MARYA REMEMBERS THE Canal Road stretching between Innisfail and Shaheen Falls: nine miles of unpaved dirt and gravel, all but impassable in winter, so dusty by mid-June it had to be oiled. She remembers the lush-growing scrub willow and oak and beech; the roadside wildflowers, chicory and Queen Anne’s lace; patches of milkweed; poison ivy; pink sweetpeas. Along the desolate stretches there were apt to be sudden surprises: strangers’ debris dumped by night, an old sofa overturned in a ditch, a junked refrigerator with its door swung open, one day a Formica-topped dinette table which Marya’s uncle Everard shamelessly hauled back home—he could use it, he said, in his “office.” (By which he meant a corner of his garage, where he kept records of a sort. He was a licensed mechanic, after all; he thought of himself as a businessman.)

Along the Innisfail Pike the countryside changed: now it was farmland, acre upon acre of farmland, sloping hills, woods, fields of wheat, rye, corn, soybeans, acres of apple trees, pear trees, the wide mud-colored Shaheen Creek. The big farms along the pike belonged to the Erdrichs and the Maccabees. There was the Jelinski cider mill on a hill above the creek, the Baptist church, the white clapboard Methodist church, the granaries, the tavern owned by the Dubnov brothers, the old Lerner farmhouse and the “new” Lerner house—white brick with black shutters, a tall chimney, an evergreen hedge, a curved blacktop driveway. Then a sprinkling of smaller farms and houses. Fields, pastureland, barbed-wire fencing. Then the old bridge above the Shaheen Creek that so frightened Marya she frequently dreamed of it: the planks rattling beneath the car’s wheels, the rust-streaked girders trembling. (The bridge had been built in 1922—not that long ago, as Wilma said. But it was cheaply constructed with a dangerously steep ascent, so narrow only one car could cross it at a time.) Then they came abruptly to the outlying area of Innisfail, the railroad yards, the warehouses along the canal, houses that were hardly more than wood-frame shacks in which entire families lived, then the slow cobbled climb to Main Street and the central business district that never failed to excite the children.

The first thing that caught their eye was the marquee of the Royalton Theatre: what was playing this week?