She got out Velma’s stationery and wrote to Ben, pleading with him to let her know as soon as possible if Eli’s condition changed, adding that she wouldn’t sleep well until she knew he was out of danger.

The house was too quiet. The Lindquist brothers had taken Bobby along on their Saturday visit to the sale barn, where they never missed a livestock auction even though they couldn’t afford to buy so much as a chicken. They went to talk to other farmers, to see what prices cattle and pigs were fetching, to listen to the rapid-fire patter of the auctioneer. They had asked her to come along, but the four of them would have had to pile into the cab of their old Dodge Brothers truck.

The news of Eli’s accident left her feeling even more miserable. In this house, it was impossible to escape the pain of her mother’s death. Velma was in everything. Her soul was part of the fabric, the metal and wood, the tablecloth, the crocheted doilies, the hooked rugs on the floor, the neat stacks of National Geographic magazines on the shelf. Emaline remembered this house as it was when Jim and Velma were first married. Jim Lindquist and his brother Lee had been bachelor farmers. The house was as spare as a monk’s cell, with not a rug on the hard pine floor or a picture on the wall. Between them, Jim and Lee had owned two plates, two bowls, two knives, two forks, two spoons, a coffeepot, a frying pan, two coffee cups, a rickety wooden table, two kitchen chairs, two narrow cots, a washbasin. They had possessed only one piece of furniture worth having, a hand-carved Swedish pine wardrobe with recessed side panels and a dovetailed drawer that had belonged to their mother.

After Jim married Velma, the brothers had built a two-room house for Lee a hundred feet from the first. Velma moved in, the windows grew curtains, the floors grew rugs, there were quilts on every bed and lace doilies on the tables. Every stitch of it she made herself. The narrow garden the Swedes had tended grew to an entire acre and then two and three acres as carrots, sweet corn, potatoes, turnips, peas, snap beans, strawberries all flourished under Velma’s hand. Emaline wondered what would happen to the garden now, if the Swedes would be able to keep it going. Except for church Sunday mornings, they worked from dawn to dark seven days a week as it was.