In the early months, sometimes I wondered still why hadn’t I gotten on that plane to Virginia. I had not been in the habit of surprising myself like that. But as the days passed, I knew it was this. It was this, I thought in the steely forests, my feet ringing on the hard-as-iron ground. It was this, I thought as steam cascaded upward from our dinner table. It was this, I thought, holding Sara’s hand as she led me to my hayloft. I felt as though I’d sidled through some force field into the world where I’d always belonged.

* * *

One evening I sat in the kitchen, watching Pear knead the bread for the first rise. I admired her ropey forearms. Almost every night, Pear made eight to ten loaves of a kind of spongy, soft-crusted bread. Those ten pounds of flour and water took thirty real minutes of kneading, or else the bread came out crumbling and structureless.

It was after dinnertime, after singing, and the kitchen was quiet. The air smelled like cinnamon, tea, and our sweat. I sat near the green-tiled stove, watching Pear and keeping track of the fire. Wind roared across the top of the chimney.

“My, that fire can draw!” Pear said. She smiled and I saw how her teeth overlapped in the front. I’d felt sorry for Pear because of the name Dice had given her. She was middle-aged and lumpy. But when I admitted this to Queen, she told me about the pears at the tops of the trees, which only farmers know about, pears you never find in stores, as big as footballs, as sweet as bleached sugar, so soft your fingers sink right through the skin when you try to pick them.

I opened up the door of the stove and dropped a heavy log right onto the center, so the embers jumped up. Strangely, the heaviest logs didn’t always burn the hottest.

“A lamb only lives two months around here,” she said. “Do you think his life is, on the whole, a good thing?” She had flour up to her elbows, and her arms looked both solid and ghostly.

“Are you asking me?” I said, surprised. I hadn’t, since that first night, been asked to speak my mind, which was fine with me, since I never had an idea what I was supposed to say.

“Oh, Harmony, yes, I’m asking you,” she said, fixing me with her pale gaze.

Dice entered the room and stoked the fire. He wore a blue shirt, which I coveted, since the rest of us wore brown and gray.