The haymow, a place where she'd played all her life, a place where she had gone to be by herself, had become a place of nameless evil. The scratching of a mouse in the wall made her jump. She sat there with her misery like a heavy lump of dough in the pit of her stomach, certain now that a baby had really started growing inside her. She could almost feel it there.

After a few minutes, shaky and sick to her stomach, she managed to get down the ladder. Her sweat-clammy hands slipped near the bottom and she landed in a huddle on the soft down hay and lay there until she stopped shaking. Then she walked slowly up to the house, tear-swollen, blood-streaked and sick, trying to hold what was left of her dress around her chest and shoulders.

"He did a good job, didn't he?" Ma's voice was dull. Her eyes were empty, as though years of submission and hard work had drained her of pity, even for her own children. With the work always at her back, she had developed the forward-leaning stoop of one pushed by a strong wind. "You go lay down. I'll bring you some salve."

Kate wanted to tell her the truth, but it was impossible. In the bedroom she shared with her sister, she tore off the rags of her dress and threw them into a corner, then got into something clean as fast as she could, so she wouldn't have to look at her own body.

She lay awake a long time that night, looking into the dark, hearing Martha's innocent breathing from the other side of the bed, listening to Pa's rasping snore and Ma's exhausted sighing in the next room. Moonlight lay across the floor. She knew that downstairs, in the little room off the kitchen, Paul lay sick with fright and not knowing what to do.

I wish I could die, she thought. Death had never seemed real to her before. It was something that happened to old people, like grandparents—or to neighbors you didn't know very well. She was safe from it for an endless time, at least another sixty or seventy years. Now it looked like even dying, however strange and terrifying, would be better than the awful thing that had happened to her and the more awful thing that was going to happen.

CHAPTER 24

“Well, Doug Martin said. He dropped his hands and took a step backward so that their bodies were no longer touching. "Who in hell is this Paul? He must have made quite an impression on you."

She shook her head, staring at him.

"I'm sorry, kid. I didn't mean to scare you. I wasn't going to attack you or anything—what kind of a guy do you think I am, for Christ's sake? Haven't you ever been kissed before?"