In the huckleberry summer after her mother had died, she remembered listening outside the open kitchen window to her grandmother and her aunt talking about the choices of men, of bad medicine and the power of the old marriage. She was a young girl standing barefoot to a long summer just beginning, and she imagined a skin bag dark with the oil of many hands, curling around the singed tips of her hair. Even then she had been thinking of Baptiste, Baptiste leaning over her as she lay on the schoolroom floor, her blood leaving, a heavy black smoke rising white from his teeth, a whispering, his breath inhaling her blue, blue heart. She wanted to believe that if her mother was still alive, her mother could tell her what to do. She wanted to jump down from the porch, run fast toward the mountains. But she had no way of knowing if she ran toward or away from him. Baptiste was everywhere.

They walked toward Perma. Grandma had promised Florence a bottle of Orange Nesbitts if she walked all the way there without complaint. Louise had chased her sister and they were laughing so hard Grandma said they would be crying soon. “Mrs. Yellow Knife,” Florence called Louise. “Mrs. Yellow Knife.” Louise ran from Florence like she was running away. Her breath was high in her chest. The magpies talked on the fence posts, and the sun shimmered over them. The black-eyed daisies were thick by the roadside, and Grandma had stopped to pick the tender shoots before they blossomed. Louise remembered jumping the barrow pit. She had turned to see Florence midleap behind her. She heard the flutter of paper against weeds. She saw a grasshopper land on Florence’s shoulder. Grandma was peeling the flower stems. She offered each of them a taste of Indian celery. “I love the spring,” Grandma said to them. Florence tried to slap the stem from Louise’s hand. “Don’t dawdle,” Grandma said. She had walked ahead of them. Louise ran to catch up to her. She walked beside her grandmother, and it felt good to be walking.

Heat waved at the end of the road. “Why do we see water at the end of the road,” she asked her grandmother, “when there is no water?”

“That’s to keep lazy people walking,” Grandma said.