MARYA VISITED HER father’s grave in the hilly Shaheen Falls cemetery, Marya drove slowly and cautiously along the old Mill Road, which had never been paved, looking for the shanty, or cabin—or might it have been called a house?—in which they had lived. The Mill Road, as it was still called, ran parallel to a larger road and appeared to be nearly untraveled. No one lived on it any longer, so far as she could judge. No telephone wires. No mailboxes. The sawmill had long disappeared, collapsed and overtaken by underbrush. Farmland on one side, uncultivated fields and woods on the other. Enormous black birds (crows, sparrow hawks?) much in evidence. Marya had become enough of a city person to stop the car and watch when a herd of eleven white-tailed deer fled across a field.

Near the junction with a larger road, set back behind a hilly cow pasture, was the old Kurelik farm. It looked saddened, diminished. A weatherworn gray house, several sagging barns, a windmill no longer in operation. The name on the dented tin mailbox was faded to illegibility. Only a half-dozen dairy cows grazed in the enormous pasture. Marya felt a brief childish impulse to drive back the rutted lane, knock on the farmhouse door, introduce herself, and ask . . . but what would she ask? What did she want to know, that the people in that old house might tell her?

She had driven the full length of the Mill Road, and had come through to the highway, without having seen a sign of her parents’ house; it was pointless to turn her car around and go back. She thought of the terrified white-tailed deer, the noisy black birds with their flapping wings, the dust billowing up behind the car.

ONCE YOU START crying, Marya’s mother had warned them, you won’t be able to stop. Marya couldn’t test the truth of this blunt prophecy because she had never allowed herself to start.

YOU WON’T RECOGNIZE downtown Innisfail!—so Wilma kept telling Marya, as if she had a surprise in reserve.