to yellow, his umbilical stump fall off, his wizened face grow rosy. He was all out of size, enormous testicles, miniature toenails, eyes two-thirds the size of his head, no neck to speak of. Our baby. We witnessed his long hours of sleep and long hours of wailing, stared into his open mouth, lost ourselves down the tiny black pit of his throat. Sometimes we looked at each other, but hardly recognized the one who looked back at us across that baby, the one who’d gone from lover to coworker overnight. My coworker fed me bowl after bowl of stew or casserole or meat pie. She kept the fire stoked. She whittled a spork, a lopsided top, four cubes that she marked to make a set of dice. She reread her old ElfQuest comic books, holding the pages up before Perley’s unfocused eyes. We ate and slept and washed diapers and hung diapers to dry over the stove.
The Helen we’d met in autumn was a lopsided top, spinning off-center. I could hardly coax her to string three words together, let alone to admit she could use our help or our friendship. She’d insist she was going back to Seattle, then just stand there looking at us to see what we’d say. She didn’t know what she knew. But now here she was barging into our cabin, didn’t call ahead, just showed up swinging a Dutch oven of raccoon stew, talking like talking and breathing were the same thing. Her hair was cut blunt and uneven in the front, tucked back long behind her ears. One deep line right between her eyebrows. She looked like she hadn’t seen mirrors much. She’d lived off the drakes, she told us, but when the meat was gone, she’d used her .22 to shoot raccoons and possums. She set the stew to warm on our stove, then wedged herself in to take measure of Perley, who stretched out naked and red on Karen’s lap, his feet curved into each other, his eyes attempting to focus. Helen looked long and hard.
“He’s certainly a baby boy,” she said.
“You can hold him if you want to,” I said.
“Thanks for the offer, but no,” Helen said. Then she got right to the point. “Look at those testicles,” she said. “You’ll have to leave this place. The Women’s Land Trust doesn’t allow those.”
We knew it way better than Helen did. We knew the bylaws. We knew the board. They were obsessed with anatomy, with who was in and who was out. We knew we’d soon be on the out list. Karen and I had placed a vague bookmark there in the days after Perley was born, but it was hard to remember the reality of anything other than sleeping, nursing, and thick white spit-up.
“If I were you, I’d get out now,” Helen said. “Why wait?”
“There’s no rush,” I said. “The Land Trust bylaw says that we can stay until Perley’s five.”
“Heavy burden for a five-year-old,” Helen said. “He asks why you have to leave the only home he’s ever known. You tell him, It’s your fault, boy. It’s because of your balls.”
“Where would we go?” I asked, but I might have guessed that over the course of that long winter, Helen had learned the answers to all the questions, and she was more than ready to share them.
“Come live with me,” she said, unsmiling. “I’ve got twenty acres. Plenty of room. My boyfriend’s not coming back. And I’d be glad to have you. I need some help. You need some help. It could be a good arrangement.”
“You want to be our landlord, is that it?” asked Karen.
“Karen,” I said.
“Let’s just call it what it is,” Karen said.
“I don’t want to be anyone’s landlord. I want to own the land in common,” Helen said. She kept her voice even, tried to make it sound like it didn’t matter to her one way or the other, but you could hear that she’d already decided: she had a plan, and we were it.
Karen heard it, too. “Can’t afford to own land,” she said, touching Perley’s nose so that his eyes crossed.
“But thank you anyway,” I said. “It’s wonderful of you to invite us.”
“The land’s paid off,” Helen said. When Karen raised her eyebrows, Helen said, “My boyfriend earned money working up north, up in one of those man camps.”
“So it’s Shane who owns the place?” asked Karen.
“We never got around to putting his name on anything,” Helen said. “Just mine. I put the