It was technically true. That when the two men were off together, for example, that night for the deputy—Saul and Bowman, Bowman and Saul—when they left Ella behind with Maul and Dan, Dan and Maul, or when the two men slipped behind trees to discuss maps or manure, galloped off after tracks invariably bearing no fruit, and when Dan wrapped himself in his tarp cocoon to search his troubled private innards, sliding day by day deeper into the blue plastic sheaf of his boy’s metamorphosis—thirty-seven years old, better late than never (girls getting no such luxury, at the mercy of first blood on cotton panties you accept the shift to womanhood or kill yourself right then, Ginny had kicked and cried for days, found Grannie’s little Derringer, Grannie standing at the girls’ door saying sorry, and meaning it, the old lady never having said sorry to Ella for anything, though why sorry at all, since the blood was a prescription of the body not the mind or God or Grannie)—and when poor, poor Dan, blank and petulant, crushed, destroyed, deleted, when even he left her behind for his brooding, abandoned her with the scuttle of cups and dirty pots and mounds of horseshit for stepping in, to stare alone at landmarks that were always the same, another peak, another rockslide, another goat half-buried in the rubble, and then when Maul of all people turned his back on her too, off to the mules with secret sugar hidden in his coveralls, their ugly snouts roving his hand for it with their gloriously grotesquely articulating lips, when the sugar was right there before them in his palm, Maul soothing them, almost got it, almost there, as if knowing exactly what she needed to hear but saying it to someone else, how cruel, how lonely to be filled with envy for these mules, truly overtaxed and fatigued as they were, stubborn and intelligent, ugly, yes, but a prescription of God, no fault of their own, while Maul at least was thoughtful to her, tried to remember her standing there, ah, yes, Ella, her binoculars searching for her sister who was laughing her head off somewhere, when the paint, of course, too, went off to graze with the others of his kind (who was Ella’s kind?), treason, like one of her children, who, far off, well come to think of it, went about their summer joys without thinking much of their mother, and worst of all, everyone, even those of them that didn’t know it, they were all still thinking of Ginny, doing for Ginny, standing at Ginny’s door banging on it still, begging her to come out, Ginny Ginny Ginny, even though now it was Ella’s turn for her door to be banged on, to be called to, Ella! Ella! Ella! Come out to us! It was at those times, only then, that she reached in her saddlebag for the small green bottle of morphine sulfate hypo-tablets, twenty-one quarter grains.