But then again, it’s maybe possible, perhaps likely, that it never did.

The Tomb of Wrestling

She struck her attacker in the head with a shovel, a small one that she normally kept in the trunk of her car for moving things off the highway. There was a certain time of year in upstate New York when the turtles left their reedy ponds to crawl ponderously through the countryside and wound up strewn like pottery shards across the road. The box turtles Joan could pick up with her hands; this was the shovel she had purchased to move the snappers to the ditches. Luckily, she had taken it from her trunk in order to straighten out her compost situation. The barrel stank so terribly that her neighbor had mentioned it, an aerobic smell of digestion, of tomatoes and corn cobs and coffee grounds combining to form such a bright sharp stink that the neighbor, who lived down the road and was loaning her a gutter-cleaning attachment for her hose, suggested Joan start alternating small shovelfuls of soil with each bucket of food scraps. So the shovel was leaned up against the side of the house, right next to the kitchen door, a few inches of its business end buried in a torn-open fifty-pound bag of peat slumped on its side. She hadn’t torn the bag open like that; it wasn’t her style—she was a person who stowed a shovel in her trunk for rescuing amphibians. The bag had been torn open by her husband, a man who sometimes was so impatient he would rip right into the side of a package of bread if the twist tie was snarled. It was not the most appealing trait, and yet in this moment, glimpsing the gaping hole in the plastic, Joan felt a surge of protective instinct where her husband was concerned. She had to save his wife! So she’d reached down, lifted the ergonomic-handled, titanium-headed shovel, and stepped into her kitchen with it.