Bobby felt his gut burning, felt his limbs weaken. He knew it. He'd been afraid of this for so long. Still, all he had to offer her was a flimsy defense. He pointed to the Falcon. “There is no work but this, Amy. What is it you want from me?”

Her anger made her hair shine, her eyes flash, her beauty flare so brilliant that he moved toward her just as she moved away. “That's not the work I'm talking about. That's not even close.”

He let her walk away then, heard the spin of tires on gravel fade until he heard nothing, until he was alone with the echoes of Amy. He sat down on a cinder block, felt tears prickle the back of his eyes, and through the world gone wobbly he saw the ghosts again. Men with lined faces sweeping the floors. Men stacking beet crates. Men arriving with their harvests, hoping to God the mill would pay them fair.

Bobby retreated, as he did so often, to Amy's cot, but he was too rattled to settle. Her blankets were like ornamentals in bloom, straight springtime, and the reflection of the rising moon in the Mason jars were all Amy: Amy laughing on the top of a mountain trail, Amy lying naked in the bedroom of their foreclosed house, Amy smiling on their wedding day, her face turned toward the sunshine.

BOBBY WAS RESTLESS, ROAMING the south side of the silo block predawn, throwing rocks at rabbits. He had a .22 inside but he didn't feel like going back to the old office building to get it. The impotent chain-link fence he'd rigged around the garden had not been any kind of deterrent to the rabbits, nor had the flashing metallic ribbons he'd tied to small stakes so they'd dance and snap in the wind. They had eaten his fall crop lettuce and spinach down to stubs. He was a quarter mile from the road but heard traffic anyway. The road was usually busy, a direct line to the main highway, but not at this time of morning. Two police cars drove past.

He let his body relax after a full, tensing shiver, took aim, and hit the rabbit square, killing it instantly. Not that there was much of a trick to that, given the rabbits' fear response. It took a pretty poor shot to miss a rabbit frozen in place under a sulfur light in the middle of an open driveway, and Bobby had been honing his aim since he'd been living in the mill. Bobby knew rabbits were stupid that way—the best response to fear is controlled action, not paralysis. But he understood it, too. It took effort to keep moving when there was no visible destination, when it felt like something large was stalking you, like the unfortunate end of everything approached, wrapped in destiny, absolute.