One

The fire had gone out not long before he woke. The air in the cabin was cold enough to chill his nose but not cold enough to show his breath. The stove, when he reached out, was still as warm as his hand.

Inside the sleeping bag, his body had generated its own heat, and the goose down kept it there, cocooning him. It was good to know he could survive a night in the cabin if he wanted to, that he could survive even the deep cold of a night in February. The only difficulty was convincing himself to leave the warmth of the bag.

He did it by imagining the smell of coffee. Down at the house, Tante would have the coffee percolating on the stove, boiling it with the chicory that gave it a burnt taste that went away only when he stirred in sugar and filled his mug to the lip with milk. The kitchen would be warm, the fire hissing and popping. Tante would have forgiven him by now, as he had already forgiven her. She would be ready for him to come back, she would not say a word, and they would go on as ever. After thirty-five years, after the whole of his life and more than a third of hers, forgiveness came easily to them, and often. The passing of time pressed them to it, made nothing else important enough to stop it. All you ever really have is time; she taught him that.

He dressed inside the bag, took his boots from its bottom where he’d kept them warm, climbed out and put them on. Opened the stove door, stirred the ashes, made sure the fire was out. Rolled up the sleeping bag and put it into ripstop plastic, and put that into more plastic, and put that into the cupboard to protect it from mice and squirrels. Laid a tarp over the cot to keep the dust and droppings off. Cast his eye about the place. Pulled his coat from the hook and put it on; pulled his hat down to his eyes, wrapped the scarf around his neck and chin, stuck his hands into his gloves, and went out the door into the cold.

It was first light, a winter dawn. If he’d wanted to take the time to climb the ridge, he could have seen the blush of sunrise warm above the horizon. But here on the western slope the light was colorless, flat. His footsteps cracked the icy air. Judging from the way his breath hovered, the temperature was well below zero.

Around him the trees seemed to hold themselves still. They looked almost dead, like the trees onstage in a high school play. His high school play. Because he was good with wood and because he had a truck and because he could drive a nail straight, he had been asked to design the set. He had made a forest of trees, bringing summer into the drab auditorium. Each of the three nights, he had refreshed the dream with new-cut saplings, their leaves kept green by the moist medium in which they stood. But as powerful as the illusion was, the trees had looked dead to him. He could tell a live tree when he saw one, and those trees had looked dead, more dead even than these looked in the dead of winter.

The first slope down from the cabin to the house was slick, thin snow over leaves. He reached his hands ahead to the trees, grabbed their brittle limbs to steady himself. Twigs broke off in his hands. To inhale froze his nostrils, to exhale thawed them. The air was raw on his cheeks and lips.

When the slope leveled, he relaxed his caution. In winter you could see deep into the woods. He watched for what he might see, for what might be there, looking for nothing in particular. Sometimes you caught deer off guard, stripping the bark from young trees, or spotted woodpeckers after you heard them, drilling old trees in search of frozen insects. He was in no hurry; he had no place to be, no job to do but keeping himself and Tante warm. He liked that about being a carpenter in winter; he liked that about winter itself. The way everything slowed down, became elemental. Nothing mattered but staying warm.

The path widened. This was the old quarry road. He came into it where it hooked left toward the lower quarry, hidden some half mile back. Downhill, the road was still open; he kept it that way with his truck, to make it easier to bring down firewood. But toward the quarry the road was recognizable only because the growth was younger and thicker than the rest of the woods. Most people would have missed it.

A hum came, first soft and distant, then louder. A single-engine plane passed overhead, just under the low clouds.

He glanced left, up the overgrown road, and saw something. Something red against something white. He almost dismissed it. But the red glowed fresh and bright, and the thought that some animal might be hurt and bleeding drew him a few steps into the woods.

He kept waiting for what he was seeing to make sense to him. But even when he recognized the red rosebuds on the white flannel, even when he knew what they were, his mind refused to comprehend what his eyes saw, concocting instead other reasons that Tante’s nightgown might be out there in the woods. The wind, a wild dog, birds. Something had taken the gown from the clothesline, had dragged it here and left it. For several long minutes his mind did not accept what else was there, accepted only the nightgown amid some strangely shaped and tinted rocks. Rocks whitened by hoarfrost. Rocks that gave the impression of a face, rocks shaped like fingers, a calf, a foot.

Then like a puzzle it came together, and he saw the picture complete. Tante. One leg bent under her, the other foot bare. Her torso twisted. Her arm flung over her eyes so that he could not see if they were open. The sleeve of the nightgown drawn back, her arm exposed: the web of blue veins, the loose flesh, the bones of her arm from wrist to elbow, the hand with only four fingers. The nightgown clean and white against the ground. Like fresh snow with roses leaping red and vivid from it.

He sat on the ground next to her. Tried not to look at her. Took off a glove and reached toward her. Where his finger touched, an oval melted from her hand. But the flesh was cold, no warmer than the ground she lay on.

He wanted to take her into his arms then, hold her to him. Warm her. Breathe life back into her. But he couldn’t.

When he felt his own hand freezing, he stood again, put his glove back on, and squatted to put his arms beneath her. It was like lifting firewood. She was a rigid, ungainly corpse.

He moved carefully to avoid trees, to keep from hitting her against them, her outstretched arm, her foot. More than once he slipped and nearly fell. He did not look down into her ancient face, afraid of what he might see.

He took her back up to the cabin, the nearer of two places; took her back to his bed. There, he removed the tarp and laid her head on the pillow where his own had rested, not an hour before.

The sheriff’s office was in a new brick building, which it shared with the post office and a video store. A flag snapped against a flagpole planted in a concrete circle in the parking lot. Between two white lines, a black car gleamed. Otherwise the lot was empty.

Stepping into the glass entryway was like stepping into an airlock or one of those radiation baths in a science fiction movie. Somewhere a machine roared ferociously, filling the box with hot air, a buffer zone between the cold outside and the warm inside. A place to preheat visitors, so they would not bring the cold inside with them.

In this space, just opposite a handwritten sign that read NO SMOKING, stood a woman smoking a cigarette, wrapped up and slouching in a big winter coat, her hair and part of her face hidden by a hat. James spoke to her. “Cold out,” he said. Two words together was all he could manage. She only nodded and took another deep drag, looking out into the parking lot as if she were expecting someone else.

He crossed the space in two steps. Opened the inner door. Stepped into the hallway with its shining linoleum floor. Found the door labeled COUNTY SHERIFF. Opened it. Stepped inside.

The sheriff’s office had freshly painted green walls. There were no curtains on the broad windows that looked out on the parking lot; the blinds were raised up. Behind a long counter another woman sat at a desk, flipping the glossy pages of a magazine. She was not in uniform. He did not know her, but she looked familiar, about as familiar as the woman in the entryway.

It had been a long time since he had been to the sheriff’s office. Things had changed. The woman’s desk was sleek and modern, U-shaped. Behind her glowed the blue screen of a computer, swimming with red and yellow fish. Or birds. He couldn’t tell.

James cleared his throat; the woman flipped a page. James thought he saw lawn mowers, other bright red machinery. Tractors. He thought it must be a farm catalog. “May I help you?” she said, not looking up.

“Sheriff here?”

“No,” she said, and now looked up. “Oh,” she said, as if she knew him or as if the sight of him had startled her. “Can I help you?” She rephrased the question as if it meant something different.

He hesitated to speak, uncertain how to put it. “It’s a death,” he said.

The woman smiled. “Sure,” she said. She kept smiling and looking at him, as if waiting for something. When he didn’t say anything more, she gave a little laugh. “Murder, suicide, or accident? Hard to tell these days, isn’t it? They just seem to throw themselves into the road. I hit two raccoons just the other day. And my uncle hit a moose, up there on the mainland. Totaled his truck.”

James shook his head. “No,” he said.

Keeping a finger at her place, the woman shut the catalog, swiveled her chair to the left, and stood. Her clothing struck him as peculiar for a woman who worked in a sheriff’s office: a long white sweater over black pants, and shiny black shoes that clacked against the floor. Her blond hair was short enough to reveal her ears; her earrings were silver birds that hung down from chains and swung against her neck. She looked like someone who should be working in a department store. “What happened?” she asked, coming toward him, the catalog still in her hand, her expression curious.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

She was standing arm’s length from him now, only the counter between them. “Who died?” she said.

“Tante.” He used the French word unself-consciously, not worried about whether she would uwnderstand. She did.

“Your aunt?”

“My guardian.”

The woman’s eyebrows rose and fell. James was too old to have a guardian. “She raised me,” James said.

The woman nodded, understanding. “How old was she?” she asked.

He thought. “Ninety-four.”

“Oh.” The woman reached out to him, the gesture sympathetic, but he could not feel her hand through the sleeve of his jacket.

She leaned down behind the counter; he heard riffling noises; then she reappeared with a form in her hand and laid it on the counter, putting the catalog facedown next to it. From the collection of pens in a mug on the counter, she extracted one and held it over the form, as if about to write.

“I’m not sure,” he said again.

“Not sure what?” she said. “Not sure she’s dead?” She glanced away from him toward the telephone. “Should we . . . ”

He shook his head. “Not sure what happened.” He looked down at the top of the woman’s head; the part in her hair was very straight, and as white as her sweater.

“It’s all right,” she said, her voice still kindly. “There’s a place for that here.” She clicked the point from the pen and pointed to a line on the form. “I’ll fill it in,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Let me.”

“Are you sure?” she said. He nodded, took the pen from her hand, and turned the form so that it faced him.

The first line asked for a name. Marguerite Anne Bernadette-Marie Deo, he wrote. He read ahead. Date of birth. Address, occupation. Circumstances under which the body was discovered. He stopped reading and listened to what the woman was saying.

“The sheriff’s out on a call, but you can wait here. As soon as he gets in, he’ll call the coroner.” She had her eyes on him and spoke in low tones, as if sharing a confidence. “They’ll have to do an autopsy,” she said. “Whenever the circumstances are uncertain . . . ”

Women in bathing suits. The cover of the catalog showed women in bathing suits. Not lawn mowers, not tractors, but women with bare legs and arms, shoulders, bony chests, fleshy hips. Flesh and bone. Not machinery. How could he have made that mistake? Flesh and bone. The foot has twenty-seven bones, the hand twenty-eight, unless a finger is missing. Together the hands and feet constitute more than half the bones in the human body. A person’s feet are as recognizable as her face, once you’ve come to know them.

When Tante was ill, the hospital sent home a bottle of milky lotion, the nurse telling him to massage her feet to keep the circulation going while she recuperated. The first time he held one of her long, bony feet in his hands, rubbing the lotion in, he thought: What kind of protection is this skin? So soft a fingernail could damage it. Like the petal of a flower, the skin of a ripe pear. He pressed his thumbs into the arch; he rubbed each toe between his fingers. Tante was silent, her eyes shut tight. Embarrassed, he thought. Ashamed. Or in pain. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. “Am I hurting you?” he said. She opened her eyes, smiled. “No,” she said. “It’s lovely.”

Lovely. He couldn’t remember her ever using the word before.

It felt strange to touch her. As a little boy, he’d clung to her, but growing up he’d pulled away, like a box elder leaning to get out of her shade and into the sunlight. It was only during that long period of her recuperation that he realized how infrequently, as adults, they had touched. During her sickness, he bathed her and dressed her, fed her, pulled the blanket up under her chin, tucked her in. Rubbed lotion into her feet, as solicitous as a lover, as careful as a parent.

He remembered what she’d said, the moment she woke up in the hospital, when she finally rose out of the hazy dementia that had accompanied her pneumonia. “How could you let them bring me here?” She’d had tears in her eyes then too. “I won’t let them touch me. I won’t.”

He told her she had no choice, if she wanted to live.

Did he have a choice now?

Yes. He would do as she wished, as she had told him to do. One final obedient act.

James folded the form into halves, quarters, eighths; put it in his breast pocket. “I’ll be back,” he said, putting the pen in the mug. The woman looked startled. The silver birds flew at her neck. “Wait!” she said. She reached her hand out to him again. “Wait!” she repeated. She might have said his name; he wasn’t sure.

But he was out the door and into the air lock, past the smoking woman. And then back in the truck and driving.

Earliest memory. He was walking along the road, his hand in his mother’s. It was full summer. The woods were thick with leaves, dense with green. He must have been three. His mother’s hand felt good around his. She kept herself between him and the road. When a car went by, she tightened her grip on him. Each car’s passing made a little wind that eddied around him; dust stung his eyes.

When they rounded the bend, he wanted to run, but his mother’s hand would not let him. On the porch of the big stone house sat Tante, rocking in the green chair, watching for him. She was old even then, but in memory now she seemed young. She did not get up when she saw him, but he saw her see him and he saw the smile she kept quiet on her familiar face. In a moment he and his mother had crossed the road and he was standing with his hands on Tante’s knees as the women exchanged a few words. Then his mother kissed his head and was gone.

“I have a surprise for you,” Tante said.

She took his hand then. Hers felt different from his mother’s, larger and rougher and harder, yet the same in that he trusted it. They walked down the steps and around to the side yard, where the big trees grew. All summer he had been playing under those trees, looking up into their shining leaves. Tante called the trees “yolks,” or so it sounded to him.

Now he saw what she had done. Up the trunk of one of the trees went a ladder, steps and rails, and in the tree was something to climb to. A place whose floor he looked up at and whose walls and roof he could glimpse among the leaves. “Go ahead, climb up,” Tante told him. He ran to the tree and gripped the rail and put his foot on the first step, then looked back. Tante was right there behind him. He climbed.

They ate lunch together in the tree, high above the ground.

She was missing the little finger on her left hand. In the tree that day she told him a story about big lizards she called “gaters,” in a wet place called a bayou in a place she called “Looziana.” She told how she, a young and stupid girl, had wandered into the bayou one day, “trying to get lost,” she said. How she had come upon a gater as big as a log—in fact, she had thought he was a log and had begun to step across him, when he twisted and snapped at her feet on his back. She fell into the water then and found herself eye to reptilian eye with him. “Please don’t eat me,” she said. “Hmmph,” he said. “What kind of a gater would I be if I didn’t eat you?” “But I am bitter inside,” she said, “and not fit to eat.” “Others have told that tale,” the gater said, “but they were lying.” He smiled broadly and his big teeth were white daggers in the sun. “Why should I believe you?” he asked. “Taste me,” she said, and extended the littlest finger she could.

“Tante,” he asked, when the story was done, “why are you bitter inside?”

“Can’t say,” she said.

“Did you get lost?” he asked.

She smiled then. “Eventually,” she said, “but not that day.”

James had made her tell the story many times after that, but the first time was his earliest clear memory of her. He brought it to mind now, as he drove the truck into the village.

It was a bright morning. There had been little snow since the January thaw, and what was left from December was either crusty and glinting where the sun hit it or black with soot, as if scorched. Strips of cloud moved through a milk-blue sky but did not interfere with the sun. In this light the town seemed shrunken, its buildings like knickknacks collected over the years, hodgepodge along the road. Nothing moved but a few cars and some chimney smoke, curling up seductively.

The woman in the sheriff’s entranceway. If a woman smokes like a chimney, can a chimney smoke like a woman?

He was hungry. He had not eaten, he could not imagine eating, yet he knew he was going to. People said life went on; so it did. He pulled into the parking lot of the diner at the far end of the village. It was an old diner that had been bought and renovated from its derelict shell, transported here from its original location, somewhere south. Big news in the local paper half a dozen years before. How the owner had to get permits from every state he passed through. How wide the load had been, how long. The day the diner arrived, the locals had come out to watch it be set on its foundation. Once in place among the old maples, it seemed it had always been there, and summer filled it with gullible tourists seeking the flavor of authenticity, a taste of the past—flapjacks that they assumed were made from scratch, maple syrup that they assumed came from the big trees.

In winter, the locals made the diner theirs. This morning it was quiet and empty but for three customers, each alone. A man in farm overalls at the counter, a white-shirted man and a blond woman in separate booths. None of their faces visible. James slid into a red leatherette booth, and a waitress in a white uniform and a blue apron brought him a laminated menu. There was a full page of breakfast choices. “Coffee,” James said, and she took the menu back, her face blank. “And toast,” he said. “Lots of butter.” She gave him a cramped little smile and made a note on her pad.

Yesterday it had been Tante who made his breakfast, stoked the fire, brewed the coffee, the transistor radio on the windowsill crackling with news and music. That’s how it should have been today, too. When he came down from the cabin again and let himself in the back door, she should have been there to turn to him and say, “Seen the sunrise?” She should have been there to set his plate on the table, and when the toast came it should have been thick slices of her bread spread with butter melting fast, and beside it the mug of sweet coffee. Last night’s argument forgiven, forgotten, without a word.

But instead this morning he had left her dead in the cabin. And when he came down to the house, he had found the outside door and the summer-kitchen door half open and the fire out, the house frost-cold and empty. He had closed the doors and stood for a moment, listening to the silent house, thinking of Tante lying in his cold bed up in the woods. By the sink sat their two mugs, washed by her hand and upside down on the drainboard. He had been five years old when she taught him to tear toast into pieces and dunk it into coffee. Morning had come to mean buttered toast and sweet coffee in the mug that fit his hand. Had his hand grown to fit the mug, or had the mug always fit? This was like asking if Tante had been born to take care of him or he to take care of her. The mug had always fit his hand. He took off a glove and touched the mug; it was icy.

Last night they had drunk tea and played rummy. Deuces wild. One-eyed jacks wild. Tante piled on the wilds when it was her turn to choose. Then she brought her cards close to her eyes, more to see them than to hide them from him. It was an old deck of poker cards they played with, the same cards they had played with when he was small. Through her fingers he could see the back of one, could see the blue etching of two bulldogs leaping at their chains, could almost read the caption under them: “There is a tie that binds us to our Homes.” That Homes, with its capital H, turning a simple word into a castle with turrets. There is a tie that binds us, the way the two Is in the H were bound by the crossbar between them. As she had taught him to see.

On the mantel over the fireplace (they’d been in the front room, where they always played, at the big wooden table), the brass balls on the anniversary clock turned this way and that, mimicking and mocking the planets revolving about the sun, never finishing one revolution before they began another. Watching them, he thought of a woman’s shoulders, the way a woman’s bare, round shoulders could shift away, her eyes shifting with them. A glint reflected off the four balls as they turned, two pairs this way, two pairs that, sending fragments of lamplight sailing silently across the walls and back again. The fire was low but glowing and hot, and it and the pair of lamps that flanked the settee painted the room unevenly with light and shadow. The walls were murky with years of soot and resin.

“This place needs painting,” he’d said to her, still waiting for her to play her turn.

“Do it when I’m dead and gone,” she’d said back, not lifting her eyes from the cards.

She always said that. It meant only that she no longer liked the smell of paint, did not like the mess of it, did not like change, did not like disruption, did not want to waste her time that way. Nothing: it meant nothing. Remembering now, he had to believe that. She could not have known how close death was.

Unless that was why she had come after him.

Now in the diner the waitress brought him a cup and saucer. “Toast coming right up,” she said, and dumped a handful of plastic creamers on the table. He stirred in two creams, two packets of sugar. He sipped. Coffee without Tante’s chicory had no flavor for him, never had.

He tried to read the newspaper he found on his seat, but couldn’t get past the headlines. He gazed out the window.

Across the street was the old Episcopal church. Two years before, it had been sold to a bank. Because the church was designated a historic landmark, the bank had been required to keep the steeple and the leaded-glass windows: a field of white lilies, a golden bridge over a blue river. Images of an earthly heaven that could be bought as easily as earned. Just right for a bank—no Jesus or Mary. The crosses they’d been allowed to take down.

Next door, in a new building built to look old, was an antique shop. Vinyl siding mimicked wood clapboards, the roof was pitched, the windowpanes falsely divided. As James watched, the front door opened and a woman in a hooded parka came out, walked to the edge of the road, and set up a sandwich-board sign, the capital A of its side toward him, the sign positioned so drivers could read it coming down the road. But he knew what it said. OPEN. ANTIQUES. SALE TODAY. Every day it was “sale today.”

A car drove in front of the sign and pulled into the diner parking lot. James didn’t so much look at it as turn his eyes on it. It was a blue-and-white car with some kind of emblem on its side. A man in a gray knit tuque and sunglasses emerged from it, gave James’s truck a long look, and then came inside, cold air wafting around him.

“Morning, Mona,” the man said to the waitress, nodding. “Hey, Sheriff,” she said back to him. Then the sheriff came to James’s booth, took off his gloves and put them in his pocket, took off his jacket and hung it on the rack, pulled his hat off and stuffed it in with the gloves, and slid into the seat opposite James, as if they had intended to meet there all along.

“Morning, James Jack,” he said.

James nodded.

The waitress brought the sheriff a menu. He waved it away and said, “Coffee and a bran muffin,” and she went off again.

The sheriff was wearing a nicely ironed navy-blue shirt with epaulets and pleated pockets and a navy-blue tie. Over his left breast was a badge. His face was still young except for the squint lines around his eyes; aside from the fact that the hair standing up from the static of his hat was white, he looked exactly as he had always looked. He had been sheriff a long time, and deputy before that. He had known James a long time, and James had known him. And the sheriff had known Tante. This was, more than anything else, why James had driven down to the sheriff’s office. To tell someone else who knew her. To see someone who might care.

The sheriff folded his hands on the table. “I understand you visited the office this morning.”

James nodded, sipped at his coffee.

“What’s up?”

James shrugged. “Nothing.” Nothing was what came to mind; nothing was all he could tell the sheriff, who would likely want to do the right thing, the legal thing. That was his job.

The sheriff sighed, and the waitress brought James’s toast and the sheriff’s muffin, balancing the plates on her forearm. She dumped another handful of creamers on the table, went away, and came back with the coffeepot and filled the sheriff’s cup and refilled James’s. James opened another creamer and dumped it in. The sheriff did the same, and took a sip.

“Everything all right up at the house?” the sheriff said.

James stirred in another packet of sugar, picked up one triangle of toast, and dunked it. Eyes closed, he took the first bite. Butter and sugar and coffee mixed in his mouth. For a moment, he heard Tante at the sink, washing the morning dishes. And when he opened his eyes, he thought he saw her there, standing across the room, watching. But no, it was the waitress—rag in her hand, wiping the counter clean, eyes on him.

“Death is a difficult thing,” the sheriff said, tearing the paper from his muffin. “You knew that my wife died?”

James nodded and said, “I was sorry to hear that.” Because it was the appropriate thing to say, and because the sheriff had often acted kindly to him, although sometimes that kindness did seem less than sincere.

The sheriff nodded. “More than a year ago.” He sipped coffee. “It’s particularly hard if you’re alone, the way you are. Death, I mean. Do you want me to go back to the house with you?”

If you came to the house, James thought about saying, would you let me do what I have to do? But he knew what would happen if he asked.

So he didn’t. He said nothing. The toast was cold, the coffee was getting cold; he felt ill, not hungry. The diner with its booths and stools and countertop felt small to him—close, hot. He felt like punching the sheriff, or crying. He had to get out, get away. “Nobody’s dead,” he said suddenly, giving the sheriff what he hoped would look like a smirk. “It was a joke. Just a joke. Everyone’s fine.”

The sheriff gave him a long look. The expression on his face changed like weather, from compassion to confusion to anger. He stood up, brushed the crumbs from his fingers. “James Jack,” he said, “if this is a joke, it’s not funny, and if it’s not a joke, it’s serious. Very serious.” He put on his hat and coat and gloves and stood so close that James had to crane his neck to look up at him. “I’ll be coming by,” the sheriff said. “You can count on it.” Then he was gone.

The waitress came with the check. “I guess you’ll pay for his?” she asked. James nodded, and handed her a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.

She hesitated, then folded the bill in half and slid it into her pocket. “Have a nice day,” she said, and went back to wiping tables.

You were never afraid of thunder,” Tante told him. “You were never afraid of anything.”

“I wasn’t?”

“No.”

“But I am now.”

“Yes. You learned it at school.”

He did remember the day darkness filled the big windows, the trees danced, bright light scissored through the clouds. He had run to watch it through the glass. Some girls screamed behind him, but that wasn’t what made him afraid. It was when the teacher grabbed his arm, dragged him away, her own eyes terrified, her voice angry and fearful at the same time. “Sit down!” she screamed above the din of children and storm, shoving him into his chair. Then she smacked him once, hard, on his left ear.

The next morning, Tante came to school with him. She stood in the doorway until the teacher saw her, rose from her desk, and came. Without a word Tante drew her into the hallway. He went to his seat, sat, pulled out his reading book, but his ears were tuned to the voices outside the door. Mostly he heard Tante’s, as low and rumbling as thunder. When the teacher came back in, both her ears were red, as if Tante’s talking-to had hurt them as much as the teacher’s hand had hurt his.

That was his second memory.

He pulled the truck into Keller’s Variety Store. It was as busy as usual—workmen buying their lunches, women picking up a few things they’d run out of or forgotten to buy at the big market on the mainland, an elderly man prowling the state liquor side of the store in search of something he could afford to drink. Some of their faces were pale shaded blue under the fluorescent fixtures, others were ruddy and dry with eyes bloodshot from exposure to winter sun and wind. Nobody there could have afforded to shop at Keller’s in summer, when tourist prices took effect.

James picked up a bottle of red wine, put it down, picked it up again. Then he picked up a box of crackers and a wedge of cheese. At the checkout he bought two instant lottery tickets, scratched them both, won nothing. And then he went back out to the truck and drove toward home. Home. Tante’s house would be his now. He had never thought about that before.

The metallic glint of the day had faded; the clouds were thickening. It had been so dry all winter that the possibility of snow seemed as remote as the mountains that appeared as he drove over the rise. But still—it might snow. It just might. Those looked like snow clouds coming down from the north: gray, shapeless, a herd of foggy elephants. Marching in over the flat, white lake and the fish shanties standing in loose groups here and there on the ice, like people gathered for a party. Or a funeral.

A little snow would be good, as long as it cleared off later.

He checked his mirror. No one behind him.

At the bottom of the hill he turned right and followed the lake. The road here was narrow, winding, and partly paved, partly not, depending on how close it came to the water. The town had learned the futility of fighting the lake for the right to have a road along its edge. Too many dollars had been spent paving a stretch only to have the lake steal the substrate from it. In places now, old tarmac had eroded into beach, so broken to bits that it seemed natural. In places now, after thaws and rains, or during a storm, the road disappeared under water. If you tried to drive through it, you might make it; if not, you could try to back out. At such places the woods and underbrush had been pushed back, driven back, to make room for three-point turns.

But this was winter and the road in winter was generally passable, and safe, if you watched for places where ice sat in the shade all day. This was not the way James usually came home from town; it was easier, and faster, to take the road that cut through the center of the island. But he wanted time to think, and he wanted to drive.

It was comforting to be in the truck. His hands fit the steering wheel, his body fit the seat; the truck sounded and felt familiar, normal, squeaking and groaning and jolting the way it always did. The truck felt like one right thing in the wrongness that the morning had become.

The thought occurred to him that he had ridden in trucks and almost nothing but trucks all his life. In fact, he could remember riding in only one car. And that was the sheriff’s, although then it had been a different car, the sheriff had been a deputy, and James had been a little boy. He remembered how fancy the police car had seemed, the chrome instruments futuristic, the two-way radio keeping up a raspy, coded chatter like alien communication, like something out of his comic books.

The deputy had taken him from Tante’s to his great-uncle’s house, where he saw more cars and trucks and people than he had ever seen there before. Men and women alike wore heavy rubber boots; the ground was muddy with their prints. The day had been sunny and warm after the cold winter, and the people in the dooryard, like the geese in the bird yard, were gabbling and pointing their beaks, open jackets flapping. When the deputy pulled in and stopped the car and the people turned toward him, James felt a new importance. The deputy put his hand on James’s shoulder and led him into the house. A peacock wailed.

In the kitchen sat his grandmother, her face sore with crying and two big, soft women in housedresses on either side of her. James did not know who they were, but he knew that they had made the cup of tea that steamed on the table, that they were there to minister to his grandmother. When James came in, they turned to him eyes brimming with tears. “Here’s the little boy,” one of them said, putting her ruddy hand on his grandmother’s shoulder. His grandmother looked at him through red eyes as if looking at something she’d forgotten and didn’t want to remember, and then she began to cry again.

That was a long time ago, the day his parents died.

He slowed for a patch of ice at the bottom of a blocked-off driveway. Summer places pocked this part of the lake road, big new houses sided with stained wood and fronted with windows facing the lake, looking west toward the mountains and the sunset. Summer homes for wealthy families, retirement homes for those still young enough to enjoy retirement. Set up off the road, just visible through the trees. Most of these people he knew by name. They were how he made a living: caretaking their places in winter, in summer doing the carpentry jobs too big for them to do themselves. But he didn’t really know them, or they him; they weren’t his friends. They pretended to be— waving in summer when they drove by in their air-conditioned cars, slapping him on the back in the hardware store or the market, joking with him while they paid for their birdseed or light-bulbs or toilet paper or beer. But their smiles said, “You’re lucky to have been born here, just too dumb to know why,” and their friendship was as superficial as their needs.

As the lake road wended east around the northern edge of the island, the houses got fewer and poorer. Here the location wasn’t so good. You faced into the winter winds. You didn’t get the sunset. The water was marshy at its edge, the bottom mucky; mosquitoes swarmed as soon as summer came. These latter were problems that could be overcome, but only by a lot of money, and the money hadn’t gotten this far yet. Between the road and the lake grew some scrubby volunteer cedars; cattails stuck up out of the ice like quenched torches.

James slowed the truck and with a sharp turn of the wheel pulled into a driveway almost hidden by the cedars and scrub grown up around it. The trailer was set back in a clearing, rear end in the woods, nose toward the lake, the bow window on its front as dark as a pair of wraparound sunglasses. James stopped the truck behind the car parked there, got out, and went and knocked at the door. It opened, and he went inside.

Faith was so slight that, the first time he’d seen her, he’d thought she was a boy. She looked like a boy now, in T-shirt and jeans, her hair so short and red. But the big fuzzy slippers on her feet and her woman’s mouth gave her away. Now she sat back down at the kitchen table, where cards were laid out in a game of solitaire. “Just let me finish this, will you?” she said, considering the cards.

James closed the door and went into the living room—which was really just the front end of the trailer, where carpet took over for the linoleum of the kitchen—and sat down where he could watch Faith in profile. She sat very straight, like a school-girl who had been chastised. On her face was an expression of calm but serious concentration, as if the game really mattered to her. With practiced motions, she peeled three cards at a time from the deck in her hand. When the sound of the cards changed, he knew she had begun to deal from the bottom, which she did whenever she was losing—she’d told him so. At the end of the game she swept the cards up into a loose pile and left them lying on the table like that.

She got up and walked toward him. She had a little bit of a bow to her legs; he noticed it now for the first time. For some reason it brought to his eyes the tears that had been waiting for something to set them off. He wanted his hand there, in the place where her legs did not touch one another. He wanted his hand there now.

When she got to him, she reached out as if to smooth his forehead, but didn’t. “Hey,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

He put his arms out and she came into them and he pulled her to him, pressed his face into her bony chest. Her breasts were small through her T-shirt. She let him touch and nuzzle her, kept her chin on top of his head. “James,” she said, about to ask a question. “Don’t talk,” he said.

He lifted her from his lap and laid her down on the carpet and came down on top of her. He ran his hand over her short hair and kissed her, first her forehead, then her lips. She kissed him back. Her taste was already familiar. In a minute, he said, “I want your clothes off.”

She looked at him a long moment, then kicked off her slippers and helped him take off her T-shirt and her jeans and the underpants underneath them. Her body surprised him. It was as pale and new as a leaf that had been kept out of light.

The hair between her legs was dark, not red; he had expected that.

“You,” she said, pulling at his shirt. But he just unzipped his pants and yanked them down, and in a moment was inside her.

How ready she was, and the smoothness of her—that was another surprise. It was like diving into summer water, the way the water closed around you, tight yet gentle, as warm as something alive. He felt the comfort of it, and the comfort of her skin under his hands, against his face. Concentrating on that, he thought he would be able to control himself. For a moment he wanted to. But when her legs closed around him, pulling him closer, something else took over, and he found himself pounding her into the floor.

When he opened his eyes in the middle of it to look at her, she was looking back at him with the same calm, serious look she wore when she played solitaire. It almost stopped him. But then he felt her hands at his back, pulling him toward her again, and he shut his eyes and forgot what he had seen.

When it was over, they lay on the floor.

“How long has it been?” she said.

He opened his eyes and gazed up at the ceiling. “Since what?”

“Since you were with a woman.”

“Eight years,” he said.

There was silence.

Then: “Why?” she said.

He thought for a moment. There was only one answer he could give, but he didn’t want to give it. He closed his eyes again as he spoke, but the tears came anyway.

“Tante,” he said.

It had been happening for a long time, and yet it seemed sudden. As if whatever kept me alive had released its grasp, a hand releasing a moth.

Everything so hard, resisting me. Gathering the cards one by one off the tabletop, my own hands worked against me, and then the cards would not, they absolutely would not square, though I tapped and tapped them. Even the rubber band fought me. The world rising against me, the world slowing me down.

Then each foot stepping into a hole, and never knowing whether or when it would touch bottom.

I reached out, but you were gone. I want you out of this house, I’d told you. Go.

I was being selfish then, thinking only of myself. I’m sorry for that, James. I have to ask your forgiveness for that. But I could not die with you there.