That’s what she’d been reading about when he’d barged into her study: the strange notions of the surrealists, with their unmoored minds and their brutal depictions of women. Limbs severed into doll parts and rearranged; high heels turned upside down and presented on a platter like a roasted bird, paper frills on their stilettos. Little girls with hair like kudzu staggering down a dark corridor, a reclining woman with food heaped on her and men with utensils eating her abdomen and breasts. A tangle of women arranged by the artist—his mustache sharpened into the kind of antennae catfish use to feel their way through the muck at the bottom of the pond—so their naked bodies created the impression of a skull. In Voluptate Mors. Through pleasure into death.

Joan’s family had fished for sport, sitting on banks, pulling worms apart like licorice and pushing them onto hooks, hauling out catfish and bass, discarding the junk fish by tossing them into the weeds to suffocate. Joan was forbidden to put them back into the water and would just crouch there, willing them to die. Sometimes, a long time later, one that she had told herself was dead would flop, just once.

In the distance, crows were screaming about something. They were trying to tell her to get out of there. Forget the rope. Go! Go! Go!

The women artists of that long-ago era were ferociously steel-eyed, their limber bodies occasionally bent in the service of one photographer or another, but rarely did they smile, even at picnics.

No, no, no.

Time swirled in its paint bucket, and she saw her own family at play, her father in an undershirt and her mother in a billed cap, both of them grinning. In the background were bluegills hanging from a stringer, each the size of a baby’s hand.

Next to the front porch, under the arborvitae, Pilgrim pulled himself forward through the bramble to the flagstone. There were knives in him that stabbed each time he moved, and he growled at them.

The birds and the squirrels and the chipmunks had a certain feel to them, and so did the toads, but sometimes other things would move through—a fox, a skunk, the black snake, un-shy and curious, probing its nose along the stone foundation of the house and then coiling into the depression next to the willow stump, inanimate, like something that might have fallen off the wheelbarrow. Spock was made nervous by the black snake and would whine under his breath until it moved on. To Pilgrim, the snake was nobody’s business but its own, though he didn’t feel that way about everything. For instance, the groundhog or the man in the kitchen.