When Josiah recovered, our fortunes changed. Later on, after a singing one night, he told us about how difficult it was to choose what to do first. Water first, then heat. Most of the wood was frozen solid, but he managed to chop enough to fill the stove, and then he brought in more logs to thaw in the dining room. Then he cleaned the sickroom. There was vomit all over the floor, and leaves and branches had blown in from the winter storm. The house was barely a house anymore, but a container for nature.

Soon Dice and Bay returned. “Did you find the earrings?” I asked Bay from my bed.

He patted my head, his hand cold as tree bark. “I was out finding new family,” he said. I tried to read his thatched face.

“Where did you take Dice?” I said. I’d given him my mother’s address; I felt I deserved a straight answer. He knew I was saying, You fled when we needed you.

Bay shook his head. “Cabin nearby,” he said. “Dice got mad when he woke up. It wasn’t his choice.” For an odd moment, I wondered if they could be blood father and son. But no fake-world kinship could provoke devotion like Bay’s.

“Such a noticer,” Bay said, and gave me a flicker of a smile.

I believed Bay, and it was easy to believe when Dice was offering me a rosy venison broth, when Bay was scrubbing the rooms on hands and knees, when they got the farm moving again, so that when I was well enough to get up, they let me rest for days and fed me sunny silver pie and thanked me for bringing the water.

The sheep had escaped their enclosures, so they got enough to eat, for the most part, and only eleven of them died. Some of the cows would never give milk again, but that was all right—beef for us now, and in the spring we’d let the good mothers keep their babies, as I always wanted.

Many of the chickens died for lack of water. The pigs were all right. They would inherit the earth. The cows and horses had also gotten out of their stables, and they’d all been drinking out of the same spot in the stream where I’d broken the ice.

We burned the mattresses. The maggots, which had come from nowhere to infest all the rot, slunk back to their hidey-holes in the earth. We all got to bathe in Dice’s bathtub, by the stove with the tiles of billow-sailed blue ships, and we luxuriated in the grime that our bodies shed.

And Josiah had found Rainer frozen dead in the milking parlor, his clothes half-off, his boots off: hypothermia. Dice only told me this when he determined I was well enough. No one talked about it, but I knew the shepherd dogs must have mauled his corpse.