SUMMER WAS SHORT in Turtle Valley. It was over before you believed it had begun. While the wheat still turned golden in the fields, the leaves of the poplar that was growing ever larger through the engine of my father’s old Ford were turning brown and yellow. The sunflowers were ripening just as the first fall rains began. Nevertheless it was still a time of celebration, a time of harvest parties at the churches and in private homes, a time of picking and putting away, and that was a joy. In Turtle Valley, it was the fowl supper we looked forward to, a community dinner held in the United Church every farmwoman contributed to. It was a feast, even then, in wartime, a time of rationing. The excess food was the point of it all, a kind of prayer for bounty, an offering that might bring a better year next year. Always next year. The prayer of the farmer. Next year.

My mother’s own particular offering was a dessert called Bird’s Nest, appropriate enough for a supper called fowl. My mother’s Bird’s Nest recipe was pasted in her scrapbook alongside one of those ghost stories she clipped from magazines on the sly and never let me read. The recipe called for nothing but apples and a thin batter you could mistake for pancake if you didn’t know better. My mother preferred greenings, but any large apple will do. Pare them and remove the cores in such a way that the apples are left whole. Arrange the apples in a deep pie dish, as many apples as you have guests. Then mix a batter with three eggs and enough sweet milk and flour to make it a little on the runny side. Pour it over the apples, filling the hole where the core was, and the deep dish besides. Bake the Bird’s Nests in a hot oven until the apples are cooked and the batter is brown and serve them with a bit of butter and a sprinkle of brown sugar. Well, you can’t get simpler than that. My mother and I made more than forty for that event.

We needn’t have made so many. The church was nowhere near as full for that year’s fowl supper as it had been for Sarah Kemp’s funeral. The few people there crouched in small groups, shoulders hunched, heads down, barely picking at the food on their plates. The Swede was there, and that was bad because so was my father. Sarah Kemp’s mother and grandmother were there, sitting alone at a table. Dan sat talking with a man I didn’t recognize. Lily Bell, Parker, and the other kids who had stripped me in the Fraser house weren’t there. I was relieved, at least, for that. My mother and father had come earlier, after taking the cream to town with Chief and the buggy, so my mother could help set up the church for the supper. I had ridden Cherry into town at dusk, after finishing up chores, so when I arrived almost everyone had filled his plate. I stood in line with the few other latecomers, listening to Ferguson gossip with Morley Boulee at the table behind me. Ferguson had avoided our family ever since he’d hit my father at the Dominion Day picnic, and he kept his back to me now.

“Well, the old widow’s finally gone,” said Mr. Boulee.

“Mrs. Roddy?” said Ferguson. “Yes, well, it’s for the best. She’d lived a miserable life these last years. Never got over her husband’s death. Bet she died thinking the Germans were coming to get her.”

“Any word on what killed her?”

“Her heart is my guess,” said Ferguson. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. She’d been laying there for quite a while. Something had started eating on her. Rats, I guess. It’s a crime nobody noticed she was gone.”

“She had no friends to notice, living like that.”

Mr. Ferguson shook his head, and then Mrs. Halley, Sarah Kemp’s grandmother, one arm dead at her side, stood up as I came close to her and shouted at me, “Sarah!”

Everyone turned to look. I put down my plate and ran outside and leaned against the building until I got my breath back. Twilight had come down and a gentle rain had begun to fall through the electric yard light in front of the church. We had no electricity at home, and I thought the light was a beautiful thing. Yet with the barbed wire on top of the fence to keep Goat away, it gave the churchyard the naked feel of a prison camp. Goat waddled out from behind Belcham’s, started towards the church, saw me, and turned back to hide again behind the store. The albino crow swooped down to pick up a scrap on Main Street and flew over my head to land on the church roof. I rubbed my hands and moved a little down the wall of the church, so I was under the eaves, out of the rain.

The man who’d been talking to Dan came out of the church and leaned against the wall. He had the careless look of an unmarried man. He lit a cigarette and pretended I wasn’t there. I folded my arms. An old man came out and talked to the bachelor. I realized they must be the Fowlers, father and son, who had recently moved to the Fraser property next to the school. The old man complained that his wife was taking too long to eat and he was getting hungry. I didn’t understand. Then his wife came out, removed her teeth, and handed them to the old man.

“Food’s getting cold,” she said.

The old man brushed bits of food from the woman’s teeth and put them in his mouth. He waved at the bachelor and went inside. The old woman put her hand over her mouth and followed.

I laughed. The bachelor laughed.

“He won’t get teeth,” said the bachelor. “Stupid old man.”

I stopped laughing but carried the smile for a long time. The bachelor sniffed and ran his hand under his nose. I grew shy. The bachelor looked at his feet. He smoked. “Oh,” he said, and offered me a cigarette.

“No.”

He put the cigarettes in his pocket and threw the spent butt on the ground. “Stinky things,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“No,” he said. He kicked the ground. After a while he lit another cigarette. “I heard you run with that half-breed,” he said.

I looked up and looked away.

He said, “I know there aren’t many men around, but there’s no need for that. I’m here now. We could have some fun.” As an afterthought, he said, “I’ve got money.”

I understood he was calling me a whore and that I was being talked about around town. I ran over to Cherry, mounted her, and headed down the main street, driving my heels into the horse’s flanks to get her galloping. I ran the horse to a sweat on the way home, replaying the scene with the bachelor over in my head — how strange things had gone, how I should have slapped his face, called him trash and laughed at his makeshift patchwork and buttonholes, the grass stains on the knees of his pants. He’d been so cocky, so self-sure that I would go running with him. I was so caught up in vengeful thoughts that I rode right by our driveway, bringing Cherry up at the start of our sheep pasture along Blood Road. I dismounted, and led her through the orchard gate. A wind carried the rank smell of the Swede’s goat. A shadow skulked across the field, and I clapped to scare it off. The sheep bleated and headed for the barn, but one ewe didn’t get up. There were dark pools all around the ewe, blood. But she wasn’t dead. The blood was warm and she was breathing.

Coyotes go for the genitals and soft belly of a sick sheep. They nip like a dog at the legs and face until the sheep falls. Then they eat her alive. This ewe was still alive, and her genitals were eaten away. I pressed on with Cherry to the yard and tied her inside the barn as the homesteader’s children knocked out a warning in their graves. I went into the house and took the .22 from the gun cupboard, loaded it, and headed back to the ewe. I aimed the gun behind the ewe’s ear and fired, then shot the rifle into the air as a warning to the shadows. I slumped into the wet grass and cried for the sheep until the rain let up and the moon poked out of the clouds. A farmer’s daughter, and I cried for the loss of one sheep.

When I reached home the second time, Nora was waiting outside my bedroom window. I threw down the gun and swung out at her. I don’t know why, exactly. I was angry because of the bachelor’s offer to buy me, and because of the sheep with her cunt eaten by coyotes. She took both my wrists and held me like a squawking chicken until the rage passed and I collapsed against the house.

Nora walked out into the yard. Her necklace jingled rhythmically, and the lights it sparked in the moonlight reflected off the house. She stamped out a circle in the dirt. Her movements were precise, as in a ritual, and the bell necklace sounded and shimmered to the beat. She sang quietly. I wondered if she hadn’t bewitched me. But of course all lovers are bewitched.

“Some men beat their women, or don’t allow them friends,” she said. “Granny says it’s all the same. That’s why they want to pay for you. That way they own you.”

She’d heard the rumors before me. Nora stamped her circle. The bells and their lights became their own music.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“We could go. We could leave.”

When I shook my head, Nora stepped inside the circle and held out her arms. I stepped into the circle with her and wrapped my arms around her and we held each other until I heard my mother and father driving home.