In the kitchen their elder daughter and son stood, backed against the sink, Jamie with his head turned into Abby’s skirts, his face buried against her thigh, his hands clenching the fabric in strained bunches. Abby held a small basket of windfalls against her other thigh, the apples pocked with rust but firm, hard, the color of dried blood. Her eyes wide upon him, hard dark nuggets of confusion and fear. And some wild elation. He passed them without speaking, feeling the heat of his face, not wanting to stop moving or try to speak, not wanting them to see him trembling. He went on through the entryway and outside. Went to the barns and sat and smoked a bitter pipe. Knowing he had lost an argument, one with a form and function unknown to him. He fed his animals and did his chores. Prudence arrived home from school and wordless, joined him. He felt her watching him and did not speak. Together they went in the dusk to the house and he sat in the kitchen with his children to eat a supper. Leah had gone to bed. Later when he went up he found her sleeping deeply, on her side, her breathing a deep rhythm almost not there. He lay beside her a long while. Once she murmured in her sleep and he leaned close to hear what she would say but she was silent. He lay on his back, up against the headboard, and reached one hand and laid it on her jutted hip. After a time he slept.

Three weeks later on a drear November morning of drizzling low sky she dressed in workaday clothes and took herself up through the sheep pastures beaten down by frosts and into the woods to the spot where the granite outcroppings were jagged upthrusts with sodden moss-backs slick to a bootheel, the rocks overhung by a pair of ancient scarred maples, the northern one that marked a boundary line for the farm running back to the original deed with the same tree, and there with a length cut from the coil that Norman turned into lead-ropes and rope halters for the horses hanged herself with a simple slip knot run up to the maple limb above and a second slip knot for her own neck before stepping off the rock. She left a couple of feet of slack, enough for a hard jerk, and although her side was smeared with moss and mud where she slapped against the granite her hands were clean as if even in the last brief spasmodic effort her body continued to obey her will.