sharp. She is waiting for me to describe the drum.

“One of the big drums,” I say. Her fingers flicker on the table.

“Was it dressed?”

“What?”

“Decorated.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

I tell her about the figures and the cross.

“Not a cross, not Christian. That is either a star or the sign of the four directions. Was it painted?”

“There was a yellow line.”

She closes her eyes, presses two fingers to the space between her eyebrows. I watch her carefully because she does this when she is trying to form a thought. I am quiet. Finally, she speaks. She talks a long time, and I can only sum up what she says: The drum is the universe. The people who take their place at each side represent the spirits who sit at the four directions. A painted drum, especially, is considered a living thing and must be fed as the spirits are fed, with tobacco and a glass of water set nearby, sometimes a plate of food. A drum is never to be placed on the ground, or left alone, and it is always to be covered with a blanket or quilt. Drums are known to cure and known to kill. They become one with their keeper. They are made for serious reasons by people who dream the details of their construction. No two are alike, but every drum is related to every other drum. They speak to one another and they give their songs to humans. I should be careful around the drum. She is bothered by its presence in the collection.

“It’s more alive than a set of human bones,” she finishes, then hesitates. “Of course, that is a traditional belief, not mine.”

I nod with some relief, for although I am surprised by my actions this afternoon, I do not believe of course that the drum itself possesses a power beyond its symbolism and antiquity.

After my mother goes to bed, I clear a pile of my files and notebooks off a low table in the corner of my bedroom and then I bring the drum inside and balance it carefully on the table. I shove two chairs up against each side. Whenever I touch the drum, even to set it down, it makes a sound. A high, hollow note. An uncertain creak, like a question. A slight tap on its edge sets up reverberations. It is exquisitely sensitive for so powerful an instrument, and I wonder what it sounds like when struck with force, by many and in unison. I turn off the light, get into bed, and lie there in my room with the drum. I leave my windows open just a crack at night, even in the winter. I like my room chilly. The darkness crackles with March cold and from time to time, deep in the woods, a barred owl screams like a woman in pain. I imagine that I might have dreams—pragmatic as I consider myself, it has been a long, strange day. The realization that I’ve stolen the drum outright surfaces and sinks. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I’m glad that I have got the weekend to decide how to proceed with the estate—I’m not sure I trust myself to catalogue another thing. No matter how justified by history I feel, I tell myself that I will not evade my guilt or rationalize away my conduct.

Which is not the same as even considering that I might do the right thing and return the drum to Sarah Tatro.

All I have is other people’s lives. What I do belongs to them and to my mother—her business, her legacy, her blood. Even the box of tears in my closet belongs to another woman, L.M.B. But now I’ve stolen the drum. And it seems to me, as I am lying in the dark of my room, that my instinctive theft signifies a matter so essential that it might be called survival. I have stepped out of rules and laws and am breathing thin, new air. My theft is but the first of many I’ll accomplish—though not of objects. There are other things I need and will have to have, things I’ll take. Thoughts, plans, private rages, and even joys now secret to myself.

I am usually a devoted sleeper, but tonight I’m wakeful. All night, it seems, I am listening. Thinking. So many ideas float in half-formed and then veer off.

When things are very quiet, the old house ticks. Not regularly, like a clock, but softly all through itself as the slats in the walls change temperature or the plaster tightens or the earth shifts underneath the granite slab foundation. From time to time, the little sounds that the house makes reverberate inside of the drum. My breath does, too. I hear a rising, then a falling. In and out. A greatness, a lightness. I grow heavier, then so inert my body seems without life. Between breaths, I lose feeling. And then my chest fills, a resurrection.

There is another thing that our old house does in the deep of night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the whole day’s footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving about on small, regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, for the old fibers of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, they reproduce the sounds of footsteps. In the night our maze of pathways is audibly retraced. I am used to it, as is mother, but sometimes a wakeful guest is frightened. I can understand this. For now, as I rise and I stand in half-darkness in the doorway of my bedroom, I hear the distinct creak of footsteps proceeding toward me, then past me, over to my bed. It’s very cold. My skin prickles. I feel the breath of my own passage, as though my dead self and living self briefly met in that doorway to sleep.

3 The Orchard

A disturbed hush has fallen upon our road. The two young people haunt it more than one would think. It is impossible to pull out onto the gravel without thinking of Davan’s rattling, red car or without imagining the long, slight form of Kendra trailing black scarves as she took her moody ambles, ears plugged with music. After the Assembly of God outpouring for Davan, which left Elsie and me in a daze, we attended the strangely shuttered memorial service for Kendra, along with Krahe’s sister from Vancouver, and seven or eight of Kendra’s drooping friends. Since then I have been afflicted with the pity and guilt that comes over one at the death of a person disliked. I now think of good things about Kendra, and there are many—her affection for her father, her goodness to Davan, even her self-absorbed dramas now seem so innocent: the searchings of an artistic child. I begin to wonder at my own antipathy—or jealousy—and as I do I wonder again at Kurt’s hostility toward Davan. These days Kurt looks stunned and confused, and I see that he’s turned inward, blamed himself for a purely emotional, fatherly mishandling of things, a tampering, a fatal clumsiness. His rage at Davan was disturbing, even brutal, but it was part of his protectiveness and Kurt castigates himself for it now.

Night after night, he comes to me. He never leaves the road. There are no trips to the city. No restless absences, unexplained. Kurt’s step is nearly silent, as he knows just where the stairs creak. When he pauses in the doorway to my room, my two selves stand apart and allow him to pass. Yet I am a realist. I know why he’s always here. One night he says, “You’re getting me through this, you know.” His voice is low and ragged. I can’t bear not knowing anymore.

“You had someone, before,” I say.

There is silence.

“Answer me.”

“Yes. Not anymore.” There is a lonely pause. “Never again.”

I stare at his face, all shadows in the silver dark, and the terrible, familiar wish to be nothing, to shatter to dust, moves me. His lie kills all feeling. I break along with him and go where he is. Our struggle goes on and on in the blackness. We are like feral children, with no rules. Pain and sex dull grief and we are both in grief, it seems. For me, this is old. I probably know what is happening better than he does because I’ve tried over and over to wreck myself on another human, and always failed. I fail now. For it seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I’d have to break every single one to let it out.

He falls asleep with his hand between my legs and his face in my hair. He is weeping in his dreams. I stay awake, considering. He said that he wants to marry me now, that we must always be together. But now that I know he can lie to me, what comfort can there be? His turning to me in such need is not a true statement of his feelings; there is nothing to make of it, really, except that I am near and willing to stay. After a short while, he wakes again, and turns to me and I am there. The night is very black, there is no moon, and I am glad that I’ve put the drum outside my room, on a table at the end of the hall.

When I wake in the morning, he is gone. I roll over, put on my robe, and go down the hall. Not until I’m brushing my teeth do I notice that my face is smeared with blood. Red-brown streaks mark the back of my hands, my arms, my body. I walk back into my room and see that the sheets are splotched and rubbed with signs. It isn’t, somehow, horrifying. I conclude he’s slashed himself, and it seems to me that this is what people do. Later that day, when I walk up the road to see him, and when I find him staring quietly at a certain stone he has been thinking about for years, I touch his shoulder.

“Where have you cut yourself?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“Kurt, I should look. They might be deep. You’re bleeding a lot.”

He raises his eyebrows and looks into my face.

“Leave it alone,” he begs.

I return to my house.

As in French novels when the scheming Marquis boasts of a lover I have made her my creature, so I begin to understand that Kurt Krahe is making me his own. His grief is sucking me into an old persona, one I have forced myself to leave behind. Yet I must admit, and this shames me, his tearing need is a thrill to me, and I am convinced that he is mine alone. I am reduced, but I need him, too. And as with all matters of too serious nature, there is absurdity. One morning, instead of contemplating the heft and soul of his sculpture, or driving twenty miles for his favorite dark roast coffee beans, or fixing his garage door, or sitting by his daughter’s grave, he is cutting the dead grass in my yard. Davan Eyke’s job once. Krahe is pushing the finicky red mower now.

I bought that mower for myself. The mower was the first birthday present I ever bought for which I would be the recipient. By which might be assessed the level of self-indulgence I commit. Who buys oneself a lawn mower for her fiftieth birthday? Shouldn’t I have given myself a spa package, a new bathrobe? Shouldn’t I have had someone else to give me a present, perhaps? Of course, I did get one from mother—a cameo strung on a velvet cord. Circa 1910. Italian, with exquisite detail, pink and white shell. I hung it over my bed and have never worn it. But I used my lawn mower last summer. It made me feel good, even when Davan nearly wrecked it, until now. I realize I am dismayed to see Kurt working on my lawn, though I am pleased to see that the machine is holding up well.

Kurt is cutting at a pretty good speed. He prefers the side-to-side strip pattern. I, on the other hand, am the type who cuts the lawn in ever smaller squares. He marches back and forth across the yard. But here’s the thing. The grass doesn’t need cutting. It hasn’t even started growing yet. It’s still practically winter. There is green beneath the unraked thatch, but not a shoot that reaches past the toe’s tip.

I call my mother to the window. We stand together watching our road’s resident artist. He is dressed out of character, like a student’s preppy dad, in dull orange pants, a white golf jacket, thick white socks, and cushiony walking shoes, also white, now mud-stained.

“How did this come about?” I ask.

Elsie gives me the suspicious and assessing look that she should be directing at Krahe. It is not my fault that he’s here. “I have no idea,” she says. “He just appeared.”

“Appeared?”

“And began to tinker with the lawn mower. Then he took it out.”

I nod. I think of saying to her, Don’t you know what this means? But then she would say in all innocence, Getting the grass cut? And I would have to tell her, No, cut by Krahe. Who has just lost his daughter. Who is not really cutting the grass at all, at least the living grass. He is perhaps shredding the tips of last fall’s dead grass, but that is beside the point. I would have to explain.

Elsie, when a man as arrogant as Krahe, a man who believes that he is touched by genius, an artist, comes to the house of his lover and cuts her grass during his usual working hours, not to mention those hours he should be devoting to his own personal mourning, he is saying, “Look what you’ve done to me. Observe my devotion. My wastage of genius hours on your lawn. Here I am cutting your grass, which will grow back. While I could have been creating something out of my sorrow, for the ages.”

But of course it would go further.

“And, darling,” he would say, “now that I’ve wasted time on your lawn, I expect that you will spend your time (much different from wasting it, as I am a genius and you are not) on me. You are my creature.”

I turn away from the window. My thoughts are too cynical. Perhaps I should see his action as another irrational sign of his bewilderment. I should treat him gently—as one comforts those caught in the unruly dictates of their mourning—but the drone of the mower on the other side of the house drills my thoughts and I quickly leave, jump into the car, and drive off, too fast.

There is a man at the isolated end of the road who exists in the firm conviction that he is an American Indian—apparently, though, he cannot decide which kind. He probably has no tribal blood whatsoever—he knows that—though his origins are complicated by the vastness of his family, who came over on the next boat after the Mayflower. They are originally the same family as the one whose estate I’m handling (and thieving from, I remind myself)—the Tatros. Except that the Tatros are not all related anymore. They’ve lived here and there in the town and on the flats for as long as the town has been here. In fact, they owned the original land grant and the town’s main road was named for Colonel John Tipton Tatro. They are the Tatros of Tatro Road and Tipton Hall and Tatro Fairgrounds and, up until now, of Tatro Farm. Having sold the land grant and bought bits of property here and there, they are less prominent, and some have fallen onto the fringes, like outbred dogs. Yet they are still a force. There is always the peculiar feeling that they could spread, once again, link acreage, and take over. Probably not Squaw Man Tatro, though. That’s what he’s sometimes called. His name is really Everett. He’s nicknamed Kit. He’s got an Indian name, too, one that sounds like something from an old gunslinger movie or a Karl May novel. It might be White Owl, same as the drugstore cigars. At any rate, as I drive toward the clarity of my bank account, there beside the road is Kit Tatro, hitchhiking. He wears jeans, a vest of some poorly tanned animal hide, a salmon-colored polyester shirt, the kind that transforms human sweat to toxic gas. The fumes waft in when I roll down the window to ask his destination. There is a method to his decoration that I can’t read. He is cleanly shaven and his longish gray-brown hair is clipped more tidily than usual. That indicates grooming. Yet there is the awful odor. Around his neck he wears five or six leather strings from which hang various amulets. At first glance, I see a bear’s claw, a small tusk of some sort, a brown leather pouch that looks like it contains herbs, or maybe human knuckle bones. He thrusts his head a bit wildly in and says he has to visit the bank.

“Happens I’m going there. But—”

“I know. I stink.” He opens the door and slides into the passenger’s seat. “I’ve been tanning hides.”

I keep the windows open and put the air on full blast. The smell seems more bearable at first when I know it isn’t actually Kit, and then I think of the skins and the whole mess of scraping them down and somehow I would rather smell Tatro again. Every time I’ve been tempted to tell him that my mother is an actual American Indian, an Ojibwe, something about Kit Tatro has stopped me—the sight of some newly skinned creature in his yard. Or, as now, a certain look he has, or smell. At least it isn’t far to town. What we call the bank is just an automated teller machine at the center store. Once the store was named Tatro’s, of course. For some reason the place has recently been remodeled on the outside to resemble a general store out of the Old West. The building is low and square with a tall false front and a sign painted with fake old-timey serifed letters. So in a way, Kit Tatro fits there. A hangdog mountain man come down to the settlement for grub.

“I’ve been doing more research on my genealogy,” he says. “I’ve come a cropper on the great-grandmother’s side, though I still think she must have been an Iroquois. They would have hid it for the shame.” He sounds a note of indignation and despair. “Always the secrecy, the hushed voices! Nobody will say what it was my great-grandfather did, who he married, what she was, who she was.”

“It’s so complicated,” I sympathize, stopping the car, opening my door quickly. Kit gets out too, and we walk up to the cash machine together. There is a light breeze blowing. I step upwind of him. He lets me go first and studiously looks away as I tap in my PIN. The machine offers me a little stack of money; I take it, and walk over to the store to buy some cream, a six-pack of Krahe’s favorite beer, a can of ginger ale, a newspaper, and a muffin.

“I think the best kind is lemon poppy seed,” says Kit. He holds out a root beer to show the teen behind the cash register, pays, and we walk out the door together. A ride home is assumed. At least he’s changed my focus somewhat, and I’ve stopped dwelling on Krahe’s lawn cutting. I’ve always been a little curious about Kit’s passion to be an Indian. It seems a lonely obsession—I never see him with other Indians or would-be Natives. And as the point is to have a tribe and belong to a specific people, I wonder what he gets out of his fantasy. But of course, he explains on the way home, his search is about making some connection. Only connect, he says, absurdly, and adds, Maybe E. M. Forster was an Iroquois at heart. Once he knows for certain where to connect, maybe everything about him will fall into place. Then again, maybe Kit Tatro irritates me because at some level I understand his longing and confusion all too well. I let him out at the turnoff to his house, and keep the windows wide open the rest of the way.

When I walk into the house, I see immediately that Elsie is serving Krahe a cup of hot chocolate. He’s gotten a chill—cutting the grass! It upsets me to see that she’s poured the chocolate into one of her favorite cups—exquisitely etched and hand-painted, one of an incomplete set she bought before an estate sale. She’s put the cup under hot water to warm first, then dried it, her little trick, to prevent a skin forming on the milk. She has given up her disapprobation, or her fear of my being used, and she has decided to encourage him, I fear. A low sensation of hurt boils up in me, its source mysterious. Why, now, has she decided to stop looking the other way? Because she can’t. I see now that the grass cutting is Kurt’s way of bringing our relationship into the open. He’s doffed his jacket. They are talking in normal, convivial tones about the town road agent and how he has suggested inserting speed bumps on the straight, paved section of Revival Road.

“He says he’s clocked some going seventy.” They both nod, together, almost in unison. Then a stiff break, a beat of silence as both remember Davan’s run and wish to veer away from unsteady ground. I have timed my entrance perfectly. With relief, both realize that I am standing in the kitchen entrance.

“Would you care for some hot chocolate?” says Elsie, getting up to fetch another of her special cups from the high shelf of the cupboard.

“Sit down!” Krahe rises to give me his chair, a gesture of old-fashioned courtesy that might touch me, as he is not at all chivalrous, except that I feel so awkward and suspicious.

“Thanks for cutting the grass.” I roughly pull a different chair out and plop down. I find myself glaring at the cup in his hand. “It’s very thoughtful of you. And very unlike you,” I add once Elsie’s back is turned. “You’ve got more important things to concern yourself with. I’ve got someone else to cut the grass, anyway.”

Not true, but I’m determined to quash Krahe’s possible repetition of this favor, no matter what motivated it.

“Who?” says Elsie, overhearing me.

I turn, widen my eyes, and blink meaningfully at her, but she is bending to place the chocolate before me. I am stung by this fake demure look of hers—the downcast eyelashes hide righteous glee and it seems to me, suddenly, they are a they, in cahoots. Elsie has decided something. She’s ahead of me. I am bewildered. And I’m also caught in my grass-cutting lie, because they know everyone I know, and I wouldn’t ask a stranger, and they’ll expect whomever I mention to come and cut the grass. I open my mouth not knowing what I’ll blurt and out comes the name Kit Tatro. It makes sense, as I’ve just dropped him off, that his name should still be on my tongue. Now I’ll have to rush back and persuade him to cut our lawn before either mother or Krahe find and question him.

“Oh, Squaw Man,” says Krahe, dismissive. “He doesn’t even cut his own lawn.”

“He needs the money.” True enough. I gulp down the chocolate too fast, scald my throat, and rise with a rude abruptness.

“And for your information, squaw means vagina, or rather, cunt. It is an insult.”

“Oh,” says Krahe. His eyes flicker as he scrambles for a light tone. “Knowing Tatro, he’d probably find that a compliment.”

“An insult to us,” I say, indicating Elsie, who turns away to show she’ll have no part of this. I am the one embarrassing her. It is then that I am positive she is rejecting me, pushing me out the door toward Krahe. Perhaps she is tired of the secrecy, or the discretion, really, but wasn’t it for her benefit? Perhaps she wants to set me free, thereby invalidating all we have carefully constructed, cheapening all that I’ve given up in order to stay with her. I don’t want to be free in that way. Krahe pretends not to notice that I am standing now, breathing hard, upset, ready to escort him out. He continues the thread of a conversation that he and Elsie had seemingly left unfinished.

“Just let me know,” he says, “about those trees. I’ll be glad to bring my chain saw over and—”

“What trees?” I break in.

“The apple trees,” says Elsie, “the orchard. Krahe thinks that with a bit of judicious pruning—”

“A great deal of severe pruning!” Krahe says with an infuriating laugh.

“—we could bring back the orchard!”

“Now while it’s still cold, before the buds form. They could even bloom this spring.”

“The orchard is gone.” My heart flares with anger and I want to reach over and shake her, but I keep my voice even. “You know I like it ruined.”

“It could be beautiful again, alive,” she says. And just like that I know she has abandoned me. Leaning on the table, I knock over my cup of chocolate and must grab dish towels off the counter to mop with. Krahe actually tries to help me and suddenly, over the spilled chocolate and in the smell of dusty grass clippings, I detect the shadow of a masculine expectation. It advances across the floor like a gloaming, to where I’m mopping up the syrupy spill on hands and knees, a dusk of longing that I would have loved to enter the day before but which panics me now. I rinse a towel out beneath the faucet, wringing it too hard, glancing out the window at the rows of beautifully gnarled trees.

The kitchen feels too small, even the house too enclosed. Elsie’s sudden betrayal has pierced me. I feel childishly vulnerable. I hang the towel up and smooth my hair back into its clip. “I’m going out,” I say before either Elsie or the too attentive Krahe can form the next sentence. And I do go out. I’ve still got the car keys in my pocket. I climb swiftly into the Subaru and drive to Kit Tatro’s. Though I could easily have walked there, Krahe might have taken his leave of Elsie and followed, cut me off, found me out.

I pull into Tatro’s littered yard and park next to piled bones and the tatters of a painted tipi. I’ve seen it often, hiking by, and now I notice up close that the symbols painted on the sides with worn acrylics are finely done, very detailed. A black bear, side view, is caught in midstride. There is a white line leading from its mouth into the bear’s stomach, ending in a sharp spear point. I suppose this has something to do with hunting magic, and indeed, Kit Tatro can use some. I happen to know, because he sometimes asks permission to hunt on our land, that he takes advantage of the doe season open only to those who shoot with muzzle loaders. I’ve lost track of his comings and goings. Sometimes he gets his doe, other years he complains of wet gunpowder or the excitement of a mis-fire. He’s never talked of going after bear.

I get out and walk past the rusted Studebaker that I imagine Tatro has had towed here intending to restore, past a stack of mink or chicken crates, an unraveling yellow roll of crime scene tape perhaps bought at a garage sale, a little tan junked computer, a bowl of teeth, open cold frames jammed with milk cartons full of dirt out of which frail tomato seedlings urge themselves to light, hardening off. There is no sign of Kit and he doesn’t answer my knock. But the solid door behind his screen door is open. The doorknob to the screen door is a screwed-on wooden spool, the old kind before thread came wound on plastic. I touch the knob. Somehow it charms me, that little thoughtfulness of saving and using the old spool. Maybe one of Kit’s wives saved the spool—he’s had a succession of pale and stoop-shouldered girlfriends, unhealthy-looking women all alike, sad and rickety-boned. Not one of them can I put a name to, and not one of them has stayed with him.

“Hey!” Kit rounds the corner, wiping his hands on the droopy stomach of his T-shirt. “You’re back!”

“I had a thought.” I want to get this over with as quickly as possible. “Would you be open to taking care of our lawn? Can we strike a deal? We need somebody to mow.”

Kit Tatro gives me an ironic, awful smile (two of his teeth are gray and fanglike), and he holds out his hand in a sweep to show me that he isn’t a person who mows even his own yard.

“Well, I know that,” I say, “but you can use our mower.”

“I dunno, I’m kind of backed up.”

I want to say, Backed up skinning roadkill? But I find myself instead doing something that I wouldn’t ever have thought of doing. I am desperate to seal this pact with Tatro, and most of all anxious to make certain Kurt Krahe never again has an excuse to mow our lawn.

“Did you know, by the way, that my mother’s one-half Indian? That she’s Ojibwe? That’s why I was looking at your Native stuff.” I nod slowly at the tipi and heaped bones.

Kit Tatro suddenly stands rooted, serious, silent but electrified like a person who has grabbed hold of a live-current horse fence. He darts his eyes from side to side and then his whole face twists with a weasel interest. I’ve somehow risen from the dead, or at least from a place of low obscurity. I’m magnetized, a super-being. I can’t help feel gratified, though I can see right now I will regret this revelation.

“Gee,” he marvels. “I thought you guys were, like, Korean or something.” He turns his mouth down, lengthens and strokes his stubbly jaw. “Yeah. Whew. When should I start?” An unworthy thrill of gratification takes me by surprise. I’ve managed not only to thwart Krahe’s lawn-mowing plot, but also to punish Elsie by means so obscure she’ll never know what I’ve done. Now she’ll be saddled with Kit Tatro’s attempts to untangle his genealogy and join his tribe, and she’ll have to endure his questions about her own knowledge and upbringing, which will disappoint him, as my mother is perfectly assimilated, cold-blooded and analytical about the reservation present, and utterly dismissive of history.

I am not inexperienced in love, I just haven’t been successful at it, if you count long-term marriage as the benchmark. But the couples I used to envy have all broken apart. And marriage simply scares me. Perhaps I excuse my lack of courage in the matter by observing that those I do know who’ve stayed together have fused or discarded chunks of personality. Canada geese. Swans. Crows. Ravens. All creatures who mate for life. Perhaps they have an ancient genetic command woven into them that we now lack and long for in equal measure. The phone beside my bed rings. Krahe calls me at midnight, knowing I fall asleep shortly after. Sometimes he calls to say good night, and tonight I consider not picking up the telephone.

“Just called to say good night,” he says, and because his voice has always moved me with its resonance and depth, and because he is on the other end of the telephone, not here with me, I feel safe enough to be somewhat more direct than I usually dare. I actually tell him not to cut the grass because it makes me uncomfortable, because I can’t stand to see him doing something so mundane, and because I think it is a bad sign.

“A bad sign of what?”

“Your sorrow,” I say, wary of referring to our relationship. “Going around cutting people’s grass is so completely out of character that it signals, to me at least, how broken you are and how lost in your grief. Just to see you behind a lawn mower is disturbing.”

But he seems pleased about that, and he laughs a little.

“You don’t know me well,” he says. “You don’t know that I actually like cutting grass and that for me it is a sign of getting better. It represents new growth. Besides, it is not just anybody’s grass. It’s your grass.”

“Which you are shaving to the bare earth,” I say, then I soften, and drop my voice. “There wasn’t any grass there to begin with, Kurt, it’s too early in the spring. The grass has really not begun to grow yet.”

He’s very quiet. We breathe on the line. Eventually he clears his throat.

“Oh, fuck,” he says, “maybe I’m in bad shape. I didn’t notice that.”

Then he asks me to go out to dinner with him at Sweet’s Mansion, a grand house restored as a restaurant and considered quite romantic. He’s never asked me out or taken me anywhere in public before and perhaps out of sheer surprise I accept the invitation.

After I hang up I unplug the phone. I have brought the drum back in and covered it with my favorite old star quilt, but I am very conscious of it and I have developed more affection for it than I should feel for an object that I intend to repatriate—for we’ll find the rightful owner by inheritance, I’ve no doubt of that. At the furthest reaches of my doubt, I admit of possibilities. In dark hours, my mind creaks open and allows a sensation of comfort in the great drum’s presence. The house is quiet, the road still, even the wind in the pines a mere shiver. It is one of those hours when the world takes a breath. When for a moment there is peace, not desolation, at the heart of things. I turn out the lights and lie on my back, bunch a fat pillow under my knees, stretch out my arms, take up the whole bed, close my eyes. I try very hard to put Krahe out of my mind, and after a while I succeed in drifting into a delicious state of half-sleep. I love to fall through that transition alone, to feel the gentle prickling of my body lifting off, the fluttering of my mind as it releases images, talk, pictures that begin to lose reference until they take on a dream irrationality. Tonight there is the brilliance of Krahe’s white shoes and socks methodically striding back and forth across the dead lawn. There is my mother’s earnest and disquieting betrayal. Chocolate steaming in figured cups. The drum gradually falling asleep beneath its quilt. Then, as I am tumbling toward sleep through the brain’s dark, I see a tarp of battered canvas, frail seedlings, a painted bear and the white arrow at its heart.

I am much more familiar with the Sweet Mansion and its furnishings than are most who come to dine. The Greek Revival mansion was built by the New Hampshire mill owner Henry Sweet, who worked hundreds and maybe thousands of young women into early graves and created of their dead-hearted misery and the electricity generated by the millrace he owned an illuminated park for his children. The glow cast from the high plateau of Goodie Hill, the setting for the mansion and its grounds, could be seen far into Vermont and was used to guide aircraft down the Connecticut River well into the 1940s. The children kept up the property into the second half of the last century and then sold the place to a developer. Elsie handled the estate sale, which was surprisingly paltry as all of the furnishings and heirlooms had long been divided up among the many Sweet descendants. The developer speculated by building a dozen houses on five-acre lots on one end of the property, and used the proceeds to restore the mansion and open it as a restaurant, which was his dream. My familiarity with the contents of the place is the result of having scouted out and sold most of the nineteenth-century (we try not to use the word Victorian) furnishings to the owner. Almost none of them are original to the mansion, but they look as though they are because we took such care in finding good pieces from that period.

I am sitting across from Kurt, knees under a starched white cloth, in one of a set of Belter tiger-oak rococo chairs, in a corner of what was once a formal parlor. He is dressed as himself once again, a rumpled shirt of some rugged mixture of silks and cottons, a beautiful tweed jacket, jeans worn in for real, not distressed. He runs his fingers across the top of his head. His hair is longer than he usually allows it, and I notice as I always do when it is a bit too long that he has really got quite beautiful hair, thick and springy, with a wave to it. He is one of those men who’d turn heads if he let his hair grow out, become a streaked mane. Maybe he’d be insufferable, I think, maybe he’d never even look at me. Then I’d be safe.

“I can’t stop thinking about Kendra today,” he says. “I feel heavy.”

“What do you think of when you think of Kendra?” I ask.

His face freezes to a careful mask, but after a little while he smiles and his features soften. “You know what I think of? How she traced her hand and drew a beak on her thumb and made a turkey. You know, the turkey hands they make in kindergarten at Thanksgiving. She made one for me last year as a kind of joke.”

“A sweet joke.”

“I know.” His hand on the water glass trembles a little. He takes a drink. “What do you do with it,” he says. “What do you do?”

There is nothing to say to that.

“She was lucky to have you as her father. You were a good father” is all I finally come up with.

“Do you think so?” He searches my face, his eyes bleak, his stare endless.

“Yes, I think so.”

He nods. He keeps on staring at me. “Faye, I know she’s gone. And I sometimes feel you slipping away, too, please don’t slip away.”

“I’m not.”

But inside, I know I am and he knows it too, and it isn’t just the lie, unless the lie stands for everything I am afraid of. I do not know why it is happening.

“You can’t stand it, can you,” he says after a long pause.

“Can’t stand what?”

“What I’m going through. You think it’s catching.”

“No.”

“You think you’ll get sadness, grief, whatever, like a virus.”

“No.”

“Then what is it? I lied to you, I know I did, but I never will again. I have taken a vow in my very being that I will die first. No lies, ever.”

I nod, I want to say I believe him, I want to answer, but a nameless feeling close to dread sifts up inside me and covers my heart and takes away my words, leaving a kind of shame.

“I don’t know what it is,” I whisper, after a time, and we sit there together in baffled silence, touching the bases of our wineglasses.

“I spent about six hours in the woods today,” he says at last.

“Looking at rocks?”

“And at stumps. There’s something human about them. I’ve decided that I hate them.” Kurt frowns and shuts his eyes, cocks his head to one side as though listening to an interior voice. When he opens his eyes, they are a smoky, soft color and filled with sadness.

“You know, I think I’ll have the halibut,” I say, then I look down at my hands, and am overtaken by a wash of despair at my clumsiness. The menu is slightly blurry and as I pretend to read it I am visited by the idea that even our most intimate sexual moments, when he sobs into my hair or I lose all sense of where my body stops or my pleasure and his begins, our nakedness, our imperfections bare to each other’s sight, our coarse humor, our dirt, lack of shame, our easy joy, have nothing to do with aspects of ourselves that, if we let them develop, become actual and other selves. The thief in me. The murderously jealous father in him. The wish I have to make him feel better, which seems so pure, may be selfish. I understand his tedious anguish.

There is very little said about how repetitious grief is.

“Why don’t you want me to prune the orchard?” asks Krahe.

A surprise darkness skims up my back. It is a prickle so unfamiliar that at first I do not recognize it as anger. And in fact, my voice emerges sounding different from how I feel. It is light, maybe girlish—a mature woman’s panic.

“I told you I like it the way it is,” I say, “dead and ruined.”

“It could be beautiful.”

“It is.”

Before he can speak again, I’ve risen and turned away. I thread among tables and chairs, and then up a set of stairs, gliding my hand along the smooth banister. The feel of old wood calms me a little, but I still feel like running down the back stairs and out what was once the scullery door. Instead, I continue down the hall. The ladies powder room is furnished with an exquisite Egyptian Revival dressing table that I remember as having gone very reasonably at auction. There is also a fainting couch upholstered in striped golden satin. I sit down on it and then tentatively lie back, close my eyes.

Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties, even to indulge the unnecessary, and maybe insulting, secretive precautions. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. I feel his suffering when he is near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain. Unsolvable. Alive. Death has again brushed close, hurled Kendra and Davan off the bridge, tossed Tatro down a steep ditch and allowed him to die in the earliest spring growth. I am part of the chain of events that began when Davan gunned his engine on Revival Road. And the drum is part of it, too, and my taking of it. Kurt Krahe’s mowing of dead grass is part of it, as is his pledge to prune the orchard. For death has set changes into motion all up and down Revival Road, and there is no telling when one event will stop bumping into the next.

Returning to the room where Krahe is waiting, I pause in the doorway. I have taken another route back to the table and Kurt is staring at the place where he thinks I will appear. It seems a bit underhanded to watch him as he watches for me, but I do anyway. He is not talking on his cell phone, which actually gets a signal high on this hill. He is not even looking at the woman at the next table, who is beautiful. He’s not drinking wine or fiddling with his napkin. He is just waiting. Waiting for me. And the way he is sitting there, unaware and waiting for me, strikes me. Perhaps this is the last moment in my life I will be truly appreciated by a man. I stand there and take it in.

When finally he rises, anxious, I propel myself into the room. He doesn’t say “Where were you?” and I don’t make an excuse. We sit down slowly at either side of the table and proceed to order and then eat our food—everything is either tasteless or too rich. We speak about small things with calm detachment. I marvel at this. You would not think we ever slept together. You would not think he pulled my hair until tears filled my eyes or that I bit him so hard I drew blood. You would not think that sometimes we have gone so far into sex that we could not get out, that sex kept driving us, hurting us. You would not think we have looked into each other’s eyes, boundlessly at peace, or that we’d ever lain naked in the raining woods and laughed ourselves sick. I know he is on the brink of asking what is this the way people do, but I will not allow him to speak. So we talk about the rocks, the ravens, the trees, and all of the little things that happen on our road.

I’m home before eleven, like a good teen on a demure date. The light is on in the first-floor living room, where Elsie likes to sit and listen to music. She has Satie on. The master of punctuation. When I walk into the room she stiffens in her chair, casts her gaze upon me, and says, in that parental voice even grown children dread to hear, “Sit down, we have something to talk about.”

“Can it wait?” It must be that she has seen the drum, and although I know it is inevitable, I really don’t want to talk about it tonight.

Elsie stares at me, trying not to blink. The music has become the backdrop to a suspense movie. All jagged exclamation points. I turn it off and sit down across from her. She is wearing an old pink chenille bathrobe and elegant turquoise earrings.

“You left these in.” I tap my earlobes.

“On purpose,” she says.

“Oh?”

She pauses in an ominous way before she speaks. “Years ago, I nearly stole these earrings from a client.”

I turn away and busy myself examining the folds and stitches of one of her more complex afghans. She continues.

“I was very tempted. I happened to have recognized the earrings from a little-known Curtis photograph. It wasn’t that the earrings are so valuable, but that they’d lain close to the girl’s neck, the subject, and if I had them it seemed, I felt, as though I was part of his work too.”

“I took the drum for similar reasons.”

“Oh, no doubt.” Her voice is dry. After an empty pause, she prompts, “When are you planning to return it?”

“I’m not.”

She throws her hands up, lets them fall to her knees and hang down, limp rags of dismay.

“It would look odd if I just brought it back now. No one knows it’s missing.”

“Nonsense. You could say you had it repaired.”

“Well, I could. You’re right.”

“But you won’t. You don’t want to.”

“No.”

“What are you going to do with it?” she asks, and I respond before I’ve thought out my answer. The resolute note in my voice surprises me.

“For now, keep it. Later we’ll find the rightful owner.”

She shrugs and seems to think aloud. “Well, yes…it’s Ojibwe and the fact that Tatro spent his life as an Indian agent on our home reservation probably makes your guess as to its origin, maybe even your intention, fairly reasonable.” She opens her arms as though surrendering. “Good luck to you, then. Not only do I want no part of it, I’m thinking of bringing it back to the Tatros’ myself. You could purchase it, you know. I bought the earrings.”

“Before or after you told the family that they were in a famous photograph?”

I think I’ve got her, but she refuses to be embarrassed.

“Only a fool would have revealed that. Of course I got them for a good price.”

It’s no use, and I hate being at odds with her. Still, the idea that she would actually take it upon herself to return the drum makes me regress a little. “Don’t you touch that drum!”

“You exasperate me.” She closes her mouth in that tight, straight line that means we’re finished arguing. This is as angry as we ever get, and we both know it won’t last. Sure enough, over breakfast, Elsie tells me that she’s decided, upon reflection, that the fact that the drum was stolen from our own people is a piece of sychronicity so disturbing that she now understands how I was motivated. I, on the other hand, am moved to tell her that I am sorry to have possibly compromised her also in the theft, as it is both of our business reputations at stake, and even (now that I know she won’t hold me to it) that I’ll consider returning the drum. But she says that she wouldn’t think of returning it, that she’s always wondered exactly how it was that Jewett Parker Tatro acquired his hoard, and that maybe in discovering more about this particular drum we will find that out. She’s willing to help me, in fact, learn its origins.

Elsie has ideas. She is spilling over with ideas and with lists of people and with plans to see them. “I’m thinking of old Shaawano, gone now,” she says, “and Mrs. String. Her first name is Chook and she’s related to the old man and married to Mike String. Lots of the people have passed on, of course, the ones who would know. But to lose or be swindled out of a drum like this is no small thing.”

We are sitting together over our usual spare female breakfast of coffee and whole grain toast. Sometimes we add yogurt or fruit, but I haven’t grocery-shopped yet this week and we are even down to the last of the bread. Elsie has toasted the heels for herself and given me the last two regular slices. I didn’t like the heels as a girl, and that little forgiving sign of her motherly attention, a tiny thoughtfulness, touches me. But I say nothing about it. I only agree that we should hire some extra people this spring or summer so we can travel as we choose. I know that the Shaawano family is of the original people who either moved south and returned, or who originally came from the south and were named for that direction. I remember Mrs. String, a round woman shaped more like a knot than a string. She is a vivid, little, lumpy-bodied lady with dark, age-freckled skin and a fluffy halo of dandelion white, permanented hair. She tends to dress in outfits of bright, flowery rayon separates that mock each other and yet somehow make their peace. I remember admiring how a skirt blazing purple iris and a burst of roses on her vest oddly complemented her poppy-dotted blouse and gave a kind of whirling effect to her, as if she were always in motion. Mrs. String’s voice is extremely gentle, marked by the old sweet accent of a person who grew up speaking Ojibwe and whose English is forever rounded and shaped so that all of the words seem kindlier. Mother tells me that Mrs. String’s mother would have known some of the original signers of the treaty that provided for the reservation. She probably spoke about them to her daughter. Those people were the holdouts, the ones upon whose stubbornness the land claim is based. She might have known about the ones who famously would not sign the payoff later, as well, like Old Nanapush, whose formal portrait by a government photographer around the time of his death by old age features a discreet but unmistakably obscene gesture. As she speculates, I can see that Elsie is becoming so intrigued with the hunt for the drum’s origins that she really may have forgotten, already, that it is stolen property.

“Not so fast,” I break into her schemings. “We should wait for a while. I don’t want the drum resurfacing so closely connected with Tatro’s death that it gets back to his surviving family…well, his niece.”

Elsie agrees and goes off, muttering, to comb through her files of letters and old papers. There is more to it, though. Even then I know it. I want the drum for myself, at least for a while. I’ll keep it off the ground. Already I’ve got a wooden tobacco box set on the windowsill beside it. I don’t know much, but I’ve got this certainty: That for the time, at least, the drum should stay with me.

Who in all of this time mourns for Davan Eyke? His mother took no more than a few days off of work and still drives the school bus. Every time I see her grim face high in the driver’s seat I imagine that she is aching for Davan, but perhaps it’s also true she’s yearning for a cigarette, for instance on the Monday morning I pass her on the way to the Tatros’. She is standing beside the parked and empty school bus, smoking with calm determination, stoking herself with nicotine. She lights a new cigarette from the still burning stub of the old one and gestures to me as I draw near. I stop in the road and roll down my window. It would be rude to do otherwise. “Hello,” she says, and offers me a cigarette. I get out of my car to accept, though I rarely smoke. She lights it for me. I ask how she is.

“I am not so fine,” she answers.

“Has your church been supportive?” I ask, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

That’s when she laughs, in surprise or derision. And her laughter is exactly like Davan’s laughter the last time I heard him. It is the laughter of ravens. Grating, unreadable. I stare at her and nod in sudden understanding. The reeking blue smoke curls around us. We are silent. After a few moments, I feel we have entered a nameless and intense mental engagement, that Davan’s mother in her sorrow has become savagely herself, and so needn’t speak again. Yet she communicates perfectly. She knows. She knows that her son’s death had something more to do with Krahe than the eye or facts can tell. She stands with me to try to absorb in words what it is she senses in images. But nothing comes clear.

We grind out the cigarette stubs with the ends of our shoes and then she nods and steps up into the bus. She settles into the driver’s seat and looks away from me as she starts the engine. She is an oddly put together woman, with exquisite black eyes and a big white dumpling of a chin. She wears no makeup and cuts her dark hair in a boxy helmet. As she shifts the bus into gear, she lifts her face keenly forward and moves down the bumpy road. She knows all about me, as people on this road do who have known my family since my grandparents came here. Most of all, she knows what happened. She would never wonder why the orchard is forsaken, or try to fix it. I suppose she pities me in some abstract way, as they all do. But that is neither here nor there.

I get back into my car. Driving toward the Tatro place, I am stricken with a familiar and weary repulsion. Everything around me is ludicrously, suddenly, worthless. The Assembly of God sign is even blank. Mrs. Eyke’s black laughter and the hard edge of her grief have invaded my thoughts, and I even feel complicit in the death of her son because of my uneasy relationship with Krahe. I am too tangled in what happened, it disturbs me. Perhaps it started on the day I tried to unwedge the Eyke car from the V of birches. Or it started when I looked too long at Krahe, and he at me, and we knew that we were going to sleep together.

Later that day, as I am taking notes on the contents of the Tatro kitchen, I remember the orchard. It occurs to me that I must develop a more serious plan to thwart Kurt in his next helpful policy. I’m not sure our conversation at Sweet’s Mansion persuaded him to leave those trees alone, and I plan to call him that night. I practice several ways to let him know, again, why his attentions aren’t wanted in the orchard. I plan to tell him my reasons for leaving the place unkempt, blowzy, unproductive. I want to make sure he lets those apples rot. Fewer blossoms every year, the apples crabbed with thrips and worm-riddled. Branches down, dying, silvered in the heavy sun. I want the long grass to shield the starving mice who gnaw rings around the bases of the apple trees, girdling them, choking them off, bringing them down. But even as I’m thinking this, I am too late. My imaginary conversations and persuasions are a waste of time. For he is revving up his chain saw, macho New England accouterment. He is striding into the orchard and lopping off deadwood with furious ease. Even as I am leaving the Tatro estate, he is piling brush. As I drive home he is putting a cone of fire to the driest twigs. I see the white spiral of smoke as I turn onto Revival Road, and breathe the scent of burning apple wood.

There are weeks of dry warmth, which is bad for our wells and ponds but wonderful to see in the woods. The willows blaze in tender bud. Drifts of wild plum blossoms float among the cavern pines. The rapturous trilling of spring peepers begins, that electronic sexual whine. I keep the windows slightly open as I drive the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathe the watery air. The road’s final quarter mile is now almost impassable, the bedrock sunk against gaping holes, swamp grass and overgrown ponds to either side where the peepers warble and moan at a throbbing pitch. As I bounce along I quiet the frogs, momentarily, so that I seem to be continually piercing a wall of sound.

In the orchard, the tiny cold buds are deep pink at the base, white at the tip. The apple trees with their low, thick crotches are shooting out leaves from every node of trunk and every branch behind the cuts. I sit an afternoon away in the snow-drifted grass, the sun-blasted grass, the grass thrown back in long shines of wind, the new grass rising underneath in shy waves of power. I want to remember the orchard as cold, sleeping, wrecked, and still mine, before it happens.

One hot ninety-degree May afternoon throws the switch.

Full moon, a spring midnight. Over everything like clear glass the light falls evenly, a tarnished silver. I am awakened by something stealing up on me, creeping through the window screens, over the drum. A breath of orchard sweetness sails, curls into my room, and I remember the days when the orchard bloomed this way every spring.

My little sister was alive then. Over the years I’ve warped my life around her memory, I think, even though sometimes now I can’t picture her at all except from photographs. I cling to what I do remember of her—little incidents. The time she ripped my fairy book or squeezed the paint from my paint set, or left my clay out to dry. The times she crawled into bed with me after bad dreams—her telling me about them, her breath hot along the side of my face. She tickled spiders out of their webs and wore pink Keds with laces she colored blue with a ballpoint pen. She was a very good sister who loved me so much that she sacrificed herself for me without hesitation and for no use, no use at all. It happened out there in the orchard.

With their deadwood sawed away, the trees have come alive. Each is loaded with as many open blossoms as the live twigs can hold. I rise and walk to the window and sit there with my hand on the drum. I can see her, running in her checkered shorts, with her flag of brown hair flying. She is climbing, quick and nimble. I can just make out the dim shapes of the trees, their twisted arms that hold her. There is no wind and the odor of white blossoms is so profound that it makes steps into the air. Only old wood can bear such rapture, I think, but maybe you have to die first, like the trees, like her.

I am making eggs for breakfast the next morning when I hear the putter of the lawn mower. I’ve woken furious and self-berating. I dragged my heart around like an apple on a string. Dangled it, daring some man to take a bite. Now Krahe sinks his teeth into it and I’m terrified to be devoured. I jerk away and swing wildly out of reach. And now the lawn mower! I turn off the stove and charge outside, but when the mower comes into view Kit Tatro is behind it with his shirt off. Kit’s bare flesh. An unforeseen drawback. His skinny chest heaves as he cuts the rise. The arrowheads and amulets on cords around his neck tangle as he strains to round the bitten stump of an old elm. His arms are ropy and sickly pale. His tender skin is an affront. I want to tell him to put his shirt back on, but don’t know how I would say such a thing without hurting his feelings. He waves at me and then I have to wave back. He cuts the engine, walks toward me.

There’s a couple of things he wants to ask me.

“You should ask my mother,” I say quickly. “She’s the one with the cultural knowledge.”

“Well, this is about the grass.”

“Oh.”

We talk about whether to reseed some bald spots and how there are new shade-friendly varieties. For a man with a grown-over, junked-up yard, he is surprisingly critical of the quality of my lawn.

“Some of it’s just quack,” he states. “Around the back of the house you’ve been invaded by creeping charley. And there’s dandelions. I don’t even know where to start with those. What do you want me to do?”

“Just leave them.”

He looks dubious, skeptical, pained. To divert him I change the subject.

“Do you know how to install a new lock and key set?”

“Of course.”

I show him the back door to the stairway that leads to my room, and he tells me that he can drive to the hardware store for a new lock and that he’ll change it as soon as he finishes the lawn. Later, while I am working upstairs, I hear the whine of his drill and the fumbling and knocking of his tools as he sets about the task. Once, twice, I nearly go down and ask him to quit, but then I look out a back window onto the trees, the bursting clouds of blossoms.

4 Jewelweed

The summer passes and I handle the sale of the Tatro collection to a Cincinnati museum, all except for the drum. I’ve grown very attached to having it in my bedroom; I touch or gaze upon it every time I enter. The drum exerts the most connective hold upon me, and it even starts to influence my dreams. Years ago, my sister stopped coming to me at night. I stopped dreaming of her, and I missed that because it was comforting to imagine that she lived a life parallel to mine and was not dead but merely somewhere else. I even wrote down things she said to me. She spoke in the form of poems. Now I am surprised to dream that she’s learned to play the piano. Her hands move with an alert grace, and she glances up at me and nods. She has a husband, a dark man walking at a distance. She is a woman, all grown up in spite of death. Bach’s Thirteenth Invention fills my dream with dark rigor, a precise contrapuntal tangle of notes. I confuse her fingers with the passionate mechanism of the spider, and I wake up sweating and cold again with loss. I lost myself along with her back there, I know it. When I touch the drum and think of her, though, I feel much stronger. I feel she has come back to help me. And so the summer, with my dreams of her that return, precious and specific, passes too quickly, as they all do here. The time of the year comes that I am always surprised to find so hard.

The orb spiders have taken up their posts in the unmowed fields of August. Just as things come ripe, the creatures always set their webs, sewn with perfect zigzag seams, across the swathes of grass, jewelweed, goldenrod, milkweed, and burdock behind the sagging barn. Last week, we were approached by a chain restaurant that specializes in false folksiness. Were we interested in selling the wide, weathered boards? Only if you’ll take the orb spiders, too, Elsie said. But they just wanted the barn board, and of course she would never destroy the barn. So the spiders wait. I am careful not to disturb their quiet weavings. I watch each spider closely, admire its curved and tapered legs. They are black with hot yellow death’s heads on their bellies. They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they’ve made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. Which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider’s, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

Today, my art is blackberry jam. I gather my equipment. It is time. Late summer builds to a steamy and forgiving lushness in New Hampshire. There is the crushing scent of heated earth. The audible drinking of taproots of white pines. Maples sucking deep. Best, there is the threatful joy of blackberries, bushes so lush with fruit that to pick them I brave the summer’s last ticks and stinging flies. We used to pick them, my sister and I, and because of the dreams I think of her with special intensity as I walk. Past the orb spider field, through the laden orchard, down a ravine, and into the boggy cutover land belonging to an absentee landlord, forty acres dense with bramble and slash. I’m heated up, sweating; my hair falls out of its tail and swings down my back. The first blackberries that I pick ring the bottom of the light old lobster pot of dented aluminum, which I’ve vowed to fill. As soon as the bottom of the pot is covered, a berry-picking stubbornness comes over me. I am a determined picker, lusting after the loaded branches, taking care not to knock off the berries so dense with sweetness they’ll let go if the bush is roughly bumped. While picking at the edge of a clearing, I am buzzed low by a helicopter, its loud ratchet an excitement. The metal creature dips so low I can see the features of the men inside of it, and then it veers off, over a fling of young maples. I search my way through the half-dried muck of hidden ponds, skirt the edges of our neighbor’s horse pasture, probe the deeper woods for an opening where sunlight has brought from the ground sweet berry bushes and burdened them with fruit. Everywhere, I find jewelweed, or touch-me-not, frail bushes of tiny, fierce, golden-mouthed flowers, spitting seeds.

As I return from my berry picking, carrying the lobster pot with both handles, I brush through the jewelweed. The light seeds bounce off me, ping off the curve of the cheap old pot. Some tear like tiny cannonballs through the webs I’ve tried so hard to avoid. I stop, of course, and watch the spiders. Exiting the field, I leave them to the suave calm of their thoughtful repairs. My scratches tingle and my hair’s a knot of twigs. I’m slick with sweat and gritty with scrapings of bark and wood rot, and I’m peaceful. I have reached an understanding in the woods, as I always do.

Perhaps, I think as I settle the pot in the deep sink and run the water, cold from the gravity-feed well and pure as the rocks it has dropped through, my purpose in life is to pay attention and to remember. Here is my real history: a father I loved and feared, a sister I simply loved, the loss of both, then mother and I together. There were hospital stays, jobs that never quite took, loves that foundered. I always came back. The relief of returning to live with my mother got stronger every time. There was always the pleasure of constructing a secure and orderly design to our days. And our work is varied and often strange so there is always enough to think about. Of course, there is now Kurt, who in his suffering has become dangerously close. But the important thing, I think now, is to preserve what Elsie and I have made between us. Our breakfasts and dinners. Our net of small doings. Our thank-you notes. Our web. Our routine.

Which is about to be disturbed.

Three things happen in swift order.

My mother begins to sing to me. We are raided by the town police. My blackberries boil to a purple foam and then overflow the blue kettle I have transferred them to. It is a much heavier pot, sort of a large Dutch oven, sandcast and coated with thick enamel. But first, the singing, which mother often does. I don’t mean that she actually serenades me. Her singing occurs when we are together in the same room pursuing mutually exclusive tasks. This afternoon, even in the heat, she is knitting an intricate afghan. After I brought the berries in, I showered so I am cool. My hair is slicked back and braided. I am washing away the detritus of the woods, swirling leaves and thrips down the drain, when Elsie starts to hum. Soon, there are words. Of course, as these are songs from my childhood, these words fill me with an awful poignancy. “Bye-bye Blackbird.” “Autumn Leaves.” And yes, a few songs in Ojibwe, mainly hymns that my grandmother sang in the old language. From way back, we have been converts. As for the love songs, which she returns to, “Green Fields” and “Greensleeves” and “Silver Dagger,” they have solemnly bitter endings. All the good ones do. Still, can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

I pour sugar into the berries ready to boil in the blue enameled kettle. The berries soon fill the kitchen with a fruity steam, and stain the insides of the pot blue-black. As I stand there stirring down the dark mass, the calming motion of my spoon and the sweet curls of fragrance allow me to think with indulgence about the old controversies that once surrounded the kettle I am using. This kettle was a source of enmity between my mother and my father, and so it remains for me a souvenir of their eternal contest. They argued viciously about this pot. It seems a humble thing to argue over, but for them, everything was monumental. Nothing was too small.

My father didn’t like that my mother had spent so much money on it. And yet she made most of the money in the family—her business was well run even then. She even met my father through the business—he was there when she came in to assess the contents of his mother’s house. They married quietly. He was fascinated with her background, I think, as though she had some mystical connection to the natural world that he lacked and loved. That was, perhaps, true enough. Their main pleasure in their first years was planting, gardening, digging wells, ponds, making patios, and setting up benches where, still, one can sit and watch the fireflies signal. I came along and surprised them, and my sister a little more than two years after. Although she was younger and followed me everywhere, her personhood was always stronger than mine. Netta had all of the sandy-haired sun in our joint personality. She burned hot. She was just my opposite. Where I was quiet, neat, untiring when it came to detail, Netta was bold and impatient; she could be careless and even cruel.

When she was still six and I had just turned nine we caught fireflies in Mason jars. We wanted lanterns, so we filled the jars with at least a dozen bugs each, then lay in the backyard across an old car blanket and played a game of memory, our favorite game that summer. We played with three decks, the cards spread facedown all around us. By dusk and by firefly light we matched the cards slowly, one to the next, concentrating fiercely on the placement of each. I think that early training is the reason I remember anything at all. The lights ebbed and burned, but at last the fireflies seemed to tire. We gathered up the decks of cards and secured them with a rubber band. I let my fireflies out and watched them waver into the cool weeds and willow bushes that bordered the yard. Then I turned to see where my sister was. Netta had smashed her fireflies onto her face and chest so that she glowed in the dark. She ran, danced, an eerie slash of heat.

Our father was an underpaid professor of philosophy, endlessly reworking his thesis on Miguel de Unamuno into a book on faith and science. He commuted thirty miles to the college town, but only three days a week. He had a way of alternating vast musings with petty concerns, announcing that the mind is a wolf and explaining how our illogical longing for a life after death is an animal hunger, and then stopping to castigate Elsie’s blue pot. He’d light on me and my sister. Your mother is the Renaissance and I am the Reformation, he’d explain. That’s why you are reasonable children. Who’s the most rational today? She gets the last cookie. Both of us would reply. He would pick only one. He was very clever at setting us against each other—choosing me, then my sister, or my mother as his favorite. I remember the heat flooding into my face as he pointed out and laughed at my drooping socks or the expression on my face, and the slick black joy when he praised me at my sister’s expense.

He was a striking man who cultivated a wild professorial mop of hair. Grayed prematurely, as if by the conflict of his thoughts, it flopped in long curls down either temple. When he was in a good mood, he let us brush it and arrange it and mother took pictures of him with a head full of plastic barrettes. He didn’t mind looking absurd as long as he was prepared for it and was in charge of the circumstances. Caught off guard in a mistake or foolishness, he would lash out. Scream. His hair would fly around his face. On campus, no one dared touch his famous hair. I remember one trip to his office, watching from a high window as he appeared, hair first, a puffed mass that bobbed as he threw himself across the paths of the central lawn. Physically, he was a graceful man with a scholar’s bowed shoulders and bloodless hands. He dressed like a forgetful monk, but he was no saint, in fact he was a liar and he was frightening—he would repeat things I said and they would be wrong. I remember that. His pants were just a bit too short, and his socks often did not match, even though my mother bought many pairs of one color to prevent this.

I’ve inherited the slender bones of his face, the delicate chin and severe, pale mouth, and perhaps his dark striving for explanations. But my sister had a happier love for inquiry, or would have. She was a questioner, could never get enough of things. And they looked alike, too, even though I had his features. She had his hair, only pale brown, and all of his expressions. She had his hands. She had his unmatching socks and distracted frown. She was like a whippet, and very strong. They had the same frame, Elsie said.

As I stare into the melt of blackberries, I remember my father’s habit of folding his metal-rimmed eyeglasses down his nose while looking at me keenly. It was a gesture I found both sweet and stodgy. He was not a person you could feel one way about. Because like my sister, he had a cruel streak that came out in surprising ways, because he managed somehow to control my mother and sometimes exerted upon us all a disfiguring attention which set us against one another, I came to realize, even back then, that we both loved and faintly disliked him. Pop wisdom has it that the unpredictable parents hook you deepest with intermittent reinforcement; you become that rat who presses the lever a thousand times for a kind word, a gesture of love.

When he died, mother gave away everything he’d owned down to the last paper clip in his office, which has since remained an unused room except for storage. It is filled with boxes that we never open, things that we don’t want to look at. The blue pot escaped the purge and reminds me of him, though.

As I am standing there stirring down the blackberries and remembering my father, a siren, strange and alarming, goes off at the turnoff to our road. Our first instinct is to worry that our neighbors have suffered some calamity, and to stare out our window where soon, as the sound enlarges, we expect to see the squad car hurtle past. But the revolving white blue flashers and the wailing noise halt in front of our windows. I’m still stirring, mesmerized, as our town police officer, Lonny Germaine, emerges from the car, from which a magnified radio distorted voice carries. The electronic voice gives indecipherable orders and Elsie, who has stopped her singing, says, “He’s drawing his pistol from the holster!”

I remove the dripping spoon from the berries and hold it over the kettle as Lonny rushes to our door, which we can see through a side window. We crane to watch him invade our house. With a mighty swing of his booted foot, Lonny kicks in our door, which gives so easily that he stumbles into the entryway, then rights himself and walks bent-kneed into the kitchen with his gun out two-handed, police fashion. Elsie gasps. “For heaven’s sake, Lonny, the door wasn’t locked! Put that down!”

All I can think of is that he’s come for the stolen drum. I am found out. I am finally exposed. I cannot move. Lonny gapes at us and then lowers his gun. He mutters foolishly. Outside, the radio-voice squawks like some great, hungry bird. I am released from my fear.

“Lonny Germaine,” I sound like a fussy schoolteacher, “would you care to explain?”

Lonny puts his gun into its hip holster, his fair cheeks suddenly mottled by embarrassment. He is a milk-white and black-haired transplanted French Canadian with round blue eyes and a pink bud of a mouth. He would perhaps have been a heartthrob in some past century, but for these times his looks are unattractively lush.

“The state police,” he says.

I cry out, suddenly, like a suspect in a crime drama. “Where’s your warrant?”

Lonny puts up the palms of his hands. “They said I should use extreme caution, use police procedure upon entering. They said there was a big patch—biggest ever in this part of the state—right out back of your place in a clearing in the woods. And you”—Lonny nods his head earnestly at me—“or some other lady was out there harvesting it.”

“Patch of what? Who?”

“Marijuana! They saw it from the helicopter.”

“Okay, I remember that helicopter.”

“Yeah.”

“So you decide to barge in here like some TV cop.”

“Well, you never know,” says Lonny, complacent and not at all defensive.

“Never know what? You’ve known us since you were a little boy. And you think we turned into drug lords?”

“It does pay,” Lonny says. “And they saw this woman out there.”

“It was me,” I say, “I was picking these blackberries!” I raise my dripping spoon. “For this jam!”

Lonny, confused now, snaps the holster on his gun and walks back out to the car to reconnoiter with the squawk box. For a while, as the two of us veer between outrage and amusement, and as I keep stirring the berries, we hear the staticky burps of conversation from the open car window. Suddenly Lonny puts his siren on again and bucks off, speeds away, up the road. Apparently he’s been instructed to harvest the crop, for perhaps an hour later, just as we’ve got used to the silence and started the rest of our day, the siren wails again. He gets so few opportunities to use it! Down the hill flies Lonny, and we jump to the window in time to see that the trunk of the police car is tied shut over a huge pile of what must be marijuana plants. As he bumps over the frost heaves in the gravel road bed, the tall fronds of the plants bob and wave, spilling out the sides of the trunk’s lid.

“So then, who planted it?” I ask Elsie. “Are you holding out on me?”

“Kit Tatro planted it,” she says. I’m surprised she knows this. But she goes on to say that she’s noticed him popping in and out of the woods across the field.

“I thought he was hunting,” I say.

“You don’t keep track of the hunting seasons, do you?”

I guess not. Tatro seems so much a part of the woods around here, almost part of the scenery, that I’ve never questioned much about his comings and goings. With a sigh and a little whoosh, the blackberries boil over the pot’s rim and cascade across the white enamel of the stove.

My father would have made a great thing of how Lonny burst into our kitchen. There would have been a hue and cry at the next town meeting. Delicious outrage. Letters to the Editor. There might have been a lawsuit. We just let it go. In the same way, we do not bother the spiders. I leave them alone. Father once had them sprayed to death, but they came right back. Look and observe, he said to us, pointing out the spiders, the wolf spiders and the flies—one and the same—the devoured becomes the devourer. He surrendered the field to the spiders, but continued to enforce his boundaries with nature selectively, kept birds from nesting in the eaves, but allowed cats to wander in and out of the loose rocks of the foundation. That was another thing my parents fought about. The cats. Elsie spayed. Father let them go feral.

These things may seem trivial, but they grew mighty. Great fury composed of need, duty, competition, sexual ambivalence, and pride existed between my parents. My father used his achingly snobbish sensitivities, his depressions, his startling sweetness, exactly the way trainers of horses use reins and whips in clever ways. It always astonishes me that relatively small humans can control horses weighing a ton and a half. Likewise my mother’s power, which has since shown itself to be considerable, was somehow channeled by means that were nearly invisible. Some days he just seemed to wear her out with his small naggings, other days it was the big thoughts that flummoxed her and bent her to his will. In the case of the blue enamel kettle, it was not the money alone he objected to, it was that she had spent a great amount upon a pot that was just shy of being the best pot. There was, he knew—although pots were more in her line of expertise—a sort of pot made only in one tiny village factory somewhere in Portugal. Not France, he shrieked. To have spent this amount of money on a pot that wasn’t quite the best that could be found was cretinous.

Cretinous was lighter fluid, the word I mean. Flames shot to the ceiling when my father said it. Other words they used in arguments had similar effects. They always used elevated words for simple insults. Neanderthalic for stupid, myopic for shortsighted, petulant for mean, and so on, as if they paged through Roget’s before they fought. We learned a great deal of vocabulary from their fights. Arrogate, obfuscate, phantasmagoria, stipple, hirsute, quell, atrophy, craven, natter, gnomic, pornographic. These were not words ordinarily encountered on grade school vocabulary tests, but I, at least, began to use them in my everyday writing assignments and soon enough was treated differently, as though I was really smart.

Brush jewelweed and its seeds pop six feet. Orb weavers make a very distinctive seam down the center of their webs. The juicier the berry, the sharper its thorns. What’s the difference between smart and self-protective? They are the same, I think. Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do. For instance, once we had enough money to live comfortably, my mother proceeded to make us almost wealthy by dealing boldly in the most extraordinary rugs. She foraged for rugs in the dry, rotting attics of down-at-the-heel scions of Yankee landowners, scrounged for rugs at neighborhood yard sales, hassled over rugs that came from overseas in bales smelling of sheep fat and burnt dung. She slipped out of rummage sales with Navajo rugs woven with careful flaws to let the bad spirits out of the design. She bought the rugs and sold them and bought them again. To her, it was a dance of happy shadows, and sometimes the money was abstract, or even distracting, as was she, the buyer. It was the rug itself that chose its place in the world. She told me this with the same gravity my father used pronouncing on his book. I didn’t take it the same way, though, because the notion made her happy. She believed in it the way she believed in blue.

There was a blue she worried over then, and covets even now. She still regards blue objects with ferocity, assessing and comparing their blueness to the particular hot blue she claims made queens of courtesans and fools of kings. A dye of indigo and radioactive cobalt. A blue of furious innocence within the ochre of the pattern and the cinnamon and the dried blood of the other wools. It is a blue so intense it looks as though it were made on another planet. It is the blue behind your eyelids when you press past the yellow lights. It is the O.D. blue, I tell myself, of ecstasy and death. I’ll avoid it, thanks anyway. I’ve survived that blue and I will not look upon it anymore.

Oh yes, and my father also had blue eyes, though his were paler and a bit washed-out, with amber flecks.

“Between the eater and the eaten,” said my father, absurd when drunk. “Perfect unity. I have proved it with a mathematical formula.” We nodded. “I’m glad someone understands how faith eats reason and becomes a new beast. Or some two.”

He liked to work in his upstairs office after dinner, and we sneaked past him, or tried to be in bed before he came down the stairs. Still, I remember him always holding hard to the stair rail, blurred and loquacious. This one night, he’d caught us and so we sat on the bottom step with him, ready to bolt. He talked to us and praised us and compared our looks and held our hands. He tried to teach us how to whistle by putting our fingers between our teeth, but couldn’t do it himself and dribbled spit, which I pointed out. He kept trying to whistle in novel, boyish ways until at last he grew furious at our polite silence and we jumped up and ran.

“Get back here, you little shits!” he yelled as we leapt up the stairs. “If I really am your dad, and I’m not sure I am your father, why don’t you little twats tell me to go to hell?”

“Shut up,” said my mother, charging down toward him, for once forgetting that they fought with elevated diction.

The novelty of the shut up silenced him. We squeezed past her, thrilled we’d been called twats, which we understood. You’d think that the appalling thing he said would have upset us or caused us to lose sleep, but it didn’t. Although, as I said, we loved him, not only the word but his idea excited us, for we then spent an hour whispering, imagining that he was not our father. It gave us inspiration to picture our father as, for instance, the man up the road who tapped maple trees, pounding hollow tubes into the bark, adjusting the buckets underneath with a kindly, brown hand. Or our father as the man who ran the pygmy zoo in summer, a wretched attempt at attracting tourists, of which there were none. The zoo man displayed pygmy breeds—tiny goats, dwarf rabbits, and miniature stubby-legged horses; he loved, he said, all the runts of the world. And although I was tall, his philosophy was one I appreciated. When my parents fought, they grew like giants while I shrank.

My father was becoming frustrated with his work, and from the upstairs bedroom he had converted into his office, I would hear him talking as he worked. Sometimes it was to argue a position along and we’d hear the muted rise and fall of certainties, though we could rarely get the words. Other times he seemed to be pleading with someone else, his voice a low wail. “Opposite ends?” I heard him cry once. “But no! Each lives by its contrary!” We melted away from the chattering sounds, usually left the house entirely, when we heard the high crackle of his voice.

Those were the times we roamed far, picked berries, waged our jewelweed wars, made investigations into the habits of the salamanders, tracked deer and coyotes, observed the spiders. One day, we returned from puttering in the woods, hoping it was all over, to find him eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen clad in nothing but a pair of boxers made of that peculiar boxer-short material, thin cotton printed with intricate red-brown squares and diamonds. I was familiar with the melting physique of my father, the drooping muscles of his chest and arms. But I hadn’t ever seen him in the boxers, legs mean and knobby, white feet tender. I turned away, but my sister turned toward him.

“Everything is elusive and in the air, but this, this is real.”

The wonder in his voice caused me to look back. He was looking at Netta as he stroked a four-inch pile of neatly stacked white paper, his typescript. It didn’t register to me at first that his work was finished. The way he nodded, grinning, saying yes, yes, alerted me to the response he was after and caused me to fear that yes, certainly, he had gone nuts.

The year he finished his book and developed its chapters for his lectures, the year he began to make increasingly impenetrable pronouncements, was the year that he grew a cult. The cult was like a fungus. That’s how we saw it—the students in his thrall grew on him like mushrooms. In the classroom, his erratic nature became a kind of charisma. His students began to show up at our house, looking thin and fanatical in worn-out expensive clothes, their hair thickly matted or combed through with oil. Their eyes blazed through the walls. They saw everything. They slept on our floors. We stayed in our room. I developed a horror of running across them ensconced here and there in the house, smoking, muttering, surrounded by books and half-finished term papers.

He began to give them lectures in our wide, sweet kitchen. They lived on cigarettes. Saucers of butts collected. They lived on bitter black coffee and on Elsie’s cooking, which they ate with famished ardor but never complimented. At first, I think, she was amused by the flotsam, and she pitied the students. Soon they bored her. And then one of them burned a neat round hole in a very old Tibetan rug and she kicked the lot of them right out the door. She rousted them from their sleeping corners and the basement couch. She chased them from the attic and the loft in the garage. She drove them back to the college and dumped them at the stone gates. They were lucky she didn’t spay them like the feral cats. But then afterward, as my father, in his office, faced the lonely task of counting up his polite rejection slips from mystified editors, and rebundling his manuscript and sending it back out, she began to leave us. She took long buying trips and when she came home she was distracted, her attention had lifted from us. We could feel it. We had to call her over and over to get her to answer a question. We had to pester her and pull on the hem of her skirt or the fabric of her dress to get her to listen.

These are times a child remembers very clearly—the absence of the two of them. The clearing around my sister and me. I can remember a specific fantasy, I don’t know if my sister shared it. I imagined something deliciously awful happened to one of us, and saw our parents holding hands as they sat at the bedside. Still, we were not technically abandoned, not at all, for our father never actually left the house. For days, he didn’t move from his office, where he’d set himself a haven of safety, shielded himself with stacks of books, papers, files in boxes and in cabinets. Elsie utterly ignored his presence. I did not dare to go to him, nor did my sister ever part the waters of the papers that lapped up the sides of his desk. Sometimes, though, as we passed his office door we heard a dry, cold, rustling sound. It was the sound that waves make when water is frozen a few feet out from the shore, the sound of waves lapping against fresh ice. Almost a music, not a papery sound at all.

That was when my sister and I started living in the orchard—it was a fine place to be. Our trees were houses and dens, whales or seagoing boats or great flying creatures—we lived for days in the branches, brought blankets to make tents, scrounged the kitchen for lunch. Perhaps we could have stayed there day and night but we always came in by ourselves. One day around dusk, though, the first time all summer, our father came out to the orchard to fetch us. I can remember that his appearance made us suddenly angry enough to defy him and to yell down that we were going to sleep in the trees. It was a game at first, and then we became wild, taunting him, throwing down apples. He stood below glaring up at us, hands at his sides. He started to climb, but we scrambled dangerously higher. He must have decided that he’d catch us quicker if he coaxed us, then, so he put out his arms, opened his hands, spoke softly. Come on. Come on. We had climbed far too high by then to jump into his arms, but he didn’t seem to understand this.

“You jump,” I said to my sister.

“No, you jump,” she said, and shook my branch.

“Okay,” I said, but I really didn’t mean it. I lost my balance and dove straight for my father, who stepped aside. I landed on my back just next to his legs and I remember in that endless time, windless, before I could breathe, looking up into the branches and seeing her.

I could see in my sister’s face that she’d seen our father let me fall. She stared down at me with great concentration and then she stepped off the branch. Our father tried to catch her and stumbled over me. She landed next to him, I didn’t see where. I think that I heard my father shriek at me Don’t you move, Faye, don’t you ever move, I’ll kill you myself, and then he was running across the field with her. Again, our mother was not home, and she’d taken the car. He ran down the road to the Eykes’, and I remember thinking what it would be like at the hospital, and what my father would say when they put my sister carefully on the bed in the doctor’s office, and the doctor shook his head and looked helpless. I knew that my father wouldn’t have to say anything to convince them all that I’d pushed her or shaken the branch or she’d taken a dare—all he’d have to do was blame it on himself too ostentatiously, but with small thoughtful pauses, and they would think he was trying to protect me, as any other father would. Somehow I knew all that was before me. I knew how my mother and my father would regard me from then on. And how I would come to regard myself.

Perhaps I even knew that his lies would squeeze his heart shut in a year, for I knew I’d lost them both, or all three of them. I knew that now I was alone. The sun gave off that sweet, endless, August glow as it sank behind the first few leaves. Eventually, of course, I disobeyed my father and moved. I didn’t know where to go, so I went into the field of orb spiders. At first, as I walked in among their waiting webs, I was afraid. The mind is a wolf. Then the light shed down sharply golden and I began to think. Thinking saved me. Perception saved me. I saw that the spiders were just substance. Not bad, not good. We were all made of the same stuff. I saw how we spurted out of creation in different shapes. How for a time I would inhabit this shape but then I’d be the lace on my sister’s shoe that had dropped off her foot onto the weeds and tamped grass, or I’d be the blue pot my parents argued about, or maybe something else. There was nothing but the endless manufacture of things out of nothing. I saw the changing and exchanging of shapes. The grass growing all around me, now, would one day be the cow, the milk, the flesh of the calf, then me.

I thought and thought in order to avoid something massive. But whenever I stopped thinking, it lay before me just the same.

The bronze sun turned across my shoulders and stung all the way down my arms. I tapped a loaded jewelweed and the seed flipped out of sight. Feral and silent as coal, the spiders ranged to all sides of me. I put out my finger and with the slightest of motions I stroked the back of a spider. I coaxed the biggest one, using a thin blade of grass, into my palm. Then I held it for a motionless time. It was a sun-warmed thing, heavy as a dirt clod, but light as a plastic toy. Poised, excited, it vibrated with cold breath, ticked swiftly in my hand. Hummed, sang, knocked away the edges of the world.