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the ledge of the stove and beneath the sink found a canvas bag.

Sam and Wilkie followed her into the breezeway.

To concentrate just once more, she thought. That's all that it would take. And indeed, as she stepped down the ramp onto the floor of the barn, she began to feel as she'd imagined she would, reading those stories in the papers over the years of the environmentalists and the anti - free traders who broke the law in the name of some greater justice, the anticipation of the act clarifying experience, rescuing it from the prison of language, the inward purpose blessing the otherwise desultory with meaning. And yet, for that very reason, she'd always considered such extremism adolescent. Too simple. Willful in its ignorance of the world's complexity. And so deadly earnest. And yet how judgmental she had been. What, after all, was wrong with earnestness? Weren't Fanning and his kind earnest? Weren't all the polluters earnest, the physical and the cultural? And did anyone ever impugn or mock them for it? No one ever thought to. Avarice was never shackled by a concern for authenticity. It didn't care about image or interpretation.

The sit-down lawn mower, its paint cracked and axles rusting, stood where the family Jeep once had. Beyond it was the ladder to the loft, where the wooden tea crates full of Eric's books were still stacked, having remained there ever since they'd followed Charlotte up from New York. She didn't come in here much anymore, and for good reason.

Along with the cans of primer under the back shelf, she found tins of turpentine that she'd purchased a few years back, intending to call someone about doing the shutters and trim. She placed them in her bag with the matches.

My second wife, my dear friend Elizabeth, died of the measles on the afternoon of November 9, Sam started in again.

"For heaven's sake, can't you shut up!"

Ten days after giving me the twins, Eleazer and Martha. Oh, to part with so desirable, so agreeable a Companion, a Dove from such a Nest of young ones too! Oh! the sad Cup, which my Father appointed me! And when five days hence my maidservant succumbed, I tested the Lord's patience by imagining the malignancy to have gone up over us. Then the twins died. The sixth and seventh of my children to be taken up by the Almighty. And when a week later Jerusha too fell sick I begg'd the Lord for the life of my dear pretty daughter. I begg'd that such a bitter Cup, as the Death of that lovely child, might pass from me. But she too went to our Savior. And I died in life unto this world as all sinners must preparing for the world to come, knowing the Lord is in thy Adversity! Fifteen children I fathered. Thirteen I buried. Such a record of woe as no man should have to bear, my cross but a dry sort of a tree. But never did I despair of the Lord's infinite wisdom or cease in the business of Worship. And you stand here aggrieved by the bitter fruit of one sinful lust? One loss of a man not your husband?

"Damn you!" she shouted, pushing him aside with her knee.

Why it is useless for you to deny that it is in the shadow of his going that you have arrived here at this foolery, allowing your spirit to shape itself thus. What, after all, are your great Politics but a woe without end? What is your pessimistic liberal blather but the Bible's own warning of the Apocalypse shorn of the just Consolation of Heaven? You have decried this world as any of the Lord's preachers might, and lived as if in the End Times, yet every day you have succumbed to the pride of earthly wisdom, the pride of thinking of yourself as above the Savior's flock. And in your condescension you violate your own philosophy of tolerance. Yes, yours is a metaphysical pride. The pride of human knowledge.

"Your children must have died of boredom," she snapped, beginning to tremble.

How stupid to have no food in the house! Surely the weakness in her limbs came from hunger. Sam rubbed his wet nose at her waist, slobbering.

Among the rusting tools and old flowerpots she looked about for an implement in case she had to force a window. She found a trowel and added it to her supplies.

There are but a few sands left in the glass of