And so descended the stairs to find his mother at the parlor door, her face wary and soft at once, a small woman lined and frightened and radiant, close to tears. He touched her and told her it was a girl and for her to go up, and heard her tread the stairs, her steps tentative and gaining as she went; not the first time in six years she’d been in the house but the first time she’d climbed those stairs her feet knew as her own, and he swung out into the kitchen thinking there was all too great a pain in this to make sense of, too great to hope to change and yet no different than it could ever be. It was all he had and it made no sense. In the kitchen Marthe and Connie and Glen sat at the table, too high-spirited for him to understand and he went past them, saying nothing but what he had to, refusing Glen’s help as he worked into his chore coat and went out into the young dark for the barns.

He fed and watered his stock and loaded the stoves in the brooder house and the laying barn and left the egg gathering for the morning, working through what should take near two hours in half that time. Working as one who gets the job done quickly not only for the stilled mind while doing it but to return to the tremble run through him as soon as he could. As if the brief time away was needed but nothing more. And came out to stand in the dark, the warm night, the clouds boiling overhead before a three-quarters moon. There was no sense to his life. He’d thought the child would bring it, that glimpsing her would run a charge through him and clarify his faults and gains. There was none of that. He supposed it would come, someway. He supposed he would love her. He guessed there would be a time he’d cut his arm away from him if only for her to use as a club to batter him with. But he felt none of this. He felt that love was only one more weight working to drag him bit by piece down into the earth. He kicked the toe of his boot into the soft deep mud and wondered why since he knew his destination anyway he couldn’t savor what came before. He wondered was he selfish. If melancholy was just selfishness. He looked overhead. The sky was a turmoil. There was no mirror there. The sky was its ownself.

His mother came out of the house and found him. Stood before him a long beat, studying his face as if reading all of him there. She did not touch him. He gazed back at her, not caring how much of what she saw was true or not. After a while she reached and touched his arm. She said, “You’ve got a lovely baby girl.” She paused and then went on. “She won’t have an easy time of it. But what a time you’ll have with her.”