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MY FATHER WAS digging the grave, with one arm. I watched his labors. We all did, especially Elinora, who stood beside me.

“He ought to hang your mother between tree branches, like the Indian skeleton we saw back a ways,” she said. “So the wolves don’t get her.”

“My mama’s not going to hang between any trees. So hush your mouth, Elinora.”

“He could bring her on with us. My uncle would give her a proper burial.”

“Santa Fe is days away yet.” I wished we could bring Mama along, too, and not leave her in this godforsaken place. But I knew better than to say anything to Daddy right then. And I wasn’t about to let Elinora know I agreed with her. Or hear any more about her stupid uncle, the Bishop.

My father was breathing heavily from his efforts. Every so often he’d stop, mop his face with his dirty handkerchief, and go on. Was he wiping away tears? I tried to see but couldn’t.

I had no tears myself. We’d had a burial ceremony less than an hour ago. We’d sung Mama’s favorite hymn. But the sound was weak against the rising wind, which carried it away in the vastness like a ball of tumbleweed. We’d be here forever, the way Daddy was proceeding. The indifferent reddish earth was slipping right back into the hole even as he dug.

“Mr. Enders, you must let me help.” It was Mr. French. He stepped forward. He and his wife, Ida, and their twin boys were traveling with us in their own wagon, where the boys now slept. In a third wagon were the Wades. His wife, Nancy, was only sixteen, three years older than me. And she with a baby.

“Poco a poco,” Daddy said. Little by little. He knew Spanish. He handed his shovel to Mr. French. “Damned ground is full of the dust of old bones,” he said.

Mr. French dug and dug and dug. The ground seemed to resist his efforts, as if it did not want my mother. As if it knew her time had come too soon. The sound he made digging was a soft thud. It was useless here—all sound was, even our voices. There was nothing to measure them against.

We were insignificant in this endless country that seemed to go on forever. Only the distant mountains gave us an idea of our size. Now they were trimmed in the gold of aspens, the sky darkening behind them.

It was the starkness of the country that had bothered Mama so much. She’d told me that in her last days as she lay feverish on her bed in the wagon as we jogged along. “There is no end to it, Lizzy,” she said. “It is eternity.”

For her it was. I heard her whimpering at night when a coyote howled. Once, when we passed an old Indian wrapped and unmoving in a blanket while sitting in front of a pueblo, she clutched my hand. “He’s waiting for me, Lizzy,” she said.

She died the next day, of the putrid fever. She who came from Georgia, where the days make you feel as if you are being bathed in milk. And then later, after all that Georgia business—after the war that took Daddy’s arm in the Battle of Buzzard Roost Gap, after the milk turned sour for her—it was to Independence, Missouri. To the arms of her family that sheltered her so. And nearly squeezed the life out of Daddy.

“Mr. Wade should help,” Elinora whispered savagely. “Rain is coming. And you know how fast night falls.”

I knew she was wishing the whole thing over and done with for herself. She wanted supper; she wanted to get into her soft nightdress and get the best place in the wagon. She did not wish to forgo her comforts. Each night as darkness came on, she scuttled into our wagon, frightened of every shadow.

“Hush your mouth, or I’ll put a scorpion in your gravy tonight,” I threatened.

She gasped. “You would, too, you . . . you—oh, if your mother hadn’t just died! And here at her holy grave site you make threats!”

“There’s nothing holy about any of this,” I told her.

“For shame! Your mother’s grave is holy!”

“It’s nothing of the kind. No grave is.”

“Oh, and you’re such a heathen. Not even to grieve her! You need to come to school with me, Lizzy Enders. You need the Sisters of Loretto. I’m going to tell your father!”

“You do and I’ll make you sorry you ever drew breath!”

All this went on in whispers, but Daddy must have heard some of it. He gripped my shoulder, thinking I was taken with grief. I did not yet know what grief was. That would come later. “I’m all right, Daddy,” I said. He let go.

I looked up at him, at the sharp outline of his face that had once been handsome. And at the eyes, which Mama said had once seen hell in the war and still recollected what it looked like and that’s why they were so sad. I looked at the empty shirtsleeve, pinned up.

I felt some of my old love for him rising in my breast. I had covered it over with anger when we left Independence, anger for taking me and Mama away. On different days coming west, I had tried to keep that anger, like a fire in the wind. Because it was safer than feeling anything else. Uncle William, one of grandfather’s half-Indian sons, had once told me that.

“Keep your anger if you can keep nothing else, Lizzy,” he had said. “People will respect you more for anger than for tears.”

So, I was trying to keep it.

But most of the time all I felt was confusion. How could you love and hate somebody at the same time? I did not know what I felt about my father anymore. But I knew you shouldn’t be halfway in your feelings. Uncle William had said so. And you couldn’t be halfway in such country as this. The shapes and colors, the unforgiving earth, the sky, the rocks, the flowering cactus, the dust storms, the sudden appearance of knee-high lilacs in the middle of all the deadness, the howling wind at night, wouldn’t let you be halfway about anything.

You had to feel something. One way or the other. It was demanded of you.

The land changes all the time, right in front of your eyes. It’s the light that changes things. You learn not to trust the light. One minute you are seeing heights and depths that are ragged and harsh and jutting out in threatening lines, and the next, everything is bathed in pink and purple and gray, soft and innocent and pulling you in.

Mr. French was finished digging. Darkness was coming on fast, though over some mountain peaks in the west there was light, like midday. I moved closer as Mr. French helped Daddy pick up the buffalo robe with Mama in it and set it into the grave. In the distance I heard a coyote wail.

“Say good-bye to your mama, Lizzy,” Daddy directed. He was standing over the buffalo robe. Elinora was reading something from her Bible. I wished she would shut up. I liked the howling of the coyote better. It was more fitting.

I stood respectfully for a minute, but it had nothing to do with Mama. I did not feel her presence inside that buffalo robe. She was gone already, away from this place. I wished I could be.

But I turned as I knew I must and went to help Mrs. French and Mrs. Wade with the supper.