She lied. She lied to herself when she first heard about the man at the fair and again when she saw him. Beyond that she didn’t know how long the lies had been occurring. As if a small phial secreted deep within herself had twisted open some long time since, releasing a vapor that ran all through her, tainting her blood and coloring her vision over everything, so everything became a needle-click off-center the way a compass will fault close upon a certain mass of particular stone. But lied to Norman when she declared no interest in going to see the colored strongman and only knew it then, knew also she was going, would go, the next day. This way discovered she’d been lying for a long time. And could not trace it, could not attribute it, could not even offer specific charges against herself, no instances, no examples, no small disguised misdeeds, but rather as an aroma rising off of her so long it had become familiar as if indeed her skin gave it off rather than her mind. Or her soul. She thought it likely it was her soul.

And so that morning driving the phaeton with the light team of fine pretty sorrels into the village and beyond to the fairgrounds with the somber Abby and solemn-pitched Jamie she knew already she’d made a mistake, knew it was more than bringing the lie to life but once done she’d have no choice but to follow it back to the source, to let it drain her as a blown beaver dam drains a spreading new-grown marshland and reverts it to meadow. And drove forward, her stretched arms directly linked through reins as extensions of her own drawn tendons to the arch-necked prancing horses. Driving someway toward herself with no excitement but the prickling of inevitable fear. Fear delicious over her as a rupture.

So tied the team in the carriage shed and hung net bags of hay for them and then with great elaborate gravity toured with her children the livestock sheds, the swine stretched on their sides, some with suckling young, the pens of ewes and lambs and the single great curled-horn rams, the teams of oxen, the dairy cattle, which barn ended with a half-dozen stout high-sided pens for bulls, the plough and dray horses, the barn beside the track with the racing horses some of which had arrived in their own railroad cars and finally the barn layered with stacks of wooden coops keeping fowl, the hens and roosters and a handful of fancy feathered and to her mind useless birds. She went through this last with greater speed, already knowing what the countryside had to offer. There were none of her own birds there.