I couldn’t tell if I was happy or sad. All the clutter in my head was gone. I felt free and easy and able to focus on new things besides my mother and Isaac and college and old necklaces and solar figurines. Dice told stories: about Tennessee miners freeing convicts and burning company buildings under cover of night, about women saboteurs dynamiting their textile mills, about beaver lodges you could crawl into, and the sandstorms he’d experienced where there was so much static electricity he had to pull a metal pipe behind him in the sand, to ground the current.

The weeks passed, then the months. We ate bread with chicken fat. Once a week, stack cake, layers adhered with applesauce made from dried apples. Sometimes we had boiled beans studded with mean razorback. Sometimes shavings of country ham, cured from last winter’s hog slaughter in a pillowcase of ashes. Thick sweet butter. Chinquapin meats prised from their spiky hulls. Bannock bread, sorghum-sweet. Fresh cheeses, still jiggling like gelatin. The worker reaped the best rewards.

I became a glutton for experiences. Experiences so real they felt unreal. We heated water for cleaning our dishes and dairy and bodies with two wood furnaces. In the winter, a water pipe below the shower split along the seams, and we couldn’t bathe there while one of the men repaired it. So again we boiled water outside in a copper tureen in the fire pit, and now I too got to take the hottest bucket bath as I stood naked in the snow. I could slough off handfuls of dead skin and oil and dirt, smear it onto my hands—the filth had the waxiness of oil pastels—then rub my hands together and it would roll up like dough. I’d never been so dirty or so clean, so protected, so exposed. The flickers tapped in the woods, the cotton snow fell from the boughs and melted on my shoulders.

The days reached the shortest point and we filled the dining table with candles and drank melted chocolate. Gemini made new bullets out of bits of lead. “For hunting?” I said, and he shrugged, which was like him. The bullets popped out of the mold brilliantly shiny and silver, but when I reached for one, he cautioned that they were hot enough to melt my skin.

For toothpaste, we used baking soda mixed with four thieves oil. For medicine, we used Pear’s tinctures and poultices and teas—plantain for swelling, witch hazel and mullein for a stuffy head, sassafras, kerosene.

I laughed to remember myself that first night, worried about eating a strip of venison. Now I ate grubs from the woodpile—boiled, with butter on top. I ate crickets, deshelled and delegged, roasted on skewers. I ate ant eggs.

Who lived like this, and who would believe me if I told them? I don’t mean believe, exactly, but believe and care. Who would?

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