“Who told you not to tell?”

“Nobody,” she said. “I only told myself.”

“Well, I guess that’s a little different. What’s your old secret?”

The red sun leaned its rim on the rooftree of Tollot’s house on the Blanco Road, and Tollot’s chimney stuck up like a black thumb against it.

Abra said softly, “Listen, you remember when we came to your place that time?”

“Sure!”

“Well, in the buggy I went to sleep, and when I woke up my father and mother didn’t know I was awake. They said your mother wasn’t dead. They said she went away. They said something bad must have happened to her, and she went away.”

Aron said hoarsely, “She’s dead.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if she wasn’t?”

“My father says she’s dead. He’s not a liar.”

“Maybe he thinks she’s dead.”

He said, “I think he’d know.” But there was uncertainty in his tone.

Abra said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find her? ’Spose she lost her memory or something. I’ve read about that. And we could find her and that would make her remember.” The glory of the romance caught her like a rip tide and carried her away.

Aron said, “I’ll ask my father.”

“Aron,” she said sternly, “what I told you is a secret.”

“Who says?”

“I say. Now you just say after me—‘I’ll take double poison and cut my throat if I tell.’ ”

For a moment he hesitated and then he repeated, “I’ll take double poison and cut my throat if I tell.”

She said, “Now spit in your palm—like this—that’s right. Now you give me your hand—see?—squidge the spit all together. Now rub it dry on your hair.” The two followed the formula, and then Abra said solemnly, “Now, I’d just like to see you tell that one. I knew one girl that told a secret after that oath and she burned up in a barn fire.”

The sun was gone behind Toiler’s house and the gold light with it. The evening star shimmered over Mount Toro.

Abra said, “They’ll skin me alive. Come on. Hurry! I bet my father’s got the dog whistle out for me. I’ll get whipped.”

Aron looked at her in disbelief. “Whipped! They don’t whip you?”

“That’s what you think!”

Aron said passionately, “You just let them try. If they go for to whip you, you tell them I’ll kill them.” His wide-set blue eyes were slitted and glinting. “Nobody’s going to whip my wife,” he said.

Abra put her arms around his neck in the dusk under the willow tree. She kissed him on his open mouth. “I love you, husband,” she said, and then she turned and bolted, holding up her skirts above her knees, her lace-edged white drawers flashing as she ran toward home.

[3]

Aron went back to the trunk of the willow tree and sat on the ground and leaned back against the bark. His mind was a grayness and there were churnings of pain in his stomach. He tried to sort out the feeling into thoughts and pictures so the pain would go away. It was hard. His slow deliberate mind could not accept so many thoughts and emotions at once. The door was shut against everything except physical pain. After a while the door opened a little and let in one thing to be scrutinized and then another and another, until all had been absorbed, one at a time. Outside his closed mind a huge thing was clamoring to get in. Aron held it back until last.