The rain began sometime while he slept, not waking him but entering into him someway as it struck soft against the old rotting splitcedar shakes overhead so his dreams were of rivers, of swimming underwater through windowglass water, some brown-skinned girl swimming alongside him, streams of bubbles sweeping from her mouth back into her short twisted glistening hair, her body naked but never quite seen altogether. Together they skimmed over the smooth riverbed stones.

He woke to a rain-dimmed early dawn, fresh and sharp-edged, bouncy. He stood up in his trousers and opened the door and watched the water run slantwise into the overgrown dried-up backyard. The dogs went past him, quick-footed with the sudden cool, after rabbits in the tall broken grass. The rain came through the open door and streaked an oval on the old floorboards around his bare feet. He ran out to the back fence and through the gate to the Chrysler where he rolled up the left-down windows, thinking, Stupid. He should’ve guessed it would rain. Feeling again that he was in a place where he could not recognize simple signs. He dug in the backseat and got his canvas coat.

Everything—the yard, the old carriage shed, the still-dark house, the trees beyond—was distinct yet close. As if color had been drained from the world and with it simple perspective. Back in the cabin he took off the coat and got a shirt on and his socks and boots. Roughed his wet hair with his fingers and then put the coat back on. The dogs splattering damp marks, traces of themselves, in the dirt layer of the floorboards. Wet and happy, both of them, smelling like dogs, eyes pitched up on him.

He stepped again into the wet day and shut the door behind him, closing them in. He stood a moment studying the dark house. It was early. He crossed over the yard to the carriage barn and went in a small man-sized door set into the two larger doors that would open out. To one side a row of vehicles: a covered buggy, an open carriage, a two-wheeled fancy gig. All dull with grime and dust, spiderwebbing like the hands of ghosts over them. The cloth sunscreen of the carriage rotted off its slender frameworks. The other side a row of straight stalls, empty, cleared of all manure or bedding, of anything at all. Except—when he went up into one and ran his hand along the planks of the stallside where the wood had been smoothed by years of rubbing—some few long dark horsehairs still caught in splinters of the wood. And the wood of the feed manger worn down where hungry necks had pushed down into it, time after time, day after day. Old tie-chains welded with rust lay in the bottom of the mangers.