Deep winter January. It had been sometime before Christmas since daytime temperatures rose over zero. Days still of air with light glittering off the hard-crusted snowbanks. Nights thirty to forty below and lying in bed wakened by the gunshot crack of trees bursting with the freeze, Leah swelling and flushed with heat, as if her body were a furnace wrapped around her child. Over the covers her breath hung in the starlight like pale moonlight off the snow. Afternoons she’d venture to the barns, swaddled like a slow-footed bear to review the hens from the walkway between the pens, leaving the filling of feeders and waterers and stoves and lamps to Norman and Connie, feeling henlike as she made her way in the fecund warmth. There were few eggs to gather and the brooder house was closed down. She’d go from there into the horsebarn, colder there, the windows rimed inside with a thick burr of frost, and slowly run a brush over each of the geldings. As a child she feared horses but this team of light drafts were different from saddle or fancy driving horses, capable of sustaining a light even trot on the cart or democrat wagon but happier with the steady step of day work in the woods or fields. Heavy-footed and round, thick-necked with large proud heads, eyes the size of her bunched fist, eyes of a density and depth she’d known on no other creature. Tommy and Pete. She talked to them while she worked over them, inhaling the sweet rich horse dust rising from them as if inhaling something of their spirits or souls. She had no doubt they had souls. She told them everything about the child in her belly. She told them about summer. She knew they remembered summer. She’d carry each a handful of shellcorn, the great soft lips against her palm. She stroked their noses. Small beads of frost chained along their sparse coarse whiskers. She’d warm their noses with her hands and breath and then leave them. They were in her dreams. She felt them to be protectors of her child. She told no one this.

She passed the benchmark of where she’d miscarried the winter before, marking it with silence. The weather had softened enough for several new inches of snow over everything, wiping clean the bootmarks and ash trails laid down on the paths, the scuffs of cinders, chaff and bark rubbish blown down off the hill. The world a new morning. There were times she felt she was living in another country. Not the winter or the place. Times she felt she was another person observing her hands at work over some piece of task. Times she would hum a low soothe that vibrated throughout her and would take her away to nowhere at all; only when back did she know she’d been gone. This could happen alone or not. As if she went away not out but deeply in, far below sense of sound or sight and she would lose everything around her and have only the deep surge of her own bloodstream, the dynamo of pulse a hum in her ears. For minutes at a time. And then resurface abruptly with no sense of having been gone but for the unfamiliar around her. At the supper table, Norman was saying, “Be mid-March now is my guess. Happens like that, it’ll be heavy.”