grocery store, the hushed way parents tried to explain it to their children before bedtime, all of them knowing there was no language large enough to take the awfulness away. They blamed it on the devil. They blamed his father and the man who trained his father, Steve Krieger. And the more they talked and talked, the more they made him into some Other so they could go on. Clara knew. She had set her hand on his skin and knew the monster was as fully human as any of them, even if she did not understand and knew she never would. “I was thinking about heaven,” she said. “What if it’s not a place? Not somewhere we go, but somewhere inside us.”
Logan kissed her cheek, cupped her face. She thought of those widows hearing voices out in the snow, of her mother fighting to get home. Here was the place that made her, the place they belonged for a time. She had healed her family in coming home. She had grounded her own far-ranging mind.
From the swing, Baby Dena began to cry. Dena had large round dark eyes, a widow’s brow that crinkled up when she was upset. A colicky baby, crying at all hours of the night. Now that they were home from the hospital, it all fell to her, since Logan avoided holding the baby. Clara tensed at the piercing sound. Each cry meant something different, and she couldn’t always tell the “I’m hungry” sob from the “change me now” lament. This cry sounded somewhere in between. Dena wanted to be held.
Logan froze as well, stopped his kissing. The crying bothered him even worse than her, sent him scurrying for cover next door at his church. He seemed still frightened of the baby, born weighing only six pounds, but he followed Clara about, watched her while she bathed Dena, sat beside her during the feedings. The baby, his baby, which he had never expected. His arms were still wrapped around her waist, but they went slack. His breath warm against her neck. “I’ll go get her,” he said, leaving Clara at the window.
HAYING SEASON
After two weeks of working at the farm, few outward signs showed in Lee. His face had tanned, but his plump cheeks and flabby stomach looked undaunted by all the hard work. Near the scar on his left arm, the skin was prickled by hundreds of small scratches and gashes he’d picked up baling hay.
Late afternoon found them in the hayfields once more, Grizz driving a lumbering International tractor that was trailed by a baler and Lee standing on the hayrack. The tractor glinted silver; the baler licked up lumps of hay from the green ground and spat them out in neatly roped twenty-pound bales that Lee caught and stacked on the hayrack beside him. He had to keep his balance as the rack swayed over the uneven ground and the bales came without ceasing. Each bale had to be wedged in tight, a mountain of hay that might come tumbling down if Lee’s aim was not quick and true.
Grizz saw all this, saw the changes in the child. Lee did not hate farmwork the way Seth had, even hard moments like this, and there was plenty of work any given season. Grizz had sold the property around the mountain to the county on the condition that the limestone never be excavated, the burial mounds left undisturbed. In perpetuity, the last of the tallgrass would not be cut. The land would remain as it was, a beautiful portrait of another time. No one would ever disturb Seth’s grave.
The funds allowed Grizz to purchase another semi, and he went to work for co-ops in neighboring counties fulltime, driving loads. He still only just scraped by each season, and after a wet spring the crops went in late this year. Grizz was, as always, nervous about the harvest. He still awaited the perfect season. He still lived in the land of next year, but he was alive and doing what he loved. And there was one boy, at least, whom he had reclaimed from hell.
Haying was hot, dirty work. Sharp straws poked out from the bales to jab and claw his skin. By the end of the day his body was furred in a fine green dust. But Lee was no longer the tenderfoot, not the foolish boy who showed up in short sleeves to bale hay and left with aching, bleeding arms. His skin was