They left the house without locking anything up and hiked over to the Kureliks’ farm through the rain, Marya and Davy running ahead, pushing at each other, squealing, as if nothing were wrong. Even out here the air seemed to smell of kerosene and rotting tarpaper. The sky was lightening minute by minute from all sides, a cold glowering look to it, not exactly morning. Marya couldn’t remember what time it was. She splashed through a mud puddle, flailing her arms: but she was thinking of the secret tunnel she sometimes made in her bed, in the bedclothes, burrowing down to the foot of the bed like a mole and lying there without moving. She could hide there forever, she thought, not even breathing.

They followed the old sawmill lane, which was partly grown over with scrub willow and cottonwood. The roof of the mill had nearly rotted through, there were open spaces in the shingles, and patches of green moss: bright green patches that leaped at the eye. Marya thought it was funny that trees—small trees, baby willows a few feet high—had begun to grow in the drainpipes. How tall could they get, she wondered, before their weight broke everything down? Then the building would collapse.

Marya’s father had worked in the mill until the mill shut down, and then he started work with the Shaheen Mining Company until there was trouble there—but Marya didn’t know what kind of trouble except he was “dropped from the payroll,” that was how he phrased it, but he was expecting to go back, he was waiting to go back any day. Marya didn’t even know where the Shaheen mine was except somewhere in the foothills north of where they lived, six or seven miles away.

Marya’s father told them not to play around the sawmill because it could fall in at any time and kill them. And not to run barefoot in the grass because of nails—there were rusty nails and spikes dumped everywhere, and pieces of broken glass. His youngest brother had died of blood poisoning, he said, from a rusty nail that went halfway through his foot when he was nine years old; he didn’t want his kids ending up like that. Marya pretended to listen because her father would have been angry if she hadn’t, but really she was thinking her own thoughts: she wasn’t going to die of anything so silly.

(Then it happened, not long afterward, Marya, running around barefoot in the weedy grass behind their house, stepped down hard on something sharp and cut her foot; but she hadn’t told anybody about it. And though her foot bled for five or ten minutes, and throbbed with pain, she didn’t cry—just sat hunched in the drainage ditch, where no one could find her, waiting for the bleeding to stop.)