The sky was lamb’s wool colored a little pink, as though there were skin behind it. Ten family members, Rainer and Osha among them, loaded the cars with trays of glass jars. I thought the jars were filled with jam. I couldn’t tell. I wondered if the jam was poisoned—what kind of sabotage they could do with it.

* * *

Thirteen of us remained, but not Dice, Bay, or Sara, so the family felt pitted. We worked and waited, and kept to ourselves. I milked the animals alone.

While family was gone, the woods went yellow—the hickories, oaks, tulip trees, basswood, birches, and beeches went yellow, and in the understory, the dogwoods, striped maples, holly, and witch hazel shone in flaming shades of red and chartreuse. On the western slopes, the green-black hemlocks and sturdy firs gathered themselves for winter. We slaughtered a hundred of our chickens. We cut their throats, let them bleed, dipped them in boiling water, then dropped them in a barrel with spikes jutting in from its sides, and hit them with a water jet so they churned in the barrel, flopping and flapping, claws chasing the bodies. A mulchy mass of wet feathers fell out at the barrel’s base. We fed the chicken heads to the pigs.

I wondered whether my mother would travel somewhere with Isaac, even though I wasn’t coming home.

I’d never flown. The flight to college would have been my first.

After I’d left my mother at security, after she’d handed me the photo of my father, I’d sat in a sculpted-foam chair in the waiting room at RDU. I watched the men on the tarmac gesture with their illuminated orange batons. Close by, planes took off; farther out, they landed. Though we hadn’t even begun to board, I felt the altitude sealing my ears.

I followed the slow crowd off solid land and into what I thought was the plane. No, it was only a tunnel on wheels. The fluorescent lights were half-off and I felt like I was dreaming. It looked to me like a dorm room hall. I’d have to buy sheets and a blanket and maybe one of those hydra-headed lamps, all paid for with my mother’s mother’s necklace.

I reached the low round entrance to the plane. I touched the lustrous red and silver paint on its exterior. A flight attendant smiled and beckoned me forward.

“Excuse me,” I said. I turned. How could you be so closed-minded to something you haven’t even tried? someone might say. What about broadening your horizons, finding yourself? But even then I knew I wanted to narrow my horizons, to wall myself in with mountains. Even then, I knew there was no self to be found.

I dragged my carry-on behind me up the jet bridge. Isaac and I knew from hiking that the uphill is easier than the down.