I took off my sweatshirt and pulled the sweater over my old Peter Pan blouse. The raw wool scratched my neck and wrists. The trousers were thick and unyielding, molded to a foreign person’s shape. The boots felt huge in the toes. I recognized how flimsy my old clothes were. I let my hair down over my shoulders. I was the only one on the farm with long hair.

“Hello,” I said.

“Cassie used to wear that sweater,” Dice said. So that was his voice: textured and cottony. “And Queen. Pear. And before that Bip. We don’t have possessions.”

He looked at me intently. He stood straight as a plumb line, the kind of straightness called exactly true. He was an unadorned man with buzzed silver hair and a concerned, falconlike brow, a look so intense it was almost cross-eyed.

He took out a knife, reached high—I backed away from him again, jumpy—and cut a ribbon of meat from the dangling shank. His hands were bright and raw, each finger the size of two of mine. He handed me the piece, dry and textured like grosgrain. I wondered how to tell him I was a vegetarian. Isaac had persuaded me to give up meat with a conversation about minimizing suffering, incremental change. Surely I could explain myself to Dice.

“Eat,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine. I was disarmed by his attention. He and I were alone—Isaac, who was a hypocrite, had nothing to do with it. I ate. The meat tasted like the landscape distilled into salt. Water shot onto my tongue. I felt like a dog. It was my first brush with Dice’s power: he aroused in me a violent desire to please.

Dice said, “I think you like it.” He ushered me out onto the porch and into the navy-blue night. I could hear the cowbells and sheep bells, now sporadic as the animals lay down to rest. “Who taught you to tie your shoes in runner’s knots?” he said.

I looked down at my laces, blushing. I didn’t know how to react to this quality of attention and so my body defaulted to shame. “My coach,” I said. “I’m a high jumper.” It seemed essential that he know this, as though the fact would somehow make me adequate. This walk felt like a test, and I was nervous.