And so that morning driving the phaeton with the light team of fine pretty sorrels into the village and beyond to the fairgrounds with the somber Abby and solemn-pitched Jamie she knew already she’d made a mistake, knew it was more than bringing the lie to life but once done she’d have no choice but to follow it back to the source, to let it drain her as a blown beaver dam drains a spreading new-grown marshland and reverts it to meadow. And drove forward, her stretched arms directly linked through reins as extensions of her own drawn tendons to the arch-necked prancing horses. Driving someway toward herself with no excitement but the prickling of inevitable fear. Fear delicious over her as a rupture.

So tied the team in the carriage shed and hung net bags of hay for them and then with great elaborate gravity toured with her children the livestock sheds, the swine stretched on their sides, some with suckling young, the pens of ewes and lambs and the single great curled-horn rams, the teams of oxen, the dairy cattle, which barn ended with a half-dozen stout high-sided pens for bulls, the plough and dray horses, the barn beside the track with the racing horses some of which had arrived in their own railroad cars and finally the barn layered with stacks of wooden coops keeping fowl, the hens and roosters and a handful of fancy feathered and to her mind useless birds. She went through this last with greater speed, already knowing what the countryside had to offer. There were none of her own birds there.

They went out then, passing the buildings of foodstuffs and handiworks and onto the carnival edge beyond the racetrack. Here she fed her children but did not eat herself until they came to the ice-cream vendor, where she took up a paper cup and wooden spoon and ate peach ice cream. She hadn’t tasted a peach in years. The chunks of fruit fortified with sugar and folded into the frozen sweetened cream churned flavor that ran over her tongue and down her throat straight to her heart and she could not finish it. Her eyes rimmed wet in the dry rarefied air. She thrust the cup to her young greedy son and without meeting the eye of her elder daughter hurried beyond the tents to the privies set there, locking herself inside standing upright, blotting her eyes and nose with a handkerchief, with great effort making no sound. She wanted water to wash her face, to flush her eyes, but there was none. She emerged and passed around the waiting line and found her children. Wordless still she took each by a hand and led them onto the midway. They found the barking voice of the white man outside the tent and she more than the children gazed up at the broad strip of canvas with a terrible African depicted, a grotesque, breaking horseshoes with his teeth. She paid the fee and they went inside.