She had started a pot of venison stew with potatoes, carrots still sweet, and a tune she sang under her breath as she worked.

I listened to that song with every kind of ear I had.

Esther had gone to fetch some firewood, something I usually did, for which I was grateful, though I had not forgotten that standing guard over my father had been, just an hour earlier, her first purpose. That I had been, just an hour earlier, a threat.

Samuel had joined me at the kitchen table and was drawing a picture of a black snake. “So I can show Daddy what was in his bed while he was sleeping.”

The snake looked about three times longer than the bed in the picture. It had a forked tongue and a wild eye.

“Whatever happened to that snake?” I asked my mother as she diced a yellow turnip for the stew.

She paused for a moment. “I would have put it in a soup. I would have chopped it up and put it in a soup . . . if I had caught it before it escaped down the drain.”

She turned to look at me, the knife poised in her hand. “But I was glad I didn’t kill it when I realized it could never have found its own way into your father’s bed with the door shut as it was.”

“Snake soup,” Samuel muttered, his head low over his work. “That’s silly, Mother.” By now the snake in his picture had acquired a set of enormous fangs. “Nobody eats snake soup.”

“Maybe not, if they have something better to eat,” my mother said. “But some people don’t, you know.”

I thought of Cate and Captan.

“I’m going to show this to Daddy,” Samuel said, hoisting the picture like a flag.

“Don’t you wake him up,” my mother said. “He needs his rest.”

And I was amazed, once again, by the idea that she wanted him to sleep now that he had finally awakened. I wanted him up, on his feet, wearing that belt, those gloves and boots, a hat on his poor, battered head, ready for what came next.

“What will we do now?” I said.

My mother gave me a puzzled look. “That’s a broad question, Ellie.”

“I mean when he wakes again. Will we get him up so he can walk?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. It’s too soon for that.” She sighed. “We have to be patient. It might take a long time for him to be well again. And he’ll need all of us to help him. I know you’ll do a lot of that work.” She stirred the stew. “It’s too bad you’re not a boy, Ellie. You have all the makings of a fine doctor.”