I had to go back into town twice that winter, when I ran out of dried milk powder, flour, sugar and coal oil. I had to make the trip down the road to the Brocker farm first, for the car had been neglected and wouldn’t start, but I spent no time with Mr. Brocker or in the town, just drove in and back and no one tried to talk to me. They must have known by then who I was, but they didn’t care, or didn’t want to care, or had been put off by the eccentricity of what it appeared I was doing. I wasn’t like young McAllister, who had to be warned before he attempted too much — he was someone they thought they could understand. I was something else, from another world, doing something utterly foreign to them, and so they let me be, watched me perhaps for signs that showed me to be different, looking for something — as if I should be branded by my madness? I don’t know.

I bought more drawing paper while I was there, and notebooks, and also some burlap and some embroidery thread, for it had occurred to me that some of my drawings might be translated onto cloth and hung on the walls. There were many hours in the winter days and nights, and this seemed to me a pleasant way to spend them, although I had never tried such things before.

I did not buy much, however, because it was impossible to get the car up the lane, and I had to carry what I got up that half-mile of deep snow. Mr. Brocker had offered to plow it out for me, but there seemed to be no point. I felt more protected this way.

I chose the drawing of a crow for the first embroidery. I was eager to get started on it, and when I put away the few supplies, I got out the drawing and began to trace it, with a piece of charred wood from the fireplace, onto the material. The burlap was a light blue; the crow, of course, would be black and filled in. I could feel my face pinch with the effort of concentration. And it was like the day of the drawing, when the crow had flown into the willow above my bedroom window. I had lain watching it while it shuffled its feathers and occasionally called to its fellows. I had crept cautiously out of bed, not wanting it to glimpse my movement and fly away, and gotten the drawing pad. As if it knew it was a model, it had become still, dignified, looking out over the acres like a general, and I had sketched it painfully, trying to follow its lines, and an extraordinary thing had begun to happen.