She was not sleeping when the ice began to boom. Perhaps she’d slept some earlier; she could never tell. Then she was lying in the bed and hearing it. The ice over the river a mile away in the valley, grown thick through the winter, began to come apart in great torn shreds the size of boxcars and barndoors, softened from the top by the warming days and strained from underneath by the feed of snowmelt from the hill brooks. It was a sound unlike any other. She imagined it to be like a very slow train wreck that went on for hours. Or maybe some bent memory Norman might hold from a great distance of artillery fire. She’d never seen it go out but had seen the remains the day after: the blocks and chunks and sheets all jumbled along the shorelines, caught up in stacks like huge spilt cards in riverbends or where the bank had caved, leaving a three- or four-tree clump half into the water for the ice to layer up behind. The central channel open and thick brown, roiling white on top with current, paddies and cakes of ice sailing along with tree limbs and other trash. So she lay in bed listening to the air-softened destruction of winter and seeing the aftermath of it in her mind, seeing also the slowed low river of summer spilling over the ledges and boulders of pools and shallows and then felt without pain or cramp or other warning the soft warm flow between her legs and reached down and knew what it was even as she lifted it to her lips to taste.

She rose in the dark and made her way downstairs to the kitchen where a single lamp was lit, hiked her nightdress and reached again and checked her fingers. Like admonishment her first and index finger were coated with blood. She stood what seemed a long time looking at it. And deflated said aloud, “Oh God damn it.” Then went out through the entry way woodshed with the meager stack and took up a length of split wood and continued outside. Barefoot into the caked hardened mud of the yard to the weathered silver post where the dinner bell hung—the bell never once rung since she’d arrived, some thing left over from other days—and began to beat the side of the bell with the stovewood. At first just a low hollow tone and then the clapper broke free of the rust seal and at counterpoint to the stovewood struck the side of the bell. So there was the hard low metal thrang followed by the crisper tone of the ring. Beating it like beating herself.