After I’d recovered, Dice summoned Bay and me to the barn. We stood pallets on their edges and laced them together to form a new enclosure for the pigs, then let them out, four curious six-hundred-pound sows with pink ears shading their faces. Dice led us back to his room, through the side door. On his bed was a long white sack, made of bedsheet, lumpy and sewn shut. It was Rainer. “Why do you want my help?” I said, squinting against the tears that burned my eyes.

“He liked you,” Dice said.

Bay took his upper body, Dice his middle, and I his feet, the lightest part. We carried him out and through the courtyard and into the pig enclosure. He was ungainly, but I’d hauled many ungainly objects on the farm—cauldrons, tables, logs. The sheet was clean but I thought I might be able to smell, despite the cold, putrefaction. I wondered if below the sheet his skin was coal colored, his nose rotted off. I preferred to think of him resting inside peacefully, as he was in life, freckled and redheaded and pleasant faced. We laid him down by the door in the pig enclosure, and Dice dismissed me. I didn’t get to see what was inside—the bone room. I imagined that they’d dig a grave in the barn’s dirt floor.

* * *

We did not mourn Rainer, since there was no such thing as the definite self and the individual members of the family did not matter as much as the whole. But as I mended I thought about him more and more. I was the one who’d sent him out. He’d been so quiet. A good hard worker. One day I’d lain under his long careless arm, and the next he had vanished. He liked the Sacred Harp song “Plenary,” so I sang it in the woods, where he’d found and carried deer, uncomplaining about the heavy loads.

No one in the fake world cared for him, he’d said.

Now even if Lindsay came looking she wouldn’t find him.

CHAPTER 26

Once the farm was back in order, Dice brought me to his room. Our spirits were so high those days I was not nervous at all. I could barely remember his clinging to me in the kitchen. I’d been so sick then that nothing had felt real.

Dice gestured to the velvet couch. I sat. His eyes seemed further recessed into his head, his cheeks sunken, his neck all cords, like there was a vacuum inside him trying to pull him inward. The illness had left him skeletal.

“Are you all right?” I said, before I could stop myself.

He smiled. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “We found the earrings.” He picked up one of the tiny bones from his bookshelf, looked at it, and placed it carefully back.