I looked out at the lighted platform, empty save for two guards with rifles, read the sign.

“Annadel,” I said. My throat hurt. “We must have come through Peelchestnut Tunnel. We’re at Annadel.”

The train moved forward.

“I want to look out the window,” he said. “I want to see one last time.”

“Rondal, hit’s nighttime. Hit’s dark.”

“Please.”

Miles stood up wearily and helped me move the desk close to the window. The train window was a rectangle of flat blackness. Then the car swayed with us and a pinpoint of light blinked like a fallen star.

“There’s the farmhouse,” Rondal said. “We just went through the cut and that there’s the Justice farm. And the tents over yonder.” He smiled.

He fell asleep before we reached Davidson. His temperature rose to 104. I checked his pulse, then settled into a chair with his hand in my lap.

“Are you really going to have a baby?” Miles asked from the corner.

“Yes. Probably in the early spring.”

He lit a kerosene lamp on the table beside him. His face was a white mask with large black hollows for eyes.

“You remember when we were younguns?” he asked. “Remember when I kilt that dog?”

Twenty-five

CARRIE BISHOP

HE WAS BITTER AND HATEFUL MUCH OF THE TIME. HE SPOKE harshly to Flora’s children when they came to visit. They called him “the mean man,” and little Rachel was frightened of him.

Sometimes he could be kind. From his bed he watched me drag my heavy belly around while I cooked and cleaned. He fretted because I must do so much.

But something would break inside him when I went to turn him, or to help him into his wheelchair.

“Well, you got me right where you always wanted me,” he’d sneer. “Right under your goddamn thumb.”

He asked for whiskey and at first I gave it to him, hoping it would ease him. But when he drank more and more, and threw an empty jug at me one night, I kept it out of the house. He berated me for that, too.

I wanted to have him carried down to the Homeplace from time to time for a visit, but he wouldn’t go, not even at Christmas. I spent Christmas Day listening to his stubborn silence, and crying to myself. Ben and Flora brought the children for a visit but he was so disagreeable that we were all uneasy. On Old Christmas Eve, I decided to leave him and walk to the Homeplace by myself.

“What the hell’s Old Christmas?” he asked as I was preparing to leave. “I aint heard of it.”