She had never stood around like that before, just looking. In Iowa everything had been visible, exposed to the elements; there was no subtext, nothing to break the furrowed monotony but subtle geographical undulations, all the rows of corn suddenly banking in unison like a flock of birds, a Dekalb sign at distant intervals, the occasional yellow cat furtively walking along a ditch. Here in upstate New York, there were the endless shadows, the low ceilings, the gloomy stone fences full of snake holes, trees bending over roadways, everything grown into everything else, warren-like and confining.

One day the landlord’s henchman had shown up to take out a tree and some brush. He spent half the morning sitting on a stump sharpening a scythe blade and then oiling, link by link, the chain in his chain saw, all the while listening to something playing through his earphones and drinking out of a huge, dirty cup with a snap-on lid. Maybe it wasn’t coffee in the cup, or maybe it was coffee and something else, because he managed to make an error in his tree-cutting calculations. The tree, instead of falling directly down the hill along a narrow, unforested trough between the cabin and the water, fell on a slant, hitting the trunk of a neighboring oak with a resounding thunderous smack. That second tree had fallen against the trunk of a third tree, which landed with a crack against the trunk of another tree, until four trees in all had crashed to the ground with an enormous rustling noise, like big girls in petticoats tripping each other.

So when she hit the stranger in her kitchen, that’s how she brought him down, like felling a tree. The ringing blow to the side of the head, the flat of the shovel against the temple, and he landed on his side, between the refrigerator and the counter, which was covered with the makings of that day’s pathetic lunch, a leftover dish made with pale slabs of tofu. It had wobbled unattractively on the way to the table, but Joan had eaten it without paying much attention, absorbed in the newspaper. It had almost turned out to be her last meal; they would have found it in her stomach at the autopsy: tofu helper. A vegetarian from beginning to end.